ings
which if allowed to materialise.' But things are materialised already,
and as a condition of their being things. It must be the aspect, then,
that materialises. But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, and
an aspect, however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannot
culminate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots.... I give it up.

Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation,
so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend
these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:--

Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had
no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however,
took some time in settling to work....

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in
your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on
Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay
exact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again. But my
undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one
page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the
second sentence turns into 'that great but unequal poet' and
thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with
Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the
page he becomes 'the gloomy master of Newstead': overleaf he is
reincarnated into 'the meteoric darling of society': and so proceeds
through successive avatars--'this arch-rebel,' 'the author of Childe
Harold,' 'the apostle of scorn,' 'the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally
sensitive of his club-foot,' 'the martyr of Missolonghi,' 'the
pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.' Now this again is Jargon. It does
not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity,
which is worse. In literature as in life he makes himself felt who not
only calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and
re-double.

For another rule--just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train your
suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon 'as regards,' 'with
regard to,' 'in respect of,' 'in connection with,' 'according as to
whether,' and the like. They are all dodges of Jargon, circumlocutions
for evading this or that simple statement: and I say that it is not
enough to avoid them nine times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times out
of a hundred. You should never use t