I take this gem with some others from a collection made three years ago, by the “Oxford Magazine”; and I hope you admire it as one beyond price.  ‘He was associated with the distinction of the Order of Merit’ means ’he was given the Order of Merit.’  If the members of that Order make a society then he was associated with them; but you cannot associate a man with a distinction.  The inventor of such fine writing would doubtless have answered Canning’s Needy Knife-grinder with:—­

     I associate thee with sixpence!  I will see thee in another
     association first!

But let us close our florilegium and attempt to illustrate Jargon by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet’s soliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this fashion:—­

To be, or the contrary?  Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion.  The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter:  so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.

That is Jargon:  and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing.  The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun.  When you write in the active voice, ‘They gave him a silver teapot,’ you write as a man.  When you write ’He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,’ you write jargon.  But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun.  Somebody—­I think it was FitzGerald—­once posited the question ’What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?’ Without pursuing that dreadful enquiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables—­those exquisite short stories—­speak only of ’things which you can touch and see’—­’A sower went forth to sow,’ ’The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,’—­and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel.  The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good.  The Gospel says ’Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’—­not ’Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.’  The Gospel does not say ‘Consider the growth of the lilies,’ or even ’Consider how the lilies grow.’  It says, ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow.’