Lucas - Style: the Art of Writing Well

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First published 1955 by Cassell & Co. Ltd. Second edition published 1964 by Pan Books Ltd. First edition reissued as Second edition in 1974 by Cassell & Co Ltd. This edition published 2012 by Harriman House Ltd, based on 1964 Pan second edition.

Copyright F. L. Lucas

The right of F. L. Lucas to be identified as the Author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Author photo by Edward Leigh, FRPS, Cambridge; reproduced by permission of the Fellows and Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, and Dr S. Oliver Lucas.

ISBN: 9780857191885

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

To Sir Charles Tennyson

Style is filled with fine things F. L. Lucas wrote the best book on prose composition for the not-so-simple reason that, in the modern era, he was the smartest, most cultivated man to turn his energies to the task.

Lucass advice can do nothing but good. His own style illustrates the virtues he commends.

Lucas has written a delightful book, exemplifying brilliantly all that it seeks to instil; enjoyment of reading and mastery of writing.

This is a splendid book. It must be set beside Qs On the Art of Writing.

Young readers particularly should find his book useful not only for what it has to say about style but for the supple and manly prose in which it is written.

This book is certain to delight many readers and could help many writers. Mr. Lucas has distinguished himself in more than thirty volumes as a poet, a novelist, a translator, a biographer, a critic and an editor. He is entitled to write about style because he writes with style. He is always clear, harmonious and pointed. His quotations are lavish and often exquisite, revealing an enviable intimacy with the best writing in seven languages. He insists that style is an expression of character, and urges his pupils to be urbane, gay, honest and laconic. His book shows that he teaches by example as well as by precept.

Lucas has written a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating book.

There is more sound sense in this book than in most attempts to improve the taste of the young person Lucass book can be enjoyed, apart from its argument, as an anthology of splendid and unfamiliar passages in English, French and Latin.

a romantic synthesis of the gentlemanly approach to literature we are bound to approve Lucas has one secret that he is too wise to give away. He is never dull.

One of the great pleasures to be derived from this book is the copiousness of quotation, the entertaining relevance of anecdote drawn from several languages and various climes. A book which anybody who at all loves prose must take delight in, and which whoever tries to write prose will profit by, for Mr. Lucas is never dogmatic, and practises what he preaches.

Lucas should know what he is talking about when it comes to writing a book about style. What is more important is that his book of nearly 300 pages has been written with style so much so that it is one of the few books of its kind which can be read through from cover to cover at one sitting.

The books most obvious merit lies in [its] quotations. There are almost as many in French as in English, and their range and aptness are remarkable.

When writers (and speakers) of English are no longer wordy, obscure, dull or pompous, then let this book go out of print; but not before. To flick over the pages of the book is to get an impression of immense erudition. Erudite it certainly is. But Lucas wears his learning lightly. He has a nice feeling for the apt anecdote and the witty analogy; and from the storehouse of his vast knowledge come many fascinating tit-bits thrown out quite casually. It would be quite wrong to think that this is a book only for students of Eng. Lit. It is for all writers who would please or persuade their readers, for all readers who would enjoy good writing more (and also enjoy more good writing).

Frank Laurence (Peter) Lucas (18941967), Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, was a distinguished literary scholar and one of the most versatile English writers of the twentieth century. Two of his books were best-sellers: Tragedy in relation to Aristotles Poetics (1927, enlarged 1957), a handbook popular among literature students; and Style (1955), an acclaimed guide to the art of writing good prose. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first modern edition of the Jacobean dramatist, which earned him the accolade the perfect annotator from T. S. Eliot.

On a grand scale too were his volumes of verse-translations from Greek and Latin poetry, especially his Greek Poetry (1951) and Greek Drama (1954). His versions, in traditional metres and diction, were praised for their grace and fidelity. But though Lucas gained fame as critic and translator, his deepest wish was recognition as a creative writer. T. E. Lawrence admired his poems and became a friend. A few of these appeared in anthologies. The best surely deserve to be better known including his First World War poems Morituri August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt and The Night is Chilly but not Dark (both 1935); his poems based on legend and history, such as The Destined Hour and Spain 1809 (1953); and his romantic lyrics like Her Answer, in after years and Dead Bee inside a window-pane (1935).

Of his fiction, Vita Sackville-West and E. M. Forster praised the sensitive, stylish novel-of-ideas, Ccile (1930), about love, philosophy and politics in the France of Turgot. Lucas also turned his hand to drama. The Bear Dances (1932) was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on Londons West-end stage. It was a brave attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in his words) grew full of very green young men going very Red.

Perhaps the wisest way with controversy, Lucas writes in Style, is to avoid it. It was a maxim he found hard to keep. He made an exception for what he saw as the obscurantism and decadence of much literary modernism. He made another for the threats to intellectual liberty, to Western Civilisation itself, from Fascism and Nazism. His powerful anti-appeasement letters to the British press from 1933 to 1939, some forty odd, though forgotten today, were widely admired at the time. They are models of the polemicists art. This is the voice of the England I love, wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich. There were also articles, satires, books, public speaking, fund-raising, petitions, meetings with migrs, help for refugees. The Nazis responded by placing him on their list for extermination once Britain had been defeated.