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.'

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly
chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch
and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the
particular. He does it even in "Venus and Adonis" (as Professor Wendell,
of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare,
published some ten years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" side
by side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot but