Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/513

Rh take a scunner against some particular word or phrase, as we have seen in this case, and they flout it pitilessly, and think in their hearts that it is the great blemish upon the speech of the day. And, by-the-bye, one of my critics, and one who I fear rates my judgment and my knowledge much above their desert, finds fault with my own English in that I use the phrase first rate as denoting a high degree of superiority, which he says "will hardly be found in that sense in serious English composition, certainly not until within a comparatively recent period." This brought to my mind the following passage from Sir Walter Scott's "Monastery," (chapter xxviii):

and this also from Fielding's "Tom Jones," (chapter iv.):

If Walter Scott, fifty years ago, and Henry Fielding, a hundred and twenty-five, called beauties and bel esprits first rate, surely I, in these days, may, with calm indifference to consequences, so call the journal in which, and the critic by whom, I am reproved. But I had, of course, no thought of these precedents when I wrote, and should have used the phrase without scruple if it had occurred to me, even were I sure that it had never been used before. Too much stress is generally laid upon the authority of mere previous usage, which is not at all necessary to the justification of a good word or phrase. Only the other day a lawyer of distinction said to me that on the spur of the moment, before a jury, he had needed, and had made and used the word juxtapose, adding that he had no business to do so, but that it was a pity that there was no such, word in the language, or, as he said, in the dictionaries. But no man needs the authority of a dictionary (even such authority as dictionaries have), or of previous usage, for such a word as juxtapose. It is involved in juxtaposition as much as interpose and transpose in interposition and transposition. The mere fact that it had not been used before this occasion, or rather that no maker of dictionaries had happened to notice it, is of no moment whatever. Any man has the right to use a word, especially a word of such natural growth and so well rooted as juxtapose, for the first time, else we should be poorly off for language. But he must be wary and sure of his ground; for an innovator does his work at his own proper peril.