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WORDS;
THEIR USE AND ABUSE.
BY
WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.,
AUTHOR OF “GETTING ON IN THE WORLD,” “ORATORY AND ORATORS,”
ETC., ETC.
Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende
Gedanke und beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe.--BECKER.
CHICAGO
SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY
1907
COPYRIGHT, 1876,
BY S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1884,
BY S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.
Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are
dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to
speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought
incarnate.--MAX MÜLLER.
A winged word hath struck ineradically in a million hearts, and
envenomed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged
word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human
wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it
dependent for all its future happiness.--W. S. LANDOR.
Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon
a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,
think.--BYRON.
A dead language is full of all monumental remembrances of the
people who spoke it. Their swords and their shields are in it;
their faces are pictured on its walls; and their very voices ring
still through its recesses.--B. W. DWIGHT.
Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph....
If Milton had endorsed a bill of exchange with half-a-dozen
blank-verse lines, it would be as good as his name, and would be
accepted as good evidence in court.--ALEXANDER SMITH.
If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make
melody with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself,
what is it? Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at
best make money by railways.--CARLYLE.
Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted
with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or
it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious
association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the
mere fascination of the syllables.--T. W. HIGGINSON.
Accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use, hear, or read,
their birth, derivation, and history. For if words are not things,
they are living powers, by which the things of most importance to
mankind are actuated, combined, and harmonized.--COLERIDGE.
Words possess an endless, indefinable, tantalizing charm. They
paint humanity in its thoughts, longings, aspirations, struggles,
failures--paint it upon a canvas of breath, in the colors of
life.--ANON.
Ye know not what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words,
but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the
Heart.--ASCHAM.
Let him who would rightly understand the grandeur and dignity of
speech, meditate on the deep mystery involved in the revelation of
the Lord Jesus as the Word of God.--F. W. FARRAR.
Words are lighter than the cloud foam
Of the restless ocean spray;
Vainer than the trembling shadow
That the next hour steals away;
By the fall of summer rain-drops
Is the air as deeply stirred;
And the rose leaf that we tread on
Will outlive a word.
Yet on the dull silence breaking
With a lightning flash, a word,
Bearing endless desolation
On its blighting wings, I heard.
Earth can forge no keener weapon,
Dealing surer death and pain,
And the cruel echo answered
Through long years again.
I have known one word hang star-like
O’er a dreary waste of years,
And it only shone the brighter
Looked at through a mist of tears,
While a weary wanderer gathered
Hope and heart on life’s dark way,
By its faithful promise shining
Clearer day by day.
I have known a spirit calmer
Then the calmest lake, and clear
As the heavens that gazed upon it.
With no wave of hope or fear;
But a storm had swept across it.
And its deepest depths were stirred.
Never, never more to slumber.
Only by a word.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
The unexpected favor with which this work has been received by the
public from year to year, since its publication in 1873, has made
the author anxious to render it more worthy of regard. He has,
therefore, carefully revised the work, corrected some errors, and
added two new chapters, one on “Onomatopes,” the other on “Names of
Men,” besides many pages on the subjects of the other chapters.
Professor G. P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,”
quotes the saying of a distinguished British scholar of the last
century, that he had known but three of his countrymen who spoke
their native language with uniform grammatical accuracy; and the
Professor adds that “the observation of most persons acquainted
with English and American society confirms the general truth
implied in this declaration.” In this statement, made by one of
the most eminent philologists of the day, is found, at least,
a partial justification of works like the present, if they are
properly written. The author is well aware that, in writing such a
book, he is obnoxious to the complaint of Goethe, that “everybody
thinks that, because he can speak, he is entitled to speak about
language;” he is aware, too, that in his criticisms on the misuses
and abuses of words, he has exposed himself to criticism; and it
may be that he has been guilty of some of the very sins which he
has condemned. If so, he sins in good company, since nearly all of
his predecessors, who have written on the same theme, have been
found guilty of a similar inconsistency, from Lindley Murray down
to Dean Alford, Breen, Moon, Marsh, and Fowler. If the public is
to hear no philological sermons till the preachers are faultless,
it will have to wait forever. “The only impeccable authors,” says
Hazlitt, “are those who never wrote.”
It is hardly necessary to add that the work is designed for popular
reading, rather than for scholars. How much the author is indebted
to others, he cannot say. He has been travelling, in his own way,
over old and well worn ground, and has picked up his materials
freely from all the sources within his reach. _Non nova, sed nové_,
has been his aim; he regrets that he has not accomplished it more
to his satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does not
need new thoughts so much as it needs that old thoughts be recast.
There are some writers, however, to whom he has been particularly
indebted; they are Archbishop Trench, the Rev. Matthew Harrison,
author of “The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English
Language,” Professor G. P. Marsh, and especially Archdeacon F. W.
Farrar, the last of whom in his three linguistic works has shown
the ability to invest the driest scientific themes with interest. A
list of the books consulted will be found on pages 479, 480.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE MORALITY IN WORDS 62
CHAPTER III.
GRAND WORDS 105
CHAPTER IV.
SMALL WORDS 139
CHAPTER V.
WORDS WITHOUT MEANING 158
CHAPTER VI.
SOME ABUSES OF WORDS 177
CHAPTER VII.
SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 194
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SECRET OF APT WORDS 210
CHAPTER IX.
THE SECRET OF APT WORDS (continued) 229
CHAPTER X.
ONOMATOPES 242
CHAPTER XI.
THE FALLACIES IN WORDS 257
CHAPTER XII.
THE FALLACIES IN WORDS (continued) 295
CHAPTER XIII.
NAMES OF MEN 323
CHAPTER XIV.
NICKNAMES 345
CHAPTER XV.
CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE 367
CHAPTER XVI.
COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH 424
INDEX 481
WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS.
“Speech is morning to the mind;
It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.”
La parole, cette main de l’esprit.--CHARRON.
Syllables govern the world.--COKE.
To the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the common operations
of life, which, but for their commonness, would be deemed full of
marvel, few things are more wonderful than the origin, structure,
history and significance of words. The tongue is the glory of man;
for though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet language,
which gives us a duplicate and multipliable existence,--enabling
mind to communicate with mind,--is the Rubicon which they never
have dared to cross. The dog barks as it barked at the creation;
the owl hoots in the same octaves in which it screamed ages ago;
and the crow of the cock is the same to-day as when it startled
the ear of repentant Peter. The song of the lark and the howl
of the leopard have continued as unchangeable as the concentric
circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee; and even
the stoutest champion of the orang-outang theory of man’s origin
will admit that no process of natural selection has yet distilled
significant words out of the cries of beasts or the notes of birds.
Though we have little reason to doubt that animals think, there is
yet no proof that a single noise made by them expresses a thought,
and especially an abstraction or a generalization, properties
characterizing the language of man. He only, in this world, is
able to classify objects which in some respects resemble, and in
others differ from one another, and to analyze and decompound the
various objects of thought; and to him is limited the privilege
of designating by arbitrary signs, and describing by distinctive
terms, the things he thus comprehends. Speech is a divine gift. It
is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon His intelligent
offspring, and proves, more conclusively than his upright form,
or his looks “commercing with the skies,” that he was made in
the image of God. Without this crowning gift to man, even reason
would have been comparatively valueless; for he would have felt
himself to be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the
midst of a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his race would
have been as uninstructive as that of barbarians and savages. The
rude tongue of a Patagonian or Australian is full of wonders to
the philosopher; but as we ascend in the scale of being from the
uncouth sounds which express the desires of a savage to the lofty
periods of a Cicero or a Chatham, the power of words expands until
it attains to regions far above the utmost range of our capacity.
It designates, as Novalis has said, God with three letters, and
the infinite with as many syllables, though the ideas conveyed by
these words are immeasurably beyond the utmost grasp of man. In
every relation of life, at every moment of our active being, in
every thing we think or do, it is on the meaning and inflection of
a _word_ that the direction of our thoughts, and the expression of
our will, turn. The soundness of our reasonings, the clearness of
our belief and of our judgment, the influence we exert upon others,
and the manner in which we are impressed by our fellow-men,--all
depend upon a knowledge of the value of words. It is in language
that the treasures of human knowledge, the discoveries of Science,
and the achievements of Art are chiefly preserved; it is language
that furnishes the poet with the airy vehicle for his most
delicate fancies, the orator with the elements of his electrifying
eloquence, the savant with the record of his classification,
the metaphysician with the means of his sharp distinction, the
statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the philosopher
with the earthly instrument of his heaven-reaching induction.
“Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an opponent in
the National Assembly, “are _things_;” and truly they were such
when _he_ thundered them forth from the Tribune, full of life,
meaning and power. Words are always things, when coming from the
lips of a master-spirit, and instinct with his own individuality.
Especially is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who
have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for thoughts,
and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed by the whole
Third Estate of a nation. Their words are not merely things, but
_living_ things, endowed with power not only to communicate ideas,
but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock and thrill
which attended their birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did
not exaggerate when he said that “words are the only things that
live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces, mausoleums
and monuments built at enormous cost and during years of toil to
perpetuate the memory or preserve the ashes of ancient kings,
have perished, and left not even a trace of their existence. The
pyramids of Egypt have, indeed, escaped in some degree the changes
and chances of thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly
engulf these masses of stone, and “leave the sand of the desert as
blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A sudden
accident may cause the destruction of the finest masterpieces of
art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvedere, or the Venus
de Medicis, upon which millions have gazed with rapture, may be
hopelessly injured or irretrievably ruined. A mob shivers into dust
the statue of Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs
seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless director of
the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of Correggio’s “Notte,”
where the light breaks from the heavenly child, and deprives the
picture of one of its fairest charms; an inferior pencil retouches
the great Vandyck at Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its
colors; and though no such mishap as these befall the product of
the painter’s skill, yet how often,--
“When a new world leaps out at his command,
And ready nature waits upon his hand;
When the ripe colors soften and unite,
And sweetly melt into just shade and light;
When mellowing years their full perfection give
And each bold figure just begins to live.
The treacherous colors the fair art betray,
And all the bright creation fades away.”
Not so with words. The language which embodies the ideas and
emotions of a great poet or thinker, though entrusted to perishable
ink and paper, which a moth or a few drops of water may destroy,
is indestructible, and, when his body has turned to dust, he
continues to rule men by the power of his thought,--not “from his
urn,” like a dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his
very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. Look at
the “winged words” of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath
of his own spiritual life; how long have they kept on the wing! For
twenty-five or thirty centuries they have maintained their flight
across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and
the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and they
are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. “The ‘Venus’
of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have vanished, and the
music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain
unfaded, and the ‘chained Prometheus’ has outlived the ‘Cupid’ of
Praxiteles, and the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.”
“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A word fitly spoken,”
says Solomon, “is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”
No artificer’s hand, however cunning, can contrive a mechanism
comparable with those masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought
by him who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid
words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful than any of
inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly estimated the power
of language. In anatomical museums one will sometimes see the
analysis of a man,--that is, the mere chemical constituents, so
much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead
substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man,
with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words
in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs of
ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced
the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies
of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a
Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in
full operation; how his words tell upon his adversary, battering
down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance!
Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are
words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind
to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive
the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with
what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican
bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the
very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that
of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? “Scholars,” says Sir
Thomas Browne, “are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their
tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further
and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock
of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.”
The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as
his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his
thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said,
“his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin;
and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive.”
Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named,
and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of
his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the
words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought.
Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you
will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind
and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous
exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even
the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the
force and completeness of the author’s idea. If any other words
can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling
rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this
is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a
linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself
a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of
any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you
may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not
one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there.
Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you
might as well think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a
wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any
of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”
Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends
on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that
his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse.
In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings,
no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering
contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s
melodies,--
“Untwisting all the links that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.”
But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies the mind
through conductors. His words, as Macaulay declares, are charmed.
Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. “No sooner are
they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New
forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial
places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of
the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole
effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should
then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken
as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat,’
‘Open Barley,’ to the door which obeyed no sound but ‘Open Sesame.’”
The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the
simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the
largest of land animals, in “Paradise Lost.” In a single line the
unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that
we almost involuntarily start aside from fear of being crushed by
the living mass:--
“Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved
His vastness.”
Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates threatens
the Arch-Fiend, Satan:--
“Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings,
Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue
Thy lingering,--or, with one stroke of this dart,
Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!”
“The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “is felt through every
movement of this sentence, especially toward the close, where it
seems to grapple with the throat of the reader; the hard _staccato_
stops that well might take the breath, in attempting to pronounce
‘or, with one stroke of this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of
sound in the last line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in
which, though a full syllable is interpolated even at the cæsural
pause, it is carried off almost without the reader perceiving the
surplusage.” No poet better understood than Milton the art of
heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional sacrifice
of their harmony. By substituting quantities for accented verse,
he produces an effect like that of the skilful organist who throws
into the full tide of instrumental music an occasional discord,
giving intenser sweetness to the notes that follow.
It is this necromantic power over language,--this skill in striking
“the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” till its
vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes
ring in all the secret chambers of the soul,--which blinds us to
the absurdities of “Paradise Lost.” While following this mighty
magician of language through
---- “many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”
we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with
“villanous saltpetre” and divinities talk Calvinism, puts the
subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the
Omnipotent Father arguing like a school divine. As with Milton,
so with his great predecessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power
of creating pictures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the
directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “the
invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence
describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which
displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with
dreadful faces at the window.”
The difference in the use of words by different writers is as
great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and
there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding
and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with
Bacon’s writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences,
so dense with pith, and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him,
it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient
instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower
order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.
“All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift of
expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should
prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it; or
rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was
overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly provoked.”
Who that is familiar with Dryden’s “full, resounding line,” has
not admired the magic effects he produces with the most familiar
words? Macaulay well says that in the management of the scientific
vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary, Gibbons,
succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak.
The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile
at his touch. Emerson, in speaking of the intense vitality of
Montaigne’s words, says that if you cut them, they will bleed.
Joubert, in revealing the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He
imparted, if I may so speak, _bowels of feeling_ to the words he
used (_donna des entrailles à tous les mots_), and poured into them
such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that
his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of
those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate
our understanding.” So in the weird poetic fictions of Coleridge
there is an indescribable witchery of phrase and conceit that
affects the imagination as if one had eaten of “the insane root
that takes the reason prisoner.”
How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to “the fitting of
aptest words to things,” which we find on every page of his poetry!
He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret
of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm,
alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick
of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the
memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,
“Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,”
and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his
ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E.
C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s marvellous gift of melody,
asks: “Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born
a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious
of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we
did not know were in the language--a softness that seemed Italian,
a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair
lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a
score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced,
partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects
untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of
metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single
trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler,
and all words seem to be in his hands.”
Words, with such men, are “nimble and airy servitors,” not masters,
and from the exquisite skill with which they are chosen, and the
firmness with which they are knit together, are sometimes “half
battles, stronger than most men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the
weird-like power of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English
writers, he has the most imperial dominion over the resources
of expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the
precise significance of every word he uses; that he has conquered
so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular as to render it
a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, the ever-shifting,
kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? Turn to whatever page
you will of his writings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his
subject, the enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and
piercing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite
your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man who has
gauged the potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the
simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our stiff Saxon
language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to
defy expression,--ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that
most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,--are
conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that
might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a
great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as
living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great
writers possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy
and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;
“And now ’tis like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute,
And now it is an angel’s song,
That makes the heavens be mute.”
The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century to those
of our own day is due not less to their choice and collocation
of words than to their weight of thought. There was no writing
public nor reading populace in that age; the writers were few
and intellectual, and they addressed themselves to learned, or,
at least, to studious and thoughtful readers. “The structure of
their language,” says Henry Taylor, “is itself an evidence that
they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different pace and
speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the
writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched
up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction,
therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impatience,
making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read.
Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over what was
pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and prolific
posture of mind by which, if he had wings, they might help him to
some more genial and profitable employment than that of running
like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics
of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those
who have followed them to train the ear and utterance of a poet.
For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days,
with all their convolutions and intertextures,--the many parts
waiting for the ultimate wholeness,--we shall perceive that without
distinctive movement and rhythmical significance of a very high
order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in
any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences is often
in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes,
its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though
conscious of plural voices and running divisions of thought,
is not, however, permitted to dissociate them from their mutual
concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them
entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as
one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately
constructed, and complex, though musical, are not easy to a remiss
reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader.”
Few persons are aware how much knowledge is sometimes necessary
to give the etymology and definition of a word. In 1839 the
British Court of Queen’s Bench,--Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Justice
Coleridge, the Attorney General, Sir J. Campbell, and other learned
lawyers,--disputed for some hours about the meaning of the word
“upon,” as a preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or
“before.” It is easy to define words as certain persons satirized
by Pascal have defined _light_: “A luminary movement of luminous
bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined _murder_ to a jury:
“Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is murderously killed. It is the
_murdering_ that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Murder,
in short, is--murder.” We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition
of _network_: “Network--anything reticulated or decussated at
equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” Many
of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of Bardolph’s
attempt to analyze the term _accommodation_: “Accommodation,--that
is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is
being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an
excellent thing.” _Brimstone_, for example, the lexicographer
defines by telling us that it is _sulphur_; and then rewards us for
the trouble we have had in turning to _sulphur_, by telling us
that it is _brimstone_. The eccentric Davy Crockett, whose exterior
roughness veiled a great deal of mother wit, happily characterized
this whole tribe of lexicographers by a remark he once made to
a Western member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a
bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his hearers
by incessant repetition,--“Sit down,” whispered Crockett, “you
are coming out of the same hole you went in at.” There is a
mythical story that the forty members of the French Academy once
undertook to define the word _crab_, and hit upon this, which they
deemed quite satisfactory: “Crab,--a small red fish, which walks
backward.” “Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when interrogated
touching the correctness of the definition; “perfect,--only I will
make one small observation in natural history. The crab is _not_ a
fish, it is _not_ red, and it does _not_ walk backward. With these
exceptions, your definition is admirable.” Too many easily made
definitions are liable to similar damaging exceptions.
The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the exact idea
is understood, in all its relations, which the word is designed
to represent. Let a man undertake to define the word “alkali”
or “acid,” for instance, and he will have to encounter some
pretty hard problems in chemistry. Lavoisier, the author of the
terminology of modern chemistry, tells us that when he undertook
to form a nomenclature of that science, and while he proposed to
himself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his
work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being able
to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of chemistry.
Often a theory or an argument, which seems clear and convincing in
its disembodied form, is found to be incoherent and altogether
unsatisfactory as soon as it is fixed in words on paper. Samuel
Bailey, who held a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley’s
“Theory of Vision,” tells us that having, in the course of a
philosophical discussion, occasion to explain it, he found, on
attempting to state _in his own language_ the grounds on which
it rested, that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear
and conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined,
therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dispassionate
examination; and the result was a clear conviction of the
erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philosophical grounds for
which conviction he has so ably and luminously set forth in his
book on the subject. The truth is, accurate definitions of the
terms of any science can only follow accurate and sharply defined
notions of the science itself. Try to define the words _matter_,
_substance_, _idea_, _will_, _cause_, _conscience_, _virtue_,
_right_, and you will soon ascertain whether you have grappled with
the grand problems or only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics
and ethics.
Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge furnished
him of the etymology of a word. He was engaged in a case where
the matter at issue was certain river-rights, especially touching
a branch of the stream known by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His
clients were in possession of rights formerly possessed by a
defunct salmon-fishing company, formed by strangers from Denmark,
and they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir” for
the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party contended
that it should be open to navigation. A natural inference from
the name of the piece of water in question seemed to turn the
scale against O’Connell; for how could he establish the right to
make that a close weir which, ever since the first existence of
the fishery, had been notoriously a lax one? His cause seemed
desperate, and he had given up all hope of success, when victory
was wrested from his adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of
paper that was handed to him across the court. These lines informed
him that in the language of Germany, and the north of Europe,
_lachs_, or _lax_, means a salmon. The “Lax Weir” was simply a
salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philological knowledge,
O’Connell won not only a verdict for his client, but for himself a
great and sudden growth of his reputation as a young advocate.
Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the study of words.
Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed in the study of an English
dictionary. Lord Chatham read the folio dictionary of Bailey
twice through, examining each word attentively, dwelling on its
peculiar import and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring
to bring the whole range of our language completely under his
control. One of the most distinguished American authors is said
to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through about once a
year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms has provoked at times
the charge of pedantry; but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used
the wealth of the language that lies buried in the pages of Noah
Webster. It is only by thus working in the mines of language that
one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the
necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using these with
no subtle discrimination of their meanings. William Pinkney, the
great American advocate, studied the English language profoundly,
not so much to acquaint himself with the nice distinctions of
its philosophical terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and
splendor of expression. He studied the dictionary, page after
page, content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole
language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and derivative
stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students; “You don’t
want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air,
common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is
full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and
power.” The leading languages of the world are full of such words,
“opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record
civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of eloquence, or
of noble poetry, and bring in their train the whole splendor of
such passages, when they are uttered.”
Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command the largest
possible number of terms, both “rich and rare,”--words most vivid
and effective,--really spirit-stirring words; for words there are,
as every poet knows, whose sound is an echo to the sense,--words
which, while by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the
mind, have also a sound and an association which are like music to
the ear, and a picture to the eye,--vivid, graphic, and picturesque
words, that make you almost see the thing described. It is said
of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, he
became a critic of their thoughts, their words, their rhymes, and
their cadences. He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; and
often, when he met a quaint or delicious word in the course of his
reading, he would take pains to make it his own by using it, as
speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon expressions
like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser, he would dwell with
an ecstasy of delight. It is said of Theophile Gautier, whose
language is remarkable for its copiousness and splendor, that
he enriched his picturesque vocabulary from the most recondite
sources, and that his favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved
words for themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and
kept a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced at
effective points.
The question has been often discussed whether, if man were
deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able to think,
and to express his thought. The example of the deaf and dumb, who
evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,--using
combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols
of their thought,--appears to show that he might find a partial
substitute for his present means of reflection. The telegraph
and railway signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are
quickly familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the
steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words to which
it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated with a
particular act, and the interposition of words becomes useless. It
is well known that persons skilled in gesticulation can communicate
by it a long series of facts and even complicated trains of
thought. Roscius, the Roman actor, claimed that he could express
a sentiment in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures
than Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus,
both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful effect, by
pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted help from the Spartans,
and threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, declaring
that “it lacked meal,” these verbal economists said that “the
mention of the sack was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors
wished to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their
country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far more
cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two
arrows, to imply that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like
a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be
able to escape their shafts. Every one has heard of the Englishman
in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay
before him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the words
“Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy
that it is said that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after
the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the
lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and
though made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly
intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally affirmed that
the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly
by facial signs, not even the hand being employed. Energetic and
faithful, however, as gesture is as a means of expression, it is
in the domain of feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and
enforcing our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The
conventionality of language, which can be parroted where there is
little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its force;
and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or a gesture is
often more eloquent than the most elaborate speech. But it is only
the most general facts of a situation that gesture can express; it
is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and utterly
fails to express the delicate shades of difference of which verbal
expression is capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan,
and laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone
and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective,
and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a judgment, or a
cognition.
Facts like these tend to show that man might still have been,
as the root of the word “man” implies in Sanskrit, “a thinking
being,” though he had never been a “speech-dividing” being; but it
is evident that his range of thought would have been exceedingly
narrow, and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have been
impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that
“Thought leapt out to wed with thought,
Ere thought could wed itself to speech,”
yet there is an intimate relation between _ratio_ and _oratio_,
and it may well be doubted whether, without _some_ signs, verbal
or of another sort, thought, except of the simplest kind, would
not have been beyond man’s power. Long use has so familiarized
us with language, we employ it so readily, and without conscious
effort, that we are apt to regard it as a matter of course, and
become blind to its mystery and deep significance. We rarely
think of the long and changeful history through which each word
we utter has passed,--of the many changes in form and changes in
signification it has undergone,--and of the time and toil spent in
its invention and elaboration by successive generations of thinkers
and speakers. Still less do we think how different man’s history
would have been, how comparatively useless would have been all
his other endowments, had God not given him the faculties “which,
out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts,
the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind, and his
own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the great instrument
that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and Massillon wielded, the
instrument by which the laws of the universe are unfolded, and the
subtle workings of the human heart brought to light.” Language is
not only a means of communication between man and man, but it has
other functions hardly less important. It is only by its aid that
we are able to analyze our complex impressions, to preserve the
results of the analysis, and to abbreviate the processes of thought.
Were we content with the bare reception of visual impressions, we
could to some extent dispense with words; but as the mind does
not receive its impressions passively, but reflects upon them,
decomposes them into their parts, and compares them with notions
already stored up, it becomes necessary to give to each of these
elements a name. By virtue of these names we are able to keep
them apart in the mind, and to recall them with precision and
facility, just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the
gardener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the
substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which when past
might have been dissipated forever, are by their connection with
language brought always within reach. Who can estimate the amount
of investigation and thought which are represented by such words
as _gravitation_, _chemical affinity_, _atomic weight_, _capital_,
_inverse proportion_, _polarity_, and _inertia_,--words which are
each the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of
anterior mental processes, and which may be compared to the paper
money, or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be
inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest centres of
commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience that would result,
and the degree in which mental activity would be arrested, were we
compelled to do without these comprehensive words which epitomize
theories, sum up the labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge
future mental processes? The effect would be to restrict all
scientific discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would
be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with iron
or copper as the sole medium of mercantile intercourse.
Language has thus an educational value, for in learning words
we are learning to discriminate things. “As the distinctions
between the relations of objects grow more numerous, involved,
and subtle, it becomes more analytic, to be able to express them;
and, inversely, those who are born to be the heirs of a highly
analytic language, must needs learn to _think up_ to it, to
observe and distinguish all the relations of objects, for which
they find the expressions already formed; so that we have an
instructor for the thinking powers in that speech which we are apt
to deem no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two things,
indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of language and
poverty of thought. Language is, on one side, as truly the limit
and restraint of thought, as on the other that which feeds and
sustains it. Among the “inarticulate ones” of the world, there
may be, for aught we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as
grand, pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain
of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express their
conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to themselves,
they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons” forever. A man of
genius who is illiterate, or who has little command of language,
is like a painter with no pigments but gray and dun. How, then,
shall he paint the purple and crimson of the sunset? Though he may
have made the circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders
of Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond
commonplace. In bridging the chasm between such a man and one of
high culture, the acquisition of words plays as important a part as
the acquisition of ideas.
It has been justly said that no man can learn from or communicate
to another more than the words they are familiar with either
express or can be made to express. The deep degradation of the
savage is due as much to the brutal poverty of his language as to
other causes. This poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the
power of abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A
savage may have a dozen verbs for “I am here,” “I am well,” “I am
thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “am”: he may have a dozen
words for “my head,” “your head,” etc.; but he can hardly conceive
of a head apart from its owner. Nearly all the tongues of the
American savages are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even
whole sentences are compressed together so violently, that often no
single syllable would be capable of separate use. The Abbé Domenech
states that such is the absolute deficiency of the simplest
abstractions in some of these languages that an Indian cannot say
“I smoke” without using such a number of concrete pictures that his
immensely long word to represent that monosyllabic action means:
“I breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone bowl
wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea of “day,” the
Pawnees use such a word as _shakoorooceshairet_, and their word
for “tooth” is the fearful polysyllable _khotsiakatatkhusin_! The
word for “tongue” in Tlatskanai has twenty-two letters. Though
these vocables, which bristle with more consonants than the
four sneezes of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De
Quincey says, “to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexican
has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language the common
address to a priest is the one word _Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzin_;
that is, “Venerable priest, whom I honor as a father.” A fagot is
_tlatlatlalpistiteutli_, and “if the fagot were of green wood, it
could hardly make a greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would
have been obliged to say “I love you,” in this language, in this
style, _ni-mits-tsikāwakā-tlasolta_; and instead of a kiss he
would have had to ask for a _tetenna-miquilitzli_. “_Dieu merci!_”
exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “_quand on a
prononcé le mot on a bien mérité la chose_.”
It is easy to see, from these facts, what an obstacle the language
of the savage presents to his civilization. Let us suppose a savage
to possess extraordinary natural endowments, and to learn any one
of the leading languages of Europe; is it not easy to see that he
would find himself prepared for labor in departments of mental
effort which had been before utterly inaccessible to him, and that
he would feel that his powers had been cheated out of their action
by this possession of only inferior tools? Hence the knowledge of
words is not an elegant accomplishment only, not a luxury, but
a positive necessity of the civilized and cultivated man. It is
necessary not only to him who would express himself, but to him
who would _think_, with precision and effect. There is, indeed, no
higher proof of thorough and accurate culture than the fact that
a writer, instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard,
chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his thought. As
he only can be called a well dressed man whose clothes exactly fit
him, being neither small and shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so
it is the first characteristic of a good style that the words fit
close to the ideas. They will be neither too big here, hanging like
a giant’s robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like
a boy’s garments into which a man has painfully squeezed himself;
but will be the exact correspondents and perfect exponents of his
thought. Between the most synonymous words a careful writer will
have a choice; for, strictly speaking, there are no synonyms in a
language, the most closely resembling and apparently equivalent
terms having some nice shade of distinction,--a fine illustration
of which is found in Ben Jonson’s line, “Men may _securely_ sin,
but _safely_ never”; and, again, in the reply with which Sydney
Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in England:
“Pooh! pooh! it is the worst _educated_ country in the world, I
grant you; but it is the best _instructed_.” William Pitt was a
remarkable example of this precision of style. Fox said of him:
“Though I am myself never at a loss for a word, Pitt not only has
_a_ word, but _the_ word,--the very word,--to express his meaning.”
Robert Hall chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety,
and he gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could
so rarely approach the realization of his own _beau-idéal_ of a
perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was correcting
the proofs of his sermon on “Modern Infidelity,” on coming to the
famous passage, “Eternal God, on what are thine enemies intent?
What are those enterprises of guilt and horror, that, for the
safety of their performers, require to be enveloped in a darkness
which the eye of Heaven must not penetrate?”--he exclaimed to his
friend, Dr. Gregory: “_Penetrate!_ did I say _penetrate_, sir, when
I preached it?” “Yes.” “Do you think, sir, I may venture to alter
it? for no man who considers the force of the English language
would use a word of three syllables there but from absolute
necessity. For _penetrate_ put _pierce_: _pierce_ is the word, sir,
and the only word, to be used there.”
John Foster was a yet more striking example of this
conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. Never,
perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of whose mind,
telegraphing with all nature’s works, was so in contrast with
its action in writing. Here it was almost painfully slow, like
the expression of some costly oil, drop by drop. He would spend
whole days on a few short sentences, passing each word under his
concentrated scrutiny, so that each, challenged and examined, took
its place in the structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks.
When Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster was
about, he replied: “Hard at it, at the rate of a line a week.”
Read a page of the essay on “Decision of Character,” and you will
feel that this was scarcely an exaggeration,--that he stood by the
ringing anvil till every word was forged into a bolt. Few persons
know how hard easy writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling
verse of Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and
anxious thought, which a single word often cost him? Irving tells
us that he was once riding with the Irish poet in the streets of
Paris, when the hackney-coach went suddenly into a deep rut, out of
which it came with such a jolt as to send their pates bump against
the roof. “By Jove, _I’ve got it_!” cried Moore, clapping his hands
with great glee. “Got what?” said Irving. “Why,” said the poet,
“that _word_ I’ve been hunting for six weeks, to complete my last
song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me.”
The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice and
fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and arrangement of
words. Virgil, after having spent eleven years in the composition
of the Æneid, intended to devote three years to its revision; but,
being prevented by his last sickness from giving it the finishing
touches which his exquisite judgment deemed necessary, he directed
his friends to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his
style, transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that it
was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for delivery
in public, should write down his thoughts,--he must, as it were,
_sculpture_ them in brass. He must not content himself with that
loose use of language which characterizes a thoughtless fluency,
but his words must have a precise and exact look, like newly
minted coin, with sharply cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes
himself “recked his own rede” in this matter we have abundant proof
in almost every page of his great speeches. In his masterpieces
we are introduced to mysteries of prose composition of which
the moderns know nothing. We find him, as a German critic has
remarked, bestowing incredible pains, not only upon the choice of
words, but upon the sequence of long and short syllables, not in
order to produce a regularly recurring metre, but to express the
most various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-changing
rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with reference to
their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the action for which his
name is a synonym, that he exhibits his consummate dexterity as
an orator. Change their order, and you at once break the charm.
The rhythm, in fact, _is_ the sense. You destroy the significance
of the sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity
of the meaning as well as the verbal force. “At his pleasure,”
says Professor Marsh, “he separates his lightning and his thunder
by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget the coming
detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the dazzling flash
with a pealing explosion that stuns, prostrates and crushes the
stoutest opponent.”
Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of euphonic
sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange their words in such
a succession of articulate sounds as would fall most pleasingly
on the ear. The wonderful effects which sometimes attended their
elocution were, in all probability, chiefly owing to their
exquisite choice of words and their skill in musical concords.
It was by the charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of
reason, that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent
Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power of
recollection when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting
rhetoric; it was this that made even Cæsar himself tremble, and
at last change his determined purpose, and acquit the man he had
resolved to condemn. When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced,
on a certain occasion, the sentence, “_Patris dictum sapiens
temeritas filii comprobavit_,” it was astonishing, says Cicero, to
observe the general applause which followed that harmonious close.
Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that period
with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us that had the final
measure,--what is technically called a _dichoree_,--been changed,
and the words placed in a different order, their whole effect would
have been absolutely destroyed. With the same exquisite sensibility
to numbers, an ancient writer says that a similar result would
follow, if, in reading the first line of the Æneid,
“Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris.”
instead of _primus_ we were to pronounce it _primis_ (_is_ being
long, and _us_ short).
It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of
words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of
an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element
of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a
writer’s own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of
it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning
grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a
grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm.
For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition,
is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered march of his lordly prose”
that is the secret of Macaulay’s charm; and it is the unstudied
grace of Hume’s periods which renders him, in spite of his
imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in
spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of
England.
It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this
mystery of style,--why it is, that when one man writes a fact,
it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a
little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot
or a revelation,--has never been sounded. “One can understand a
little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a
gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make
a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how
words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive
to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism
than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love,
how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion, how a page can
be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry
or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its
opposite,--who has fathomed yet this wonder?”
From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one
can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of
translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead
languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational
red republicans of the day than this,--that the study is useless,
because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have
been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle’s
version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s Cicero, Morris’s Virgil,
Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epictetus, must be either a prodigious
scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator
even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion
of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this seems plausible
enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious
and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,--the
exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,--are precisely
those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most
masterly translations of them are no more like the original than
a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of
a writer,--the life and spirit,--all that is idiomatic, peculiar,
or characteristic,--all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in
Horace,--evaporates in a translation.
It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost every word
in one language has equivalents in every other; but a critical
study of language shows that, with the exception of terms denoting
sensible objects and acts, there is rarely a precise coincidence in
meaning between any two words in different tongues. Compare any two
languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathematicians
would say, many incommensurable quantities, many words in each
untranslatable into the other, and that it is often impossible, by
a paraphrase, to supply an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy
image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the
disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in
thousands of instances, not _annular_; the centres do not coincide;
the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible objects are not
always exact equivalents in any two languages. It might be supposed
that a _berg_ (the German for mountain or hill) was a _berg_ all
the world over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in
one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word expressing
it in another. Yet, as a late German writer[1] has said, this is
far from being the case. The English “mountain,” for instance,
refers to something bigger than the German _berg_. On the other
hand, “hill,” which has the next lower signification, in its many
meanings is far too diminutive for the German term, which finds no
exact rendering in any English vocable.
A comparison of the best English versions of the New Testament
with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy of the happiest
translations. Even in the Revised Version, upon which an enormous
amount of labor was expended by the best scholars in England and
the United States, many niceties of expression which mark the
original fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue
compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can draw a clear
line where other languages can only make a blot, the translators
have been compelled to use the same English word for different
Greek ones, and thus obliterate many fine distinctions which are
essential to the meaning. Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown,
it is impossible to exhibit in English the delicate shades of
difference in meaning which appear in the Greek between the two
verbs both rendered “love,”[2] in John xxi, 15-17. “The word first
employed by Christ is a very common one in the New Testament,
and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. It is used of
God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16--‘God so _loved_ the world,’
etc.--and of man’s love to God, as in Matt. xxii, 37--‘Thou shalt
_love_ the Lord thy God,’ etc. The other word more particularly
implies that warmth of feeling which exists between friends. Thus,
it is used respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou
_lovest_ is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself,
when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus _loved_.’ Now, the
use of the one word at first by Christ serves to remind St. Peter
of the claim which his Divine Master had upon his deep, reverential
love. But the Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness,
does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole heart
flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other word, and assures
the Saviour at least of a fervent personal affection. Christ then
repeats His question, still using the same verb, and Peter replies
as before. But on asking the question for the third time, Christ
graciously adopts the term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to
him again as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh
to His own loving heart.”[3] Now all this is lost through the
comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent the subtle
distinctions of the Greek original are and must be lost in the
translation, may be guessed from the fact that there are no fewer
than ten Greek words which have been rendered “appoint” in the
ordinary version, no fewer than fourteen which stand for “give,”
and no fewer than twenty-one which correspond to “depart.”
Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence
to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero’s
elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus,
of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent
of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and
even of Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling
through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of
the Greek and Latin poets,--never. As soon will another Homer
appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his
lyre. _Imitations_ of the “Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be
given, or _another_ poem may be substituted in its place; but a
perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe
somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the
form in _altering_ the form. Language is a strangely suggestive
medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words
upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, as
Cowper said of books, “are not seldom talismans and spells.” They
have, especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of
necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative
signs. Over and above their meanings as given in the dictionary,
they connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by their
employment for hundreds of years. There are in every language
certain magical words, which, though they can be translated into
other tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken
tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding
words in those tongues. Such words in English are _gentleman_,
_comfort_, and _home_, about each of which cluster a multitude of
associations which are not suggested by any foreign words by which
they can be rendered. There is in poetry a mingling of sound and
sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening
associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and
which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the _meaning_
be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of
hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not the dress
of thought; it is its living expression, and controls both the
physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.
How many abortive attempts have been made to translate the “Iliad”
and the “Odyssey” into English verse! What havoc have even Pope
and Cowper made of some of the grandest passages in the old bard!
The former, it has been well said, turned his lines into a series
of brilliant epigrams, sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles”
of Ovid; the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors of
Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which gods and men
loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans, the synod of the Trojans,
and the deities in council, have much of the air of a Quaker
meeting-house. Regarded as an English poem, Pope’s translation
of the “Iliad” is unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely
versified production; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard
into another language, it is but a _caput mortuum_, containing but
little more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid and
romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mythologic coloring,
the unspeakable audacity and freshness of the images,--all that
breathes of an earlier world, and of the sunny shores, and laughing
waves, and blue sky, of the old Ægean,--all this, as a critic has
observed, “is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and
fall of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like
the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words
of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary artist;
instead of the ever varied, resounding swell of the hexameter, the
neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern couplet. In short, the old
bard is stripped of his flowing chlamys and his fillets, and is
imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes, the laced velvet coat, and
flowing periwig of the eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more
of the spirit of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from
the Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that
it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby and
William C. Bryant have been more successful in many respects than
Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some advantages by compensating
defects.
Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “Æneid” into verse? Did
he give us that for which Virgil toiled during eleven long years?
Did he give us the embodiment of those vulgar impressions which,
when the old Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in
all his manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English
literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradise Lost,” when
he attempted, even in the same language, to put it into rhyme,--a
proposal to do which drew from Milton the contemptuous remark:
“Ay, young man; you can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made
a more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of Ulysses. His
rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and powerful as it confessedly
is, proved an utterly inadequate vehicle for the high argument
of the great Puritan. So with his modernizations of Chaucer. His
reproductions of “the first finder of our faire language” contain
much admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are simply
elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors and forms, the
distinctive beauties of the old poet,--above all, the simplicity
and sly grace of his language, the exquisite tone of _naïveté_,
which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his
verse,--utterly vanish. Dryden failed, not from lack of genius,
but simply because failure was inevitable,--because this aroma of
antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language, is
sure to evaporate.
All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of expression,
or some complexional peculiarity, essential to the truthful
exhibition of the original. The outline, the story, the bones
remain; but the soul is gone,--the essence, the ethereal light,
the perfume is vanished. As well might a painter hope, by using a
different kind of tint, to give the expression of one of Raphael’s
or Titian’s masterpieces, as any man expect, by any other words
than those which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning.
Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a manner of his
own, without which the identity and truth of his work are lost.
If, then, the meaning and spirit of a poem cannot be transferred
from one place to another, so to speak, under the roof of a common
language, must it not _a fortiori_ be impossible to transport them
faithfully across the barriers which divide one language from
another, and antiquity from modern times?
How many ineffectual attempts have been made to translate Horace
into English and French! It is easy to give the right meaning, or
something like the meaning, of his lyrics; but they are cast in
a mould of such exquisite delicacy that their ease and elegance
defy imitation. All experience shows that the _traduttore_ must
necessarily be _tradittore_,--the translator, a traducer of the
Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and
expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce
in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of
meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital
beauty of a lyric. The special imagination of the poet, it has been
well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language;
possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings
of words; skilled in their finest sympathies; powerful to make
them yield a meaning which another never could have extracted from
them. It is of the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in
the highest exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the
rendering of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception,
and the words in which it is conveyed, are a simultaneous creation,
and the idea springs forth full-grown, in its panoply of radiant
utterance.
The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, exist
in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation
is death. Alter the melody ever so skilfully, and you change the
effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant
version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase
than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one
containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful linguist
can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material
of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be
there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the
aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin
figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation
and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape,
with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape
arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest
original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,--a barely
“good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is
better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter
are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.
The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of whose
onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still more clearly,
when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders are made in
translating even from one living language into another. Few
English-speaking persons can understand the audacity of Racine, so
highly applauded by the French, in introducing the words _chien_
and _sel_ into poetry; “dog” and “salt” may be used by us without
danger; but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “entrails” in
the way the French do. Every one has heard of the Frenchman, who
translated the majestic exclamation of Milton’s Satan, “Hail!
horrors, hail!” by “_Comment vous portez-vous, Messieurs les
Horreurs, comment vous portez-vous?_” “How do you do, horrors, how
do you do?” Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage
from Shakespeare in his own tongue,
“Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so _woe-begone_,”
translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off with
you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth” in the
witches’ scene is rendered in Italian _polto inferno_. Hardly less
ridiculous is the blunder made by a translator of Alexander Smith’s
“Life-Drama,” who metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with
kingdoms,” into “_me fait un vêtement de royaumes_,”--“makes me a
garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer as Lord Mahon, in
his “History of the War of the Succession in Spain,” translates
the French word _abbé_ by “abbot.” One of the chief difficulties
in translating into a foreign language is that, though every word
the translator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the
combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the words _arène_
and _rive_ are both to be found in the best French writers; yet
if a foreigner, not familiar with the niceties of that language,
should write
“Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l’arène,”
he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by the most
illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom will not admit of the
expression _sur la rive du fleuve_, correct though each word may be
taken singly, but requires the phrase _sur le bord de la rivière_,
as it does _amasser du sable_, and not _amasser de l’arène_. What
can be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton
describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, where, he
says, the air was
“_Brushed_ with the _hiss_ of _rustling_ wings,”
a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will
convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused
by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near
to the original as to write
“Stirred with the noise of quivering wings,”
will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one
translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,
“The learned _pate ducks_ to the golden fool,”
and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words
we have italicized would be reproduced?
The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly exemplified
by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare with such a version
as we might expect in another language:
“How sweet the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.”
A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute and take all
taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, after some such
fashion as the following:
“With what a charm the moon serene and bright
Lends on the bank its soft reflected light!
Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear
The strains melodious, with a raptured ear;
For soft retreats, and night’s impressive hour,
To harmony impart divinest power.”
In view of all these considerations what can be more untrue than
the statement so often made, that to be capable of easy translation
is a test of the excellence of a composition? This doctrine, it
has been well observed, goes upon the assumption that one language
is just like another language,--that every language has all the
ideas, turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures,
associations, abstractions, points of view which every other
language has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true that all
languages are pretty much alike for the purposes of Science; but
even in this respect some are more suitable than others, which have
to coin words or to borrow them, in order to express scientific
ideas. But if languages are not all equally adapted even to furnish
symbols for those universal and eternal truths in which Science
consists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally
rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally
happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of
some original and fertile mind, who has availed himself of one of
them? * * *
“It seems that a really great author must admit of translation, and
that we have a test of his excellence when he reads to advantage in
a foreign language as well as in his own. Then Shakespeare _is_ a
genius because he can be translated into German, and not a genius
because he cannot be translated into French. The multiplication
table is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because
it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to belong
to any one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have
conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and recondite,
they would be difficult to put into words, and that the very fact
of their having insinuated themselves into one language would
diminish the chance of that happy accident being repeated in
another. In the language of savages you can hardly express any idea
or act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hottentot or
Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius of Plato, Pindar,
Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes?”[4]
The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot be played
upon another. To the most cunning writer that ever tried to
translate the beauties of an author into a foreign tongue, we may
say in the language of a French critic: “You are that ignorant
musician who plays his part exactly, not skipping a single note,
nor neglecting a rest,--only what is written in the key of _fa_, he
plays in the key of _sol_. Faithful translator!”
When we think of the marvellous moral influence which words have
exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that the ancients believed
there was a subtle sorcery in them, “a certain bewitchery or
fascination,” indicating that language is of mystic origin. The
Jews, believing that God had revealed a full-grown language to
mankind, attached a divine character to language, and supposed
that there was a natural and necessary connection between words
and things. The name of a person was not a mere conventional
sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part of the person
himself. Hence we find in Genesis no less than fifty derivations
of names, in almost all of which the derivation connects the name,
prophetically or otherwise, with some event in the person’s life.
Hence, also, the practice, under certain conditions, of changing
men’s names, as illustrated in the histories of Abraham, Sarah,
Jacob, Joshua and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara
(bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech. “Even in the
New Testament we find our Lord Himself in a solemn moment fixing
on the mind of His greatest apostle a new and solemn significance
given to the name he bore. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will
I build my church.’ St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a
name when, in Phil. iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend
as γνήσιε Σύζυγε, ‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and
very probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there
a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even their
mysterious alphabetical characters, called “Runes,” possessed
magical powers; that they could stop a sailing vessel or a flying
arrow,--that they could excite love or hate, or even raise the
dead. The Greeks believed that there was a necessary, mysterious
connection between words and the objects they signified, so that
man unconsciously expressed, in the words whereby he named things
or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as though in
a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The accidental good omen in
the name of an envoy who was called Hegesistratos, or “leader of
an army,” decided a Greek general to assist the Samians, and led
to the battle of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to
enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius, Salvius,
Felix, and Faustus. Cæsar gave a command in Spain to an obscure
Scipio, merely for the omen which his name involved. When an
expedition had been planned under the leadership of Atrius Niger,
the soldiers absolutely refused to proceed under a commander of
so ill-omened a name,--_dux abominandi nominis_,--it being, as De
Quincey says, “a pleonasm of darkness.” The same deep conviction
that words are powers is seen in the _favete linguis_ and _bona
verba quæso_ of the Romans, by which they endeavored to repress the
utterance of any word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so
suggested to the imagination should actually occur. So they were
careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any word directly
expressive of death or other calamity, saying _vixit_ instead
of _mortuus est_, and “be the event fortunate or otherwise,”
instead of “adverse.” The name Egesta they changed into Segesta,
Maleventum into Beneventum, Axeinos into Euxine, and Epidamnus
into Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of
_damnum_, or detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has
prevailed,--an illustration of which we have in the life of Pope
Adrian VI, who, when elected, dared not retain his own name, as he
wished, because he was told by his cardinals that every Pope who
had done so had died in the first year of his reign.[5]
That there is a secret instinct which leads even the most
illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, is
illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in “the black
art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influence, it is said,
attaches to names, and it is believed that demons, invoked in the
name of a living individual, can be made to appear. One of the
magic arts practised there is to write a man’s name on a skull, a
bone, a shroud, a bier, an image made of paste, and then put it
in a place where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it
is believed, will be wrought against the person whose name is so
inscribed.
But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations to learn
the mystic power of words. There is not a day, hardly an hour of
our lives, which does not furnish examples of their ominous force.
Mr. Maurice says with truth, that “a light flashes out of a word
sometimes which frightens one. It is a common word; one wonders
how one has dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when
there were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one of
his characters say of another, “She speaks poniards, and every word
stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are sharper than drawn
swords, which give more pain than a score of blows; and, again,
there are words by which pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief
removed, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused.
How often has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a
sublime yet undecided purpose,--a word of sympathy opened a new
vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect of heaven,--a word of
truth fired a man of action to do a deed which has saved a nation
or a cause,--or a genius to write words which have gone ringing
down the ages!
“I have known a word more gentle
Than the breath of summer air;
In a listening heart it nestled,
And it lived forever there.
Not the beating of its prison
Stirred it ever, night or day;
Only with the heart’s last throbbing
Could it ever fade away.”
A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases which shall
be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word
may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the
earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what
accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be
years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”
“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable than the spell
that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to
the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so;
and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one
or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains
unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea,
as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its
bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body
out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the
horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.”
The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, perhaps, more
strikingly than by the fact that unity of speech is essential to
the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond
than identity of religion, government, or interests; and nations
of one speech, though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds
yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling.
Prof. Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion
of Arndt, “_Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?_” was founded upon
the idea that the oneness of the _Deutsche Zunge_, the German
speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, and of duties; and
the universal acceptance with which the song was received showed
that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart
responded. When a nation is conquered by another, which would hold
it in subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its
character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, and the
second conquest is often the more difficult of the two. To kill it
effectually, its nationality must be killed, and this can be done
only by killing its language; for it is through its language that
its national prejudices, its loves and hates, and passions live.
When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,--if,
indeed, it dies at all,--has time to convey the national traditions
into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep
the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish
language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that
language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted
by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or
eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is
one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement
of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of
foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with
an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a
perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to
the Americanization of our foreign population.
The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle
ages, appear to be _glebæ adscriptitiæ_, and to extirpate them,
except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost
impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant
her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire
adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs
who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen
in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France
and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to
the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on
not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his
ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his
sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing,
ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have
ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth,
in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his
subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn
his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as
had Charlemagne before him.
England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a
hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more
of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph
II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German,
Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,--German;
but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of
Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and
the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long
period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as
did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested
their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance.
The strongest bond of union between the different States of this
country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical
unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken
throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of
Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different
tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of
political structure or sagacity of political administration could
hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture
and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of
speech,--the common language in which we express our thoughts and
feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy,
giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same
books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,--this is like a
soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer
unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could
possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as
those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the
bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late
outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South
into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?
As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that
nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations
than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar
thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will
gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought
and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain
by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of
their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their
phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded
by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.
A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power of words;
but, great as is their power, and though, when nicely chosen, they
have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, the _man_ who makes
them potent. As it was not the famous needle gun, destructive as
it is, which won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence
and discipline of the Prussian soldier,--the man _behind_ the gun,
educated in the best common schools in the world,--so it is the
latent heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives
them momentum and projectile force. The same words, coming from
one person, are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming
from another, they are the cannon shot that pierces the target
in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is the same in each case; the
enormous difference lies in the man who says it. The man fills out,
crowds his words with meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s
work; or he makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their
destination, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. The
weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend oftentimes less
upon their intrinsic worth than upon the degree in which they have
been organized into the nature of the person who utters them;
their force, less upon their inherent power than upon the latent
heat stored away in their formation, which is liberated in their
publication.
There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which
is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which
makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire.
Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas,
are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into
other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well
as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of
original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by
constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some
of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have
been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and
commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience
by saying “Mesopotamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact.
Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that “every
sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand
miles long.” Willis says that every word of Webster weighs a pound.
College sophomores, newly fledged lawyers, and representatives from
Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New Hampshire
giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to
the patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and
destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, but in
a great degree the added weight of his temper and constitution,
the trip-hammer _momentum_ with which he makes it fall upon the
theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the man helped,
too, to make his words impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and
overwhelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense
current of his physical energy.” When the great champion of New
England said, in the United States Senate, “There are Lexington and
Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever,” it
was the weight of character, and of all the associations connected
with it, which changed that which, uttered by another, would have
been the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. The
majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened the pulse
even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is due to the fact that
it came from a mighty nature, which had weighed and felt all the
meaning which those three spots represent in the stormy history
of the world. It was this which gave such prodigious power to the
words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an
electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority, the
scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl of his voice, “like
thunder heard remote,” the impending lightnings which seemed ready
to dart from his eyes, and, above all, the evidence which these
furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that abashed the
proudest peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform
the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing from other
lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.
In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are reported to have
so overwhelmingly oppressed those who heard them, almost every
one is disappointed. It is the creative individuality projected
into the words that makes the entire difference between Kean or
Kemble and the poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is
said that Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than
by the simple words, “_Who said that?_” An acute American writer
observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially commonplace
in his intellect and prejudices, though of vast acquirement and
giant force of character, calls Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of
hell,” the metaphor may not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible
significance when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward
Coke glaring through it.[6] What can be more effective than the
speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? Yet the only
effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s shoulders the staff of
Ulysses. Pope well observes that, had Ulysses made the same speech,
the troops would have sailed for Greece that very night. The world
considers not merely what is said, but _who_ speaks, and _whence_
he says it.
“Let but a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens, how the style refines!”
says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet says of a
preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that
“Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway.”
Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of position and
character, when he makes Hecuba entreat Ulysses to intercede for
her; “for the arguments,” says she, “which are uttered by men of
repute, are very different in strength from those uttered by men
unknown.”
The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon the character
of the man that uses it. Let two men of different education,
tastes, and habits of thought, utter the word “grand,” and our
sense of the word is modified according to our knowledge of the
men. The conceptions represented by the words a man uses, it is
evident, are different from every other man’s; and into this
difference enter all his individuality of character, the depth or
the shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education,
the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that
distinguishes him from another man.
Mr. Whipple says truly that “there are no more simple words than
‘green,’ ‘sweetness,’ and ‘rest,’ yet what depth and intensity of
significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’; what a still ecstasy of
religious bliss irradiates ‘sweetness,’ as it drops from the pen
of Jonathan Edwards; what celestial repose beams from ‘rest’ as
it lies on the page of Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the
resources of language; yet they are expressed in common words,
transfigured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality
which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking of style
as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that “the marvel of
Shakespeare’s diction is its immense suggestiveness,--his power
of radiating through new verbal combinations, or through single
expressions, a life and meaning which they do not retain in their
removal to dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the
emotion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it cannot
be flashed upon the ‘inward eye,’ it is hinted to the inward ear
by some exquisite variation of tone. An American essayist on
Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of
acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical suggestiveness
in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing it describes. ‘The
recitation,’ he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal
from all this painted pedantry, _and sweetly torments us with
invitations to its own inaccessible homes_!’ He who has not felt
this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read him. He may
have looked _at_ the words, but has never looked _into_ them.”
The fact that words are never taken absolutely,--that they
are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, but of
natures,--that they are media for the emission and transpiration
of character,--is one that cannot be too deeply pondered by
young speakers and writers. Fluent young men who wonder that the
words which they utter with such glibness and emphasis have so
little weight with their hearers, should ask themselves whether
their characters are such as to give weight to their words. As
in engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least
one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s character
should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. When a La
Place or a Humboldt talks of the “universe,” the word has quite
another meaning than when it is used by plain John Smith, whose
ideas have never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a
man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “the solemn
responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference in the weight
of the words whether they come from one who has been tried and
proved in the world’s fiery furnace, and whose whole life has been
a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or from a callow youth
who prates of that which he feels not, and testifies to things
which are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a hollow
ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks of “trials and
tribulations” which he has never felt. “Words,” says the learned
Selden, “must be fitted to a man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the
fellow that was to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired
first to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”
Few things are more interesting in the study of a language, than
to note how much it gains by time and culture. In its vocabulary,
its forms, and its euphonic and other changes, it embodies the
mental growth and modifications of thousands of minds. It enriches
itself with all the intellectual spoils of the people that use
it, and with the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed,
and refined. The language of an old and highly civilized people
differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad and majestic
river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of the world, differs
from the tiny streamlet in which it had its origin. And yet it is
no less true that, as Max Müller has observed, since the beginning
of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial
elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements
of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and
going of words; but no man can ever invent an entirely new word.
Before a novel term can be introduced into use, there must be
some connection with a former term,--a bridge to enable the
mind to pass over to the new word. Equally true is it that when
a vocable has dropped out of the language,--has become dead or
obsolete,--it is almost as impossible to call it back to life as
it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, it is true,
speaks of commanding “old words that have long slept to wake;”
and Horace declares that many words will be born again that have
seemingly dropped into their graves. But it is certain that, as
Prof. Craik says, “very little revivification has ever taken place
in human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce into a
language a dozen new words than restore to general use an old one
that has been discarded. It is true that when Thomson published his
“Castle of Indolence,” he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called
obsolete words, of which not a few, as “carol,” “glee,” “imp,”
“appall,” “blazon,” “sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is
true, also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge,
Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies
with words taken from the more archaic and obsolescent element of
the language, and that we have in use many words that were more or
less neglected during the eighteenth century. But in nearly all
these cases it is probable that the vocables thus recalled to a
living and working condition, were never actually dead, but only in
a state of suspended animation.
It has been calculated that our English language, including the
nomenclature of the arts and sciences, contains one hundred
thousand words; yet of this immense number it is surprising how few
are in common use. It is a common opinion that every Englishman and
American speaks English, every German German, and every Frenchman
French. The truth is, that each person speaks only that limited
portion of the language with which he is acquainted. To the great
majority even of educated men, three-fourths of these words are
almost as unfamiliar as Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon
all the obsolete or obsolescent words; all the words of special
arts or professions; all the words confined in their usage to
particular localities; all the words of recent coinage which have
not yet been naturalized; all the words which even the educated
speaker uses only in homœopathic doses,--and it is astonishing
into what a manageable volume your plethoric Webster or Worcester
will have shrunk. It has been calculated that a child uses only
about one hundred words; and, unless he belongs to the educated
classes, he will never employ more than three or four hundred.
A distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers or
writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary persons, of
fair intelligence, not over three or four thousand. Even the great
orator, who is able to bring into the field, in the war of words,
half the vast array of light and heavy troops which the vocabulary
affords, yet contents himself with a far less imposing display
of verbal force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of
words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges with using a
“Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thousand; and Shakespeare
himself, “the myriad-minded,” only fifteen thousand. Each word,
however, has a variety of meanings, with more or fewer of which
every man is familiar, so that his knowledge of the language,
which has practically over a million of words, is far greater
than it appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the
difficulty of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is greatly
overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the boast of every new
dictionary-maker that _his_ vocabulary contains so many thousand
words more than those of his predecessors. This may, or may not, be
a merit; but it is certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson
that does not contain some word--obsolete, un-English, or purely
scientific--that has no business there; while Webster and Worcester
cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a time; each doing his
best to load and deform his pages, and all the while triumphantly
challenging the world to observe how prodigious an advantage he has
gained over his rivals.
We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the meaning of words;
but it is _life_ that discloses to us their significance in all
the vivid realities of experience. It is the actual world, with
its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains, that reveals to
us their joyous or terrible meanings--meanings not to be found
in Worcester or Webster. Does the young and light-hearted maiden
know the meaning of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a
business career understand the significance of the words “failure”
and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many-storied
building under a July sun, for the meaning of “toil”; and, for a
definition of “overwork,” go to the pale seamstress who
“In midnight’s chill and murk
Stitches her life into her work;
Bending backwards from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil;
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not;
Satirizing her despair
With the emblems woven there!”
Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, and
reputation,--with disease racking every limb,--for the definition
of “remorse”; and go to the bedside of the invalid for the proper
understanding of “health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals
to us the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our hearts the
ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and
human experience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings
pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the force of
the commonest terms; while to others their terrible significance
comes home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the
innermost fibres of their being.
To conclude,--it is one of the marvels of language, that out of
the twenty plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is
capable, have been formed all the articulate voices which, for six
thousand or more years, have sufficed to express all the sentiments
of the human race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated
that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years,
could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters
of the alphabet, if each writer were daily to write out forty
pages of them, and if each page should contain different orders
of the twenty-four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the
vocal organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the
properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while at
the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to receive with
pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can estimate the misery that
man would experience were his sense of hearing so acute that the
faintest whisper would give him pain, loud talking or laughter
stun him, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?
“If Nature thunder’d in his opening ears,
And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish that Heaven had left him still
The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Karl Hildebrand.
[2] ἀγαπάω and φιλέω.
[3] “Companion to the Revised Version of the English New
Testament,” by Alexander Roberts, D.D.
[4] “University Sermons,” by J. H. Newman.
[5] We have heard of an Englishman’s deploring with the deepest
pathos his having been named “James,” asserting that it had to some
extent made a flunkey of his very soul, against his will.
[6] “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.