I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration
and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher
being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties,
a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a
mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and
involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has
to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it;
but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts
and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the
purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is
lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable
volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence:
"Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations for
God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's
falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that
the proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and a
progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters,
which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_.
Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack
of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the
tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from
national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty,
and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the
prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge
somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."
I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.
IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.
INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my _engagedness_" sounds as well
and is as proper as "the amount of my _indebtedness_." We have already
_hard-heartedness_, _wickedness_, _composedness_, and others.
Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the
participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of
speech which should not be encouraged.
Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on
Bacon's "Essays," uses _preparedness_. Albeit that brevity is a
cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be
better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In
favor of _indebtedness_ over others of like coinage, this is to be
said--that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to
the bosom of all humanity.
INTELLECTS. That man's intellectual power is not one and indivisible,
but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous
truth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of this
great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important
word _intellect_ when applied to one individual. If so, it were still
indefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and
proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal
gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The plural
is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.
LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock." This use of _leave_ as a neuter verb,
however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. _To leave off_
is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (the
hall) at a quarter past six." The place should be inserted after the
second _left_. Even the first is essentially active, some form of
action being understood after _off_: we left off _work_ or _play_.
MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase.
OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the
countenance of critical writers. We say _seeming_ convenience; for in
this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously
often, by the _our_, a feeling of patronage. With his _our_ he pats
the author on the back.
PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an
unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.
PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently
misused, and by so many good writers, as _propose_, when the meaning
is to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by a
personal accusative--I propose to you, to him, to myself. In the
preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence;
"The author _proposed_ to himself merely to write a fanciful story,
evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not _purpose_ attempting a
portraiture of Italian manners and character"--a sentence than which a
fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of _propose_
and _purpose_.
PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose no
chance of uttering "dictionary words," hit or miss; and is sometimes
heard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look for
more correctness.
RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers or
universality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into the
family circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxon
word whose place it would usurp--_trustworthy_. _Reliable_ is,
however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again.
When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove that
a bill rendered has been paid, you are _re-liable_ for the amount.
RELIGION. Even by scholars this word is often used with looseness. In
strictness it expresses exclusively our relation to the Infinite, the
_bond_ between man and God. You will sometimes read that he is the
truly religious man who most faithfully performs his duties of
neighbor, father, son, husband, citizen. However much a religious man
may find himself strengthened by his faith and inspirited for the
performance of all his duties, this strength is an indirect, and not a
uniform or necessary, effect of religious convictions. Some men who
are sincere in such convictions fail in these duties conspicuously;
while, on the other hand, they are performed, at times, with more than
common fidelity by men who do not carry within them any very lively
religious belief or impressions. "And now abideth faith, hope, and
charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Nor can
the greatest do the work of the others any more than faith that of
hope or charity. Each one of "these three" is different from and
independent of the other, however each one be aided by cooperation
from the others. The deep, unique feeling which lifts up and
binds the creature to the Creator is elementarily one in the human
mind, and the word used to denote it should be kept solely for this
high office, and not weakened or perverted by other uses. Worcester
quotes from Dr. Watts the following sound definition: "In a proper
sense, _virtue_ signifies duty toward men, and _religion_ duty to
God."
SALOON. That eminent pioneer of American sculpture, brilliant talker,
and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio Greenough, was
indignantly eloquent against the American abuse of this graceful
importation from France, applied as it is in the United States to
public billiard-rooms, oyster-cellars and grog-shops.
SUBJECT-MATTER. A tautological humpback.
TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who should
use this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken
off.
We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and
spoken speech--some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced
even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and
disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright
vulgarisms--that is, phrases that come from below, and are
thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These
last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such
abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of
some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be
readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for
generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable
exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred
years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase
to _make_ money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To _make_ money
is to _coin_ it: you should say _get_ money." Johnson, adds Boswell,
"was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and
prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as _pledging_ myself,
for _undertaking_; _line_ for _department_ or _branch_, as the _civil
line_, the _banking line_. He was particularly indignant against the
almost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or
_opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of
which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an _idea_ or
_image_ of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have
an idea or image of an _argument_ or _proposition_. Yet we
hear the sages of the law 'delivering their _ideas_ upon the question
under consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirely
coinciding in the _idea_ which has been ably stated by an honorable
member.'"
Whether or not the word _idea_ may be properly used in a deeper or
grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that
he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar
ones. All the four phrases _make money_, _pledge_, _line_, and _idea_,
whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer,
are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large
to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has
been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
VIII.
A NATIONAL DRAMA.[8]
[8] From _Putnam's Monthly_, 1857.
We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows,
processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative
than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the
mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent
for man might find support in the features of our general life. To
complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order
that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but
that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which
lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any
number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical
people. A loud, unanimous, derisive _no_ would be the answer. And
yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward
to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the
richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter
are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical.
From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures,
lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in
Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment.
Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock;
and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while
yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a
creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national
drama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in their
depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the
dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.
A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the
heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and
feelings. To have a literature--that is, a body of enduring
books--implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the
mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books
will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that
have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth,
exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate while
they delight many generations.
Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of
deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and
strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the
body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative,
transmitting itself to a remote posterity.
The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves
the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power.
Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books
of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?
To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone,
and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally
human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them.
Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be
a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a
proof of their breadth and depth--of their high humanity.
The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is
needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily
sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks.
But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a
Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows that
the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and
feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by
multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly
enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern
civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the
poets--especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently
stated--looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff
of their writings.
The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most
generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent
conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's
fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that
one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"--the only one not written chiefly or
largely in verse--is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies
(except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and
"Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less
English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count
Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?
Of Milton's two dramas---to confine myself here to the dramatic
domain--the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,") like his epics, is Biblical;
the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere
"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth."
Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with
Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so
poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to
each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from
which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British
names.
Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic
celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all
abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of
a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits,
is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the
poetic advantage of remoteness in time--being thrown back to the reign
of Henry III.--is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem,
Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause,
by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial
paralysis even of his high poetic genius.
Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its
subjects almost exclusively ancient--Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In
the works of the great comic genius of France, Molière, we have a
salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. The
scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was
written.
Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.
Molière was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis
XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and
amuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Molière was by nature a
great satirist. I call him a _great_ satirist, because of the
affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite--namely, a
clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the
false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense,
shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the
comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was
the best field, and for Molière especially, gifted as he was with
histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities,
the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the
game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he
transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness
of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not
because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat
out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a
lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a
personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a
miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he
is Misanthropy personified.
This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of
relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Molière
multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is
sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies
are farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so.
In Molière little dramatic growth goes on before the
spectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up by
successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves
chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the
stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through
the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most important
personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents
for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate
rather to the action than creative of action.
Molière is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him
the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and
body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet.
Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was
a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy
ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life.
Molière's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are,
philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character
and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be
highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote
ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is
essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who
therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which
reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That,
notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his
comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the
breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his
rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.
Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these
three the scene of one is in Spain.
Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet,
Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers," "Intrigue and Love," and
"Wallenstein."
Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia," "Egmont," "Torquato Tasso," are
all foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no local
habitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen,"
written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in
prose, "Faust"--the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling
the greatest poems of all time--"Faust" is not strictly a drama: its
wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic
necessity.
The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Molière, is an exception to
the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an
exception which, like that of Molière, confirms the rule. Unlike the
ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at
ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish
and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality
of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial. His personages
are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold
recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the
semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge,
honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest
characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical
one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly
content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by
the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have
already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile,
skillful, poetic playwright.
Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing
practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where
these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the
present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time,
as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets,
having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of
Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of
place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.
The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry
is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of
its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and,
therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals
with the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; the
lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to
gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and
lyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward
while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by
the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the
strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of
one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must
be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his
actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of
humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in
their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest
feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its
highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and
all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest
poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth
and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which
are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world
seems to be present as spectators and listeners.
Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest
peoples--the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a
large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act
of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and
faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers
of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and
demands variety and fullness and elevation of _personality_; and
this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom
implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in
fullness and elevation.