Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/245

THE QUESTION OF STYLE wonderful things with a limited number of tools: a certain eminent surgeon has been known to perform successfully an operation for appendicitis with no other instrument than a simple pair of scissors. One trouble with many of us is that we overwork just a few words and combinations of words, and neglect other equally good combinations; we have the vice of the hackneyed phrase. A well-known American critic once said in conversation that he would rather be caught stealing a watch than saying that a book "filled a long-felt want"—and unquestionably the two offences differ in kind rather than degree. It was Daudet who expressed the philosophy of the hackneyed phrase perhaps rather more felicitously than any other:

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