TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who should use this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken off.
We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and spoken speech—some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright vulgarisms—that is, phrases that come from below, and are thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase to make money: “Don’t you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it: you should say get money.” Johnson, adds Boswell, “was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line for department or branch, as the civil line, the banking line. He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have an idea or image of an argument or proposition. Yet we hear the sages of the law ‘delivering their ideas upon the question under consideration;’ and the first speakers of Parliament ‘entirely coinciding in the idea which has been ably stated by an honorable member.’”
Whether or not the word idea may be properly used in a deeper or grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar ones. All the four phrases make money, pledge, line, and idea, whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer, are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
[VIII.]
A National Drama.[8]
We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent for man might find support in the features of our general life. To complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical people. A loud, unanimous, derisive no would be the answer. And yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock; and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national drama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in their depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.
A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and feelings. To have a literature—that is, a body of enduring books—implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate while they delight many generations.
Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity.