On the Art of Writing

On the Art of Writing

By Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Preface
5. On the Art of Writing
   1. Lecture I: Inaugural
   2. Lecture II: The Practice of Writing
   3. Lecture III: On the Difference Between Verse and Prose
   4. Lecture IV: On the Capital Difficulty of Verse
   5. Lecture V: Interlude: On Jargon
   6. Lecture VI: On the Capital Difficulty of Prose
   7. Lecture VII: Some Principles Reaffirmed
   8. Lecture VIII: On the Lineage of English Literature (I)
   9. Lecture IX: On the Lineage of English Literature (II)
   10. Lecture X: English Literature in Our Universities (I)
   11. Lecture XI: English Literature in Our Universities (II)
   12. Lecture XII: On Style
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To
John Hay Lobban

Preface

By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into a smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very few corrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader will all too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than in arguments dropped and left at loose ends⁠—the whole bewraying a man called unexpectedly to a post where in the act of adapting himself, of learning that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his main purpose and skirmish with difficulties⁠—they will be the truer to life; and so may experimentally enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing is a living business.

Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps excuse certain small vivacities, sallies that meet fools with their folly, masking the main attack. That, we will see, is serious enough; and others will carry it on, though my effort come to naught.

It amounts to this⁠—Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; but an Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we must consider it as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that potters with any glory of its past, as a thing dead and done for, is to that extent renegade. If that be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can excuse the relaxation of an effort⁠—however vain and hopeless⁠—to better him, or some part of him. If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage, we persist in striving to write well, we can easily resign to other nations all the secondary fame to be picked up by commentators.

Recent history has strengthened, with passion and scorn, the faith in which I wrote the following pages.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

November 1915

On the Art of Writing

Lecture I

Inaugural

Wednesday, January 29, 1913

In all the long quarrel set between philosophy and poetry I know of nothing finer, as of nothing more pathetically hopeless, than Plato’s return upon himself in his last dialogue “The Laws.” There are who find that dialogue (left unrevised) insufferably dull, as no doubt it is without form and garrulous. But I think they will read it with a new tolerance, maybe even with a touch of feeling, if upon second thoughts they recognise in its twisting and turnings, its prolixities and repetitions, the scruples of an old man who, knowing that his time in this world is short, would not go out of it pretending to know more than he does, and even in matters concerning which he was once very sure has come to divine that, after all, as Renan says, “La Verité consiste dans les nuances.” Certainly “the mind’s dark cottage battered and decayed” does in that last dialogue admit some wonderful flashes,

From Heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates,

or rather to that noble “banquet-hall deserted” which aforetime had entertained Socrates.

Suffer me, Mr. Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen, before reaching my text, to remind you of the characteristically beautiful setting. The place is Crete, and the three interlocutors⁠—Cleinias a Cretan, Megillus a Lacedaemonian, and an Athenian stranger⁠—have joined company on a pilgrimage to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, first lawgiver of the island, had reputedly derived not only his parentage but much parental instruction. Now the day being hot, even scorching, and the road from Knossos to the Sacred Cave a long one, our three pilgrims, who have foregathered as elderly men, take it at their leisure, and propose to beguile it with talk upon Minos and his laws. “Yes, and on the way,” promises the Cretan, “we shall come to cypress-groves exceedingly tall and fair, and to green meadows, where we may repose ourselves and converse.” “Good,” assents the Athenian. “Ay, very good indeed, and better still when we arrive at them. Let us push on.”

So they proceed. I have said that all three are elderly men; that