people. Ninety years ago, for instance, great mental force,
certainly, was needed by Wordsworth, to break through the consecrated
poetic associations of a century, and speak the language that was
his, that was to become in a measure the language of the next
generation. But he did it with the tact of a scholar also. English,
for a quarter of a century past, has been assimilating the
phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of
the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part
also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but pedants
will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For many
years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of
the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive
scholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,
for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,
rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist,
therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also
attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the
scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be apt to
restore not really obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer
edge of words still in use: ascertain, communicate, discover--words
like these it has been part of our "business" to misuse. And still,
as language was made for man, he will be no authority for
correctnesses which, limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but
accidents in their origin; as if one vowed not to say "its," which
ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his" "hers," for inanimate
objects, being but a barbarous and really inexpressive survival. Yet
we have known many things like this. Racy Saxon monosyllables, close
to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long,
savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second intention." In this late
day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably