Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1662/In Italics
IN ITALICS.
One of the innumerable characteristics of women which cause the "inextinguishable laughter" of men is the habit cherished by many of underscoring their words; writing in italics for the better direction of the reader, and the more distinct emphasizing of the sense. Like many other things, the value or worthlessness of this habit depends solely on its use or abuse. Judiciously employed, those passages underlined, those words in italics, are excellent finger-posts to the mind; but when finger-posts are put up at every field-gate and foot-wide bridle-path, the attention gets chopped up into unmeaning fragments, and the sense is lost by subdivision. With some people, however, the habit is inveterate. We have seen letters in which every line was dashed as regularly as the t's were crossed and the i's dotted. Sometimes the dashes were doubled, and not always in the right place: as, Will you come to tea to-night? or, We missed you yesterday very much; Our music was good and the singing Excellent; and so on. Editors know the kind of thing only too well from the amateur contributors who overwhelm them with their attentions. Were they to print as their untechnical correspondents write, their pages would be typographical harlequins—shape standing for colour. Italics for all the adjectives and adverbs; small capitals to all the nouns; inverted commas bracketing each well-known phrase and commonplace quotation; notes of exclamation standing sentinel at the end of every sentence; unmeaning dashes carrying the mind into the vast and vague—this is the kind of thing by which amateur writers would, if they were followed, break up the decent uniformity of bourgeois and small pica. We question, however, if the public would like the change, and we are sure that the printers would not; and even the writers themselves would feel a little surprise, if nothing more, when they saw their method translated into type, and learnt practically the need of level handwriting and a more sparing use of what we may call caligraphic expletives. A century ago, and less, italics and capitals were employed much more freely than now; as is still the case with the Germans, every noun was headed with its distinctive letter in large, while the accent was laid by means of the italicized running hand, which showed the reader what he was expected to note; but the emphasis given by both is often poor and misplaced, and the result is one of forcible feebleness and empty pomposity rather than anything else.
It is the same with certain speakers. They emphasize their words as if each began with a capital, or was to be written in italics; and their voices inflect the inverted commas and notes of admiration which, writing, they would have marked down with a broad pen and in the blackest ink. If they tell you that they have just come in from a drive in the Park where they saw the chestnut team, they speak with as much emphasis as if they were acting in a melodrama at the moment of supreme danger, or, if in graver style, as if they were relating the deliberations of a Cabinet council, dealing with the fall of empires and the creation of future history. When they shake hands with you and inquire after your health, which is in the most uninteresting condition of flawless perfection, they wring your hand for the first part till you can hardly repress your groans, and for the second they throw into their voices such an array of italics and capital letters as would be excessive and exaggerated were they asking after the condition of an invalid hovering between life and death, and whose state carried with it the welfare of more existences than his own. They mean no more than the next comer who shakes hands without torture, and speaks without emphasis, whose voice has no italics, and his words no capital letters: it is simply their way, and they emphasize by inflation, as others emphasize by adjectives and by using the largest words for the smallest events. It is very funny to listen to these emphatic people. From a distance, a stranger to their method might imagine them in deep distress, or furious wrath. They growl, they shriek, they hammer out their words, with urgent stress and swinging force; they run through their register, now high, now low, and always powerfully emphatic; but it is all nothing. They are talking about the weather, of the cattle-plague, yesterday's dinner or to-morrow's tea, and their italics are of no more value than so many painted cannon and dummy gunners, things that look formidable, but do not carry either peas or pellets.
This habit of italicizing insignificant words and unimportant phrases passes into the life as well as the voice and the handwriting of a man, and people who act in italics and Roman capitals are quite as common as those who speak and write in them. Who does not know the emphatic self-importance by which the smallest event of a man's life is as largely acted, and as much dilated on as if his whole career turned on that one pivot? Some people lose their fortunes, their best beloved, their health, and no one hears a word; others part with their cook, and the world has the fact blown through a trumpet into its ears. Every acquaintance they possess hears the whole history spoken in capital letters and italics, from the first cause of disagreement to the last of final severance; and every one is expected to find the narrative interesting, and the moral typography suitable to the occasion. To change a house with these loudly-emphasized individuals is of more importance than to others of a weaker kind is marriage or partnership; and a dinner is an event which has its array of italics, from the soup to the dessert, and from the guests to the dresses. One gets tired of all this fervour and force, this making snail-shells into pearl-oysters, and seashore pebbles into diamonds; and with so much ado about nothing one welcomes the repose of monotony itself, the rest of indifference. Colour in one's life is all very well; but it is fatiguing to see nothing but scarlet and purple before one's eyes; and even the very sky is the better for a haze as a veil and a few clouds to cast a shadow. But our emphasized friends who live in italics know nothing of haze or cloud, and the sobriety of neutral tints is a grace which they cannot compass, a beauty which they do not discern. They have no sympathy with the flowers that are born to bloom unseen, but prefer to cast their sweetness very far abroad indeed, and to make every wandering wind a messenger telling of their whereabouts and manner of being. The people who do good by stealth and blush to find it fame, are people whom they neither envy nor affect, and they not only let their left hands know all that their right do, but they let every other person's left hand know it also. Each separate act of their lives is as a new chapter, begun with a huge ornamental initial letter and ended with a tail-piece, embodying the chief incidents; while the type is printed in italics, and the substantives are made in capitals. Has my lord spoken to them civilly? No Persian manuscript is more elaborate, more ornate; no schoolgirl's letter to her bosom friend more thickly underlined and emphasized than their narration of the great event. Has a crumb fallen from the huge bakery of fortune into their laps? The world is gathered to view the fragment with a clamour to which the hen's hysterical announcement of her last-laid egg is tame and subdued. Whatever happens to them has to be announced in posters to all their friends, and if they split hairs on the one hand they make each half into ships' cables on the other.