Captain Boyd Alexander
[1] There is only one rule for good prose, the rule which Newman and Huxley in
their different ways enunciated and followed—to set down your exact, full and
precise meaning so lucidly and simply that no man can mistake it . . . . I am ready to assert that
almost the best prose has been written by men who are not professional men of letters, and who therefore escape the
faded and weary mannerisms of the self-conscious
litterateur. As an example I would point to the prose of Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, and
of a dozen explorers like Captain
Scott and Captain Boyd
Alexander, and of soldiers . . . . like the Canadian general Arthur Currie.
John Buchan: from Homilies and Recreations:
The Judicial Temperament (1926)
General Arthur Currie
[2] Prose is not to
be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it
is not quick as poetry but
rather a gathering web of
insinuations which go
further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between
strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings
unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone . .
Henry Green: Pack My Bag (1940)
Thomas Huxley: Sketch of then hypothetical five-toed Eohippus
being ridden by "Eohomo"
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