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"It is certain," said Phellion, "that the leading article seems to me to be stamped with vigor joined to an atticism which we may seek in vain in the columns of the other public prints." "Yes," said Dutocq, "the matter is very well presented; and besides, there's a turn of phrase, a clever diction, that doesn't belong to everybody. However, we must wait and see how it keeps on.
Rome gave the palm to Atticism, and modern oratory has gone still farther in the same direction, until its predominant quality has become that of making sustained appeals to the understanding. Logical vigilance and long chains of reasoning, avoided by the ancients, are the essentials of our modern oratory.
Are you bound to give Vestorius some days, and must you go through the stale banquet of his Latin Atticism again after an interval? It is exactly as if I were the imperator. The choice was just lately offered him of selecting any of the winter quarters, as he writes me word. Wouldn't you be fond of such a man as that? Of which of your friends would you, if not of him?
The student of Euripides observes a struggle, ineffectual it is true, but pregnant with meaning, against all that is most specially recognised as conservative and national. He strives to pour new wine into old bottles; but in this case the bottles are too strong for him to burst. The Atticism which had guided and comprehended, now began to cramp development.
In order to make him a true classic, it was necessary to attribute to him later a design, a plan, literary invention, qualities of atticism and urbanity of which he had certainly never dreamed in the luxuriant development of his natural inspirations. And who appear by his side?
Here is his own description of his conduct: "I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out and I hissed." It was the young Milton, in the year in which he wrote the Hymn on the Nativity.
Vergil is, of course, not greatly concerned in deriding Atticism itself: to this school Vergil must have felt less aversion than to Antony's flowery style; it is the perversion of the doctrine that amuses the poet. Taken in conjunction with other hints, these two poems show us where the poet's sympathies lay during those years of terror.
Hegesias took the former for his model, and had so vain a conceit of his own taste for Atticism, that he considered his predecessors, who were really masters of it, as mere rustics in comparison of himself. But what can be more insipid, more frivolous, or more puerile, than that very concinnity of expression which he actually acquired?" "But still we wish to resemble the Attic Speakers."
The evanescence of the large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal to us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and without pathetically enough! provoking the only answer, the plea that the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians.
But if he bestows the name of Atticism on a half-starved, a dry, and a niggardly turn of expression, provided it is neat, correct, and genteel, I cannot say, indeed, that he bestows it improperly; as the Attic Orators, however, had many qualities of a more important nature, I would advise him to be careful that he does not overlook their different kinds and degrees of merit, and their great extent and variety of character.
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