language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your
whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should
go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a
fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or
circumvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there
his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.

LECTURE VI.

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

Thursday, May 15

To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we have
to essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of his
compass-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside his
knowledge--outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge.
I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his host
on the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In
asking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise only
that, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back'
of the desert.

In my last lecture but one, then,--and before our small interlude with
Jargon--the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this
point: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinary
unemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments.
This point, I believe, we made effectively enough.

Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a corresponding
point, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying
extraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to these
high emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be,
Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questions
about prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can,
to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, is
an art) you cannot classify as in a science.

Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. In
studying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust all
classification! All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an
art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may
make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have
any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one.
Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classified
is not only conv