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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