significant. I will not deny that it may spring in part from a tendency
which often meets us in language, to narrow the whole circle of virtues
to some one upon which peculiar stress is laid; [Footnote: Thus in
Jewish Greek [Greek: eleaemosnuae] stands often for [Greek: dikaosnuae]
(Deut. vi. 25; Ps. cii. 6, LXX), or almsgiving for righteousness.] but
still, in selecting this peculiar one as _the_ 'virtue' of woman, there
speaks out a true sense that this is indeed for her the citadel of the
whole moral being, the overthrow of which is the overthrow of all; that
it is the keystone of the arch, which being withdrawn, the whole
collapses and falls.
Or consider all which is witnessed for us in 'kind.' We speak of a
'kind' person, and we speak of man-'kind,' and perhaps, if we think
about the matter at all, fancy that we are using quite different words,
or the same words in senses quite unconnected. But they are connected,
and by closest bonds; a 'kind' person is one who acknowledges his
kinship with other men, and acts upon it; confesses that he owes to
them, as of one blood with himself, the debt of love. [Footnote: Thus
Hamlet does much more than merely play on words when he calls his
father's brother, who had married his mother, 'A little more than _kin_,
and less than _kind_.' [For the relation between _kind_ (the adj.) and
_kind_ ('nature,' the sb.) see Skeat's Dict.]] Beautiful before, how
much more beautiful do 'kind' and 'kindness' appear, when we apprehend
the root out of which they grow, and the truth which they embody; that
they are the acknowledgment in loving deeds of our kinship with our
brethren; of the relationship which exists between all the members of
the human family, and of the obligations growing out of the same.
But I observed just now that there are also words bearing on them the
slime of the serpent's trail; uses, too, of words which imply moral
perversity--not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired
senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their
deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A 'prude' is
now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does
not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this
over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone
strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been
profound, before matters could have come to this point. 'Prude,' a
French word, means properly virtuous or prudent. [Footnote: [Compare
French _prude_, on the etymology of which see Schelar's _French Dict._,
ed. 3 (1888)].] But where morals are greatly and generally relaxed,
virtue is treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a dissolute age, and one
incredulous of any inward purity, by the 'prude' or virtuous woman is
intended a sort of female Tartuffe, affecting a virtue which it is
taken for granted none can really possess; and the word abides, a proof
of the world's disbelief in the realities of goodness, of its
resolution to treat them as hypocrisies and deceits.
Again, why should 'simple' be used slightingly, and 'simpleton' more
slightingly still? The 'simple' is one properly of a single fold;
[Footnote: [Latin _simplicem_; for Lat. _sim-_, _sin-_= Greek [Greek:
ha] in [Greek: ha-pax], see Brugmann, _Grundriss_, Section 238, Curtius,
_Greek Etym._ No. 599.]] a Nathanael, whom as such Christ honoured to
the highest (John i. 47); and, indeed, what honour can be higher than
to have nothing _double_ about us, to be without _duplicities_ or
folds? Even the world, which despises 'simplicity,' does not profess to
admire 'duplicity,' or double-foldedness. But inasmuch as it is felt
that a man without these folds will in a world like ours make himself a
prey, and as most men, if obliged to choose between deceiving and being
deceived, would choose the former, it has come to pass that 'simple'
which in a kingdom of righteousness would be a world of highest honour,
carries with it in this world of ours something of contempt. [Footnote:
'Schlecht,' which in modern German means bad, good for nothing, once
meant good,--good, that is, in the sense of right or straight, but has
passed through the same stages to the meaning which it now possesses,
'albern' has done the same (Max Müller, _Science of Language_, 2nd
series, p. 274).] Nor can we help noting another involuntary testimony
borne by human language to human sin. I mean this,--that an idiot, or
one otherwise deficient in intellect, is called an 'innocent' or one
who does no hurt; this use of 'innocent' assuming that to do hurt and
harm is the chief employment to which men turn their intellectual
powers, that, where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.
Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words
expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side.
Our 'silly' is the Old-English 'saelig' or blessed. We see it in a
transition state in our early poets, with whom 'silly' is an
affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One
among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, 'this
harmless _silly_ babe,' But 'silly' has travelled on the same lines as
'simple,' 'innocent,' and so many other words. The same moral
phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus 'sheepish' in the _Ormulum_
is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who
was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation of the
Christian faith, while the name of its Divine Founder was still strange
to the ears of the heathen, they were wont, some in ignorance, but more
of malice, slightly to mispronounce this name, turning 'Christus' into
'Chrestus'--that is, the benevolent or benign. That these last meant no
honour thereby to the Lord of Life, but the contrary, is certain; this
word, like 'silly,' 'innocent,' 'simple,' having already contracted a
slight tinge of contempt, without which there would have been no
inducement to fasten it on the Saviour. The French have their
'bonhomie' with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks their
[Greek: eyetheia]. Lady Shiel tells us of the modern Persians, 'They
have odd names for describing the moral qualities; "Sedakat" means
sincerity, honesty, candour; but when a man is said to be possessed of
"sedakat," the meaning is that he is a credulous, contemptible
simpleton.' [Footnote: _Life and Manners in Persia_, p. 247.] It is to
the honour of the Latin tongue, and very characteristic of the best
aspects of Roman life, that 'simplex' and 'simplicitas' never acquired
this abusive signification.
Again, how prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts
and blessings which indeed come directly from God--to build altars to
Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which
we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their
highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a
word; for 'happy' and 'happiness' are connected with 'hap,' which is
chance;--how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very
essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave
nor can take it away. [Footnote: The heathen with their [Greek:
eudaimonia], inadequate as this word must be allowed to be, put _us_
here to shame.] Against a similar misuse of 'fortunate,' 'unfortunate,'
Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost
everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims:
'Call not the royal Swede _unfortunate_,
Who never did to _Fortune_ bend the knee.'
There are words which reveal a wrong or insufficient estimate that men
take of their duties, or that at all events others have taken before
them; for it is possible that the mischief may have been done long ago,
and those who now use the words may only have inherited it from others,
not helped to bring it about themselves. An employer of labour
advertises that he wants so many 'hands'; but this language never could
have become current, a man could never have thus shrunk into a 'hand'
in the eyes of his fellow-man, unless this latter had in good part
forgotten that, annexed to those hands which he would purchase to toil
for him, were also heads and hearts [Footnote: A similar use of [Greek:
somata] for slaves in Greek rested originally on the same forgetfulness
of the moral worth of every man. It has found its way into the
Septuagint and Apocrypha (Gen. xxxvi. 6; 2 Macc. viii. 11; Tob. x. 10);
and occurs once in the New Testament (Rev. xviii. 13). [In Gen. xxxvi.
6 the [Greek: somata] of the Septuagint is a rendering of the Hebrew
_nafshôth_, souls, so Luther translates 'Seelen.']]--a fact, by the way,
of which, if he persists in forgetting it, he may be reminded in very
unwelcome ways at the last. In Scripture there is another not
unfrequent putting of a part for the whole, as when it is said, 'The
same day there were added unto them about three thousand _souls_' (Acts
ii. 41). 'Hands' here, 'souls' there--the contrast may suggest some
profitable reflections.
There is another way in which the immorality of words mainly displays
itself, and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when
honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made
plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if
not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. 'The
tongue,' as St. James has said, 'is a _world_ of iniquity' (iii. 7); or,
as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our
purpose, '_the ornament_ of iniquity,' that which sets it out in fair
and attractive colours.
How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there should be an ugly
word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust,
even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays
fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, makes sin
plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong,
thus bringing the user of it under the woe of them 'that call evil good,
and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness,
that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter' (Isai. v. 20). On this
text, and with reference to this scheme, South has written four of his
grandest sermons, bearing this striking title, _Of the fatal Imposture
and Force of Words_. [Footnote: _Sermons_, 1737, vol. ii. pp. 313-351;
vol. vi. pp. 3-120. Thus on those who pleaded that their 'honour' was
engaged, and that therefore they could not go back from this or that
sinful act:--'Honour is indeed a noble thing, and therefore the word
which signifies it must needs be very plausible. But as a rich and
glistening garment may be cast over a rotten body, so an illustrious
commanding word may be put upon a vile and an ugly thing--for words are
but the garments, the loose garments of things, and so may easily be
put off and on according to the humour of him who bestows them. But the
body changes not, though the garments do.'] How awful, yea how fearful,
is this 'imposture and force' of theirs, leading men captive at will.
There is an atmosphere about them which they are evermore diffusing, a
savour of life or of death, which we insensibly inhale at each moral
breath we draw. [Footnote: Bacon's words have often been quoted, but
they will bear being quoted once more: Credunt enim homines rationem
suam verbis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum
retorqueant et reflectant.] 'Winds of the soul,' as we have already
heard them called, they fill its sails, and are continually impelling
it upon its course, to heaven or to hell.
Thus how different the light in which we shall have learned to regard a
sin, according as we have been wont to designate it, and to hear it
designated, by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity;
or by one which palliates this and conceals; men, as one said of old,
being wont for the most part to be ashamed not of base deeds but of
base names affixed to those deeds. In the murder trials at Dublin, 1883,
those destined to the assassin's knife were spoken of by approvers as
persons to be removed, and their death constantly described as their
'removal.' In Sussex it is never said of a man that he is drunk. He may
be 'tight,' or 'primed,' or 'crank,' or 'concerned in liquor,' nay, it
may even be admitted that he had taken as much liquor as was good for
him; but that he was drunk, oh never. [Footnote: 'Pransus' and 'potus,'
in like manner, as every Latin scholar knows, mean much more than they
say.] Fair words for foul things are everywhere only too frequent; thus
in 'drug-damned Italy,' when poisoning was the rifest, nobody was said
to be poisoned; it was only that the death of this one or of that had
been 'assisted' (aiutata). Worse still are words which seek to turn the
edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in
France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered
themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which
they coveted, was called 'poudre de succession.' We might suppose
beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in
an advanced state of artificial cultivation. But it is not so. Captain
Erskine, who visited the Fiji Islands before England had taken them
into her keeping, and who gives some extraordinary details of the
extent to which cannibalism then prevailed among their inhabitants,
pork and human flesh being their two staple articles of food, relates
in his deeply interesting record of his voyage that natural pig they
called '_short_ pig,' and man dressed and prepared for food, '_long_
pig.' There was doubtless an attempt here to carry off with a jest the
revolting character of the practice in which they indulged. For that
they were themselves aware of this, that their consciences did bear
witness against it, was attested by their uniform desire to conceal, if
possible, all traces of the practice from European eyes.
But worst, perhaps, of all are names which throw a flimsy veil of
sentiment over some sin. What a source, for example, of mischief
without end in our country parishes is the one practice of calling a
child born out of wedlock a 'love-child,' instead of a bastard. It
would be hard to estimate how much it has lowered the tone and standard
of morality among us; or for how many young women it may have helped to
make the downward way more sloping still. How vigorously ought we to
oppose ourselves to all such immoralities of language. This opposition,
it is true, will never be easy or pleasant; for many who will endure to
commit a sin, will profoundly resent having that sin called by its
right name. Pirates, as Aristotle tells us, in his time called
themselves 'purveyors.' [Footnote: _Rhet_. iii. 2: [Greek: oi laestai
autous poriotas kalousi nun.]] Buccaneers, men of the same bloody
trade, were by their own account 'brethren of the coast.' Shakespeare's
thieves are only true to human nature, when they name themselves 'St.
Nicholas' clerks,' 'michers,' 'nuthooks,' 'minions of the moon,'
anything in short but thieves; when they claim for their stealing that
it shall not be so named, but only conveying ('convey the wise it
call'); the same dislike to look an ugly fact in the face reappearing
among the voters in some of our corrupter boroughs, who receive, not
bribes--they are hugely indignant if this is imputed to them--but
'head-money' for their votes. Shakespeare indeed has said that a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet; but there are some things which
are not roses, and which are counted to smell a great deal sweeter
being called by any other name than their own. Thus, to deal again with
bribes, call a bribe 'palm oil,' or a 'pot de vin,' and how much of its
ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English 'sharper' and
'blackleg' than the French 'chevalier d'industrie': [Footnote: For the
rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, _Louis XIV_. p. 43.] and the same
holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin
'conciliatrix.' In this last word we have a notable example of the
putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful
occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its
own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the
mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa,
to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a
dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek:
hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the
great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in
detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures
of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral
ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration
of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to
everything--names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the
honourable--as one of the most remarkable tokens of this, even as it
again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result.] Use
and custom soon dim our eyes in such matters as these; else we should
be deeply struck by a familiar instance of this falsehood in names, one
which perhaps has never struck us at all--I mean the profane
appropriation of 'eau de vie' (water of life), a name borrowed from
some of the Saviour's most precious promises (John iv. 14; Rev. xxii.
17), to a drink which the untutored savage with a truer instinct has
named 'fire-water'; which, sad to say, is known in Tahiti as 'British
water'; and which has proved for thousands and tens of thousands, in
every clime, not 'water of life,' but the fruitful source of disease,
crime, and madness, bringing forth first these, and when these are
finished, bringing forth death. There is a blasphemous irony in this
appropriation of the language of heaven to that which, not indeed in
its use, but too frequent abuse, is the instrument of hell, that is
almost without a parallel. [Footnote: Milton in a profoundly
instructive letter, addressed by him to one of the friends whom he made
during his Italian tour, encourages him in those philological studies
to which he had devoted his life by such words as these: Neque enim qui
sermo, purusne an corruptus, quaeve loquendi proprietas quotidiana
populo sit, parvi interesse arbitrandum est, quae res Athenis non semel
saluti fuit; immo vero, quod Platonis sententia est, immutato vestiendi
more habituque graves in Republica motus mutationesque portendi,
equidem potius collabente in vitium atque errorem loquendi usu occasum
ejus urbis remque humilem et obscuram subsequi crediderim: verba enim
partim inscita et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si
ignavos et oscitantes et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum
animos haud levi indicio declarant? Contra nullum unquam audivimus
imperium, nullam civitatem non mediocriter saltern floruisse, quamdiu
linguae sua gratia, suusque cultus constitit. Compare an interesting
Epistle (the 114th) of Seneca.] If I wanted any further evidence of
this, the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to
observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with
others, be it in the conflict of the tongue or the pen, or of weapons
more wounding yet, if such there be, is ever to assume some honourable
name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject
in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name
which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious
light. [Footnote: See p. 33.] A deep instinct, deeper perhaps than men
give any account of to themselves, tells them how far this will go;
that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments on one side or
the other, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words
are evermore, however imperceptibly, diffusing. By argument they might
hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by help of these nicknames
they enlist what at first are so much more potent, the prejudices and
passions of the many, on their side. Thus when at the breaking out of
our Civil War the Parliamentary party styled _themselves_ 'The Godly,'
while to the Royalists they gave the title of 'The Malignants,' it is
certain that, wherever they could procure entrance and allowance for
these terms, the question upon whose side the right lay was already
decided. The Royalists, it is true, made exactly the same employment of
what Bentham used to call question-begging words, of words steeped
quite as deeply in the passions which animated _them_. It was much when
at Florence the 'Bad Boys,' as they defiantly called themselves, were
able to affix on the followers of Savonarola the title of Piagnoni or
The Snivellers. So, too, the Franciscans, when they nicknamed the
Dominicans 'Maculists,' as denying, or at all events refusing to affirm
as a matter of faith, that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without
stain (sine macula), perfectly knew that this title would do much to
put their rivals in an odious light. The copperhead in America is a
peculiarly venomous snake. Something effectual was done when this name
was fastened, as it lately was, by one party in America on its
political opponents. Not otherwise, in some of our northern towns, the
workmen who refuse to join a trade union are styled 'knobsticks,'
'crawlers,' 'scabs,' 'blacklegs.' Nor can there be any question of the
potent influence which these nicknames of contempt and scorn exert.
[Footnote: [See interesting chapter on Political Nicknames in
D'Israeli's _Curiosities of Literature_.]]