Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 7

the vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the
laws only, but of those affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences,
of his language, which through the associations of literary history have
become a part of its nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology,
many a license, many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as
actually expressive. His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great
experience in literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or
hackneyed illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the
unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and
renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge
for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest
detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive
too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and
therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the
science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a freedom
which in such case will be the freedom of a master.
For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really vindicating
his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system of
composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of
the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.
Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English
equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the
rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which

like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still further
illustrate good taste.--The right vocabulary! Translators have not
invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of translation,
driving for the most part at idiom or construction; whereas, if the
original be first-rate, one's first care should be with its elementary
particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact
following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as [15] the
pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only each word or
syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration a little.
Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed
and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he
would select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the
words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and
doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search
of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a
vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the
strictest sense original. That living authority which language needs lies,
in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every language
possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own, expand at once
and purify its very elements, which must needs change along with the
changing thoughts of living people. Ninety years ago, for instance,
great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth, to break
through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and speak the
language that was his, that was to become in a measure the language of
the next generation. But he did it with the tact of a scholar also. English,
for a quarter of a century past, has been assimilating the phraseology of
pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of the great German
metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part also the [16]
language of mystical theology: and none but pedants will regret a great
consequent increase of its resources. For many years to come its
enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of the vocabulary of
science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive scholarship--in a
liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too, for after all the chief
stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to
grapple with. The literary artist, therefore, will be well aware of
physical science; science also attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal.
And then, as the scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be

apt to restore not really obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer
edge of words still in use: ascertain, communicate, discover--words like
these it has been part of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language
was made for man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which,
limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as
if one vowed not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare;
"his" "hers," for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really
inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. Racy
Saxon