This brings us back to quietism and the question whether the perfect English prose would deal with the highest things in the spirit of man’s secret meditations. I do more than doubt it. Secret meditation is incommunicably secret; it is thought without words, and disposed to poetry rather than prose. I suspect our writer really means rumination, in which case, however, he is no better off. For the genius of the language does not run easily in reverie, it is a language that loves action and life. It has few cloistered virtues, and to employ it for cloistered thought would be to use only one or two of its many stops, and those not the most characteristic. Lastly, I cannot but think that the choice of “quietism” as the aim of perfect English prose is a sign of decadence, for it indicates the will to retire into oneself, and to cease to “act” by means of words. The scene it calls up is familiar and bourgeois: a small circle of “cultured” men week-ending in a luxurious country house and confessing “intimately” their literary weaknesses. It is the prevalent atmosphere of the _Literary Supplement_ and the _Spectator_. It is essential that there be “equality” between them, that none should presume to wish to inspire another to any “new way of life,” that action, in short, should be excluded. Once granted these conditions of sterility, and the perfect prose, we are told, would emerge. The rest of us, however, have a very different conception of the perfect English prose. The perfect English prose will be anything but a sedative after a full meal of action. It will be not only action itself, but the cause of action, and its deliberate aim will be to intensify and refine action and to raise action to the level of a fine art. Anything less than a real effect upon real people in a real world is beneath the dignity even of common prose. The very “leaders” in the penny journals aim at leaving a mark upon events. Is the perfect prose to be without hope of posterity? On second thoughts, I shall withdraw Plato from the position of model in which I put him. Plato, it is evident, is likely to be abused; without intending it, his mood, translated into English, appears to be compatible only with luxurious ease; he is read by modern Epicureans. And I shall put in Plato’s place Demosthenes, the model of Swift, the greatest English writer the world has yet seen. Yes, Demosthenes let it be, since Plato is being used for balsam. We seek an English Demosthenes. Index _Adonais_, 178 “Æ,” 117-34 Andrews, Francis, 176 _Anglo-Irish Essays_ (John Eglinton), 74 _Apology, The_ (Plato), 97 _Appreciations and Depreciations_ (Boyd), 76 Archer, William, 59 Arnold, Matthew, 82 _Art and Letters_, 136 Asquith, H. H., 68 _Athenæum, The_, 70 Baring, Maurice, 27 Beardsley, Aubrey, 115 Beerbohm, Max, 23 Bell, Clive, 72 Benda, Julien, 81 _Beyond Good and Evil_ (Nietzsche), 133 _Bhagavad Gita, The_, 44, 112