Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that, and the action, fine.
It is only in the fastidious conventionality of later ages that a false shame quenches enthusiasm, and “the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences” infects the healthy veins of our mental constitution. Then it is that reverence perishes, and simple acts must be veiled in metaphysical euphuisms, and simple thoughts overlaid with galimatias, with tortured acceptations, with uncouth archaisms. ‘It[182] must always be the same. After the beautiful period of Spanish literature come Gongora and his cultorists; after Tasso and Ariosto, the Chevalier Marin and his pale cortège of mannered seicentisti, armed with points and conceits; after Shakspeare, euphuism; after the admirable French of the sixteenth century, after the language of Rabelais, of Des Periers, of Marot, of Henri Estienne, of Amyot, of Montaigne, comes “préciosité,”[183] so vain, so affected, so puerile, so pretentious, so unreal, so false.’
Thus the language of nations is the type of their moral as well as of their intellectual character. As long as men are noble and simple, their language will be rich in power and truth; when they fall into corruption and sensuality, their words will degenerate into the dingy and miserable counters, which have no intrinsic value, and only serve as a worthless and conventional medium of exchange. In the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who could go into emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap-dog, and the apotheosis of a eunuch’s hair, we read the handwriting of an empire’s condemnation. Even a past[184] literature is full of power to save a people from utter degeneracy. It is the true poet after all who, more than the financier, more than the merchant, more than the statesman, more than the soldier, saves his countrymen from ruin, elevates their conduct by purifying their thoughts, keeps their feet upon the mountain, and turns their eyes towards the sun.
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.