Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/93

Rh that all prècieuses were not ridiculous; but the prevailing assumption is that what he showed up was the current preciosity. Yet the fact clearly could not have been so. Supposing any one to have ever talked the jargon we hear in the farce, it could not have been such types as these. It was not perked-up middle-class Audreys, gullible by valets, blunderingly bewraying themselves, who arrived at the fine frenzy of "Voiturez-nous les commoditès de la conversation." No; preciosity was not quite what the judicious Moliere supposed it to be; and the précieuses — and this he must have known — were not at all what he represented them. He had merely used the immemorial stratagem of satirising the practice by fictitiously degrading the practitioners. He convicted it of gross and vulgar absurdity by first masking them in gross and vulgar absurdity. As a matter of fact, preciosity is the last fault to which gross and vulgar absurdity can attain.

What then is it, in essence and origin? We can take it from two points of view. Scientifically speaking, it is an attempt to deviate widely and wilfully, waywardly, from the normal forms of Rh