It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar
for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to
write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more
precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I
am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all
low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, _slipshod_ allusions. It is
not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use;
it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to
follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of the language. To write
a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as any one would
speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of
words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting
aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. Or, to give another
illustration, to write naturally is the same thing in regard to common
conversation as to read naturally is in regard to common speech. It
does not follow that it is an easy thing to give the true accent and
inflection to the words you utter, because you do not attempt to rise
above the level of ordinary life and colloquial speaking. You do
not assume, indeed, the solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone of
stage-declamation; neither are you at liberty to gabble on at a venture,
without emphasis or discretion, or to resort to vulgar dialect or
clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You are tied
down to a given and appropriate articulation, which is determined by the
habitual associations between sense and sound, and which you can only
hit by entering into the author's meaning, as you must find the proper
words and style to express yourself by fixing your thoughts on the
subject you have to write about. Any one may mouth out a passage with
a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to
write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task.
Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as
the thing you want to express: it is not so easy to pitch upon the very
word that exactly fits it. Out of eight or ten words equally common,
equally intelligible, with nearly equal pretensions, it is a matter
of some nicety and discrimination to pick out the very one the
preferableness of which is scarcely perceptible, but decisive.
The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style is that there is no
discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but 'tall,
opaque words,' taken from the 'first row of the rubric'--words with
the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English
terminations. If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary
pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author's elegance by the
measurement of his words and the substitution of foreign circumlocutions
(with no precise associations) for the mother-tongue.(1) How simple is
it to be dignified without case, to be pompous without meaning! Surely
it is but a mechanical rule for avoiding what is low, to be always
pedantic and affected. It is clear you cannot use a vulgar English word
if you never use a common English word at all. A fine tact is shown in
adhering to those which are perfectly common, and yet never falling into
any expressions which are debased by disgusting circumstances, or
which owe their signification and point to technical or professional
allusions. A truly natural or familiar style can never be quaint
or vulgar, for this reason, that it is of universal force and
applicability, and that quaintness and vulgarity arise out of the
immediate connection of certain words with coarse and disagreeable
or with confined ideas. The last form what we understand by _cant_ or
_slang_ phrases.--To give an example of what is not very clear in the
general statement, I should say that the phrase _To cut with a knife,_
or _To cut a piece of wood,_ is perfectly free from vulgarity, because
it is perfectly common; but _to cut an acquaintance_ is not quite
unexceptionable, because it is not perfectly common or intelligible, and
has hardly yet escaped out of the limits of slang phraseology. I should
hardly, therefore, use the word in this sense without putting it in
italics as a license of expression, to be received _cum grano
salis._ All provincial or bye-phrases come under the same mark of
reprobation--all such as the writer transfers to the page from his
fireside or a particular _coterie,_ or that he invents for his own sole
use and convenience. I conceive that words are like money, not the worse
for being common, but that it is the stamp of custom alone that gives
them circulation or value. I am fastidious in this respect, and would
almost as soon coin the currency of the realm as counterfeit the King's
English. I never invented or gave a new and unauthorised meaning to any
word but one single one (the term _impersonal_ applied to feelings),
and that was in an abstruse metaphysical discussion to express a very
difficult distinction. I have been (I know) loudly accused of revelling
in vulgarisms and broken English. I cannot speak to that point; but
so far I plead guilty to the determined use of acknowledged idioms and
common elliptical expressions. I am not sure that the critics in
question know the one from the other, that is, can distinguish any
medium between formal pedantry and the most barbarous solecism. As an
author I endeavour to employ plain words and popular modes of
construction, as, were I a chapman and dealer, I should common weights
and measures.
The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their
application. A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length,
and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the
connection in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and
irrelevant. It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the
expression to the idea, that clenches a writer's meaning:--as it is not
the size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to
its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are
as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and
more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything
that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of
bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words
without anything in them. A person who does not deliberately dispose of
all his thoughts alike in cumbrous draperies and flimsy disguises may
strike out twenty varieties of familiar everyday language, each coming
somewhat nearer to the feeling he wants to convey, and at last not hit
upon that particular and only one which may be said to be identical
with the exact impression in his mind. This would seem to show that Mr.
Cobbett is hardly right in saying that the first word that occurs is
always the best. It may be a very good one; and yet a better may present
itself on reflection or from time to time. It should be suggested
naturally, however, and spontaneously, from a fresh and lively
conception of the subject. We seldom succeed by trying at improvement,
or by merely substituting one word for another that we are not satisfied
with, as we cannot recollect the name of a place or person by merely
plaguing ourselves about it. We wander farther from the point by
persisting in a wrong scent; but it starts up accidentally in the
memory when we least expected it, by touching some link in the chain of
previous association.
There are those who hoard up and make a cautious display of nothing but
rich and rare phraseology--ancient medals, obscure coins, and Spanish
pieces of eight. They are very curious to inspect, but I myself would
neither offer nor take them in the course of exchange. A sprinkling of
archaisms is not amiss, but a tissue of obsolete expressions is more fit
_for keep than wear._ I do not say I would not use any phrase that
had been brought into fashion before the middle or the end of the last
century, but I should be shy of using any that had not been employed by
any approved author during the whole of that time. Words, like clothes,
get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been for some
time laid aside. Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I
can read with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit
of his authors that the idea of imitation is almost done away. There is
an inward unction, a marrowy vein, both in the thought and feeling,
an intuition, deep and lively, of his subject, that carries off any
quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress.
The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps
his ideas are altogether so marked and individual as to require their
point and pungency to be neutralised by the affectation of a singular
but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing
costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The
old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Browne, are
a kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical
modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. I do not, however, know how
far this is the case or not, till he condescends to write like one
of us. I must confess that what I like best of his papers under the
signature of Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence, to
decide what is most excellent) is the account of 'Mrs. Battle's Opinions
on Whist,' which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns
of expression--
A well of native English undefiled.
To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these _Essays_ of
the ingenious and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and
relish that Erasmus's _Colloquies_ or a fine piece of modern Latin have
to the classical scholar. Certainly, I do not know any borrowed pencil
that has more power or felicity of execution than the one of which I
have here been speaking.
It is as easy to write a gaudy style without ideas as it is to spread a
pallet of showy colours or to smear in a flaunting transparency.
'What do you read?' 'Words, words, words.'--'What is the matter?'
'_Nothing_,' it might be answered. The florid style is the reverse of the
familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas;
the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them.
When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have
them fine. Look through the dictionary, and cull out a _florilegium_,
rival the _tulippomania_. _Rouge_ high enough, and never mind the
natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire
the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who
regard only appearances, will be delighted with the imposition. Keep to
your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well.
Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought,
a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle cargo of verbiage
splits at once. Such writers have merely _verbal_ imaginations, that
retain nothing but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all
green and gold. They soar far above the vulgar failing of the _Sermo
humi obrepens_--their most ordinary speech is never short of an
hyperbole, splendid, imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a
cento of sounding common-places. If some of us, whose 'ambition is more
lowly,' pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners to pick up a
number of 'unconsidered trifles,' they never once direct their eyes
or lift their hands to seize on any but the most gorgeous, tarnished,
threadbare, patchwork set of phrases, the left-off finery of poetic
extravagance, transmitted down through successive generations of
barren pretenders. If they criticise actors and actresses, a huddled
phantasmagoria of feathers, spangles, floods of light, and oceans of
sound float before their morbid sense, which they paint in the style of
Ancient Pistol. Not a glimpse can you get of the merits or defects of
the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and
wilful rhodomontade. Our hypercritics are not thinking of these little
fantoccini beings--