By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a
great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my
house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on
it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, _Haec fuit,
Haec almae janua sacra domus._ Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as
first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.
It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a
good thing not to have to return to the Faith.
They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the
possible exception of Omaha, Neb.
LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like _'possible exception'?_
AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the
book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine.
You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the
_cliche_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not
because you naturally write odd prose - contrariwise, left to yourself
you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and
puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school
calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done,
and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed,
putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
pale as a film of dirty wax - sometimes even they dictate to a
typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
generally put the Queen's English - yes, the Queen's English - on the
rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel' - a good word.
Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward
English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write
twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is
proved by the mass they turn out.
