SOME ABUSES OF WORDS.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words.--PROVERBS XVII, 27.
Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions, and you know
him.... He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure
for the great or small.--LAVATER.
Words are women; deeds are men.--GEORGE HERBERT.
He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth,
like the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own
ink.--RAY.
The old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing three languages
that he used to declare that he had three hearts. The Emperor
Charles V expressed himself still more strongly, and declared
that in proportion to the number of languages a man knows, is he
more of a man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who
understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke thirty
with rare excellence, must have been many men condensed into
one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient or modern times, he
had perhaps the greatest knowledge of words. Yet, with all his
marvellous linguistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak
of nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves
a higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold
chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign languages with
a fluency and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for
a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility,--left no trace of
his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplating them, we can
but wonder at his gifts, as we wonder at the Belgian giant or a
five-legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions,
De Quincey suggests that the following would be an appropriate
epitaph for his eminence: “Here lies a man who, in the act of
dying, committed a robbery,--absconding from his fellow-creatures
with a valuable polyglot dictionary.” Enormous, however, as were
the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less
vain of his acquirements,--priding himself, as he did, less upon
his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of a single
tongue. “What am I,” said he to a visitor, “but an ill-bound
dictionary?” The saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often
suggested by such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told
that Scaliger understood twenty different languages,--“That’s
twenty words for one idea,” said she; “I had rather have twenty
ideas for one word.” In this reply she foreshadowed the great error
of modern scholarship, which is too often made the be-all and the
end-all of life, when its only relation to it should be that of a
graceful handmaid. The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted
at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his
energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact.
The educated man is too often one who knows more of _language_
than of _idea_,--more of the husk than of the kernel,--more of
the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a
heap of symbols,--of mere counters,--with which he feels himself
to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these
shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout
the realm, he has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,--paper
like bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless
in exchange, and repudiated in real traffic. The great scholar is
often an intellectual miser, who expends the spiritual energy that
might make him a hero upon the detection of a wrong dot, a false
syllable, or an inaccurate word.
In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed in so
large a measure to the people, and every third man is an orator,
it is easier to find persons with the twenty words for one
idea, than persons with twenty ideas for one word. Of all the
peoples on the globe, except perhaps the Irish, Americans are the
most spendthrift of language. Not only in our court-houses and
representative halls, but everywhere, we are literally deluged
with words,--words,--words. Everybody seems born to make long
speeches, as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian theory
that Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a universal belief, and
all are laboring to fill up the realms of space with “mouthfuls of
spoken wind.” The quantity of breath that is wasted at our public
meetings,--religious, political, philanthropic, and literary,--is
incalculable. Hardly a railroad or a canal is opened, but the
occasion is seized on as a chance for speeches of “learned length
and thundering sound”; and even a new hotel cannot throw open its
doors without an amount of breath being expended, sufficient, if
economically used, to waft a boat across a small lake.
One is struck, in reading the “thrilling” addresses on various
occasions, which are said to have “chained as with hooks of steel
the attention of thousands,” and which confer on their authors
“immortal reputations” that die within a year, to see what
tasteless word-piling passes with many for eloquence. The advice
given in Racine’s “_Plaideurs_,” by an ear-tortured judge to
a long-winded lawyer, “to skip to the deluge,” might wisely be
repeated to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian art
of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our orators are
forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,--raising an ocean to
drown a fly,--loading cannon to shoot at humming-birds. Thought
and expression are supplanted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead
of great thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant
sentences,--the value of a thousand pounds sterling of sense
concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,--we have a mass of
verbiage, delivered with a pompous elocution. Instead of ideas
brought before us, as South expresses it, like water in a well,
where you have fulness in a little compass, we have the same
“carried out into many petty, creeping rivulets, with length and
shallowness together.”
It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached the
highest climax. A member may have a thought or a fact which may
settle a question; but if it may be couched in a sentence or
two, he thinks it not worth delivering. Unless he can wire-draw
it into a two-hours speech, or at least accompany it with some
needless verbiage to plump it out in the report, he will sit stock
still, and leave the floor to men who have fewer ideas and more
words at command. The public mind, too, revolts sometimes against
nourishment in highly concentrated forms; it requires bulk as well
as nutriment, just as hay, as well as corn, is given to horses, to
distend the stomach, and enable it to act with its full powers.
Then, again,--and this, perhaps, is one of the main causes of
long-winded speeches,--there is a sort of reverence entertained
for a man who can “spout” two or three hours on the stretch; and
the wonder is heightened, if he does it without making a fool of
himself. Nothing, however, can be more absurd than to regard mere
volubility as a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from
being the case that it may be doubted whether any large-thoughted
man, who was accustomed to grapple with the great problems of life
and society, ever found it easy upon the rostrum to deliver his
thoughts with fluency and grace.
Bruce, the traveller, long ago remarked of the Abyssinians, that
“they are all orators, as,” he adds, “are most barbarians.” It is
often said of such tonguey men that they have “a great command
of language,” when the simple fact is that language has a great
command of them. As Whately says, they have the same command of
language that a man has of a horse that runs away with him. A
true command of language consists in the power of discrimination,
selection, and rejection, rather than in that of multiplication.
The greatest orators of ancient and modern times have been
remarkable for their economy of words. Demosthenes, when he
“Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne,”
rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even less time
to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There are some of the Greek
orator’s speeches which were spoken, as they may now be read with
sufficient slowness and distinctness, in less than half an hour;
yet they are the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius the
effect of whose words the ancients exhausted their language in
describing; which they could adequately describe only by comparing
it to the workings of the most subtle and powerful agents of
nature,--the ungovernable torrent, the resistless thunder. Chatham
was often briefer still, and Mirabeau, the master-spirit of the
French tribune, condensed his thunders into twenty minutes.
It is said that not one of the three leading members of the
convention that formed the Constitution of the United States spoke,
in the debates upon it, over twenty minutes. Alexander Hamilton
was reckoned one of the most diffuse speakers of his day; yet
he did not occupy more than two hours and a half in his longest
arguments at the bar, nor did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over
half that time. A judge who was intimately acquainted with Burr and
his practice declares that he repeatedly and successfully disposed
of cases involving a large amount of property in half an hour.
“Indeed,” says he, “on one occasion he talked to the jury seven
minutes in such a manner that it took me, on the bench, half an
hour to straighten them out.” He adds. “I once asked him, ‘Colonel
Burr, why cannot lawyers always save the time, and spare the
patience of the court and jury, by dwelling only on the important
points in their cases?’ to which Burr replied, ‘Sir, you demand the
greatest faculty of the human mind, selection.’” To these examples
we may add that of a great English advocate. “I asked Sir James
Scarlett,” says Buxton, “what was the secret of his preëminent
success as an advocate. He replied that he took care to press home
the one principal point of the case, without paying much regard to
the others. He also said that he knew the secret of being short.
‘I find,’ said he, ‘that when I exceed half an hour, I am always
doing mischief to my client. If I drive into the heads of the jury
unimportant matter, I drive out matter more important that I had
previously lodged there.’”
Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy to such an
extreme that he tried almost to do without words. “If there is a
man on earth,” said he, “tormented by the cursed desire to get a
whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and this phrase
into one word,--that man is myself.” The ambition of many American
speakers, and not a few writers, is apparently the reverse of this.
We do not seem to know that in many cases, as Hesiod says, a half
is more than the whole; and that a speech or a treatise hammered
out painfully in every part is often of less value than a few
bright links, suggestive of the entire chain of thought. Who wants
to swallow a whole ox, in order to get at the tenderloin?
Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now than
it once was, because men think more rapidly. They are not more
thoughtful than their ancestors, but they are more vivid,
direct, and animated in their thinking. They are more impatient,
therefore, of long-windedness, of a loose arrangement, and of a
heavy, dragging movement in the presentation of truth. “A century
ago men would listen to speeches and sermons,--to divisions and
subdivisions,--that now would be regarded as utterly intolerable.
As the human body is whisked through space at the rate of a mile a
minute, so the human mind travels with an equally accelerated pace.
Mental operations are on straight lines, and are far more rapid
than they once were. The public audience now craves a short method,
a distinct, sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating movement,
upon the part of its teachers.”[18] It is, in short, an age of
steam and electricity that we live in, not of slow coaches; an age
of locomotives, electric telegraphs, and phonography; and hence it
is the cream of a speaker’s thoughts that men want,--the wheat, and
not the chaff,--the kernel, and not the shell,--the strong, pungent
essence, and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse
to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even _well_
said, on a subject, but the very _apices rerum_, the tops and
sums of things reduced to their simplest expression,--the drop of
oil extracted from thousands of roses, and condensing all their
odors,--the healing power of a hundred weight of bark in a few
grains of quinine.
“Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever issued
from the mind of man,” says South, “have been couched under, and
delivered in, a few close, home, and significant words.... Was not
the work of all the six days [of creation] transacted in so many
words?... Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were,
dropped from God’s mouth, and nature itself was but the product of
a word.... The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom
all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them by a
single sentence consisting of two or three words. And γνῶθι σεαυτὸν
still lives and flourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast
volumes are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion.”
Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many speeches, is
the habitual exaggeration of language which deforms both our public
and our private discourse. The most unmanageable of all parts of
speech, with many persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly
said that the adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the
substantives, though they may agree in gender, number, and case.
Generally the weakness of a composition is just in proportion to
the frequency with which this class of words is introduced. As in
gunnery the force of the discharge is proportioned, not to the
amount of powder that can be used, but to the amount that can be
thoroughly ignited, so it is not the multitude of words, but the
exact number fired by the thought, that gives energy to expression.
There are some writers and speakers who seem to have forgotten
that there are three degrees of comparison. The only adjectives
they ever use are the superlative, and even these are raised to
the _third power_. With them there is no gradation, no lights and
shadows. Every hill is Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue
is godlike, every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every
molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their vocabulary;
epithets are heightened into superlatives; superlatives stretch
themselves into hyperboles; and hyperboles themselves get out of
breath, and die asthmatically of exhaustion.
Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe, our
Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably the most
addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our mountains, lakes
and rivers are all on a gigantic scale, we seem to think our speech
must be framed after the same pattern. Even our jokes are of the
most stupendous kind; they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies,
or suggest the immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in
portraying the most trivial incident, rolls along a Mississippian
flood of eloquence, and the vastness of his metaphors makes you
think you are living in the age of the megatheriums and saurians,
and listening to one of a pre-Adamite race. Our political speeches,
instead of being couched in plain and temperate language, too
often bristle
“With terms unsquared
Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped,
Would seem hyperboles.”
In ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our poverty
of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most ordinary themes,
except in the most extravagant and enraptured terms. Everything
that pleases us is positively “delicious,” “nice,” or “charming”;
everything handsome is “elegant,” or “splendid”; everything that we
dislike is “hateful,” “dreadful,” “horrible,” or “shocking.” Listen
to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and you will
learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours, they have met
with more marvellous adventures and hairbreadth escapes,--passed
through more thrilling experiences, and seen more gorgeous
spectacles,--endured more fright, and enjoyed more rapture,--than
could be crowded into a whole life-time, even if spun out to
threescore and ten.
Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy season, and
he will tell you that “it rains cats and dogs,” or that “it beats
all the storms since the flood.” If his clothes get sprinkled in
crossing the street, he has been “drenched to the skin.” All our
winds blow a hurricane; all our fires are conflagrations,--even
though only a hen-coop is burned; all our fogs can be cut with
a knife. Nobody fails in this country; he “bursts up.” All our
orators rival Demosthenes in eloquence; they beat Chillingworth in
logic; and their sarcasm is more “withering” than that of Junius
himself. Who ever heard of a public meeting in this country that
was not “an immense demonstration”; of an actor’s benefit at
which the house was not “crowded from pit to dome”; of a political
nomination that was not “sweeping the country like wild-fire”?
Where is the rich man who does not “roll in wealth”; or the poor
man who is “worth the first red cent”? All our good men are
paragons of virtue,--our villains, monsters of iniquity.
Many of our public speakers seem incapable of expressing themselves
in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any subject whatever. A great
deal of our writing, too, is pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key.
Quiet ease of style, like that of Cowley’s “Essays,” Goldsmith’s
“Vicar of Wakefield,” or White’s “Natural History of Selborne,”
is almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming more
and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if it would come
to consist of head-lines and exclamation points. Some of the
most popular correspondents are those whose communications are a
perfect _florilegium_ of fine words. They rival the “tulipomania”
in their love of gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care
little how trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they
have dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of Rufus Choate,
whose brain teemed with a marvellous wealth of words, and who was
very prodigal of adjectives, that he “drove a substantive-and-six”
whenever he spoke in public, and that he would be as pathetic as
the grand lamentations in “Samson Agonistes” on the obstruction of
fish-ways, and rise to the cathedral music of the universe on the
right to manufacture India-rubber suspenders. When Chief-Justice
Shaw, before whom he had often pleaded, heard that there was a new
edition of “Worcester’s Dictionary,” containing two thousand five
hundred new words, he exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let
Choate get hold of it!”[19]
Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at some
exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness, describing
microscopic things by colossal metaphors. Thus a French naturalist
represents the blood of a louse as “rushing through his veins like
a torrent!” Even in treating on this very subject of exaggeration,
a writer in an English periodical, after rebuking sharply this
_American_ fault, himself outrages truth by declaring that
“he would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that never
caricatures the subject on which he speaks!” To a critic who thus
fails to reck his own rede, one may say with Sir Thomas Browne:
“Thou who so hotly disclaimest the devil, be not thyself guilty of
diabolism.”
Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of amplification
and exaggeration,--of blowing up molehills into Himalayas and
Chimborazos? Can anything be more obvious than the dangers of such
a practice? Is it not evident that by applying super-superlatives
to things petty or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so
that, when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be
bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpardonable
sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is not necessary
that our “good Homers” should be always electrifying us with a
savage intensity of expression. There is nothing of which a reader
tires so soon as of a continual blaze of brilliant periods,--a
style in which a “_qu’il mourut_” and a “let there be light” are
crowded into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which
adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where all men
are giants, there are no giants; where all is emphatic in style,
there is no emphasis. Travel a few months among the mountains, and
you will grow as sick of the everlasting monotony of grandeur, of
beetling cliffs and yawning chasms, as of an eternal succession of
plains. Yet, in defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational
writer thinks the reader will deem him dull unless every sentence
blazes with meaning, and every paragraph is crammed with power.
His intellect is always armed cap-a-pie, and every passage is an
approved attitude of mental carte and tierce. If he were able to
create a world, there would probably be no latent heat in it, and
no twilight; and should he drop his pen and turn painter, his
pictures would be all foreground, with no more perspective than
those of the Chinese.
De Quincey, speaking of the excitability of the French, says that,
having appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of
trivial and ordinary life, they have no language of passion for the
service of poetry, or of occasions really demanding it, because
it has been already enfeebled by continual association with cases
of an unimpassioned order. “Ah, Heavens!” or “O my God!” are
exclamations so exclusively reserved by the English for cases of
profound interest that, on hearing a woman even utter such words,
they look round expecting to see her child in some situation of
danger. But in France “_Ciel!_” and “_O mon Dieu!_” are uttered
by every woman if a mouse does but run across the floor. There
is much suggestive truth in this. By the habitual use of strong
language men may blunt and petrify their feelings, as surely as
by the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants they may deaden the
sensibility of the palate. “Naturally the strongest word ought to
be used to give expression to the strongest feeling. But strong
words have been so blunted through frequent use that they have
lost their sharp edge, and pass over our thick skin without even
pricking our sensibility; while, at moments when we expect a heavy
blow, the light tickling of the socially polite feather may far
more vividly stimulate our sensibility.”
It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse, whether oral
or written, that it is the subdued expression of conviction and
feeling, when the speaker or writer, instead of giving vent to his
emotions, veils them in part, and suffers only glimpses of them to
be seen, that is the most powerful. It is the man who is all _but_
mastered by his excitement, but who, at the very point of being
mastered, masters himself,--apparently cool when he is at a white
heat,--whose eloquence is most conquering. When the speaker, using
a gentler mode of expression than the case might warrant, appears
to stifle his feelings and studiously to keep them within bounds,
a reaction is produced in the hearer’s mind, and, rushing into the
opposite extreme, he is moved more deeply than by the most vehement
and passionate declamation. The jets of flame that escape now and
then,--the suppressed bursts of feeling,--the partial eruptions
of passion,--are regarded as but hints or faint intimations of
the volcano within. Balzac, in one of his tales, tells of an
artist, who, by a few touches of his pencil, could give to a most
commonplace scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over
the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and
blood. Through a half-opened door you see a bed with the clothes
confusedly heaped, as in some death-struggle, over an undefined
object which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor
you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and
these hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more
powerfully than the most elaborate detail, because the imagination
of man is more powerful than art itself. So with Hood’s description
of the Haunted House:--
“Over all there hung a cloud of fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper to the ear,
‘The place is haunted!’”
Thoreau, describing an interview he had at Concord with John Brown,
notices as one of the latter’s marked peculiarities, that he did
not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. “He referred to
what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the
least vent to his pent-up fire. _It was a volcano with an ordinary
chimney-flue._” In one of the published letters of the late Rev.
F. W. Robertson, there are some admirable comments on a letter,
full of strongly expressed religious sentiments, pious resolutions,
etc., which he had received from a fashionable lady. The letter, he
says, “is in earnest so far as it goes; only _that fatal facility
of strong words_ expresses feeling which will seek for itself no
other expression. She believes or means what she says, but the very
vehemence of the expression injures her, for really it expresses
the penitence of a St. Peter, and would not be below the mark if it
were meant to describe the bitter tears with which he bewailed his
crime; but when such language is used for trifles, there remains
_nothing stronger for the awful crises of human life_. It is like
Draco’s code,--death for larceny; and there remains for parricide
or treason only death.”
Let us then be as chary of our superlatives as of our Sunday suit.
Hardly a greater mistake can be made in regard to expression, than
to suppose that a uniform intensity of style is a proof of mental
power. So far is this from being true, that it may safely be said
that such intensity not only implies a want of truthfulness and
simplicity, but even of earnestness and real force. Intensity
is not a characteristic of nature, in spirit or in matter. The
surface of the earth is not made up of mountains and valleys, but,
for the most part, of gentle undulations. The ocean is not always
in a rage, but, if not calm, its waves rise and fall with gentle
fluctuation. Hurricanes and tempests are the extraordinary, not
the usual, conditions of our atmosphere. Not only the strongest
thinkers, but the most powerful orators, have been distinguished
rather for moderation than for exaggeration in expression. The
great secret of Daniel Webster’s strength as a speaker lay in
the fact that he made it a practice to understate rather than to
overstate his confidence in the force of his own arguments, and in
the logical necessity of his conclusions. The sober and solid tramp
of his style reflected the movements of an intellect that palpably
respected the relations and dimensions of things, and to which
exaggeration would have been an immorality. Holding that violence
of language is evidence of feebleness of thought and lack of
reasoning power, he kept his auditor constantly in advance of him,
by suggestion rather than by strong asseveration, and by calmly
stating the facts that _ought_ to move the hearer, instead of by
making passionate appeals, the man being always felt to be greater
than the man’s feelings. Such has been the method of all great
rhetoricians of ancient and modern times.
The most effective speakers are not those who tell all they think
or feel, but those who, by maintaining an austere conscientiousness
of phrase, leave on their hearers the impression of reserved power.
Great bastions of military strength must lie at rest in times of
peace, that they may be able to execute their destructive agencies
in times of war; and so let it be with the superlatives of our
tongue. Never call on the “tenth legion,” or “the old guard,”
except on occasions corresponding to the dignity and weight of
those tremendous forces. Say plain things in a plain way, and then,
when you have occasion to send a sharp arrow at your enemy, you
will not find your quiver empty of shafts which you wasted before
they were wanted.
“You should not speak to think, nor think to speak;
But words and thoughts should of themselves outwell
From inner fulness; chest and heart should swell
To give them birth. Better be dumb a week
Than idly prattle; better in leisure sleek
Lie fallow-minded, than a brain compel
To wasting plenty that hath yielded well,
Or strive to crop a soil too thin and bleak.
One true thought, from the deepest heart upspringing,
May from within a whole life fertilize;
One true word, like the lightning sudden gleaming,
May rend the night of a whole world of lies.
Much speech, much thought, may often be but seeming,
But in one truth might boundless ever lies.”
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Shedd’s “Homiletics.”
[19] Perhaps Choate justified himself by the authority of Burke,
who sometimes harnessed five adjectives to a noun; _e.g._, in his
diatribe against the metaphysicians, he says: “Their hearts are
like that of the principal of evil himself,--incorporeal, pure,
unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.”