I associate thee with sixpence! I will see thee in another association first!
But let us close our florilegium and 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 forever 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 face
Had 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 meeting Leander:—
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled 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 hit
Shrinks 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?
