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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Ben Jonson
Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mind, every day coming. Nor fetch words from the extreme and utmost ages; since the chief virtue of a style is perspicuity, and nothing so vicious in it, as to need an interpreter. Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes. For they have the authority of years, and out of their intermission do win to themselves a kind of grace-like newness. But the eldest of the present, and newness of the past language, is the best. For what was the ancient language, which some men so dote upon, but the ancient custom? Yet when I name custom, I understand not the vulgar customs: For that were a precept no less dangerous to language, than life, if we should speak or live after the manners of the vulgar: But that I call custom of speech, which is the consent of the learned; as custom of life, which is the consent of the good. Virgil was most loving of antiquity; yet how rarely doth he insert aquai and pictai! Lucretius is scabrous and rough in these; he seeks them: As some do Chaucerisms with us, which were better expunged and banished. Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we gather flowers to strew houses, or make garlands; but they are better when they grow to our style; as in a meadow, where through the mere grass and greenness delights; yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify. Marry, we must not play, or riot too much with them, as in Paranomasies: Nor use too swelling or ill-sounding words; Quae per salebras, altaque saxa cadunt. It is true, there is no sound but shall find some lovers, as the bitterest confections are grateful to some palates. Our composition must be more accurate in the beginning and end than in the midst; and in the end more than in the beginning; for through the midst the stream bears us. And this is attained by custom more than care or diligence. We must express readily, not fully, not profusely. There is difference between a liberal and a prodigal hand. As it is a great point of art, when our matter requires it, to enlarge, and veer out all sail; so to take it in not contract it is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it. Either of them hath their fitness in the place. A good man always profits by his endeavor, by his help; yea, when he is absent; nay, when he is dead by his example and memory, that, where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest.
Excerpted from Relaxations of Studies and Discoveries |
The
Cambridge Companion to Ben
Jonson,
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