Of all the qualities that have been attributed to style, elegance is perhaps the one that is hardest to describe. It has been said that elegance is based on simplicity. That is true. But not everything that is simple is elegant. Elegance is a kind of refined and beautiful simplicity, even, we might say, a sophisticated simplicity, although that may sound like a contradiction in terms. A block of rough granite is simple, but not elegant; a block of polished marble is likewise simple, but it is probably not elegant because of its square shape. It is not difficult, however, to imagine how a simple shape, say, a triangle, or a sphere, or an oval, made of polished black or white marble, could be extremely elegant.Refinement, beauty, sophistication, shapeliness, polish, fluency, all these qualities seem to be different aspects of elegance, but it is easier, perhaps, to visualize them embodied in physical objects than to exemplify them in writing, let alone to impart them to a piece of writing of your own. Let us, nevertheless, try to see how these qualities can be captured in words.It snowed during the night. By morning the street was covered to an even depth. Until the traffic got going again, everything was pure, clean white. It snowed thickly, heavily, determinedly all night through, covering everything thickly, heavily, determinedly, as if God was weary of this street, this town, this country, and simply wanted to blot it out. It snowed heavily overnight, and for a short time in the morning the street, its dirt, and its ordinariness were hidden by a sheet of pure, clean white. Our judgment of what is elegant and what is not is bound to be somewhat subjective, but of the three examples given above, only the third has any real claim to elegance. This is not to say that the first two examples represent bad writing. The first example is a simple, no-nonsense account of the scene. It sounds almost as though the writer was determined not to wax lyrical about the transfiguring effect of the snow. That sort of restraint is often admirable and can be very effective in some contexts. By contrast, the second writer is obviously striving for effect and has an emotional response to the snow, indeed wishes to moralize it. But while the threefold repetitions may be powerful, they are too heavy handed, we might say, to be considered elegant. Elegance demands a certain lightness of touch. It is difficult to communicate raw emotion elegantly. In fact, it would in most cases seem out of place to strive for elegance if you were trying to communicate passion or express spontaneous emotion. The third example uses simple language and basically unpretentious image—we are to think of the snow as being like a dust cover thrown over furniture in an unoccupied house rather than a sheet spread over a bed, perhaps—but it has neatness and flow and a more musical rhythm then the heavily accented second example. These qualities entitle it to be called elegant.Let us consider some further examples:I loathe and detest hypocrisy in any shape or form, but most of all I abominate any person who treats you as if you were his friend, when, in his heart, he would be extremely glad to see you dead. Mrs. Van Donk has an extraordinary capacity for friendship, which extends even to her very worst enemies. In contrast, in this essay, we argue for a broader understanding of what it is to engage in struggle and of what people of our persuasion are, in fact, struggling for. We, by contrast, would argue that we struggle more effectively when we do so as members of a broadly based coalition. Again, none of these sentences is badly written, but most readers would probably consider the second and fourth examples to be more elegant than the first and third. If you read these sentences over to yourself, you will find that the second and fourth roll off the tongue more smoothly than the others. Sentence three, in particular, is rather awkward to say, not because it contains any long or difficult words, but because it contains a lot of short, simple ones that are not organized in such a way as to make them flow together. In fact, the sentence seems designed almost deliberately to trip up anybody who tried to read it aloud. It is not, of course, intended to be read aloud. If it had been, the writer would perhaps have taken greater pains to smooth out some of its roughness.This takes us some distance toward understanding the place of elegance in the overall scheme of style. In the final analysis, elegance has to be rated as less important than clarity and simplicity. Every sentence should be clear, most sentences should be kept simple, but a succession of carefully crafted, seamlessly flowing sentences might in the end prove slightly wearisome for the reader. Elegance, as has been said, is not a quality that coexists well with passion and power. Most people would be willing to sacrifice a beautiful and sophisticated phrase for a really powerful and compelling one.However, most writing is not necessarily intended to seize the reader by the throat. Page after page of raw power would probably be even more wearisome to read than page after page of studied elegance. It is better that writing should flow than that it should stutter. It is better that simplicity should be combined with refinement than that it should be combined with awkwardness. It is better, usually, to describe a mouse as a small furry rodent with a pointed snout and a long, slender tail than as a little animal that has fur and a pointed nose and a thin, long tail, because the former is a neat, compact, and agreeable-sounding combination of words, while the latter, though made up of simpler terms, is less neat and less satisfying. A degree of elegance is worth striving for in ordinary prose, because ordinary prose should be neat, economical, simple, and flowing most of the time.In order to achieve elegance, you should be simple, be as economical as you can with words, and do your best to keep your sentence smooth and flowing. Your best ally in the latter endeavor is, again, your "mind's voice." Listen as you write. Read it out loud. If it sounds balanced and smooth to you, it will create the same impression on the page for the sensitive reader.
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