ages of prose composition, drift into ragged, preposterous, inorganic sentences, without beginning, middle, or end, which they ought to break into two or three.

And then they hunt up terms that are fit for science, poetry, or devotion. They affect "evolution" and "factors," "the interaction of forces," "the co-ordination of organs"; or else everything is "weird," or "opalescent," "debonair," and "enamelled," so that they will not call a spade a spade. I do not say, stick to Saxon words and avoid Latin words as a law of language, because English now consists of both good and plain English prose needs both. We seldom get the highest poetry without a large use of Saxon, and we hardly reach precise and elaborate explanation without Latin terms. Try to turn precise and elaborate explanation into strict Saxon; and then try to turn "Our Father, which art in heaven" into pure Latin words. No! current English prose not the language of poetry or of prayer must be of both kinds, Saxon and Latin. But wherever a Saxon word is enough, use it; because if it have all the fulness and the precision you need, it is the more simple, the more direct, the more homely.

Never quote anything that is not apt and new. Those stale citations of well-worn lines give us a cold shudder, as does a pun at a dinner-party. A familiar phrase from poetry or Scripture may pass when imbedded in your sentence. But to show it round as a nugget which you have just picked up is the innocent freshman's snare. Never imitate any writer, however good. All imitation in literature is a mischief, as it is in art. A great and popular writer ruins his followers and mimics, as did Raffaelle and Michel

Angelo; and when he founds a school of style, he impoverishes literature more than he enriches it. Johnson, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin have been the cause of flooding us with cheap copies of their special manner. And even now Meredith, Stevenson, Swinburne, and Pater lead the weak to ape their airs and graces. All imitation in literature is an evil. I say to you, as Mat Arnold said to me (who surely needed no such warning), "Flee Carlylese as the very devil!" Yes, flee Carlylese, Ruskinese, Meredithese, and every other ese, past, present, and to come. A writer whose style invites imitation so far falls short of being a true master. He becomes the parent of caricature, and frequently he gives lessons in caricature himself.

Though you must never imitate any writer, you may study the best writers with care. And for study choose those who have founded no school, who have no special and imitable style. Read Pascal and Voltaire in French; Swift, Hume, and Goldsmith in English; and of the moderns, I think, Thackeray and Froude. Ruskin is often too rhapsodical for a student; Meredith too whimsical; Stevenson too "precious," as they love to call it; George Eliot too laboriously enamelled and erudite. When you cannot quietly enjoy a picture for the curiosity aroused by its so-called "brushwork," the painting may be a surprising sleight-of-hand, but is not a masterpiece.

Read Voltaire, Defoe, Swift, Goldsmith, and you will come to understand how the highest charm of words is reached without your being able to trace any special element of charm. The moment you begin to pick out this or that felicity of phrase, this or that sound of music in the words, and directly it strikes you as

eloquent, lyrical, pictorial — then the charm is snapped. The style may be fascinating, brilliant, impressive; but it is not perfect.

Of melody in style I have said nothing; nor indeed can anything practical be said. It is a thing infinitely subtle, inexplicable, and rare. If your ear does not hear the false note, the tautophony or the cacophony in the written sentence, as you read it or frame it silently to yourself, and hear it thus inaudibly long before your eye can pick it forth out of the written words, nay, even when the eye fails to localize it by analysis at all

- then you have no inborn sense of the melody of words, and be quite sure that you can never acquire it. One living Englishman has it in the highest form; for the melody of Ruskin's prose may be matched with that of Milton and Shelley. I hardly know any other English prose which retains the ring of that ethereal music

echoes of which are more often heard in our poetry than in our prose. Nay, since it is beyond our reach, wholly incommunicable, defiant of analysis and rule, it may be more wise to say no more.

Read Swift, Defoe, Goldsmith, if you care to know what is pure English. I need hardly tell you to read another and a greater Book. The Book which begot English prose still remains its supreme type. The English Bible is the true school of English literature. It possesses every quality of our language in its highest form except for scientific precision, practical affairs, and philosophic analysis. It would be ridiculous to write an essay on metaphysics, a political article, or a novel in the language of the Bible. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to write anything at all in the language

of the Bible. But if you care to know the best that our literature can give in simple noble prose - mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Holy Scriptures in the English tongue.

IV

The Principle of Sincerity

By George Henry Lewes 1

IN ALL sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of. Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent. It can be of no good that you should tell in your "clever" feeble way what another has already told us with the dynamic energy of conviction. If you can tell us something that your own eyes have seen, your own mind has thought, your own heart has felt, you will have power over us, and all the real power that is possible for you. If what you have seen is trivial, if what you have thought is erroneous, if what you have felt is feeble, it would assuredly be better that you should not speak at all; but if you insist on speaking Sincerity will secure the uttermost of power.

1 This selection is reprinted from Chapter IV of G. H. Lewes' Principles of Success in Literature, first published as a series of papers in the Fortnightly Review, of which Lewes was editor, in 1865. George Henry Lewes, 1817-1878, was an English journalist and literary man who lived with Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) as her husband from 1854 until his death in 1878. Lewes was a versatile and brilliant author of literary, dramatic, philosophical, and scientific works. Whatever the subject he dealt with he brought to it a large fund of good sense, vivacity and independence. Perhaps his best known works are his Biographical History of Philosophy, 1845-6, and his Life and Works of Goethe, 1855. He was a disciple of Comte and the Positivist philosophy alluded to in the note on Mr. Frederic Harrison above.-EDITOR.