“He that would write well,” says Roger Ascham, “must follow the advice
of Aristotle, to speak as the common people speak, and to think as the
wise think.”
Coleridge says: “To write or talk concerning any subject, without having
previously taken the pains to understand it, is a breach of the duty
which we owe to ourselves, though it may be no offence against the law
of the land. The privilege of talking, and even publishing, nonsense, is
necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make use of it, the
better.”[86]
Much reading and good company are supposed to be the best methods of
getting at the niceties and elegancies of a language; but this road is
long and irksome. The great point is to acquire our most usual
Anglicisms; all those phrases and peculiarities which form the
characteristics of our language. Nearly eighty years since, Mr. Sharp
took upon himself to say that we had no grammar capable of teaching a
foreigner to read our authors; adding, “but of this I am sure, that we
have none by which he can be enabled to understand our conversation.”
What an annoyance are long speakers, long talkers, and long
writers—people who will not take time to think, or are not capable of
thinking accurately! Once when Dr. South had preached before Queen Anne,
her majesty observed to him, “You have given me a most excellent
discourse, Dr. South; but I wish you had had time to make it longer.”
“Nay, madam,” replied the doctor, “if I had had time, I should have made
it shorter.”
Method in treating your subject is of great importance. Southey has well
illustrated the absence of this quality. A Quaker, by name Benjamin Lay
(who was a little cracked in the head, though sound at the heart), took
one of his compositions to Benjamin Franklin, that it might be printed
and published. Franklin, having looked over the manuscript, observed
that it was deficient in arrangement: “It is no matter,” replied the
author; “print any part thou pleaseth first.” Many are the speeches, and
the sermons, and the treatises, and the poems, and the volumes, which
are like Benjamin Lay’s book: the head might serve for the tail, and the
tail for the body, and the body for the head; either end for the middle,
and the middle for either end; nay, if you could turn them inside out,
like a polypus or a glove, they would be no worse for the operation.[87]
* * * * *
Free Translation is a rare accomplishment. Sir John Denham, who is
declared by Johnson “to have been one of the first that understood the
necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting
lines and interpreting single words,” gives the same praise to Sir
Richard Fanshawe, whom he addresses thus:
That servile path thou nobly dost decline,
Of tracing word by word and line by line;
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,
To make translations and translators too:
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.
Dryden said, all the translations of the old school “want to be
translated into English;” and verbal translation he compares to “dancing
on ropes with fettered legs.” Education cannot do all that Helvetius
supposes, but it can do much. _Elle fait danser l’ours_,—It makes a bear
dance. It is said that some insects take the colour of the leaf that
they feed upon. “I was common clay till roses were planted in me,” says
some aromatic earth, in an eastern fable.
To unlearn is harder than to learn, and the Grecian flute-player was
right in requiring double fees from those pupils who had been taught by
another master. “I am rubbing their father out of my children as fast as
I can,” said a clever widow of rank and fashion.
The Education of princes, or indeed the spoilt children of rich and
distinguished parents, must be the _experimentum crucis_ of teaching.
“If Fénelon did succeed, as it is recorded he did, in educating the
Dauphin, his success was little less than a miracle. How can any man,
though of advanced age and of high reputation, perhaps also of a sacred
profession and of elevated station, be expected to preserve any useful
authority over a child (probably a wayward little animal), if he, the
tutor, must always address the pupil by his title, or at least must
never forget that he is heir to a throne?”
There is some truth in the following remarks by a writer in _Blackwood’s
Magazine_, upon information overmuch:
We deal largely in general knowledge—an excellent article, no doubt;
but one may have too much of it. Sometimes ignorance is really
bliss. It has not added to my personal comfort to know to a decimal
fraction what proportion of red earth I may expect to find in my
cocoa every morning; to have become knowingly conscious that my
coffee is mixed with ground liver and litmus, instead of honest
chicory; and that bisulphuret of mercury forms the basis of my
cayenne. It was once my fate to have a friend staying in my house
who was one of these minute philosophers. He used to amuse himself
after breakfast by a careful analysis and diagnosis of the contents
of the teapot, laid out as a kind of _hortus siccus_ on his plate.
“This leaf, now,” he would say, “is fuchsia; observe the serrated
edges: that’s no tea-leaf—positively poisonous. This now, again, is
blackthorn, or privet—yes, privet; you may know it by the divisions
in the panicles: that’s no tea-leaf.” A most uncomfortable guest he
was; and though not a bad companion in many respects, I felt my
appetite improved the first time I sat down to dinner without him.
It won’t do to look into all your meals with a microscope. Of course
there is a medium between these over-curious investigations and an
implicit faith in every thing that is set before you.
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Footnote 86:
One fine morning, a stalwart anti-Newtonian, properly accredited,
presented himself to Baron Maseres, in the library of his mansion at
Reigate: “I am come to talk over my favourite subject,” he said (it
was, to overturn the universe!). “I am happy to see you,” replied the
Baron; “but before we commence, I must ask you if you consider
yourself proficient in mathematics?” The anti-Newtonian was
dumbfounded. “Then,” rejoined the Baron, “it would be unprofitable for
us to begin;” and he passed on to a more genial topic.
Footnote 87:
_The Doctor._
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Business-Life.
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