If the reader is so favored as to possess a copy of the 'Comparative
Physiognomy' of Dr. James W. Redfield (a work long out of market, and
which never had much of a sale), he may find in a chapter concerning the
likeness between certain men and parrots some wise remarks on ridiculous
eccentricities in literature. 'In inferior minds,' says the Doctor,'the
love of originality shows itself in oddity.' 'There is many a sober
innovator,' he continues, farther on,' whose delight it is to ponder
'O'er many a volume of forgotten lore,'
that he may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the
day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a
patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents
a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these writers
to parrots.
Now it is a well-known peculiarity of parrots that they have a passion
for perching themselves in places where they will be on a level with the
heads of the superior race whose utterances they imitate. The perch a
parrot affects is almost always an altitude of about six feet, or the
height of the tallest men. They feel their inferiority keenly if you
leave them to hop about on the floor. It occurs to us that nothing could
please a parrot more, if it could be, than a pair of stilts on which it
could hop comfortably.
The literary parrot, more fortunate than his feathered fellow, finds
stilts in words--obsolete words, such as men do not use in common
intercourse with their fellows. Modern rhymesters more and more affect
this thing. Every day sees some _outre_ old word resurrected from its
burial of rubbish, and set in the trochaics and spondees of love songs
and sonnets. Dabblers in literature, who would walk unseen, pigmies
among a race of giants, get on their word-stilts, and straightway the
ear-tickled critics and the unconsciously nose-led public join in paeans
of applause. Sage men, who do not exactly see through the thing, nod
their heads approvingly, and remark: 'Something in that fellow!' And the
delighted ladies, prone as the dear creatures often are to be pleased
with jingle that they don't understand, exclaim: 'A'n't he delightful!'
The lamented Professor Alexander once produced a very excellent poem,
which contained only words of a single syllable, forcibly illustrating
the power of simple language. We should be glad to reproduce it here, by
way of contrapose to our own accompanying poem, but cannot now recall it
to memory in its completeness. Any child, who could talk as we all talk
in our families, could read and understand fully the poem to which I
refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below,
and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he
_can_ do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read
and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic
feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his
English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may
not be found in the standard dictionaries of our tongue.
To it: