LORD HALDANE ON STYLE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 88, 2 June 1911, Page 2

LORD HALDANE ON STYLE.

Lord Haldane, presiding at a meeting of the Academic Committee of tho Royal Literary Society, said it was the" characteristic of the English people that they were more coin (rued with matter than with form. The Greeks in their best periods showed the world for all time the lesson that the two could not ho separated. In Athens at its best it was never permitted to the great artist, whether in words or in plastic materials, to set forth as finished’ and complete anything in which the perfection of form did not engage the skill of the artist as blindingly as the perfection of matter. But’ with us, as perhaps with all the Teutonic races, it was, and perhaps had always been, the case that provided the matter was great there was loss need of insistence on the form. Even with Shakespears and with Goethe it was so. It would be found also in our romantic literature. They would find that disregard to form in a great novelist like Scott, and even in a great poet like Words worth: But' when they turned to other races they would find that a different example had been set. Perhaps since the Greeks no, nation had rivalled the French in the insistence on the inseparability of form from matter. The French, with their unrivalled gilt ot perfect expression, had shown how consideration tpr style niirdit be elevated into somefchiiif that was neither a science nor an art, but the national outcome ot a -national capacity. We might, not with our language, and, still more, because of our national idosyncrasies, he capable of reaching the level of the French, but wo had in our language a capacity of expression which was perhaps unrivalled. Ihe English language lent itself to lyric poetry and to the spiritual and subjective mere closely than did the French. We had also a language that was perfectly organised, and had a potency inherent in it of expressing hue and delicate shades of meaning, that had been done with success in our literature but it had not been done so easily as in the French, and that perhaps had been because we had never .riven the same thought and studj to the matter as the French.