instructive for us, that it should yield us so much, when we come to
analyse and probe it; and yield us the more, the more deeply and
accurately we do so. It is full of instruction, because it is the
embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and
thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and
of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It
stands like the Pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and
intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those
pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the
progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working
in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the
single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of
things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one
word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have
enriched it for ever--making in that new word a new region of thought to
be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is
the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been
safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning
flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have
been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and
perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one
period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their
precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which
empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have
sunk into oblivion.' And for all these reasons far more and mightier in
every way is a language than any one of the works which may have been
composed in it. For that work, great as it may be, at best embodies
what was in the heart and mind of a single man, but this of a nation.
The _Iliad_ is great, yet not so great in strength or power or beauty
as the Greek language. [Footnote: On the Greek language and its merits,
as compared with the other Indo-European languages, see Curtius,
_History of Greece,_ English translation, vol. i. pp. 18-28.] _Paradise
Lost_ is a noble possession for a people to have inherited, but the
English tongue is a nobler heritage yet. [Footnote: Gerber (_Sprache
als Kunst,_ vol. i. p. 274): Es ist ein bedeutender Fortschritt in der
Erkenntniss des Menschen dass man jetzt Sprachen lernt nicht bloss, um
sich den Gedankeninhalt, den sie offenbaren, anzueignen, sondern
zugleich um sie selbst als herrliche, architektonische Geisteswerke
kennen zu lernen, und sich an ihrer Kunstschönheit zu erfreuen.]
And imperfectly as we may apprehend all this, there is an obscure sense,
or instinct I might call it, in every one of us, of this truth. We all,
whether we have given a distinct account of the matter to ourselves or
not, believe that words which we use are not arbitrary and capricious
signs, affixed at random to the things which they designate, for which
any other might have been substituted as well, but that they stand in a
real relation to these. And this sense of the significance of names,
that they are, or ought to be,--that in a world of absolute truth they
ever would be,--the expression of the innermost character and qualities
of the things or persons that bear them, speaks out in various ways, It
is reported of Boiardo, author of a poem without which we should
probably have never seen the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto, that he was
out hunting, when the name Rodomonte presented itself to him as exactly
fitting a foremost person of the epic he was composing; and that
instantly returning home, he caused all the joy-bells of the village to
be rung, to celebrate the happy invention. This story may remind us of
another which is told of the greatest French novelist of modern times.
A friend of Balzac's, who has written some _Recollections_ of him,
tells us that he would sometimes wander for days through the streets of
Paris, studying the names over the shops, as being sure that there was
a name more appropriate than any other to some character which he had
conceived, and hoping to light on it there.
You must all have remarked the amusement and interest which children
find in any notable agreement between a name and the person who owns
that name, as, for instance, if Mr. Long is tall--or, which naturally
takes a still stronger hold upon them, in any manifest contradiction
between the name and the name-bearer; if Mr. Strongitharm is a weakling,
or Mr. Black an albino: the former striking from a sense of fitness,
the latter from one of incongruity. Nor is this a mere childish
entertainment. It continues with us through life; and that its roots
lie deep is attested by the earnest use which is often made, and that
at the most earnest moments of men's lives, of such agreements or
disagreements as these. Such use is not un-frequent in Scripture,
though it is seldom possible to reproduce it in English, as for
instance in the comment of Abigail on her husband Nabal's name: 'As his
name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him' (i Sam.
xxv. 25). And again, 'Call me not Naomi,' exclaims the desolate widow--
'call me not Naomi [or _pleasantness_]; call me Marah [or _bitterness_],
for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.' She cannot endure
that the name she bears should so strangely contradict the thing she is.
Shakespeare, in like manner, reveals his own profound knowledge of the
human heart, when he makes old John of Gaunt, worn with long sickness,
and now ready to depart, play with his name, and dwell upon the consent
between it and his condition; so that when his royal nephew asks him,
'How is it with aged Gaunt?' he answers,
'Oh, how that name befits my composition,
Old _Gaunt_ indeed, and _gaunt_ in being old--
_Gaunt_ am I for the grave, _gaunt_ as the grave--' [Footnote:
Ajax, or [Greek: Aias], in the play of Sophocles, which bears his name,
does the same with the [Greek: aiai] which lies in that name (422,
423); just as in the _Bacchae_ of Euripides, not Pentheus himself, but
others for him, indicate the prophecy of a mighty [Greek: penthos] or
grief, which is shut up in his name (367). A tragic writer, less known
than Euripides, does the same: [Greek: Pentheus, esomenes sumphoras
eponymos]. Eteocles in the _Phoenissae_ of Euripides makes a play of
the same kind on the name of Polynices.] with much more in the same
fashion; while it is into the mouth of the slight and frivolous king
that Shakespeare puts the exclamation of wonder,
'Can sick men play so nicely with their names?' [Footnote: 'Hus' is
Bohemian for 'goose' [the two words being in fact cognate forms]; and
here we have the explanation of the prophetic utterance of Hus, namely,
that in place of one goose, tame and weak of wing, God would send
falcons and eagles before long.]
Mark too how, if one is engaged in a controversy or quarrel, and his
name imports something good, his adversary will lay hold of the name,
will seek to bring out a real contradiction between the name and the
bearer of the name, so that he shall appear as one presenting himself
under false colours, affecting a merit which he does not really possess.
Examples of this abound. There was one Vigilantius in the early
Church;--his name might be interpreted 'The Watchful.' He was at issue
with St. Jerome about certain vigils; these he thought perilous to
Christian morality, while Jerome was a very eager promoter of them; who
instantly gave a turn to his name, and proclaimed that he, the enemy of
these watches, the partisan of slumber and sloth, should have been not
Vigilantius or The Watcher, but 'Dormitantius' or The Sleeper rather.
Felix, Bishop of Urgel, a chief champion in the eighth century of the
Adoptianist heresy, is constantly 'Infelix' in the writings of his
adversary Alcuin. The Spanish peasantry during the Peninsular War would
not hear of Bonaparte, but changed the name to 'Malaparte,' as
designating far better the perfidious kidnapper of their king and enemy
of their independence. It will be seen then that Aeschylus is most true
to nature, when in his _Prometheus Bound_ he makes Strength tauntingly
to remind Prometheus, or The Prudent, how ill his name and the lot
which he has made for himself agreed, bound as he is with adamantine
chains to his rock, and bound, as it might seem, for ever. When
Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton
c'est un lion,' it was the same instinct at work, though working from
an opposite point. It made itself felt no less in the bitter irony
which gave to the second of the Ptolemies, the brother-murdering king,
the title of Philadelphus.
But more frequent still is this hostile use of names, this attempt to
place them and their owners in the most intimate connexion, to make, so
to speak, the man answerable for his name, where the name does not thus
need to be reversed; but may be made as it now is, or with very
slightest change, to contain a confession of the ignorance,
worthlessness, or futility of the bearer. If it implies, or can be made
to imply, anything bad, it is instantly laid hold of as expressing the
very truth about him. You know the story of Helen of Greece, whom in
two of his 'mighty lines' Marlowe's Faust so magnificently
apostrophizes:
'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?'
It is no frigid conceit of the Greek poet, when one passionately
denouncing the ruin which she wrought, finds that ruin couched and
fore-announced in her name; [Footnote: [Greek: Helenas [=helenaos],
helandros, heleptolis], Aeschylus, _Agamemnon_, 636.] as in English it
might be, and has been, reproduced--
'_Hell_ in her name, and heaven in her looks.'
Or take other illustrations. Pope Hildebrand in one of our _Homilies_
is styled 'Brand of Hell,' as setting the world in a blaze; as
'Höllenbrand' he appears constantly in German. Tott and Teuffel were
two officers of high rank in the army which Gustavus Adolphus brought
with him into Germany. You may imagine how soon those of the other side
declared that he had brought 'death' and 'hell' in his train. There
were two not inconsiderable persons in the time of our Civil Wars, Vane
(not the 'young Vane' of Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets), and
Sterry; and one of these, Sterry, was chaplain to the other. Baxter,
having occasion to mention them in his profoundly instructive
_Narrative of his Life and Times_, and liking neither, cannot forbear
to observe, that '_vanity_ and _sterility_ were never more fitly joined
together;' and speaks elsewhere of 'the vanity of Vane, and the
sterility of Sterry.' This last, let me observe, is an eminently unjust
charge, as Baxter himself in a later volume [Footnote: Catholic
Theology, pt, 3, p. 107.] has very handsomely acknowledged. [Footnote:
A few more examples, in a note, of this contumely of names. Antiochus
Epiphanes, or 'the Illustrious,' is for the Jews, whom he so madly
attempted to hellenize, Antiochus Epimanes, or 'the Insane.' Cicero,
denouncing Verres, the infamous praetor of Sicily, is too skilful a
master of the passions to allow the name of the arch-criminal to escape
unused. He was indeed Verres, for he _swept_ the province; he was a
_sweep-net_ for it (everriculum in provincia); and then presently,
giving altogether another turn to his name, Others, he says, might be
partial to 'jus verrinum' (which might mean either Verrine law or boar-
sauce), but not he. Tiberius Claudius Nero, charged with being a
drunkard, becomes in the popular language 'Biberius Caldius Mero.' The
controversies of the Church with heretics yield only too abundant a
supply, and that upon both sides, of examples of this kind. The 'royal-
hearted' Athanasius is 'Satanasius' for the Arians; and some of St.
Cyprian's adversaries did not shrink from so foul a perversion of his
name as to call him Koprianos, or 'the Dungy.' But then how often is
Pelagius declared by the Church Fathers to be a pelagus, a very _ocean_
of wickedness. It was in vain that the Manichaeans changed their
master's name from Manes to Manichaeus, that so it might not so nearly
resemble the word signifying madness in the Greek (devitantes nomen
insaniae, Augustine, _De Haer_. 46); it did not thereby escape. The
Waldenses, or Wallenses, were declared by Roman controversialists to be
justly so called, as dwelling 'in valle densa,' in the thick valley of
darkness and ignorance. Cardinal Clesel was active in setting forward
the Roman Catholic reaction in Bohemia with which the dismal tragedy of
the Thirty Years' War began. It was a far-fetched and not very happy
piece of revenge, when they of the other side took pleasure in spelling
his name 'CLesel,' as much as to say, He of the 150 ass-power. Berengar
of Tours calls a Pope who had taken sides against him not pontifex, but
'pompifex.' Metrophanes, Patriarch of Constantinople, being counted to
have betrayed the interests of the Greek Church, his spiritual mother,
at the Council of Florence, saw his name changed by popular hate into
'Metrophonos,' or the 'Matricide.' In the same way of more than one
Pope Urbanus it was declared that he would have been better named
'Turbanus' (quasi _turbans_ Ecclesiam). Mahomet appears as 'Bafomet,'
influenced perhaps by 'bafa,' a lie, in Provençal. Shechem, a chief
city of the heretical Samaritans, becomes 'Sychar,' or city of lies
(see John iv. 5), so at least some will have it, on the lips of the
hostile Jews; while Toulouse, a very seedplot of heresies, Albigensian
and other, in the Middle Ages, is declared by writers of those times to
have prophesied no less by its name (Tolosa = tota dolosa). In the same
way adversaries of Wiclif traced in his name an abridgement of 'wicked-
belief.' Metternich was 'Mitternacht,' or Midnight, for the political
reformers of Germany in the last generation. It would be curious to
know how often the Sorbonne has been likened to a 'Serbonian' bog; some
'privilegium' declared to be not such indeed, but a 'pravilegium'
rather. Baxter complains that the Independents called presbyters
'priestbiters,' Presbyterian ministers not 'divines' but 'dry vines,'
and their Assembly men 'Dissembly men.']
Where, on the other hand, it is desired to do a man honour, how gladly,
in like manner, is his name seized on, if it in any way bears an
honourable significance, or is capable of an honourable interpretation
--men finding in that name a presage and prophecy of that which was
actually in its bearer. A multitude of examples, many of them very
beautiful, might be brought together in this kind. How often, for
instance, and with what effect, the name of Stephen, the proto-martyr,
that name signifying in Greek 'the Crown,' was taken as a prophetic
intimation of the martyr-crown, which it should be given to him, the
first in that noble army, to wear. [Footnote: Thus in a sublime Latin
hymn by Adam of St. Victor:
Nomen habes _Coronati_;
Te tormenta decet pati
Pro _corona_ gloriae.
Elsewhere the same illustrious hymnologist plays in like manner on the
name of St. Vincentius:
Qui _vincentis_ habet nomen
Ex re probat dignum omen
Sui fore nominis;
_Vincens_ terra, _vincens_ mari
Quidquid potest irrogari
Poenae vel formidinis.
In the Bull for the canonization of Sta. Clara, the canonizing Pope
does not disdain a similar play upon her name: Clara Claris praeclara
meritis, magnae in caelo claritate gloriae, ac in terrâ miraculorum
sublimium, clare claret. On these 'prophetic' names in the heathen
world see Pott, _Wurzel-Wörterbuch_, vol. ii. part 2, p. 522.]
Irenaeus means in Greek 'the Peaceable'; and early Church writers love
to remark how fitly the illustrious Bishop of Lyons bore this name,
setting forward as he so earnestly did the peace of the Church,
resolved as he was, so far as in him lay, to preserve the unity of the
Spirit in the bond of peace. [Footnote: We cannot adduce St. Columba as
another example in the same kind, seeing that this name was not his
birthright, but one given to him by his scholars for the dove-like
gentleness of his character. So indeed we are told; though it must be
owned that some of the traits recorded of him in _The Monks of the
West_ are not _columbine_ at all.] The Dominicans were well pleased
when their name was resolved into 'Domini canes'--the Lord's watchdogs;
who, as such, allowed no heresy to appear without at once giving the
alarm, and seeking to chase it away. When Ben Jonson praises
Shakespeare's 'well-filed lines'--
'In each of which he seems to _shake a lance_
As brandished in the eyes of ignorance'
--he is manifestly playing with his name. Fuller, too, our own Church
historian, who played so often upon the names of others, has a play
made upon his own in some commendatory verses prefixed to one of his
books:
'Thy style is clear and white; thy very name
Speaks pureness, and adds lustre to the frame.'
He plays himself upon it in an epigram which takes the form of a
prayer:
'My soul is stainèd with a dusky colour:
Let thy Son be the soap; I'll be the fuller.'
John Careless, whose letters are among the most beautiful in Foxe's
_Book of Martyrs_, writing to Philpot, exclaims, 'Oh good master
Philpot, which art a principal pot indeed, filled with much precious
liquor,--oh pot most happy! of the High Potter ordained to honour.'
Herein, in this faith that men's names were true and would come true,
in this, and not in any altogether unreasoning superstition, lay the
root of the carefulness of the Romans that in the enlisting of soldiers
names of good omen, such as Valerius, Salvius, Secundus, should be the
first called. Scipio Africanus, reproaching his soldiers after a mutiny,
finds an aggravation of their crime in the fact that one with so ill-
omened a name as Atrius Umber should have seduced them, and persuaded
them to take him for their leader. So strong is the conviction of men
that names are powers. Nay, it must have been sometimes thought that
the good name might so react on the evil nature that it should not
remain evil altogether, but might be induced, in part at least, to
conform itself to the designation which it bore. Here we have an
explanation of the title Eumenides, or the Well-minded, given to the
Furies; of Euxine, or the kind to strangers, to the inhospitable Black
Sea, 'stepmother of ships,' as the Greek poet called it; the
explanation too of other similar transformations, of the Greek Egesta
transformed by the Romans into 'Segesta,' that it might not suggest
'egestas' or penury; [Footnote: [But the form _Segesta_ is probably
older than _Egesta_, the Romans here, as in other cases, retaining the
original initial _s_, which in Greek is represented generally by the
rough, sometimes by the smooth breathing.]] of Epidamnus, which, in
like manner seeming too suggestive of 'damnum,' or loss, was changed
into 'Dyrrachium'; of Maleventum, which became 'Beneventum'; of Cape
Tormentoso, or Stormy Cape, changed into 'Cape of Good Hope'; of the
fairies being always respectfully spoken of as 'the good people' in
Ireland, even while they are accredited with any amount of mischief; of
the dead spoken of alike in Greek and in Latin simply as 'the
majority'; of the dying, in Greek liturgies remembered as 'those about
to set forward upon a journey'[Footnote: [Greek: oi exodeuontes]]; of
the slain in battle designated in German as 'those who remain,' that is,
on the field of battle; of [Greek: eulogia], or 'the blessing,' as a
name given in modern Greek to the smallpox! We may compare as an
example of this same euphemism the famous 'Vixerunt' with which Cicero
announced that the conspirators against the Roman State had paid the
full penalty of their treason.
Let me observe, before leaving this subject, that not in one passage
only, but in passages innumerable, Scripture sets its seal to this
significance of names, to the fact that the seeking and the finding of
this significance is not a mere play upon the surface of things: it
everywhere recognizes the inner band, which ought to connect, and in a
world of truth would connect, together the name and the person or thing
bearing the name. Scripture sets its seal to this by the weight and
solemnity which it everywhere attaches to the imposing of names; this
in many instances not being left to hazard, but assumed by God as his
own peculiar care. 'Thou shalt call his name Jesus' (Matt. i. 21; Luke
i. 31) is of course the most illustrious instance of all; but there is
a multitude of other cases in point; names given by God, as that of
John to the Baptist; or changed by Him, as Abram's to Abraham (Gen.
xvii. 3), Sarai's to Sarah, Hoshea's to Joshua; or new names added by
Him to the old, when by some mighty act of faith the man had been
lifted out of his old life into a new; as Israel added to Jacob, and
Peter to Simon, and Boanerges or Sons of thunder to the two sons of
Zebedee (Mark iii. 17). The same feeling is at work elsewhere. A Pope
on his election always takes a new name. Or when it is intended to make,
for good or for ill, an entire breach with the past, this is one of the
means by which it is sought to effect as much (2 Chr. xxxvi. 4; Dan. i.
7). How far this custom reaches, how deep the roots which it casts, is
exemplified well in the fact that the West Indian buccaneer makes a
like change of name on entering that society of blood. It is in both
cases a sort of token that old things have passed away, that all have
become new to him.
But we must draw to a close. Enough has been said to attest and to
justify the wide-spread faith of men that names are significant, and
that things and persons correspond, or ought to correspond, to them.
You will not, then, find it a laborious task to persuade your pupils to
admit as much. They are prepared to accept, they will be prompt to
believe it. And great indeed will be our gains, their gains and ours,--
for teacher and taught will for the most part enrich themselves
together,--if, having these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying
round about us, so far more precious than mines of Californian gold, we
determine that we will make what portion of them we can our own, that
we will ask the words which we use to give an account of themselves, to
say whence they are, and whither they tend. Then shall we often rub off
the dust and rust from what seemed to us but a common token, which as
such we had taken and given a thousand times; but which now we shall
perceive to be a precious coin, bearing the 'image and superscription'
of the great King: then shall we often stand in surprise and in
something of shame, while we behold the great spiritual realities which
underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths which we have been
witnessing _for_ in our words, but, it may be, witnessing _against_ in
our lives. And as you will not find, for so I venture to promise, that
this study of words will be a dull one when you undertake it yourselves,
as little need you fear that it will prove dull and unattractive, when
you seek to make your own gains herein the gains also of those who may
be hereafter committed to your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark
the kindling of the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival
of the flagging attention, with which the humblest lecture upon words,
and on the words especially which they are daily using, which are
familiar to them in their play or at their church, will be welcomed by
them. There is a sense of reality about children which makes them rejoice
to discover that there is also a reality about words, that they are not
merely arbitrary signs, but living powers; that, to reverse the saying
of one of England's 'false prophets,' they may be the fool's counters,
but are the wise man's money; not, like the sands of the sea,
innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, clustering in
families, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have
been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world
till now.