SMALL WORDS.
It is with words as with sunbeams,--the more they are condensed,
the deeper they burn.--SOUTHEY.
Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which
keeps splitting itself into halves.--COLERIDGE.
Among the various forms of ingratitude, one of the commonest is
that of kicking down the ladder by which one has climbed the steeps
of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the
author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small
degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music of
our tongue, sneers at them as low:
“While feeble expletives their aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.”
“How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and, truly,
Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon
part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary.
But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little
wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English
literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the
infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in
his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins,
and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse,
show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid
the temptation of such a line as that quoted. “Small words,” he
elsewhere says, “are generally stiff and languishing, but they may
be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of
“---- the ladder
Whereto the climber upward turns his face,
But when he once attains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.”
The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,--in
the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,--are
small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker
and writer despises. All passionate expression,--the outpouring
of the soul when moved to its depths,--is, for the most part, in
monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the
brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory
strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against
the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box,
in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good
or evil are the little monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is
the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and
light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens
the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles from the maiden’s
lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable of a divine song
which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses
of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the
royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’--well might
Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should come
‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what ‘captain, colonel or
knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the impregnable fortress,--the
very Malakoff of the will; it is the breastwork and barrier thrown
up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or
overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it
is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays
the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope,
and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar.”
Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most
expressive in the language, of which the great majority are
monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that
some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke
sneers at this whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,”
as “the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains that,
“because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been suffered to usurp a
place among words. “Where will you look for it” (the interjection),
he triumphantly asks; “will you find it among laws, or in books
of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful
arts or sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry,
in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer has forgotten
one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind
emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,--namely, the Bible.
But the use of this part of speech is not confined to books. It
is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on
the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest
love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies
of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and
despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More
than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told
by the highest authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of
angels, and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.
What word in the English language is fuller of significance, has
a greater variety of meanings, than the diminutive “Oh”? Uttered
by the infant to express surprise or delight, it is used by the
man to indicate fear, aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according
to the tone in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of
the emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is
condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly utterance
in the House of Commons! In no other assembly, perhaps, are the
powers of human speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that
body that one of the most famous of interjections originated,--we
mean the cry of “Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative
verb, is now “nothing more or less than a great historical
interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which it is
uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or derision. It has
been truly said that when a large assembly is animated by a common
sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that
utterance only through interjections.
Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to the
interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! “The first
sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word ‘O.’” This “O,”
the sign of the vocative, must not be confounded with “Oh!” the
emotional interjection, which expresses a sentiment, as of appeal,
entreaty, expostulation, etc. What depth of meaning is contained in
that little word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines
by Wordsworth:
“She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be!
Now she is in her grave,--and oh!
The difference to me.”
What possible combination of words could be more significant than
the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s theory, or the
contemptuous “Fudge!” with which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar
of Wakefield,” sums up the pretensions of the languishing Miss
Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs:
“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but
where is that to be found?”
“Fudge!”
How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans at the
supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how forcibly “Oho!”
expresses exasperating self-felicitation at the discovery of a
carefully guarded secret! What volumes of meaning are sometimes
condensed into the little word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray,
“is always crying ‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those
almost infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of
human life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: “‘Ha!’
is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection of
sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as consisting
only in the transposition of what is no substantial letter, but a
bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age of a minute, in the very
turning of our breath, is our mirth changed to mourning!”
“Nature in many tones complains,
Has many sounds to tell her pains;
But for her joys has only three,
And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he!”
The truth is that, so far is this class of words from being, as Max
Müller contends, the mere _outskirts_ of language, they are more
truly words than any others. These little words, so expressive of
joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like
fiery jets from volcanic isles,--these surviving particles of the
ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the
face to all lips, and are understood by all men,--these “silver
fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of Tennyson’s,
“the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the dictionaries of all
races,”--
“The only words
Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”--
are emphatically and preëminently language. It is doubtless
true that civilization, with its freezing formalities, tends
to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their natural
accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on the other hand,
it should be noted, that there are certain interjections which are
the fruits of the highest and most mature forms of human culture.
Interjections, in truth, are not so much “_parts_ of speech” as
entire expressions of feeling or thought. They are preëminently
pictorial. If I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,”
“beautifully,” without other words or explanatory gestures, I say
nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things; but
if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or sorrow,
surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows at once by what
affection I am moved. I communicate a fact by a single syllable.
Instead of ranking below other words, the interjection stands on
a higher plane, because its significance is more absolute and
immediate. Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been
derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the natural
interjection “ah”! _ach!_ we have the root of a large class of
words in the Aryan languages, such as ἄχος, _achen!_ “ache,”
“anguish,” “anxious,” _angustus_, and the word “agony” itself. Many
words are used interjectionally which are not interjections, such
as “Farewell!” “Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as
elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbreviated
sentences, resembling the Ο for οὐ, “not,” with which the poet
Philoxenus is said to have replied in writing to the tyrant
Dionysius who had invited him to the court of Syracuse. The true
interjection is an apostrophe, condensed into a syllable. It is
the effort of Nature to unburden herself of some intense, pressing
emotion. It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or
hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value till it
lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks of certain
deeds as “little more than interjections, which give vent to the
long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry, and the drama, the
interjection plays an important part. Public speakers, especially,
find it indispensable to their success. “As the most eloquent men
are apt to find their language inadequate to their needs,--as
still, after they have exhausted their vocabulary of other words,
‘There hover in these restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best,
Which into words no virtue can digest,’
they find great need of the interjection. In their hands it
deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense longings,
carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities, and expresses
the most passionate emotions in the instant of their most
overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar with the history of
oratory, does not remember instances when these little words, so
despised by grammarians, have been more impressive, more to the
point, more eloquent than a long speech? The interjections of
Whitefield,--his “Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and
his “Oh!” of encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted
listener,--were words of tremendous power, and formed a most potent
engine in his pulpit artillery.[11] Garrick used to say that he
would give a hundred guineas if he could say “Oh!” as Whitefield
did. The condensed force of interjections,--their inherent
expressiveness,--entitles them, therefore, to be regarded as the
appropriate language, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the
effect of good acting depends largely on the proper introduction
and just articulation of this class of words.
Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of modulation, and
cannot be rendered with any truth except by one who has mastered
the whole play. What a profound insight of the masterpiece of
the poet is required of him who would adequately utter the word
“indeed” in the following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,”
says an English writer, “the gist of the chief action of the play,
and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be spoken
with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic scheme of Iago’s
conduct. There is no thought of the grammatical structure of the
compound, consisting of the preposition ‘in’ and the substantive
‘deed,’ which is equivalent to ‘act,’ ‘fact,’ or ‘reality.’ All
this vanishes and is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is
employed as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.”
“_Iago._ I did not think he had been acquainted with her.
_Oth._ O, yes, and went between us very oft.
_Iago._ INDEED!
_Oth._ Indeed? ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he
not honest?
_Iago._ Honest, my lord?
_Oth._ Honest? ay, honest!”
The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections, which are
used by the orators and poets with great effect. To gratify the
Athenians, as they behold their once proud enemy humbled to the
dust, and draining the cup of affliction to the very last dregs,
Æschylus, in his “Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation
in which abject misery can be expressed.
The English language is preëminently a language of small words.
It has more monosyllables than any other modern tongue, a
peculiarity which gives it a strikingly direct and straightforward
character, equally removed from the indirect French and the
intricate, lumbering German. Its fondness for this class of
words is even greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of
our present monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,”
“beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were, in the
Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, impatient of
all superfluities, cuts down its words to the narrowest possible
limits,--lopping and condensing, never expanding. Sometimes it
cuts off an initial syllable, as in “gin” for “engine,” “van” for
“caravan,” “prentice” for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig”
for “periwig”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables,
as in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” for
“citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,” “tick”
for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes it strikes out a letter,
or letters, from the middle of a word, or otherwise contracts
it, as in “last” for “latest,” “lark” for “laverock,” “since”
for “sithence,” “fortnight” for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for
“hlaford,” “morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,” “chirp”
for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,” “consols” for
“consolidated annuities.” The same abbreviating processes are
followed, when English words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we
have the monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable _extraneus_;
“spend” from _expendo_; “scour” from _exscorio_; “stop” from
_obstipo_; “funnel” from _infundibulum_; “ply” from _plico_;
“jetty” from _projectum_; “dean” from _decanus_; “count” from
_computo_; “stray” from _extravagus_; “proxy” from _procurator_;
“spell” from _syllabare_, etc. Not only are single Latin words thus
maimed when converted into English, and their letters changed,
transposed, or omitted, but often two English words are clipped
and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud” and “dance” we have
“prance”; from “grave” and “rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip”
and “roll” comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,”
we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive
monosyllables the English language manifests the same economy, and
forms words of a totally different meaning by the simple change
of a vowel; as, bag, beg, big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but;
ball, bell, bill, boll, bull; or, again, by the change of the first
letter; as, fight, light, might, night, right, tight,--dash, hash,
lash, gash, rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles
is rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content
with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, and half the
syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, in speaking, shorter
than any other people, so that our language threatens to become
a kind of stenology, or algebraic condensation of thought,--a
pemmican of ideas. Voltaire said that the English gained two hours
a day by clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown
itself in rendering the final _e_ in English always mute. In
Chaucer the final _e_ must often be sounded as a separate syllable,
or the verse will limp. To the same cause we owe such expressions
as “ten _o_’clock,” instead of “_of_ the clock,” or “_on_ the
clock,” and the hissing _s_, so offensive to foreign ears. The old
termination of the verb, _th_, has given way to _s_ in the third
person singular, and _en_ to a single letter in the third person
plural.
The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern English, is
emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the grandest passages in
our literature are made up almost exclusively of Saxon words. The
English Bible abounds in grand, sublime, and tender passages,
couched almost entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in
Ezekiel, which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest
in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man, can these
bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest,”--contains
seventeen monosyllables to three others. What passage in Holy Writ
surpasses in energetic brevity that which describes the death of
Sisera,--“At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he
fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down dead”? Here
are twenty-two monosyllables to one dissyllable thrice repeated,
and that a word which is usually pronounced as a monosyllable.
The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in
pathos by any similar passage in the whole range of literature;
yet a very large proportion of these touching words are of one
or two syllables:--“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high
places; how are the mighty fallen!... Ye mountains of Gilboa, let
there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of
offering.... Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their
lives, and in their death they were not divided.... They were
swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.... How are the
mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast
slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother
Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was
wonderful, passing the love of women.” Occasionally a long word
is used in the current version, where a more vivid or picturesque
short one might have been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims:
“Oh, ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the
wrath to come?” In one of the older versions “brood” is used in
place of “generation,” with far greater effect.
The early writers, the “pure wells of English undefiled,” abound
in small words. Shakespeare employs them in his finest passages,
especially when he would paint a scene with a few masterly touches.
Hear Macbeth:
“Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in Nature
For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers,
Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech’d with gore.”
Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the “Thane of
Cawdor”:
“That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”
Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!
Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking of the
vanity of “adding house to house and field to field,” has these
beautiful lines:
“Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,
And he that cares for most shall find no more.”
“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, Gifford;
yet they may be paralleled by others in the same writer, equally
musical and equally expressive.
Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables of “learned
length and thundering sound”; but he knew also when to produce the
grandest effects by the small words despised by inferior artists.
Read his account of the journey of the fallen angels:
“Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
_Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death_,--
A universe of death.”
In what other language shall we find in the same number of words a
more vivid picture of desolation than this? Hear, again, the lost
archangel calling upon hell to receive its new possessor:
“One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be--all but less than He
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least,
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for His envy; will not drive us hence;
Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”
Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read the following
exquisite lines, in which the truth of the sentiment that “poetry
is the short-hand of thought” is strikingly illustrated:
“How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow’d mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall a while repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there.”
Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we find anything
more perfect than these lines? What a quantity and variety of
thought are here condensed into two verses, like a cluster of rock
crystals, sparkling and distinct, yet receiving and reflecting
lustre by the combination! Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy,
grandeur and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which
has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine words in
these lines, sixty-two are monosyllables.
Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of monosyllables
is often the very secret of his charm. It is true that he too
frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and outlandish terms,
thinking thereby to render his style more gorgeous or grand. But
his chief strength lies in his despotic command over the simplest
forms of speech. Listen to the words in which he describes the
destruction of Sennacherib:
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,
And their hearts beat but once, and forever lay still.”
Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are monosyllables; and
yet how exquisitely are all these monosyllables linked into the
majestic and animated movement of the anapestic measure! Again,
what can be more musical and more melancholy than the opening verse
of the lines in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land?
“Adieu! adieu! my native shore
Fades o’er the waters blue,
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native land, good night!
With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go
Athwart the foaming brine;
Nor care what land thou bear’st me to,
So not again to mine.
Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves!
My native land, good night!”
Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, “adieu”; the
rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint the scene to
the life; yet all the words but one are monosyllables.
How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are the following
lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic music is one of the
principal charms:
“Those evening bells! those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells,
Of youth and home, and that sweet time,
When last I heard their soothing chime.
Those joyous hours have passed away;
And many a heart, that then was gay,
Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
And hears no more those evening bells.
And so ’twill be when I am gone;
That tuneful peal will still ring on,
While other bards shall walk those dells,
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!”
The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems strikingly
illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable:
“She was sent forth
To bring that light which never wintry blast
Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes--
The light that shines from loving eyes upon
Eyes that love back, till they can see no more.”
Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly
all the rest are monosyllables.
Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,”
has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to
Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative
brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion
as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy
in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer
syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract
his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made
upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words
or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when
armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line,
fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this
heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front
at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after
the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and
though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s
eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the
day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an
advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a
word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the
way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far
are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such
are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most
rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt
words,--yardlongtailed, like fiends.”
I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s fondness for
big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, and also of
certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal
contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a
pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident from the
passages I have cited, that these Liliputians,--these Tom Thumbs
of the dictionary,--play as important a part in our literature as
their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Horne Tooke admitted
their force, when, on his trial for high treason, he said that he
was “the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.”
Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now
known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean,
these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and
are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great
family of words.
The class of small words which were once contemptuously called
“particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and
hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases
just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its
thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but
as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and
modify its ideas,--in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries,
and to reason logically,--the microscopic parts of speech become
indispensable. In some kinds of writing the almost exclusive use of
small words is necessary. What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s
immortal book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in
the ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, or
the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building
a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this
grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of
the “Rambler,” in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind,
“lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid
of his fame.” When a man half understands the subject of which he
speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, use words
of “learned length and thundering sound.” But when he is master of
his theme, and when he feels deeply, he will use short, plain words
which all can understand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said,
strike out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it
sends its bullets straight to the point.[12] When, after wearily
waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his indignant
letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, from his usual
elephantine style, and used short, sharp, and stinging terms.
In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language, the soul
of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language
contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel _a_ alone, more
than five hundred; by the vowel _e_, some four hundred and fifty;
by the vowel _i_, about four hundred; by the vowel _o_, over four
hundred; and by the vowel _u_, more than two hundred and fifty;
we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words,
even the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated
as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know when and
how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than
to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have
borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has
occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, I would
say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,--themselves a happy
example of the thing he commends:
“Think not that strength lies in the big round word,
Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.
To whom can this be true who once has heard
The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak
When want or woe or fear is in the throat,
So that each word gasped out is like a shriek
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange, wild note
Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength
Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,
Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length;
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,
And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase,
Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine,--
Light, but no heat--a flash, but not a blaze!
Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts;
It serves of more than fight or storm to tell,
The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts,
The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell,
The roar of guns, the groans of men that die
On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well
For them that far off on their sick beds lie;
For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead;
For them that laugh, and dance, and clap their hand;
To joy’s quick step, as well as grief’s slow tread.
The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time;
And though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand,
With each, with all, these may be made to chime,
In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme.”
FOOTNOTES:
[11] “Lectures on the English Language,” by G. P. Marsh.
[12] “The Use of Short Words,” by Hon. Horatio Seymour.