Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought the mound which is the old Castle of Cambridge. Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies through the precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing encloses the mound, having a small gate, for the key of which a notice-board advised me to ring the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler answered the bell and opened the gate, which stands just against his wicket. I thanked him, but could not forbear asking “Why do they keep this gate closed?” “I don’t know, sir,” he answered, “but I suppose if they didn’t the children might get in and play.”
So with his answer I went up the hill and from the top saw Cambridge spread at my feet; Magdalene below me, and the bridge which—poor product as it is of the municipal taste—has given its name to so many bridges all over the world; the river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the tower of St. John’s, and beyond it the unpretentious but more beautiful tower of Jesus College. To my right the magnificent chine of King’s College Chapel made its own horizon above the yellowing elms. I looked down on the streets—the narrow streets—the very streets which, a fortnight ago, I tried to people for you with that medieval throng which has passed as we shall pass. Still in my ear the gaoler’s answer repeated itself—“I suppose, if they didn’t keep it locked, the children might get in and play”: and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a while had no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the town below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon—“Regnum Scientiae ut regnum Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.—Into the Kingdom of Knowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must become as a little child.”
Lecture XII
On Style
Wednesday, January 28, 1914
Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books for his living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him, that few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the reviewers say. This promise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for me once in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick; who added, however, “Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. There was a critic who called one of my books ‘epoch-making.’ Being anonymous, he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to have made the effort.”
May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a preface or brief apology for this lecture? Short-lived as is the author’s joy in his critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consent with Sir Thomas Browne that “there is nothing immortal but immortality,” he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England call themselves “Press-Cutting Agencies,” in America “Press-Clipping Bureaux,” and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth, unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation. “Your book,” they write falsely, “is exciting much comment. May we collect and send you notices of it appearing in the World’s Press? We submit a specimen cutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir,” etc.
Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guilty of taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservation among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written to appraise. So it happened that having this vacation, to dust—not to read—a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on a review signed by no smaller a man than Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and informing the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of good stories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way of stopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted to know: that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the last chapter, instead of winding up and telling “how everybody lived ever after,” he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessing and the remark that nine o’clock was striking and all good children should be in their beds.
That criticism has haunted me during the vacation. Looking back on a course of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them in print; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I have seemed to hear you complain—“He has exhorted us to write accurately, appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and essay Verse. He has insisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised. But just what we most needed he has not told. At the final doorway to the secret he turned his back and left us. Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity—these we may achieve. But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm, with distinction? Where has he given us rules for what is called Style in short?—having attained which an author may count himself set up in business.”
Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind’s ear I heard you reproaching me. I beg you to accept what follows for my apology.
To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one
