当代英文散文五：Lucidity, Simplicity, Euphony
2014-09-30 00:20阅读：
Lucidity, Simplicity,
Euphony
By W. Somerset Maugham
I have never had much patience with the writers who claim
from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have
only to go to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to
express with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it
difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no
philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you;
but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly
what the maning of each sentence is. Few people have written
English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of
obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and
the other to wilfulness. People often write obscurely because they
have never taken the trouble to learn to write clear. This sort of
obscurity you find t
oo often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in
literary critics. Here is is indeed strange. You would have thought
that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters
of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of
language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet
you will find in their works sentence after sentence that you must
read twice to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it,
for the writers have evidently not said what they intended.
Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not
quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he
wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from
laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural
enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused
idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not
before, but as they write. The pen originates the thoughts. The
disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the
author must be always on his guard, is that there is a sort of
magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on
a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own
clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into
the wilful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to
suppose that their thoughts have a significance greater than at
first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too
profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and
very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is
with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise
reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is
very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite
understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this
there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting
down one’s impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can
always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is
another form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic
exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the
vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden
into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number
of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only
pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd trick.
If the sense is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage
that no one thinks of reading.
Simplicity is not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have
aimed at it because I have no gift for richness. Within limits I
admire richness in others, though I find it difficult to digest in
quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight, but twenty
only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the
noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give
the sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of
wave following wave in the open sea; there is no doubt that in all
this there is something inspiring. Words thus strung together fall
on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous rather than
intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to
conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are
tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will
not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all. Your
mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a subject that will suit
it. It is surely out of place to write in the grand style of
inconsiderable things.
But if richness needs gifts with which everyone is not
endowed, simplicity by no means comes by nature. To achieve it
needs rigid discipline. So far as I know ours is the only language
in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of
prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have
been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic. English
prose is elaborate rather than simple. It was not always so.
Nothing could be more racy, straightforward and alive than the
prose of Shakespeare; but it must be remembered that this was
dialogue written to be spoken. We do not know how he would have
written if like Corneille he had composed prefaces to his plays. It
may be that the would have been as euphuistic as the letters of
Queen Eli zabeth. But earlier prose, the prose of Sir Thomas More,
for instance, is neither ponderous, flowery nor oratorical. It
smacks of the English soil. To my mind King James’s Bible has been
a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to
deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an
oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with
us.
Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to
our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the
misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual
life of our country is that this work for so long a period became
the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those
rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part
and parcel of the national sensibility. The plain, honest English
speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted
their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was evidently
something in the English temper to which this was congenial,
perhaps a native lack of precision in thought, perhaps a naive
delight in fine words for their own sake, an innate eccentricity
and love of embroidery, I do not know; but the fact remains that
ever since, Engllish prose has had to struggle against the tendency
to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the language
has reasserted itself, as it did with Dryden and the writers of
Queen Anne, it was only to be submerged once more by the
pomposities of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson. When English prose recovered
simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles
Lamb at his best, it lost it again with De Quincey, Carlyle,
Meredith and Walter Pater. It is obvious that the grand style is
more striking than the plain. Indeed many people think that a style
that does not attract notice is not style. They will admire Walter
Pater’s, but will read an essay by Matthew Arnold without giving a
moment’s attention to the elegance, distinction and sobriety with
which he set down what he had to say.
The dictum that the style is the man is well known. It is one
of those aphorisms that say too much to mean a great deal. Where is
the man in Goethe, in his birdlike lyrics or in his clumsy prose?
And Hazlitt? But I suppose that if a man has a confused mind he
will write in a confused way, if his temper is capricious his prose
will be fantastical, and if he has a quick, darting intelligence
that is reminded by the matter in hand of a hundred things, he
will, unless he has great self-control, load his pages with
metaphor and simile. There is a great difference between the
magniloquence of the Jacobean writers, who were intoxicated with
the new wealth that had lately been brought into the language, and
the turgidity of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, who were the victims of
bad theories. I can read every word that Dr. Johnson wrote with
delight, for he had good sense, charm and wit. No one could have
written better if he had not wilfully set himself to write in the
grand style. He knew good English when he saw it. No critic has
praised Dryden’s prose more aptly. He said of him that he appeared
to have no art other than that of expressing with clearness what he
thought with vigor. And one of his Lives he finished with the
words: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not
coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and
nights to the volumes of Addison.” But when he himself sat down to
write it was with a very different aim. He mistook the orotund for
the dignified. He had not the good breeding to see that simplicity
and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
Whether you ascribe importance to euphony, the last of the
three characteristics that I mentioned, must depend on the
sensitiveness of your ear. A great many readers, and many admirable
writers, are devoid of this quality. Poets as we know have always
made a great use of alliteration. They are persuaded that the
repetition of a sound gives an effect of beauty. I do not think it
does so in prose. It seems to me that in prose alliteration should
be used only for a special reason; when used
by accident it falls on the ear very disagreeable. But its
accidental use is so common that one can only suppose that the
sound of it is not universally offensive. Many writers without
distress will put two rhyming words together, join a monstrous long
adjective to a monstrous long noun, or between the end of one word
and the beginning of another have a conjunction of consonants that
almost breaks your jaw. These are trivial and obvious instances.
These are trivial and obvious instances. I mention them only to
prove that if careful writers can do such things it is only because
they have no ear. Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is
only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is
good to look at and good to listen to.
I have read many books on English prose, but have found it
hard to profit by them; for the most part they are vague, unduly
theoretical, and often scolding. But you cannot say this of
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It is a valuable work.
I do not think anyone writes so well that he cannot learn much from
it. It is lively reading. Fowler liked simplicity,
straightforwardness and common sense. He had no patience with
pretentiousness. He had a sound feeling that idiom was the backbone
of a language and he was all for the racy phrase. He was no slavish
admirer of logic and was willing enough to give usage right of way
through the exact demesnes of grammar. English grammar is very
difficult and few writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So
heedful a writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so
ungrammatically that a schoolmaster, finding such errors in a
schoolboy’s essay, would be justly indignant. It is necessary to
know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but
it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
Usage is the only test, I would prefer a phrase that was easy and
unaffected to a phrase that was grammatical. One of the differences
between French and English is that in French you can be grammatical
with complete naturalness, but in English not invariably. It is a
difficulty in writing English that the sound of the living voice
dominates the look of the printed word. I have given the matter of
style a great deal of thought and have taken great pains. I have
written few pages that I feel I could not improve and far too many
that I have left with dissafisfaction because, try as I would, I
could do no better. I cannot say of myself what Johnson said of
Pope: “He never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor
quitted it by despair.” I do not write as I want to ; I write as I
can.
But Fowler had no ear. He did not see that simplicity may
sometimes make concessions to euphony. I do not think a
far-fetched, an archaic or even an affected word is out of place
when it sounds better than the blunt, obvious one or when it gives
a sentence a better balance. But, I hasten to add, though I think
you may without misgiving make this concession to pleasant sound, I
think you should make none to what may obscure your meaning.
Anything is better than not to write clearly. There is nothing to
be said against lucidity, and against simplicity only the
possibility of dryness. This is a risk that is well worth taking
when you reflect how much better it is to be bald than to wear a
curly wig. But there is in euphony a danger that must be
considered. It is very likely to be monotonous. When George Moore
began to write, his style was poor; it gave you the impression that
he wrote on wrapping paper with a blunt pencil. But he developed
gradually a very musical Egnlish. He learnt to write sentences that
fall away on the ear with a misty languor and it delighted him so
much that he could never have enough of it. He did not escape
monotony. It is like the sound of water lapping a shingly beach, so
soothing that you presently cease to be sensible of it. It is so
mellifluous that you hanker for some harshness, for an abrupt
dissonance, that will interrupt the silky concord. I do not know
how one can guard against this. I suppose the best chance is to
have a more lively faculty of boredom than one’s readers so that
one is wearied before they are. One must always be on the watch for
mannerisms and when certain cadences come too easily to the pen ask
oneself whether they have not become mechanical. It is very hard to
discover the exact point where the idiom one has formed to express
oneself has lost its tang. As Dr. Johnson said: “He that has once
studiously formed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete
ease.” Admirably as I think Matthew Arnold’s style was suited to
his particular purposes, I must admit that his mannerisms are often
irritating. His style was an instrument that he had forged once for
all; it was not like the human hand capable of performing a variety
of actions.
If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with
liveliness you would write perfectly: you would write like
Voltaire. And yet we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness many
be: it may result in the tiresome acrobatics of Meredith. Macaulay
and Carlyle were in their different ways arresting, but at the
heavy cost of naturalness. Their flashy effects distract the mind.
They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was
very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and
jumped through it at every other step. A good style should show no
sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. I
think no one in France now writes more admirably than Colette, and
such is the ease of her expression that you cannot bring yourself
to believe that she takes any trouble over it. I am told that there
are pianists who have a natural technique so that they can play in
a manner that most executants can achieve only as the result of
unremitting toil, and I am willing to believe that there are
writers who are equally fortunate. Among them I was much inclined
to place Colette. I asked her. I was exceedingly surprised to hear
that she wrote everything over and over agiain she told me that she
would often spend a whole morning working upon a single page. But
it does not matter how one gets the effect of ease. For my part, if
I get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom
provides me with the word, the turn of phrase, that is appropriate
without being far-fetched or commonplace.
--From The
Summing Up
