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extraordinary speech being natural to prose, its difficulty is to say the ordinary things, or does he mean simply that prose has to struggle with its legitimate material-extraordinary things? At any rate I feel that the difficulty of verse is to say extraordinary things in a way palatable to the aesthetic sense, and of prose to say the ordinary things. Glance at the school of contemporary realistic poetry which is so intent upon expressing itself in average speech. Its undress kind of language (speech, as it were, in a dressing-gown) falls away into a looseness and waste that the widest and most generous canons of art cannot admit. Hardy, of course, uses something of the same method, but hardly ever without a dramatic fullness, a sharpness of effect, and a philosophy behind it to justify it. Whereas these realistic poets cannot forbear from heavily underlining their narrative, padding it out by refrain and repetition, and indeed treating their material as if there were no such thing as harmony, condensation and suggestion in narrative and dramatic poetry. It copies its subject out without transforming it-without economy, without beauty, and without the poetic vision. It puts the poetic speech into corduroys and a cloth cap. It is as Dr. Johnson said of Grey, "To be dull in a new way." It is dowdy-an inevitable but false reaction against the vertigo of the pseudo-picturesque. But prose, directly it begins to climb the mountain side, comes upon the plateau of the purple patch. It is right that it should be so; prose, with its looser structure, its more extensive area of rhythms, has a better chance of preserving the ordinary from the commonplace than verse. It may be difficult to write like Sir Thomas Browne, but it is still more so, I venture, to write like Swift. I doubt if verse

on the other hand (being the language of vision) ought to say ordinary things at all; it ought at any rate to transfigure them (unlike the later and ecclesiastical Wordsworth) into the extraordinary.

Sir Arthur refers of course to style, but you have, I am sure, had enough of that. I only suggest that if the young idea cares for nothing but shooting its personality into the page, it should be caned or fined far more rigorously than if, at school, it had failed to attend a football match, or, at the university, had been tracked to a public-house. Style is not an external ornament, but the embodiment of a synthetic character, as well as of an intellectual or moral impulse.

As for a generic principle on which the schoolmaster or professor is to work, I would beg him to teach his charges in the first place to think, in the second to think clearly. O beautiful land of Cokaine, where all the citizens have allied themselves to that glorious aim! O twittering Tophet of Fleet Street, Parliament, Law Courts, Municipalities and Officialism, which torment themselves to escape it! Sir Arthur's chapter on "Jargon" ought to be a Mene Tekel Upharsin to every sprouting writer. He makes a proper distinction between jargon and journalese, defining the latter as painting the lily and the former, begotten of caution out of indolence, as walking circumspectly round the target and then congratulating itself that it has hit it. Among other vices, it uses a storage of meaningless words, such as "case," "character," "condition," "degree" (as I myself am so liable to do), and so on. For an illustration he gives half a dozen lines of a statement by Lloyd George, in which the word "character" is used in four different senses.

Let me, stimulated by my pleasure and instruction in reading this lecture, and following the example of our author, turn a passage of fine prose into modern jargon. Take the last few lines of Izaak Walton's "Life of Donne," a passage supreme in English literature for its emotional reticence, its simple dignity, and its power of condensing whole elegies into a few words:

"He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge, with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed in a continual praise of that God that first breathed it into his active body that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust : "But I shall see it reanimated."

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Now for our jargonist :

"The late divine, now so lamentably deceased, conducted, during a life of considerable eminence, a zealous and indefatigable investigation into the mysteries of knowledge, in the unflagging pursuit of which his incessant activities-activities of mind, body, and estate admirably co-ordinated-have been ultimately consummated by the mystery of death. But death, it would seem, is the portal of infinitude, and the erudite doctor may be said to only have interrupted his untiring quest in order that it might be reverently associated with a more aetherial order-an order, it should be added, which, appropriately enough, inaugurated that quest at its very inception. His corporeal frame, in short, was, throughout a highly distinguished career, impregnated with the divine afflatus, and now, such are the mutabilities of this evanescent and mundane existence, is, by way of a graphic illustration, gathered unto a mere handful of venerable dust and a little ashes.

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Moreover, it can hardly be denied that, whatever the view

point of our readers, whatever the fluctuating conditions and development of belief; whatever, again, the multiplicity of divergent creeds, it would be positively impious to make the suggestion that that dust, irrevocably materialized as it would seem to apparently be to a superficial aspect, will, at some future date unspecified (and by the interposition of the divine ministration), finally achieve the culmination of a glorious resurrection."

After all, surely the whole business of education is not facts, but the meaning of facts, not words, but the meaning of words-not merely learning things, but feeling and seeing them—the education of taste. For the study of the arts, the use of tradition, and the acquirement of taste, not only make headway against ignorance and stupidity, which if not worse do more harm than all the sins in the Decalogue. They are an infallible aid to discriminate between good and evil.

XVII

OLD BOOKS

MY DEAR X,

"Chats on old books "-I suppose that is what I am coming to. Not being one of those masterly ingénus in letters who can do without reading, a library becomes a calf helmet against the paper-shrapnel of the moderns. A man who writes very modern books once informed me that the only reputable way to read a book was to tear out the part you wanted and get into a railway carriage with it. How then, I exclaimed with exquisite courtesy, is posterity going to read you? Let me boldly declare with Hazlitt, "I do not altogether think the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two." To collect books to form libraries, that is to say, is not the eccentricity of atrophied beings who have dropped falteringly out of the struggle for Real Life; it may even be not only a friendliness, an amenity, a funeral rite to the dead, a way of acquiring knowledge and enjoying beauty to oneself, but a positive social service. Then again, if one desires a library of books rather than a mass of printed leaves, garbed in neat suits of cloth, like a crocodile of small boys in Etons, there is no alternative but to buy old as well as new books. So I bought and

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