Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many speeches, is the habitual exaggeration of language which deforms both our public and our private discourse. The most unmanageable of all parts of speech, with many persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly said that the adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the substantives, though they may agree in gender, number, and case. Generally the weakness of a composition is just in proportion to the frequency with which this class of words is introduced. As in gunnery the force of the discharge is proportioned, not to the amount of powder that can be used, but to the amount that can be thoroughly ignited, so it is not the multitude of words, but the exact number fired by the thought, that gives energy to expression. There are some writers and speakers who seem to have forgotten that there are three degrees of comparison. The only adjectives they ever use are the superlative, and even these are raised to the third power. With them there is no gradation, no lights and shadows. Every hill is Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue is godlike, every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their vocabulary; epithets are heightened into superlatives; superlatives stretch themselves into hyperboles; and hyperboles themselves get out of breath, and die asthmatically of exhaustion.
Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe, our Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably the most addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our mountains, lakes and rivers are all on a gigantic scale, we seem to think our speech must be framed after the same pattern. Even our jokes are of the most stupendous kind; they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies, or suggest the immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in portraying the most trivial incident, rolls along a Mississippian flood of eloquence, and the vastness of his metaphors makes you think you are living in the age of the megatheriums and saurians, and listening to one of a pre-Adamite race. Our political speeches, instead of being couched in plain and temperate language, too often bristle
“With terms unsquared
Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped,
Would seem hyperboles.”
In ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our poverty of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most ordinary themes, except in the most extravagant and enraptured terms. Everything that pleases us is positively “delicious,” “nice,” or “charming”; everything handsome is “elegant,” or “splendid”; everything that we dislike is “hateful,” “dreadful,” “horrible,” or “shocking.” Listen to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and you will learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours, they have met with more marvellous adventures and hairbreadth escapes,—passed through more thrilling experiences, and seen more gorgeous spectacles,—endured more fright, and enjoyed more rapture,—than could be crowded into a whole life-time, even if spun out to threescore and ten.
Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy season, and he will tell you that “it rains cats and dogs,” or that “it beats all the storms since the flood.” If his clothes get sprinkled in crossing the street, he has been “drenched to the skin.” All our winds blow a hurricane; all our fires are conflagrations,—even though only a hen-coop is burned; all our fogs can be cut with a knife. Nobody fails in this country; he “bursts up.” All our orators rival Demosthenes in eloquence; they beat Chillingworth in logic; and their sarcasm is more “withering” than that of Junius himself. Who ever heard of a public meeting in this country that was not “an immense demonstration”; of an actor’s benefit at which the house was not “crowded from pit to dome”; of a political nomination that was not “sweeping the country like wild-fire”? Where is the rich man who does not “roll in wealth”; or the poor man who is “worth the first red cent”? All our good men are paragons of virtue,—our villains, monsters of iniquity.
Many of our public speakers seem incapable of expressing themselves in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any subject whatever. A great deal of our writing, too, is pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key. Quiet ease of style, like that of Cowley’s “Essays,” Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” or White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” is almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming more and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if it would come to consist of head-lines and exclamation points. Some of the most popular correspondents are those whose communications are a perfect florilegium of fine words. They rival the “tulipomania” in their love of gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care little how trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they have dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of Rufus Choate, whose brain teemed with a marvellous wealth of words, and who was very prodigal of adjectives, that he “drove a substantive-and-six” whenever he spoke in public, and that he would be as pathetic as the grand lamentations in “Samson Agonistes” on the obstruction of fish-ways, and rise to the cathedral music of the universe on the right to manufacture India-rubber suspenders. When Chief-Justice Shaw, before whom he had often pleaded, heard that there was a new edition of “Worcester’s Dictionary,” containing two thousand five hundred new words, he exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let Choate get hold of it!”[19]
Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at some exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness, describing microscopic things by colossal metaphors. Thus a French naturalist represents the blood of a louse as “rushing through his veins like a torrent!” Even in treating on this very subject of exaggeration, a writer in an English periodical, after rebuking sharply this American fault, himself outrages truth by declaring that “he would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that never caricatures the subject on which he speaks!” To a critic who thus fails to reck his own rede, one may say with Sir Thomas Browne: “Thou who so hotly disclaimest the devil, be not thyself guilty of diabolism.”
Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of amplification and exaggeration,—of blowing up molehills into Himalayas and Chimborazos? Can anything be more obvious than the dangers of such a practice? Is it not evident that by applying super-superlatives to things petty or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so that, when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpardonable sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is not necessary that our “good Homers” should be always electrifying us with a savage intensity of expression. There is nothing of which a reader tires so soon as of a continual blaze of brilliant periods,—a style in which a “qu’il mourut” and a “let there be light” are crowded into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where all men are giants, there are no giants; where all is emphatic in style, there is no emphasis. Travel a few months among the mountains, and you will grow as sick of the everlasting monotony of grandeur, of beetling cliffs and yawning chasms, as of an eternal succession of plains. Yet, in defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational writer thinks the reader will deem him dull unless every sentence blazes with meaning, and every paragraph is crammed with power. His intellect is always armed cap-a-pie, and every passage is an approved attitude of mental carte and tierce. If he were able to create a world, there would probably be no latent heat in it, and no twilight; and should he drop his pen and turn painter, his pictures would be all foreground, with no more perspective than those of the Chinese.