"
Artisans, countrymen, and merchants--the ideal had been already accepted
in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the
vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman
first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the
turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers
and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of
letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered
tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir
Thomas Browne.
But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world more
difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk,
as any one may see who tries for himself--or even compares the
letter-writing with the conversation of his friends. So that this desire
of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate
art. Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with
the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the
writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality.
Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the
air, and quite unlearned people--journalists and pamphleteers and the
like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper--partook
of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists.
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