The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: On the Art of Writing
Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

Release Date: January 5, 2006 [EBook #17470]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE ART OF WRITING ***

Produced by James Tenison

ON THE ART OF WRITING

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C.F. CLAY, Manager
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET.

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras: MACMILLAN & CO. LTD.
Toronto: J.M. DENT AND SONS, LTD.
Tokyo: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA.

Copyrighted in the United States of America by
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS,
2, 4 AND 6, WEST 45TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

All rights reserved

ON THE ART OF WRITING

LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
1913-1914

BY

SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M.A.
Fellow of Jesus College
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature

Cambridge: at the University Press
1917

First Edition 1916
Reprinted 1916,1917

TO JOHN HAY LOBBAN

PREFACE

By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into a
smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very few
corrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader will
all too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than in
arguments dropped and left at loose ends--the whole bewraying a man
called unexpectedly to a post where in the act of adapting himself, of
learning that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his main purpose
and skirmish with difficulties--they will be the truer to life; and so
may experimentally enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing is a
living business.

Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps excuse certain small
vivacities, sallies that meet fools with their folly, masking the main
attack. _That_, we will see, is serious enough; and others will carry it
on, though my effort come to naught.

It amounts to this--Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; but
an Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we mus