Proud Words

THE author of This Freedom, in telling us of the great moderation of his hero in the use of swear-words, refers to our age as one ‘given to easy freedom of language.’ This is not the freedom to which he refers in the title. It may be that he was obscurely conscious of a certain easy freedom of his own in the use of our mother tongue. And this reminds one of what, in last year’s book, the same author has to say about the favorite words of his heroine and her husband: ‘Why, Tony and I get fond of a word and then we have it for our own, whichever of us it is, and use it for everything.’ One at once thinks of Mr. Hutchinson himself and of many others of t he writing craft.

Professor Kittredge used to point out how this was characteristic of no less a writer than Shakespeare— how Shakespeare in a certain year would be obsessed with a word or figure and return to it as much as twice within the same play! In the current novelists this kind of obsession is more obstinate. It sometimes lasts through a considerable period of years: the favorite word appears in book after book, and sometimes as often as dozens or scores of times within a book; and it is much more suggestive of an easy freedom of language than anything in Shakespeare.

But what must be most discouraging to the authors themselves is that fine words are catching, and no writer, however curious he may be in searching them out for himself, can ever for a long while ‘have them for his own.’ One of the words of the year in 1922 was undoubtedly the vigorous adjective ‘devastating.’ Who invented it, I do not know, but it has clearly come into vogue. The publishers of Mr. Hecht’s Gargoyles let us know on the cover that it is a devastating book. The publishers of Mr. Swinnerton’s The Three Lovers let us know that, in this latest, of his productions, he has given us unusually prolonged and devastating revelations of the hearts and brains of girls. In this case the publishers have but taken the cue from the author himself: for more than once he makes effective use of the forceful new word.

Mr. Walpole uses the word in more than one place in The Cathedral, and with evident pride and deliberation. Amy Brandon is represented as being devoured by ‘the one dominating, devastating desire she had ever known.’ (One would suppose that one such desire would be all one could know in a lifetime.) And Falk Brandon had a secret preoccupation that seemed ‘so absorbing and devastating to him that he could not believe that every one around him would not guess it.

. . . His secret was quite simply that, for the last year, he had been devastated by the consciousness of Annie Hogg, the daughter of the landlord of The Dog and Pilchard! Yes, devastated was the word.’

There seems to be a slight anachronism here: it does not seem possible that, away back in the eighteen-nineties, the Archdeacon’s son could have been so sure that that was the word. But it is clear enough that, a generation later, it perfectly satisfies the taste of Mr. Walpole. And in This Freedom Mr. Hutchinson makes his usual improvements on other people’s words by speaking of an act of Rosalie’s father which ‘proved to be but a stagger down into morass heavier and more devastating of ambition.’

The word ‘devastating’ makes its appeal on two distinct grounds. It is violent, superlative; and it is, or was a year ago, unusual in its application. It was thought to be recherché; the discerning reader is likely to call it affected. And it is the affectation with which we are concerned in the present article.

One of our most enterprising writers is Mr. Hergesheimer; and he is given to renewing his stock of expressive words more often than most. It is particularly edifying to note in his case the change of fashion from year to year. Often the favored word is used correctly; often it is used with an easy freedom, in some sense of his own, not yet recorded in the dictionaries. In 1917, in The Three Black Pennies, the word of the year was ‘paramount.’ And so fond was Mr. Hergesheimer of this word, so persuaded was he that he ‘had it for his own,’ that he was inclined to ‘ use it for everything,’ at least for everything remarkable or extreme — and things remarkable or extreme were very common in The Three Black Pennies. ‘Her discontent was paramount. It was deeper than he had supposed. . . . A paramount situation to which he lacked the key. . . . A small reason for withholding any paramount salvation. . . . Caught in the flood of her paramount disdain.’

Year before last, in Cytherea, the favorite word was the adjective ‘engaging,’ together with the related noun and verb. Everything that was attractive to Lee Randon is represented as engaging—dresses, people, and even tlie room in the Inglaterra Hotel. That is a good word and, used with proper regard to English usage, Mr. Ilergesheimer might have found it in Henry James. The freedom lies only in the frequency of its use, the strain put upon it. But Mr. Hergesheimer is not content with the adjective. He is so intrigued,— if I may use a word of kindred spirit, a favorite of Mr. Swinnerton’s,— he is so intrigued with the adjective that he must draw in the verb and noun. Our Yankee writer becomes positively exotic when he has ins hero wonder * if his children would constit ut e a sufficient engagement.’ One suspects that Mr. Hergesheimer is undertaking to extend the scope of English usage through the adoption of idioms from a Latin tongue; and one wonders whether he will succeed in doing so. The question presses more urgently when we read of how the hero ‘ disposed his attention in a hundred channels,’ and of how ‘the tropical evening was accomplished rapidly.’

In 1922 the favorite words of Mr. Hergesheimer are the noun ‘maturity’ and the corresponding adjective; and while, so far as I have observed, he uses these words correctly, he certainly runs them into the ground. He gives us not merely a feeling of the juvenility of the young man who is so haunted with the notion of maturity, but also an uneasy feeling that the author’s style has not yet come itself to the stage of maturity. He gives us much the feeling that Mr. Swinnerton does with his use, well over a dozen times in his latest book, of the words ‘sophisticated’ and ‘sophistication’ — the feeling that he must be writing for the very young. In Havana the hero ‘continually found himself in situations of the most gratifying maturity — here he was in the dining-room of the Inglaterra Hotel, with a tall rum punch before him, and a mature-looking cigar.’ And, once started, the author does not always stop to think whether he is making sense with this continual sounding of his leitmotif, and he sometimes lands in humorous confusion: as where, speaking of the growing loveliness of a young woman, he says, ‘the maturity of her engagement to marry had already intensified her.’ One might think of the maturing of bonds, but hardly of the maturity of an engagement to marry.

Mr. Hergesheimer may be affected beyond all living novelists; but it must be acknowledged that he achieves what they all so desperately crave, and what so few of them do achieve. He is certainly ‘different.’ Mr. Scott Fitzgerald is often as affected as Mr. Hergesheimer; but the only ‘difference’ he achieves is that of posturing affectation. ‘She was dazzling — alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance. ... It has been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. . . . And from loving it with a vanity that was almost masculine, she became suddenly anæsthetic to it. . . . Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor a tribute. . . . He would drop his arm around her and find her kiss.’

Mr. Ben Hecht is equally anxious to be different, and, like Mr. Fitzgerald, he is no doubt successful in this regard so far as conception and composition go. But his style, formed in a cheap school of newspaper writing, strives in vain to achieve any kind of distinction. Where he is most ‘subtle,’ most expressive in intention, he is most sadly inexpressive and common in effect. He makes a considerable use of the class of adjectives which Mr. McFee is reaching out for when he says of Mrs. Dainopoulos, ‘She liked Evanthia because she had that ineluctable quality of transfiguring an act into a grandiose gesture.’ That is not very bad. Apart from the use of the word ‘quality’ for ‘faculty,’ there is no positive impropriety in the English of his sentence. But his fine word ‘ineluctable’ is so out of place in his prosy writing that it jumps out from the page crying to be let alone. And generally Mr. McFee does leave such words alone, and so much the better for everybody concerned.

Mr. Hecht has greater pretensions to style, or to the expressive style, and he will not let these words alone. He tells us, in Gargoyles, that a certain woman ‘would snuggle kittenishly between the empty sheets, an unintelligible sense of immorality lending a luxury to her wearincss.’ He seems to mean, not unintelligible, but vague or indefinable, or curious, or mysterious, to use the favorite words of Messrs. Swinnerton and Hutchinson in these cases. A girl tells a man, yes, she loves him. ‘Her “yes” had given him an inexplicable moment.’ Why inexplicable? It appears simple enough. Perhaps ineffable is meant.

It is not in this direction that Mr. Hecht can look for distinction. Too many other authors have shared his fondness for these words. They have shared likewise his fondness for the word ‘sense,’ noun or verb, as a more recherché word for feeling or feel, and have been prone, like him, to use it largely and loosely. He is not the first to speak of a heart ‘lacerated by the poignant things it senses,’ or of a man who had ‘inspired in him a curious sense of obedience toward all mothers he encountered.’ Mr. Hecht may use this word for everything, as Nona put it; but he cannot have, for his own, words which have been the favorites of every sentimental writer of the last ten years. When Mark Sabre, in If Winter Comes, ‘had a sudden sense of the tremendous and poignant adventure on which they were embarked together,’ — he and his wife, — the feeling was no doubt fresh and unique in his experience; but his author was not having any of these expressive words for his own, any more than one who rides in the loop-the-loop is having an exclusive enjoyment of that excitement. People since Pater have been having a sense of this or of that, which they take for a kind of sixth sense. In the novels of Mr. Walpole, it is most likely to be a sudden sense. In Mr. Swinnerton, it is a curious or an extraordinary sense. In Mr. Wells, it has been over and over again a sense of fine adventure. In Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mr. Walpole, and Mr. Hutchinson, and Mr. Fitzgerald, and Mr. Swinnerton, as well as in Mr. Hecht, it is almost sure to be a sense of something poignant.

It is evident that these writers aspire to a certain rarity of diction, a distinction, even a preciousness, in the use of English. And two of them, Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Hergesheimer, have indeed a wide reputation for these very qualities. But preciousness is the privilege of writers like Stevenson and Pater and Mr. Cabell; distinction is the prerogative of writers like Thackeray and Sterne and Mr. George Moore — men who write with deliberate care and a sensitive mastery of the mother tongue. A great outcry has been made over the commonness of Mr. Sinclair Lewis and the crudeness of Mr. Sherwood Anderson. But these men have the merit of writing plainly; and as for the King’s English, they observe it with a probably greater scrupulousness than either Mr. Hutchinson or Mr. Walpole or Mr. Swinnerton.

It would take too long to illustrate the fallibility of these British writers in matters of English idiom and grammar. But some examples might be given of their figures of speech. It is probably in the use of figures that careless precious writers are most likely to betray themselves. For careless writers in general are apt to forget, what the great writers had always in mind, that figures of speech, if they are anything, are an appeal to the imagination, and that the imagination abhors being baulked and cheated by a confused appeal.

When Mr. Hutchinson speaks of an ‘impregnably rooted impression,’ he forgets that impregnably means ‘not to be taken by assault,’ and connotes a fortress and not a root. But the reader does not forget it. When the same writer says that his lovers were ‘affianced as it were at a blow,’ no apologetic ‘as it were’ can keep us from laughing at the violent and ludicrous image. When Mr. Hecht says of a man in love, ‘He was being transported,’ the reader remembers that to be transported means to be shipped to Tasmania for a criminal offense, and his imagination is carried far from the young man in love. When Mr. Swinnerton says of his hero, ‘His impulse was to withdraw, to see her no more; but dudgeon is the preserve of the very young man, so he dismissed it,’ we say to ourselves, one might avoid hunting in someone’s else preserve, but how dismiss it? When Mr. Hergesheimer says, ‘The simple path of truth must be put aside,’ we consider that paths are generally the product of much travel, and that, while they may be left at will, they are not so easily put aside. When Mr. Walpole speaks of ‘ the pressure of her heart beating up in her throat,’ we image a pressure as one thing and a beating as another, and we cannot image them together. When he tells us, of a girls’ party, that ‘a chatter arose like the murmur of bees,’ we feel sure that a chatter is one thing and a murmur another, and that his first impression of a girls’ party is better than his second. And when he tells us that ‘the lamps in the High Street suddenly flaring beat out the sky,’ we say that that may be very fine writing, but it’s not the fine writing of Ruskin or of Pierre Loti.

It is worth while to dwell a moment on the word ‘poignant,’ mentioned above. For it is the most infallible diagnostic of the disease we have under observation — a disease which we may define as the mania for indicating emotion by means of adjectives. Like the word ‘devastating,’ ‘poignant’ is prized for suggesting emotion both strong and rare, so that the author feels himself to be writing in a manner at once vigorous and precious. It is not the word of the year, but the word of the decade, or perhaps, thus far, of the century. It makes its appeal, no doubt, to some extent because it is felt to be of Gallic origin, and as yet not quite English. It is, as a matter of fact, a good English word. You will find it used sparingly, but correctly, in Charles Lamb and Walter Scott. But somehow, among all their vices, the intervening Victorians did not number this of excessive appeal to poignancy. I doubt if the creator of Paul Dombey and Little Nell once resorted to this word for the heightening of pathos. If I remember rightly, it was not adjectives, let alone connotative and nondescriptive adjectives, with which he worked his magic. And so the word ‘ poignant ‘ has come down to our time a coin of sterling value. I don’t know who first began to debase it. All I know is that you cannot open a sentimental novel to-day without encountering this now vague but fervid attributive. And the worst of it is that these emotional story-tellers, in their eagerness to be elegantly expressive, have neglected to inquire into the meaning of the word, and as often as not they use it in phrases that make no sense.

This word, however recherché, means simply keen, or piercing, or pungent; and the reader who has the misfortune to know its meaning is thrown into great confusion when Mr. Hutchinson, say, offers him sentences like the following: ‘And precisely as beauty touched him in the most exquisite and poignant depths . . . Piercing depths? Pungent depths? ‘And Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.’ Piercing clutch? Pungent clutch?

There we have in a word all that is most unpalatable in such writing. What we have mainly been observing is the pride of words, the affectation of a difference. Alas, one cannot achieve distinction in this manner by the adoption of half a dozen smart words. Smart words spread too fast. The distinction of Pater and Thackeray is more than skin-deep. It is not an affair of words, but of individuality of thought and phrasing. And the worst of it is that affectation seldom walks alone. And here we have it in its characteristic combination with slovenliness and sentimental violence. It is not a combination that makes for distinction.