When In Doubt, Have A Man Come

I Sat Down On The Edge Of A Deep Soft Chair And Looked At Mrs Regan. She Was Worth A Stare. She Was Trouble.

The Dilemma Of The Critic Has Always Been That If He Knows Enough To Speak With Authority, He Knows Too Much To Speak With Detachment.

All Language Begins With Speech, And The Speech Of Common Men At That, But When It Develops To The Point Of Becoming A Literary Medium It Only Looks Like Speech.

It Is Not Funny That A Man Should Be Killed, But It Is Sometimes Funny That He Should Be Killed For So Little, And That His Death Should Be The Coin Of What We Call Civilization.

It Is A Mass Language Only In The Same Sense That Its Baseball Slang Is Born Of Baseball Players. That Is, It Is A Language Which Is Being Molded By Writers To Do Delicate Things And Yet Be Within The Grasp Of Superficially Educated People. It Is Not A Natural Growth, Much As Its Proletarian Writers Would Like To Think So. But Compared With It At Its Best, English Has Reached The Alexandrian Stage Of Formalism And Decay.