That the note was not printed must not strictly be taken to mean that he repented of his repentance. But he was not easily brought to correct or discard—the initial process of composition had been too careful to be lightly tampered with. In A. M. he had a very stern critic for such words as "tameless," but he was found less amenable than George Meredith, who, accepting correction, altered two uses of words so formed. This letter was written during the making of Poems:—
"Palace Court House, Friday.
"My dear Francis,—The Bible has 'unquenchable,' and I don't think it could have 'quenchless.' Lowell has 'exhaustless' somewhere. I think one can strictly hold 'less' to equal 'minus' or 'without,' and with these the verb is impossible. I remember refusing to be taught a setting of some words of Praed's that had 'tameless' for 'untamable,' so you see it is an old objection with me.
"I must confess that 'dauntless' has taken a very firm place in the language.
"Never has there been such a dance of words as in 'The Making of Viola.' All other writers make their words dance on the ground with a certain weight, but these go in the blue sky. I have to unsay everything I said in criticism of that lovely poem. I think the long syllables make themselves valued in every case. But I do not like three syllables in the course of the poem—the three that give the iambic movement. I have not made up my mind as to the alternative endings. They are all so beautiful.—Ever most sincerely yours,
Alice Meynell."
The suggestions as to metrical modifications he accepted. I print here a letter of which, however, the interest for me is not etymological: its interest is that he troubled to write at all to an inattentive Yahoo of a friend:—
"Dear Ev., as to the note you asked the Latin simplex is from plecto (or rather its root) 'I entwine,' and some root allied to the Greek 'together.' The root-meaning is therefore 'twined together,' and it primarily means that which has synthesis or unity as opposed to that which is confused or perplexed by lack of oneness. When Wordsworth (is it not?) somewhere speaks of a being 'simple and unperplexed,' consciously or unconsciously, he uses the word mainly in this original sense, though few even thoughtful folk explicitly so grasp it. It is degenerated in the common mouth to the meaning almost of 'elementary.' Milton, saying poetry should be simple, sensuous, and passionate (is that the third word?), by simple means synthetic—opposed to prose (especially, doubtless, he had in mind philosophic prose), which is analytic.—Yours,
F. T."
He never dropped the habit of words. One of the last letters he wrote, dated from Rascals' Corner, Southwater, September 14, 1907, was written when he had detected a random paragraph of A. M.'s in the Daily Chronicle:—
"Dear Mrs. Meynell,—You might have added to the willow par. the Latin salex and the Eng. sallow:
"Among the river sallows borne aloft
Or sinking, as the light wind lives or dies!"The English, I should guess, may be from one of the Romance tongues; if so all these modern forms are, mediately or immediately, from the Latin. But it is interesting to find the Latin and the Irish really identical (if you neglect the inflectional endings in the former)—salic and salagh. 'Tis but the difference 'twixt a plain and a guttural hard consonant—for connective vowels are unstable endlessly. As for k and g, you see, e.g., reg-o evolve rec-tum.
"Excuse this offhand note, but your paragraph interested me.
"With warm love to yourself, Wilfrid, and all the quondam kids who are fast engaging themselves off the face of my earth.—Yours ever, dear Mrs. Meynell,
Francis Thompson."
He watched with much interest his words creep into currency. Roseal—"most beloved of my revivals"—which he had known only in Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla, he saw reappear in Dowson and other writers, and realised it was probably from Thompson and not from Lodge that it had been learnt. In this he saw the sign—the only one, he said—of his influence. He could hardly have expected that two years after his death "labyrinthine" would be a word used not only in poetry books, but on political platforms—by Mr. George Wyndham and his less-versed opponents. Words that ten years earlier irked the reader in poetry became, with a change of mood, acceptable in public speaking, so that Mr. Asquith's use of "fuliginous" irked nobody.
The objection to a poet's range of phrase finds no support in the dictionaries, whose abundance is a reproach to the restricted scope of the modern tongue. Johnson is three parts made up of terms neglected or discarded, for the reason, chiefly, that we are lazy and unlearned. The coster-monger whose speech comprises fewer words each year, thinks the parson a fop for the extent of his vocabulary, and the parson in his turn is impatient with his poets. The curtailment of our speech goes on apace, and if we love the poet—the Wordsworth of "Daffodils" or the Thompson of "Daisy"—as a man of few words, we should admire him for being at times a man of many.
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