A Plea for Leniency

No one hastens more eagerly than I to render homage to precision and felicity of phrase. To encounter these qualities in the conversation of others yields me much the same satisfaction that — fortune favoring — I myself derive from hitting upon the exact epithet to define my thought, or upon the melody of words to reveal the emotional undercurrent. My admiring sympathy goes out to Jowett, — the story is well known, and as well worth repeating, — who, in one of his lectures, having characterized several Oriental peoples, each by an appropriate adjective, hesitated long for the illuminating word which should aptly describe the Egyptians. Regardless of his audience, he gazed into the tree tops outside his window, and wailed. The very reluctance of his inspiration may have suggested the triumphant result: “that ambiguous people dwelling on the banks of their ancient river.” And Jowett smacked his lips. The delight of the moment must have been great and worth waiting for, but this pause took place in a lecture room.

Such a pause in conversation not only sends the wits of the speaker wool-gathering, but stimulates his interlocutor to come to the rescue with a series of undesired and confusing suggestions.

I wish to make a plea for leniency toward the inept and inadequate word when uttered in the urgent stress of conversation. It is better, for instance, that the pianist who ventures to play Schubert’s Erlkoenig should at the expense of a few false notes make the horse dash through the forest and reach the courtyard mit Müh' und Noth than that he should secure absolute accuracy by portraying a furniture van struggling through ruts. When you have immediate need of the contents of a locked trunk, having lost the key, do not send for a locksmith, but seize the nearest crowbar or poker and break open the trunk; then at your leisure summon the locksmith to repair the damage, since in the meantime you will have secured the essential thing. With a rough, wholly inappropriate word you may in conversation make yourself at least understood: it is your clumsy and brutal way of getting at your locked-up thought. Of course to make this possible in conversation two are needed, as Stevenson says of speaking the truth, — one to speak and one to hear. If your interlocutor is continually running ahead of you with samples of his own vocabulary, you will probably weakly yield and take a word or two of his now and then just to relieve your own stuttering misery; the result will be that you come to a full stop with some stupid platitude, whereas you started out in full chase of a real thought.

There is another nuisance, in the form of the placid individual who, not being engaged in fitting dresses to thoughts, is at leisure to watch your sartorial efforts with a total disregard of the thought you are trying to array. Such a one corrects single unimportant epithets, remoulds your phrases, suggests better pronunciations and intonations, until you either forget what you wanted to say, or lose interest in it, and feel constrained to offer refreshments and a cigar.

At. no time more than when a thought is struggling toward expression should a friend bear with a friend’s infirmities. A deep sympathy should be poured out with lavish affection about the one who is seriously striving to say some real thing. In this atmosphere of patient, sympathetic intelligence the inept word, the crude phrase, the wholly inadequate expression wall be enabled to do their work and the thought-transference will be effected; the thought wall be safely lodged in the mind of the other, slightly bruised in transit, but intact and intelligible. With an “I know what you mean,” “exactly,” or “go on, I understand,” much help may be rendered, and at last,when the thinker of the thought has placed his friend in possession, and by reason of this effort has entered into fuller possession of it himself, the conversation is in a way to begin. Then lavish upon the elaboration of the thought all the beauties that can be woven out of words, — precision,balance,music, — but let us, dear lovers of language, remember to be discreetly gentle and listen with averted glance while the thought is still in negligée.