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 byG.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 THEUNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE1913-1914

BY

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

Cambridge: at the University Press1917

First Edition 1916
Reprinted 1916,1917

TO JOHN HAY LOBBAN

PREFACE

By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into asmooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very fewcorrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader willall too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than inarguments dropped and left at loose ends—the whole bewraying a mancalled unexpectedly to a post where in the act of adapting himself, oflearning that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his main purposeand skirmish with difficulties—they will be the truer to life; and somay experimentally enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing is aliving business.

Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps excuse certain smallvivacities, sallies that meet fools with their folly, masking the mainattack. That, we will see, is serious enough; and others will carry iton, though my effort come to naught.

It amounts to this—Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; butan Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we must considerit as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that potters with any glory ofits past, as a thing dead and done for, is to that extent renegade. Ifthat be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can excuse therelaxation of an effort—however vain and hopeless—to better him, orsome part of him. If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage,we persist in striving to write well, we can easily resign to othernations all the secondary fame to be picked up by commentators.

Recent history has strengthened, with passion and scorn, the faith inwhich I wrote the following pages.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH
November 1915

CONTENTS

LECTURE

I INAUGURAL

II THE PRACTICE OF WRITING

III ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE

IV ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF VERSE

V INTERLUDE: ON JARGON

VI ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

VII SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

VIII ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (I)

IX ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

X ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)

XI ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSIT

...

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!