THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores.... Non potest alius esse
ingenio, alius animo color.--SENECA.
The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the
surface.--PASCAL.
Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in
accounts, ciphers and symbols pass for real sums, so, in the
course of human affairs, words and names pass for things
themselves.--ROBERT SOUTH.
Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.--ISAIAH v, 20.
The fact that a man’s language is a part of his character,--that
the words he uses are an index to his mind and heart,--must
have been noted long before language was made a subject of
investigation. “Discourse,” says Quintilian, “reveals character,
and discloses the secret disposition and temper; and not without
reason did the Greeks teach that as a man lived so would he speak.”
_Profert enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta detegit.
Nec sine causa Græci prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiam dicere._
When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or cogs
broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim the fact;
instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, while the disorder
continues, will continually betray its own infirmity. So when a
man’s mind is disordered or his heart corrupted, there will gather
on his face and in his language an expression corresponding to
the irregularities within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the
speech as well as in the face. As physicians judge of the state
of the body, so may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except
under peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or delicacy
seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart,--the pet words,
phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing our strongest
appetencies and antipathies,--will rise most frequently to the
lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not exaggerate in saying that
no glass renders a man’s form and likeness so true as his speech.
“As a man speaks, so he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so
is he.”
If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, and pure
in thought and feeling, these qualities will be symbolized
in his words; and, on the other hand, if he has a confused
habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and hypocritical, these
characteristics will reveal themselves in his speech. The door
keeper of an alien household said to Peter, “Thou art surely a
Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth thee”; and so, in spite of all masks
and professions, in spite of his reputation, the essential nature
of every person will stamp itself on his language. How often do the
words and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally
to the church, prays long and loud in public, and attends rigidly
to every outward observance, betray in some mysterious way,--by
some impalpable element which we instinctively detect, but cannot
point out to others,--the utter worldliness of his character! How
frequently do words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution,
affect us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and
unreality of the speaker’s character! How often does the use of a
single word flash more light upon a man’s motives and principles
of action, give a deeper insight into his habits of thought and
feeling, than an entire biography! How often, when a secret sorrow
preys upon the heart, which we would fain hide from the world
by a smiling face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or
parenthetical word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard chamber to
be, the key and the secret of which we have in our own possession;
yet all the time a crimson stream is flowing across the door sill,
telling of murdered hopes within.
Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by our English
vocabulary,--embracing over a hundred thousand distinct
terms,--each man selects his own favorite expressions, his own
forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is part of the essential
difference between him and all other men; and in the verbal stock
in trade of each individual we should find, could it once be laid
open to us, a key that would unlock many of the deepest mysteries
of his humanity,--many of the profoundest secrets of his private
history. How often is a man’s character revealed by the adjectives
he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these words of
themselves reveal the temperament. The conscientious man weighs his
words as in a hair-balance; the boaster and the enthusiast employ
extreme phrases, as if there were no degree but the superlative.
The cautious man uses words as the rifleman does bullets; he utters
but few words, but they go to the mark like a gunshot, and then he
is silent again, as if he were reloading. The dogmatist is known by
his sweeping, emphatic language, and the absence of all qualifying
terms, such as “perhaps” and “it may be.” The fact that the word
“glory” predominates in all of Bonaparte’s dispatches, while
in those of his great adversary, Wellington, which fill twelve
enormous volumes, it never once occurs--not even after the hardest
won victory,--but “duty,” “duty,” is invariably named as the
motive for every action, speaks volumes touching their respective
characters. It was to work out the problem of self-aggrandizement
that Napoleon devoted all his colossal powers; and _conscience_,
_responsibility_, and kindred terms, seem never to have found their
way into his vocabulary. Men, with their physical and moral force,
their bodily energies, and their passions, prejudices, delusions,
and enthusiasms, were to him but as fuel to swell the blaze on
the altar of that ambition of which he was at once the priest and
deity. Of duties to them he never for a moment dreamed; for, from
the hot May-day of Lodi to the autumnal night of Moscow, when he
fled the flaming Kremlin, he seemed unconscious that he was himself
a created and responsible being.
An author’s style is an open window through which we can look in
upon him, and estimate his character. The cunning reader reads
between the lines, and finds out secrets about the writer, as
if he were overhearing his soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase
or epithet, draws conclusions from asseveration and emphasis,
notes the half-perceptible sneer or insinuation, detects the
secret misery that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s
idiosyncrasies even when he tries hardest to mask them. We know a
passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a Rembrandt or a Dürer.
Macaulay is betrayed by his antitheses, and Cicero by his _esse
videatur_.
Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of a historian
by his style, his language being an infallible index to his
character. “If it is very heavy and cumbrous, it indicates either
a dull man or a pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man;
if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with great
solemnity, the writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly
antithetical and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways of
stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected man. If it
be plain and simple, always clear, but never eloquent, the writer
may be a very sensible man, but is too hard and dry to be a very
great man. If, on the other hand, it is always elegant, rich in
illustrations, and without the relief of simple and great passages,
we must admire the writer’s genius in a very high degree, but we
may fear that he is too continually excited to have attained to
the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily calm. In this manner
the mere language of a historian will furnish us with something
of a key to his mind, and will tell us, or at least give us cause
to presume, in what his main strength lies, and in what he is
deficient.” It has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in
which it was impossible to speak the truth.
A writer in the “Edinburgh Review” observes that the statement that
a man’s language is part of his character, holds true, not only in
regard to the usage of certain shibboleths of a party, whether in
religion or politics, but also in regard to a general vocabulary.
“There is a school vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain
phrases brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated,
and passing now and then into general currency. In this age of
examinations,--army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,--the
verb ‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with the vernacular, and
must take its place in dictionaries. The sportsman Nimrod has his
esoteric vocabulary, and so has likewise the angler Walton. The man
of the world has his own set of phrases, understood and recognized
by the fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the
fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of nature,
speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’ The connoisseur
in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in a picture, and he uses
other terms which seem as if they had been invented to puzzle the
uninitiated. Your favorite landscape may have ‘tones’ in it, as
well as your violin. With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with
cloth that is ‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and
observe that a painting is ‘broad.’ You sit down at dinner with a
‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table, and looking up
see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or Wouvermans before you on the
wall.”
As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a people is
often a moral barometer, which marks with marvellous precision the
rise or fall of the national life. The stock of words composing
any language corresponds to the knowledge of the community that
speaks it, and shows with what objects it is familiar, what
generalizations it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,--all
its cognitions and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of
mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our
institutions, public and private, become other than they have been,
all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these days of
railroads, steamboats and telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry
and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of
building, articles of food and luxury of every description, how
many words and phrases are in every one’s mouth which would be
utterly unintelligible to the most learned man of a century ago,
were he to rise from his grave and walk our streets!... Language is
expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances
and needs of those who use it; it is enriched or impoverished,
in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of
their minds.”[7] Every race has its own organic growth, its own
characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its
political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its
customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all
these peculiarities is found in its speech. If a people is, as
Milton said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a
quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle
to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while,
on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted,--if it is
morally bankrupt and dead to all lofty sentiments,--its mockery of
virtue, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of
life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably
betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the opposite
qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation of soul.
These discreditable qualities will find an utterance “in the use
of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or
even ridiculous; in the squandering of such as ought to have been
reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight
and secular objects; and in the employment, almost in jest and
play, of words implying the deepest moral guilt.”
Could anything be more significant of the profound degradation of
a people than the abject character of the complimentary and social
dialect of the Italians, and the pompous appellations with which
they dignify things in themselves insignificant, as well as their
constant use of intensives and superlatives on the most trivial
occasions? Is it not a notable fact that they, who for so long
a time had no country,--on whose altars the fires of patriotism
have, till of late, burned so feebly,--use the word _pellegrino_,
“foreign,” as a synonym for “excellent”? Might we not almost infer
_a priori_ the servile condition to which, previous to their late
uprising, centuries of tyranny had reduced them, from the fact that
with the same people, so many of whom are clothed in rags, a man of
honor is “a well dressed man”; that a man who murders in secret is
“a brave man,” _bravo_; that a _virtuoso_, or “virtuous man,” is
one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpture,--arts
which should be the mere embroidery, and not the web and woof, of
a nation’s life; that, in their magnificent indigence, they call a
cottage with three or four acres of land _un podere_, “a power”;
that they term every house with a large door _un palazzo_, “a
palace,” a lamb’s fry _una cosa stupenda_, “a stupendous thing,”
and that a message sent by a footman to his tailor through a
scullion is _una ambasciata_, “an embassy”?
Let us not, however, infer the _hopeless_ depravity of any people
from the baseness of the tongue they have inherited, not chosen. It
makes a vast difference, as Prof. Marsh justly observes, whether
words expressive of noble thoughts and mighty truths do not exist
in a language, or whether ages of soul-crushing tyranny have
compelled their disuse, and the employment of the baser part of
the national vocabulary. The mighty events that have lately taken
place in Italy “show that a tone of hypocrisy may cling to the
tongue, long after the spirit of a nation is emancipated, and that
where grand words are found in a speech, there grand thoughts,
noble purposes, high resolves exist also; or, at least, the spark
slumbers which a favoring breath may, at any moment, kindle into a
cherishing and devouring flame.”[8]
A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French language,
while it has such positive expressions as “drunk” and “tipsy,”
conveyed by _ivre_ and _gris_, contains no such negative term as
“sober.” _Sobre_ means always “temperate” or “abstemious,” never
the opposite condition to intoxication. The English, it is argued,
drink enough to need a special illustrative title for a man who has
not drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol freely
during the sieges, the French have never yet felt the necessity
of forming any such curious subjective appellation, consequently
they do not possess it. Again, the French boast that they have no
such word as “bribe,” as if this implied their exemption from that
sin; and such, indeed, may be the fact. But may not the absence
of this word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their
lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offense, just as
the lack of the word “humility,” in the language of the Greeks,
usually so rich in terms, proves that they lacked the thing itself,
or as the fact that the same people had no word corresponding
to the Latin _ineptus_, argues, as Cicero thought, not that the
character designated by the word was wanting among them, but that
the fault was so universal with them that they failed to recognize
it as such? Is it not a great defect in a language that it lacks
the words by which certain forms of baseness or sinfulness, in
those who speak it, may be brought home to their consciousness?
Can we properly hate or abhor any wicked act till we have given it
a specific objective existence by giving it a name which shall at
once designate and condemn it? The _pot-de-vin_, and other jesting
phrases which the French have coined to denote bribery, can have no
effect but to encourage this wrong.
What shall we think of the fact that the French language has no
word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not a noteworthy circumstance,
shedding light upon national character, that among thirty-seven
millions of talkers, no provision, except the awkward paraphrase,
_celui qui écoute_, “he who hears,” should have been made for
hearers? Is there any other explanation of this blank than the
supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure love of
talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the proverb, he
believes that silence is silver, but talking is golden; and
that, not caring whether he is listened to or not, he has never
recognized that he has no name for the person to whom he chatters?
Again, is it not remarkable that, among the French, _bonhomme_, “a
good man,” is a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word,
“gehenna,” has been condensed into _gêne_, and means only a petty
annoyance; and that _honnêteté_, which once meant honesty, now
means only civility? It was in the latter half of the reign of
Louis XIV that the word _honnête_ exchanged its primitive for its
present meaning. Till then, according to good authority, when a
man’s descent was said to be _honnête_, he was complimented on the
virtuousness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity of
their condition; and when the same term was applied to his family,
it was an acknowledgment that they belonged to the middle ranks
of society, not a suggestion that they were plebeians. Again,
how significant is the fact that the French has no such words as
“home,” “comfort,” “spiritual,” and but one word for “love” and
“like,” compelling them to put Heaven’s last gift to man on a
par with an article of diet; as “I love Julia,”--“I love a leg
of mutton”! Couple with these peculiarities of the language the
circumstance that the French term _spirituel_ means simply witty,
with a certain quickness, delicacy, and versatility of mind, and
have you not a real insight into the national character?
It is said that the word oftenest on a Frenchman’s lips is _la
gloire_, and next to that, perhaps, is _brillant_, “brilliant.” The
utility of a feat or achievement in literature or science, in war
or politics, surgery or mechanics, is of little moment in his eyes
unless it also dazzles and excites surprise. It is said that Sir
Astley Cooper, the great British surgeon, on visiting the French
capital, was asked by the surgeon _en chef_ of the empire how many
times he had performed some feat of surgery that required a rare
union of dexterity and nerve. He replied that he had performed the
operation thirteen times. “Ah! but, Monsieur, I have performed him
one hundred and sixty time. How many time did you save his life?”
continued the curious Frenchman, as he saw the blank amazement of
Sir Astley’s face. “I,” said the Englishman, “saved eleven out
of the thirteen. How many did _you_ save out of a hundred and
sixty?” “Ah! Monsieur, I lose dem all;--but de operation was very
_brillant_!”
The author of “Pickwick” tells us that in America the sign vocal
for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, etc., is “Go Ahead!”
while with John Bull the ritual form is “All Right!”--and he
adds that these two expressions are somewhat expressive of the
respective moods of the two nations. The two phrases are, indeed,
vivid miniatures of John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on
the safety valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin
into his steam furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have
entered the station, and who would hardly object to being fired off
from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there were one chance
in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his journey. Let us hope
that the day may yet come when our “two-forty” people will exchange
a little of their fiery activity for a bit of Bull’s caution, and
when our Yankee Herald’s College, if we ever have one, may declare
“All Right!” to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with as
much propriety as it might now inscribe “Go Ahead!” beneath that
fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle, that hovers over the
peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips its wings in two oceans, and has
one eye on Cuba and the other on Quebec.
A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth that the
language of nations is a mirror, in which may be seen reflected
with unerring accuracy all the elements of their intellectual as
well as of their moral character. What scholar that is familiar
with Greek and Latin has failed to remark how indelibly the
contrariety of character in the two most civilized nations of
antiquity is impressed on their languages, distinguished as is
the one by exuberant originality, the other by innate poverty
of thought? In the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of all
the European tongues,--which surpasses every other alike in
its metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its
capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate shades of
meaning,--the thought controls and shapes the language; while the
tyrannous objectivity of the Latin, rigid and almost cruel, like
the nation whose voice it is, and whose words are always _Sic
volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas_, coerces rather than
simply syllables the thought. “Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge,
“the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our
race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of
indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness of
nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was
excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind
like English; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer,
the gloom and intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest
by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding
with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors under the
Promethean touch of Demosthenes himself. And Latin,--the voice of
Empire and of Law, of War and of the State,--the best language for
the measured research of History, and the indignant declamation
of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious in
its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit
of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the
maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and
uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and
haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved
and thoughtful Tacitus.”
It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the most majestic
of nations, so theirs is the only ancient language that contains
the word “majesty,” the Greek having nothing that exactly
corresponds to it; and the Latin language is as majestic as were
the Romans themselves. Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds
an argument to show that the intellectual character of the Romans
was higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word
_convivium_ means “a living together,” while the corresponding
Greek term, συμπόσιον, means “a drinking together.” While the
Romans retained their early simplicity and nobility of soul,
their language was full of power and truth; but when they became
luxurious, sensual, and corrupt, their words degenerated into
miserable and meaningless counters, without intrinsic value, and
serving only as a conventional medium of exchange. It has been
said truly that “in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility of
Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who would go into
emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap-dog and the apotheosis
of a eunuch’s hair, we read the hand-writing of an empire’s
condemnation.”
The climate of a country, as well as the mind and character of its
people, is clearly revealed in its speech. The air men breathe,
the temperature in which they live, and the natural scenery amid
which they pass their lives, acting incessantly upon body and
mind, and especially upon the organs of speech, impart to them
a soft or a harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we
should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious,
as though they had received an impress from the transparency of
their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds of the winds that sigh
among the woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals,
the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo
of the breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the
pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris cannot be
that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than the Doric, the
dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken in the voluptuous
regions of Asia Minor, was softer and more sinuous than the Attic.
The Anglo-Saxon, the language of a people conversant chiefly with
gloomy forests and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally
harsh and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, cradled
on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no more speak in the
soft and melting accents of a Southern tongue than the screaming
eagle could utter the liquid melody of a nightingale’s song.
It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the New
Testament there are whole chapters with no words ending in
consonants, except the proper names of the original. Italian has
been called the love-talk of the Roman without his armor. Fuller,
contrasting the Italians and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the
former, “whose country is called ‘the country of good words,’
love the circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as
a sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle presently
with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon, mount in
language, soar high, fetch compasses of compliment, and then in due
time stoop to game, and seize on the business propounded. Clean
contrary, the Switzers (who sent word to the king of France not to
send them an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with
plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not straight
on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, the flowers of
rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet perfume to such as are
troubled with the mother; yea, generally, great soldiers have their
stomachs sharp set to feed on the matter; loathing long speeches,
as wherein they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they
could conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best
eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.”
It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of expression,
and the modifications of meaning which its borrowed words have
undergone, that its distinctive genius is most strikingly seen.
The forms of salutation used by different nations are saturated
with their idiosyncrasies, and of themselves alone essentially
reveal their respective characters. How clearly is the innermost
distinction between the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in
their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” How vividly
are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny, world-enjoying
temper of the one people with the profound religious feeling of the
other! The formula of the robust, energetic, valiant Roman,--with
whom virtue was manliness, and whose value was measured by his
_valor_,--was _Salve! Vale!_ that is, “Be well,” “Be strong.”
In the expression, “If God will it, you are well,” is betrayed
the fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of the Turk, “May
your shadow never be less!” speaks of a sunny clime. In the hot,
oppressive climate of Egypt perspiration is essential to health,
and you are asked, “How do you perspire?” The Italian asks, _Come
sta?_ literally, “How does he stand?” an expression originally
referring to the _standing_ of the Lombard merchants in the market
place, and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health
depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, however, have
regarded the word “stand” in this formula as meaning no more
than “exist”; mere life itself, in the land of _far niente_,
being a blessing. The Genoese, a trading people, and at one time
the bankers of Europe, used in former days to say, _Sanita e
guadagno_, or “Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of
the countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The dreamy,
meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and abstractions, salutes
you with the vague, impersonal, metaphysical _Wie gehts?_--“How
goes it?” Another salutation which he uses is, _Wie befinden sie
sich?_--“How do you find yourself?” A born philosopher, he is so
absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco smoke, that
he thinks you cannot tell him of the state of your health till you
have searched for and _found_ it.
The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks, _Hoe
vaart’s-ge?_ “How do you go?” an expression eminently
characteristic of a trading, travelling people, devoted to
business, and devoid of sentiment. The thoughtful Swede inquires,
“How do you think?” They also inquire, _Hur mär ni?_--literally
“How can you?” that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless,
vivacious Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and is
more anxious about appearances than about realities,--who has
never to hunt himself up like the German, and desires less to do,
like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be lively, to show himself,--says
frankly, _Comment vous portez-vous?_--“How do you carry yourself?”
In these few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul,
of the French character. Externals, the shapes and shows of
things,--for what else could we expect a people to be solicitous,
who are born actors, and who live, to a great extent, for stage
effect; who unite so much outward refinement with so much inward
coarseness; who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and
an almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented, as
Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to add the
shirt? It has been said that a man would be owl-blind, who in the
“Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye” of the kindly Scot, could not perceive the
mixture of national pawkiness with hospitable cordiality. “One
sees, in the mind’s eye, the canny chield, who would invite you
to dinner three days in the week, but who would look twice at
your bill before he discounted it.” What can be more unmistakably
characteristic than the Irish peasant’s “Long life to your honor;
may you make your bed in glory!” After such a grandiose salute,
we need no mouser among the records of antiquity to certify to
us that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we need any
other key to his peculiar vivacity and impressionableness of
feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-loving enthusiasm.
Finally, of all the national forms of salutation, the most signally
characteristic,--the one which reveals the very core, the inmost
“heart of heart” of a people,--is the Englishman’s “How do you
do?” In these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense
practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of his
character, are revealed as by a lightning’s flash. To do! Not to
think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to _do_; and this doing is
so universal among the English,--its necessity is so completely
recognized,--that no one dreams of asking whether you are doing, or
what you are doing, but all demand, “_How_ do you do?”
It has been well observed by the learned German writer, J. D.
Michaelis, that “some virtues are more sedulously cultivated
by moralists, when the language has fit names for indicating
them; whereas they are but superficially treated of, or rather
neglected, in nations where such virtues have not so much as a
name. Languages may obviously do injury to morals and religion
by their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from
the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking fact,
noted by an English traveller, that the native language of Van
Dieman’s Land has four words to express the idea of taking life,
not one of which indicates the deep-lying distinction between
to kill and to murder; while any word for love is wanting to it
altogether. One of the most formidable obstacles which Christian
missionaries have encountered in teaching the doctrines and
precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has been the absence from
their languages of a spiritual and ethical nomenclature. It is in
vain that the religious teachers of a people present to them a
doctrinal or ethical system inculcating virtues and addressed to
faculties, whose very existence their language, and consequently
the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize.
Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have no name by which
they can be described and denounced, as things to be loathed and
shunned. Hence, in translating the Bible into the languages of
savage nations, the translators have been compelled to employ
merely provisional phrases, until they could develop a dialect
fitted to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said
that the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and “nature,”
could not apprehend the doctrine of the union of Christ’s two
natures in one single person. There are languages of considerable
cultivation in which it is not easy to find a term for the Supreme
Being. Seneca wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not
even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious fact
that the English language, rich as it is in words to express the
most complex religious ideas, as well as in terms characterizing
vices and crimes, had until about two centuries ago no word for
“selfishness,” the root of all vices, nor any single word for
“suicide.” The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral
ideal, but the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the
Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed energy of the
will, by which it yielded to the allurements of sensual pleasure;
and _vir_tue, literally “manliness,” was the determined spirit, the
courage and vigor with which it resisted such temptations. But the
idea of “holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter
strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been impossible to
express them in either of the classical tongues of antiquity. As
De Maistre has strikingly observed, man knew well that he could
“irritate” God or “a god,” but not that he could “offend” him.
The words “crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those
of “sin” and “sinner” belong only to the Christian tongue. For a
similar reason, man could always call God “Father,” which expresses
only a relation of creation and of power; but no man, of his own
strength, could say “my Father”! for this is a relation of love,
foreign even to Mount Sinai, and which belongs only to Calvary.
Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen, had no term
for the Christian virtue of “humility”; and when the apostle Paul
coined one for it, he had to employ a root conveying the idea,
not of self-abasement before a just and holy God, but of positive
debasement and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a
word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, cannot be
rendered adequately either by German or Greek, the two richest of
human languages, and without which we should all be disarmed for
one great case, continually recurrent, of social enormity. It is
the word “humbug.” “A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise
be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric
of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not
through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous and inexorable
word.”
There is no way in which men so often become the victims of error
as by an imperfect understanding of certain words which are
artfully used by their superiors. Cynicism is seldom shallower
than when it sneers at what it contemptuously calls the power of
words over the popular imagination. If men are agreed about things,
what, it is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about names?
But while it is true that in the physical world things dominate
over names, and are not at the mercy of a shifting vocabulary,
yet in the world of ideas,--of history, philosophy, ethics and
poetry,--words triumph over things, are even equivalent to things,
and are as truly the living organism of thought as the eyes, lips,
and entire physiognomy of a man, are the media of the soul’s
expression. Hence words are the only certain _test_ of thought;
so much so that we often stop in the midst of an assertion, an
exclamation, or a request, startled by the form it assumes in
words. Thus, in Shakespeare, King John says to Hubert, who pleaded
his sovereign’s order for putting the young prince to death, that
if, instead of receiving the order in signs,
“Thou
Hadst bid me tell my tale _in express words_,
Deep shame had struck me dumb.”
Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but the very
mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the beauty or ugliness
of our inner selves.
A volume might be written on the mutual influence of language and
opinion, showing that as
“Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,
And these reciprocally those again,”
so the sentiments we cherish mould our language, and our words
react upon our opinions and feelings. Let a man go into a foreign
country, give up his own language, and adopt another, and he will
gradually and unconsciously change his opinions, too. He will
neither be able to express his old ideas adequately in the new
words, nor to prevent the new words of themselves putting new
ideas in his brain. Who has failed to notice that the opinion we
entertain of an object does not more powerfully influence the
mind in applying to it a name or an epithet, than the epithet
or name influences the opinion? Call thunder “the bolt of God’s
wrath,” and you awaken a feeling of terror; call it, with the
German peasant, _das liebe gewitter_, “the dear thunder,” and you
excite a different emotion. As the forms in which we clothe the
outward expression of our feelings react with mighty force upon
the heart, so our speculative opinions are greatly confirmed or
invalidated by the technical terms we employ. Fiery words, it has
been truly said, are the hot blast that inflames the fuel of our
passionate nature; and formulated doctrine, a hedge that confines
the discursive wanderings of the thoughts. In personal quarrels,
it is the stimulus men give themselves by stinging words that
impels them to violent deeds; and in argumentative discussions it
is the positive affirmation and reaffirmation of our views which,
more than the reasons we give, deepen our convictions. The words
that have helped us to conquer the truth often become the very
tyrants of our convictions; and phrases once big with meaning
are repeated till they “ossify the very organs of intelligence.”
False or partial definitions often lead into dangerous errors; an
impassioned polemic falls a victim to his own logic, and a wily
advocate becomes the dupe of his own rhetoric.
Words, in short, are excellent servants, but the most tyrannical of
masters. Some men command them, but a vast majority are commanded
by them. There are words which have exercised a more iron rule,
swayed with a more despotic power, than Cæsar or the Russian Czar.
Often an idle word has conquered a host of facts; and a mistaken
theory, embalmed in a widely received word, has retarded for
centuries the progress of knowledge. Thus the protracted opposition
in France to the Newtonian theory arose chiefly from the influence
of the word “attraction”; the contemptuous misnomer, “Gothic,”
applied to northern mediæval architecture, perpetuated the dislike
with which it was regarded; and the introduction of the term
“landed proprietor” into Bengal caused a disorganization of society
which had never been caused by its most barbarous invaders.
Macaulay, in his “History of England,” mentions a circumstance
strikingly illustrative of the connection between language and
opinion,--that no large society of which the language is not
Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that wherever a language
derived from ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to
this day prevails. “Men believe,” says Bacon, “that their reason is
lord over their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a
reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect.... Words, as a
Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest,
and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.” Not only every
language, but every age, has its charmed words, its necromantic
terms, which give to the cunning speaker who knows how to ring
the changes upon them, instant access to the hearts of men, as
at “Open Sesame!” the doors of the cave flung themselves open to
the thieves, in the Arabian tale. “There are words,” says Balzac,
“which, like the trumpets, cymbals and bass drums of mountebanks,
attract the public; the words ‘beauty,’ ‘glory,’ ‘poetry,’ have
witcheries that seduce the grossest minds.” At the utterance of the
magic names of Austerlitz and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a
forlorn hope, and met death at the cannon’s mouth.
When Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem was
exhibited in London in 1820, Mrs. Siddons, the famous actress,
entering the exhibition room, said: “The paleness of your Christ
gives it a supernatural look.” This, says the painter, settled its
success. There is great value in the selection of terms; many a
man’s fortune has been made by a happy phrase. Thousands thronged
to see the great work with “a supernatural look.”
South, in his eloquent sermons on “The Fatal Imposture and Force of
Words,” observes that any one who wishes to manage “the rabble,”
need never inquire, so long as they have ears to hear, whether
they have any understanding whereby to judge. With two or three
popular, empty words, well tuned and humored, he may whistle them
backward and forward, upward and downward, till he is weary; and
get upon their backs when he is so. When Cæsar’s army mutinied, no
argument from interest or reason could persuade them; but upon his
addressing them as _Quirites_, the tumult was instantly hushed, and
they took that word in payment of all. “In the thirtieth chapter
of Isaiah we find some arrived at that pitch of sottishness, and so
much in love with their own ruin, as to own plainly, and roundly
say, what they would be at. In the tenth verse, ‘Prophesy not unto
us,’ say they, ‘right things, but prophesy to us smooth things.’ As
if they had said, ‘Do but oil the razor for us, and let us alone to
cut our own throats.’ Such an enchantment is there in words; and so
fine a thing does it seem to some to be ruined plausibly, and to be
ushered to destruction with panegyric and acclamation; a shameful,
though irrefragable argument of the absurd empire and usurpation of
words over things; and that the greatest affairs and most important
interests of the world are carried on by things, not as they are,
but as they are called.”
The Romans, after the expulsion of Tarquin, could not brook the
idea of being governed by a _king_; yet they submitted to the
most abject slavery under an emperor. Cromwell was too sagacious
to disgust the republicans by calling himself King, though he
doubtless laughed grimly in his sleeve as, under the title of Lord
Protector, he exercised all the regal functions. We are told by
Saint Simon that at the court of the grand monarch, Louis XIV,
gambling was so common that even the ladies took part in it. The
gentlemen did not scruple to cheat at cards; but the ladies had
a peculiar tenderness on the subject. No lady could for a moment
think of retaining such unrighteous gains; the moment they were
touched, they were religiously given away. But then, we must add,
the gift was always made to some other winner of her own sex.
By carefully avoiding the words “interchange of winnings,” the
charming casuists avoided all self-reproach, and all sharp censure
by their discreet and lenient confessors. There are sects of
Christians at the present day that protest vehemently against a
hired ministry; yet their preachers must be warmed, fed and clothed
by “donation parties”; reminding one of the snob gentleman in
Molière, whose father was no shop-keeper, but kindly “chose goods”
for his friends, which he let them have for--money.
Party and sectarian leaders know that the great secret of the art
of swaying the people is to invent a good shibboleth or battle
cry, to be dinned continually in their ears. Persons familiar with
British history will remember certain talismanic vocables, such
as “Wilkes and Liberty,” the bare utterance of which has been
sufficient at times to set a whole population in a flame; while the
solemn and sepulchral cadences in which Pitt repeated the cuckoo
song of “thrones and altars,” “anarchy and dissolution of social
order,” were more potent arguments against revolution than the most
perfect syllogism that was ever constructed in mood and figure. So
in our own country this verbal magic has been found more convincing
than arguments in “Barbara” or “Baralipton.” Patriots and
demagogues alike have found that it was only necessary, in South’s
phrase, to take any passion of the people, when it was predominant
and just at the critical height of it, “and nick it with some
lucky or unlucky word,” and they might “as certainly overrule it
to their own purpose as a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder,
will infallibly blow it up.” “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” “No
More Compromise,” “The Higher Law,” “The Irrepressible Conflict,”
“Squatter Sovereignty,” and other similar phrases, have roused and
moved the public mind as much as the pulpit and the press.
Gouverneur Morris, in his Parisian journal of 1789, tells an
anecdote which strikingly illustrates this influence of catch-words
upon the popular mind. A gentleman, in walking, came near to a knot
of people whom a street orator was haranguing on the power of a
qualified veto (_veto suspensif_), which the constituent assembly
had just granted to the king. “Messieurs,” said the orator, “we
have not a supply of bread. Let me tell you the reason. It has
been but three days since the king obtained this qualified veto,
and during that time the aristocrats have bought up some of these
_suspensions_, and carried the grain out of the kingdom.” To
this profound discourse the people assented by loud cheers. Not
only shibboleths, but epithets, are often more convincing than
syllogisms. The term _Utopian_ or _Quixotic_, associated in the
minds of the people with any measure, even the wisest and most
practicable, is as fatal to it as what some one calls the poisonous
sting of the American (?) _humbug_.
So in theology; false doctrines and true doctrines have owed their
currency or non-currency, in a great measure, to the coinage of
happy terms, by which they have been summed up and made attractive
or offensive. Trench observes that “the entire secret of Buddhism
is in the ‘Nirvâna.’ Take away the word, and it is not too much
to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone.” When the
Roman Catholic Church coined the term “transubstantiation,” the
error which had so long been held in solution was precipitated,
and became henceforth a fixed and influential dogma. What a
potent watchword was the term “Reformation,” in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries! Who can estimate the influence of the
phrases “Broad Church,” “Liberal Church,” “Close Communion,” in
advancing or retarding the growth of certain religious sects at
this day? Many of even the most “advanced thinkers,” who reject
the supernatural element of the Bible, put all religions upon the
same level, and deem Shakespeare as truly inspired as the Apostles,
style themselves “Christians.”
Even in science happy names have had much to do with the general
reception of truth. “Hardly any original thoughts on mental or
social subjects,” says a writer, “ever make their way among
mankind, or assume their proper proportions even in the minds
of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have,
as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.” How much is
the study of the beautiful science of botany hindered by such
“lexical superfetations” as _chrysanthemum leukanthemum, Myosotis
scorpioeides_,--“scorpion-shaped mouse’s ear”; and how much is that
of astronomy promoted by such popular terms as “the bear,” “the
serpent,” “the milky way”! How much knowledge is gathered up in
the compact and easily remembered phrase, “correlation of forces”;
and to what an extent the wide diffusion of Darwin’s speculations
is owing to two or three felicitous and comprehensive terms, such
as “the struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” “the
process of natural selection”! Who that has felt the painfulness
of doubt has not desired to know something of “the _positive_
philosophy” of Comte? On the other hand, the well-known anatomist,
Professor Owen, complains with just reason of the embarrassments
produced in his science by having to use a long description
instead of a name. Thus a particular bone is called by Soemmering
“_pars occipitalis stricte sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis
spheno-occipitalis_,” a description so clumsy that only the direst
necessity would lead one to use it.
Even great authors, who are supposed to have “sovereign sway and
masterdom” over words, are often bewitched and led captive by them.
Thus Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing
their Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not because
they knew anything of that locality, but because Susquehanna was
“such a _pretty name_.” Again, to point an epigram or give edge
to a sarcasm, a writer will stab a rising reputation as with a
poniard; and, even when convicted of misrepresentation, will sooner
stick to the lie than part with a _jeu d’esprit_, or forego a
verbal felicity. Thus Byron, alluding to Keats’s death, which was
supposed to have been caused by Gifford’s savage criticism in the
“Quarterly,” said:
“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!”
Though he was afterward informed of the untruth of these lines,
Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth and wit, could not
willingly let them die; and so the witticism yet remains to mislead
and provoke the laughter of his readers.
Again, there are authors who, to meet the necessities of rhyme,
or to give music to a period, will pad out their sentences with
meaningless expletives. They employ words as carpenters put false
windows into houses; not to let in light upon their meaning, but
for symmetry. Or, perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of
distension of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to
act with its full powers,--just as some of the Russian peasantry
mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as hay and straw, as
well as corn, are given to horses, to supply the necessary bulk.
Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating Juvenal, says:
“Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru.”
This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to saying:
“Let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind
extensively.” If the Spartans, as we are told, fined a citizen
because he used three words where two would have done as well, how
would they have punished such prodigality of language?
It is an impressive truth which has often been noticed by
moralists, that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads to
corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of any mean, sensual,
or criminal practice in a familiar or flippant tone, the delicacy
of his moral sense is almost sure to be lessened, he loses his
horror of the vice, and, when tempted to do the deed, he is
far more likely to yield. Many a man, without dreaming of such
a result, has thus talked himself into vice, into sensuality,
and even into ruin. The apostle James was so impressed with the
significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerring sign of
character. “If any man offend not in word,” he declares, “the same
is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” Again
he declares that “the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly
poison”; commenting upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes:
“The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known; there
are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated into the
veins produces death in three seconds.... In that drop of venom
which distils from the sting of the smallest insect, or the spikes
of the nettle-leaf, there is concentrated the quintessence of a
poison so subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and
yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole
constitution, and convert night and day into restless misery.”
So, he adds, there are words of calumny and slander, apparently
insignificant, yet so venomous and deadly that they not only
inflame hearts and fever human existence, but poison human society
at the very fountain springs of life. It was said with the deepest
feeling of the utterers of such words, by one who had smarted under
their sting: “Adders’ poison is under their lips.”
Who can estimate the amount of misery which has been produced in
society by merely idle words, uttered without malice, and by words
uttered in jest? A poet, whose name is unknown to us, has vividly
painted the effects of such utterances:
“A frivolous word, a sharp retort,
A flash from a passing cloud,
Two hearts are scathed to their inmost core,
Are ashes and dust forevermore;
Two faces turn to the crowd,
Masked by pride with a lifelong lie,
To hide the scars of that agony.
“A frivolous word, a sharp retort,
An arrow at random sped;
It has cut in twain the mystic tie
That had bound two souls in harmony,
Sweet love lies bleeding or dead.
A poisoned shaft, with scarce an aim,
Has done a mischief sad as shame.”
How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, and kindled
furious wars among nations! It was one of the virtues of George
Washington that he knew how to be silent. John Adams said he had
the most remarkable mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of
controlling his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which David
Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack made
upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him that he had no
anxiety to have “the last word,”--that which in family circles has
been pronounced to be “the most dangerous of infernal machines.”
It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals only that
the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of their sway in the
world of politics? Is not fluency of speech, in many communities,
more than statesmanship? Are not brains, with a little tongue,
often far less potent than “tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need
any one be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place
of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made judges
without law, and diplomatists without French; which has sent to
the army brigadiers who knew not a cannon from a mortar, and to
the legislature men who could not tell a bank note from a bill of
exchange; which, according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister
of Mr. Pitt, who never opened Vattel, and which was near making a
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a
sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,” says Corporal
Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s novels, “you must know all
the ins and outs of speechifying. It’s words that make another
man’s mare go your road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as
invented language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does in
the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; wants a
missus,--talks her over; wants your horse,--talks you out of it;
wants a place,--talks himself into it.... Words make even them ’ere
authors, poor creatures, in every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note
of the _words_, and the things will take care of themselves.”
It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible for the
mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl audibly against
the service into which they are pressed, and testify against their
taskmasters. The latent nature of a man struggles often through
his own words, so that even truth itself comes blasted from his
lips, and vulgarity, malignity, and littleness of soul, however
anxiously cloaked, are betrayed by the very phrases and images of
their opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said,
“makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, and a
philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of reform.”[9] But
though the truth often leaks out through the most hypocritical
words, it is yet true that they are successfully employed, as
decoy ducks, to deceive, and the dupes who are cheated by them are
legion. There are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to
enter and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to
every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they
invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the symbols of
words, not words as the symbols of things. There is, in short, “a
besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call
it, brings upon the mind of man.... Words are able to persuade men
out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of
sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite
of nature and experience.”[10]
All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply of the
shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of the word monomania:
“When a _poor_ fellow takes a piece of goods from a shop, it is
called theft; but if a wealthy lady does the same thing, it is
called _monomania_.” There is biting satire as well as _naïveté_
and dry humor in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power
of language; how the same act may be made to appear in wholly
different lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it.
The same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, or
as black as “the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron’s flag,”
through the lubricity of language. “_Timidus_,” says Seneca, “_se
cantum vocat; sordidus parcum_.” Thousands who would shrink back
with disgust or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led
“first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have thrown
over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. A singular but
most instructive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after
another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, and
showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has
been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the fact that, among
the ancient Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime
and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a thief”
was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference
in our estimate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call
him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French
epithet, “industrious chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy,
when poisoning was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by
the fact that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears
polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? Or can
any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion of words in
France, when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered
themselves from persons who stood between them and the inheritance
they coveted, was called “succession powder”?
Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for relieving
the consciences of rich criminals by softening the names of their
crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known passage of his history,
tells how the morals of the Greeks of his day were sapped, and
how they concealed the national deterioration, by perversions of
the customary meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says,
passed as “manliness” and _esprit de corps_, and prudent caution
for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak for
effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient inertness.”
The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in the art of coining
agreeable names for disagreeable things. “Taxes” they called
“subscriptions,” or “contributions”; the prison was “the house”;
the executioner a “public servant”; and a general abolition of debt
was “a disburdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to
all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled to see
what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in perfecting this
“devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful the press has been in its
efforts to transmute acts of wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and
to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth
and earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.
The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to
the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with
doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half
their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in
doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in
plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.
Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing
books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, and added that he left
his former home in New Jersey under disgrace for a similar theft.
This fact a New York paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar
Misfortune.” About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being
sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran away
with the money to the North. Having been pursued, overtaken, and
compelled to return the money, he was spoken of by “the chivalry”
as the young man “who had lately _met with an accident_.” Is it
not an alarming sign of the times, when, in the legislature of one
of our largest eastern States, a member declares that he has been
asked by another member for his vote, and told that he would get
“five hundred _reasons_ for giving it”; thus making the highest
word in our language, that which signifies divinely given power of
discrimination and choice, the synonym of bribery?
Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been more debased
than “gentleman.” Originally the word meant a man born of a
noble family, or _gens_, as the Romans called it; but as such
persons were usually possessed of wealth and leisure, they were
generally distinguished by greater refinement of manners than the
working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the course of
ages their riches and legal privileges diminished, and the gulf
which separated them from the citizens of the trading towns was
bridged by the increasing wealth and power of the latter, the term
“gentleman” came at last to denote indiscriminately all persons
who kept up the state and observed the social forms which had once
characterized men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that
the acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning.
Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment assume
to be a gentleman, but the term is applied to the vilest criminals
and the most contemptible miscreants, as well as to the poorest and
most illiterate persons in the community.
In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of society have
so far disappeared that even the porter who lounges in his big
chair, and condescends to show you out, is the “gentleman in the
hall”; Jeames is the “gentleman in uniform”; while the valet is
the “gentleman’s gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV,
who was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in heart
and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon the ground of
his grand and suave manners, “the first gentleman of Europe.” But
in the United States the term has been so emptied of its original
meaning,--especially in some of the southern states, where society
has hardly emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot
each other in a street fray still babble of being “born gentlemen,”
and of “dying like gentlemen,”--that most persons will think it is
quite time for the abolition of that heartless conventionality,
that pretentious cheat and barbarian, the gentleman. Cowper
declared, a hundred years ago, in regard to duelling:
“A gentleman
Will not insult me, and no other can.”
A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “gentleman” was
praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, and remarked that
“it was the most quiet, peaceable place he ever saw; there was
no quarrelling or rowdyism, no fighting about the streets. If a
_gentleman_ insulted another, he was _quietly shot down_, and
there was the last of it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted
as marshal at the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York,
had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing
a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders: “I asked
the _gentlemen_ if he desired to address the audience, but he
declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, when
he was surrounded in the barn, where he was shot like a beast,
offered to pledge his word “as a _gentleman_,” to come out and try
to shoot one or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar
visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was asked by a
hackman: “Are you the _man_ that’s going to ride with me; for I am
the _gentleman_ that’s to drive?”
When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, how easy it
is to gloss over his folly by talking of his “generosity,” his
“big-heartedness,” and “contempt for trifles”; or, if he runs into
the opposite vice of miserly meanness, how convenient to dignify
it by the terms “economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! Many
a man has blown out another’s brains in “an affair of honor,” who,
if accused of murder, would have started back with horror. Many a
person stakes his all on a public stock, or sells wheat or corn
which he does not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall,
who would be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself
only a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency of
appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “hell,” and as much
a gambler as if he were staking his money on _rouge-et-noir_ or
_roulette_. Hundreds of officials have been tempted to defraud
the government by the fact that the harshest term applied to the
offence is the rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted
without compunction the downfall of the government, and plundered
its treasury, as “secessionists,” who would have expected to dangle
at the rope’s end, or to be shot down like dogs, had they regarded
themselves as rebels or traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious
word “steal,”--“_convey_ the wise it call.” There are multitudes
of persons who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging
themselves, Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and
guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression that they
are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “connoisseurs in good
living,” whose cheeks would tingle with indignation and shame if
they were accused, in point-blank terms, of vices so disgusting as
intemperance or gluttony. “I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As
You Like It,” “though I thank the gods I am foul.”
Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to juggle
with words, none better than auctioneers understand how much
significance lies in certain shades of expression. It is told of
Robins, the famous London auctioneer, who in selling his wares
revelled in an oriental luxury of expression, that in puffing an
estate he described a certain ancient gallows as a “hanging wood.”
At another time, having made the beauties of the earthly paradise
which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously enchanting, and
finding it necessary to blur it by a fault or two, lest it should
prove “too good for human nature’s daily food,” the Hafiz of the
mart paused a moment, and reluctantly added: “But candor compels me
to add, gentlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid
property,--_the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the
nightingales_.”
It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is done
to society by the debasement of its language in the various
ways we have indicated. When the only words we have by which to
designate the personifications of nobleness, manliness, courtesy
and truth are systematically applied to all that is contemptible
and vile, who can doubt that these high qualities themselves will
ultimately share in the debasement to which their proper names are
subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in
our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont
to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which
brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses
over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize
an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral condemnation
and disgust, even at the expense of some coarseness, than to call
evil good and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for
darkness, by the use of a term that throws a veil of sentiment over
a sin! In reading the literature of former days, we are shocked
occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our fathers;
but even their coarsest terms,--the “naked words, stript from
their shirts,”--in which they denounced libertinism, were far less
hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy which has taught men to abuse
each other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsomeness
of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in the most modest
terms.
It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language stabs
straight at the very heart of his country. He commits a crime
against every individual of a nation, for he poisons a stream
from which all must drink; and the poison is more subtle and
more dangerous, because more likely to escape detection, than the
deadliest venom with which the destructive philosophy of our day is
assailing the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “Let
the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an Italian
scholar, “be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in
part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare
but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country
are an indolent, idly yawning race, with minds already long
prepared for any amount of servility?”
Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or employed, and
other classes of men, in their mutual relations, is indicated by
the names they give each other. Some years ago the legislature
of Massachusetts made a law requiring that children of a certain
age, employed in the factories of that State, should be sent to
school a certain number of weeks in the year. While visiting the
factories to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State
government was complied with, an officer of the State inquired of
the agent of one of the principal factories at New Bedford, whether
it was the custom to do anything for the physical, intellectual,
or moral welfare of the work people. The reply would not have been
inappropriate from the master of a plantation, or the captain
of a coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my work
people as I regard _my machinery_.... They must look out for
_themselves_, as I do for _myself_. When my machinery gets old and
useless, I reject it and get new: and these people are a part of my
machinery.” Another agent in another part of the State replied to
a similar question, that “he used his mill hands _as he used his
horse_; as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered
good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of him as
soon as he could, and what became of him afterward was no affair of
his.”
But we need not multiply illustrations to show the moral power of
words. As the eloquent James Martineau says: “Power they certainly
have. They are alive with sweetness, with terror, with pity. They
have eyes to look at you with strangeness or with response. They
are even creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or
flood it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the
weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom of its
supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith possesses will,
to the end of time, be master of the critic whom it deserts. The
whole inner life of men moulds the forms of language, and is
moulded by them in turn; and as surely pines when they are rudely
treated as the plant whose vessels you bruise or try to replace
with artificial tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale
of feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum of
imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules
of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly alter its
dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its elastic media, and
turn its transparent into opaque, you not only disturb expression,
you dislodge the very things to be expressed. And in proportion as
the idea or sentiment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal
characteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements
from ages of various affection and experience, does it become less
possible to replace it by any equivalents, or dispense with its
function by any act of will.”
To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with words,
which should make all men ponder what they utter. Not only is
every wise and every idle word recorded in the book of divine
remembrance, but modern science has shown that they produce an
abiding impression on the globe we inhabit. Plunge your hand into
the sea, and you raise its level, however imperceptibly, at the
other side of the globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air,
once set in motion, never cease; its waves, raised by each sound,
travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and in
less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere takes up the
altered movement resulting from that sound. The air itself is one
vast library, on whose pages are written in imperishable characters
all that man has spoken, or even whispered. Not a word that goes
from the lips into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere
which wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever,
and the heavens are no more. There, till the heavens are rolled
together as a scroll, will still live the jests of the profane, the
curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the atheist, “keeping company
with the hours,” and circling the earth with the song of Miriam,
the wailing of Jeremiah, the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of
Demosthenes, and the denunciations of Burke.
“Words are mighty, words are living;
Serpents, with their venomous stings,
Or, bright angels, crowding round us
With heaven’s light upon their wings;
Every word has its own spirit,
True or false, that never dies;
Every word man’s lips have uttered
Echoes in God’s skies.”
FOOTNOTES:
[7] “Language and the Study of Language,” by W. D. Whitney.
[8] “Lectures on the English Language.”
[9] “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.
[10] South’s Sermons.