Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak strongest reason in his own,”—
they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. In their dialect people are blasés, and passés, or have un air distingué; in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boquet for bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of a sous, instead of a sou, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s “un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable novelists and writers of books of travel have even shown so bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian, whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans, Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, making the book, though an English book, unintelligible to an Englishman, however familiar with his native tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and that not in its purity, but “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for exotics is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that the parent language would not know it again. They strip it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into bifteck; “plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into pouding de plomb; “partner” becomes partenaire; “riding-coat” becomes redingote; and now fashionable English tailors advertise these “redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming that they are borrowing an expression which the French stole from the English. It was their contempt for the practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age.
It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names,—the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man. There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off his hat in token of respect to himself,—that is, as the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian name of “Bubb,” was once nominated to represent Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister remarked,—“My dear fellow, your name will damn you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” “What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily managed,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all the Spanish Court at your feet.”
The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magniloquent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer, “long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, shaming our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from real and modest worth. Let there be added to these complaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its beauty and power.”
When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the books over which generation after generation of readers has hung with the deepest delight,—which have retained their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,—have been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is beauty. Simplicity is power.”
It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force their way in these days into the language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,” “monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,” and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in the language of literature and common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” “exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:
“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me.
Our mutual flame is like the affinity
That doth exist between two simple bodies.