On the Art of Writing

by the Home Secretary to say that Lilian Lenton was reported by the medical officer at Holloway Prison to be in a state of collapse and in imminent danger of death consequent upon her refusal to take food. Three courses were open⁠—(1) To leave her to die; (2) To attempt to feed her forcibly, which the medical officer advised would probably entail death in her existing condition: (3) To release her. The Home Secretary adopted the last course.’ ”

“Would probably entail death in her existing condition”! Will anyone tell me how Mr. McKenna or anyone else could kill, or (as he prefers to put it) entail death upon, Miss Lenton in a non-existing condition?

(2) Next take the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As we know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer can use incisive speech when he chooses. On May 8th as reported in next day’s Morning Post, Mr. Lloyd George, answering a question, delivered himself of this to an attentive Senate:⁠—

With regard to Mr. Noel Buxton’s questions, I cannot answer for an enquiry which is of a private and confidential character, for although I am associated with it I am not associated with it as a Minister of the Crown.⁠ ⁠… Those enquiries are of a very careful systematic and scientific character, and are being conducted by the ablest investigators in this country, some of whom have reputations of international character. I am glad to think that the investigation is of a most impartial character.

It must be a comforting thought, that an inquiry of a private and confidential character is also of a very systematic and scientific character, and besides being of a most impartial character, is conducted by men of international character⁠—whatever that may happen to mean. What is an international character, and what would you give for one?

We found that this way of talking, while pretending to be something pontifical, is really not prose at all, nor reputable speech at all, but Jargon; nor is the offence to be excused by pleading, as I have heard it pleaded, that Mr. Lloyd George was not using his own phraseology but quoting from a paper supplied him by some permanent official of the Treasury: since we select our civil servants among men of decent education and their salaries warrant our stipulating that they shall be able, at least, to speak and write their mother tongue.

We laid down certain rules to help us in the way of straight Prose:⁠—

1. Always always prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

2. Almost always prefer the direct word to the circumlocution.

3. Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with its little auxiliary “its’s” and “was’s,” and its participles getting into the light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can tell a man’s style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or “composition.”

The authors of that capital handbook The King’s English, which I have already recommended to you, add two rules:⁠—

4. Prefer the short word to the long.

5. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

But these two precepts you would have to modify by so long a string of exceptions that I do not commend them to you. In fact I think them false in theory and likely to be fatal in practice. For, as my last lecture tried to show, you no sooner begin to philosophise things instead of merely telling a tale of them than you must go to the Mediterranean languages: because in these man first learnt to discuss his “why” and “how,” and these languages yet guard the vocabulary.

Lastly, we saw how, by experimenting with rhythm, our prose “broke its birth’s invidious bar” and learnt to scale the forbidden heights.

Now by attending to the few plain rules given above you may train yourselves to write sound, straightforward, work-a-day English. But if you would write melodious English, I fear the gods will require of you what they ought to have given you at birth⁠—something of an ear. Yet the most of us have ears, of sorts; and I believe that, though we can only acquire it by assiduous practice, the most of us can wonderfully improve our talent of the ear.

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of Quintilian or borrow one from any library (Bohn’s translation will do) and turn to his ninth book, you will find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, classified, in which a writer or speaker can vary his Style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its balance.

All these rules, separately worth studying, if taken together may easily bewilder and dishearten you. Let me choose just two, and try to hearten you by showing that, even with these two only, you can go a long way.

Take the use of right emphasis. What Quintilian says of right emphasis⁠—or the most important thing he says⁠—is this:⁠—

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader’s sense and imprinted on his mind.

That seems obvious enough, for English use as well as for Latin. “The wages of sin is Death”⁠—anyone can see how much more emphatic that is than “Death is the wages of sin.” But let your minds work on this matter of emphasis, and discover how emphasis has always its right point somewhere, though it be not at all necessarily at the end of the sentence. Take a sentence in which the strong words actually repeat themselves for emphasis:⁠—

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at the end:⁠—

Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen.

The Latin puts it