I have often fancied, in penitential moments, a day of judgment for us who write, when we shall stand in flushed array before the Ultimate Critic and answer the awful question, 'What have you done with your language?' There shall be searchings of soul that morning, and searchings of forgotten pages of magazines and 'best sellers' and books of every sort, for the cadence that may bring salvation. But many shall seek and few shall find, and the goats shall be sorted out in droves, condemned to an eternity of torture, none other than the everlasting task of listening to their own prose read aloud.
'What have you done with your language?' It is a solemn question for all of us, for you who speak as well as for us who write. Our language is a priceless heritage. It has been the ladder of life up which we climbed; with it we have bridged the sundering flood that forever rolls between man and man; through its aid have come to us the treasures of the past, the world's store of experience; by means of it our poets have wrought their measures, our philosophers their dreams. Bit by bit, precious mosaic after precious mosaic, the great body of English literature has been built up, in verse and prose, the crown of that division of language we call our own. Consciously finding itself three centuries ago, our English prose blossomed at once into the solemn splendors of the King James Bible and then into the long-drawn, ornate magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne, never again till our day to lose consciousness of its power, to forget its high and holy task, the task of maintaining our language at full tide and ministering to style and beauty. There were fluxes in the fashions, naturally; little of Browne's music being found in the almost conversational fluency (but not laxness) of Addison, even as the suave Mr. Addison himself has vanished in the tempestuous torrents of Carlyle. But there always was an Addison, a Carlyle, a Newman, a Walter Pater, whose work loomed large in popular regard, whose influence was mighty in shaping a taste for prose style. Who now, we may ask, looking around us in America, looms large in popular regard as a writer of ample vision, amply and beautifully clothed in speech, and whose influence is mighty in shaping a taste for prose style? It is not enough to have the worthies of the past upon our shelves. Each age must have its own inspiration. Again we hear the solemn question, 'What have you done with your language?' Only Ireland may answer, 'We have our George Moore, and we had our Synge not long ago--but we stoned his plays.'