It is the function of language to convey ideas. Ideas are the real foundation of good lecturing and words must always be subordinate.

The English Parliamentarian, Gladstone, had the reputation of being able to say less in more time than any man who ever lived. The difference between a good and a bad use of words is well illustrated in the discussion between Gladstone and Huxley on Genesis and Science. Of course everybody knows now that Gladstone was annihilated, in spite of the cleverness with which, when beaten, he would, in Huxley’s phrase, “retreat under a cloud of words.”

Grandiloquence will produce, in the more intelligent of your audience, an amused smile, and while it is well to have your hearers smile with you, they should never have reason to smile at you.

Here again, a great deal depends on what you have been reading. In the use of good, clear, powerful English, Prof. Huxley is without a peer, and his “collected essays” will always remain a precious heritage in English literature. For an example of the exact opposite, take the magazines and pamphlets of the so-called new thought, which at bottom is neither “new” nor “thought.” In reality it is made up of words, words, and then—more words.

I read a fifteen hundred word article, in a new thought magazine, by one of its foremost prophets, and nowhere from beginning to end, was there a single tangible idea, nothing but a long drawn out mass of meaningless jargon.

“Thus spake Zarathustra” is the same thing at its best. As an example of a style to be carefully avoided the following is in point. It is also a rara avis; a gem of purest ray. It is taken from the local Socialist platform of an Arizona town:

Therefore, it matters not, though the Creator decked the earth with prolific soil, and deposited within great stores of wealth for man’s enjoyment, for, if Economic Equality is ostracised, man is enslaved and the world surges through space around the sun, a gilded prison. It matters not, though the infinite blue vast be sown with innumerable stars and the earth be adorned with countless beauties, teeming with the multiplicity of living forms for man’s edification, for if Liberty is exiled, the intellect is robbed and man knows not himself. It matters not, though nature opens her generous purse and pours forth melodies of her myriad-tongued voices for man’s delectation, for, if the shackles of wage slavery are not loosed, the mind is stultified and ambition destroyed by the long hours of toil’s monotony in the factory, the machine shop, in the mines, at the desk, and on the farm. It matters not, though the fireside of the home sheds forth a radiance in which is blended paternal love, health and happiness, for, if woman is denied equal suffrage, then this queen of the household, perforce, becomes a moral slave.

Man, therefore, is not the sovereign citizen as pictured by the flashing phrases of the orator and soothsayer.

Liberty exiled, we have heard of before, but economic equality ostracised, is new. The idea that the multiplicity of living forms exist for man’s edification, is ancient to the point of being moldy, but we must concede originality to “myriad tongued voices” issuing from a “purse.” The concluding remarks about the “flashing phrases of the orator” are peculiarly well taken—unless that gentleman should be mean enough to say, “you’re another.”

Of course there is no objection to real eloquence and one’s sentences should always be smooth and rhythmical. One great source of smoothness and rhythm is alliteration. Tennyson says:

Here the smooth movement comes from the alliteration on d in the first line and the tripling of the initial s in the second.

gets its music from the alliteration on f. In revising the MS. of my lecture on “Weismann’s Theory of Heredity” for publication, I found the following sentence, referring to Johannes Mueller.

“He failed to fill the gap his destructive criticism had created.”

This sentence gives to the ear a sense of rhythm that is somewhere interrupted and disturbed. Examination shows that the rhythm comes from the alliterations “failed to fill” and “criticism had created,” and the disturbance arises from the interjection between them of the word “destructive.” Destructive is a good word here, but not essential to the sense and not worth the interruption it makes in the smoothness of the sentence. So it had to go.

Avoid long words wherever possible, and never use a word you do not understand. As an example of the vast picture which half a dozen short words of Saxon English will conjure up, take these lines from “The Ancient Mariner”:

The power of expression in a single word, appears in Keats’ description of Ruth, in his “Ode to the Nightingale.”

What a master-stroke is the use of “alien,” this time a Latin derivative, in the last line quoted. What a picture of that old time drama, with its theme of love and sorrow co-eval with the human race.

First get your idea, then express it in words that give it forth clearly. No verbiage, no fog or clouds, no jargon, but simplicity, lucidity, vividness, and power.