impulse.  You must first be your own reader, chiselling out the thought definitely for yourself:  and, after that, must carve out the intaglio yet more sharply and neatly, if you would impress its image accurately upon the wax of other men’s minds.  We found that even for Men of Science this neat clean carving of words was a very necessary accomplishment.  As Sir James Barrie once observed, ’The Man of Science appears to be the only man who has something to say, just now—­and the only man who does not know how to say it.’  But the trouble by no means ends with Science.  Our poets—­those gifted strangely prehensile men who, as I said in my first lecture, seem to be born with filaments by which they apprehend, and along which they conduct, the half-secrets of life to us ordinary mortals—­our poets would appear to be scamping artistic labour, neglecting to reduce the vague impressions to the clearly cut image which is, after all, what helps.  It may be a triumph that they have taught modern French poetry to be suggestive.  I think it would be more profitable could they learn from France—­that nation of fine workmen—­to be definite.

But about ’getting there’—­I ask you to remember Wolfe, with the seal of his fate on him, stepping into his bateau on the dark St. Lawrence River and quoting as they tided him over:—­

     The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
     And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
     Await alike th’ inevitable hour;
     The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

‘I had rather have written those lines,’ said Wolfe, ’than conquer Canada.’  That is how our forefathers valued noble writing.  The Denver editor holds that you may write as you please so long as you get there.  Well, Wolfe got there:  and so, in Wolfe’s opinion, did Gray:  but perhaps to Wolfe and Gray, and to the Denver editor, ‘there’ happened to mean two different places.  Wolfe got to the Heights of Abraham.

Further, it was against this loose adaptation of words to thought and to things that we protested in our interpolated lecture on Jargon, which is not so much bad writing as the avoidance of writing.  The man who employs Jargon does not get ‘there’ at all, even in a raw rough pioneering fashion:  he just walks around ‘there’ in the ambient tracks of others.  Let me fly as high as I can and quote you two recent achievements by Cabinet Ministers, as reported in the Press:—­(1) ’Mr McKenna’s reasons for releasing from Holloway Prison Miss Lenton while on remand charged in connexion with (sweet phrase!) the firing of the tea pavilion in Kew Gardens are given in a letter which he has caused to be forwarded to a correspondent who inquired as to the circumstances of the release.  The letter says “I am desired by the Home Secretary to say that Lilian Lenton was reported by the medical officer at Holloway Prison to be in a state of collapse and in imminent danger of death consequent upon her refusal to take food.  Three courses were open—­(1) To leave her to die; (2) To attempt to feed her forcibly, which the medical officer advised would probably entail death in her existing condition:  (3) To release her.  The Home Secretary adopted the last course."’