I questioned the words of Alice, ‘Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again!’ I maintained that the sort of double-verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist.
With these scruples – not to say overscrupulosity – in mind, I was prompted to ask Pierre Coustillas, the world’s foremost authority on George Gissing – a master of plain English prose perfected by the acutest discrimination – as to whether ‘a Frenchman of equal discernment had ever noted in Gissing the use of the redundant auxiliary verb of “got” (as in “I have got” instead of “I have”).’ I added: ‘In your estimation, having read and reread Gissing, do you regard Gissing as a purist in English usage?’
For a contemporary usage, I noted that Wilde, in his Ideal Husband of 1893, has the character, Mrs. Cheveley, say: ‘You have got to promise me to suppress your report.’
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| ‘You have got to promise me . . ’ |
Linguistic oddities?
Professor Coustillas kindly replied: ‘As you seem to have guessed linguistic problems and Gissing’s use of English have been to me (and to my wife) a fascinating subject. Very rarely do we happen to notice oddities. An example which will not surprise you is his (in my opinion) faulty use – off and on – of “like” for “as”. Clara Collet* once told him about this and (surprisingly!) he declared himself surprised. But this being said, he was, I think, an excellent stylist. He was a purist. His correspondence with Kitton about their respective editorial labours for the Rochester Edition of Dickens’s works (Methuen) is interesting in this respect.
‘He certainly never uses the form used by Mrs. Cheveley! Indeed he never uses “do” with “have”. I think that looking for “I do not have” in his works and correspondence would be a waste of time.
‘Although I do not wish either you or myself to spend too much time on such problems, I am tempted to ask you whether you have noticed that very few English people ever use the word “whom” these days. The mistake which consists in using “who” for “whom” is common even among English academics. As a foreigner, such things worry me grievously.’
* Noted statistician and confidante of George Gissing and Eleanor Marx.
Evanescent conjectures . . . alleged solecism.
In the event, since this correspondence was conducted in November 2009, we never returned to these rather evanescent conjectures and, nine years later, this venerated scholar sadly was taken from us (Pierre Coustillas, literary scholar, born 11 July 1930; died 11 August 2018).
Only lately have I reconsidered the alleged solecism of ‘like’ for ‘as’.
It did not take me long to find in Demos an example of how the ‘as = like’ misconception of Gissing’s ‘impure English’ might have arisen.
In Demos, the protagonist Richard Mutimer is lower-class. On two occasions the alleged solecism can be read:
‘She never takes things like you do,’ Richard remarked.
‘You’re not going to say, like mother did, that it was the worst piece of news she’d ever heard?’
In my view, in each case the lower class colloquialisms are in character, so hardly the error Clara Collet supposedly identified.
So for loyal Gissingites the writings of our hero remain an unpolluted stream of both demotic and unadorned English in cadences regulated by a classicist, in exemplars of English prose at its neatest and nimblest because even when, without sentiment, it reaches down to explore below the Lower Depths it still issues from a source that flows faultlessly from the Heights of Parnassus.
See also . . . Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement (re. Gissing’s feminism). http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/03/escape-chute-unexpected-loophole-to.html
See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html
See also . . . Respectable Log-Rolling. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/02/?m=0
