THE SECRET OF APT WORDS--(_continued_).
“To acquire a few tongues,” says a French writer, “is the task
of a few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of a
life.”--COLTON.
When words are restrained by common usage to a particular sense,
to run up to etymology, and construe them by a dictionary, is
wretchedly ridiculous.--JEREMY COLLIER.
Where do the words of Greece and Rome excel,
That England may not please the ear as well?
What mighty magic’s in the place or air,
That all perfection needs must centre there?--CHURCHILL.
It is an interesting question connected with the subject of style,
whether a knowledge of other languages is necessary to give an
English writer a full command of his own. Among the arguments urged
in behalf of the study of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of
the commonest is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of
those tongues to one who would speak and write his own language
effectively. The English language, we are reminded, is a composite
one, of whose words thirty per cent are of Roman origin, and
nearly five per cent of Greek; and is it not an immense help, we
are asked, to a full and accurate knowledge of the meanings of the
words we use, to know their entire history, including their origin?
Is not the many-sided Goethe an authority on this subject, and
does he not tell us that “_wer fremde sprache nicht kennt weiss
nichts von seinen eigenen_,”--“He who is acquainted with no foreign
tongues, knows nothing of his own”? Have we not the authority of
one of the earliest of English schoolmasters, Roger Ascham, for
the opinion that, “even as a hawke fleeth not hie with one wing,
even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue”?
In answering the general question in the negative, we do not
mean to question the value or profound interest of philological
studies, or to express any doubt concerning their utility as a
means of mental discipline. The value of classical literature as
an instrument of education has been decided by an overwhelming
majority of persons of culture. We cannot, without prejudice to
humanity, separate the present from the past. The nineteenth
century strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws
nutriment from them. Our whole literature is closely connected
with that of the ancients, draws its inspiration from it, and can
be understood only by constant reference to it. As a means of that
encyclopedic culture, of that thorough intellectual equipment,
which is one of the most imperious demands of modern society, an
acquaintance with foreign, and especially with classic, literature,
is absolutely indispensable; for the records of knowledge and of
thought are many-tongued, and even if a great writer could have
wreaked his thoughts upon expression in another language, it is
certain that another mind can only in a few cases adequately
translate them. It is only by the study of different languages
and different literatures, ancient as well as modern, that we can
escape that narrowness of thought, that Chinese cast of mind, which
characterizes those persons who know no language but their own,
and learn to distinguish what is essentially, universally, and
eternally good and true from what is the result of accident, local
opinion, or the fleeting circumstances of the time. It is useless
to say that we know human nature thoroughly, if we know nothing
of antiquity; and we can know antiquity only by study of the
originals. Mitford, Grote, and Mommsen differ, and the reader who
consults them with no knowledge of Greek or Latin is at the mercy
of the last author he has perused. It has been frequently remarked
that every school of thinkers has its mannerism and its mania, for
which there is no cure but intercourse with those who are free from
them. To study any class of writers exclusively is to bow slavishly
to their authority, to accept their opinions, to make their tastes
our tastes, and their prejudices our prejudices. Only by qualifying
their ideas and sentiments with the thoughts and sentiments of
writers in other ages, shall we be able to resist the intense
pressure which is thus exercised upon our convictions and feelings,
and avoid that mental slavery which is baser than the slavery of
the body.
The question, however, is not about the general educational value
of classical studies, but whether they are indispensable to him
who would write or speak English with the highest force, elegance,
and accuracy. I think they are not. In the first place, I deny
that a knowledge of the etymologies of words,--of their meanings a
hundred or five hundred years ago,--is essential to their proper
use now. How am I aided in the use of the word “villain” by knowing
that it once meant peasant,--in the use of “wince” by knowing that
it meant kick,--in the use of “brat,” “beldam,” and “pedant,”
by knowing that they meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and
tutor,--in the use of “meddle,” by knowing that formerly it had
no offensive meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own
affairs? Am I more or less likely to use “ringleader” correctly
to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly spoken of by an old
divine as “the ringleader of our salvation”? Shall I be helped in
the employment of the word “musket” by knowing that it was once the
name of a small hawk, or fly, or in the use of the word “tragedy”
by knowing that it is connected in some way with the Greek word for
a goat? Facts like these are of deep interest to all, and of high
value to the scholar; but how is the knowledge of them necessary
that one may speak or write well?
The question with the man who addresses his fellow-man by tongue
or pen to-day, is not what ought to be, or formerly was, the
meaning of a word, but, what is it _now_? Indeed, it may be
doubted whether a reference to the roots and derivations,--the
old original meanings of words,--which have grown obsolete by the
fluctuations of manners, customs, and a thousand other causes, does
not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to confusion, and prove
rather a hindrance than a help to the correct use of our tongue.
Words not only, for the most part, ride very slackly at anchor
on their etymologies, borne, as they are, hither and thither by
the shifting tides and currents of usage, but they often break
away from their moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man’s
antecedents may help us sometimes to estimate his present self: but
the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty centuries ago
may only mislead us as to its meaning now. Spenser uses the word
“edify” in the sense of “to build”; but would any one speak of a
house being edified to-day? “Symbol” and “conjecture” are words
that etymologically have precisely the same signification; and the
same is true of “hypostasis,” “substance,” and “understanding,”
derived respectively from the Greek, Latin, and Saxon; yet have
either the two former, or the three latter words, as they are now
used, the least similarity of meaning? Is it desirable to call
a suffering man a “passionate” man,--to say with Bishop Lowth
that “the Emperor Julian very ‘judiciously’ planned the overthrow
of Christianity,”--to speak with Paley of the “judiciousness”
of God,--and with Guizot of the “duplicity” of certain plays of
Shakespeare (meaning their dual structure),--merely because we
find these significations lying at the remote and dead roots of
the words which we now employ in wholly different significations?
The effect of a constant reference to etymology, in the use of
words, is seen in the writings of Milton, whose use of “elate”
for “lifted on high,” “implicit” for “entangled,” “succinct” for
“girded,” “spirited” for “inspired,” and hundreds of other such
perversions of language, may please the scholar who loves to crack
philological nuts, but is fitted only to perplex, confound, and
mislead the ordinary reader. It is seen still more plainly in the
writings of Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, who not
only imported Latin words by wholesale into the language, only
giving them an anglicized form and termination, but sometimes
employed in a new sense words already adopted into English, and
used in their original sense. Thus Taylor uses “immured” for
“encompassed,” “irritation” for “making void”; and in referring to
“the bruising of the serpent’s head,” he ludicrously speaks of the
“‘contrition’ of the serpent.” Again, he uses the word “excellent”
for “surpassing,” and even perverts the meaning of the word so far
as to speak of “an ‘excellent’ pain!”
Will it be said that words become more vivid and picturesque,--that
we get a firmer and more vigorous grasp of their meaning,--when, as
Coleridge advises, we present to our minds the visual images that
form their primary meanings? The reply is, that long use deadens
us to the susceptibility of such images, and in not one case in a
thousand, probably, are they noticed. How many college graduates
think of a “miser” as being etymologically a “miserable” man, of
a “savage” as one living in “a wood,” or of a “desultory” reader
as one who leaps from one study to another, as a circus rider
leaps from horse to horse? A distinguished poet once confessed
that the Latin _imago_ first suggested itself to him as the root
of the English word “imagination” when, after having been ten
years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define this most
important term in the critical vocabulary of his art. “We have had
to notice over and over again,” says Mr. Whitney in his late work
on “The Life and Growth of Language,” “the readiness on the part of
language-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous rubbish
the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and concentrate force
upon the new and more adventitious tie. This is one of the most
fundamental and valuable tendencies in name-making; it constitutes
an essential part of the practical availability of language.”
If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him who would
command all the resources of our tongue, how comes it that the
most consummate mastery of the English language is exhibited by
Shakespeare? Will it be said that his writings prove him to have
been a classical scholar; that they abound in facts and allusions
which imply an intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of
Greek and Roman literature? We answer that this is a palpable
begging of the question. By the same reasoning we can prove that
scores of English authors, who, we know positively, never read a
page of Latin or Greek, were, nevertheless, classical scholars. By
similar logic we can prove that Shakespeare followed every calling
in life. Lawyers vouch for his acquaintance with law; physicians
for his skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge of the
phenomena of mental disease; naturalists assert positively, from
the internal evidence of his works, that he was a botanist and an
entomologist; bishops, that he was a theologian; and claims have
been put forth for his dexterity in cutting up sheep and bullocks.
Ben Jonson tells us that he had “small Latin and less Greek”;
another contemporary, that he had “little Latin and no Greek.”
“Small Latin,” indeed, it must have been which a youth could
have acquired in his position, who married and entered upon the
duties of active life at eighteen. The fact that translations were
abundant in the poet’s time, and that all the literature of that
day was steeped in classicism, will fully account for Shakespeare’s
knowledge of Greek and Roman history, as well as for the classical
turns of expression which we find in his plays.
But it may be said that Shakespeare, the oceanic, the many-souled,
was phenomenal, and that no rule can be based on the miracles of
a cometary genius who has had no peer in the ages. What shall we
say, then, to Izaak Walton? Can purer, more idiomatic, or more
attractive English be found within the covers of any book than
that of “The Complete Angler”? Among all the controversialists
of England, is there one whose words hit harder,--are more like
cannon-balls,--than those of Cobbett? By universal concession he
was master of the whole vocabulary of invective, and in narration
his pen is pregnant with the freshness of green fields and woods;
yet neither he, nor “honest Izaak,” ever dug up a Greek root,
or unearthed a Latin derivation. Let any one compare a page of
Cobbett with a page of Bentley, the great classical critic, and
he will find that the former writer excels the latter alike in
clearness and precision of terms, in grammatical accuracy, and in
the construction of his periods. Again, what shall we say of Keats,
who could not read a line of Greek, yet who was the most thoroughly
classical of all English authors,--whose soul was so saturated
with the Greek spirit, that Byron said “he was a Greek himself”?
Or what will the classicists do with Lord Erskine, confessedly the
greatest forensic orator since Demosthenes? He learned but the
elements of Latin, and in Greek went scarcely beyond the alphabet;
but he devoted himself in youth with intense ardor to the study of
Milton and Shakespeare, committing whole pages of the former to
memory, and so familiarizing himself with the latter that he could
almost, like Porson, have held conversations on all subjects for
days together in the phrases of the great English dramatist. It was
here that he acquired that fine choice of words, that richness of
thought and gorgeousness of expression, that beautiful _rhythmus_
of his sentences, which charmed all who heard him.
If one must learn English through the Greek and Latin, how shall we
account for the admirable,--we had almost said, inimitable,--style
of Franklin? Before he knew anything of foreign languages he
had formed his style, and gained a wide command of words by the
study of the best English models. Is the essayist, Edwin P.
Whipple, a master of the English language? He was not, we believe,
classically educated, yet few American authors have a greater
command of all the resources of expression. His style varies in
excellence,--sometimes, perhaps, lacks simplicity; but, as a rule,
it is singularly copious, nervous, and suggestive, and clear as a
pebbled rill. What is the secret of this command of our tongue?
It is his familiarity with our English literature. His sleepless
intellect has fed and fattened on the whole race of English
authors, from Chaucer to Currer Bell. The profound, sagacious
wisdom of Bacon, and the nimble, brilliant wit of Sydney Smith;
the sublime mysticism of Sir Thomas Browne, and the rich, mellow,
tranquil beauty of Taylor; Jonson’s learned sock and Heywood’s
ease; the gorgeous, organ-toned eloquence of Milton, and the close,
bayonet-like logic of Chillingworth; the sweet-blooded wit of
Fuller, and Butler’s rattling fire of fun; Spenser’s voluptuous
beauty, and the lofty rhetoric, scorching wit, and crushing
argument of South; Pope’s neatness, brilliancy, and epigrammatic
point, and Dryden’s energy and “full resounding line”; Byron’s
sublime unrest and bursts of misanthropy, and Wordsworth’s deep
sentiment and sweet humanities; Shelley’s wild imaginative melody,
and Scott’s picturesque imagery and antiquarian lore; the polished
witticisms of Sheridan, and the gorgeous periods of Burke,--with
all these writers, and every other of greater or lesser note, even
those in the hidden nooks and crannies of our literature, he has
held converse, and drawn from them expressions for every exigency
of his thought.
To all these examples we may add one, if possible, still more
convincing,--that of the late Hugh Miller, who, as Professor
Marsh justly remarks, had few contemporaneous superiors as a
clear, forcible, accurate, and eloquent writer, and who _uses the
most cumbrous Greek compounds_ as freely as monosyllabic English
particles. His style is literally the despair of all other English
scientific writers; yet it is positively certain that he was wholly
ignorant of all languages but that in which he wrote, and its
Northern provincial dialects.
As to the oft-quoted saying of Goethe, to which the objector is
so fond of referring, we may say with Professor Marsh, that, “if
by knowledge of a language is meant the power of expressing or
conceiving the laws of a language in formal rules, the opinion
may be well founded; but, if it refers to the capacity of
understanding, and skill in properly using our own tongue, all
observation shows it to be very wide of the truth.” Goethe himself,
the same authority declares, was an indifferent linguist; he
apparently knew little of the remoter etymological sources of his
own tongue, or the special philologies of the cognate languages;
and “it is difficult to trace any of the excellencies of his
marvellously felicitous style to the direct imitation, or even the
unconscious influence of foreign models.”[26] But he was a profound
student of the great German writers of the sixteenth century; and
hence his works are a test example in refutation of the theory that
ascribes so exaggerated a value to classical studies.
It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light upon this
subject, that the greatest masters of style in all the ages were
the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any language but their own.
In the most flourishing period of their literature, they had
no grammatical system, nor did they ever make any but the most
trivial researches in etymology. “The wise and learned nations
among the ancients,” says Locke, “made it a part of education to
cultivate their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks counted all
other nations barbarous, and had a contempt for their languages.
And though the Greek learning grew in credit among the Romans,
... yet it was the Roman tongue that was made the study of their
youth; their own language they were to make use of, and therefore
it was their own language they were instructed and exercised in.”
Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language, and one
of the mightiest masters of expression the world has seen, knew
no other tongue than his own. He modelled his style after that of
Thucydides, whose wonderful compactness, terseness, and strength
of diction were derived from no study of old Pelasgic, Phœnician,
Persian, or other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech,--of
which he knew nothing,--but were the product of his own marvellous
genius wreaking itself upon expression.
No riches are without inconvenience. The men of many tongues almost
inevitably lose their peculiar raciness of home-bred utterance, and
their style, like their words, has a certain polyglot character.
It has been observed by an acute Oxford professor that the Romans,
in exact proportion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the
finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us that he was
in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign languages,
because it was his business to write _German_, and he thought that,
by reading other languages, he should lose his nicer perceptions
of what belonged to his own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley’s
defects to his continental associations, and said that his losses
at home overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore, who was
a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity with
which the Greeks wrote their own language was justly attributed to
their entire abstinence from every other. It is a saying as old as
Cicero that women, being accustomed solely to their native tongue,
usually speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing
those of men. “A man who thinks the knowledge of Latin essential
to the purity of English diction,” says Macaulay, “either has
never conversed with an accomplished woman, or does not deserve to
have conversed with her. We are sure that all persons who are in
the habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that the
orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no means the most
scrupulous about marring their native tongue. We could mention
several members of Parliament, who never fail to usher in their
scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords.”
Mr. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” does not
hesitate to express the opinion that “our great English scholars
have corrupted the English language by jargon so uncouth that a
plain man can hardly discern the real lack of ideas which their
barbarous and mottled dialect strives to hide.” He then adds that
the principal reason why well educated women write and converse in
a purer style than well educated men, is “because they have not
formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards,
which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be
introduced into a state of society unfitted for them.” To nearly
the same effect is the declaration of that most acute judge of
style, Thomas De Quincey, who says that if you would read our
noble language in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic
propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its
composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the
women’s letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc
Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on “Paradise Lost”?
What prose style, always excepting that of the “Areopagitica,” is
worse for imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved,
half-rhythmical periods, “dragging, like a wounded snake, their
slow length along”? Yet Bentley and Milton, whose minds were
imbued, saturated with Greek literature through and through, were
probably the profoundest classical scholars that England can boast.
Let the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native
tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and beware lest
while he is wandering in fancy along the banks of the Meander, the
Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drinking at the fountains of Helicon,
he heedlessly and profanely trample under foot the beautiful,
fragrant, and varied productions of his own land.
FOOTNOTE:
[26] “Lectures on the English Language.”