I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm may still be unknown to Englishmen—­“piuttosto bruttini.”  See what an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but tolerant and familiar.  You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they be condemned. Brutto—­ugly—­is the word of justice, the word for any language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the European concert.  But bruttino is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the rear—­“rather than not.”  “Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way that we need say few words about—­the fewer the better;” nay, this paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no further.  After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be composed of brass instruments.

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into which a traveller hither has to enter!  Do we possess anything here more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than our particle “un”?  Poor are those living languages that have not our use of so rich a negative.  The French equivalent in adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itself—­or hardly; it does not attain the participle; so that no French or Italian poet has the words “unloved”, “unforgiven.”  None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravest and the most majestic of all ironies.  In our English, the words that are denied are still there—­“loved,” “forgiven”:  excluded angels, who stand erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not be done.

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain of loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in sight.  All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-foretelling is the word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferable speech.  And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languages for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to their own garden enclosed, without recognition.  Never may they be disregarded or confounded with the universal stock.  If I would not so neglect piuttosto bruttini, how much less a word dominating literature!  And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no great English author but has abundant possession.  No need to recall them.  But even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full consciousness of their birthright.  Thus does a man who was hardly an author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights.  He has incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and the head he studied was, he says, full of “power and grief.”