Assimilation. Endless fresh distinction, to match the infinite
complexity of things, is the concern of the writer, who spends all his
skill on the endeavour to cloth the delicacies of perception and thought
with a neatly fitting garment. So words grow and bifurcate, diverge and
dwindle, until one root has many branches. Grammarians tell how “royal”
and “regal” grew up by the side of “kingly,” how “hospital,” “hospice,”
“hostel” and “hotel” have come by their several offices. The inventor of
the word “sensuous” gave to the English people an opportunity of
reconsidering those headstrong moral preoccupations which had already
ruined the meaning of “sensual” for the gentler uses of a poet. Not only
the Puritan spirit, but every special bias or interest of man seizes on
words to appropriate them to itself. Practical men of business transfer
such words as “debenture” or “commodity” from debt or comfort in general
to the palpable concrete symbols of debt or comfort; and in like manlier
doctors, soldiers, lawyers, shipmen,—all whose interest and knowledge are
centred on some particular craft or profession, drag words from the
general store and adapt them to special uses. Such words are sometimes
reclaimed from their partial applications by the authority of men of
letters, and pass back into their wider meanings enhanced by a new
element of graphic association. Language never suffers by answering to
an intelligent demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but to
all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it. The good
writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension, but there he is,
at work among words,—binding the vagabond or liberating the prisoner,
exalting the humble or abashing the presumptuous, incessantly alert to
amend their implications, break their lazy habits, and help them to
refinement or scope or decision. He educates words, for he knows that
they are alive.
Compare now the case of the ruder multitude. In the regard of
literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, “all are the multitude;
only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding,” and the
poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums. Wherever thought and taste
have fallen to be menials, there the vulgar dwell. How should they gain
mastery over language? They are introduced to a vocabulary of some
hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the
wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be
spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit. The resources of
the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas
can put to use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon
words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confident
booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords he has
manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A dozen expressions to serve one
slovenly meaning inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp. “Vast,”
“huge,” “immense,” “gigantic,” “enormous,” “tremendous,” “portentous,”
and such-like groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a
barren uniformity of low employ. The reign of this democracy annuls
differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or
disposition. Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one purpose,
begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.
Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the same
statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words. Where the
ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary word into the
language, to fill a place already occupied, the quicker apprehension of
others will fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new
work for it to do. Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, the
trained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differences worthy
of scrupulous expression. The old foresters had different names for a
buck during each successive year of its life, distinguishing the fawn
from the pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age
increased. Thus it is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest
of moral distinctions. Language halts far behind the truth of things,
and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new
implement of description. Every strange word that makes its way into a
language spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance, relating
itself from whatsoever centre to fresh points in the circumference. No
two words ever coincide throughout their whole extent. If sometimes good
writers are found adding epithet to epithet for the same quality, and
name to name for the same thing, it is because they despair of capturing
their meaning at a venture, and so practise to get near it by a maze of
approximations. Or, it may be, the generous breadth of their purpose
scorns the minuter differences of related terms, and includes all of one
affinity, fearing only lest they be found too few and too weak to cover
the ground effectively. Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of the
Prayer-Book, wherein we “acknowledge and confess” the sins we are
forbidden to “dissemble or cloke;” and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who
huddles together “give, devise, and bequeath,” lest the cunning of
litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets yield
still better instances. When Milton praises the _Virtuous Young Lady_ of
his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to “pity
and ruth,” it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the
second of these nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge and
intensify his meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, the one
civilised, the other barbarous; and ruth is a quality as much more
instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness is keener, harder,
and more deliberate than the inborn savagery of ruthlessness.
It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of this accumulated and
varied emphasis that the need of synonyms is felt. There is no more
curious problem in the philosophy of style than that afforded by the
stubborn reluctance of writers, the good as well as the bad, to repeat a
word or phrase. When the thing is, they may be willing to abide by the
old rule and say the word, but when the thing repeats itself they will
seldom allow the word to follow suit. A kind of interdict, not removed
until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used
word. The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold.
Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the
hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage
passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his
own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another
of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to
marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, he will
acquit himself voluminously, with only one allusion (it is a point of
pride) to the oyster by name. He will compare the succulent bivalve to
Pandora’s box, and lament that it should harbour one of the direst of
ills that flesh is heir to. He will find a paradox and an epigram in the
notion that the darling of Apicius should suffer neglect under the frowns
of Æsculapius. Question, hypothesis, lamentation, and platitude dance
their allotted round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance
masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly proffers her ancient
epilogue of chastened hope. When all is said, nothing is said; and
Montaigne’s _Que sçais-je_, besides being briefer and wittier, was
infinitely more informing.
But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought,
whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real
meaning, is not subject to these tympanies. He feels no idolatrous dread
of repetition when the theme requires, it, and is urged by no necessity
of concealing real identity under a show of change. Nevertheless he,
too, is hedged about by conditions that compel him, now and again, to
resort to what seems a synonym. The chief of these is the indispensable
law of euphony, which governs the sequence not only of words, but also of
phrases. In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose
it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their
individual scope, bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly,
some cumbrous fragments of their recent association. That he may avoid
this, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he
be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance. By a
slight stress laid on the difference of usage the unshapeliness may be
done away with, and a new grace found where none was sought. Addison and
Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun,
yet surely there is something to please the mind, as well as the ear, in
the description of the heavenly judgment,
That brought into this world a world of woe.
Where words are not fitted with a single hard definition, rigidly
observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight
differences of application into clear relief. The practice has its
dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament, yet even so it may be
preferable to the flat stupidity of one identical intention for a word or
phrase in twenty several contexts. For the law of incessant change is
not so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before the apprentice,
as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever; if the change be
not ordered by art it will order itself in default of art. The same
statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is
not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking.
Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known
to language. Take the exquisite repetitions in these few lines:—
Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Here the tenderness of affection returns again to the loved name, and the
grief of the mourner repeats the word “dead.” But this monotony of
sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies rather in the
prominence given by either repetition to the most moving circumstance of
all—the youthfulness of the dead poet. The attention of the discursive
intellect, impatient of reiteration, is concentrated on the idea which
these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is
content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often
bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same
phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a
buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some
modern writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged
themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his
prose essays, falls to crying his text like a hawker,
Beating it in upon our weary brains,
As tho’ it were the burden of a song,
clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring
him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who
would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to
employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a
thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest
soul resolved to stir them. But he whose message is for minds attuned
and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way
of emphasis. Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully
whether the altered incidence does not justify and require an altered
term, which the world is quick to call a synonym. The right dictionary
of synonyms would give the context of each variant in the usage of the
best authors. To enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the hero
of _Paradise Lost_, without reference to the passages in which they
occur, would be a foolish labour; with such reference, the task is made a
sovereign lesson in style. At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech
with his leman Sin to gain a passage from the lower World, Satan is “the
subtle Fiend,” in the garden of Paradise he is “the Tempter” and “the
Enemy of Mankind,” putting his fraud upon Eve he is the “wily Adder,”
leading her in full course to the tree he is “the dire Snake,” springing
to his natural height before the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is
“the grisly King.” Every fresh designation elaborates his character and
history, emphasises the situation, and saves a sentence. So it is with
all variable appellations of concrete objects; and even in the stricter
and more conventional region of abstract ideas the same law runs. Let a
word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of
emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest
it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the
midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for it in the
author’s purpose.
The chameleon quality of language may claim yet another illustration. Of
origins we know nothing certainly, nor how words came by their meanings
in the remote beginning, when speech, like the barnacle-goose of the
herbalist, was suspended over an expectant world, ripening on a tree.
But this we know, that language in its mature state is fed and fattened
on metaphor. Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician, but the
earliest principle of change in language. The whole process of speech is
a long series of exhilarating discoveries, whereby words, freed from the
swaddling bands of their nativity, are found capable of new relations and
a wider metaphorical employ. Then, with the growth of exact knowledge,
the straggling associations that attended the word on its travels are
straitened and confined, its meaning is settled, adjusted, and balanced,
that it may bear its part in the scrupulous deposition of truth. Many
are the words that have run this double course, liberated from their
first homely offices and transformed by poetry, reclaimed in a more
abstract sense, and appropriated to a new set of facts by science. Yet a
third chance awaits them when the poet, thirsty for novelty, passes by
the old simple founts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest
technical applications of specialised terms. Everywhere the intuition of
poetry, impatient of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lags so far
behind, is busy in advance to find likenesses not susceptible of
scientific demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy the heart
while they leave the colder intellect only half convinced. When an
elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers is confronted with the principle of
gravitation he gives voice to science in verse:—
That very law which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.
But a seer like Wordsworth will never be content to write tunes for a
text-book of physics, he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of matter
and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty:—
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
Poets, it is said, anticipate science; here in these four lines is work
for a thousand laboratories for a thousand years. But the truth has been
understated; every writer and every speaker works ahead of science,
expressing analogies and contrasts, likenesses and differences, that will
not abide the apparatus of proof. The world of perception and will, of
passion and belief, is an uncaptured virgin, airily deriding from afar
the calculated advances and practised modesty of the old bawd Science;
turning again to shower a benediction of unexpected caresses on the most
cavalier of her wooers, Poetry. This world, the child of Sense and
Faith, shy, wild, and provocative, for ever lures her lovers to the
chase, and the record of their hopes and conquests is contained in the
lover’s language, made up wholly of parable and figure of speech. There
is nothing under the sun nor beyond it that does not concern man, and it
is the unceasing effort of humanity, whether by letters or by science, to
bring “the commerce of the mind and of things” to terms of nearer
correspondence. But Literature, ambitious to touch life on all its
sides, distrusts the way of abstraction, and can hardly be brought to
abandon the point of view whence things are seen in their immediate
relation to the individual soul. This kind of research is the work of
letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to
be numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all metrical
standards to be traced and described. The greater men of science have
been cast in so generous a mould that they have recognised the partial
nature of their task; they have known how to play with science as a
pastime, and to win and wear her decorations for a holiday favour. They
have not emaciated the fulness of their faculties in the name of
certainty, nor cramped their humanity for the promise of a future good.
They have been the servants of Nature, not the slaves of method. But the
grammarian of the laboratory is often the victim of his trade. He
staggers forth from his workshop, where prolonged concentration on a
mechanical task, directed to a provisional and doubtful goal, has dimmed
his faculties; the glaring motley of the world, bathed in sunlight,
dazzles him; the questions, moral, political, and personal, that his
method has relegated to some future of larger knowledge, crowd upon him,
clamorous for solution, not to be denied, insisting on a settlement
to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may either forsake the
divinity he serves, falling back, for the practical and æsthetic conduct
of life, on those common instincts of sensuality which oscillate between
the conventicle and the tavern as the poles of duty and pleasure, or,
more pathetically still, he may attempt to bring the code of the
observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries of the untameable world,
and suffer the pedant’s disaster. A martyr to the good that is to be, he
has voluntarily maimed himself “for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake”—if,
perchance, the kingdom of Heaven might come by observation. The
enthusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to
chain language also to the bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the
poet’s right-hand weapon, he despises; all that is tentative, individual,
struck off at the urging of a mood, he disclaims and suspects. Yet the
very rewards that science promises have their parallel in the domain of
letters. The discovery of likeness in the midst of difference, and of
difference in the midst of likeness, is the keenest pleasure of the
intellect; and literary expression, as has been said, is one long series
of such discoveries, each with its thrill of incommunicable happiness,
all unprecedented, and perhaps unverifiable by later experiment. The
finest instrument of these discoveries is metaphor, the spectroscope of
letters.
Enough has been said of change; it remains to speak of one more of those
illusions of fixity wherein writers seek exemption from the general lot.
Language, it has been shown, is to be fitted to thought; and, further,
there are no synonyms. What more natural conclusion could be drawn by
the enthusiasm of the artist than that there is some kind of preordained
harmony between words and things, whereby expression and thought tally
exactly, like the halves of a puzzle? This illusion, called in France
the doctrine of the _mot propre_, is a will o’ the wisp which has kept
many an artist dancing on its trail. That there is one, and only one way
of expressing one thing has been the belief of other writers besides
Gustave Flaubert, inspiriting them to a desperate and fruitful industry.
It is an amiable fancy, like the dream of Michael Angelo, who loved to
imagine that the statue existed already in the block of marble, and had
only to be stripped of its superfluous wrappings, or like the indolent
fallacy of those economic soothsayers to whom Malthus brought rough
awakening, that population and the means of subsistence move side by side
in harmonious progress. But hunger does not imply food, and there may
hover in the restless heads of poets, as themselves testify—
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
Matter and form are not so separable as the popular philosophy would have
them; indeed, the very antithesis between them is a cardinal instance of
how language reacts on thought, modifying and fixing a cloudy truth. The
idea pursues form not only that it may be known to others, but that it
may know itself, and the body in which it becomes incarnate is not to be
distinguished from the informing soul. It is recorded of a famous Latin
historian how he declared that he would have made Pompey win the battle
of Pharsalia had the effective turn of the sentence required it. He may
stand for the true type of the literary artist. The business of letters,
howsoever simple it may seem to those who think truth-telling a gift of
nature, is in reality two-fold, to find words for a meaning, and to find
a meaning for words. Now it is the words that refuse to yield, and now
the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed them is at the same time
altering his words to suit his meaning, and modifying and shaping his
meaning to satisfy the requirements of his words. The humblest processes
of thought have had their first education from language long before they
took shape in literature. So subtle is the connexion between the two
that it is equally possible to call language the form given to the matter
of thought, or, inverting the application of the figure, to speak of
thought as the formal principle that shapes the raw material of language.
It is not until the two become one that they can be known for two. The
idea to be expressed is a kind of mutual recognition between thought and
language, which here meet and claim each other for the first time, just
as in the first glance exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its
eyes on the world, and pleads for life. But thought, although it may
indulge itself with the fancy of a predestined affiance, is not confined
to one mate, but roves free and is the father of many children. A belief
in the inevitable word is the last refuge of that stubborn mechanical
theory of the universe which has been slowly driven from science,
politics, and history. Amidst so much that is undulating, it has pleased
writers to imagine that truth persists and is provided by heavenly
munificence with an imperishable garb of language. But this also is
vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of
fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable than what is made. Not
words nor works, but only that which is formless endures, the vitality
that is another name for change, the breath that fills and shatters the
bubbles of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of truth and untruth.
No art is easy, least of all the art of letters. Apply the musical
analogy once more to the instrument whereon literature performs its
voluntaries. With a living keyboard of notes which are all incessantly
changing in value, so that what rang true under Dr. Johnson’s hand may
sound flat or sharp now, with a range of a myriad strings, some falling
mute and others being added from day to day, with numberless permutations
and combinations, each of which alters the tone and pitch of the units
that compose it, with fluid ideas that never have an outlined existence
until they have found their phrases and the improvisation is complete, is
it to be wondered at that the art of style is eternally elusive, and that
the attempt to reduce it to rule is the forlorn hope of academic
infatuation?
* * * * *