ON THE TOP NOTE
A pleasant-looking young lady (whose name I think was Pamela) sitting opposite me in the bus was complaining to her companion that Reginald was so dead-alive. You couldn't get him excited about anything. He was most frightfully clever, of course—a B.Sc. and all that sort of thing, don't you know; but, oh, so awfully icy. You went to a theatre with him, and you got most tremendously thrilled, and he would say, "Yes, quite nice." Or you got him to read a book that was simply ripping and that you had wallowed in most terrifically, and he would say, "Quite nice." She liked people to be enthusiastic. It was most horribly disappointing when you were simply boiling with excitement to hear someone say, "Yes, quite nice." It made you feel most awfully done in, don't you know. If people enjoyed themselves, why shouldn't they say they enjoyed themselves and let themselves "go" a bit? She always let herself go.
I felt that I agreed with her on the main issue. Reginald was aggravating. I felt that I knew Reginald. I saw him going through life more than a little bored with everything. There's nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he seems to say. Man delights him not, nor woman neither. He is astonished at nothing, amused by nothing, cheered by nothing. His mind has disciplined his emotions so effectually that they have ceased to have anything to do. He is superior to tears or laughter, and would refuse to be surprised even if he saw the lions by the Nelson Column suddenly stand up and roar for their dinner. As a moderately enthusiastic person, I sympathised with the young lady opposite about Reginald. I wished Reginald would let himself go a bit.
But then it seemed to me that a mist passed before my vision and that Reginald himself was sitting in the seat opposite talking to a friend about Pamela. He liked Pamela very much, he said, but really her gush got on his nerves. She was always on her top note. Everything was most frightfully good or most awfully jolly or most hideously bad. Why couldn't people express themselves reasonably and use words with some respect for their meaning? He wished someone would tell Pam not to shriek every time she opened her mouth. It was such a pity, because she really had a pretty mouth and was a nice girl.
And hearing (imaginatively) Reginald's view of the matter, I was bound to admit that he had a case too. For I share his dislike of these extravagances of speech with which our Pamelas express the warmth of their feelings and the poverty of their minds. I should like to remind Pamela of the caution which Johnson gave to Boswell. He had accompanied Bozzy to Harwich to see him embark for Utrecht. I happened to say, says Boswell, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place.
"Johnson: Don't, sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here."
It may have occurred to Boswell that Johnson was hardly the person to rebuke the use of big words; but though Johnson loved long words he did not use wrong words. His sin was not the hysteria of speech, but the pedantry of speech. He liked the fine clothes of language and dressed his thoughts up in full-bottomed wig and ruffles. It was a curious weakness for so great a man whose natural expression was always simple and vigorous. His big words were an after-thought of the pedant imposed on the brief, energetic utterance that was natural to him, as when commenting on some work he said that it "had not wit enough to keep it sweet" and then, pulling himself together, blunted the edge of that swift, keen criticism by saying that "it had not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction." But though Johnson's big words blurred his thought, they did not misrepresent it. They deprived it of force, but not of precision. His rebuke to Boswell was in regard to the extravagance of the word for the occasion. It would have been annoying or inconvenient to be kept at Harwich, but it would not have been terrible.
But the modern habit is not a mere matter of excess, as in the case of Boswell. In the attempt to be emphatic, Pamela murders speech. If you pass her the mustard, she says "Thanks, awfully." If she has enjoyed her game of tennis, she says it has been "awfully jolly," and if she approves of a book, she declares it to be "frightfully good." I am old enough to remember when this verbal atrocity began to be used, and I have lived to see it become the accepted coinage of a certain kind of conversation. It began as a piece of affectation, and has ended as a desolating vulgarity.
I do not think that Reginald wants Pamela to be less enthusiastic. He only wants her to preserve some proportion in regard to things. He feels as Jamie Soutar, of Drumtochty, in Ian Maclaren's story, felt. Jamie had "a gift o' discreemination," and was distressed by the purple adjectives of Mr. Hopps, the little Cockney. When Mr. Hopps raved about the sunset, Jamie observed that it was "no bad."
"No bad!" said Mr. Hopps. "I call it glorious, and if it hisn't, then I'd like to know what his."