AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the
book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine.
You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the
_cliche_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not
because you naturally write odd prose--contrariwise, left to yourself
you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and
puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school
calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done,
and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed,
putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they dictate to a
typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the
rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word.
Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward
English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write
twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is
proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers
and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of
criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I
had my way--
LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this.
AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have made myself clear.
Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at Undervelier than any place I
was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, I
forgave them, because they were such good people, and after a short
and bitter night I went out in the morning before the sun rose and
took the Moutier road.
The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase seems familiar--was
more or less like an H. That is, there were two high parallel ranges
bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps a thousand
feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows
with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where
one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All
the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the
night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread
or coffee, which was a folly.
When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood
outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier.
He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as
sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary
of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in
my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him
to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all
such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over
me and grew deeper as I descended.