ON FAMILIAR STYLE

William Hazlitt
It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and
suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that
requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It
utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose,
unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common
use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of
the true idiom of the language. To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as any one
would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could
discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. Or to give
another illustration, to write naturally is the same thing in regard to common conversation as to read
naturally is in regard to common speech. It does not follow that it is an easy thing to give the true accent
and inflection to the words you utter, because you do not attempt to rise above the level of ordinary life
and colloquial speaking. You do not assume, indeed, the solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone of stage
declamation; neither are you at liberty to gabble on at a venture, without emphasis or discretion, or to
resort to vulgar dialect or clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You are tied down to
a given and appropriate articulation, which is determined by the habitual associations between sense and
sound, and which you can only hit by entering into the author's meaning, as you must find the proper
words and style to express yourself by fixing your thoughts on the subject you have to write about. Any
one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write
or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to
use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express: it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that
exactly fits it. Out of eight or ten words equally common, equally intelligible, with nearly equal
pretensions, it is a matter of some nicety and discrimination to pick out the very one, the preferableness
of which is scarcely perceptible, but decisive. The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style is that there
is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but "tall, opaque words," taken from the
"first row of the rubric"—words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely
English terminations. If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary pretension, it would be fair to judge
of an author's elegance by the measurement of his words and the substitution of foreign circumlocutions
(with no precise associations) for the mother-tongue. How simple it is to be dignified without ease, to be
pompous without meaning! Surely it is but a mechanical rule for avoiding what is low, to be always
pedantic and affected. It is clear you cannot use a vulgar English word, if you never use a common
English word at all. A fine tact is shown in adhering to those which are perfectly common, and yet never
falling into any expressions which are debased by disgusting circumstances, or which owe their
signification and point to technical or professional allusions. A truly natural or familiar style can never be
quaint or vulgar, for this reason, that it is of universal force and applicability, and that quaintness and
vulgarity arise out of the immediate connection of certain words with coarse and disagreeable or with
confined ideas. The last form what we understand by cant or slang phrases.—To give an example of what
is not very clear in the general statement. I should say that the phrase To cut with a knife, or To cut a
piece of wood, is perfectly free from vulgarity, because it is perfectly common; but to cut an
acquaintance is not quite unexceptionable, because it is not perfectly common or intelligible, and has
hardly yet escaped out of the limits of slang phraseology. I should hardly therefore use the word in this
sense without putting it in italics as a license of expression, to be received cum grano salis. All provincial
or bye-phrases come under the same mark of reprobation—all such as the writer transfers to the page
from his fireside or a particular coterie, or that he invents for his own sole use and convenience. I
conceive that words are like money, not the worse for being common, but that it is the stamp of custom
alone that gives them circulation or value. I am fastidious in this respect, and would almost as soon coin
the currency of the realm as counterfeit the King's English. I never invented or gave a new and
unauthorised meaning to any word but one single one (the term impersonal applied to feelings) and that
was in an abstruse metaphysical discussion to express a very difficult distinction. I have been (I know)
loudly accused of revelling in vulgarisms and broken English. I cannot speak to that point; but so far I
plead guilty to the determined use of acknowledged idioms and common elliptical expressions. I am not
sure that the critics in question know the one from the other, that is, can distinguish any medium between
formal pedantry and the most barbarous solecism. As an author, I endeavour to employ plain words and
popular modes of construction, as, were I a chapman and dealer, I should, common weights and
measures.
The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their application. A word may
be a fine sounding word, of an unusual length, and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet
in the connection in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and irrelevant. It is not pomp or
pretension, but the adaptation of the expression to the idea, that clenches a writer's meaning:—as it is not
the size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to its place, that gives strength to the
arch; or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and
more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is
worth. I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words
without anything in them. A person who does not deliberately dispose of all his thoughts alike in
cumbrous draperies and flimsy disguises may strike out twenty varieties of familiar every-day language,
each coming somewhat nearer to the feeling he wants to convey, and at last not hit upon that particular
and only one which may be said to be identical with the exact impression in his mind. This would seem to
show that Mr. Cobbett is hardly right in saying that the first word that occurs is always the best. It may be
a very good one; and yet a better may present itself on reflection or from time to time. It should be
suggested naturally, however, and spontaneously, from a fresh and lively conception of the subject. We
seldom succeed by trying at improvement, or by merely substituting one word for another that we are not
satisfied with, as we cannot recollect the name of a place or person by merely plaguing ourselves about it.
We wander farther from the point by persisting in a wrong scent; but it starts up accidentally in the
memory when we least expected it, by touching some link in the chain of previous association.
There are those who hoard up and make a cautious display of nothing but rich and rare
phraseology—ancient medals, obscure coins, and Spanish pieces of eight. They are very curious to
inspect, but I myself would neither offer nor take them in the course of exchange. A sprinkling of
archaisms is not amiss, but a tissue of obsolete expressions is more fit for keep than wear. I do not say I
would not use any phrase that had been brought into fashion before the middle or the end of the last
century, but I should be shy of using any that had not been employed by any approved author during the
whole of that time. Words, like clothes, get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been
for some time laid aside. Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure; and
he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors that the idea of imitation is almost done away.
There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively,
of his subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress.
The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so
marked and individual as to require their point and pungency to be neutralised by the affectation of a
singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing costume, they would probably
seem more startling and out of the way. The old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas
Browne, are a kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical modern, reconciling
us to his peculiarities. I do not however know how far this is the case or not, till he condescends to write
like one of us. I must confess that what I like best of his papers under the signature of Elia (still I do not
presume, amidst such excellence, to decide what is most excellent) is the account of "Mrs. Battle's
Opinions on Whist," which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression—
A well of native English undefiled.
To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the ingenious and highly gifted
author have the same sort of charm and relish that Erasmus's Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin
have to the classical scholar. Certainly, I do not know any borrowed pencil that has more power or
felicity of execution than the one of which I have here been speaking.
It is as easy to write a gaudy style without ideas as it is to spread a pallet of showy colours, or to
smear in a flaunting transparency. "What do you read?"—"Words, words, words."—"What is the
matter?"—"Nothing," it might be answered. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is
employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal
the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine. Look
through the dictionary, and cull out aflorilegium, rival the tulippomania. Rouge high enough, and never
mind the natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural
health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only appearances, will be delighted with the
imposition. Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well. Swell out an
unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought, a distinction is the rock on which all this
brittle cargo of verbiage splits at once. Such writers have merely verbal imaginations, that retain nothing
but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all green and gold. They soar far above the vulgar
failing of the Sermo humi obrepens—their most ordinary speech is never short of an hyperbole, splendid,
imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-places. If some of us,
whose "ambition is more lowly," pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners to pick up a number of
"unconsidered trifles," they never once direct their eyes or lift their hands to seize on any but the most
gorgeous, tarnished, thread-bare, patch-work set of phrases, the left off finery of poetic extravagance,
transmitted down through successive generations of barren pretenders. If they criticise actors and
actresses, a huddled phantasmagoria of feathers, spangles, floods of light, and oceans of sound float
before their morbid sense, which they paint in the style of Ancient Pistol. Not a glimpse can you get of
the merits or defects of the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and wilful
rhodomontade. Our hypercritics are not thinking of these little fantoccini beings—
That strut and fret their hour upon the stage—
but of tall phantoms of words, abstractions, genera and species, sweeping clauses, periods that
unite the Poles, forced alliterations, astounding antitheses—
And on their pens Fustian sits plumed.
If they describe kings and queens, it is an Eastern pageant. The Coronation at either House is
nothing to it. We get at four repeated images—a curtain, a throne, a sceptre, and a footstool. These are
with them the wardrobe of a lofty imagination; and they turn their servile strains to servile uses. Do we
read a description of pictures? It is not a reflection of tones and hues which "nature's own sweet and
cunning hand laid on," but piles of precious stones, rubies, pearls, emeralds, Golconda's mines, and all the
blazonry of art. Such persons are in fact besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the
glittering but empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital letters, seas of sunbeams,
visions of glory, shining inscriptions, the figures of a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope
leaning on an anchor, make up their stock-in-trade. They may be considered as hieroglyphical writers.
Images stand out in their minds isolated and important merely in themselves, without any ground-work of
feeling—there is no context in their imaginations. Words affect them in the same way, by the mere
sound, that is, by their possible, not by their actual application to the subject in hand. They are fascinated
by first appearances, and have no sense of consequences. Nothing more is meant by them than meets the
ear: they understand or feel nothing more than meets their eye. The web and texture of the universe, and
of the heart of man, is a mystery to them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in unison with it. They
cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the varnish of sentiment. Objects are not linked to feelings,
words to things, but images revolve in splendid mockery, words represent themselves in their strange
rhapsodies. The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they
sacrifice every thing, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things. With
a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are the slaves of vulgar affectation—of a
routine of high-flown phrases. Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to invent any thing, to strike
out one original idea. They are not copyists of nature, it is true; but they are the poorest of all plagiarists,
the plagiarists of words. All is farfetched, dear-bought, artificial, oriental in subject and allusion; all is
mechanical, conventional, vapid, formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and confound the
understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear by
the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry
and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the
fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure
raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper's description of the Empress of Russia's palace of ice, "as
worthless as in show 'twas glittering"—
It smiled, and it was cold!

FROM – Table Talk (1822)