The touch and racy dialect of the Border Minstrelsy, which Walter Scott edited, Mr. Evans's Collection of Old Ballads, and Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, guided public taste into a direction opposed to the tame mediocrity of the imitators of Dryden and Pope. The ear and the mind alike were charmed by the exceeding simplicity of the style of these old ballads, and their almost exclusive use of monosyllables.
Here are a few notes from one of those Jacobite songs which resounded so freely among the Highlands when Prince Charles Edward came to recover the crown of his fathers. Walter Scott compares such ballads to the "grotesque carving on a Gothic niche:"
"It's nae the battle's deadly stoure
Nor friends pruived fause that'll gar me cower,
But the reckless hand o' povertie,
Oh! that alane can daunton me!
"High was I born to kingly gear,
But a cuif came in my cap to wear,
But wi' my braid sword I'll let him see
He's nae the man will daunton me."
The Lake school of poetry, being founded in a deep love of nature and a close scrutiny of her works, had a concurrent influence in restoring the liberal use of the older forms of speech. Writers like Charles Lamb, whose minds were richly stored with the treasures of Elizabethan lore, were sometimes accused of affectation in employing archaisms, but "the old words of the poet," as the author of "Summer Time in the Country" observes, "like the foreign accent of a sweet voice, give a charm to the tone, without in any large degree obscuring the sense." Indeed, if the most popular passages in Wordsworth, and in his great master Shakespeare, be examined, they will be found to answer on the whole to that ideal of English phraseology which is here formed—one, namely, in which the Saxon element largely predominates. Thus, almost at random, we quote from The Midsummer Night's Dream:
"What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy queen?"
And from Wordsworth's "Idle Shepherd Boys:"
"Beneath a rock, upon the grass,
Two boys are sitting in the sun;
Boys that have had no work to do,
Or work that now is done.
On pipes of sycamore they play
The fragments of a Christmas hymn;
Or with that plant which in our dale
We call stag-horn or fox's tail,
Their rusty hats they trim:
And thus, as happy as the day,
Those shepherds wear the time away."
Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab, in Romeo and Juliet, may also be pointed out as a signal example of pure Saxon English throughout; but it is too long and too familiar to our readers to be quoted here.
There are not wanting men of talent and research, who have remarked the change which has come over the national literature in its rebound toward Saxon diction, and who have recommended it very distinctly. Dean Swift, though in point of time he preceded the movement, held as a principle that no Saxon word should be allowed to fall into disuse. Dean Hoare has, in our own time, expressed his decided conviction that those speakers and writers impart most pleasure whose style is most Saxon in its character; and this remark applies, as he believes, especially to poetry. It is in accordance with the spirit of the age that we recoil from that "fine writing" which is generally mere declamation. In proportion as we become practical, the racy style—pointed, suggestive, and curt—rises in value. By the exercise of thought and cultivation of science we become exact, and through plenty of business we become brief-spoken. Vague talking and writing is now at a discount, and persons express themselves with more substance and strength because they are trained in the love of truth, historic and scientific, and have contracted a hatred of shams of every kind. Directness of statement is what is now most valued in a writer, and such men as Dr. Newman among Catholics, and Carlyle and Emerson among non-Catholics, have contributed in an immense degree to promote reverence for this quality. Circumlocution and over-expansion are faults which no one will now tolerate, and this jealousy for the clear and ready conveyance of ideas has a great deal to do with recurrence to the pregnant monosyllables, the picture-words, the gnarled and knotted strength of Saxon English.
It is, however, to Tennyson, more than to any other modern writer, that the public owes the more frequent use of short and sinewy words already known to most readers, and the enrichment of the language by the revival of many words which had become obsolete. Enoch Arden, though a poem consisting of two thousand lines, contains scarcely a word that is not of Saxon origin. It is, as far as language is concerned, simplicity almost in excess. Thus, to take but one example, it is not till we reach the last word of the following passage that we are reminded of the partly Latin origin of our tongue: