When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the books over which generation after generation of readers has hung with the deepest delight,--which have retained their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,--have been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is beauty. Simplicity is power.”
It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force their way in these days into the language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,” “monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,” and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in the language of literature and common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” “exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:
