Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/212

198 b. Sustained archaism in narrative and dialogue.

A novelist who places his story in some former age may do so for the sake of a purely superficial variety, without any intention of troubling himself or his readers with temporal colour more than is necessary to avoid glaring absurdities; he is then not concerned with archaism at all. More commonly, however, it is part of his plan to present a living picture of the time of which he writes. When this is the case, he naturally feels bound to shun anachronism not only in externals, but in thought and the expression of thought. Now with regard to the language of his characters, it would be absurd for him to pretend to anything like consistent realism: he probably has no accurate knowledge of the language as his characters would speak it; and if he had this knowledge, and used it, he would be unintelligible to most of his readers, and burdensome to the rest. Accordingly, if he is wise, he will content himself with keeping clear of such modes of expression as are essentially modern and have only modern associations, such as would jar upon the reader's sense of fitness and destroy the time illusion. He will aim, that is to say, at a certain archaic directness and simplicity; but with the archaic vocabulary, which instead of preserving the illusion only reminds us that there is an illusion to be preserved, he will have little to do. This we may call negative archaism. Esmond is an admirable example of it, and the 'Dame Gossip' part of Mr. Meredith's Amazing Marriage is another. It hardly occurs to us in these books that the language is archaic; it is appropriate, that is all. The same may be said, on the whole, of Treasure Island, and of one or two novels of Besant's.

Only the novelist who is not wise indulges in positive archaism. He is actuated by the determination to have everything in character at all costs. He does not know very much about old English of any period ; very few people do, and those who know most of it would be the last to attempt