228 NOTES ON STYLE 



of not thinking overmuch about writing. A fastidious avoid- 

 ance of what is plain and common may lead us insensibly into 

 the worst of all faults affectation and stylistic pedantry ; 

 may blind us to the fact that what we say is more important 

 than how we say it, and that the first condition of good 

 writing is strong feeling and clear thinking. 



Englishmen, however, incline toward carelessness rather 

 than scrupulousness in the matter of language. It will be 

 long before our journalists and novelists deserve the reproach 

 which George Sand is said to have addressed to Flaubert, and 

 which, in my opinion, Flaubert, that martyr to verbal nicety, 

 deserved : ' You regard expression as an end in itself ; it is 

 but an effect.' 



The purity of idiom in English literature runs its chief risks 

 from bookish phrases, from misapplied terms like 'predica- 

 ment' and 'category,' from nouns in 'ist' and 'ism' 

 (' scientist,' ' educationalist,' ' evolutionism '), from evil 

 metaphors involved in verbs like ' to avail oneself of,' from 

 hackneyed forms of artificial sentences, which save the writer 

 trouble and blind him to the duty of saying freshly what he 

 thinks and feels. From the great curse of German, the whole- 

 sale incorporation of foreign words into the language, we are 

 fortunately delivered by the genius of our mother speech. 

 We cannot construct endless ugly verbs in iren, or adopt 

 French vocables with mutilated terminations. Nor again is 

 it within the power of English writers to construct flaccid 

 sentences of between two hundred and three hundred words, 

 in which the attention of the reader is suspended till the close 

 falls on the separable particle of the leading verb. That is a 

 stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, which can be found 

 only in Germany. 



De Quincey, in the essay already quoted from, inveighs 

 against ' the tumid and tumultuary structure of our sentences. 1 

 He delivers his impeachment in the following period, which, 

 except that it is artfully conducted to a climax, might seem 

 designed to illustrate the fault he is attacking : 



Ever since a more bookish air was impressed upon composition 

 without much effort by the Latinised and artificial phraseology, by 



