John Mackinnon Robertson

“ It is a world with more words than knowledge, with a vocabulary constantly widening itself from the stores of other tongues, and an imagination constantly kept on the stretch by the impact of other literatures. Artistic judgment could not quite keep pace with the accumulation of literature, even in the greatest brain of the time. For Shakspere is not only euphuistic in his youth, even when bantering Euphuism; he retains to the last some of the daring exorbitance of speech which is the essential quality of Euphuism ”

“ Meredith's style is the most pronounced outbreak of preciosity in modern English literature. I here, if ever, we may allow ourselves a quasi-Pantagruelian protest. It is indeed impossible for a reader who respects Mr. Meredith's genius to read him — or at least his later works without irritation at his extraordinary ill-usage or language. Old admirers, going back to his earlier works, never free from the sin of preciosity, recognise that there has been an almost continuous deterioration the fatal law or all purposive preciosity. ”

“ The common-sense literature of the "age of prose and reason" in England, however, represents not merely the reaction against the previous preciosity of extravagance; it connects with the movement of regulation in France, with the campaign of Molière and Boileau against the preciosity of their time — that which Molière burlesqued and degraded in his farce. Here we come to a preciosity that seems in a manner the contrary of that of the Euphuists, seeing that it is consciously rather a fastidious process of purification and limitation than one of audacious adventure in language. ”

“ And between the extreme of wooden conservatism, which is the arrest of all development, and the extreme of fantastic licence, which is unstable and unhealthy development, the only standard of wholesome innovation is that set up by the strife of the opposing forces, which amounts to a rough measure of the common literary good of the society concerned. The most extravagant forms of preciosity are sure to die, whether of ridicule or of exhaustion. ”

“ That is the imagination of a man who either never knew what swimming is or has forgotten what he knew. The occurrence, as related in the novel, is an impossible dream. Mr. Meredith may be in touch with the developments of fencing — an old hobby of his — but his conception of what people do or can do in the water is pure fantasy. In this, indeed, there is pathos; and perhaps the ideal reader would see only pathos — or literary picturesque — in the kindred aberration of the novelist's prose. But when writers are still so imperfect, there can be few perfect readers. ”

“ Rather we are struck everywhere with a special sort of sensibility, a curious cleverness, an incapacity for commonplace — to say nothing of higher qualities in any one instance. Preciosity, in fact, is a misdirection of capacity, not at all a proof of incapacity for better things. And we have to look, finally, for the special conditions under which the misdirection tends most to take place. In terms of our previous conclusion, they will amount in general to some defect of regulative influence, some overbalance of the forces of individual self-will and literary sectarianism. ”

“ We end by deploring, as contemporary criticism always must, a particular case of excessive preciosity, after setting out to find the soul of goodness in the thing in general. As it was in bygone instances that we could best see the element of compensation, the saving grace, it may be that the difficulty in seeing it in contemporary cases, and above all in Mr. Meredith's, is one which will lessen for posterity; though it is hard to believe that posterity, with its ever enlarging library, will have the time to ponder all of that tormented prose, supposing it to have the patience. ”

“ It all goes to produce, not only that defect of relation to current life which we see in his unhappy style, but that further defect which consists in his lapses into unreality as a novelist. For many of us there is such unreality in those devices of plot complication to which he so inveterately clings, and which so vexatiously trip up at once our illusion and our sense of his insight into the dynamic forces of character. ”

“ The less extravagant forms are likely to have a wider vogue; and even in disappearing may leave normal style a little brighter and freer, or a little subtler, for their spell of life; though on the other hand all preciosity tends to set up a reaction towards commonplace. But in any case, all forms alike represent a certain ungoverned energy, an extravagance and exorbitance of mental activity, an exorbitance which is of course faulty as such, but which has nothing in common with mere vulgar absurdity. Molière's provincial pecques, once more, are impossible. ”

“ As M. Taine puts it, "the excess of folly in poetry, like the excess of injustice in politics, prepares and predicts revolutions." [5] And from the preciosity of literary specialists we pass rapidly to the language and the sentiment of the new man of the world, coloured only by the reminiscence of the preciosities of the past. Literature becomes the interest, if not of all, at least of all men and women of any education; and language conforms of necessity to common sense and common thought. The reign of preciosity, which is wayward one-sidedness and strenuous limitation, is over. ”

“ In an age in which culture is mainly scholarly and imaginative, and science and criticism are only nascent, the tendency will go far to colour all literature ; and, as innovation goes on in form with little or no deepening of thought, the licence of expression goes from bad to worse, poetry giving place to pedantry and technicality and verbal metaphysic, till the test of skill has come to be strangeness of expression, and polite literature in general is become a masquerade, remote from all actuality of feeling and conduct. ”

“ Lastly, we have the self-willed preciosity of Mr. Meredith, who may or may not belong to an age of decadence, but who certainly writes viciously alongside of many good writers. What is the common element or symptom in all these cases?
Clearly, as we said before, the explanation is never that of vulgar absurdity; in all, we are dealing, it may be, with egoism, with unbalanced judgment, with juvenility of intelligence, with lopsidedness, with certain faults of character ”

“ Yet in England also, under the rule of a sophisticated common sense, as in Boileau's France under the same rule, there was limitation of the intellectual life, with the old result. Poetry and drama fell into, and for two generations adhered to, new stereotyped and factitious forms, which again fostered preciosity of a kind, the preciosity of artificial and falsetto style. So much is there in common between an apparent contraction and an apparent expansion in human progress. ”

“ But the essential characteristic remains the same; it is still an innovation, a manifestation of egoism and cliqueism in taste; only the egoism is that of a very select and exclusive type, a taste which has passed through times of commotion, and calls with its unemployed nervous energy for elegance and finesse; the cliqueism is that of certain fastidious members and hangers-on of a formal and aristocratic court or upper four hundred. The new preciosity has the period of vigorous euphuism behind it, in the earlier energetic and expansive literature of Ronsard and Montaigne. ”

“ Of all the social forces which regulate the play of speech and literature, the healthiest are those of a vigorous all-round culture; and an all-round culture is just what is lacking, in the terms of the case, alike in an epoch of decadence and in an epoch of novelty. Decadence means a lack of healthy relation among the social forces, an elevation or excessive enrichment of some elements and a degradation of others. ”

“ Browning, herself magnetised by it and so on the way to a preciosity of her own, had no corrective influence. The poet in his prime was aloof from present-day English problems as well as from present-day English life; his poems, whether written at home or abroad, deal for the most part with either foreign or unlocalised and ideal life; and he finally impresses a reader as writing rather for himself than for any public. ”

“ Meredith persisted in being cryptic, eccentric, fantastic, elliptic. As if it were not enough to be artistically too subtle for his generation, he must needs persist in being gratuitously difficult and repellent as a writer, perverting a fine faculty to the bad ambition of being extraordinary, nay, to that of seeming superior. ”

“ The weaker Dryden shows it at his outset, in his complete acceptance of the fantastic ideal.
What had happened in the interval between Shakspere and Milton was the diversion of the mass of mental energy from imaginative to ratiocinative literature, from questions of aesthetics and poetry to questions of life and conduct; so that the drama passed to ineptitude in the hands of weak imitators, and poetry became essentially a pastime, though one pursued by some intelligences of remarkable eccentric power. ”

“ In imperial Rome certain prior forms of intellectual and civic energy were absolutely interdicted: hence an overplus or overbalance in other forms, of which factitious literature was one. Energies repressed and regulated in one sphere could play lawlessly in another, where formerly the force of regulation had been a general discipline of common sense, now lacking. The former rule of old and middle-age over youth was dissolved under a régime which put age and youth equally in tutelage ”

“ Ethically, then, preciosity is an assertion of individual or special personality as against the common usage of talk; in other words, it is an expression either of egoism or of cliqueism in conversation or literature. But to call it egoism and cliqueism does not settle the matter, though both words are apt to signify decisive censure. Even when used censoriously, they point, sociologically speaking, only to some excess of tendencies which up to a certain point are quite salutary. Every step in progress, in civilisation, is won by some departure from use and wont ”

“ So little security does strangeness of style give for freshness of thought.
The case is past arguing. Short of the systematic counterfeiting of the Limousin student, nearly every element that men have agreed to vituperate in preciosity is found in this insupportable idiom. And all the while we recognise it as the writing of an artist of unusual insight and originality; a novelist, if not of the very first rank, yet so powerful and so independent that to apply to him the term second-rate is not allowable. ”

“ And as the expansion of language is a most important part in intellectual progress, it follows that to set up and secure that there must come into play much self-assertion, and not a little cliqueism. The new word is frowned upon by the average man as "new-fangled" whether it be good or bad: the more complex and discriminated phrase is apt to be voted pretentious, whether it be imaginative or merely priggish. ”

“ The violent metaphor, thrust into the fore-front of the sentence to impress us in advance, remains a grinning mask which moves no more; the dragon becomes "the numerous cooks." And the satire baulks no less than the poetry ”

“ The ladies knew by heart all the phrases of Euphues, singular phrases, far-fetched and sophisticated, which are as enigmas for which the author seems determinedly to seek the least natural and the most remote expressions, full of exaggerations and antitheses, where mythological allusions, reminiscences of alchemy, metaphors from botany and astronomy, all the medley, all the pell-mell of erudition, travel, mannerism, rolls in a deluge of comparisons and conceits. ”

“ Meredith had fixed his psychological habits, and no sense of community with his generation could now avail to make him treat language as a common possession, which any one may rightly improve, but which no one may fitly seek to turn into impenetrable jungle for his own pleasure. ”

“ And here as usual we can trace good indirect results, while, as in the case of Carlyle, the activity of modern criticism and the modern prevalence of the common interest in speech over egoisms and cliqueisms have prevented any direct contagion of the faults. While preparing for himself the penalty of future neglect, as regards not a little of his over-abundant output, Browning has pushed contemporary English poetry towards vivacity, towards variety, towards intellectuality, without setting up a Browning school even in the Browning Society. ”

“ It comes from the young, the headstrong, the self-absorbed, the revolutionary, the whimsical, the one-sided, the imperfectly developed; but it never comes from mere fools — unless we are to fall back on the definition (which sometimes seems a truth) according to which fools in all ages have done a great deal for civilisation by their habit of preparing the way for the angels. ”

“ Meredith's æsthetic deviation from "the general deed of man" ; and his contemporaries have their share of responsibility; but we must recognise in him what we have recognised behind all forms of preciosity — a specific limitation or one-sidedness, a failure to develop equably and in healthy relation to all the forces of the intellectual life. It cannot indeed be said of him that he has not grown. ”