Pocket Vocabularies

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Title:     Pocket Vocabularies
Author: Alice Meynell [More Titles by Meynell]

A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable vocabulary. It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad- dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes. Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and 'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word- painting' (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn. Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of language. It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives, fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century. Literature doubtless is made of words. What then is needful, he seems to ask, besides a knack of beautiful words? Unluckily for him, he has achieved, not style, but slang. Unluckily for him, words are not style, phrases are not style. 'The man is style.' O good French language, cunning and good, that lets me read the sentence in obverse or converse as I will! And I read it as declaring that the whole man, the very whole of him, is his style. The literature of a man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his qualities, with little fibres running invisibly into the smallest qualities he has. He who is not a man of letters, simply is not one; it is not too audacious a paradox to affirm that doing will not avail him who fails in being. 'Lay your deadly doing down,' sang once some old hymn known to Calvinists. Certain poets, a certain time ago, ransacked the language for words full of life and beauty, made a vocabulary of them, and out of wantonness wrote them to death. To change somewhat the simile, they scented out a word--an earlyish word, by preference--ran it to earth, unearthed it, dug it out, and killed it. And then their followers bagged it. The very word that lives, 'new every morning,' miraculously new, in the literature of a man of letters, they killed and put into their bag. And, in like manner, the emotion that should have caused the word is dead for those, and for those only, who abuse its expression. For the maker of a portable vocabulary is not content to turn his words up there: he turns up his feelings also, alphabetically or otherwise. Wonderful how much sensibility is at hand in such round words as the New Literature loves. Do you want a generous emotion? Pull forth the little language. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine!

Take, as an instance, Mr. Swinburne's 'hell.' There is, I fear, no doubt whatever that Mr. Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a vocabulary, with the inevitable consequences to the word. And when the minor men of his school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may very well happen to any young man practising authorship), I must not be accused of phantasy if I say that they put their hands into Mr. Swinburne's vocabulary and pick it. These vocabularies are made out of vigorous and blunt language. 'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?' Alas, they are homespuns from the factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities. Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage. The property of power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it created them. But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to make amends for a currency debased. No more than any other can a witty writer dispense with a sense of humour. In his moments of sentiment the lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at least perceptible. A sense of humour cannot be always present, it may be urged. Why, no; it is the lack of it that is--importunate. Other absences, such as the absence of passion, the absence of delicacy, are, if grievous negatives, still mere negatives. These qualities may or may not be there at call, ready for a summons; we are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily aware, unless they ought to be in action, whether their action is possible. But want of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these are lacks wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are all-influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying; what other paradoxes can I adventure? Without power--no style. Without a possible humour,--no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the language and put it in his pocket.

[The end]
Alice Meynell's essay: Pocket Vocabularies

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