Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

all advanced unhesitatingly and often into the perilous reaches of ornateeloquence. Boldest of all was Walt Whitman, who saw the necessity of desophisticatinghimself in order to achieve it. All of them were able to renewthe validity of impassioned utterance by availing themselves of a numberof novel elements.The novel element which seems to me to be of least importance wasthe presence of new words and idioms. There are no examples of this in thepage we are studying. “Bejuggled,” which Melville had already employed inMardi, is not in most dictionaries, but “juggled” has a long history on bothsides of the Atlantic. But if there are no new words, there are some examplesof novel usage.“The whale shed off enticings.” There is little doubt that De Quinceyor even Carlyle would have written “shed enticements.” “Enticings” will befollowed in the next paragraph by “hand-clappings.” These verbal nounsbased on the present participle are relatively rare in the plural. A number,after losing their dynamic force (paintings, savings, undertakings), haveentered common use, and others (understandings, risings, mumblings)are on their way to the same static condition. But we do not say laughings,shoppings, studyings, enticings, or hand-clappings. Melville in Moby Dickoffers us intertwistings, spurnings, coincidings, imminglings, and even“what lovely leewardings!” I have counted thirty-one of them. The followingyear, while writing Pierre, he will have forgotten his infatuation with pluralgerunds and will have set out to create new words in -ness, heightening theabstraction in abstract words. There we find beautifulness, domesticness(twice!), unidentifiableness, and undulatoriness—all deplorable and someof them atrocious.(Yet genius on wings can confound any of our own theoretical objections.Emily Dickinson wrote:’Tis glory’s overtakelessnessThat makes our running poor.In addition to forging our American language for us, Emily Dickinson enjoyedmany a witches’ sabbath with the language on her own.)Much of this coinage in Melville is mere huffing and purring. Ayoung man of thirty-one with barely a high-school education has remarkedShakespeare’s bold inventions without having acquired the tact thatcontrolled them. I find the plural gerunds on this page, however, completelysuccessful.202