heaviest in your esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a fundamental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think of the matter as you would think of an individual.

III

On English Prose

By Frederic Harrison 1

Fili mi Dilectissime (if, sir, I may borrow the words of the late Lord Derby when, as Chancellor of the University, he conferred the degree of D.C.L. on Lord Stanley, his son) — I fear that I am about to do an unwise thing. When, in an hour of paternal weakness, I accepted your invitation to address the Bodley Society on Style, it escaped me that it was a subject with which undergraduates have but small concern. And now I find myself talking on a matter whereof I know very little, and could do you no good even if I knew much, in presence of an illustrious historian, to say nothing of your own Head, who was an acknowledged master of English when my own literary style aspired to nothing more elegant than the dry forms of pleadings and deeds.

1 Mr. Harrison's address "On English Prose was delivered in 1898 before the Bodley Literary Society, Oxford, of which his son, C. René Harrison, was President. It forms Chapter VII of his book, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers.

Frederic Harrison, who was born in 1831, is a well known English writer on historical, literary, and philosophical subjects. He was from 1880 to 1905 President of the English Positivist Committee, and has been, since his university days, a prominent exponent of the Positivist philosophy. This system, originated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), bases its intellectual, social, and moral beliefs on the methods of natural science, and advocates a Religion of Humanity" in the place of any worship of a supernatural being.- EDITOR.

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Every one knows how futile for any actual result are those elaborate disquisitions on Style which some of the most consummate masters have amused themselves in compiling, but which serve at best to show how quite hackneyed truisms can be graced by an almost miraculous neatness of phrase. It is in vain to enjoin on us "propriety," "justness of expression," suitability of our language to the subject we treat,” and all the commonplaces which the schools of Addison and of Johnson in the last century promulgated as canons of good style. "Proper words in proper places," says Swift, "make the true definition of a style." “Each phrase in its right place," says Voltaire. Well! Swift and Voltaire knew how to do this with supreme skill; but it does not help us, if they cannot teach their art. How are we to know what is the proper word? How are we to find the right place? And even a greater than Swift or Voltaire is not much more practical as a teacher. "Suit the action to the word, and the word to the action," says Hamlet. "Be not too tame neither. Let your own discretion be your tutor." Can you trust your own discretion? Have undergraduates this discretion? And how could I, in presence of your College authority, suggest that you should have no tutor but your own discretion?

All this is as if a music-master were to say to a pupil, Sing always in tune and with the right intonation, and whatever you do, produce your voice in the proper way! Or, to make myself more intelligible to you here, it is as if W. G. Grace were to tell you, Play a "yorker" in the right way, and place the ball in the proper spot with reference to the field! We know that

neither the art of acting, nor of singing, nor of cricket can be taught by general commonplaces of this sort. And good prose is so far like cricket that the W. G.'s of literature, after ten or twenty "centuries," can tell you nothing more than this-to place your words in the right spot, and to choose the proper word, according to the "field" that you have before you.

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The most famous essay on Style, I suppose, is that by one of the greatest wizards who ever used language I mean the Ars Poetica of Horace, almost every line of which has become a household word in the educated world. But what avail his inimitable epigrams in practice? Who is helped by being told not to draw a man's head on a horse's neck, or a beautiful woman with the tail end of a fish? "Do not let brevity become obscurity; do not let your mountain in ` labor bring forth a mouse; turn over your Greek models night and day; your compositions must be not only correct, but must give delight, touch the heart," and so forth, and so forth. All these imperishable maxims, as clean cut as a sardonyx gemthese "chestnuts," as you call them in the slang of the day serve as hard nuts for a translator to crack, and as handy mottoes at the head of an essay; but they are barren of any solid food as the shell of a walnut.

Then Voltaire, perhaps the greatest master of prose in any modern language, wrote an essay on Style, in the same vein of epigrammatic platitude. No declamation, says he, in a work on physics. No jesting in a treatise on mathematics. Well! but did Douglas Jerrold himself ever try to compose a Comic Trigonometry; and could another Charles Lamb find any fun in Spencer's First Principles? A fine style, says

Voltaire, makes anything delightful; but it is exceedingly difficult to acquire, and very rarely found. And all he has to say is, “Avoid grandiloquence, confusion, vulgarity, cheap wit, and colloquial slang in a tragedy." He might as well say, Take care to be as strong as Sandow, and as active as Prince Ranjitsinhji, and whatever you do, take care not to grow a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac in the new play!

An ingenious professor of literature has lately ventured to commit himself to an entire treatise on Style, wherein he has propounded everything that can usefully be said about this art, in a style which illustrates things that you should avoid. At the end of his book he declares that style cannot be taught. This is true enough; but if this had been the first, instead of the last, sentence of his piece, the book would not have been written at all. I remember that, when I stood for the Hertford Scholarship, we had to write a Latin epigram on the thesis

Omnia liberius nullo poscente

-fatemur, (I replied -)

Carmina cur poscas, carmine si sit opus?

And so I say now. Style cannot be taught. And this perhaps puts out of court the professor's essay, and no doubt my own also. Nothing practical can be said about Style. And no good can come to a young student by being anxious about Style. None of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; no! nor one gem to his English prose, unless nature has endowed him with that rare gift- a subtle ear for the melody of words, a fastidious instinct for the connotations of a phrase.