Page images
PDF
EPUB

southern and western states of North America, where the earliest population has usually been of a less religious character; and, most of all, it applies to the names of the back settlements. These people live under influences the most opposite to those of false refinement: coarse necessities, elementary features of peril or embarrassment, primary aspects of savage nature, compose the scenery of their thoughts; and these are reflected by their names. Dismal Swamp expresses a condition of unreclaimed nature, which must disappear with growing civilisation. Big Bone Lick tells a tale of cruelty that cannot often be repeated. Buffaloes, like all cattle, derive medicinal benefit from salt; they come in droves for a thousand miles to lick the masses of rock salt. The new settlers observing this, lie in ambush to surprise them twenty-five thousand noble animals, in one instance, were massacred for their hides. In the following year the usual crowds advanced; but the first who snuffed the tainted air wheeled round, bellowed, and "recoiled" far into his native woods. Meantime the large bones remain to attest the extent of the merciless massacre. Here, as in all cases, there is a truth expressed; but again too casual and special. Besides that, from contempt of elegance, or from defect of art, the names resemble the seafaring nomenclature in being too rudely compounded.

As with the imposition of names, so with the use of the existing language, most classes stand between the pressure of two extremes of coarseness, of carelessness, of imperfect art, on the one hand, of spurious refinement and fantastic ambition upon the other. Authors have always been a dangerous class for any language. Amongst the myriads who are prompted to authorship by the coarse love of reputation, or by the nobler craving for sympathy, there will always be thousands seeking distinctions through novelties of diction. Hopeless of any audience through mere weight of matter, they will turn for their last resource to such tricks of innovation as they can bring to bear upon language. What care they for

purity or simplicity of diction, if at any cost of either they can win a special attention to themselves? Now, the great body of women are under no such unhappy bias. If they happen to move in polished circles, or have received a tolerable education, they will speak their native language of necessity with truth and simplicity. And supposing them not to be professional writers, (as so small a propor tion can be, even in France or England,) there is always something in the situation of women which secures a fidelity to the idiom. From the greater excitability of females, and the superior vivacity of their feelings, they will be liable to far more irritations from wounded sensibilities. It is for such occasions chiefly that they seek to be effective in their language. Now, there is not in the world so certain a guarantee for pure idiomatic diction, without tricks or affectation, as a case of genuine excitement. Real situations are always pledges of a real natural language. It is in counterfeit passion, in the mimical situations of novels, or in poems that are efforts of ingenuity, and no ebullitions of absolute unsimulated feeling, that female writers endeavour to sustain their own jaded sensibility, or to reinforce the languishing interest of their readers by extravagances of language. No woman in this world, under a movement of resentment from a false accusation, or from jealousy, or from confidence betrayed, ever was at leisure to practise vagaries of caprice in the management of her mother tongue; strength of real feeling shuts out all temptation to the affectation of false feeling.

Hence the purity of the female Byzantine Greek. Such caprices as they had took some other course, and found some other vent than through their mother tongue. Hence, also, the purity of female English. Would you desire at this day to read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque from idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition-steal the mail bags, and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of

terpretation by misapplying this term. "Yankee," in the American use, does not mean a citizen of the United States as opposed to a foreigner, but a citizen of the Northern New England States (Massachusetts, Connecticut, &c.) opposed to a Virginian, a Kentuckian, &c.

women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post-that class who combine more of intelligence, cultivation, and of thoughtfulness, than any other in Europe the class of unmarried women above twenty-five-an increasing class; women who, from mere dignity of character, have renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life, rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their birth. Women capable of such sacrifices, and marked by such strength of mind, may be expected to think with deep feeling, and to express themselves (unless where they have been too much biased by bookish connexions) with natural grace. Not impossibly these same women, if required to come forward in some public character, might write ill and affectedly. They would then have their free natural movement of thought distorted into some accommodation to artificial standards, amongst which they might happen to select a bad one for imitation. But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages; not warped, on the one hand, into that constraint or awkwardness which is the inevitable effect of conscious exposure to public gaze; yet, on the other, not left to vacancy or the chills of apathy, but sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their corre spondents.

So far as concerns idiomatic Eng. lish, we are satisfied, from the many beautiful female letters which we have heard upon chance occasions from every quarter of the empire, that they, the educated women of Great Britain above all, the interesting class of women unmarried upon scruples of sexual honour-and also (as in Constantinople of old) the nurseries of Great Britain, are the true and best depositaries of the old mother idiom. But we must not forget, that though this is another term for what is good in English, when we are talking of a human and a popular interest, there is a separate use of the language, as in the higher forms of history or philosophy, which ought not to be idiomatic. As respects that which is,

it is remarkable that the same orders cling to the ancient purity of diction amongst ourselves who did so in pagan Rome-viz., women, for the reasons just noticed, and people of rank. So much has this been the tendency in England, that we know a person of great powers, but who has in all things a one-sided taste, and is so much a lover of idiomatic English as to endure none else, who professes to read no writer since Lord Chesterfield. It is certain that this accomplished nobleman, who has been most unjustly treated from his unfortunate collision with a national favourite, and in part also from the laxity of his moral principles, where, however, he spoke worse than he thought, wrote with the ease and careless grace of a high-bred gentleman. But his style is not peculiar: it has always been the style of his order. After making the proper allowance for the continual new infusions into our peerage from the bookish class of lawyers, and for some modifications derived from the learned class of spiritual peers, the tone of Lord Chesterfield has always been the tone of our old aristocracy; a tone of elegance and propriety, above all things free from the stiffness of pedantry or academic rigour, and obeying Cæsar's rule of shunning tanquam scopulum any insolens verbum. It is, indeed, through this channel that the solicitudes of our British nobility have always flowed: other qualities might come and go according to the temperament of the individual; but what in all generations constituted an object of horror for that class, was bookish precision and professional peculiarity. From the free popular form of our great public schools, to which nine out of ten amongst our old nobility resorted, it happened unavoidably that they were not equally clear of popular vulgarities; indeed, from another cause, that could not have been avoided for it is remarkable that a connexion, as close as through an umbilical cord, has always been maintained between the very highest orders of our aristocracy and the lowest of our democracy, by means of nurses.

An increasing class; but not in France. It is a most remarkable moral phenomenon in the social condition of that nation, and one which speaks a volume as to the lower tone of female dignity, that unmarried women, at the age which amongst us obtains the insulting name of old maids, are almost unknown. What shocking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue?

The nurses and immediate personal attendants of all classes come from the same sources, most commonly from the peasantry of the land; they import into all families alike, into the highest and the lowest, the coarsest expressions from the vernacular language of anger and contempt. Whence, for example, it was, that about five or six years ago, when a new novel circulated in London, with a private understanding that it was a juvenile effort from two very young ladies of the very highest rank, nobody who reflected at all could feel much surprise that one of the characters should express her self-esteem by the popular phrase that she did not "think small beer of herself." Equally in its faults and its merits, the language of high life has always tended to simplicity and the vernacular ideal, recoiling from every mode of bookishness. And in this, as in so many other instances, it is singular to note the close resemblance between polished England and polished Rome. Augustus Cæsar was so little able to enter into any artificial forms or tortuous obscurities of ambitious rhetoric, that he could not so much as understand them. Even the old antique forms of language, where it happened that they had become obsolete, were to him disgusting. probably the main bond of connexion between himself and Horace was their common and excessive hatred of obscurity; from which quality, indeed, the very intellectual defects of both, equally with their good taste, alienated them to intensity.

And

The pure racy idiom of colloquial or household English, we have insisted, must be looked for in the circles of well-educated women not too closely connected with books. It is certain that books, in any language, will tend to encourage a diction too remote from the style of spoken idiom; whilst the greater solemnity, and the more ceremonial costume of regular literature must often demand such a non-idiomaticdiction, upon mere principles of good taste. But why is it that in our day literature has taken so determinate a swing towards this professional language of books, as to justify some fears that the other extreme of the free colloquial idiom will perish as a living dialect? The apparent cause lies in a phenomenon of modern life, which, on other accounts also, is entitled to anxious consideration. It is

in newspapers that we must look for the main reading of this generation; and in newspapers, therefore, we must seek for the causes operating upon the style of the age. Seventy years ago this tendency in political journals to usurp upon the practice of books, and to mould the style of writers, was noticed by a most acute observer, himself one of the most brilliant writers in the class of satiric sketchers and personal historians that any nation has produced. Already, before 1770, the late Lord Orford was in the habit of saying to any man who consulted him on the cultivation of style-" Style is it that you want? Oh, go and look into the newspapers for a style." This was said half contemptuously and half seriously. But the evil has now become overwhelming. One single number of a London morning paper, which in half a century has expanded from the size of a dinner napkin to that of a breakfast tablecloth, from that to a carpet, and will soon be forced, by the expansions of public business, into something resembling the mainsail of a frigate, already is equal in printed matter to a very large octavo volume. Every old woman in the nation now reads daily a vast miscellany in one vol. royal octavo. The evil of this, as regards the quality of knowledge communicated, admits of no remedy. Public business, in its whole unwieldy compass, must always form the subject of these daily chronicles. Nor is there much room to expect any change in the style. The evil effect of this upon the style of the age may be reduced to two forms. Formerly the natural impulse of every man was, spontaneously to use the language of life; the language of books was a secondary attainment not made without effort. Now, on the contrary, the daily composers of newspapers have so long dealt in the professional idiom of books, as to have brought it home to every reader in the nation who does not violently resist it by some domestic advantages. Time was, within our own remembrance, that if you should have heard, in passing along the street, from any old apple-woman such a phrase as "I will avail myself of your kindness," forthwith you would have shied like a skittish horse-you would have run away in as much terror as any old Roman upon those occasions when Bos loquebatur. At present you swallow such marvels as matters of course.

The

whole artificial dialect of books bas come into play as the dialect of ordinary life. This is one form of the evil impressed upon our style by journalism; a dire monotony of bookish idiom has encrusted and stiffened all native freedom of expression, like some scaly leprosy or elephantiasis, barking and hide-binding the fine natural pulses of the elastic flesh. Another and almost a worse evil has established itself in the prevailing structure of sentences. Every man who has had any experience in writing, knows how natural it is for hurry and fulness of matter to discharge itself by vast sentences, involving clause within clause ad infinitum-how difficult it is, and how much a work of time, to break up this huge fasciculus of cycle and epicycle into a graceful succession of sentences, long intermingled with short, each modifying the other, and arising musically by links of spontaneous connexion. Now the plethoric form of period, this monster model of sentence, bloated with decomplex intercalations, and exactly repeating the form of syntax which distinguishes an act of Parliament, is the prevailing model in newspaper eloquence. Crude undigested masses of suggestion, furnishing rather raw materials for composition and jotting for the memory, than any formal developments of the ideas, describe the quality of writing which must prevail in journalism: not from defect of talents, which are at this day of that superior class which may be presumed from the superior importance of the function itself; but from the necessities of hurry and of instant compliance with an instant emergency, granting no possibility for revision, or opening for amended thought, which are evils attached to the flying velocities of public business.

As to structure of sentence, and the periodic involution, that scarcely admits of being exemplified in the conversation of those who do not write. But the choice of phraseology is naturally and easily echoed in the colloquial forms of those who surrender themselves to such an influence. To mark in what degree this contagion of bookishness has spread, and how deeply it has moulded the habits of expression in classes naturally the least likely to have been reached by a revolution so artificial in its character, we will report a single record from the memorials of our own experience.

Some eight years ago, we had occasion to look for lodgings in a newlybuilt suburb of London. The mistress of the house, (with respect to whom we have nothing to report more than that she was in the worst sense a vulgar woman, that is, not merely a lowbred person-so much might have been expected from her occupation-but morally vulgar by the evi. dence of her own complex precautions against fraud, reasonable enough in so dangerous a capital, but not calling for the very ostentatious display of them which she obtruded upon us) was in regular training, it appeared, as a student of newspapers. She had no children: the newspapers were her children. There lay her studies, that branch of learning constituted her occupation, from morning to night: and the following were amongst the words which she-this semibarbarian

poured from her cornucopia during the very few minutes of our interview; which interview was brought to an abrupt issue by mere nervous agitation upon our part. The words, as noted down within an hour of the occasion, and after allowing a fair time for our recovery, were these:-first," Category; secondly, "predicament;" (where, by the way, from the twofold iteration of the idea-Greek and Roman-it appears that the old lady was "twice armed;")-thirdly, "individuality;" fourthly, "procrastination ;" fifthly, "speaking diplomatically, would not wish to commit herself;" sixthly," would spontaneously adapt the several modes of domestication to the reciprocal interests, &c. ;" and finally, (which word it was that settled us; we heard it as we reached the topmost stair on the second floor; and, without further struggle against our instincts, round we wheeled, rushed down forty-five stairs, and exploded from the house with a fury causing us to impinge against an obese or protuberant gentleman, and calling for mutual explanations; a result which nothing could account for, but a steel bow, or mustachios on the lip of an elderly woman: meantime the fatal word was,) seventhly," anteriorly." Concerning which word we solemnly depose and make affidavit, that neither from man, woman, nor book, had we ever heard it before this unique rencontre with this abominable woman on the staircase. The occasion which furnished the excuse for

such a word was this: From the staircase window we saw a large shed in the rear of the house: apprehending some nuisance of "manufacturing industry" in our neighbourhood, "What's that?" we demanded. Mark the answer: "A shed; and anteriorly to the existing shed there was;" what there was, posterity must consent to have wrapt up in darkness, for there came on our nervous seizure, which intercepted further communication. But observe, as a point which took away any gleam of consolation from the case, the total absence of all malaprop picturesqueness, that might have defeated its deadly action upon the nervous system. No it is due to the integrity of her disease, and to the completeness of our suffering, that we should attest the unimpeachable correctness of her words and of the syntax by which she connected them.

Now, if we could suppose the case that the old household idiom of the land were generally so extinguished amongst us as it was in this particular instance-if we could imagine, as a universal result of journalism, that a coarse unlettered woman, having occasion to say, "this or that stood in such a place before the present shed," should take as a natural or current formula," anteriorly to the existing shed there stood, &c."-what would be the final effect upon our literature? Pedantry, though it were unconscious pedantry, once steadily diffused through a nation as to the very moulds of its thinking, and the general tendencies of its expression, could not but stiffen the natural graces of composition, and weave fetters about the free movement of human thought. This would interfere as effectually with our power of enjoying much that is excellent in our past literature, as it would with our future powers of producing. And such an agency has been too long at work amongst us, not to have already accomplished some part of these separate evils. Amongst women of education, as we have argued above, standing aloof from liter ature, and less uniformly drawing their intellectual sustenance from newspapers, the deadening effects have been partially counteracted. Here and there, amongst individuals, alive to the particular evils of the age, and watching the very set of the current, there may have been even a more sys

tematic counteraction applied to the mischief. But the great evil in such cases is this-that we cannot see the extent of the changes wrought or being wrought, from having ourselves partaken in them. Tempora mutan tur; and naturally, if we could review them with the neutral eye of a stranger, it would be impossible for us not to see the extent of those changes. But our eye is not neutral: we also have partaken in the changes; et nos mutamur in illis. And this fact disturbs the power of appreciating those changes. Every one of us would have felt, sixty years ago, that the general tone and colouring of a style was stiff, bookish, pedantic, which, from the habituation of our organs, we now feel to be natural and within the privilege of learned art. Direct objective qualities it is always by comparison easy to measure; but the difficulty commences when we have to combine with this outer measurement of the object another corresponding measurement of the subjective or inner qualities by which we apply the measure; that is, when besides the ob jects projected to a distance from the spectator, we have to allow for variations or disturbances in the very eye which surveys them. The eye cannot see itself; we cannot project from ourselves, and contemplate as an object our own contemplating faculty, or appreciate our own appreciating power. Biases, therefore, or gradual warpings, that have occurred in our critical faculty as applied to style, we cannot allow for; and these biases will unconsciously mask, to our perceptions, an amount of change in the quality of popular style such as we could not easily credit.

Separately from this change for the worse in the drooping idiomatic freshness of our diction, which is a change that has been going on for a century, the other characteristic defect of this age lies in the tumid and tumultuary structure of our sentences. The one change has partly grown out of the other. Ever since a more bookish air was impressed upon composition without much effort by the Latinized and artificial phraseology, by forms of expression consecrated to books, and by "long-tailed words in osity and ation," either because writers felt that already, in this one act of preference shown to the artificial vocabulary, they had done enough to establish a differ

« PreviousContinue »