Is it pushing this to point out that the monosyllables are or are nearest to Old English? That the deepest, most earthed of the languages in our many-layered tongue carry the deepest, most basic meanings? It is as if the foreign elaborations, the wonderful artifice of the new and the inserted words only really strike fire when they hit the flint of the old. Since Shakespeare’s time, one way to divide writers is between the embellished, the high extravagant stylists — Charles Dickens, James Joyce — and the more earthed — George Eliot, Samuel Beckett. Of course there was crossover in these as in
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