'An Ironist of the Contemplative Life'

Of the many ways to write badly, among the most annoying is the would-be imitator of Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater using a self-consciously exotic, often antiquated vocabulary, coupled with an archness of tone. I find the practice especially common among older, non-academic, usually male writers. (Academics wield their own unreadable argot.) An example of this creaky antiquarianism I recently encountered in a blog post: the repeated use of maiden to mean young woman. I think the author, a man, wished to sound – how? Old-fashioned, chivalric, grandfatherly? He ended up sounding arch and vain. He wanted to be “a real character,” a lovingly mild eccentric, but sounds patronizing of women and more generally of his readers. At least for this reader, such writing tends to call attention to itself and away from whatever the author thinks he wishes to say. 

Potentially, any word that ever showed up in English, even the hoariest Old English fossil, might be used by a contemporary writer. Everything depends on intent, intended audience and appropriateness of tone. Caution is always urged. Vocabulary and syntax are as unique as DNA. Simple and direct is usually the wisest way to proceed. True style can’t be forced or applied from the outside like a fresh coat of paint. It comes from within, the place where sensibility meets the world.

 

The American-born British essayist Logan Pearsall Smith addresses the issue in A Few Practical Suggestions (1920), a tract written by him for the Society for Pure English, founded by Smith, Robert Bridges and others in 1913. Referring to old-fashioned words like maiden, Smith writes:

 

“There is one curious means by which the life of these words may be lengthened and by which, possibly, they may regain a current and colloquial use. They can be still used humorously and as it were in quotation marks; words like pelf, maiden, lad, damsel, and many others are sometimes used in this way, which at any rate keeps them from falling into the limbo of silence. Whether any of them have by this means renewed their life would be an interesting subject of inquiry; it is said that at Eton the good old word usher, used first only for humorous effect, has now found its way back into the common and colloquial speech of the school.”

 

Smith assumes a writer is an independent spirit, as liberal and liberating as the First Amendment, choosing words that accomplish his purpose with a fine ear and good taste. He knows some writers have little gift for evaluating the appropriateness of language. They throw words like a baker slamming dough. Smith is no snob. He knows language varies among social classes (more in his day than ours):

 

“We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns’s poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of vivid local terms both to our written and our spoken language. In the great enrichment of the vocabulary of the romantic movement by means of words like murk, gloaming, glamour, gruesome, eerie, eldritch, uncanny, warlock, wraith—all of which were dialect or local words, we find a good example of the expressive power of dialect speech, and see how a standard language can be enriched by the use of popular sources.”

 

The object is vividness and precision.

 

Smith was born on this date, October 18, in 1865, and died in 1946 at age eighty. Shortly after his death, his friend Desmond MacCarthy wrote a brief remembrance of Smith, later collected in Memories (1953), republished by Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books:

 

“[T]his mandarin of the art of letters incidentally became a moralist, this devotee of detachment an ironist of the contemplative life. He observed others with all the excited interest of a gossip, but he brought to our tea-tables and dinner-tables something of the solitude of the thinker.”

 

Of course, be sure to enjoy Smith’s best-known work, Trivia.