Chapter IV: Part 4

'This particularising style,' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it produces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its way: but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of this energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," he communicates more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.'

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered it vividly.

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a passage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay within South's compass:--

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest
not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine
eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the
dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust
of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those
dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble
flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the
death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say
_This is Iesabel_; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it
should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, _This is
Iesabel._

Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failing tendency to transform into _shape_, into _life_, the feeling that may dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet's imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.'

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.

A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; for language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is your reason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.

LECTURE VI.

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

Thursday, May 15

To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we have to essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of his compass-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside his knowledge--outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge. I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his host on the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In asking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise only that, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back' of the desert.

In my last lecture but one, then,--and before our small interlude with Jargon--the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this point: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinary unemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments. This point, I believe, we made effectively enough.

Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a corresponding point, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to these high emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be, Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questions about prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can, to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, is an art) you cannot classify as in a science.

Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. In studying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust all classification! All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one. Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classified is not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had to _make_ a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would classification help? To classify in a science is necessary for the purpose of that science: to classify when you come to art is at the best an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. It serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about 'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan. We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead. Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if 'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the horizon: whereas Donne--a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one--had by 1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to Jacobean and Caroline poetry.

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man (_improbus homo_) with his wicked inventions is for ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled--and, if you are wise, thank Heaven--that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins.

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as 'a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm laxly.' When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get the better of you.

Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened. Its difficulty--the inherent, the native disability of prose--is to handle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse. Well, we strike into the line of our prose-writers, say as early as Malory. We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur:--

'My time hieth fast,' said the king. Therefore said Arthur unto Sir
Bedivere, 'Take thou Excalibur my good sword, and go with it to yonder
water side; and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in
that water and come again and tell me what there thou seest.' 'My
lord,' said Bedivere, 'Your commandment shall be done; and lightly
bring you word again.' So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he
beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of
precious stones, and then he said to himself, 'If I throw this rich
sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss.'
And then Sir Bedivere hid Excaliber under a tree. And so, as soon as he
might, he came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water
and had thrown the sword into the water, 'What saw thou there?' said
the king, 'Sir,' he said, 'I saw nothing but waves and winds.'

Now I might say a dozen things of this and of the whole passage that follows, down to Arthur's last words. Specially might I speak to you of the music of its monosyllables--'"What sawest you there?" said the king... "Do as well as thou mayest; for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into the Vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul."' But, before making comment at all, I shall quote you another passage; this from Lord Berners' translation of Froissart, of the death of Robert Bruce:--

It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and
feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that
there was no way for him but death. And when he felt that his end drew
near, he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he trusted
best, and shewed them how there was no remedy with him, but he must
needs leave this transitory life.... Then he called to him the gentle
knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the lords, 'Sir
William, my dear friend, ye know well that I have had much ado in my
days to uphold and sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most
ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished,
whereof I am right sorry; the which was, if I might achieve and make an
end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in
rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have gone and warred on
Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy Christian faith. To this
purpose mine heart hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent
thereto... And sith it is so that my body can not go, nor achieve that my
heart desireth, I will send the heart instead of the body, to
accomplish mine avow... I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of
this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and
take of my treasure as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise,
both for yourself and such company as ye will take with you, and
present my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord lay, seeing my
body can not come there. And take with you such company and purveyance
as shall be appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye come, let
it be known how ye carry with you the heart of King Robert of Scotland,
at his instance and desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre.' Then
all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity.

There, in the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth, you have Malory and Berners writing beautiful English prose; prose the emotion of which (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So you see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,' but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It is when prose attempts to _philosophise_, to _express thoughts_ as well as to relate simple sayings and doings--it is then that the trouble begins. When Malory has to philosophise death, to _think_ about it, this is as far as he attains:--

'Ah, Sir Lancelot,' said he, 'thou wert head of all Christian Knights!
And now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou
liest, thou were never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were the
curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou were the truest friend
to thy lover that ever strood horse, and thou were the truest lover of
a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that
ever strooke with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever
came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest
that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest Knight
to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'

Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, eloquent as he can be on the virtues of his dead friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of death itself all he can accomplish is, 'And now I dare say that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest.'

Let us make a leap in time and contrast this with Tyndale and the translators of our Bible, how they are able to make St Paul speak of death:--

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass
the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O
death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

There you have something clean beyond what Malory or Berners could compass: there you have a different kind of high moment--a high moment of philosophising: there you have emotion impregnated with thought. It was necessary that our English verse even after Chaucer, our English prose after Malory and Berners, should overcome this most difficult gap (which stands for a real intellectual difference) if it aspired to be what to-day it is--a language of the first class, comparable with Greek and certainly no whit inferior to Latin or French.

* * * * *

Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge over the gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' Prologue:--

O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre!
O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight!

in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to her children:--

O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne,
Your woful moder wendë stedfastly
That cruel houndës or some foul vermyne
Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy
And your benignë fader tendrely
Hath doon you kept...

You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, of that time:--

He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.

He came al so still
To his mother's bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.

He came al so still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.

Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza as this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":--

Though it be sung of old and young
That I should be to blame,
Their's be the charge that speak so large
In hurting of my name;
For I will prove that faithful love
It is devoid of shame;
In your distress and heaviness
To part with you the same:
And sure all tho that do not so
True lovers are they none:
For, in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone.

All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in innocent emotion: they are not _thoughtful_. So when Barbour breaks out in praise of Freedom, he cries

A! Fredome is a noble thing!

And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on

Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.

(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)

Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He livis at ese that frely livis!
A noble hart may haif nane ese,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking
Is yharnit ouer all othir thing...

--and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom _is_.

Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from the Nut-Brown Maid's artless confession,

in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone,

let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's--

Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposéd dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buriéd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
As interest of the dead!--which now appear
But things removed, that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is mine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way--there is less of heart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties--but how much more thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.

But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men's eyes--unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular--to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which _habitually philosophised life_: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking _Why?_ 'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose? his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers--call them the gods, or whatever you will--that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good and evil, life, love, death?'

These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an answer--some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content with the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature which answered so differently--and having other reasons to suspect what the Church said and did--grew aware that their literature had been as a child at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death: it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way--to make their report worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery--new literary forms had to be invented--new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the verse in which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek, which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet; or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new meanings; or lastly, to do all three together.

Well, it was done; and in verse very fortunately done; thanks of course to many men, but thanks to two especially--to Sir Thomas Wyat, who led our poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which Italy had cast its classical heritage; and to Marlowe, who impressed blank verse upon the drama. Of Marlowe I shall say nothing; for with what he achieved you are familiar enough. Of Wyat I may speak at length to you, one of these days; but here, to prepare you for what I hope to prove--that Wyat is one of the heroes of our literature--I will give you three brief reasons why we should honour his memory:--

(1) He led the way. On the value of that service I shall content myself with quoting a passage from Newman:--

When a language has been cultivated in any particular department of
thought, and so far as it has been generally perfected, an existing
want has been supplied, and there is no need for further workmen. In
its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in it at all is
almost a work of genius. It is like crossing a country before roads are
made communicating between place and place. The authors of that age
deserve to be Classics both because of what they do and because they
can do it. It requires the courage and force of great talent to compose
in the language at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a
permanent impression on it.

This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened up a new country to Englishmen. But he did more.

(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive that the lyric, if it would philosophise life, love, and the rest, must boldly introduce the personal note: since in fact when man asks questions about his fortune or destiny he asks them most effectively in the first person. 'What am _I_ doing? Why are _we_ mortal? Why do _I_ love _thee_?'

This again Wyat did: and again he did more.

For (3) thirdly--and because of this I am surest of his genius--again and again, using new thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the result in language so direct, economical, natural, easy, that I know to this day no one who can better Wyat's best in combining straight speech with melodious cadence. Take the lines _Is it possible?_--

Is it possible?
For to turn so oft;
To bring that lowest that was most aloft:
And to fall highest, yet to light soft?
Is it possible?

All is possible!
Whoso list believe;
Trust therefore first, and after preve;
As men wed ladies by licence and leave,
All is possible!

or again--

Forget not! O forget not this!--
How long ago hath been, and is,
The mind that never meant amiss:
Forget not yet!

or again (can personal note go straighter?)--

And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay, say nay, for shame!
To save thee from the blame
--Of all my grief and grame.
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay! say nay!

(Say 'nay,' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative.')

No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, and will read it to you in full--

What should I say?
Since Faith is dead
And Truth away
From you is fled?
Should I be led
With doubleness?
Nay! nay! mistress.

I promised you
And you promised me
To be as true
As I would be:
But since I see
Your double heart,
Farewell my part!

Thought for to take
Is not my mind;
But to forsake
One so unkind;
And as I find,
So will I trust,
Farewell, unjust!

Can ye say nay
But that you said
That I alway
Should be obeyed?
And--thus betrayed
Or that I wist!
Farewell, unkist!

I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History of English Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.' I know not to what wiseacre we owe that pronouncement: but what do you think of it, after the lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the same volume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us of Wilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that

there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the
author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and
idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe.'
The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that
the earlier English poets of the period--Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder,
and the Earl of Surrey--drew their inspiration from Petrarch and
Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from
Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the
sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish
which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude
and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some
degeneration.

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'

(Thought for to take
Is not my mind;
But to forsake

This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland--

Farewell unkiss'd!)

But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--

Let me not to the marriage of true Minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
Which alters where it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.

Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,' which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books: and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent convulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quantity of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the mass of it clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could write at his average. For a sample:--

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as
'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a
frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls
of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of
Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others,
while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their
beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner
parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the
French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than
they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any
authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the stature of the grown man to be.

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue (yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or
else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him,
that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one
of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And
as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in
them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary,
everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling,
that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there befel a miracle.

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Authorised Version of the Bible.

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius. I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis. Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply miracles _praeter necessitatem_; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men--not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent--sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work--improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees--that only by miracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St Paul's Cathedral; and you know what _they_ did. Individual genius such as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.

Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you 'courses of study' in English Literature never include the Authorised Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?... I wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow.

'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality...'

'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:
if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it
would utterly be contemned.'

'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.'

'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the
land that is very far off.'

'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert
from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.'

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan--have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars,--Milton, Sir Thomas Browne--practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your words through life as well as your hearts.

LECTURE VII

SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

Thursday, May 29

Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to learn from it, moreover, how by mastering _rhythm_, our Prose overcame the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin instrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man's thought however sublime, his emotion however profound.

Now in the course of my remarks I happened--maybe a little incautiously--to call the Authorised Version a 'miracle'; using that word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning no more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed that the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators--to the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed it eagerly in their preface:--

Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that
we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one
a good one ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones
one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against: that hath
bene our indeavour, that our marke.

(See [Footnote 1] at the end of this lecture.)

Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it will astound you when you compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle (it has been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that there were certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable to account. Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, I spoke of the Authorised Version as a 'miracle.' It was, it remains, marvellous to me.

Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within the leaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear to readers as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuing them--almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth's Kitten with those other falling leaves:--

That almost I could repine
That your transports are not mine.

But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by this word 'miracle' I meant to suggest to you a something like plenary inspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it were sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle.

Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hope to discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy--with what meaning, if any--we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions which have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards.

But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the forty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark nonsense. Remember that I used this very same word 'miracle' of Shakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, or at any rate stark bombast. He never blotted a line--'I would he had blotted a thousand' says Ben Jonson: and Ben Jonson was right. Shakespeare could have blotted out two or three thousand lines: he was great enough to afford it. Somewhere Matthew Arnold supposes us as challenging Shakespeare over this and that weak or bombastic passage, and Shakespeare answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt we were right, but after all, 'Did it greatly matter?'

So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven in asserting that here and there they wrote nonsense. They could afford it. But we do stultify criticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and beauty, we prostrate ourselves indiscriminately before what is good and what is bad, what is sublime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any reviser to put forth a hand to the ark.

The most of us Christians go to church on Christmas Day, and there we listen to this from Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7:--

Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation,
when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the
land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her
by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they
that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined.

Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they
joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men
rejoice when they divide the spoil.

For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his
shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.

For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and
garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel
of fire.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm. But have you ever, sitting in church on a Christmas morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if it mean anything more than a sing-song according somehow with the holly and ivy around the pillars? _'Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest,'_ But why--if the joy be not increased? _'For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.'_ Granted the rhythmical antithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the improvement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better than garments rolled in blood? And, in fine, what is it all about? Now let us turn to the Revised Version:--

But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish. In the
former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the
land of Naphtali, but in the latter time hath he made it glorious,
by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they
that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast
increased their joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in
harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.

For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the
rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian.

For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the
garments rolled in blood, shall even be for burning, for fuel of
fire.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the
government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be
called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.

I say (knowing no Hebrew, merely assuming our Revisers to be at least no worse scholars than the forty-seven) that here, with the old cadences kept so far as possible, we are given sense in place of nonsense: and I ask you to come to the Revised Version with a fair mind. I myself came to it with some prejudice; in complete ignorance of Hebrew, and with no more than the usual amount of Hellenistic Greek. I grant at once that the Revised New Testament was a literary fiasco; largely due (if gossip may be trusted) to trouble with the Greek Aorist, and an unwise decision--in my opinion the most gratuitously unwise a translator can take--to use one and the same English word, always and in every connotation, as representing one and the same Greek word: for in any two languages few words are precisely equivalent. A fiasco at any rate the Revised New Testament was, deserving in a dozen ways and in a thousand passages the scorn which Professor Saintsbury has recently heaped on it. But I protest against the injustice of treating the two Revisions--of the New Testament and of the Old--as a single work, and saddling the whole with the sins of a part. For two years I spent half-an-hour daily in reading the Authorised and Revised Versions side by side, marking as I went, and in this way worked through the whole--Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament. I came to it (as I have said) with some prejudice; but I closed the books on a conviction, which my notes sustain for me, that the Revisers of the Old Testament performed their task delicately, scrupulously, on the whole with great good judgment; that the critic does a wrong who brings them under his indiscriminate censure; that on the whole they have clarified the sense of the Authorised Version while respecting its consecrated rhythms; and that--to name an example, that you may test my words and judge for yourselves--the solemn splendour of that most wonderful poem, the story of Job, [Greek: dialampei], 'shines through' the new translation as it never shone through the old.

* * * * *

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 connexion 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 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._