and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and
hearts of men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer
indicating and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life.
To study a people's language will be to study _them_, and to study them
at best advantage; there, where they present themselves to us under
fewest disguises, most nearly as they are. Too many have had a hand in
the language as it now is, and in bringing it to the shape in which we
find it, it is too entirely the collective work of a whole people, the
result of the united contributions of all, it obeys too immutable laws,
to allow any successful tampering with it, any making of it to witness
to any other than the actual facts of the case. [Footnote: Terrien
Poncel, _Du Langage_, p. 231: Les langues sont faites à l'usage des
peuples qui les parlent; elles sont animées chacune d'un esprit
différent, et suivent un mode particulier d'action, conforme à leur
principe. 'L'esprit d'une nation et le caractère de sa langue, a écrit
G. de Humboldt, 'sont si intimement liés ensemble, que si l'un était
donné, l'autre devrait pouvoir s'en déduire exactement.' La langue
n'est autre chose que la manifestation extérieure de l'esprit des
peuples; leur langue est leur esprit, et leur esprit est leur langue,
de telle sorte qu'en devéloppant et perfectionnant l'un, ils
développent et perfectionnent nécessairement l'autre. And a recent
German writer has well said, Die Sprache, das selbstgewebte Kleid der
Vorstellung, in welchem jeder Faden wieder eine Vorstellung ist, kann
uns, richtig betrachtet, offenbaren, welche Vorstellungen die
Grundfaden bildeten (Gerber, _Die Sprache als Kunst_).] Thus the
frivolity of an age or nation, its mockery of itself, its inability to
comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its
moral indignation against evil, all this will find an utterance in the
employment of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial
or even ridiculous. 'Gehenna,' that word of such terrible significance
on the lips of our Lord, has in French issued in 'gêne,' and in this
shape expresses no more than a slight and petty annoyance. 'Ennui'
meant once something very different from what now it means. [Footnote:
_Ennui_ is derived from the Late Latin phrase _in odio esse_.] Littré
gives as its original signification, 'anguish of soul, caused by the
death of persons beloved, by their absence, by the shipwreck of hopes,
by any misfortunes whatever.' 'Honnêteté,' which should mean that
virtue of all virtues, honesty, and which did mean it once, standing as
it does now for external civility and for nothing more, marks a
willingness to accept the slighter observances and pleasant courtesies
of society in the room of deeper moral qualities. 'Vérité' is at this
day so worn out, has been used so often where another and very
different word would have been more appropriate, that not seldom a
Frenchman at this present who would fain convince us of the truth of
his communication finds it convenient to assure us that it is 'la vraie
vérité.' Neither is it well that words, which ought to have been
reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, should be
squandered on slight and secular objects,--'spirituel' itself is an
example in point,--or that words implying once the deepest moral guilt,
as is the case with 'perfide,' 'malice,' 'malin,' in French, should be
employed now almost in honour, applied in jest and in play.
Often a people's use of some single word will afford us a deeper
insight into their real condition, their habits of thought and feeling,
than whole volumes written expressly with the intention of imparting
this insight. Thus 'idiot,' a Greek word, is abundantly characteristic
of Greek life. The 'idiot,' or [Greek: idiotas], was originally the
_private_ man, as contradistinguished from one clothed with office, and
taking his share in the management of public affairs. In this its
primary sense it was often used in the English of the seventeenth
century; as when Jeremy Taylor says, 'Humility is a duty in great ones,
as well as in _idiots_.' It came then to signify a rude, ignorant,
unskilled, intellectually unexercised person, a boor; this derived or
secondary sense bearing witness to a conviction woven deep into the
Greek mind that contact with public life, and more or less of
participation in it, was indispensable even to the right development of
the intellect, [Footnote: Hare, _Mission of the Comforter_, p. 552.] a
conviction which would scarcely have uttered itself with greater
clearness than it does in this secondary use of 'idiot.' Our tertiary,
in which the 'idiot' is one deficient in intellect, not merely with
intellectual powers unexercised, is only this secondary pushed a little
farther. Once more, how wonderfully characteristic of the Greek mind it
is that the language should have one and the same word ([Greek: kalos]),
to express the beautiful and the good--goodness being thus contemplated
as the highest beauty; while over against this stands another word
([Greek: aischros]) used alike for the ugly to look at and for the
morally bad. Again, the innermost differences between the Greek and the
Hebrew reveal themselves in the several salutations of each, in the
'Rejoice' of the first, as contrasted with the 'Peace' of the second.
The clear, cheerful, world-enjoying temper of the Greek embodies itself
in the first; he could desire nothing better or higher for himself, nor
wish it for his friend, than to have _joy_ in his life. But the Hebrew
had a deeper longing within him, and one which finds utterance in his
'Peace.' It is not hard to perceive why this latter people should have
been chosen as the first bearers of that truth which indeed enables
truly to _rejoice_, but only through first bringing _peace_; nor why
from them the word of life should first go forth. It may be urged,
indeed, that these were only forms, and such they may have at length
become; as in our 'good-by' or 'adieu' we can hardly be said now to
commit our friend to the Divine protection; yet still they were not
forms at the beginning, nor would they have held their ground, if ever
they had become such altogether.
How much, again, will be sometimes involved in the gradual disuse of
one name, and the coming up of another in its room. Thus, little as the
fact, and the moral significance of the fact, may have been noticed at
the time, what an epoch was it in the history of the Papacy, and with
what distinctness marking a more thorough secularizing of its whole
tone and spirit, when '_Ecclesia_ Romana,' the official title by which
it was wont at an earlier day to designate itself, gave place to the
later title, '_Curia_ Romana,' the Roman _Church_ making room for the
Roman _Court_. [Footnote: See on this matter _The Pope and the Council_,
by Janus, p. 215.] The modifications of meaning which a word has
undergone as it had been transplanted from one soil to another, so that
one nation borrowing it from another, has brought into it some force
foreign to it before, has deepened, or extenuated, or otherwise
modified its meaning,--this may reveal to us, as perhaps nothing else
would, fundamental diversities of character existing between them. The
word in Greek exactly corresponding to our 'self-sufficient' is one of
honour, and was applied to men in their praise. And indeed it was the
glory of the heathen philosophy to teach man to find his resources in
his own bosom, to be thus sufficient for himself; and seeing that a
true centre without him and above him, a centre in God, had not been
revealed to him, it was no shame for him to seek it there; far better
this than to have no centre at all. But the Gospel has taught us
another lesson, to find our sufficiency in God: and thus 'self-
sufficient,' to the Greek suggesting no lack of modesty, of humility,
or of any good thing, at once suggests such to us. 'Self-sufficiency'
no man desires now to be attributed to him. The word carries for us its
own condemnation; and its different uses, for honour once, for reproach
now, do in fact ground themselves on the innermost differences between
the religious condition of the world before Christ and after.
It was not well with Italy, she might fill the world with exquisite
specimens of her skill in the arts, with pictures and statues of rarest
loveliness, but all higher national life was wanting to her during
those centuries in which she degraded 'virtuoso,' or the virtuous man,
to signify one skilled in the appreciation of painting, music, and
sculpture; for these, the ornamental fringe of a people's life, can
never, without loss of all manliness of character, be its main texture
and woof--not to say that excellence in them has been too often
dissociated from all true virtue and moral worth. The opposite
exaggeration of the Romans, for whom 'virtus' meant predominantly
warlike courage, the truest 'manliness' of men, was more tolerable than
this; for there is a sense in which a man's 'valour' is his value, is
the measure of his worth; seeing that no virtue can exist among men who
have not learned, in Milton's glorious phrase,' to hate the cowardice
of doing wrong.' [Footnote: It did not escape Plutarch, imperfect Latin
scholar as he was, that 'virtus' far more nearly corresponded to
[Greek: andreia] than to [Greek: arete] (_Coriol. I_)] It could not but
be morally ill with a people among whom 'morbidezza' was used as an
epithet of praise, expressive of a beauty which on the score of its
sickly softness demanded to be admired. There was too sure a witness
here for the decay of moral strength and health, when these could not
merely be dissevered from beauty, but implicitly put in opposition to
it. Nor less must it have fared ill with Italians, there was little joy
and little pride which they could have felt in their country, at a time
when 'pellegrino,' meaning properly the strange or the foreign, came to
be of itself a word of praise, and equivalent to beautiful. [Footnote:
Compare Florio's Ital. Diet.: 'pelegrino, excellent, noble, rare,
pregnant, singular and choice.'] Far better the pride and assumption
of that ancient people who called all things and persons beyond their
own pale barbarous and barbarians; far better our own 'outlandish,'
used with something of the same contempt. There may be a certain
intolerance in our use of these; yet this how much healthier than so
far to have fallen out of conceit with one's own country, so far to
affect things foreign, that these last, merely on the strength of being
foreign, commend themselves as beautiful in our sight. How little,
again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the
spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious
among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured
so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib
and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture-
galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is
unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again,
or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an
ignoble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the
temper and tone of mind that produced them has passed away. [Footnote:
See on this matter Marsh, _On the English Language_, New York, 1860, p.
224.]
Happily it is nearly impossible for us in England to understand the
mingled scorn, hatred, fear, suspicion, contempt, which in time past
were associated with the word 'sbirri' in Italian. [Footnote: [Compare
V. Hugo's allusion to Louis Napoleon in the _Châtiments_:
'Qui pour la mettre en croix livra,
_Sbire_ cruel!
Rome républicaine à Rome catholique!']]
These 'sbirri' were the humble, but with all this the acknowledged,
ministers of justice; while yet everything which is mean and false and
oppressive, which can make the name of justice hateful, was implied in
this title of theirs, was associated with their name. There is no surer
sign of a bad oppressive rule, than when the titles of the
administrators of law, titles which should be in themselves so
honourable, thus acquire a hateful undermeaning. What a world of
concussions, chicane and fraud, must have found place, before tax-
gatherer, or exciseman, 'publican,' as in our English Bible, could
become a word steeped in hatred and scorn, as alike for Greek and Jew
it was; while, on the other hand, however unwelcome the visits of the
one or the interference of the other may be to us, yet the sense of the
entire fairness and justice with which their exactions are made,
acquits these names for us of the slightest sense of dishonour.
'Policeman' has no evil subaudition with us; though in the last century,
when a Jonathan Wild was possible, 'catchpole,' a word in Wiclif's time
of no dishonour at all, was abundantly tinged with this scorn and
contempt. So too, if at this day any accidental profits fall or
'escheat' to the Crown, they are levied with so much fairness and more
than fairness to the subject, that, were not the thing already
accomplished, 'escheat' would never yield 'cheat,' nor 'escheator'
'cheater,' as through the extortions and injustices for which these
dues were formerly a pretext, they actually have done.
It is worse, as marking that a still holier sanctuary than that of
civil government has become profane in men's sight, when words which
express sacred functions and offices become redolent of scorn. How
thankful we may be that in England we have no equivalent to the German
'Pfaffe,' which, identical with 'papa' and 'pope,' and a name given at
first to any priest, now carries with it the insinuation of almost
every unworthiness in the forms of meanness, servility, and avarice
which can render the priest's office and person base and contemptible.
Much may be learned by noting the words which nations have been obliged
to borrow from other nations, as not having the same of home-growth--
this in most cases, if not in all, testifying that the thing itself was
not native, but an exotic, transplanted, like the word that indicated
it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the
social and political life of England, as distinguished from that of the
other European nations, that to it alone the word 'club' belongs;
France and Germany, having been alike unable to grow a word of their
own, have borrowed ours. That England should have been the birthplace
of 'club' is nothing wonderful; for these voluntary associations of men
for the furthering of such social or political ends as are near to the
hearts of the associates could have only had their rise under such
favourable circumstances as ours. In no country where there was not
extreme personal freedom could they have sprung up; and as little in
any where men did not know how to use this freedom with moderation and
self-restraint, could they long have been endured. It was comparatively
easy to adopt the word; but the ill success of the 'club' itself
everywhere save here where it is native, has shown that it was not so
easy to transplant or, having transplanted, to acclimatize the thing.
While we have lent this and other words, political and industrial for
the most part, to the French and Germans, it would not be less
instructive, if time allowed, to trace our corresponding obligations to
them.
And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a
word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a
Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong
family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word
in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek [Greek: philostorgos]
How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which
Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in
the Greek answering to the Latin 'ineptus'; not from this concluding,
as we might have anticipated, that the character designated by the word
was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with
the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all.
[Footnote: _De Orat_. ii. 4: Quem enim nos _ineptum_ vocamus, is mihi
videtur ab hoc nomen habere ductum, quod non sit aptus. Idque in
sermonis nostri consuetudine perlate patet. Nam qui aut tempus quid
postulet, non videt, aut plura loquitur, aut se ostentat, aut eorum
quibuscum est vel dignitatis vel commodi rationem non habet, aut
denique in aliquo genere aut inconcinnus aut multus est, is ineptus
esse dicitur. Hoc vitio cumulata est eruditissima illa Graecorum natio.
Itaque quod vim hujus mali Graeci non vident, ne nomen quidem ei vitio
imposuerunt. Ut enim quasras omnia, quomodo Graeci ineptum appellent,
non invenies.] Very instructive you may find it to note these words,
which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to
correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to
go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would
not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact
equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language:
'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'borné,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,'
'égarement,' 'élan,' 'espièglerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,'
'gentil,' 'ingénue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,'
'prévenant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident
that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are
to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not
found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and
subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody,
there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have
devised for themselves such words as the following: 'gemüth,'
'heimweh,' 'innigkeit,' 'sehnsucht,' 'tiefsinn,' 'sittsamkeit,'
'verhängniss,' 'weltschmerz,' 'zucht'; all these being German words
which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their
equivalents in French.
The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations
dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many
shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one
another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing
'hablár' from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give
it in 'hâbler' the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in
exactly their own coin, for of 'parler' which in like manner is but to
speak in French, they make 'parlár,' which means to prate, to chat.
[Footnote: See Darmesteter, _The Life of Words_, Eng. ed. p. 100.]
But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These illustrations, to
which it would be easy to add more, justify all that has been asserted
of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold
themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light
and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied
to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see,
on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of
them children of light, others children of this world, or even of
darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our
passions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they
receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which
again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse.
[Footnote: Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn
from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (_Tusc_. iii. 7)
laments of 'confidens' that it should have acquired an evil
signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly
pushing (compare Virgil,_Georg_. iv. 444), a meaning which little by
little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not
inherent in it at all. In the same way 'latro,' having left two earlier
meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (_Aen_. xii.
7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise
'facinus' begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but
ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. 'Pronuba' starts
with meaning a bridesmaid it ignobly ends with suggesting a procuress.]
Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of
which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and
about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding
such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or
to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than
hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, 'By thy words thou
shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned'?
LECTURE IV.
ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which
letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we
might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all
vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present;
that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact
it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only,
connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods
that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of
bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written
records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers
itself for our investigation--'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson
calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain
amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the
end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus
Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became
extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the
negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have
exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this
matter Sayce's _Principles of Comparative Philology_, pp. 175-181.]--
itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same
time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or
other writing which employs it. The written records may have been
falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of
causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it
aright.
Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your
sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting
inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry
on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present
language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the
different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary,
succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the
successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so
to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the
forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their
date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it
does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed
upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely
analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and
chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German,
Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with
slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to
analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for
himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with
tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that
people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what
succession they followed, one upon the other.
Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and
Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this,
in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be
drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have
severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by
them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still
work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now,
when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still
be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will
introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of
large periods of our history.
Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such
instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages
by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when
the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed
each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the
small dominant class, the other that of the great body of the people.
By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the
two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed
prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a multitude of
the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist
duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not
long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a
question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should
adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if
not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express
some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever
formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but
practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should
maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of
one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it
intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only
remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold
on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful.
In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word
expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that
there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word
noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.