And now, if you please, mark the contrast. We are living in a business age. War has blunted our sensibilities, has made us callous, has coarsened civilization. We care little for so-called polite literature. We want the rugged kind. The family circle does not meet for literary exercises. We are thinking of commercialism, of money making, of gigantic locomotives, of immense bridges and tunnels, of aqueducts a hundred and thirty miles long, of skyscraping buildings, flying machines, telephones, typewriting machines, typesetting machines, electric devices. We are thinking of them until we are thinking of little else.
It is the age of the machine. Mechanical processes are doing the work that formerly demanded mental skill. The village blacksmith no longer commands admiration by his picturesque and intelligent forging of the nail and shoe--he buys them ready made by machinery. The learned shoemaker no longer artfully fashions my lady’s dainty slipper--the shoe machine punches it out. We bawl letters and dinner invitations through that mechanical device, the telephone, instead of writing them in the old fashioned courtly way. Time was when men put brains into what they did with their hands; but to-day, machines rather than brains are doing the work of the world.
Our language and our literature cannot escape the influence. Instead of the sweetly gliding words and sentences of the men who translated the Bible, the deliberation of Thackeray, the ornate embellishments of Washington Irving--instead of the soft speaking poetry of 1850 and the flossy velvet prose of 1860 our present-day writers are using whirlwind sentences and words in staccato that bite and scratch and explode. We are changing our diction from the niceties of literary expression to a blunter and a coarser form of expression.
There can be no harm in it, however. The net result is to improve the language. It is taking on the additional strength and agility and brevity that come of our industrial activity. The very magnitude of our undertakings, the very dimensions of our ambitions inspire to greatness of thought and forcefulness of speech. The red blood of war is nourishing the vitals of our language.
THE FASCINATION OF WRITING FOR THE EDITORIAL PAGE