A Poet of the 'Nineties
should weigh Theocritus and one's neighbor in one balance, I cannot, for the sake even of courtesy, cast that standard aside. I do not, however, contradict it when I say that the natural speech of one decade is not the natural speech of another. In 1590 it was the fashion of the court to parley Euphues. Shakespeare's characters use a florid speech to show their good breeding, and "Multitudinous seas incarnadine" probably got as much applause quia magniloquent as a Witticism of Wilde's quia witty. In 1600, people were interested in painted speech. It was vital. It was part of the time. For a later age it is rank affectation. Some say the "nineties" spoke as they wrote. I have heard it said that "A generation of men came down from Oxford resolved to talk as prose had been written." They had, presumably, the conviction that the speech of life and of poetry should be the same. They were quixotic. They loved the speech of books and proposed to make daily speech copy it.
Men of the renaissance had done something like this. They wrote excellent Latin, but daily speech did not follow it. Lorenzo Valla wrote invectively as Johnson might have written elegiacly, "linguam latinam magnum sacramentum est." And, indeed, Johnson wrote Latin, as beautifully as Flaminius, so far did his reverence lead him. He would have been content always writing Latin, I think, but failing that he set himself the task of bringing into English all that he could of the fineness of Latinity. He wrote an English that had grown out of Latin. He, at his worst, approached the Miltonian quagmire—the old error of supposing that
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