Wednesday, February 26
You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in my second lecture encouraged you to the practice of verse as well as of prose, I seize the very next opportunity to warn you against confusing the two, which differ on some points essentially, and always so as to demand separate rules—or rather (since I am shy of the word 'rules') a different concept of what the writer should aim at and what avoid. But you must, pray, understand that what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to the tiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods—and they hardly—can cure a versifier of being prosaic.
We started upon a promise to do without scientific definitions; and in drawing some distinctions to-day between verse and prose I shall use only a few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far as they go; not to be found contrary to your scientific ones, if ever, under another teacher you attain to them; yet for the moment used only as guides to practice, and pretending to be no more.
Thus I go some way—though by no means all the way—towards defining literature when I remind you that its very name (litterae—letters) implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example, however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back, and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, the Writer—the Man of Letters—does to-day differ from the Orator. There was a time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than the orator, and in the most literal sense, to 'get a hearing.' Nay, he got it with more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-court provided, whereas Thespis jogged to fairs in a cart, and the Muse of History, like any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd. Herodotus in search of a public packed his history in a portmanteau, carted it to Olympia, found a favourable 'pitch,' as we should say, and wooed an audience to him much as on a racecourse nowadays do those philanthropic gentlemen who ply a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a gold chain. It would cost us an effort to imagine the late Bishop Stubbs thus trying his fortune with a bag full of select Charters at Queen's Club or at Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve a crowd that showed some disposition to edge off towards the ring or the rails.
The historian's conditions have improved; and like any other sensible man he has advanced his claim with them, and revised his method. He writes nowadays with his eye on the printed book. He may or may not be a dull fellow: being a dull fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but at least he knows that, if you lay him upside down on your knee, you can on awaking pick him up, resume your absorption, and even turn back some pages to discover just where or why your interest flagged: whereas a Hellene who deserted Herodotus, having a bet on the Pentathlon, not only missed what he missed but missed it for life.
The invention of print, of course, has made all, or almost all, the difference.
I do not forget that the printed book—the written word—presupposes a speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of the speaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollecting that prose has its origin in speech—even as it behoves us to recollect that Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passion from the lyre—we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine, Béranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozen first-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung. It may help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from its origins if you will but remind yourselves that asonnetand asonatawere once the same thing, and that aballadmeant a song accompanied by dancing—the wordballatahaving been specialised down, on the one line to theballet, in which Mademoiselle Genée or the Russian performers will dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Clerk Saunders," 'ballads' to which no one in his senses would dream of pointing a toe.
Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries—the pipe, the lute, the tabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; and in a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose. In the Drama, to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upon their intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in the heroine's eyes and her visible beauty: though even in the Drama to-day you may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action and paragraphs for the [Greek: Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passion in its give-and-take. Again we still—some of us—deliver sermons from pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I am told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that the leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offer you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke, Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once brought down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers, 'Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack' is, if I remember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the course of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for Lord Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost Lord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardly revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory, which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written prose.
Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration. Burke, as we know, was never shy of declaiming—even of declaiming in a torrent—when he stood up to speak: but almost as little was he shy of it when he sat down to write. If you turn to his "Letters on the Regicide Peace" —no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days and closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to his country—
In this good old House, where everything at least is well aired, I shall be content to put up my fatigued horses and here take a bed for the long night that begins to darken upon me—
if, I say, you turn to these "Letters on the Regicide Peace" and consult the title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to 'a Member of the present Parliament'; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke and his correspondent are in general agreement. But skim the pages and your eyes will be arrested again and again by sentences like these:—
The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price—the blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Magnificent, truly! But your ear has doubtless detected the blank verse—three iambic lines:—
Are purchased at ten thousand times their price…Be shed but to redeem the blood of man…The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:—
But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact,
Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar,
by repetitions:—
Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another … Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be, is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point—
by quick staccato utterances, such as:—
And is this example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other—
or
Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride!
I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it be critical) recognise them at once asrhetoric, as the spoken word masquerading under guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers: but actually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now striding from fire-place to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anon pausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a House of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled by shades. In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the style is Cicero denouncing Catiline.
As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, with a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love others better: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discoveringhow it is done. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating either. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and wrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wished to recite to an Elizabethan audience that
All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players—
or Hamlet to soliloquise
To be, or not to be: that is the question—
the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the other cast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advanced boldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for such recitations and for that purpose built boldly forward into the auditorium, struck an attitude, declaimed the purple passage, and returned, covered with applause, to continue the action of the play. This was the theatrical convention; this the audience expected and understood; for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, though the device must have been wearing thin even in 1795-6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into language proper to be addressed to Mr Speaker of the House of Commons. Shakespeare wrote, as Burke wrote, for his audience; and their glory is that they have outlasted the conditions they observed. Yet it was by observing them that they gained the world's ear. Let us, who are less than they, beware of scorning to belong to our own time.
For my part I have a great hankering to see English Literature feeling back through these old modes to its origins. I think, for example, that if we studied to write verse that could really be sung, or if we were more studious to write prose that could be read aloud with pleasure to the ear, we should be opening the pores to the ancient sap; since the roots are always the roots, and we can only reinvigorate our growth through them.
Unhappily, however, I cannot preach this just yet; for we are aiming at practice, and at Cambridge (they tell me) while you speak well, you write less expertly. A contributor to "The Cambridge Review," a fortnight ago, lamented this at length: so you will not set the aspersion down to me, nor blame me if these early lectures too officiously offer a kind of 'First Aid': that, while all the time eager to descant on theaffinitiesof speech and writing, I dwell first on theirdifferences; or that, in speaking of Burke, an author I adore only 'on this side idolatry,' I first present him in some aspects for your avoidance. Similarly I adore the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, yet should no more commend it to you for instant imitation than I could encourage you to walk with a feather in your cap and a sword under your gown. Let us observe proprieties.
To return to Burke.—At his most flagrant, in these "Letters on the Regicide Peace," he boldly raids Shakespeare. You are all, I doubt not, conversant with the Prologue to "Henry the Fifth":—
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars: and at his heels,Leash'd in like hounds, should Famine, Sword and FireCrouch for employment.
Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent to be familiar with it, boldly claps into prose and inserts into a long diatribe against Pitt for having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the French Directory. Thus it becomes:—
On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars: that he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous Kennel (where his scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of War, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues and Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all whose habit, Order, Peace, Religion and Virtue, are alien and abhorrent.
Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the shortcomings of his' play-house, whereas Burke is denouncing his country's shame and prophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid?
Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men: nor is it all the secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken with the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other. That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important step farther. The root of the matter lies in certain essential differences between verse and prose. We will keep, if you please, to our rough practical definitions. Literature—the written word—is a permanent record of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to be permanent. We set a thing down in ink—we print it in a book—because we feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose; and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it convey a certain pleasure to the ear.
You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt Whitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)—is the Book of Job—are the Psalms—all of these as rendered in our Authorised Version of Holy Writ—are all of these poetry? Well 'yes,' if you want my opinion; and again 'yes,' I am sure. But truly on this field, though scores of great men have fought across it—Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the two Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe, Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere—but our axles grow hot. Let us put on the brake: for in practice the dispute comes to very little: since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions as J. K. Stephen recommended. From them
It finds out what it cannot do,And then it goes and does it.
I am journeying, say, in the West of England. I cross a bridge over a stream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty: yet nothing happened as I stepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of no change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and I shall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. But at what turn of the road this will happen, just how long the small multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into conviction—that nobody can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. They are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a De Quincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I advise you who are beginners to keep well one side or other of the frontier, remembering that there is plenty of room and what happened to Tupper.
If we restrict ourselves to the terms 'verse' and 'prose,' we shall find the line much easier to draw. Verse is memorable speech set down in metre with strict rhythms; prose is memorable speech set down without constraint of metre and in rhythms both lax and various—so lax, so various, that until quite recently no real attempt has been made to reduce them to rule. I doubt, for my part, if they can ever be reduced to rule; and after a perusal of Professor Saintsbury's latest work, "A History of English Prose Rhythm," I am left doubting. I commend this book to you as one that clears up large patches of forest. No one has yet so well explained what our prose writers, generation after generation, have tried to do with prose: and he has, by the way, furnished us with a capital anthology—or, as he puts it, with 'divers delectable draughts of example.' But the road still waits to be driven. Seeking practical guidance—help for our present purpose—I note first that many a passage he scans in one way may as readily be scanned in another; that when he has finished with one and can say proudly with Wordsworth:—
I've measured it from side to side,'Tis three feet long and two feet wide,
we still have a sensation of coming out (our good master with us) by that same door wherein we went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trial discover much profit in his table of feet—Paeons, Dochmiacs, Antispasts, Proceleusmatics and the rest—an Antispast being but an iamb followed by a trochee, and Proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, or four consecutive short syllables—when I reflect that, your possible number of syllables being as many as five to a foot, you may label them (as Aristotle would say) until you come to infinity, where desire fails, without getting nearer any rule of application.
Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect its immediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever Professor Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon English verse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandly enough, quoting Walt Whitman:—
I am the teacher of athletes; He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own; He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they yield us small instruction in the path we seek.
It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts. Verse is written in metre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freest possible rhythm. That distinction seems simple enough, but it carries consequences very far from simple. Let me give you an illustration taken almost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of "Paradise Regained":—
Up to a hill anon his steps he rearedFrom whose high top to ken the prospect round,If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry; while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest possible incident—how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seen from the top. Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, how strangely they differ from prose. Mark the inversions: 'Up to a hill anon his steps he reared,' 'But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.' Mark next the diction—'his steps he reared.' In prose we should not rear our steps up the Gog-magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, arrived at the top, should we 'ken' the prospect round; we might 'con,' but should more probably 'survey' it. Even 'anon' is a tricky word in prose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you a few minutes ago. Mark thirdly the varied repetition, 'if cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd—but cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.' Lastly compare the whole with such an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write in plain prose:—
Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation—a herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort.
But you will ask, 'Whyshould verse and prose employ diction so different?Whyshould the one invert the order of words in a fashion not permitted to the other?' and I shall endeavour to answer these questions together with a third which, I dare say, you have sometimes been minded to put when you have been told—and truthfully told—by your manuals and histories, that when a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier? It is not their usual way. In learning to skate, for instance, they do not cut figures before practising loose and easy propulsion.
The answer is fairly simple. Literature (once more) is a record of memorable speech; it preserves in words a record of such thoughts or of such deeds as we deem worth preserving. Now if you will imagine yourself a very primitive man, lacking paper or parchment; or a slightly less primitive, but very poor, man to whom the price of parchment and ink is prohibitive; you have two ways of going to work. You can carve your words upon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you can commit them to memory and carry them about in your head; which is cheaper and handier. For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating the tax-collector, to know how many days there are in the current month. But further you find it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off to the tribal tree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent a formula, and you cast that formula intoversefor the simple reason that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle of rhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not possessed by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not say, 'Quick thy tablets, memory! Let me see—January has 31 days, February 28 days, March 31 days, April 30 days.' You invent a verse:—
Thirty days hath September,April, June and November…
Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University some such process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold bad irreverently-minded men even to the "Evidences" of our cherished Paley.
This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distance of poetry. But wait! The men who said the more memorable things, or sang them—the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues and famines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquests of the clan, all the 'old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago'—the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, a bed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on to the next lordship—these were gentlemen, scôps, bards, minstrels (call them how you will), a professional class who had great need of a full repertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt their strains to the particular hall of entertainment. It would never do, for example, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of the Hoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived where the crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings: for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preached to you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule of good writing. Nay, when the Billings intermarried with the Tootings—when the Billings took to cooing, so to speak—a hasty blend of excerpts would be required for the "Epithalamium." So it was all a highly difficult business, needing adaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, a retentive memory and every artifice to assist it. Take "Widsith," for example, the 'far-travelled man.' He begins:—
Widsith spake: he unlocked his word-hoard.
So he had a hoard of words, you see: and he must have needed them, for he goes on:—
Forthon ic maeg singan and secgan spell,Maenan fore mengo in meoduhealle,Hu me cynegode cystum dohten.Ic waes mid Hunum and mid Hreth-gotum,Mid Sweom and mid Geatum, and mid Suth-Denum.Mid Wenlum ic waes and mid Waernum and mid Wicingum.Mid Gefthum ic waes and mid Winedum….
(Therefore I can sing and tell a tale, recount in the Mead Hall, how men of high race gave rich gifts to me. I was with Huns and with Hreth Goths, with the Swedes, and with the Geats, and with the South Danes; I was with the Wenlas, and with the Waernas, and with the Vikings; I was with the Gefthas and with the Winedae….)
and so on for a full dozen lines. I say that the memory of such men must have needed every artifice to help it: and the chief artifice to their hand was one which also delighted the ears of their listeners. They sang or intoned to the harp.
There you get it, Gentlemen. I have purposely, skimming a wide subject, discarded much ballast; but you may read and scan and read again, and always you must come back to this, that the first poets sang their words to the harp or to some such instrument: and just there lies the secret why poetry differs from prose. The moment you introduce music you let in emotion with all its sway upon speech. From that moment you change everything, down to the order of the words—thenaturalorder of the words: and (remember this) though the harp be superseded, the voice never forgets it. You may take up a Barrack Room Ballad of Kipling's, and it is there, though you affect to despise it for a banjo or concertina:—
Ford—ford—ford of Kabul river…
'Bang, whang, whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife.' From the moment men introduced music they made verse a thing essentially separate from prose, from its natural key of emotion to its natural ordering of words. Do not for one moment imagine that when Milton writes:—
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
or
Of man's first disobedience and the fruitOf that forbidden tree…
—where you must seek down five lines before you come to the verb, and then find it in the imperative mood—do not suppose for a moment that he is here fantastically shifting words, inverting phrases out of their natural order. For, as St Paul might say, there is a natural order of prose and there is a natural order of verse. The natural order of prose is:—
I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, though not of that county; my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first in Hull.—[Defoe.]
or
Further I avow to your Highness that with these eyes I have beheld the person of William Wooton, B.D., who has written a good sizeable volume against a friend of your Governor (from whom, alas! he must therefore look for little favour) in a most gentlemanly style, adorned with the utmost politeness and civility.—[Swift.]
The natural order of poetry is:—
Thus with the yearSeasons return, but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.
or
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
and this basal difference you must have clear in your minds before, in dealing with prose or verse, you can practise either with profit or read either with intelligent delight.
Thursday, April 17
In our last lecture, Gentlemen, we discussed the difference between verse, or metrical writing, and prose. We traced that difference (as you will remember) to Music—to the harp, the lyre, the dance, the chorus, all those first necessary accompaniments which verse never quite forgets; and we concluded that, as Music ever introduces emotion, which is indeed her proper and only means of persuading, so the natural language of verse will be keyed higher than the natural language of prose; will be keyed higher throughout and even for its most ordinary purposes—as for example, to tell us that So-and-so sailed to Troy with so many ships.
I grant you that our steps to this conclusion were lightly and rapidly taken: yet the stepping-stones are historically firm. Verse does precede prose in literature; verse does start with musical accompaniment; musical accompaniment does introduce emotion; and emotion does introduce an order of its own into speech. I grant you that we have travelled far from the days when a prose-writer, Herodotus, labelled the books of his history by the names of the nine Muses. I grant you that if you go to the Vatican and there study the statues of the Muses (noble, but of no early date) you may note that Calliope, Muse of the Epic—unlike her sisters Euterpe, Erato, Thalia—holds for symbol no instrument of music, but a stylus and a tablet. Yet the earlier Calliope, the Calliope of Homer, was a Muse of Song.
[Greek: Menin aeide, Thea—]
'Had I a thousand tongues, a thousand hands.'—For what purpose does the poet wish for a thousand tongues, but to sing? for what purpose a thousand hands, but to pluck the wires? not to dip a thousand pens in a thousand inkpots.
I doubt, in fine, if your most learned studies will discover much amiss with the frontier we drew between verse and prose, cursorily though we ran its line. Nor am I daunted on comparing it with Coleridge's more philosophical one, which you will find in the "Biographia Literaria" (c. XVIII)—
And first for the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state which it counteracts, and how this balance of antagonism becomes organised into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term) by a supervening act of the will and judgment consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure.
I will not swear to understand precisely what Coleridge means here, though I believe that I do. But at any rate, and on the principle that of two hypotheses, each in itself adequate, we should choose the simpler, I suggest in all modesty that we shall do better with our own than with Coleridge's, which has the further disadvantage of being scarcely amenable to positive evidence. We can say with historical warrant that Sappho struck the lyre, and argue therefrom, still within close range of correction, that her singing responded to the instrument: whereas to assert that Sappho's mind 'was balanced by a spontaneous effort which strove to hold in check the workings of passion' is to say something for which positive evidence will be less handily found, whether to contradict or to support.
Yet if you choose to prefer Coleridge's explanation, no great harm will be done: since Coleridge, who may be presumed to have understood it, promptly goes on to deduce that,
as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement.
which is precisely where we found ourselves, save that where Coleridge uses the word 'excitement' we used the word 'emotion.'
Shall we employ an illustration before proceeding?—some sentence easily handled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I care not what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'—That is a proposition with which you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true; provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial heat; in short a very fair touchstone. Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines of Dekker—
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?O sweet content!Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?O punishment!Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'dTo add to golden numbers golden numbers?O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!Work apace, apace, apace, apace;Honest labour wears a lovely face;Then hey, nonny nonny—hey, nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crystal spring?O sweet content!Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears?O punishment!Then he that patiently want's burden bearsNo burden bears, but is a king, a king!O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!Work apace, apace, apace, apace;Honest labour wears a lovely face;Then hey, nonny nonny—hey, nonny nonny!
There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedate sentence, 'Contentment breeds Happiness,' converted to mere emotion. Note (to use Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain indicative sentences in the two stanzas—(1) 'Honest labour wears a lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations: both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an outburst of emotional nonsense—'hey, nonny nonny—hey, nonny nonny!'—as a man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought.
Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let usprosifythe lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which genius has been able to reduce it and still make noble verse. You have all read Wordsworth's famous Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads," and you know that Wordsworth's was a genius working on a theory that the languages of verse and of prose are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into what banalities that theory over and over again betrayed him: banalities such as—
His widowed mother, for a second mateEspoused the teacher of the village school:Who on her offspring zealously bestowedNeedful instruction.
—and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius working persistently on a narrow theory will now and again 'bring it off' (as they say). So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, did undoubtedly 'bring it off' in the following sonnet:—
These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the airWith words of apprehension and despair;While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,Men unto whom sufficient for the dayAnd minds not stinted or untill'd are given,Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven,Are cheerful as the rising sun in May.What do we gather hence but firmer faithThat every gift of noble originIs breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath;That Virtue and the faculties withinAre vital; and that riches are akinTo fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?
Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions. The sentences, though metrical, run straightforwardly, verb following subject, object verb, as in strict prose. In short here you have verse reduced to the order and structure of prose as nearly as a man of genius, working on a set theory, could reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emotional key. But first let me say that you will find very few like instances of success even in Wordsworth; and few indeed to set against innumerable passages wherein either his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and, succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over dead flats of commonplace. Let me tell you next that the instances you will find in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible; and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared with a passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Take this, for example, from Jeremy Taylor:—
Since all the evil in the world consists in the disagreeing between the object and the appetite, as when a man hath what he desires not, or desires what he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his spirit to the present accident hath variety of instance for his virtue, but none to trouble him, because his desires enlarge not beyond his present fortune: and a wise man is placed in a variety of chances, like the nave or centre of a wheel in the midst of all the circumvolutions and changes of posture, without violence or change, save that it turns gently in compliance with its changed parts, and is indifferent which part is up, and which is down; for there is some virtue or other to be exercised whatever happens—either patience or thanksgiving, love or fear, moderation or humility, charity or contentedness.
Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:—
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose. Like much of Jeremy Taylor's writing it is prose tricked out with the trappings and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for example, with a brace of heroics—'Since all the evil in the world consists'…'between the object and the appetite.' You may say, further, that the simile of the wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too: that Homer might have used it ('As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while the nave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest'—something of that sort). Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchanging Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with the metre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something we discover to be the emotional pitch.
But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quite unconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse—in which, however, he was no adept—with a sure instinct for beautiful prose. Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton: "The Compleat Angler" is packed with praise of it: and in "The Compleat Angler" occurs this well-known passage:—
But, master, first let me tell you, that very hour which you were absent from me, I sat down under a willow tree by the waterside, and considered what you had told me of the owner of that pleasant meadow in which you then had left me; that he had a plentiful estate, and not a heart to think so; that he had at this time many law-suits depending, and that they both damped his mirth and took up so much of his time and thoughts that he had no leisure to take the sweet content that I, who pretended no title to them, took in his fields: for I could there sit quietly; and looking on the water, see some fishes sport themselves in the silver streams, others leaping at flies of several shapes and colours; looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with woods and groves; looking down the meadows, could see, here a boy gathering lilies and lady-smocks, and there a girl cropping culverlocks and cowslips, all to make garlands suitable to this present month of May. These and many other field-flowers so perfumed the air that I thought that very meadow like that field in Sicily of which Diodorus speaks, where the perfumes arising from the place make all dogs that hunt in it to fall off and lose their hottest scent. I say, as I thus sat, joying in my own happy condition, and pitying this poor rich man that owned this and many other pleasant groves and meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth; or rather they enjoy what the others possess and enjoy not; for Anglers and meek quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; and they, and they only can say as the poet has happily exprest it:
'Hail, blest estate of lowliness!Happy enjoyments of such mindsAs, rich in self-contentedness,Can, like the reeds in roughest winds,By yielding make that blow but smallAt which proud oaks and cedars fall.'
There you have a passage of felicitous prose culminating in a stanza of trite and fifth-rate verse. Yes, Walton's instinct is sound; for he is keying up the pitch; and verse, even when mediocre in quality, has its pitch naturally set above that of prose. So, if you will turn to your Walton and read the page following this passage, you will see that, still by a sure instinct, he proceeds from this scrap of reflective verse to a mere rollicking 'catch':
Man's life is but vain, for 'tis subject to painAnd sorrow, and short as a bubble;'Tis a hodge-podge of business and money and care,And care, and money and trouble…
—which is even worse rubbish, and yet a step upwards in emotion because Venator actually sings it to music. 'Ay marry, sir, this is music indeed,' approves Brother Peter; 'this cheers the heart.'
In this and the preceding lecture, Gentlemen, I have enforced at some length the opinion that to understand the many essential differences between verse and prose we must constantly bear in mind that verse, being metrical, keeps the character originally imposed on it by musical accompaniment and must always, however far the remove, be referred back to its origin and to the emotion which music excites.
Mr George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel "Cashel Byron's Profession" to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as being more easily and readily written so: a performance which brilliantly illuminates a half-truth. Verse—or at any rate, unrhymed iambic verse—is easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out the emotion which makes verse characteristic and worth writing. I have little doubt that, had he chosen to attempt it, Mr Shaw would have found his story still more ductile in the metre of "Hiawatha." But the experiment proves nothing: or no more than that, all fine art costing labour, it may cost less if burlesqued in a category not its own.
Let me take an example from a work with which you are all familiar—"The Student's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge." On p. 405 we read:—
The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is divided into ten sections, A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. A student may take either one or two sections at the end of his second year of residence, and either one or two more sections at the end of his third or fourth year of residence; or he may take two sections at the end of his third year only. Thus this Tripos can be treated either as a divided or as an undivided Tripos at the option of the candidate.
Now I do not hold that up to you for a model of prose. Still, lucidity rather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent pains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey his information metrically, thus:—
There is a Tripos that aspires to blendThe Medieval and the Modern tonguesIn one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse!)Divided into sections A, A2,B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I.A student may take either one or two(With some restrictions mention'd in a footnote)At th' expiration of his second year:Or of his third, or of his fourth againTake one or two; or of his third aloneTake two together. Thus this tripos is(Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed)Divisible or indivisibleAt the option of the candidate—Gadzooks!
This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that it is more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal flaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admit of emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule of writing—that it should be appropriate.
Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it—that verse is by nature more emotional than prose—certain consequences would seem to follow: of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high moments.
Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is important. You remember my quoting to you in my last lecture these lines of Milton's:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he rearedFrom whose high top to ken the prospect round,If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary as it well could be), but isderivative. It borrows its wings, its impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the view—just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men, 'marched up a hill and then marched down again,' he certainly would not use diction such as:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.
Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off,' largely through knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find Tennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:—
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoilIn ocean-smelling osier—
(i.e.in a fish-basket)
—and his faceRough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,Not only to the market town were known,But in the leafy lanes beyond the downFar as the portal-warding lion-whelpAnd peacock yewtree of the lonely HallWhose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering,
why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who, seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent bivalve'—
The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!
I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plungein medias res, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and intervals. I believe that it lay—though whether consciously or not he scarcely tells us—at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selecting certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very first, Homer'srapidity. 'First,' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid; and,' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien.'
Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why verse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's choice ofrapidityto put in the forefront of Homer's merits may seem merely capricious. 'Homer (we say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself indicates Homer's simplicity, directness, nobility. Surely either one of these should be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue with either?'
But when we see that the difficulty of verse-narrative lies justhere; that the epic poet who is rapid has met, and has overcome, the capital difficulty of his form, then we begin to do justice not only to Arnold as a critic but (which is of far higher moment) to Homer as a craftsman.
The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact something daemonic. He seems to shirk nothing: and the effect of this upon critics is bewildering. The acutest of them are left wondering how on earth an ordinary tale—say of how some mariners beached ship, stowed sail, walked ashore and cooked their dinner—can be made so poetical. They are inclined to divide the credit between the poet and his fortunate age—'a time' suggests Pater 'in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture "in the great style" against a sky charged with marvels.'
Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius. Just here it is rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, genius overcame it; yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical achievement is such a success. Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in this technical triumph over the capital disability of annihilating flat passages. I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists; because they have only to give a stage direction 'Enter Cassius, looking lean,' and Cassius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer has in his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe him, walk him off. I grant the rapidity of Dante. It is amazing; and we may yield him all the credit for choosing (it was his genius that chose it) a subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity; since Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, though they differ in other respects, have this in common, that they are populous and the inhabitants of each so compendiously shepherded together that the visitor can turn from one person to another without loss of time. But Homer does not escort us around a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage to another. He proposes at least, both in the "Iliad" and in the "Odyssey," to unfold a story; and heseemsto unfold it so artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve us a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.
I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is this apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at the extreme of his difficulty—when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.
Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that no poet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the great Elizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated, in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake," in twelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the sea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy. Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts, and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:—
For ever climbing up the climbing wave
—your ship taking one wave much as she takes another—is in its nature monotonous. Nay, you have only to read Falconer's "Shipwreck" to discover how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in a first-class tempest. Courses, reckonings, trimmings of canvas—these occur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. But to the reader, if he be a landsman, their repetition in narrative may easily become intolerable; and when we get down to the 'trades,' even the seaman sets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep. In short you cannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as upon the plains of windy Troy: nor could any but a superhuman genius make sustained poetry (say) out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve, which none the less was one of the most heroic feats in history.
This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse, has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr Noyes' poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:—
Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis DrakePut down the helm and drove against the seas—Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman,Full fraught with weather wisdom, once againPut down the helm and so drove on—et cetera.
Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next to impossible. He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a ten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us in plain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made a superb epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, what amazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforward tale!—eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, and magnificently presented to Circe
Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main
—and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficulties connected therewith.
Note the space given to Telemachus and his active search for the lost hero: note too how the mass of Odysseus' seafaring adventures is condensed into a reported speech—a traveller's tale at the court of Alcinoüs. Virgil borrowed this trick, you remember; and I dare to swear that had it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga of Nelson's pursuit after Villeneuve he would have achieved it triumphantly—by means of a tale told in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton. Note, again, how boldly (being free to deal with an itinerary of which his audience knew nothing but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal of the marvellous, spaced at irregular distances) Homer works in a shipwreck or a miracle wherever the action threatens to flag. Lessing, as you know, devoted several pages of the "Laoköon" to the shield of Achilles; to Homer's craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer: so that we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being wearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one may presume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in a sense that the shield is being made forus.Well, that is one artifice out of many: but if you would gauge at all Homer's resource and subtlety in technique I recommend you to analyse the first twelve books of the "Odyssey" and count for yourselves the device by which the poet—[Greek: polutropos] as was never his hero—evades or hurries over each flat interval as he happens upon it.
These things, Ulysses,The wise bards alsoBehold and sing.But O, what labour!O Prince, what pain!
You may be thinking, Gentlemen, that I take up a disproportionate amount of your time on such technical matters at these. But literature being an art (forgive the reiteration!) and therefore to be practised, I want us to be seeking all the timehow it is done; to hunt out the principles on which the great artists wrought; to face, to rationalise, the difficulties by which they were confronted, and learn how they overcame the particular obstacle. Surely even for mere criticism, apart from practice, we shall equip ourselves better by seeking, so far as we may, how the thing is done than by standing at gaze before this or that masterpiece and murmuring 'Isn't that beautiful! How in the world, now…!'
I am told that these lectures are criticised as tending to make you conceited: to encourage in you a belief that you can do things, when it were better that you merely admired. Well I would not dishearten you by telling to what a shred of conceit, even of hope, a man can be reduced after twenty-odd years of the discipline. But I can, and do, affirm that the farther you penetrate in these discoveries the more sacred the ultimate mystery will become for you: that the better you understand the great authors as exemplars of practice, the more certainly you will realise what is the condescension of the gods.
Next time, then, we will attempt an enquiry into the capital difficulty of Prose.
Thursday, May 1
We parted, Gentlemen, upon a promise to discuss the capital difficulty of Prose, as we have discussed the capital difficulty of Verse. But, although we shall come to it, on second thoughts I ask leave to break the order of my argument and to interpose some words upon a kind of writing which, from a superficial likeness, commonly passes for prose in these days, and by lazy folk is commonly written for prose, yet actually is not prose at all; my excuse being the simple practical one that, by first clearing this sham prose out of the way, we shall the better deal with honest prose when we come to it. The proper difficulties of prose will remain: but we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at any rate what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heard somewhere of a religious body in the United States of America which had reason to suspect one of its churches of accepting Spiritual consolation from a coloured preacher—an offence against the laws of the Synod—and despatched a Disciplinary Committee with power to act; and of the Committee's returning to report itself unable to take any action under its terms of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured had undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from it in the Committee's presence, the performance could be brought within no definition of preaching known or discoverable. So it is with that infirmity of speech—that flux, that determination of words to the mouth, or to the pen—which, though it be familiar to you in parliamentary debates, in newspapers, and as the staple language of Blue Books, Committees, Official Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prose which is not prose and under its real name of Jargon.
You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called Journalese. The two overlap, indeed, and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices. But Jargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries among good douce people who have never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never talk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad weather'; who have never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess,' 'recrudesce,' 'envisage,' 'adumbrate,' or with phrases such as 'the psychological moment,' 'the true inwardness,' 'it gives furiously to think.' It dallies with Latinity—'sub silentio,' 'de die in diem,' 'cui bono?' (always in the sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')—but not for the sake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier is his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poor language, to make it more floriferous, more poetical—like the Babu for example who, reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you, the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'
Thereis metaphor:thereis ornament:thereis a sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks—no such zeal, artistic or professional, animates—the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons. Caution is its father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: its mother, Indolence. It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in these times,safe: a thousand men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming the language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being.
Has a Minister to say 'No' in the House of Commons? Some men are constitutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys it thus—'The answer to the question is in the negative.' That means 'no.' Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that the speaker is a pompous person?—which was no part of the information demanded.
That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. But as a rule Jargon is by no means accurate, its method being to walk circumspectly around its target; and its faith, that having done so it has either hit the bull's-eye or at least achieved something equivalent, and safer.
Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that—
In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin provided was of the usual character.
Now this is not accurate. 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased,' for whom a coffin was supplied, it is wholly superfluous to tell us that he is deceased. But actually John Jenkins never had more than one case, and that was the coffin. The Clerk says he had two,—a coffin in a case: but I suspect the Clerk to be mistaken, and I am sure he errs in telling us that the coffin was of the usual character: for coffins have no character, usual or unusual.
For another example (I shall not tell you whence derived)—
In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class [So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as well as a first-class. He might be a stuffed animal: perhaps he is] In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class the class-list will show by some convenient mark (1) the Section or Sections for proficiency in which he is placed in the first class and (2) the Section or Sections (if any) in which he has passed with special distinction.
'The Section or Sections (if any)'—But, how, if they are not any, could they be indicated by a mark however convenient?
The Examiners will have regard to the style and method of the candidate's answers, and will give credit for excellencein these respects.
Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon? The first is that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech. It says 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin' when it means 'John Jenkins's coffin': and its yea is not yea, neither is its nay nay: but its answer is in the affirmative or in the negative, as the foolish and superfluous 'case' may be. The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. I shall have something to say by-and-by about the concrete noun, and how you should ever be struggling for it whether in prose or in verse. For the moment I content myself with advising you, if you would write masculine English, never to forget the old tag of your Latin Grammar—
Masculine will only beThings that you can touch and see.
But since these lectures are meant to be a course in First Aid to writing, I will content myself with one or two extremely rough rules: yet I shall be disappointed if you do not find them serviceable.
The first is:—Whenever in your reading you come across one of these words,case, instance, character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree—whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another of them—pull yourself up and take thought. If it be 'case' (I choose it as Jargon's dearest child—'in Heaven yclept Metonomy') turn to the dictionary, if you will, and seek out what meaning can be derived fromcasus, its Latin ancestor: then try how, with a little trouble, you can extricate yourself from that case. The odds are, you will feel like a butterfly who has discarded his chrysalis.
Here are some specimens to try your hand on—
(1) All those tears which inundated Lord Hugh Cecil's head were dry in the case of Mr Harold Cox.
Poor Mr Cox! left gasping in his aquarium!
(2) [From a cigar-merchant] In any case, let us send you a case on approval.
(3) It is contended that Consols have fallen in consequence: but such is by no means the case.
'Such,' by the way, is another spoilt child of Jargon, especially in Committee's Rules—'Co-opted members may be eligible as such; such members to continue to serve for such time as'—and so on.
(4) Even in the purely Celtic areas, only in two or three cases do the Bishops bear Celtic names.
For 'cases' read 'dioceses.'
Instance.In most instances the players were below their form.
But what were they playing at? Instances?
Character—Nature.There can be no doubt that the accident was caused through the dangerous nature of the spot, the hidden character of the by-road, and the utter absence of any warning or danger signal.
Mark the foggy wording of it all! And yet the man hit something and broke his neck! Contrast that explanation with the verdict of a coroner's jury in the West of England on a drowned postman—'We find that deceased met his death by an act of God, caused by sudden overflowing of the river Walkhan and helped out by the scandalous neglect of the way-wardens.'
The Aintree course is notoriously of a trying nature.
On account of its light character, purity and age, Usher's whiskey is a whiskey that will agree with you.
Order.The mésalliance was of a pronounced order.
Condition.He was conveyed to his place of residence in an intoxicated condition.
'He was carried home drunk.'