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Style

W >> Walter Raleigh >> Style




It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the morose
angularity that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably
insistent on the chief of the incommodities imposed upon the
writer, the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to mean
something. The boon of the recurring monotonous expanse, that an
apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restful mechanical
repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder the
hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying patterns, with
his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master, the
canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing,
and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same.
But if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to
differ, there remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in
the building materials of the two arts, those blocks of "arbitrary
size and figure; finite and quite rigid." There is truth enough in
the comparison to make it illuminative, but he would be a rash
dialectician who should attempt to draw from it, by way of
inference, a philosophy of letters. Words are piled on words, and
bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to think words the
more intractable. Truly, it was a man of letters who said it,
avenging himself on his profession for the never-ending toil it
imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture
of the nursery. Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense
that holds good of bricks. They move and change, they wax and
wane, they wither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to
place, from mouth to mouth, they are never at a stay. They take on
colour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection of
neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverse
imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building
that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes
them. The same epithet is used in the phrases "a fine day" and
"fine irony," in "fair trade" and "a fair goddess." Were different
symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of
literature would perish. For words carry with them all the
meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those
that he selects for prominence in the train of his thought. A
slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the
common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have
shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are
addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense
given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in
its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off
the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants
wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In choosing a sense for your
words you choose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls
in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations
are broken or renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all
possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be
well to treat briefly of slang. For slang, in the looser
acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed
diametrically opposite, in origin and worth. Sometimes it is the
technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the
operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society
despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of slang,
which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is
vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the
world's dictionaries and of compass to the world's range of
thought. Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens
in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those
wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great,
vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of
the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to
accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of
property. For this reason, and by no special masonic precautions
of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices
of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his mates,
until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was
awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what
directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the
dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on
the bench! It is the trite story,--romanticism forced to plead at
the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by
Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna
Seward. Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of
diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque
confession of the culprit, made in proud humility, that he "clicked
a red 'un" must needs be interpreted, to save the good faith of the
court, into the vaguer and more general speech of the classic
convention. Those who dislike to have their watches stolen find
that the poorest language of common life will serve their simple
turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabulary that has
grown around an art. They can abide no rendering of the fact that
does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-owners. They
carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing all glitter
and finish in the matter of expression.

This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural
efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand,
and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind
that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental
sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to
whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for
every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance
strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten
round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy
rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street, secure
of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship. Of the same lazy
stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying
contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many.
For the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite;
the average talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called
on to describe or to define, must constantly be furnished with the
materials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes and
dislikes. Why should he alienate himself from the sympathy of his
fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression of his
emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of
expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him
engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of the day is on all
lips, and what was "vastly fine" last century is "awfully jolly"
now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.
Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can
boast its fashion-plates. The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip
the fear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers,
as they run hither and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the
prize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of
good breeding. Like those famous modern poets who are censured by
the author of Paradise Lost, the talkers of slang are "carried away
by custom, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part
worse than else they would have exprest them." The poverty of
their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a
partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their paltry
conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events.
Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or social
circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do
the work of talk. There are few families, or groups of familiars,
that have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and
accepted by affection, passing current only within those narrow and
privileged boundaries. This wealth is of no avail to the
travelling mind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material
such "as, buried once, men want dug up again." A few happy words
and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the wider
world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into
oblivion with the other perishables of the age.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence,
then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated
and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on
the other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark
rather of authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one
age. The accretions of time bring round a word many reputable
meanings, of which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain.
It is a counsel of perfection--some will say, of vainglorious
pedantry--but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn to the head,
and he who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century
will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from
the fourteenth. To know them is of service, if only for the
piquancy of avoiding them. But many times they cannot wisely be
avoided, and the auspices under which a word began its career when
first it was imported from the French or Latin overshadow it and
haunt it to the end.

Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like "nice,"
"quaint," or "silly," of all flavour of their origin, as if it were
of no moment to remember that these three words, at the outset of
their history, bore the older senses of "ignorant," "noted," and
"blessed." It may be granted that any attempt to return to these
older senses, regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry;
but a delicate writer will play shyly with the primitive
significance in passing, approaching it and circling it, taking it
as a point of reference or departure. The early faith of
Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to
unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of
"silly"; the history of the word is contained in that cry of St.
Augustine, Indocti surgunt et rapiunt coelum, or in the fervent
sentence of the author of the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum.
And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful
artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show
himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the
grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety
and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of
eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard,
he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of
"nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take
care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the
daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust of folly the word
carries meanings numerous and diverse enough; it must not be
cruelly burdened with all the laudatory occasions of an
undiscriminating egotism.

It would be easy to cite a hundred other words like these, saved
only by their nobler uses in literature from ultimate defacement.
The higher standard imposed upon the written word tends to raise
and purify speech also, and since talkers owe the same debt to
writers of prose that these, for their part, owe to poets, it is
the poets who must be accounted chief protectors, in the last
resort, of our common inheritance. Every page of the works of that
great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with examples of
felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible word.
Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a word
only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and
etymological meaning. Thus the seraph Abdiel, in the passage that
narrates his offer of combat to Satan, is said to "explore" his own
undaunted heart, and there is no sense of "explore" that does not
heighten the description and help the thought. Thus again, when
the poet describes those


Eremites and friars,
White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery,


who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise of Fools, he
seems to invite the curious reader to recall the derivation of
"trumpery," and so supplement the idea of worthlessness with that
other idea, equally grateful to the author, of deceit. The
strength that extracts this multiplex resonance of meaning from a
single note is matched by the grace that gives to Latin words like
"secure," "arrive," "obsequious," "redound," "infest," and "solemn"
the fine precision of intent that art can borrow from scholarship.

Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Milton himself
is bold to write "stood praying" for "continued kneeling in
prayer," and deft to transfer the application of "schism" from the
rent garment of the Church to those necessary "dissections made in
the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built."
Words may safely veer to every wind that blows, so they keep within
hail of their cardinal meanings, and drift not beyond the scope of
their central employ, but when once they lose hold of that, then,
indeed, the anchor has begun to drag, and the beach-comber may
expect his harvest.

Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart of
sameness, such is the estate of language. According as they
endeavour to reduce letters to some large haven and abiding-place
of civility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugal
tendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writers dubbed
Classic or Romantic. The Romantics are individualist, anarchic;
the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to
confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the
stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to
a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light
cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their
lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and
modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape
them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences,
and appropriate or invent strange jargons. They furbish up old
words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the
machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it. They are at
odds with the idiom of their country in that it serves the common
need, and hunt it through all its metamorphoses to subject it to
their private will. Heretics by profession, they are everywhere
opposed to the party of the Classics, who move by slower ways to
ends less personal, but in no wise easier of attainment. The
magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice done to it
by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol of a
world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect
of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to
one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together
in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards
order and reason;--this was surely an aim worthy of labour and
sacrifice. Both have been freely given, and the end is yet to
seek. The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in
plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away
on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it
was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism
and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship
with the ancients and the oecumenical authority of letters?
Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the
lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the
winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with
the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil. It
was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of
language cried out against the monotony of their Utopia, and the
crowds who were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams went
straying after the feathered chiefs of the rebels, who, when the
fulness of time was come, themselves received apotheosis and the
honours of a new motley pantheon. The tomb of that great vision
bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic
poet as "a dead Romantic."

In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic
ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal
agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so
inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves
nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed, through a long decline, by
the pallor of reflected glories. Even the irresistible novelty of
personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and
the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or
in Shakespeare had as good not be. He is a replica and a shadow, a
foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was
never guilty of tautology. This is the error of the classical
creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye
can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never
be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and
finality. Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her
prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in
the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for
permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of
generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is
transformed into a science, their expression into an academic
terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the
arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed
becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make
acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice
tends, should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences. There
words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless,
scentless, dried weeds, a hortus siccus of proper names, each
individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea.
No wind blows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to
discompose the melancholy workers at their task of tying Latin
labels on to withered sticks. Definition and division are the
watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and
creation. Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no
value to the stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a
study of anatomy, or an architect by a knowledge of the strains and
stresses that may be put on his material. The exact logical
definition is often necessary for the structure of his thought and
the ordering of his severer argument. But often, too, it is the
merest beginning; when a word is once defined he overlays it with
fresh associations and buries it under new-found moral
significances, which may belie the definition they conceal. This
is the burden of Jeremy Bentham's quarrel with "question-begging
appellatives." A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious
philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-
father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of
such unimpassioned vocables as "codification" and "international,"
Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it
of those "affections of the soul" wherein Burke had found its
highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of
such a word as "innovation," it was hardly prejudice in general
that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice
against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own
figures,--although he had the courage of his convictions, and
laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his
style,--bears witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded
weapons. He will pack his text with grave argument on matters
ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, in the notes
with a pleasant description of the flesh and the spirit playing
leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holy precincts of
the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough from his own
ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words. The claim of
reason and logic to enslave language has a more modern advocate in
the philosopher who denies all utility to a word while it retains
traces of its primary sensuous employ. The tickling of the senses,
the raising of the passions, these things do indeed interfere with
the arid business of definition. None the less they are the life's
breath of literature, and he is a poor stylist who cannot beg half-
a-dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion he
would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous
revolt.

The two main processes of change in words are Distinction and
Assimilation. Endless fresh distinction, to match the infinite
complexity of things, is the concern of the writer, who spends all
his skill on the endeavour to cloth the delicacies of perception
and thought with a neatly fitting garment. So words grow and
bifurcate, diverge and dwindle, until one root has many branches.
Grammarians tell how "royal" and "regal" grew up by the side of
"kingly," how "hospital," "hospice," "hostel" and "hotel" have come
by their several offices. The inventor of the word "sensuous" gave
to the English people an opportunity of reconsidering those
headstrong moral preoccupations which had already ruined the
meaning of "sensual" for the gentler uses of a poet. Not only the
Puritan spirit, but every special bias or interest of man seizes on
words to appropriate them to itself. Practical men of business
transfer such words as "debenture" or "commodity" from debt or
comfort in general to the palpable concrete symbols of debt or
comfort; and in like manlier doctors, soldiers, lawyers, shipmen,--
all whose interest and knowledge are centred on some particular
craft or profession, drag words from the general store and adapt
them to special uses. Such words are sometimes reclaimed from
their partial applications by the authority of men of letters, and
pass back into their wider meanings enhanced by a new element of
graphic association. Language never suffers by answering to an
intelligent demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but
to all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it.
The good writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension,
but there he is, at work among words,--binding the vagabond or
liberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or abashing the
presumptuous, incessantly alert to amend their implications, break
their lazy habits, and help them to refinement or scope or
decision. He educates words, for he knows that they are alive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude. In the regard of
literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, "all are the
multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or
understanding," and the poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums.
Wherever thought and taste have fallen to be menials, there the
vulgar dwell. How should they gain mastery over language? They
are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words,
which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs
for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the
very excess of what they inherit. The resources of the tongue they
speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to
use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon
words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the
confident booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-
tempered swords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A
dozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with
the sense of luxury and pomp. "Vast," "huge," "immense,"
"gigantic," "enormous," "tremendous," "portentous," and such-like
groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barren
uniformity of low employ. The reign of this democracy annuls
differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or
disposition. Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one
purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries
of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the
same statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words.
Where the ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary
word into the language, to fill a place already occupied, the
quicker apprehension of others will fasten upon it, drag it apart
from its fellows, and find new work for it to do. Where a dull eye
sees nothing but sameness, the trained faculty of observation will
discern a hundred differences worthy of scrupulous expression. The
old foresters had different names for a buck during each successive
year of its life, distinguishing the fawn from the pricket, the
pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age increased. Thus it
is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest of moral
distinctions. Language halts far behind the truth of things, and
only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new
implement of description. Every strange word that makes its way
into a language spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance,
relating itself from whatsoever centre to fresh points in the
circumference. No two words ever coincide throughout their whole
extent. If sometimes good writers are found adding epithet to
epithet for the same quality, and name to name for the same thing,
it is because they despair of capturing their meaning at a venture,
and so practise to get near it by a maze of approximations. Or, it
may be, the generous breadth of their purpose scorns the minuter
differences of related terms, and includes all of one affinity,
fearing only lest they be found too few and too weak to cover the
ground effectively. Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of the
Prayer-Book, wherein we "acknowledge and confess" the sins we are
forbidden to "dissemble or cloke;" and the bead-roll of the lawyer,
who huddles together "give, devise, and bequeath," lest the cunning
of litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets
yield still better instances. When Milton praises the Virtuous
Young Lady of his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves
her only to "pity and ruth," it is not for the idle filling of the
line that he joins the second of these nouns to the first. Rather
he is careful to enlarge and intensify his meaning by drawing on
the stores of two nations, the one civilised, the other barbarous;
and ruth is a quality as much more instinctive and elemental than
pity as pitilessness is keener, harder, and more deliberate than
the inborn savagery of ruthlessness.

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