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 be appropriate: 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 be accurate: 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.
But about “getting there”—I ask you to remember Wolfe, with the seal of his fate on him, stepping into his bateau on the dark St. Lawrence River and quoting as they tided him over:—
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike th’ inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
“I had rather have written those lines,” said Wolfe, “than conquer Canada.” That is how our forefathers valued noble writing. The Denver editor holds that you may write as you please so long as you get there. Well, Wolfe got there: and so, in Wolfe’s opinion, did Gray: but perhaps to Wolfe and Gray, and to the Denver editor, “there” happened to mean two different places. Wolfe got to the Heights of Abraham.
Further, it was against this loose adaptation of words to thought and to things that we protested in our interpolated lecture on Jargon, which is not so much bad writing as the avoidance of writing. The man who employs Jargon does not get “there” at all, even in a raw rough pioneering fashion: he just walks around “there” in the ambient tracks of others. Let me fly as high as I can and quote you two recent achievements by Cabinet Ministers, as reported in the Press:—(1) “Mr. McKenna’s reasons for releasing from Holloway Prison Miss Lenton while on remand charged in connection with (sweet phrase!) the firing of the tea pavilion in Kew Gardens are given in a letter which he has caused to be forwarded to a correspondent who inquired as to the circumstances of the release. The letter says ‘I am desired
