Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/94

82 phrase in a given language. Now, as normal diction is as it were common property, and as every flagrant innovation in words or phrases is thus apt to be a trespass on the comfort of neighbours, or to seem a parade of superior intellectual wealth, it is likely to provoke more or less objection, which often rises to resentment. 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; and to make that departure there always needs a certain egoism, often a great deal of cliqueism. 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. 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. The less extravagant forms are likely to have a wider vogue; and even in disappearing may leave normal style a little brighter and Rh