Quality and Section.Mr ——, exhibiting no less than five works, all of a superior quality, figures prominently in the oil section.
This was written of an exhibition of pictures.
Degree.A singular degree of rarity prevails in the earlier editions of this romance.
That is Jargon. In prose it runs simply 'The earlier editions of this romance are rare'—or 'are very rare'—or even (if you believe what I take leave to doubt), 'are singularly rare'; which should mean that they are rarer than the editions of any other work in the world.
Now what I ask you to consider about these quotations is that in each the writer was using Jargon to shirk prose, palming off periphrases upon us when with a little trouble he could have gone straight to the point. 'A singular degree of rarity prevails,' 'the accident was caused through the dangerous nature of the spot,' 'but such is by no means the case.' We may not be capable of much; but we can all write better than that, if we take a little trouble. In place of, 'the Aintree course is of a trying nature' we can surely say 'Aintree is a trying course' or 'the Aintree course is a trying one'—just that and nothing more.
Next, having trained yourself to keep a look-out for these worst offenders (and you will be surprised to find how quickly you get into the way of it), proceed to push your suspicions out among the whole cloudy host of abstract terms. 'How excellent a thing is sleep,' sighed Sancho Panza; 'it wraps a man round like a cloak'—an excellent example, by the way, of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that 'among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.' How vile a thing—shall we say?—is the abstract noun! It wraps a man's thoughts round like cotton wool.
Here is a pretty little nest of specimens, found in "The Times" newspaper by Messrs. H. W. and F. G. Fowler, authors of that capital little book "The King's English":—
One of the most important reforms mentioned in the rescript is the unification of the organisation of judicial institutions and the guarantee for all the tribunals of the independence necessary for securing to all classes of the community equality before the law.
I do not dwell on the cacophony; but, to convey a straightforward piece of news, might not the Editor of "The Times" as well employ a man to write:—
One of the most important reforms is that of the Courts, which need a uniform system and to be made independent. In this way only can men be assured that all are equal before the law.
I think he might.
A day or two ago the musical critic of the "Standard" wrote this:—
Mr Frederick Lamond, the Scottish pianist, as an interpreter of Beethoven has few rivals. At his second recital of the composer's works at Bechstein Hall on Saturday afternoon he again displayed a complete sympathy and understanding of his material that extracted the very essence of aesthetic and musical value from each selection he undertook. The delightful intimacy of his playing and his unusual force of individual expression are invaluable assets, which, allied to his technical brilliancy, enable him to achieve an artistic triumph. The two lengthy Variations in E flat major (Op. 35) and in D major, the latter on the Turkish March from 'The Ruins of Athens,' when included in the same programme, require a master hand to provide continuity of interest.To say that Mr Lamond successfully avoided moments that might at times, in these works, have inclined to comparative disinterestedness, would be but a moderate way of expressing the remarkable fascination with which his versatile playing endowed them, butat the same timetwo of the sonatas given included a similar form of composition, and no matter how intellectually brilliant may be the interpretation, the extravagant use of a certain mode is bound in time to become somewhat ineffective. In the Three Sonatas, the E major (Op. 109), the A major (Op. 2), No. 2, and the C minor (Op. 111), Mr Lamond signalised his perfect insight into the composer's varying moods.
Will you not agree with me that here is no writing, here is no prose, here is not even English, but merely a flux of words to the pen?
Here again is a string, a concatenation—say, rather, a tiara—of gems of purest ray serene from the dark unfathomed caves of a Scottish newspaper:—
The Chinese viewpoint, as indicated in this letter, may not be without interest to your readers, because it evidently is suggestive of more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate in disaster resembling the Chang-Sha riots. It also ventures to illustrate incidents having their inception in recent premature endeavours to accelerate the development of Protestant missions in China; but we would hope for the sake of the interests involved that what my correspondent describes as 'the irresponsible ruffian element' may be known by their various religious designations only within very restricted areas.
Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! and are asking the Christians—as to-day's newspapers inform us—to pray for them. Do you wonder? But that is, or was, the Chinese 'viewpoint,'—and what a willow-pattern viewpoint! Observe its delicacy. It does not venture to interest or be interesting; merely 'to be not without interest.' But it does 'venture to illustrate incidents'—which, for a viewpoint, is brave enough: and this illustration 'is suggestive of something more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate.' What materialises? The unpleasant aspect? or the things? Grammar says the 'things,' 'things which if allowed to materialise.' But things are materialised already, and as a condition of their being things. It must be the aspect, then, that materialises. But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, and an aspect, however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannot culminate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots…. I give it up.
Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:—
Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however, took some time in settling to work….
Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into 'that great but unequal poet' and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes 'the gloomy master of Newstead': overleaf he is reincarnated into 'the meteoric darling of society': and so proceeds through successive avatars—'this arch-rebel,' 'the author of Childe Harold,' 'the apostle of scorn,' 'the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot,' 'the martyr of Missolonghi,' 'the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.' Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse. In literature as in life he makes himself felt who not only calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and re-double.
For another rule—just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train your suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon 'as regards,' 'with regard to,' 'in respect of,' 'in connection with,' 'according as to whether,' and the like. They are all dodges of Jargon, circumlocutions for evading this or that simple statement: and I say that it is not enough to avoid them nine times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred. You should never use them. That is positive enough, I hope? Though I cannot admire his style, I admire the man who wrote to me, 'Re Tennyson—your remarks anent his "In Memoriam" make me sick': for though re is not a preposition of the first water, and 'anent' has enjoyed its day, the finish crowned the work. But here are a few specimens far, very far, worse:—
The special difficulty in Professor Minocelsi's case [our old friend 'case' again] arosein connexion withthe view he holdsrelative tothe historical value of the opening pages of Genesis.
That is Jargon. In prose, even taking the miserable sentence as it stands constructed, we should write 'the difficulty arose over the views he holds about the historical value,' etc.
From a popular novelist:—
I was entirely indifferentas tothe results of the game, caring nothing at allas towhetherI had losses or gains—
Cut out the first 'as' in 'as to,' and the second 'as to' altogether, and the sentence begins to be prose—'I was indifferent to the results of the game, caring nothing whether I had losses or gains.'
But why, like Dogberry, have 'had losses'? Why not simply 'lose.' Let us try again. 'I was entirely indifferent to the results of the game, caring nothing at all whether I won or lost.'
Still the sentence remains absurd: for the second clause but repeats the first without adding one jot. For if you care not at all whether you win or lose, you must be entirely indifferent to the results of the game. So why not say 'I was careless if I won or lost,' and have done with it?
A man of simple and charming character, he was fitlyassociated withthe distinction of the Order of Merit.
I take this gem with some others from a collection made three years ago, by the "Oxford Magazine"; and I hope you admire it as one beyond price. 'He was associated with the distinction of the Order of Merit' means 'he was given the Order of Merit.' If the members of that Order make a society then he was associated with them; but you cannot associate a man with a distinction. The inventor of such fine writing would doubtless have answered Canning's Needy Knife-grinder with:—
I associate thee with sixpence! I will see thee in another association first!
But let us close ourflorilegiumand attempt to illustrate Jargon by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet's soliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this fashion:—
To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.
That is Jargon: and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, 'They gave him a silver teapot,' you write as a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,' you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun. Somebody—I think it was FitzGerald—once posited the question 'What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?' Without pursuing that dreadful enquiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables—those exquisite short stories—speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'—'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,'—and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'—not 'Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.' The Gospel does not say 'Consider the growth of the lilies,' or even 'Consider how the lilies grow.' It says, 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'
Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the particular. He does it even in "Venus and Adonis" (as Professor Wendell, of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare, published some ten years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" side by side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot but mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualised image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, the abstract term, the thing seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of which start out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins:—
Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds:Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds,And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,All headlong throws herself the clouds among.
Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to his hero and to business without ado:—
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face—(You have the sun visualised at once),Even as the sun with purple-colour'd faceHad ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn.
When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:—
Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong;Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.
Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:—
Upon this promise did he raise his chin,Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.
Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meetingLeander:—
It lies not in our power to love or hate,For will in us is over-ruled by fate…,
and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting with Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:—
Or as a snail whose tender horns being hitShrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,Long after fearing to creep forth again;So, at his bloody view—
I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack into verse, such as:—
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care.
Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us take Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something very like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, and what I may callsolidified sensation. Let us take this admired passage from his "Duchess of Malfy":—
Ferdinand.How doth our sister Duchess bear herselfIn her imprisonment?
Basola.Nobly: I'll describe her.She's sad as one long used to 't, and she seemsRather to welcome the end of miseryThan shun it: a behaviour so nobleAs gives a majesty to adversity(Note the abstract terms.)You may discern the shape of lovelinessMore perfect in her tears than in her smiles;She will muse for hours together; and her silence(Here we first come on the concrete: and beautiful it is.)Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.
Now set against this the well-known passage from "Twelfth Night" where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to him and invented by her—a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more definite is the language:—
Viola.My father had a daughter lov'd a man; As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,Ishould your lordship.
Duke.And what's her history?
Viola.A blank, my lord. She never told her love,But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,And with a green and yellow melancholyShe sat like Patience on a monumentSmiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespearehasto use the abstract noun 'concealment,' on an instant it turns into a visible worm 'feeding' on the visible rose; how, having to use a second abstract word 'patience,' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.
Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim—to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague—as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by setting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America" alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry into the Policy of the European Powers." Here is the deadly parallel:—
In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Ægypt and Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.
In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government.
You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought to his own page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on the mind?
'This particularising style,' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it produces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its way: but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of this energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," he communicates more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.'
You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered it vividly.
Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a passage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay within South's compass:—
The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not sayThis is Iesabel; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know,This is Iesabel.
Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failing tendency to transform intoshape, intolife, the feeling that may dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet's imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.'
Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.
A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; for language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is your reason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.
Thursday, May 15
To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we have to essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of his compass-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside his knowledge—outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge. I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his host on the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In asking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise only that, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back' of the desert.
In my last lecture but one, then,—and before our small interlude with Jargon—the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this point: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinary unemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments. This point, I believe, we made effectively enough.
Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a corresponding point, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to these high emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be, Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questions about prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can, to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, is an art) you cannot classify as in a science.
Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. In studying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust all classification! All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one. Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classified is not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had tomakea beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would classification help? To classify in a science is necessary for the purpose of that science: to classify when you come to art is at the best an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. It serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about 'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan. We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead. Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if 'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the horizon: whereas Donne—a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one—had by 1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to Jacobean and Caroline poetry.
In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man (improbus homo) with his wicked inventions is for ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled—and, if you are wise, thank Heaven—that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.
Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins.
You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as 'a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm laxly.' When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get the better of you.
Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened.Its difficulty—the inherent, the native disability of prose—is tohandle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse.Well, we strike into the line of our prose-writers, say as early asMalory. We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur:—
'My time hieth fast,' said the king. Therefore said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, 'Take thou Excalibur my good sword, and go with it to yonder water side; and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water and come again and tell me what there thou seest.' 'My lord,' said Bedivere, 'Your commandment shall be done; and lightly bring you word again.' So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of precious stones, and then he said to himself, 'If I throw this rich sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss.' And then Sir Bedivere hid Excaliber under a tree. And so, as soon as he might, he came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water and had thrown the sword into the water, 'What saw thou there?' said the king, 'Sir,' he said, 'I saw nothing but waves and winds.'
Now I might say a dozen things of this and of the whole passage that follows, down to Arthur's last words. Specially might I speak to you of the music of its monosyllables—'"What sawest you there?" said the king… "Do as well as thou mayest; for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into the Vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul."' But, before making comment at all, I shall quote you another passage; this from Lord Berners' translation of Froissart, of the death of Robert Bruce:—
It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that there was no way for him but death. And when he felt that his end drew near, he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he trusted best, and shewed them how there was no remedy with him, but he must needs leave this transitory life…. Then he called to him the gentle knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the lords, 'Sir William, my dear friend, ye know well that I have had much ado in my days to uphold and sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished, whereof I am right sorry; the which was, if I might achieve and make an end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have gone and warred on Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy Christian faith. To this purpose mine heart hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent thereto… And sith it is so that my body can not go, nor achieve that my heart desireth, I will send the heart instead of the body, to accomplish mine avow… I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and take of my treasure as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise, both for yourself and such company as ye will take with you, and present my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord lay, seeing my body can not come there. And take with you such company and purveyance as shall be appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye come, let it be known how ye carry with you the heart of King Robert of Scotland, at his instance and desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre.' Then all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity.
There, in the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth, you have Malory and Berners writing beautiful English prose; prose the emotion of which (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So you see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,' but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It is when prose attempts tophilosophise, toexpress thoughtsas well as to relate simple sayings and doings—it is then that the trouble begins. When Malory has to philosophise death, tothinkabout it, this is as far as he attains:—
'Ah, Sir Lancelot,' said he, 'thou wert head of all Christian Knights! And now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were the curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever strood horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'
Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, eloquent as he can be on the virtues of his dead friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of death itself all he can accomplish is, 'And now I dare say that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest.'
Let us make a leap in time and contrast this with Tyndale and the translators of our Bible, how they are able to make St Paul speak of death:—
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
There you have something clean beyond what Malory or Berners could compass: there you have a different kind of high moment—a high moment of philosophising: there you have emotion impregnated with thought. It was necessary that our English verse even after Chaucer, our English prose after Malory and Berners, should overcome this most difficult gap (which stands for a real intellectual difference) if it aspired to be what to-day it is—a language of the first class, comparable with Greek and certainly no whit inferior to Latin or French.
* * * * *
Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge over the gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' Prologue:—
O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre!O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight!
in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to her children:—
O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne,Your woful moder wendë stedfastlyThat cruel houndës or some foul vermyneHadde eten you; but God of his mercyAnd your benignë fader tendrelyHath doon you kept…
You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, of that time:—
He came al so stillThere his mother was,As dew in AprilThat falleth on the grass.
He came al so stillTo his mother's bour,As dew in AprilThat falleth on the flour.
He came al so stillThere his mother lay,As dew in AprilThat falleth on the spray.
Mother and maidenWas never none but she;Well may such a ladyGoddes mother be.
You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza as this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":—
Though it be sung of old and youngThat I should be to blame,Their's be the charge that speak so largeIn hurting of my name;For I will prove that faithful loveIt is devoid of shame;In your distress and heavinessTo part with you the same:And sure all tho that do not soTrue lovers are they none:For, in my mind, of all mankindI love but you alone.
All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in innocent emotion: they are notthoughtful. So when Barbour breaks out in praise of Freedom, he cries
A! Fredome is a noble thing!
And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on
Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.
(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)
Fredome all solace to man giffis,He livis at ese that frely livis!A noble hart may haif nane ese,Na ellys nocht that may him plese,Gif fredome fail'th: for fre likingIs yharnit ouer all othir thing…
—and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedomis.
Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from theNut-Brown Maid's artless confession,
in my mind, of all mankindI love but you alone,
let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's—
Thy bosom is endearéd with all heartsWhich I by lacking have supposéd dead:And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,And all those friends which I thought buriéd.How many a holy and obsequious tearHath dear religious love stolen from mine eyeAs interest of the dead!—which now appearBut things removed, that hidden in thee lie.Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,Who all their parts of me to thee did give;That due of many now is mine alone:Their images I loved I view in thee,And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way—there is less of heart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties—but how much more thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!
Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.
But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men's eyes—unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular—to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, whichhabitually philosophised life: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever askingWhy?'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose? his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers—call them the gods, or whatever you will—that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good and evil, life, love, death?'
These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an answer—some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content with the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature which answered so differently—and having other reasons to suspect what the Church said and did—grew aware that their literature had been as a child at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death: it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way—to make their report worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery—new literary forms had to be invented—new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the verse in which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek, which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet; or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new meanings; or lastly, to do all three together.
Well, it was done; and in verse very fortunately done; thanks of course to many men, but thanks to two especially—to Sir Thomas Wyat, who led our poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which Italy had cast its classical heritage; and to Marlowe, who impressed blank verse upon the drama. Of Marlowe I shall say nothing; for with what he achieved you are familiar enough. Of Wyat I may speak at length to you, one of these days; but here, to prepare you for what I hope to prove—that Wyat is one of the heroes of our literature—I will give you three brief reasons why we should honour his memory:—
(1) He led the way. On the value of that service I shall content myself with quoting a passage from Newman:—
When a language has been cultivated in any particular department of thought, and so far as it has been generally perfected, an existing want has been supplied, and there is no need for further workmen. In its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in it at all is almost a work of genius. It is like crossing a country before roads are made communicating between place and place. The authors of that age deserve to be Classics both because of what they do and because they can do it. It requires the courage and force of great talent to compose in the language at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a permanent impression on it.
This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened up a new country toEnglishmen. But he did more.
(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive that the lyric, if it would philosophise life, love, and the rest, must boldly introduce the personal note: since in fact when man asks questions about his fortune or destiny he asks them most effectively in the first person. 'What amIdoing? Why arewemortal? Why doIlovethee?'
This again Wyat did: and again he did more.
For (3) thirdly—and because of this I am surest of his genius—again and again, using new thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the result in language so direct, economical, natural, easy, that I know to this day no one who can better Wyat's best in combining straight speech with melodious cadence. Take the linesIs it possible?—
Is it possible?For to turn so oft;To bring that lowest that was most aloft:And to fall highest, yet to light soft?Is it possible?
All is possible!Whoso list believe;Trust therefore first, and after preve;As men wed ladies by licence and leave,All is possible!
or again—
Forget not! O forget not this!—How long ago hath been, and is,The mind that never meant amiss:Forget not yet!
or again (can personal note go straighter?)—
And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay, say nay, for shame!To save thee from the blame—Of all my grief and grame.And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay! say nay!
(Say 'nay,' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative.')
No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, and will read it to you in full—
What should I say?Since Faith is deadAnd Truth awayFrom you is fled?Should I be ledWith doubleness?Nay! nay! mistress.
I promised youAnd you promised meTo be as trueAs I would be:But since I seeYour double heart,Farewell my part!
Thought for to takeIs not my mind;But to forsakeOne so unkind;And as I find,So will I trust,Farewell, unjust!
Can ye say nayBut that you saidThat I alwayShould be obeyed?And—thus betrayedOr that I wist!Farewell, unkist!
I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History of English Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.' I know not to what wiseacre we owe that pronouncement: but what do you think of it, after the lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the same volume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us of Wilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that
there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe.' The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that the earlier English poets of the period—Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and the Earl of Surrey—drew their inspiration from Petrarch and Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some degeneration.
Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'
(Thought for to takeIs not my mind;But to forsake
This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church ofScotland—
Farewell unkiss'd!)
But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets—
Let me not to the marriage of true MindsAdmit impediment. Love is not loveWhich alters where it alteration findsOr bends with the remover to remove.
Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,' which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books: and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.
The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent convulsions. I suppose that the most of us—if, after reading a quantity of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch—would confess to finding the mass of it clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could write at his average. For a sample:—
English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as 'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches…. Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the FrenchDoudie, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument.
This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.
Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say something: that is, tomakesomething. It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the stature of the grown man to be.
These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue (yet with a sure instinct he does it):—
If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write… And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that no man can do worse.
On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.
For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were alive and trying todosomething. Unconsciously for the most part they were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm for its periods.
And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there befel a miracle.
You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the AuthorisedVersion of the Bible.
I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius. I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis. Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply miraclespraeter necessitatem; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men—not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent—sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work—improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees—that only by miracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St Paul's Cathedral; and you know whattheydid. Individual genius such as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.
Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you 'courses of study' in English Literature never include the Authorised Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?… I wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow.
'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality…'
'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.'
'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is ofwrought gold.'
'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold theland that is very far off.'
'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'
When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men—holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan—have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars,—Milton, Sir Thomas Browne—practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.
What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours—to direct your words through life as well as your hearts.
Thursday, May 29
Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to learn from it, moreover, how by masteringrhythm, our Prose overcame the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin instrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man's thought however sublime, his emotion however profound.
Now in the course of my remarks I happened—maybe a little incautiously—to call the Authorised Version a 'miracle'; using that word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning no more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed that the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators—to the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed it eagerly in their preface:—
Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against: that hath bene our indeavour, that our marke.
(See [Footnote 1] at the end of this lecture.)
Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it will astound you when you compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle (it has been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that there were certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable to account. Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, I spoke of the Authorised Version as a 'miracle.' It was, it remains, marvellous to me.
Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within the leaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear to readers as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuing them—almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth's Kitten with those other falling leaves:—
That almost I could repineThat your transports are not mine.
But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by this word 'miracle' I meant to suggest to you a something like plenary inspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it were sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle.
Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hope to discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy—with what meaning, if any—we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions which have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards.
But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the forty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark nonsense. Remember that I used this very same word 'miracle' of Shakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, or at any rate stark bombast. He never blotted a line—'I would he had blotted a thousand' says Ben Jonson: and Ben Jonson was right. Shakespeare could have blotted out two or three thousand lines: he was great enough to afford it. Somewhere Matthew Arnold supposes us as challenging Shakespeare over this and that weak or bombastic passage, and Shakespeare answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt we were right, but after all, 'Did it greatly matter?'
So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven in asserting that here and there they wrote nonsense. They could afford it. But we do stultify criticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and beauty, we prostrate ourselves indiscriminately before what is good and what is bad, what is sublime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any reviser to put forth a hand to the ark.
The most of us Christians go to church on Christmas Day, and there we listen to this from Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7:—
Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.
For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm. But have you ever, sitting in church on a Christmas morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if it mean anything more than a sing-song according somehow with the holly and ivy around the pillars?'Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest,'But why—if the joy be not increased?'For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.'Granted the rhythmical antithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the improvement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better than garments rolled in blood? And, in fine, what is it all about? Now let us turn to the Revised Version:—
But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time hath he made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased their joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian.
For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall even be for burning, for fuel of fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
I say (knowing no Hebrew, merely assuming our Revisers to be at least no worse scholars than the forty-seven) that here, with the old cadences kept so far as possible, we are given sense in place of nonsense: and I ask you to come to the Revised Version with a fair mind. I myself came to it with some prejudice; in complete ignorance of Hebrew, and with no more than the usual amount of Hellenistic Greek. I grant at once that the Revised New Testament was a literary fiasco; largely due (if gossip may be trusted) to trouble with the Greek Aorist, and an unwise decision—in my opinion the most gratuitously unwise a translator can take—to use one and the same English word, always and in every connotation, as representing one and the same Greek word: for in any two languages few words are precisely equivalent. A fiasco at any rate the Revised New Testament was, deserving in a dozen ways and in a thousand passages the scorn which Professor Saintsbury has recently heaped on it. But I protest against the injustice of treating the two Revisions—of the New Testament and of the Old—as a single work, and saddling the whole with the sins of a part. For two years I spent half-an-hour daily in reading the Authorised and Revised Versions side by side, marking as I went, and in this way worked through the whole—Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament. I came to it (as I have said) with some prejudice; but I closed the books on a conviction, which my notes sustain for me, that the Revisers of the Old Testament performed their task delicately, scrupulously, on the whole with great good judgment; that the critic does a wrong who brings them under his indiscriminate censure; that on the whole they have clarified the sense of the Authorised Version while respecting its consecrated rhythms; and that—to name an example, that you may test my words and judge for yourselves—the solemn splendour of that most wonderful poem, the story of Job, [Greek: dialampei], 'shines through' the new translation as it never shone through the old.
* * * * *
And now Gentlemen (as George Herbert said on a famous occasion), let us tune our instruments.
Before discussing with you another and highly important question of style in writing, I will ask you to look back for a few moments on the road we have travelled.
We have agreed that our writing should beappropriate: that it should fit the occasion; that it should rise and fall with the subject, be grave where that is serious, where it is light not afraid of what Stevenson in "The Wrong Box" calls 'a little judicious levity.' If your writing observe these precepts, it will be well-mannered writing.
To be sure, much in addition will depend on yourself—on what you are or have made yourself, since in writing the style can never be separated from the man. But neither can it in the practice of virtue: yet, though men differ in character, I do not observe that moralists forbear from laying down general rules of excellence. Now if you will recall our further conclusion, that writing to be good must be persuasive (since persuasion is the only true intellectual process), and will test this by a passage of Newman's I am presently to quote to you, from his famous 'definition of a gentleman,' I think you will guess pretty accurately the general law of excellence I would have you, as Cambridge men, tribally and particularly obey.
Newman says of a gentleman that among other things:
He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out…. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they found it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion: but he is too clear-sighted to be unjust. He is simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
Enough for the moment on this subject: but commit these words to your hearts, and you will not only triumph in newspaper controversy. You will do better: you will avoid it.
To proceed.—We found further that our writing should beaccurate: because language expresses thought—is, indeed, the only expression of thought—and if we lack the skill to speak precisely, our thought will remain confused, ill-defined. The editor of a mining paper in Denver, U.S.A., boldly the other day laid down this law, that niceties of language were mere 'frills': all a man needed was to 'get there,' that is, to say what he wished in his own way. But just here, we found, lies the mischief. You will not get there by hammering away on your own untutored impulse. You must first be your own reader, chiselling out the thought definitely for yourself: and, after that, must carve out the intaglio yet more sharply and neatly, if you would impress its image accurately upon the wax of other men's minds. We found that even for Men of Science this neat clean carving of words was a very necessary accomplishment. As Sir James Barrie once observed, 'The Man of Science appears to be the only man who has something to say, just now—and the only man who does not know how to say it.' But the trouble by no means ends with Science. Our poets—those gifted strangely prehensile men who, as I said in my first lecture, seem to be born with filaments by which they apprehend, and along which they conduct, the half-secrets of life to us ordinary mortals—our poets would appear to be scamping artistic labour, neglecting to reduce the vague impressions to the clearly cut image which is, after all, what helps. It may be a triumph that they have taught modern French poetry to be suggestive. I think it would be more profitable could they learn from France—that nation of fine workmen—to be definite.