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CHAPTER III
AIRS AND GRACES
Certain types of humour—Elegant variation—Inversion—Archaism—Metaphor—Repetition—Miscellaneous.
Certain Types of Humour
Some of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become a part of the injudicious novice's stock-in-trade. Olfactory organ, once no doubt an agreeable substitute for 'nose', has ceased to be legal tender in literature, and is felt to mark a low level in conversation. No amount of classical authority can redeem a phrase that has once reached this stage. The warmest of George Eliot's admirers, called upon to swallow some tough morsel of polysyllabic humour in a twentieth-century novel, will refuse to be comforted with parallel passages from Adam Bede. Loyalty may smother the ejaculation that 'George Eliot knew no better': it is none the less clear to him that we know better now. A few well-worn types are illustrated below.
a. Polysyllabic humour.
He was a boy whom Mrs. Hackit had pronounced stocky (a word that etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an instrument of punishment for the refractory).—Eliot.
Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his corduroys.—Eliot.
No one save an individual not in a condition to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw...—Times.
And an observer of Miss Tox's proceedings might have inferred so much without declaratory confirmation.—Dickens.
But it had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be