Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac
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Writing in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: “From Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to examine it well. If no poetry should please but what is calculated to every refinement of a language, of how ill consequence this would be for the future let him consider, and make it his own case, who, being now in fair repute, shall, two or three ages hence, when the language comes to be double-refined, understand that his works are come obsolete and thrown aside. I cannot—” he, perhaps Milton, continues—“I cannot but look upon it as a very pleasant humour that we should be so compliant with the French custom as to follow set fashions, not only in garments, but in music and poetry. For clothes, I leave them to the discretion of the modish; breeches and doublet will not fall under a metaphysical consideration. But in arts and sciences, as well as in moral notions, I shall not scruple to maintain, that what was ‘verum et bonum’ once, continues to be so always. Now whether the trunk-hose fancy of Queen Elizabeth’s days, or the pantaloon genius of ours be best, I shall not be hasty to determine.”
Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply to the Critics, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents; but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the Lexicographers, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings of their great “exchequer of words.” Turn over the prefaces of our elder lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak, and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure. Baret, one of our earliest lexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses himself:—“I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete words which now a daies no good writer will use.”8 Words spurned at by the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into confusion. Henry Cockram, whose volume has been at least twelve times reprinted, boldly avows that “what any before me in this kind have begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;” and, presuming on the privilege of “an interpreter of hard English words,” the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms, which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some writers and speakers, as Hamon L’Estrange, were attempting.9 What a picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the fleeting stages of their decadency from Trevisa to Caxton, from Caxton to Baret, from Baret to Cockram, and from Cockram to his numerous successors!
Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that “purity of style,” whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom, fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She has even submitted to Fashion, that most encroaching usurper of words, who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banishing the old and establishing the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fashion under the consecrated name of Custom.
But let us not quit this topic of “purity of style” without offering our sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the encumbering Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a set oration at the University of Glasgow by a noble personage. This taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life, was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.
It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical. These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural progress of a long-protracted birth.
A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect existence, encumbered by the heavy mass in which it lies involved, resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when
| ————Half appear’d The tawny Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts. |
1 “Curiosities of Literature,” Art. “History of New Words.”
2 These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner’s “History of England.” I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:—
“Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King’s son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght.”
Now we have plain, intelligible prose—
“Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the truth, and truth shall help you.”
3 Sir Francis Palgrave’s “Rise and Progress of the English Common wealth;” Proofs and Illustrations, ccxiii.
4 This letter to the translator Hoby has been passed over by those who collected the few letters of the learned Cheke; and, what seems strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby’s translation, having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.
5 Sir Thomas Wilson’s “Arte of Rhetoric,” 1553.
6 Spenser’s protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen in his “Three Letters,” which are preserved unmutilated in Todd’s “Spenser;” they are deficient in Hughes’ edition.
7 Heylin’s “Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles.” L’Estrange’s rejoinder may be found in the