If it were possible to exclude needed new words from a language, the French Academy would have succeeded in its attempts to do so, consisting as it did of the chief scholars of France. Not content with crushing political liberty, Richelieu sought to become autocrat of the French language. No word was to be uttered anywhere in the realm until he had countersigned it. But in spite of all the efforts of his Academy to exercise a despotic authority over the French tongue, new words have continually forced their way in, and so they will continue to do while the French nation maintains its vitality, in spite of the protests of all the purists and academicians in France. “They that will fight custom with grammar,” says Montaigne, “are fools”; and, with the limitations to be hereafter stated, the remark is just, and still more true of those who triumphantly appeal against custom to the dictionary, which is not merely a home for living words, but a cemetery for the dead.
Even slang words, after long knocking, will often gain admission into a language, like pardoned outlaws received into the body of respectable citizens. We need not add to these, words coined in his lofty moods by the poet, who is a maker by the very right of his name. That creative energy which distinguishes him,—“the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,”—will, of course, display itself here, and the all-fusing imagination will at once, as Trench has remarked, suggest and justify audacities in speech which would not be tolerated from creeping prose-writers. Great liberties may be allowed, too, within certain bounds, to the idiosyncrasies of all great writers. We love the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, better than the smoothly clipped uniformity of the Dutch yew tree. Carlyleisms may therefore be tolerated from the master, though not from the umbræ that spaniel him at the heels, and feebly echo his singularities and oddities. A style that has no smack or flavor of the man that uses it is a tasteless style. But there is a limit even to the liberty of great thinkers in coining words. It must not degenerate into license. Coleridge was a skilful mint-master of words, yet not all his genius can reconcile us to such expressions as the following, in a letter to Sir Humphrey Davy: “I was a well meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated with more zeal than wisdom.”
No one would hesitate to place Isaac Barrow among the greatest masters of the English tongue; yet the weighty thoughts which his words represented did not prevent many of the trial-pieces which he coined in his verbal mint from being returned on his hands. Who knows the meaning of such words as “avoce,” “acquist,” “extund”? Sir Thomas Browne abounds in such hyperlatinistic expressions as “bivious,” “quodlibetically,” “cunctation,” to which even his gorgeous rhetoric does not reconcile the reader. Charles Lamb has “agnise” and “bourgeon.” Coleridge invents “extroitive,” “retroitive,” “influencive”; Bentley, “commentitious,” “negoce,” “exscribe.” Sydney Smith was continually coining words, some of them compounds from the homely Saxon idiom, others big-wig classical epithets, devised with scholar-like precision, and exceedingly ludicrous in their effect. Thus he speaks of “frugiverous” children, of “mastigophorous” schoolmasters, of “fugacious” or “plumigerous” captains; of “lachrymal and suspirious” clergymen; of people who are “simious,” and people who are “anserous”; he enriches the language with the expressive hybrid, “Foolometer”; and he characterizes the September sins of the English by the awful name of “perdricide.” In the early ages of our literature, when the language was less fixed, and there were few recognized standards of expression, writers coined words without license, supplying the place of correct terms, when they did not occur to their minds, by analogy and invention. But a bill must not only be drawn by the word-maker; it must also be accepted. The Emperor Tiberius was very properly told that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. All innovations in speech, every new term introduced, should harmonize with the general principles of the language. No new phrase should be admitted which is not consonant with its peculiar genius, or which does violence to its fundamental integrity. Nor should any form of expression be tolerated that violates the universal laws of language. As Henry lingers has well said, a philosophical mind will consider that, whatever deflection may have taken place in the original principles of a language, whatever modification of form it may have undergone, it is, at each period of its history, the product of a slow accumulation and countless multitude of associations, which can neither be hastily formed nor hastily dismissed; that these associations extend even to the modes of spelling and pronouncing, of inflecting and combining words; and that anything which does violence to such associations impairs, for the time, at least, the power of the language.
Even good usage itself is but a proximate and strongly presumptive test of purity. Custom is not an absolute despotism, though it approaches very nearly to that character. Its decisions are generally authoritative; but, as there are extreme measures which even oriental despots cannot put into execution without endangering the safety of their possessions, so there are things which custom cannot do without endangering the fixity and purity of language. If grammatical monstrosities exist in a language, a correct taste will shun them, as it does physical deformities in the arts of design. Dean Alford defends some of his own indefensible expressions by citing the authority of the Scripture; but authority for the most vicious forms of speech can be found in all our writers, not excepting King James’s translators,—as Mr. Harrison has shown by hundreds of examples in his work on “The English Language.” Take, for example, the following sentence, or part of a sentence, from so great a writer as Dean Swift: “Breaking a constitution by the very same errors, that so many have been broke before.” Here, in a sentence of only fifteen words, we have three grammatical errors, glaring, and, in such a writer, unpardonable. We smile at the rustic ignorance which has engraved on a Hampshire tombstone such lines as
“Him shall never come again to we;
But us shall one day surely go to he;”
but is this couplet a whit more ungrammatical than Scott’s “I know not whom else are expected,” in “the Pirate”; or Southey’s sentence in “the Doctor,” “Gentle reader, let you and I, in like manner, endeavor to improve the enclosure of the Carr;” or Professor Aytoun’s
“But it were vain for you and I
In single fight our strength to try.”
A writer in “Blackwood” affirms that, “with the exception of Wordsworth, there is not one celebrated author of this day who has written two pages consecutively without some flagrant impropriety in the grammar;” and the statement, we believe, is undercharged. The usage, therefore, of a good writer is only prima facie evidence of the correctness of a disputed word or phrase; for he may have used the word carelessly or inadvertently, and it is altogether probable that, were his attention called to it, he would be prompt to admit his error. It has been remarked that “nowadays” and “had have” meet all the conditions of good usage, being reputable, national, and present; but one is a solecism, the other a barbarism. Again, if the writer is an old writer, like Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, or Addison, his authority must always be received with caution, and with increasing caution as we recede from the age in which he flourished. The great changes which our language has undergone within even a hundred years, show that the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are unsafe guides for the nineteenth, unless they are corroborated by contemporary usage. Let the English language he enriched in the spirit, and according to the principles of which we have spoken, and it will be, not a tank, but a living stream, casting out everything effete and impure, refreshed by new sources of inspiration and wealth, keeping pace with the stately march of the ages, and still retaining much of its original sweetness, expression and force.