LITERARY STYLE 87 



and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her opera- 

 tions ; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but 

 whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 

 the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all 

 beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to 

 respect others as himself. 



"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberr.l 

 education, for he is as completely as a man can be, in harmony 

 with nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. 

 They will get on together rarely ; she as his ever beneficent 

 mother ; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister 

 and interpreter." 



The second address "On a Piece of Chalk" (Coll. 

 Essays, viii, p. i), was delivered to the working-men of 

 Norwich during the meeting of the British Association. 

 Here Mr. Leonard Huxley (Life, i, p. 297) may with 

 advantage be quoted : — 



" This lecture ' On a Piece of Chalk,' together with two 

 others delivered this year, seem to me to mark the maturing 

 of his style into that mastery of clear expression for which he 

 deliberately laboured, the saying exactly what he meant, neither 

 too much nor too little, without confusion and without obscurity. 

 Have something to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's 

 theory of style ; Huxley's was to say that which has to be said 

 in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each 

 word. Be clear, though you may get convicted of error. If you 

 are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact sometime and 

 get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly 

 to use language which will give a loophole of escape either 

 way, there is no hope for you. 



" This was the secret of his lucidity. In no one could 

 Buffon's aphorism on style find a better illustration, Le style 

 c'esi Vhomme meme. In him science and literature, too often 

 divorced, were closely united ; showing that truthfulness need 

 not be bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than 

 in luxuriance of diction. Years after, no less an authority than 

 Spedding, in a letter upon the influence of Bacon on his own 

 style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets 



