She said, ‘It’s the fall of the year;
But come, come!’”
How tame and gray is the idiom which conveys a fact, which defines a season, but suggests nothing to our imaginations, by the side of the idiom which brings swiftly before our eyes the brilliant desolation of autumn!
The narrow vocabulary, which is the conversational freehold of people whose education should have provided them a broader field, admits of little that is picturesque or forcible, and of less that is finely graded or delicately conceived. Ordinary conversation appears to consist mainly of “ands,” “buts,” and “thes,” with an occasional “well” to give a flavor of nationality, a “yes” or “no” to stand for individual sentiment, and a few widely exaggerated terms to destroy value and perspective.
Is this, one wonders, the “treasure of dexterous felicities” which Mr. Bagehot contemplated with such delight, and which a critical society is destined to preserve flawless and uncontaminated? Is this the “heroic utterance,” the great “mother tongue,” possessing which we all become—or so Mr. Sydney Dobell assures us—
“Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare’s soul,
Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme,
And rich as Chaucer’s speech and fair as Spenser’s dream”?
Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr. Oscar Wilde to such rapturous and finely worded praise,—praise which awakens in us a noble emulation to prove what we can accomplish with a medium at once so sumptuous and so flexible? “For the material that painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with language,” says Mr. Wilde. “Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, color as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze; but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.”
This is not claiming too much, for in truth Mr. Wilde is sufficiently well equipped to illustrate his claim. If his sentences are sometimes overloaded with ornament, the decorations are gold, not tinsel; if his vocabulary is gorgeous, it is never glaring; if his allusions are fanciful, they are controlled and subdued into moderation. Even the inevitable and swiftly uttered reproach of “fine writing” cannot altogether blind us to the fact that his are beautiful words,—pearls and amethysts M. Gautier would call them,—aptly chosen, and fitted into place with the careful skill of a goldsmith. They are free, moreover, from that vice of unexpectedness which is part of fine writing, and which Mr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among the literary workers of to-day; the desire to surprise us by some new and profoundly irrelevant application of a familiar word. The “veracity” of a bar of music, the finely executed “passage” of a marble chimney-piece, the “andante” of a sonnet, and the curious statement, commonly applied to Mr. Gladstone, that he is “part of the conscience of a nation,”—these are the vagaries which to Mr. Saintsbury, and to every other student of words, appear so manifestly discouraging. Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of an æsthetic sideboard which was described to him as having a Chippendale feeling about it, before which touching conceit the ever famous “fringes of the north star” pale into insignificance. A recent editor of Shelley’s letters and essays says with seeming seriousness in his preface that the “Witch of Atlas” is a “characteristic outcome,” an “exquisite mouse of fancy brought forth by what mountain of Shelleyan imagination.” Now, when a careful student and an appreciative reader can bring himself to speak of a poem as a “mouse of fancy,” merely for the sake of forcing a conceit, and confronting us with the perils of the unexpected, it is time we turned soberly back to first principles and to our dictionaries; it is time we listened anew to M. Gautier’s advice, and studied the value of words.