WORDS WITHOUT MEANING.
POLONIUS. What do you read, my Lord?
HAMLET. Words, words, words.--SHAKESPEARE.
Is not cant the _materia prima_ of the Devil, from which all
falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves; from
which no true thing can come? For cant is itself properly a
double-distilled lie; the second power of a lie.--CARLYLE.
Mankind are fond of inventing certain solemn and sounding
expressions which appear to convey much, and in reality mean
little; words that are the proxies of absent thoughts, and, like
other proxies, add nothing to argument, while they turn the
scales of decision.--SHELLEY.
Some years ago the author of the “Biographical History of
Philosophy,” in a criticism of a certain public lecturer in London,
observed that one of his most marked qualities was the priceless
one of frankness. “He accepts no sham. He pretends to admire
nothing he does not in his soul admire. He pretends to _be_ nothing
that he _is_ not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how many are
as wearied as he, but dare not confess it? Oh, if men would but
recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If men would but cease lying
in traditionary formulas,--pretending to admire, pretending to
believe, and all in sheer respectability!”
Who does not admire the quality here commended, and yet what
quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding brass and
tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an amount of insincerity there
is in human speech! In how few persons is the tongue an index to
the heart! What a meaningless conventionality pervades all the
forms of social intercourse! Everybody knows that “How d’ye do?”
and “Good morning!” are parroted in most cases without a thought of
their meaning, or at least, without any positive interest in the
health or prosperity of the person addressed; we begin a letter
to one whom we secretly detest with “My dear sir,” and at the end
subscribe ourselves his “obedient servant,” though we should resent
a single word from him which implied a belief in our sincerity,
or bore the slightest appearance of a command. But not to dwell
upon these phrases, the hollowness of which may be excused on
the ground that they sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the
roughest men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet
startling to reflect how large a proportion of human speech is the
veriest cant. That men should use words the meaning of which they
have never weighed or discriminated, is bad enough; but that they
should habitually use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly
worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in which
man can be placed toward man, that does not call into play more or
less of language without meaning. The “damnable iteration” of the
lawyer in a declaration of assault and battery is not more a thing
of form than is the asseveration of one petitioner that he “will
ever pray,” etc., and of another that he “will be a thousand times
obliged,” if you will grant his request. Who does not know to what
an amount of flummery the most trifling kindness done by one person
to another often gives occasion on both sides? The one racks the
vocabulary for words and phrases in which to express his pretended
gratitude, while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by having
to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently disclaims any merit
in the grant, which he really grudged, and will never think of
without feeling that he made a great sacrifice.
The secret feeling of many a “public benefactor,” loudly praised
by the newspapers, was finely let out by Lord Byron when he sent
four thousand pounds to the Greeks, and privately informed a friend
that he did not think he could _well get off for less_. How many
wedding and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials
and to public enterprises, are made by those who secretly curse
the occasion that exacts them! With the stereotyped “thanks” and
“grateful acknowledgments” of the shopkeeper all are familiar, as
they are with “the last,” the “positively the last,” and the “most
positively the very last” appearances of the dramatic stars that
shine for five hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As nobody is
deceived by these phrases, it seems hypercritical to complain of
them, and yet one can hardly help sympathizing with the country
editor who scolds a celebrated musician because he is now making
farewell tours “once a year,” whereas formerly he made them “only
once in five years.” Considering the sameness of shop-keepers’
acknowledgments, one cannot help admiring the daring originality
of the Dutch commercial house of which the poet Moore tells, that
concluded a letter thus: “Sugars are falling more and more every
day; not so the respect and esteem with which we are your obedient
servants.” The cant of public speakers is so familiar to the public
that it is looked for as a matter of course. When a man is called
on to address a public meeting, it is understood that the apology
for his “lack of preparation” to meet the demand so “unexpectedly”
made upon him, will preface the “impromptu” which he has spent
weeks in elaborating, as surely as the inevitable “This is so
unexpected” prefaces the reply of a maiden to the long-awaited
proposal of marriage from her lover.
Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that cant in them
seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find more of it than in
books, magazines, and newspapers? How many reasons are assigned
by authors for inflicting their works on the public, other than
the true one, namely, the pleasure of writing, the hope of a
little distinction, or of a little money! How many writers profess
to welcome criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe to spite,
envy, or jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is intrinsically
more deceptive than the multitudinous “we” in which every writer,
great and small, hides his individuality,--whether his object be,
as Archdeacon Hare says, “to pass himself off unnoticed, like
the Irishman’s bad guinea in a handful of halfpence,” or to give
to the opinions of a humble individual the weight and gravity of
a council? “Who the ---- is ‘We’?” exclaimed the elder Kean on
reading a scathing criticism upon his “Hamlet”; and the question
might be pertinently asked of many other _nominis umbræ_ who
deliver their vaticinations and denunciations as oracularly as
if they were lineal descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. Who
can estimate the diminution of power and influence that would
result should the ten thousand editors in the land, who now assume
a mystic grandeur and speak with a voice of authority, as the
organs of the public or a party, come down from their thrones, and
exchange the regal “we” for the plebeian and egotistic “I”? “Who is
‘I’?” the reader might exclaim, in tones even more contemptuous
than Kean’s. The truth is, “I” is a nobody. He represents only
himself. He may be Smith or Jones,--the merest cipher. He may weigh
but a hundred pounds, and still less morally and intellectually.
He may be diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom Thumb. Who
cares what such a pygmy thinks? But “we” represents a multitude, an
imposing crowd, a mighty assembly, a congress, or a jury of sages;
and we all quail before the opinions of the great “we.” As a writer
has well said: “‘We have every reason to believe that beef will
rise to starvation prices’ is a sentiment which, when read in a
newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach tremble; but substitute
an ‘I’ for the ‘we,’ and nobody cares a copper for the opinion. It
has been well said that what terrified Belshazzar was the hand on
the wall, because he couldn’t see to whom it belonged; and the same
may be said of the editorial ‘we.’ It is the mystery in which it is
involved that invests it with potency.”
The history of literature abounds with examples of words used
almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. There is a
time in the history of almost every literature when language
apparently loses its vitality, and becomes dead, by being divorced
from the living thought that created it. Many of the most effete
and worn-out forms of expression, when first introduced, pleased
by their novelty, and manifested originality in their inventors;
but by dint of continual repetition, the delicate bloom has been
rubbed off, and they have lost their power. A great deal of what
is preserved in books, and is called fine writing, is made up of
these lifeless parts of language, which are like the elements of a
decayed and rotten tree, of which the organic form and structure
are perfect, but the life of which has departed. It is the outward
form of literature without the soul; an abundance of fine writing,
but no ideas. It has been truly said that it is amazing to see
how much of this dead material is accumulated at the present day;
whole books filled to repletion with words without thoughts,
standing like dead forests, upright indeed, and regular in form
and structure, but presenting no fruit nor verdure, sheltering no
life, monuments only of past vitality, and soon to crumble into
oblivion. “Wandering through these catacombs of the mind, one meets
everywhere with the most admirable ‘styles,’ which, doubtless, when
first constructed, were the vehicles of as admirable thought, the
fit language of great and stately minds, but which, transported
from the past, and made to represent the little and despicable
‘notions’ of their plunderers, become a very mockery.”
Who does not know how feeble and hollow British poetry had become
in the eighteenth century, just before the appearance of Cowper?
Compelled to appear in the costume of the court, it had acquired
its artificiality; and dealing with the conventional manners and
outside aspects of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the
proper haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the vehicle
of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated into a mere trick
of art,--a hand-organ operation, in which one man could grind out
tunes nearly as well as another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a
perpetually recurring assortment of images, had become so much the
traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set himself
up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply himself with his
stock in trade. The style that prevailed has been aptly termed by
the poet Lowell “the Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called
the wine “rosy,” sleep “balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen
always employ a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express
the commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain, almanac
name, but always “Phœbus,” or “the orb of day.” The moon was known
only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the refulgent lamp of night.”
Naïads were as plenty in every stream as trout or pickerel. If
these poets wished to say tea, they would write
“Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.”
Coffee would be nothing less than
“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray.”
A boot would be raised to
“The shining leather that the leg encased.”
A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St.
Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and a
magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than “Minos” or
“Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of a young man’s falling
in love, he set himself to relate how Cupid laid himself in ambush
in the lady’s eye, and from that fortress shot forth a dart at the
breast of the unhappy youth, who straightway began to writhe under
his wound, and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile
upon him. All women in that golden age were “nymphs”; “dryads”
were as common as birds; carriages were “harnessed pomps”; houses,
humble or stately “piles”; and not a wind could blow, whether the
sweet South, or “Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “a
gentle zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the
well known lines:
“While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes,
Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’
In the next line ‘it whispers through the trees’;
If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’
The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with ‘sleep.’”
Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions and to
threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much as the small
wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius of Cowper broke through
these traditionary fetters, and relieved poetry from the spell in
which Pope and his imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm.
Expressing his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of such verse,
in which sentiment was so often
“Sacrificed to sound,
And truth cut short to make a period round,”
he cried:
“Give _me_ the line that ploughs its stately course,
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force;
That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart,
Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.”
The charm of Cowper’s letters, acknowledged by all competent judges
to be the best in the English language, lies in the simplicity
and naturalness,--the freedom from affectation,--by which they
are uniformly characterized. Contrasting them with those of
Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew Combe observes in a letter to a friend:
“Cowper’s letters, to my mind, do far more to excite a deep sense
of religion, than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one
gives expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feelings
which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The other _forces in
the one topic in all his letters_, and lashes himself up to a
due fervor of expression, whether the mind wills or not. On one
occasion Wilberforce dispatched a very hurried letter on Saturday
night, without any religious expressions in it. In the night-time
his conscience troubled him so much for the omission, that he could
not rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with the
piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure from his rule!
Only think what a perversion of a good principle this was!”
It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of words
of which we have spoken are used most frequently. Sir Henry Wotton
long since defined an ambassador as “a gentleman sent abroad _to
lie_ for the benefit of his country.” In Europe, so indissolubly
has diplomacy been associated with trickery, that it is said
Talleyrand’s wonderful success with the representatives of foreign
courts was owing largely to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody
believing it possible that he was striving for that for which he
seemed to be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in
which he spoke of and dealt with all public matters, completely
puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate from diplomacy
the mysterious devices that distinguish the hack from the true
diplomatist. In the titles and styles of address used by Kings and
Emperors, we have examples of cant in its most meaningless forms.
One sovereign is His Most Christian Majesty; another, Defender
of the Faith, etc. A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue
a commission of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his
“well-beloved,” though in his heart he detests them.
Everybody knows that George I of England obtained his crown, not
by hereditary title, but by an Act of Parliament; yet, in his
very first speech to that body, he had the effrontery to speak of
ascending the throne of his ancestors. Well might Henry Luttrell
exclaim:
“O that in England there might be
A duty on hypocrisy!
A tax on humbug, an excise
On solemn plausibilities,
A stamp on everything that canted!
No millions more, if these were granted,
Henceforward would be raised or wanted.”
So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “wire-pulling,”
and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected to a State
legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank his fellow-citizens
for having sent him there “by their voluntary, unbiased suffrages.”
When the patriot, Patkul, was surrendered to the vengeance of
Charles XII of Sweden, the following sentence was read over to
him: “It is hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our
_most merciful_ sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to
his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc. “What
mercy!” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with the same mockery
of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition was wont, when condemning
a heretic to the torture, to express the tenderest concern for
his temporal and eternal welfare. One of the most offensive forms
of cant is the profession of extreme humility by men who are full
of pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman Pontiffs
styled himself “the servant of the servants of God,” at the very
time when he humiliated the Emperor of Germany by making him wait
five days barefoot in his ante-chamber in the depth of winter,
and expected all the Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to
kiss his toe or hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always
mouthing the language of piety and benevolence, especially when
about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the Fourteenth’s
paroxysms of repentance and devotion were always the occasion
for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots; and Napoleon was always
prating of his love of peace, and of being compelled to fight by
his quarrelsome neighbors. While the French revolutionists were
shouting “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed in
Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by cartloads
from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite amusement of
Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robespierre’s fellow-cutthroats,
was the rearing of doves. The contemplation of their innocence,
he said, made the charm of his existence, in consoling him for
the wickedness of men. Even when he had reached the height of his
“bad preëminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National
Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which he
nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody compatriots,
who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs as himself, that when a
distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband’s
life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his
favorite spaniel’s tail, he cried out, “Good heavens, Madam! have
you no _humanity_?”
“My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of cant.” If
professional politicians should follow this advice, many of them
would be likely to find their occupation clean gone. At elections
they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of
patriotism,--to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that,
and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be
comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down
the throats of the people,--that the voters, whom the old party
hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves
at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel O’Connell,
the popular Irish orator, is said to have had a large vocabulary
of stock political phrases, upon which he rang the changes with
magical effect. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye,
while he wept with the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever
in danger of halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped
catch-words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his
“head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know ye not,”
etc., which never failed him in any emergency.
Offensive as are all these forms of speech without meaning,
they are not more so than the hollow language of--strange to
say,--some moral philosophers. Many persons have been so impressed
by the ethical essays of Seneca, in which he sings the praises
of poverty, and denounces in burning language the corruption of
Rome and the extortion in the provinces, that they could account
for the excellence of these writings only on the theory of a
Christian influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman
philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul. But what
are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading them by the light
of the author’s life and character, we find they are only words.
A late German historian tells us that the same Seneca who could
discourse so finely upon the abstemiousness and contentment of
the philosopher, and who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt
for earthly things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the
four years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of
three hundred millions of sesterces,--over fifteen millions of
dollars. While writing his treatise on “Poverty,” he had in his
house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined wood brought
from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost as much as twenty-five,
and even seventy thousand dollars. The same Seneca, who denounced
extortion with so virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens
with the gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who
preached so much about purity of morals, was openly accused of
adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his pupil Nero into
still more shameful practices. He wrote a work upon “Clemency,”
yet had, beyond question, a large part of Nero’s atrocities upon
his conscience. It was he who composed the letter in which Nero
justified before the Senate the murder of his own mother.[13]
Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the stump and
platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be feared that
they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are
doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking remark
of Coleridge, that truths, of all others the most awful and
interesting, are too often considered so true that they lose all
the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul,
side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual
handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, and it is
only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their
full meaning. Gradually the terms most vital to belief cease to
mean what they meant when first used; the electric life goes out
of them; and, for all practical purposes, they are dead. Hence it
is that “the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom
questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life,
because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt,
until personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it
is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics,
so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested
a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas, which
tendency all the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully
directed to keeping the meaning alive are barely found sufficient
to counteract.”[14]
There can be little doubt that many a man whose life is thoroughly
selfish cheats himself into the belief that he is pious, because
he parrots with ease the phrases of piety and orthodoxy. Who is
not familiar with scores of such pet phrases and cant terms, which
are repeated at this day apparently without a thought of their
meaning? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing
“the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little interest,” and
“fields white for the harvest”? Who is not weary of the ding-dong
of “our Zion” and the solecism of “in our midst”; and who does
not long for a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer
“feel to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” says
Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the present day think
it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as
a token to each other! They must ‘improve’ this and that text, and
they must do so and so in a ‘prayerful’ way; and so on. A young
lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings
were the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended her
to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.” The language
of prayer, both public and private, being made up more or less of
technical expressions, tends continually to become effete. The
scriptural and other phrases, which were used with good taste and
judgment several generations ago, may have lost their significance
to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others which
have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it has been truly
said, are imperilled by the continued use of conventional
phraseology after the life of it has gone out, so that nothing in
the real experience of the people responds to it, when they hear it
or when they use it. Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,”
remarks that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally
applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation, and
not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling; in which case the
last words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good
man who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so
completely beclouded in the blinding influence of this expression,
that he exclaimed, ‘O Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and
thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘I have taken upon me
to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes,’ the utterance
was forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted, perverted, and
abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own element the
better.”
Many persons have very erroneous ideas of what constitutes
religious conversation. That is not necessarily religious talk
which is interlarded with religious phrases, or which is solely
about divine things; but that which is permeated with religious
feeling, which is full of truth, reverence, and love, whatever the
theme may be. Who has not heard some men talk of the most worldly
things in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of
spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting his whole
spiritual being? And who has not heard other men talk about the
divinest things in so dry, formal, and soulless a way that their
words seemed a profanation, and chilled him to the core? It is
almost a justification of slang that it is generally an effort to
obtain relief from words worn bare by the use of persons who put
neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable
of expressing anything real.
When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had recanted, she
replied, “No; he has only _canted_.” Often, when there is no
deliberate hypocrisy, good men use language so exaggerated and
unreal as to do more harm than the grossest worldliness. We have
often, in thinking upon this subject, called to mind a saying of
Dr. Sharp, of Boston, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all
cant and shams. “There’s Dr. ----,” said he, about the time of the
first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “who went all the way to
Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he should meet a poor Baptist
minister in the street, he wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had
an intense abhorrence of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave
expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was visiting him
spent a day in sighing and in begging pardon for his suspirations,
saying that they were caused by grief that he had so hard a heart.
The great divine bore with him all the first day, but when the
lamentations were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said:
“Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensating principle,
and be thankful and still.” “Compensating principle!” exclaimed the
young man; “what can compensate for a hard heart?” “Why, a soft
head, to be sure,” said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great
provocation. Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A
great many men would be positive forces of goodness in the world,
if they did not let all their principles and enthusiasm escape
in words. They are like locomotives which let off so much steam
through the escape valves, that, though they fill the air with
noise, they have not power enough left to move the train. There is
hardly anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without
deeds. “The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest before
the enemy; it is well said to him that his courage is better kept
till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous indignation against
evil from the platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize
the spiritual giant; so much indignation as is expressed has found
vent; it is wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with
evil; the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains
that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.”[15]
“Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng;
They will condense within thy soul,
And change to purpose strong.
But he who lets his feelings run
In soft luxurious flow,
Shrinks when hard service must be done,
And faints at every woe.
Faith’s meanest deed more favor bears,
Where hearts and wills are weigh’d.
Than brightest transports, choicest prayers,
Which bloom their hour and fade.”[16]
It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages,
being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having
learned the simple verse, “I said, I will take heed to my ways,
that I offend not with my tongue,” he went away, saying that was
enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months,
and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another
verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master
this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy,
even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on his cards
“J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,” and was never known to unfold his
cambric handkerchief, with the words, “Let us weep.” On the other
hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without
attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,--to cheat one’s
self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought
or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who
have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they
have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of
what they felt in other and better years,--above all, when they
employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been
forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in the shock of
conflict,--they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression
they produce on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once
detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions
of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest
and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion
commands respect; but intense words should never be used when the
religious life is not intense. “Costing little, words are given
prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the
space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No
wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words,
the weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have conveyed
all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief
experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself.
Farewell, then, to the toil of the ‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has
found for itself a vent in words.”[17]
Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant,
which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was
asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied,
“I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or
Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is
a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I
have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves,
who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says
is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the
gloss off my own impression,--if I have any.”
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Ulhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94.
[14] Mill’s “Logic.”
[15] Sermons, by Rev. F. W. Robertson.
[16] Professor J. H. Newman.
[17] “Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson.”