PRECIOSITY.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 834, 4 June 1910, Page 9

PRECIOSITY.

In the currant issue of the "Dial" (says en Ivndisli joiini?.!) tiie editor, Wγ. Francis I , ', lirowne, takes an uiinei:i.ioiuiiy pessimistic view of coiitem-p«:-;',ry liteinture. lit talks of its uanfr'iijit'.'y, and declares that if lileratuie i 1; i:ul already bankrupt, it is, at any into, displaying . all tho febrile to oxteiid its credit which a ii'.c-HiEiit di:.|ilays who sees insolvency Bt:ini;n him in the h.'.:\ "No other explanation," lie submits, "can account with any degree of satisi.-ctior. far the fashion in which their (writers') vocabularies are tricked out with technicalities and neologism!;, for tho reckless way in which they riot in thn bizarre and Uip paradoxical, lor the intellectual and ethical audacities in . which they uid'.iljic.." Jn e:> far as Mr. Urowne's re-vuii-ks rcl'.te tf; the philosophy of die Say. they nee! iiol- roncorii u. , ; lipre. ii. would bo an immens; , relief tt: one's feelings U) bo allowed to say

all one thought of certain developments of Pluralism, 'lhc two chief charges, however, which he brings against contemporary liter.-.ture, those of imwholeKOineness and preciosity, are, whether good or ovil, not necessarily symptoms of decadence. That tliero is some :m----n'holesomcncss in.fiction is notorious, although the number of books which ■Iμ libraries have found it necessary to "index" , seems to have been remarkably small. Even if it were larger, there would bo no ground oi despair for the future. There is a periodicity in such matters, and we perhaps exaggerate the evil from the fact that we are issuing from an era of literature which has been perhaps unique in tho history of our country for its fastidious purity. At any rate, no censor would pass the complete works of Shakespeare, Chances, or Fielding, and thosi. mommies wo do not associate with literary bankruptcy.

On the other hand, "preciosity" is often simply a literary swear word. If a writer in a certain context deliberately uses a word where the average man would usp a different word ho is "precious." Now, every writer who div tormiiK's to be unflinchingly true to hie own perceptions of truth or beauty must have his own vocabulary, for the simple reason that no two men's perceptions of those things are absolutely identical. Thero is, indeed, a. conception, of style in accordance with which a writer consciously limits himself to a vocabulary of a few hundred words sanctioned by tradition and handles and rehandles his thought until it can bo expressed by them. It is the classic ideal, and has produced, especially in France, masterpieces with which posterity will never dispense, but evidently that is not an inferior conception by which a writer, instead of adapting his thought to his vocabulary, adapts his vocabulary to his thought and compels it to express it. to its .last nuance. Surely the- mind should be tho master and language tho instrument. Vet work produced in accordance with this method will always incur at first the charge of preciosity. The-' average man will always he as puzzled by it as Brumby was by Dick Sanctuary's

"kind of writing," and will eye it very much as a terrier eyes a bee. Everyone, however, for whom literature means anything,. has known Dick's solicitude for the one and only word, and has ranged far and wide through books with his notebook,•■recording uncommon uses of words, reversions to etymological meaning and cunning sleights of syntax, partly for the sheer pleasure of the thing and partly to acquaint himself with the resources of his mother tongue with a view to a completer mastery-of it. Nor is it merely at the. beginning of one's interest in literature that this is done, bill from time to time later on one bet nines conscious that ho is using an overdriven vocabulary, that words are losing their individuality, that he is handling language not like an artist but like an artisan. Then a word hunger arises, and ho must repair to writers belonging \o a day when language was more fluid than now, not perhaps to classics well enough known already, but to one of the outlaws of literature, some writer lurking in the undergrowth of tho Elizabethan forest —a man for whom the beginning of a sentence was the beginning of an adventure,- who in his straits forced words to serve his purpose generally against the will of God and with poor result, but here and there with a felicity that delights and stimulates.,