Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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was a gallimaufry or hodge-podge of all other speeches.” Arthur Golding grieves over the disjected members of the language:—

“Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature), Dismember’d, hack’d, maim’d, rent, and torn, Defaced, patch’d, marr’d, and made in scorn.”

      A critic who has left us “An Arte of English Poetry,” written perhaps about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which, however, he never could in his own verses, “natural, pure, and the most usual of all his country,” seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but there he acknowledges that “the preachers, the secretaries, and travellers,” were great corrupters, and not less “our Universities, where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the primitive languages.” The coarse bran of our own native English was, however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against “the daily talk of northern men.” The good southern was that “we of Middlesex or Surrey use.” Middlesex and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied from “the usual speech of the Court, and that of London within sixty miles, and not much above.” But was our English more stable within this assigned circumference of the metropolis than any other line of demarcation? About 1580, Carew informs us that “Within these sixty years we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of our language consisteth in them.”

      Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.

      But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for introducing “a waggon-load of words,” and have proclaimed that Chaucer “wrote the language of no age;” a reproach which has been transferred to our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy axe of verbal pedantry.

      Even great authors glanced with a suspicious eye on these vicissitudes of language, not without a conviction that they themselves were personally interested in these uncertain novelties. It would seem as if Milton, from the new invasion of Gallic words and Gallic airiness which broke in at the Restoration, had formed some uneasy anticipations that his own learned diction and sublime form of poetry might suffer by the transition, and that Milton himself might become as obsolete as some of his great predecessors appeared to his age. The nephew of Milton, in the preface to his “Theatrum Poetarum,” where the critical touch of the great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets, who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. 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.”

      Thus

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