times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred. You should never use them. That is positive enough, I hope? Though I cannot admire his style, I admire the man who wrote to me, "Re Tennyson - your remarks anent his In Memoriam make me sick"; for though re is not a preposition of the first water, and "anent" has enjoyed its day, the finish crowned the work. But here are a few specimens far, very far, worse:

The special difficulty in Professor Minocelsi's case [our old friend "case" again] arose in connection with the view he holds relative to the historical value of the opening pages of Genesis.

That is jargon. In prose, even taking the miserable sentence as it stands constructed, we should write "the difficulty arose over the views he holds about the historical value," etc.

From a popular novelist:

I was entirely indifferent as to the results of the game, caring nothing at all as to whether I had losses or gains —

Cut out the first "as" in ". as to," and the second "as to" altogether, and the sentence begins to be prose. "I was indifferent to the results of the game, caring nothing whether I had losses or gains."

But why, like Dogberry, have "had losses"? Why not simply "lose"? Let us try again. "I was entirely indifferent to the results of the game, caring nothing at all whether I won or lost."

Still the sentence remains absurd; for the second clause but repeats the first without adding one jot. For if you care not at all whether you win or lose, you must be entirely indifferent to the results of the game. So why not say, "I was careless if I won or lost," and have done with it?

A man of simple and charming character, he was fitly associated with the distinction of the Order of Merit.

I take this gem with some others from a collection made three years ago, by the Oxford Magazine; and I hope you admire it as one beyond price. "He was associated with the distinc

tion of the Order of Merit" means "he was given the Order of Merit." If the members of that Order make a society, then he was associated with them; but you cannot associate a man with a distinction. The inventor of such fine writing would doubtless have answered Canning's Needy Knife-grinder with:

I associate thee with sixpence! I will see thee in another association first!

But let us close our florilegium and attempt to illustrate jargon by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet's soliloquy) and remolding a few lines of it in this fashion:

To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavor of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying

nature.

That is jargon; and to write jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be forever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write "He was made the recipient of a silver teapot," you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun. Somebody I think it was Fitzgerald - once posited the

question, "What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?" Without pursuing that dreadful inquiry, I ask you to note how carefully the Parables those exquisite short stories-speak only of 'things which you can touch and see" - "A sower went forth to sow," "The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took," and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word if the word be good. The Gospel says "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's" — not "Render unto Cæsar the things that appertain to that potentate." The Gospel does not say "Consider the growth of the lilies," or even "Consider how the lilies grow." It says, "Consider the lilies, how they grow."

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase, forcing you to touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the particular. He does it even in Venus and Adonis (as Professor Wendell, of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare, published some ten years ago). Read any page of Venus and Adonis side by side with any page of Marlowe's Hero and Leander and you cannot but mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualized image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalization, the abstract term, the thing seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of which start out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins:

Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds:
Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds,
And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,

All headlong throws herself the clouds among.

Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to his hero and to business without ado:

Even as the sun with purple-color'd face —

(You have the sun visualized at once)

Even as the sun with purple-color'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;

Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn.

When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:

Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.

Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:

Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meeting Leander:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate. . .

and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus's last meeting with Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:

Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So, at his bloody view -

I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack into verse, such as:

Sleep that knits up the ravel'd sleeve of care.

Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us take Webster for the comparison - Webster, a man of genius or of something very like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, and what I may call solidified sensation. Let us take this admired passage from his Duchess of Malfy:

Ferdinand. How doth our sister Duchess bear herself
In her imprisonment?

Basola.

Nobly: I'll describe her.

She's sad as one long wed to't, and she seems
Rather to welcome the end of misery

Than shun it: a behavior so noble

As gives a majesty to adversity.1

You may discern the shape of loveliness

More perfect in her tears than in her smiles;

She will muse for hours together; 2 and her silence
Methinks expresseth more than if she spake

Now set against this the well-known passage from Twelfth Night, where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about some one unknown to him and invented by her a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more definite is the language:

Viola. My father had a daughter lov'd a man;

Duke.

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.

And what's her history?

Viola. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare has to use the abstract noun "concealment," on an instant it turns into a visible worm "feeding" on the visible

1 Note the abstract terms.

2 Here we first come on the concrete; and beautiful it is.