_THE ALTILOQUENT._
"With words of learned length and thundering sound."
GOLDSMITH.
This is a talker not content to speak in words plain and simple, such as
common sense teaches and requires. He talks as though learning and
greatness in conversation consisted in fine words run together as beads
on a string. You would infer on hearing him that he had ransacked
Johnson to find out the finest and loftiest words in which to express
his ideas, so far as he has any. The regions in which ordinary mortals
move are too mundane for him; so he rises aloft in flights of winged
verbiage, causing those who listen below to wonder whither he is going,
until he has passed away into the clouds, beyond their peering ken. At
other times he speaks in such grandiloquence of terms as make his
hearers open their eyes and mouths in vacant and manifold interjections!
"How sublime! How grand! How surpassingly eloquent! Was it not
magnificent?"
I will give the reader a few illustrations of this talker, as gathered
from a variety of sources.
"That was a masterly performance," said Mr. Balloon to his friend Mr.
Gimblett, as they came out of church one Sunday morning, when the Rev.
Mr. German had been preaching on the _Relation of the Infinite to the
Impossible_.
"Yes," replied Mr. Gimblett, "I suppose it was very fine; but much
beyond my depth. I confess to being one of the sheep who looked up and
were not fed."
"That's because you haven't a metaphysical mind," said Mr. Balloon,
regarding his friend with pity; "you have got a certain faculty of mind,
but I suspect you have not got the _logical grasp_ requisite for the
comprehension of such a sermon as that."
"I am afraid I have not," said Mr. Gimblett.
"I tell you what it is," continued Mr. Balloon, "Mr. German has a
_head_. He's an intellectual giant, I hardly know whether he is greater
as a subjective preacher, or in the luminous objectivity of his
_argumentum ad hominem_. As an instructive reasoner, too, he is
perfectly great. With what synthetical power he refuted the Homoiousian
theory. I tell you Homoiousianism will be nowhere after that."
"To tell the truth," said Mr. Gimblett, "I went to sleep at that long
word, and did not awake until he was on Theodicy."
"Ah, yes," said Mr. Balloon, "that was a splendid manifestation of
ratiocinative word-painting. I was completely carried away when, in his
magnificent, sublime, and marrowy style he took an analogical view of
the anthropological." But at this point Mr. Balloon soared away into the
air, and left Mr. Gimblett standing with wondering vision as to whither
he had gone.
At the time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher
thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between
heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition
corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual
sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity
ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may
calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch with all magnetical
rapidity."
A certain American altiloquent was once talking of liberty, when he
said, "White-robed liberty sits upon her rosy clouds above us; the
Genius of our country, standing on her throne of mountains, bids her
eagle standard-bearer wind his spiral course full in the sun's proud
eye; while the Genius of Christianity, surrounded by ten thousand
cherubim and seraphim, moves the panorama of the milky clouds above us,
and floats in immortal fragrance--the very aroma of Eden through all the
atmosphere."
An altiloquent was one day about taking a journey into the country. He
was rather of a nervous tendency, having met with two or three accidents
in travelling. Before getting into the hired conveyance he asked the
driver, "Can you, my friend, conduct this quadruped along the highway
without destroying the equilibrium of the vehicle?" The journey having
been made without the "equilibrium of the vehicle" being destroyed, when
he reached the inn where the horse was to lodge for the night, he said
to the ostler, "Boy, extricate this quadruped from the vehicle,
stabulate him, devote him an adequate supply of nutritious aliment, and
when the aurora of morn shall again illumine the oriental horizon I will
reward you with pecuniary compensation for your amiable hospitality."
On a certain occasion one of this class of talkers was dining in a
country farm-house, when, among other vegetables on the table, cabbage
was one. After despatching the first supply, he was asked by the hostess
if he would take a little more, when he said, "By no means, madam.
Gastronomical satiety admonishes me that I have arrived at the ultimate
of culinary deglutition consistent with the code of Esculapius."
A photographer once, describing his mode of taking pictures, said, "Then
we replace the slide in the shield, draw this out of the camera, and
carry it back into the shadowy realm where Cocytus flows in black
nitrate of silver, and Acheron stagnates in the pool of hyposulphite,
and invisible ghosts, trooping down from the world of day, cross a Styx
of dissolved sulphate of iron, and appear before Rhadamanthus of that
lurid Hades."
A certain doctor once, conversing about the romantic scenery of
Westmoreland, said, "In that magnificent county you see an apotheosis
of nature, and an apodeikneusis of the theopratic Omnipotence."
Mr. Paxton Hood tells of a minister who described a tear "as that small
particle of aqueous fluid, trickling from the visual organ over the
lineaments of the countenance, betokening grief." Of another, who spoke
of "the deep intuitive glance of the soul, penetrating beyond the
surface of the superficial phenomenal to the remote recesses of absolute
entity or being; thus adumbrating its immortality on its precognitive
perceptions." Of another, an eminent man, head of a college for
ministers, when repeating a well-known passage of Scripture, "'He that
believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his'"--here he
paused, and at last said, "Well, out of his ventriculum shall flow
'living water!'"
One altiloquent rendered "Give us this day our daily bread" as follows:
"Confer upon us during this mundane sphere's axillary revolution our
diurnal subsistence." And another, instead of saying, "Jesus wept,"
said, "And Jesus the Saviour of the world burst into a flood of tears;"
upon hearing which Dr. Johnson is said to have exclaimed in disgust,
"Puppy, puppy!"
A minister once, speaking in the presence of a few friends met for the
purpose of promoting the interests of a certain Young Men's Christian
Association, relieved himself in the following: "When I think of this
organization, with its complex powers, it reminds me of some stupendous
mechanism which shall spin electric bands of stupendous thought and
feeling, illuminating the vista of eternity with corruscations of
brilliancy, and blending the mystic brow of eternal ages with a tiara of
never-dying beauty, whilst for those who have trampled on the truth of
Christ, it shall spin from its terrible form toils of eternal funeral
bands, darker and darker, till sunk to the lowest abyss of destiny."
A physician, while in his patient's room, in speaking to the surgeon
about him, said, "You must phlebotomize the old gentleman to-morrow."
The old gentleman, who overheard, immediately exclaimed in a fright, "I
will never suffer that."
"Sir, don't be alarmed," replied the surgeon; "he is only giving orders
for me to bleed you."
"O, as for the bleeding," answered the patient, "it matters little; but
as for the other, I will sooner die than endure it."
I have read of an Irishman who, speaking of a house which he had to let,
said, "It is free from opacity, tenebrosity, fumidity, and injucundity,
or translucency. In short, its diaphaneity, even in the crepuscle, makes
it a pharos, and without laud, for its agglutination and amenity, it is
a most delectable commorance; and whoever lives in it will find that the
neighbours have none of the truculence and immanity, the torvity, the
spinosity, the putidness, the pugnacity, nor the fugacity observable in
other parts of the town. Their propinquity and consanguinity occasions
jucundity and pudicity, from which and the redolence of the place they
are remarkable for longevity."
Altiloquents are not unfrequently found among a class of young persons
who think they must talk in a manner corresponding with their dress and
appearance--fine and prim. A barber is a "tonsorial artist," and the
place in which he works a "hair-dressing studio;" a teacher of swimming
is a "professor of natation," and he who swims "natates in a
natatorium;" a common clam-seller is a "vender of magnificent bivalves;"
a schoolmaster is a "preceptor," or "principal of an educational
institute;" a cobbler is a "son of Crispin;" printers are "practitioners
of the typographical art;" a chapel is a "sanctuary," a church a
"temple," a house a "palace" or an "establishment," stables and
pig-styes are "quadrupedal edifices and swinish tenements."
One of this class, a young lady at school, considering that the word
"eat" was too vulgar for refined ears, is said to have substituted the
following: "To insert nutritious pabulum into the denticulated orifice
below the nasal protuberance, which, being masticated, peregrinates
through the cartilaginous cavities of the larynx, and is finally
domiciliated in the receptacle for digestible particles."
* * * * *
"It is impossible," says a recent writer, "not to deplore so pernicious
a tendency to high-flown language, because all classes of society
indulge in it more or less; and because, as we have already said, it
proceeds in every instance from mental deficiencies and moral defects,
from insincerity and dissimulation, and from an effeminate proneness to
use up in speaking the energy we should turn to doing and apply to life
and conduct. Without a substratum of sincerity, no man can speak right
on, but runs astray into a kind of phraseology which bears the same
relation to elegant language that the hollyhock does to the rose."
The altiloquent talker may be called a _word-fancier_, searching for all
the fine words discoverable, and then putting them together in a sort of
mosaic-pavement style or artificial-flower order, making something to be
considered _pretty_, or _fascinating_, or _profound_.
"Was it not beautiful?" asked Miss Bunting of Mr. Crump, after hearing
one of these talkers. "Did you ever hear anything like it?"
"No, I did not," answered Mr. Crump, "and I do not wish to hear anything
like it again. Too much like a flourishing penman, Miss Bunting, who
makes more of his flourishes than of his sense, and which attract the
reader more than his communication."
"But was he not very deep, Mr. Crump?"
"No, Miss Bunting, he was not deep. You remind me of an occasion some
time past when reading a book of an altiloquent style. A friend of mine
asked, 'Is it not deep?' I answered, 'Not deep, but drumlie.' The
drumlie often looks deep, and is liable to deceive; but it is shallow,
as shallow as a babbling brook, as shallow as the beauty of the rose or
the human countenance. Sometimes you may think you have a pearl; but it
is only a dewdrop into which a ray of light has happened to fall. Such
kind of talk, wherever it may be, is only like the aurora-borealis, or
like dissolving views which for the moment please. But you know, Miss
Bunting, it is the light of the sun that makes the day, and it is
substantial food that feeds and strengthens.
"Balloons are very good things for rising in the air and floating over
people's heads; but they are worthless for practical use in the stirring
and necessary activities of life. Gew-gaws are pretty things to call
forth the wonder of children and ignorant gazers; but the judicious pass
them with an askant look and careless demeanour. A table well spread
with fine-looking artificial flowers and viands may be nice for the eye,
but who can satisfy his hunger and thirst with them? Thus it is with
your altiloquent talkers, Miss Bunting. They give you, as a rule, only
the tinsel, the varnish, the superficial, which vanishes into thin
nothing under your analysis of thought or your reflection of intelligent
light."