I have heard of the House Beautiful but never of the House Gaudy. Now don’t be a British snob but answer like a little Irish gentleman, as I should answer if you asked me what “acht-en-tachtig Achtergracht” mean in Dutch. Of course, working it out in the light of my own intelligence, I feel that, if “House” is an Oxford sobriquet for Christ Church and “gaudy” Oxford slang for a merrymaking of sorts, you ought to have suppressed that capital G and written “the House gaudy,” in distinction from the Balliol gaudy, the Magdalen gaudy, etc.
You are not a Hottentot (Loud cheers), but you are as fond of capital letters as a Hottentot is of glass beads.
I’m feeling rather full of beans to-day ... (as you perceive.)...
The improvement was visibly maintained in his letter of 25.6.20:
Thanks for your two letters of the 23rd and 24th instant postum. Don’t start; instant postum is the ridiculous name of the toothsome beverage which my specialist ordered me to take instead of tea or coffee....
I jump at the chance of playing the schoolmaster in the matter of those capital letters. It is too utterly jolly finding you in a compliant mood....
My rule and yours might well be to start with a definite prejudice against capital letters in the middle of a sentence, combined with a resolve never to use them if it can be avoided. Having taken up this firm standpoint, we can afford and we can begin to make concessions. For instance, my heart leapt with joy, nearly twenty years ago, when the founders of the Burlington Review decided to abolish all capitals to adjectives, to print “french, german, egyptian, persian,” etc. You have no idea how well this affected the page. But what is all right in a majestic review (or was it magazine, by the way?) like the Burlington may look ultraprecious in a novel. Therefore I concede French, German, etc. Only remember that it is a concession, a concession to Anglo-American vulgarity. A Frenchman writes (and that not invariably: I mean, not every Frenchman). “Un Français les Anglais,” but (invariably) “L’elan français, le rosbif anglais”. The Germans and Danes begin all nouns with a capital (as the English did, in some centuries), but no adjectives whatever. The Italians, Norwegians and Swedes have no capitals to their adjectives; the Dutch are gradually discarding them; they are discarded entirely in scientists’ Latin: the Narbonne Lycosa (a certain spider of the Tarantula genus) in Latin becomes Lycosa narbonniensis....
Your question about “high mass” is, involuntarily, not quite fair. Mass quite conceivably comes within the category of such words as State and a few others, which are spelt with a capital in one sense and not in another.[13] I write “going to mass” (no French catholic would write “allant à la Messe!”) and I see no reason why catholics should write Mass except in a technical work. They would write “the Host” because of the real presence; but I see no more reason for the Mass than for Matins or Compline. Obviously, it is different in a technical work in translating Fabre, I speak of a Wasp, a Spider, a Beetle; in translating Couperus, I do not....
“The Colonel, the Major, the Vicar,” in a novel; don’t they set your teeth on edge? As well write about the Postmistress of the village.
When in doubt, as I wrote to you on the subject of the hyphenated nouns, take little Murray[14] for your guide. He has the sense to begin the vast, the immense majority of his words with a lower-case letter. And there are doubtful words: Titanic, Cyclopean. I never know these without turning ’em up for myself.