'An Appreciation of Words Is So Rare'

Most forgotten writers are deservedly forgotten, of course. Writing talent is unfairly distributed among literary aspirants. Sincerity and hard work count for nothing if you have no gift or fail to develop what little you’re given. Agnes Repplier writes in “Words” (Essays in Idleness, 1897): 

“An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.”

 

During her long working life, Repplier (1855-1950) was a prolific essayist and writer of popular biographies who was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her work in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published more than one-thousand essays on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I knew several like her, but few so industrious.

 

Repplier had a Victorian streak of fuddy-duddy-ism but redeems herself with the occasional shiv to the gut. In “Words,” she neatly renders Carlyle, a frustratingly uneven writer and man: “No man uses words more admirably, or abuses them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That he should delight in seeing his pages studded all over with such spikes as ‘mammonism,’ ‘flunkeyhood’ [Past and Present (1843): ‘All his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness”], ‘nonentity,’ and ‘simulacrum,’ that he should repeat them again and again with unwearying self-content, is an enigma that defies solution, save on the simple presumption that they are designed, like other instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of the sufferer.” She revels in Carlyle’s phrase “little red-colored pulpy infants,” and describes it as “the art of a Dutch master who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us with subdued vehemence the absolute realities of life.”

 

I like Repplier’s defiant spirit and scorn for the merely fashionable. Here she is on prose style: “The exquisite adjustment of a word to its significance, which was the instrument of Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph; the generous sympathy of a word with its surroundings, which was the secret wrung by Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of language,--these are the twin perfections which constitute style, and substantiate genius.” Repplier could turn out a tour-de-force sentence like this from “Children, Past and Present” (Books and Men, 1899):

 

“To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the ‘children’s pump’ for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be starved, frozen and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific.