cibly is, of course, a valuable
acquisition--almost as valuable as the art of writing clearly. But
forcible expression is not, like clear expression, a mere question of
mechanism and of the manipulation of words; it is a much higher power,
and implies much more.

Writing clearly does not imply thinking clearly. A man may think and
reason as obscurely as Dogberry himself, but he may (though it is not
probable that he will) be able to write clearly for all that. Writing
clearly--so far as arrangement of words is concerned--is a mere matter
of adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, placed
and repeated according to definite rules.[1] Even obscure or illogical
thought can be clearly expressed; indeed, the transparent medium of
clear writing is not least beneficial when it reveals the illogical
nature of the meaning beneath it.

On the other hand, if a man is to write forcibly, he must (to use a
well-known illustration) describe Jerusalem as "sown with salt," not
as "captured," and the Jews not as being "subdued" but as "almost
exterminated" by Titus. But what does this imply? It implies
knowledge, and very often a great deal of knowledge, and it implies
also a vivid imagination. The writer must have eyes to see the vivid
side of everything, as well as words to describe what he sees. Hence
forcible writing, and of course tasteful writing also, is far less a
matter of rules than is clear writing; and hence, though forcible
writing is exemplified in the exercises, clear writing occupies most
of the space devoted to the rules.

Boys who are studying Latin and Greek stand in especial need of help
to enable them to write a long English sentence clearly. The periods
of Thucydides and Cicero are not easily rendered into our idiom
without some knowledge of the links that connect an English sentence.

There is scarcely any better training, rhetorical as well as logical,
than the task of construing Thucydides into genuine English; but the
flat, vague, long-winded Greek-English and Latin-English imposture
that is often tolerated in our examinations and is allowed to pass
current for genuine English, diminishes instead of increasing the
power that our pupils should possess over their native language. By
getting marks at school and college for construing good Greek and
Latin into bad English, our pupils systematically unlearn what they
may have been allowed to pick up from Milton and from Shakespeare.

I must ackn