But let us not quit this topic of “purity of style” without offering our sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the encumbering Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a set oration at the University of Glasgow by a noble personage. This taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life, was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.
It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical. These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural progress of a long-protracted birth.
A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect existence, encumbered by the heavy mass in which it lies involved, resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when
| ————Half appear’d The tawny Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts. |
[1] “Curiosities of Literature,” Art. “History of New Words.”
[2] These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner’s “History of England.” I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:—
“Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King’s son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght.”
Now we have plain, intelligible prose—