QUESTIONS OF LANGUAGE
world had problems of language in the later age of the civilization
which are not unlike ours. And
it
produced what might be called
the "Alexandrian solution"-the concentration on purity of style
and a bookish and classical language. The writer purifies and polishes
his word-forms and sentences. He may even review the earlier clas–
sical literature to find words and phrases which have dropped out of
current use, or quote ancient authors to justify himself when he is
criticized, like a theologian quoting from the canon of the fathers. ·
The word "Alexandrian" comes, of course, from the writers of the
late Hellenic period who wrote this way. The Roman writers were
also
Alexandrian in a sense. A very good example of the artificial
style of a late writer of the Alexandrian type was Apuleius, the author
of
The Golden Ass.
His bookish command of Latin enabled him
to gain fame as a prose writer and as a euphuist. The literary lan–
guage he used was a composite achievement and he drew extensively
on the early Latin writers, making remarkable use of pre-Ciceronian
phrasing which was "dead" in the first century.
It ,would be easy to make lists of euphuists at the time of the
Renaissance, or even pre-Renaissance Latin writers, who viewed
"style"
in
an archaeological spirit as Apuleius did. But if we want
to come nearer home in time it would perhaps be better to take up
instead some of the so-called decadents of the late nineteenth century.
As
soon as one mentions Apuleius, Walter Pater and
Marius
the
Epicurean
come to mind. Pater was perhaps the most articulate
exponent in modern England of the Alexandrian conception of lit–
erary work, of the polishing and refining of the now effete or "bar–
barous" spoken tongue into a classical language. Though Pater is
completely out of fashion and the cla..<:Sical aestheticism he represented
is remote from the spirit of an age of revolution and from the solution
which English prose writers have generally adopted, he nevertheless
affords an excellent example of the traditionalist attitude a man of
letters might well adopt in a period of decline.
It may seem absurd to mention Marcel Proust, who was so
much of an innovator in style, in connection with the decadent clas–
sicists. Proust's innovations, as is well known, were partly due to his
sense of time. The long sentences with their hesitations and paren–
theses expressed the nerves and sensitiveness of the writer traveling
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