“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten the language in which their fathers and mothers used to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau:
“Quoique vous écriviez, évitez la bassesse;
Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;”
and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for clad,—all of which have so learned an air, and are preferred to the simpler words for the same reason, apparently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” to “circumvented,” as having a deeper meaning.
Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epithets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sympathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching words, “Jesus wept,”—“Jesus, the Saviour of the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”? “Puppy!” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the book in a rage; and had the author been present, Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: “Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated by a wit of his own time who calls it
“A turgid style,
Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile;
Uplifts the club of Hercules—for what?
To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat;