ment. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labors at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unзuccessful and always unsuccessful; but, at least, in these vain bouts I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the co-ordination of parts.

"That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters; he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that. great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.

"And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him

try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that failure is the only high-road to success.' "1

For a chosen few, conscious effort, such as Franklin and Mr. Stevenson made, is of priceless value; but for most young writers, the best practicable way to increase their vocabulary is by unconscious assimilation, by absorbing words from books or from conversation, as children do, without thinking about processes or results. The danger of this method lies in the temptation to pick up words as words, without mastering their meaning. There is sometimes less promise in juvenile writers who take the first word that offers than in those who halt between two words. The facility of the former may be fatal to the acquirement of excellence: the slowness of the latter fosters a habit of seeking the right expression, which often develops into a faculty for finding it.

mine the

choice of

After making sure that a given word is English, a writer may ask himself whether it is (1) the word that will convey his exact meaning to his readers, How to deter (2) the word that will impress his meaning on his readers, (3) the word that will be agreeable to his readers. The relative attention to be given to each of these points varies with the nature of the subjectmatter and the quality of the readers addressed.

words.

SECTION 1.

CLEARNESS.

A writer should choose that word or phrase which will convey his meaning with CLEARNESS. It is not enough to

1 R. L. Stevenson: Memories and Portraits; A College Magazine, Ject. i.

clearness.

use language that may be understood; he should use language that must be understood. He should remember Importance of that, as far as attention is called to the medium of communication, so far is it withdrawn from the ideas communicated, and this even when the medium is free from flaws. How much more serious the evil when the medium obscures or distorts an object!

"The young," writes Carlyle, "must learn to speak by imitation of the older who already do it or have done it: the ultimate rule is, Learn so far as possible to be intelligible and transparent, no notice taken of your 'style,' but solely of what you express by it; this is your clear rule, and if you have anything that is not quite trivial to express to your contemporaries, you will find such rule a great deal more difficult to follow than many people think!"?

"Any writer who has read even a little," says Anthony Trollope, "will know what is meant by the word 'intelligible.' It is not sufficient that there be a meaning that may be hammered out of the sentence, but that the language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader; and not only some proposition of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no less, which the writer has intended to put into his words. . . A young writer, who will acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, will often feel himself tempted by the difficulties of language to tell himself that some one little doubtful passage, some single collocation of words, which is not quite what it ought to be, will not matter. I know well what a stumbling-block such a passage may be. But he should leave none such behind him as he goes on. The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself."

If to every one who understands English every word always meant one thing and one thing only, and if com

1 Non ut intellegere possit, sed ne omnino possit non intellegere curan dum. Quintilian: Inst. Orator. viii. ii. xxiv.

2 Carlyle: Reminiscences; Edward Irving. Edited by C. E. Norton. 8 Is there redundancy here?

4 Anthony Trollope: An Autobiography, chap. xii.

binations of words exactly corresponded to relations of things, clearness (otherwise called perspicuity) would be secured by grammatical correctness; but in the Difficulty language as it exists clearness is not so easily clearly. won. Even under the most favorable conditions, it is exceedingly difficult to attain.

of writing

Such, for example, were the conditions under which Macaulay wrote his "History." What he saw at all he saw distinctly; what he believed he believed with his whole strength; he wrote on subjects with which he had long been familiar; and he made lucidity his primary object in composition. For him, in short, there was no difficulty in securing clearness, except that which is inherent in the nature of language. This difficulty he overcame with unusual success, as all his critics1 admit, but with how much labor his biographer will tell us:

"The main secret of Macaulay's success lay in this, that to extraordinary fluency and facility he united patient, minute, and persistent diligence. He well knew, as Chaucer knew before him, that

'There is na workeman

That can bothe worken wel and hastilie.

This must be done at leisure parfaitlie.'

If his method of composition ever comes into fashion, books probably will be better, and undoubtedly will be shorter. As soon as he had got into his head all the information relating to any particular episode in his 'History' (such, for instance, as Argyll's expedition to Scotland, or the attainder of Sir John Fenwick, or the calling in of the clipped coinage), he would sit down and write off the whole story at a headlong pace, sketching in the outlines under the genial and audacious impulse of a first conception, and securing in black and white each idea and epithet and turn of phrase, as it flowed straight from his busy brain to his rapid fingers.

1 One of the severest of them, Mr. John Morley, says that Macaulay 'never wrote an obscure sentence in his life." See "The Fortnightly Re view," April, 1876, p. 505.

"As soon as Macaulay had finished his rough draft, he began to fill it in at the rate of six sides of foolscap every morning, written in so large a hand and with such a multitude of erasures, that the whole six pages were, on an average, compressed into two pages of print. This portion he called his 'task,' and he was never quite easy unless he completed it daily. More he seldom sought to accomplish; for he had learned by long experience that this was as much as he could do at his best; and except when at his best, he never would work at all.

...

Macaulay never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it. He thought little of recasting a chapter in order to obtain a more lucid arrangement, and nothing whatever of reconstructing a paragraph for the sake of one happy stroke or apt illustration."

"1

One of the means by which Macaulay secured the clearness that distinguishes all his writings is noted by a later historian. "I learned from Macaulay," says Mr. Freeman, "never to be afraid of using the same word or name over and over again, if by that means anything could be added to clearness or force. Macaulay never goes on, like some writers, talking about 'the former' and 'the latter,' 'he, she, it, they,' through clause after clause, while his reader has to look back to see which of several persons it is that is so darkly referred to."2

From the point of view of clearness, it is always better to repeat a noun than to substitute for it a pronoun which Obscure or fails to suggest that noun unmistakably and No fault is, however, more common than the use of an obscure or equivocal pronoun. For example:

equivocal

pronouns.

at once.

"I must go and help Alice with the heifer; she is not very quiet yet, and I see her going out with her pail."

1 Trevelyan: Life and Letters of Macaulay, vol. ii. chap. xi.

2 The International Review, September, 1876, p. 690.

8 Captain Marryat: The Children of the New Forest, chap. xvii.