Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition.
It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true, that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon,—in the language we hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the time of the great Methodist movement in the last century, when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, familiar way of preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed that this rough private was always in his place, mouth open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a better reason, and was able to give it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.” “Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.”
Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon discovered that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, he became “a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,—whether demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,—on all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,” said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard words, no Latin phrases, no fieri facias; and that is the secret of my style, if I have any.”
Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that
“No contrefited termes had she
To semen wise;”
and if any one would write or speak well, his English should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can be simpler and yet more sublime than the “Let there be light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible Ourgos which had created all things, we might think it very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier leaps upon his horse. “Trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!” roars Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think of driving them before me with this crutch.” “I know,” says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that the light has spread, and that even the bayonets think.” “You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts!” When a Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,—“Well,” said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred and eighty; but when I’m mad I weigh a ton!” “Were I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle of the Nile, “‘more frigates’ would be found written on my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars, and the glory of America, the words might have been historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacularly, as they have been, for over threescore years and ten.
There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name, but, as if they believed with Butler, that
“He that’s but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,