Theory is all very well, but to be of any value it must be founded on the solid rock of fact; and even when it is so established it has to yield to convenience. This is what the purist cannot be induced to understand. He seems to think that the language was made once for all, and that any deviation from the theory acted on in the past is intolerable in the present. He is often wholly at sea in regard to his theories and to his facts—more often than not; but no doubt as to his own infallibility ever discourages him. He just knows that he is right and that everybody else is wrong; and he has no sense of humor to save him from himself. And he makes up in violence what he lacks in wisdom. He accepts himself as a prophet verbally inspired, and he holds that this gives him the right to call down fire from heaven on all who do not accept his message.
It was a purist of this sort who once wrote to a little literary weekly in New York, protesting against the use of people when persons would seem to be the better word, and complacently declaring that “for twenty-five years or more I have kept my eye on this little word people and I have yet to find a single American or English author who does not misuse it.” We are instantly reminded of the Irish juryman who said, “Eleven more obstinate men I never met in the whole course of my life.” In this pitiful condition of affairs one cannot discover on what this purist bases the hope he expresses that “in the course of two or three hundred years the correct employment of it may possibly become general.” Rather may it be hoped that in the course of two or three hundred years a knowledge of the principles which govern English usage may become general.
What is called the Split Infinitive is also a cause of pain to the purist, who is greatly grieved when he finds George Lewes in the ‘Life of Goethe’ saying “to completely understand.” This inserting of an adverb between the to and the rest of the verb strikes the word-critic as pernicious, and he denounces it instantly as a novelty to be stamped out before it permanently contaminates our speech. Even Professor A. S. Hill, in his ‘Foundations of Rhetoric,’ while admitting its antiquity, since it has been in use constantly from the days of Wyclif to the days of Herbert Spencer, still declares it to be “a common fault” not sanctioned or even condoned by good authority.
The fact is, I think, that the Split Infinitive has a most respectable pedigree, and that it is rather the protest against it which is the novelty now establishing itself. The Split Infinitive is to be found in the pages of Shakspere, Massinger, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Burke, Coleridge, Byron, De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Motley, Lowell, and Holmes. But it is a fact also, I think, that since the protest has been raised there has been a tendency among careful writers to eschew the Split Infinitive, or at least to employ it only when there is a gain in lucidity from its use, as there is, for example, in Professor Lounsbury’s “to more than counterbalance” (‘Studies in Chaucer,’ i. 447).
A writer who has worked out for himself a theory of style, and who has made up his mind as to the principles he ought to follow in writing, often yields to protests the validity of which he refuses to admit. He gives the protestant the benefit of the doubt and drops the stigmatized words from his vocabulary and refrains from the stigmatized usages, reserving always the right to avail himself of them at a pinch. What such a writer has for his supreme object is to convey his thought into the minds of his readers with the least friction; and he tries therefore to avoid all awkwardness of phrase, all incongruous words, all locutions likely to arouse resistance, since any one of these things will inevitably lessen the amount of attention which this reader or that will then have available for the reception of the writer’s message. This is what Herbert Spencer has called the principle of Economy of Attention; and a firm grasp of this principle is a condition precedent to a clear understanding of literary art.
For a good and sufficient reason such a writer stands ready at any time to break this self-imposed rule. If a solecism, or a vulgarism even, will serve his purpose better at a given moment than the more elegant word, he avails himself of it, knowing what he is doing, and risking the smaller loss for the greater gain. M. Legouvé tells us that at a rehearsal of a play of Scribe’s he drew the author’s attention to a bit of bad French at the climax of one of the acts, and Scribe gratefully accepted the correct form which was suggested. But two or three rehearsals later Scribe went back unhesitatingly to the earlier and incorrect phrase, which happened to be swifter, more direct, and dramatically more expressive than the academically accurate sentence M. Legouvé had supplied. Shakspere seems often to have been moved by like motives, and to have been willing at any time to sacrifice strict grammar to stage-effectiveness.
Two tendencies exist side by side to-day, and are working together for the improvement of our language. One is the tendency to disregard all useless distinctions and to abolish all useless exceptions and to achieve simplicity and regularity. The other is the tendency toward a more delicate precision which shall help the writer to present his thought with the utmost clearness.
Of the first of these abundant examples can be cited phrases which the word-critic would denounce, and which are not easy to defend on any narrow ground, but which are employed freely even by conscientious writers, well aware that no utility is served by a pedantic precision. So we find Matthew Arnold in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ speaking of “the four first,” where the purist would prefer to have said “the first four.” So we find Hawthorne in the ‘Blithedale Romance’ writing “fellow, clown, or bumpkin, to either of these,” when the purist would have wished him to say “to any one of these,” holding that “either” can be applied only when there are but two objects.
In like manner the word-critics object to the use of the superlative degree when the comparative is all that is needed; yet we find in the King James translation of Genesis, “her eldest son, Esau,” and she had but two sons. And they refuse to allow either a comparative or a superlative to adjectives which indicate completeness; yet we find in Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall,’ “its success was not more universal.” They do not like to see a writer say that anything is “more perfect” or “most complete,” holding that what is universal or perfect or complete “does not admit of augmentation,” as one of them declared more than a century ago in the Gentleman’s Magazine for July, 1797. In all these cases logic may be on the side of the word-critic. But what of it? Obedience to logic would here serve no useful purpose, and therefore logic is boldly disobeyed. However inexact these phrases may be, they mislead no one and they can be understood without hesitation.
Side by side with this tendency to take the short-cut exists the other tendency to go the long way round if by so doing the writer’s purpose is more easily accomplished. There is a common usage which is frequently objurgated by the word-critics and which may fall into desuetude, not through their attacks, but because of its conflict with this second tendency. This is the insertion of an unnecessary who or which after an and or a but, as in this sentence from Professor Butcher’s admirable discussion of Aristotle’s ‘Theory of Poetry’: “Nature is an artist capable indeed of mistakes, but who by slow advances and through many failures realizes her own idea.” So in Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ we are told of “a chorus of twenty-seven youths and as many virgins, of noble family, and whose parents were both alive.” This locution is proper in French, but it is denounced as improper in English by the purists, who would strike out the but from Professor Butcher’s and the and from Gibbon’s.