has it taken you? Or what sort of a hive could ever keep together such a
swarm of lop-sided monstrosities? Of some you are the proud creator, the
rest you have dug up from dark lurking-places, till 'tis
Curse on you, piling woe on mortal woe!
How have you gathered all the minor sewers into one cloaca maxima, and
discharged the whole upon my innocent head! Have you never a friend or
relation or well-wisher? Did you never meet a plain-dealer to give you a
dose of candour? That would have cured you. You are dropsical, man; you
are like to burst with it; and you take it for muscular healthy
stoutness; you are congratulated only by the fools who do not see what is
the matter; the instructed cannot help being sorry for you.
But here in good time comes Sopolis; we will put you in the good doctor's
hands, tell him all about it, and see if anything can be done for you. He
is a clever man; he has taken many a helpless semi-lunatic like you in
hand and dosed him into sanity.--Good day, Sopolis. Lexiphanes here is a
friend of mine, you know. Now I want you to undertake his case; he
is afflicted with a delirious affection of the vocal organs, and I fear
a complete breakdown. Pray take measures to cure him.
_Lex_. Heal him, not me, Sopolis; he is manifestly moon-struck; persons
duly pia-matered he accounts beside their five wits; he might come from
Samos and call Mnesarchus father; for he enjoins silence and linguinanity.
But by the unabashed Athene, by Heracles the beast-killer, no jot or
tittle of notice shall he have from me. 'Tis my foreboding that I fall not
in with him again. For his censures, I void my rheum upon them.
_Sop_. What is the matter with him, Lycinus?
_Ly_. Why, _this_ is the matter; don't you hear? He leaves us his
contemporaries, and goes a thousand years off to talk to us, which he
does by aid of these tongue-gymnastics and extraordinary compounds--
prides himself upon it, too, as if it were a great thing to disguise
yourself, and mutilate the conversational currency.
_Sop_. Well, to be sure, this is a serious case; we must do all we
can for him. Providentially, here is an emetic I had just mixed for a
bilious patient; here, Lexiphanes, drink it off; the other man can wait;
let us purge you of this vocal derangement, and get you a clean bill of
health. Come along, down with it; you will feel much easier.
_Lex_. I know not what you would be at, you and Lycinus, with your
drenches; I fear me you are more like to end than mend my speech.
_Ly_. Drink, quick; it will make a man of you in thought and word.
_Lex_. Well, if I must. Lord, what is this? How it rumbles! I must have
swallowed a ventriloquist.
_Sop_. Now, let it come. Look, look! Here comes _in sooth, anon_ follows,
close upon them _quoth he, withal, sirrah, I trow,_ and a general
sprinkling of _sundry_. But try again; tickle your throat; that will help.
_Hard, by_ has not come up yet, nor _a-weary_, nor _rehearse_, nor
_quandary_. Oh, there are lots of them lurking yet, a whole stomachful. It
would be well to get rid of some of them by purging; there should be an
impressive explosion when _orotundity_ makes its windy exit. However, he
is pretty well cleaned out, except for what may be left in the lower
bowels. Lycinus, I shall now leave him in your charge; teach him better
ways, and tell him what are the right words to use.
_Ly_. I will, Sopolis; and thank you for clearing the way. Now,
Lexiphanes, listen to me. If you want sincere commendations upon your
style, and success with popular audiences, give a wide berth to that sort
of stuff. Make a beginning with the great poets, read them with some one
to help you, then go on to the orators, and when you have assimilated
their vocabulary, proceed in due time to Thucydides and Plato, not
forgetting a thorough course also of pleasant Comedy and grave Tragedy.
When you have culled the best that all these can show, you may reckon
that you have a style. You have not realized it, but at present you are
like the toymen's dolls, all gaudy colouring outside, and inside, fragile
clay.
If you will take this advice, put up for a little while with being called
uneducated, and not be ashamed to mend your ways, you may face an
audience without a tremor; you will not then be a laughing-stock any
more; the cultivated will no longer exercise their irony upon you and
nickname you the Hellene and the Attic just because you are less
intelligible than many barbarians. But above all things, do bear in mind
not to ape the worst tricks of the last generation's professors; you are
always nibbling at their wares; put your foot upon them once for all, and
take the ancients for your model. And no dallying with unsubstantial
flowers of speech; accustom yourself, like the athletes, to solid food.
And let your devotions be paid to the Graces and to Lucidity, whom you
have so neglected.
Further, put a stopper on bombast and grandiloquence and mannerism; be
neither supercilious nor overbearing; cease to carp at other people's
performances and to count their loss your gain. And then, perhaps the
greatest of all your errors is this: instead of arranging your matter
first, and then elaborating the diction, you find some out-of-the-way
word, or are captivated by one of your own invention, and try to build up
your meaning round it; if you cannot get it in somehow or other, though
it may have nothing to do with the matter, you are inconsolable; do you
remember the _mobled queen_ you let off the other day? It was quite
off the point, and you did not know what it meant yourself; however, its
oddness tickled the ears of the ignorant many; as for the cultivated,
they were equally amused at you and at your admirers.
Again, could anything be more ludicrous than for one who claims to be a
purist, drawing from the undefiled fountain of antiquity, to mix in
(though indeed that reverses the proportion) expressions that would be
impossible to the merest schoolboy? I felt as if I should like the earth
to swallow me up, when I heard you talk of a man's _chemise_, and use
_valet_ of a woman; who does not know that a man wears a shirt, and that a
valet is male? But you abound in far more flagrant blunders than these: I
have _chidden_, not _chode_ you; we do not _write_ a friend, we _write to_
him; we say _'onest_, not _honest_; these usages of yours cannot claim
even alien rights among us. Moreover, we do not like even poetry to read
like the dictionary. But the sort of poetry to which your prose
corresponds would be Dosiadas's _Altar_, Lycophron's _Alexandra_, or any
more pestilent pedantry that may happen to exist. If you take the pains to
unlearn all this, you will have done the best you can for yourself. If you
let yourself be seduced by your sweet baits again, I have at least put in
my word of warning, and you will have only yourself to blame when you find
yourself on the downward path.