Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (London: Readers Union / Jonathan Cape, 1944), pp. 120-122 (Part I, IX: Recent Prose):

Typical pudding-stone is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s style though he was not a young writer when he adopted it. In his unpretentious popular novels of the ’Eighties and ’Nineties he had been at his best: with simple humorous tales of the West Country and, though avoiding any suspicion of illiteracy, with no thought of setting himself up as an authority on English. He later took up style as a simple evangelist might take up ritual; and was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. The following is a quotation from his On the Art of Writing, 1916. It is a concoction of styles which the contemporary reader was perhaps expected to taste critically with: ‘Ah! a savour of Morris! Ah! a smack of Bunyan! Ah! a touch of Henry James! Ah, oh, ah! a tang, taste, suspicion, whiff, of Burke, Hazlitt, Jeremy Taylor, Washington Irving!’

‘Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much must ever depend on who speaks, and to whom, in what mood and upon what occasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of all manner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin against the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the fair way of use and wont (as "wire", for instance, for telegram), even as surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedantic impostors, such as "anti-body" and "picture-drome", and that, generally, it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the censor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare's audacity) our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable of responding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge and experience.’

In this passage we see the first clear signs of the breakdown of prose logic that has become so evident since the end of the First World War. Even in late Victorian times, no person of Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s eminence would have dared to publish a sentence so plainly grotesque as ‘By the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue which is flexible, alive, capable of responding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge and experience.’ When the test of translation into Latin is applied, it fails at every point. No Latin orator would have figured new words as slaves to be manumitted: he would have seen them as barbarians applying for citizenship. Nor would he have figured the act of manumission as infusing new blood into anything: he would have put in the step here left out, namely, that after manumission the former slaves would be permitted to marry into their masters' families. Nor would he have written of a tongue as 'flexible and alive': he would have known that any human tongue, unless its owner happens to be paralysed, poisoned, or frozen stiff, is flexible and alive. He would therefore have avoided the word lingua (which means 'tongue' in the senses both of speech and of the organ of speech) and used instead 'modus loquendi', a 'manner of speaking'. Nor would he have admitted that a tongue into which new blood has been infused could 'respond to man's demands' as if it were a separate person or animal. Nor would he have mixed his vocabularies—Ennius with Petronius—as is done here: the Elizabethan phrase ‘I hold it a sin against the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the fair way of use and wont’ mixed with the late-Victorian devotional-scientific phrase ‘capable of responding to new demands of man’s untiring quest’.

Graves' study: Hat tip: Eric Thomson.