Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/106

94 Molière and Boileau, bourgeois both, though with a great difference in their culture, represented the wholesome intrusion, even in that undemocratic age, of the larger world, of the more general interest, on the mincing cliques of the court, who had now ceased to represent any fresh intellectual force; and they were keeping the language sound, in its modern form, for the coming generations who were to use it to such manifold new purpose. But when we reflect that the language of Montesquieu and Voltaire and Rousseau remains substantially the sonorous and sinewy language of Bossuet and Pascal, and that that is the language as formed in an age of restrictive preciosity; when further we recollect that the language restricted by the English writers of the Restoration and of the reign of Anne is substantially the language of Hume and Goldsmith and Sterne; we are forced to recognise once more how far is Molière's vivacious farce from letting us see what preciosity originally and essentially is; how far the thing is from being a mere vulgar silliness. It indeed needs the faculty of the Bossuets and Pascals, the Humes and Voltaires, the Sternes and Rousseaus, to save the corrected tongue from sinking to triviality; and, once more, it is only by turning finally to the common good of national speech the results of their creative revolt that individual energy and the specialism of clique justify their audacious dealings with language.

But we see that such gain has accrued to the common stock or language from preciosity again and again; and the knowledge should make us considerate, not only in our estimate of the preciosities of the past but in our reception of what looks like preciosity in the present. First, it may only be necessary neology. But even downright constructive preciosity, albeit it stands for self-will, or an excess of innovating zeal and of appetite for change, is not blank absurdity. It comes from the young, the headstrong, Rh