WORDS;

Their Usage and Misuse.

BY

WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.,

AUTHOR OF “GETTING ON IN THE WORLD,” “ORATORY AND ORATORS,”
ETC., ETC.

Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende Gedanke und beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe.—Becker.

CHICAGO

SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY

1907

Copyright, 1876,

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.

Copyright, 1884,

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.

[Pg vii]

The unexpected favor with which this work has been received by the public from year to year, since its publication in 1873, has made the author anxious to render it more worthy of regard. He has, therefore, carefully revised the work, corrected some errors, and added two new chapters, one on “Onomatopes,” the other on “Names of Men,” besides many pages on the subjects of the other chapters.

Professor G. P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,” quotes the saying of a distinguished British scholar of the last century, that he had known but three of his countrymen who spoke their native language with uniform grammatical accuracy; and the Professor adds that “the observation of most persons acquainted with English and American society confirms the general truth implied in this declaration.” In this statement, made by one of the most eminent philologists of the day, is found, at least, a partial justification of works like the present, if they are properly written. The author is well aware that, in writing such a book, he is obnoxious to the complaint of Goethe, that “everybody thinks that, because he can speak, he is entitled to speak about language;” he is aware, too, that in his criticisms on the misuses and abuses of words, he has exposed himself to criticism; and it may[viii] be that he has been guilty of some of the very sins which he has condemned. If so, he sins in good company, since nearly all of his predecessors, who have written on the same theme, have been found guilty of a similar inconsistency, from Lindley Murray down to Dean Alford, Breen, Moon, Marsh, and Fowler. If the public is to hear no philological sermons till the preachers are faultless, it will have to wait forever. “The only impeccable authors,” says Hazlitt, “are those who never wrote.”

It is hardly necessary to add that the work is designed for popular reading, rather than for scholars. How much the author is indebted to others, he cannot say. He has been travelling, in his own way, over old and well worn ground, and has picked up his materials freely from all the sources within his reach. Non nova, sed nové, has been his aim; he regrets that he has not accomplished it more to his satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old thoughts be recast. There are some writers, however, to whom he has been particularly indebted; they are Archbishop Trench, the Rev. Matthew Harrison, author of “The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language,” Professor G. P. Marsh, and especially Archdeacon F. W. Farrar, the last of whom in his three linguistic works has shown the ability to invest the driest scientific themes with interest. A list of the books consulted will be found on pages 479, 480.

[ix]

[Pg 1]

WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.

To the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the common operations of life, which, but for their commonness, would be deemed full of marvel, few things are more wonderful than the origin, structure, history and significance of words. The tongue is the glory of man; for though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet language, which gives us a duplicate and multipliable existence,—enabling mind to communicate with mind,—is the Rubicon which they never have dared to cross. The dog barks as it barked at the creation; the owl hoots in the same octaves in which it screamed ages ago; and the crow of the cock is the same to-day as when it startled the ear of repentant Peter. The song of the lark and the howl of the leopard have continued as unchangeable as the concentric circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee; and even the stoutest champion of the orang-outang theory[2] of man’s origin will admit that no process of natural selection has yet distilled significant words out of the cries of beasts or the notes of birds. Though we have little reason to doubt that animals think, there is yet no proof that a single noise made by them expresses a thought, and especially an abstraction or a generalization, properties characterizing the language of man. He only, in this world, is able to classify objects which in some respects resemble, and in others differ from one another, and to analyze and decompound the various objects of thought; and to him is limited the privilege of designating by arbitrary signs, and describing by distinctive terms, the things he thus comprehends. Speech is a divine gift. It is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon His intelligent offspring, and proves, more conclusively than his upright form, or his looks “commercing with the skies,” that he was made in the image of God. Without this crowning gift to man, even reason would have been comparatively valueless; for he would have felt himself to be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the midst of a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his race would have been as uninstructive as that of barbarians and savages. The rude tongue of a Patagonian or Australian is full of wonders to the philosopher; but as we ascend in the scale of being from the uncouth sounds which express the desires of a savage to the lofty periods of a Cicero or a Chatham, the power of words expands until it attains to regions far above the utmost range of our capacity. It designates, as Novalis has said, God with three letters, and the infinite with as many syllables, though the ideas conveyed by these words are immeasurably beyond the utmost grasp of man. In every relation of life, at every moment[3] of our active being, in every thing we think or do, it is on the meaning and inflection of a word that the direction of our thoughts, and the expression of our will, turn. The soundness of our reasonings, the clearness of our belief and of our judgment, the influence we exert upon others, and the manner in which we are impressed by our fellow-men,—all depend upon a knowledge of the value of words. It is in language that the treasures of human knowledge, the discoveries of Science, and the achievements of Art are chiefly preserved; it is language that furnishes the poet with the airy vehicle for his most delicate fancies, the orator with the elements of his electrifying eloquence, the savant with the record of his classification, the metaphysician with the means of his sharp distinction, the statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the philosopher with the earthly instrument of his heaven-reaching induction.

“Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an opponent in the National Assembly, “are things;” and truly they were such when he thundered them forth from the Tribune, full of life, meaning and power. Words are always things, when coming from the lips of a master-spirit, and instinct with his own individuality. Especially is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for thoughts, and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed by the whole Third Estate of a nation. Their words are not merely things, but living things, endowed with power not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did not exaggerate when he said that “words are the only things that[4] live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces, mausoleums and monuments built at enormous cost and during years of toil to perpetuate the memory or preserve the ashes of ancient kings, have perished, and left not even a trace of their existence. The pyramids of Egypt have, indeed, escaped in some degree the changes and chances of thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly engulf these masses of stone, and “leave the sand of the desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A sudden accident may cause the destruction of the finest masterpieces of art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvedere, or the Venus de Medicis, upon which millions have gazed with rapture, may be hopelessly injured or irretrievably ruined. A mob shivers into dust the statue of Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless director of the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of Correggio’s “Notte,” where the light breaks from the heavenly child, and deprives the picture of one of its fairest charms; an inferior pencil retouches the great Vandyck at Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its colors; and though no such mishap as these befall the product of the painter’s skill, yet how often,—

Not so with words. The language which embodies the ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a[5] few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and, when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men by the power of his thought,—not “from his urn,” like a dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. Look at the “winged words” of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long have they kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. “The ‘Venus’ of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the ‘chained Prometheus’ has outlived the ‘Cupid’ of Praxiteles, and the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.”

“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A word fitly spoken,” says Solomon, “is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” No artificer’s hand, however cunning, can contrive a mechanism comparable with those masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums one will sometimes see the analysis of a man,—that is, the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs[6] of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? “Scholars,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.”

The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other[7] words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”

Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s melodies,—

But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay[8] declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. “No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat,’ ‘Open Barley,’ to the door which obeyed no sound but ‘Open Sesame.’”

The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the largest of land animals, in “Paradise Lost.” In a single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:—

Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:—

“The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “is felt through every movement of this sentence, especially toward the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the reader; the hard staccato stops that well might take the breath, in attempting to pronounce ‘or, with one stroke of this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of sound in the last[9] line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a full syllable is interpolated even at the cæsural pause, it is carried off almost without the reader perceiving the surplusage.” No poet better understood than Milton the art of heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional sacrifice of their harmony. By substituting quantities for accented verse, he produces an effect like that of the skilful organist who throws into the full tide of instrumental music an occasional discord, giving intenser sweetness to the notes that follow.

It is this necromantic power over language,—this skill in striking “the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the soul,—which blinds us to the absurdities of “Paradise Lost.” While following this mighty magician of language through

we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with “villanous saltpetre” and divinities talk Calvinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a school divine. As with Milton, so with his great predecessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pictures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “the invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window.”

The difference in the use of words by different writers[10] is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with Bacon’s writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.

“All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly provoked.” Who that is familiar with Dryden’s “full, resounding line,” has not admired the magic effects he produces with the most familiar words? Macaulay well says that in the management of the scientific vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary, Gibbons, succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. Emerson, in speaking of the intense vitality of Montaigne’s words, says that if you cut them, they will bleed. Joubert, in revealing the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles à tous les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our understanding.” So in the weird poetic fictions of Coleridge there is an indescribable witchery of[11] phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one had eaten of “the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.”

How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to “the fitting of aptest words to things,” which we find on every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,

and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s marvellous gift of melody, asks: “Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language—a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands.”

Words, with such men, are “nimble and airy servitors,” not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they[12] are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit together, are sometimes “half battles, stronger than most men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the weird-like power of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers, he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the precise significance of every word he uses; that he has conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression,—ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,—are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;

The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century[13] to those of our own day is due not less to their choice and collocation of words than to their weight of thought. There was no writing public nor reading populace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual, and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to studious and thoughtful readers. “The structure of their language,” says Henry Taylor, “is itself an evidence that they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impatience, making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read. Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he had wings, they might help him to some more genial and profitable employment than that of running like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those who have followed them to train the ear and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and intertextures,—the many parts waiting for the ultimate wholeness,—we shall perceive that without distinctive movement and rhythmical significance of a very high order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running[14] divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to dissociate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader.”

Few persons are aware how much knowledge is sometimes necessary to give the etymology and definition of a word. In 1839 the British Court of Queen’s Bench,—Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Justice Coleridge, the Attorney General, Sir J. Campbell, and other learned lawyers,—disputed for some hours about the meaning of the word “upon,” as a preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or “before.” It is easy to define words as certain persons satirized by Pascal have defined light: “A luminary movement of luminous bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined murder to a jury: “Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is—murder.” We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition of network: “Network—anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of Bardolph’s attempt to analyze the term accommodation: “Accommodation,—that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing.” Brimstone, for example, the lexicographer defines by telling us that it is sulphur; and then rewards us for the trouble we have had in turning to sulphur,[15] by telling us that it is brimstone. The eccentric Davy Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his hearers by incessant repetition,—“Sit down,” whispered Crockett, “you are coming out of the same hole you went in at.” There is a mythical story that the forty members of the French Academy once undertook to define the word crab, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite satisfactory: “Crab,—a small red fish, which walks backward.” “Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when interrogated touching the correctness of the definition; “perfect,—only I will make one small observation in natural history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is admirable.” Too many easily made definitions are liable to similar damaging exceptions.

The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define the word “alkali” or “acid,” for instance, and he will have to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry. Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chemistry, tells us that when he undertook to form a nomenclature of that science, and while he proposed to himself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of chemistry. Often a theory or an argument, which seems clear and convincing in its disembodied form, is found to be[16] incoherent and altogether unsatisfactory as soon as it is fixed in words on paper. Samuel Bailey, who held a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley’s “Theory of Vision,” tells us that having, in the course of a philosophical discussion, occasion to explain it, he found, on attempting to state in his own language the grounds on which it rested, that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear and conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined, therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dispassionate examination; and the result was a clear conviction of the erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philosophical grounds for which conviction he has so ably and luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only follow accurate and sharply defined notions of the science itself. Try to define the words matter, substance, idea, will, cause, conscience, virtue, right, and you will soon ascertain whether you have grappled with the grand problems or only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics.

Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge furnished him of the etymology of a word. He was engaged in a case where the matter at issue was certain river-rights, especially touching a branch of the stream known by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His clients were in possession of rights formerly possessed by a defunct salmon-fishing company, formed by strangers from Denmark, and they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir” for the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party contended that it should be open to navigation. A natural inference from the name of the piece of water in question seemed to turn the scale against O’Connell; for how could he establish the right to make that a close weir which, ever[17] since the first existence of the fishery, had been notoriously a lax one? His cause seemed desperate, and he had given up all hope of success, when victory was wrested from his adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of paper that was handed to him across the court. These lines informed him that in the language of Germany, and the north of Europe, lachs, or lax, means a salmon. The “Lax Weir” was simply a salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philological knowledge, O’Connell won not only a verdict for his client, but for himself a great and sudden growth of his reputation as a young advocate.

Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the whole range of our language completely under his control. One of the most distinguished American authors is said to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. It is only by thus working in the mines of language that one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings. William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of[18] expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page, content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students; “You don’t want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.” The leading languages of the world are full of such words, “opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages, when they are uttered.”

Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command the largest possible number of terms, both “rich and rare,”—words most vivid and effective,—really spirit-stirring words; for words there are, as every poet knows, whose sound is an echo to the sense,—words which, while by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, have also a sound and an association which are like music to the ear, and a picture to the eye,—vivid, graphic, and picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he would take pains to make it his own by using it, as speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon expressions like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser, he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of[19] Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced at effective points.

The question has been often discussed whether, if man were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able to think, and to express his thought. The example of the deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,—using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,—appears to show that he might find a partial substitute for his present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated with a particular act, and the interposition of words becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, declaring that “it lacked meal,” these verbal economists said that “the mention of the sack was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors wished[20] to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. Every one has heard of the Englishman in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the words “Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as gesture is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The conventionality of language, which can be parroted where there is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the delicate shades of difference of which verbal expression is capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone[21] and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective, and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a judgment, or a cognition.

Facts like these tend to show that man might still have been, as the root of the word “man” implies in Sanskrit, “a thinking being,” though he had never been a “speech-dividing” being; but it is evident that his range of thought would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have been impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that

yet there is an intimate relation between ratio and oratio, and it may well be doubted whether, without some signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the simplest kind, would not have been beyond man’s power. Long use has so familiarized us with language, we employ it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we are apt to regard it as a matter of course, and become blind to its mystery and deep significance. We rarely think of the long and changeful history through which each word we utter has passed,—of the many changes in form and changes in signification it has undergone,—and of the time and toil spent in its invention and elaboration by successive generations of thinkers and speakers. Still less do we think how different man’s history would have been, how comparatively useless would have been all his other endowments, had God not given him the faculties “which, out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts, the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind, and his own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the great instrument that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and[22] Massillon wielded, the instrument by which the laws of the universe are unfolded, and the subtle workings of the human heart brought to light.” Language is not only a means of communication between man and man, but it has other functions hardly less important. It is only by its aid that we are able to analyze our complex impressions, to preserve the results of the analysis, and to abbreviate the processes of thought.

Were we content with the bare reception of visual impressions, we could to some extent dispense with words; but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively, but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts, and compares them with notions already stored up, it becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name. By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility, just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gardener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their connection with language brought always within reach. Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought which are represented by such words as gravitation, chemical affinity, atomic weight, capital, inverse proportion, polarity, and inertia,—words which are each the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, and which may be compared to the paper money, or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest centres of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience that would result, and the degree in which mental activity would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these[23] comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental processes? The effect would be to restrict all scientific discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with iron or copper as the sole medium of mercantile intercourse.

Language has thus an educational value, for in learning words we are learning to discriminate things. “As the distinctions between the relations of objects grow more numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic, to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must needs learn to think up to it, to observe and distinguish all the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions already formed; so that we have an instructor for the thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the “inarticulate ones” of the world, there may be, for aught we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand, pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to themselves, they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons” forever. A man of genius who is illiterate, or who has little command of language, is like a painter with no pigments but gray and dun. How, then, shall he paint the purple and crimson of the sunset? Though he may have made the[24] circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders of Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond commonplace. In bridging the chasm between such a man and one of high culture, the acquisition of words plays as important a part as the acquisition of ideas.

It has been justly said that no man can learn from or communicate to another more than the words they are familiar with either express or can be made to express. The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. This poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the power of abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A savage may have a dozen verbs for “I am here,” “I am well,” “I am thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “am”: he may have a dozen words for “my head,” “your head,” etc.; but he can hardly conceive of a head apart from its owner. Nearly all the tongues of the American savages are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even whole sentences are compressed together so violently, that often no single syllable would be capable of separate use. The Abbé Domenech states that such is the absolute deficiency of the simplest abstractions in some of these languages that an Indian cannot say “I smoke” without using such a number of concrete pictures that his immensely long word to represent that monosyllabic action means: “I breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone bowl wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea of “day,” the Pawnees use such a word as shakoorooceshairet, and their word for “tooth” is the fearful polysyllable khotsiakatatkhusin! The word for “tongue” in Tlatskanai has twenty-two letters. Though these vocables, which bristle with more consonants than the four sneezes[25] of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De Quincey says, “to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexican has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language the common address to a priest is the one word Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzin; that is, “Venerable priest, whom I honor as a father.” A fagot is tlatlatlalpistiteutli, and “if the fagot were of green wood, it could hardly make a greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would have been obliged to say “I love you,” in this language, in this style, ni-mits-tsikāwakā-tlasolta; and instead of a kiss he would have had to ask for a tetenna-miquilitzli. “Dieu merci!” exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “quand on a prononcé le mot on a bien mérité la chose.”

It is easy to see, from these facts, what an obstacle the language of the savage presents to his civilization. Let us suppose a savage to possess extraordinary natural endowments, and to learn any one of the leading languages of Europe; is it not easy to see that he would find himself prepared for labor in departments of mental effort which had been before utterly inaccessible to him, and that he would feel that his powers had been cheated out of their action by this possession of only inferior tools? Hence the knowledge of words is not an elegant accomplishment only, not a luxury, but a positive necessity of the civilized and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who would express himself, but to him who would think, with precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof of thorough and accurate culture than the fact that a writer, instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard, chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his thought. As he only can be called a well dressed man whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and[26] shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first characteristic of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas. They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant’s robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a boy’s garments into which a man has painfully squeezed himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having some nice shade of distinction,—a fine illustration of which is found in Ben Jonson’s line, “Men may securely sin, but safely never”; and, again, in the reply with which Sydney Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in England: “Pooh! pooh! it is the worst educated country in the world, I grant you; but it is the best instructed.” William Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of style. Fox said of him: “Though I am myself never at a loss for a word, Pitt not only has a word, but the word,—the very word,—to express his meaning.” Robert Hall chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could so rarely approach the realization of his own beau-idéal of a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was correcting the proofs of his sermon on “Modern Infidelity,” on coming to the famous passage, “Eternal God, on what are thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of Heaven must not penetrate?”—he exclaimed to his friend, Dr. Gregory: “Penetrate! did I say penetrate, sir, when I preached it?” “Yes.” “Do you think, sir, I may venture[27] to alter it? for no man who considers the force of the English language would use a word of three syllables there but from absolute necessity. For penetrate put pierce: pierce is the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there.”

John Foster was a yet more striking example of this conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of whose mind, telegraphing with all nature’s works, was so in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was almost painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, drop by drop. He would spend whole days on a few short sentences, passing each word under his concentrated scrutiny, so that each, challenged and examined, took its place in the structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks. When Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster was about, he replied: “Hard at it, at the rate of a line a week.” Read a page of the essay on “Decision of Character,” and you will feel that this was scarcely an exaggeration,—that he stood by the ringing anvil till every word was forged into a bolt. Few persons know how hard easy writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling verse of Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and anxious thought, which a single word often cost him? Irving tells us that he was once riding with the Irish poet in the streets of Paris, when the hackney-coach went suddenly into a deep rut, out of which it came with such a jolt as to send their pates bump against the roof. “By Jove, I’ve got it!” cried Moore, clapping his hands with great glee. “Got what?” said Irving. “Why,” said the poet, “that word I’ve been hunting for six weeks, to complete my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me.”

The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice[28] and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and arrangement of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven years in the composition of the Æneid, intended to devote three years to its revision; but, being prevented by his last sickness from giving it the finishing touches which his exquisite judgment deemed necessary, he directed his friends to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his style, transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that it was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for delivery in public, should write down his thoughts,—he must, as it were, sculpture them in brass. He must not content himself with that loose use of language which characterizes a thoughtless fluency, but his words must have a precise and exact look, like newly minted coin, with sharply cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes himself “recked his own rede” in this matter we have abundant proof in almost every page of his great speeches. In his masterpieces we are introduced to mysteries of prose composition of which the moderns know nothing. We find him, as a German critic has remarked, bestowing incredible pains, not only upon the choice of words, but upon the sequence of long and short syllables, not in order to produce a regularly recurring metre, but to express the most various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-changing rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with reference to their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the action for which his name is a synonym, that he exhibits his consummate dexterity as an orator. Change their order, and you at once break the charm. The rhythm, in fact, is the sense. You destroy the significance of the sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity of the meaning as well as the verbal force. “At his pleasure,”[29] says Professor Marsh, “he separates his lightning and his thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion that stuns, prostrates and crushes the stoutest opponent.”

Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason, that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Cæsar himself tremble, and at last change his determined purpose, and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain occasion, the sentence, “Patris dictum sapiens temeritas filii comprobavit,” it was astonishing, says Cicero, to observe the general applause which followed that harmonious close. Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us that had the final measure,—what is technically called a dichoree,—been changed, and the words placed in a different order, their whole effect would have been absolutely destroyed. With the same exquisite sensibility to numbers, an ancient writer says that a similar result would follow, if, in reading the first line of the Æneid,

[30]

instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being long, and us short).

It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.

It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this mystery of style,—why it is, that when one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,—has never been sounded. “One can understand a little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail[31] an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,—who has fathomed yet this wonder?”

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,—that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle’s version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s Cicero, Morris’s Virgil, Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,—the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,—are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,—the life and spirit,—all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,—all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,—evaporates in a translation.

It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost every word in one language has equivalents in every other; but a critical study of language shows that, with[32] the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between any two words in different tongues. Compare any two languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quantities, many words in each untranslatable into the other, and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible objects are not always exact equivalents in any two languages. It might be supposed that a berg (the German for mountain or hill) was a berg all the world over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer[1] has said, this is far from being the case. The English “mountain,” for instance, refers to something bigger than the German berg. On the other hand, “hill,” which has the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact rendering in any English vocable.

A comparison of the best English versions of the New Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was expended by the best scholars in England and the United States, many niceties of expression which mark the original fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue[33] compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can draw a clear line where other languages can only make a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning. Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs both rendered “love,”[2] in John xxi, 15-17. “The word first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. It is used of God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16—‘God so loved the world,’ etc.—and of man’s love to God, as in Matt. xxii, 37—‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ etc. The other word more particularly implies that warmth of feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself, when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness, does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to[34] His own loving heart.”[3] Now all this is lost through the comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have been rendered “appoint” in the ordinary version, no fewer than fourteen which stand for “give,” and no fewer than twenty-one which correspond to “depart.”

Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero’s elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,—never. As soon will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the “Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of books, “are not seldom talismans and spells.” They have, especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative[35] signs. Over and above their meanings as given in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by their employment for hundreds of years. There are in every language certain magical words, which, though they can be translated into other tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding words in those tongues. Such words in English are gentleman, comfort, and home, about each of which cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested by any foreign words by which they can be rendered. There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not the dress of thought; it is its living expression, and controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.

How many abortive attempts have been made to translate the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” into English verse! What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of the grandest passages in the old bard! The former, it has been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epigrams, sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles” of Ovid; the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans, the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded as an English poem, Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” is[36] unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into another language, it is but a caput mortuum, containing but little more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness of the images,—all that breathes of an earlier world, and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue sky, of the old Ægean,—all this, as a critic has observed, “is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary artist; instead of the ever varied, resounding swell of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes, the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig of the eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more of the spirit of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more successful in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some advantages by compensating defects.

Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “Æneid” into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodiment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradise[37] Lost,” when he attempted, even in the same language, to put it into rhyme,—a proposal to do which drew from Milton the contemptuous remark: “Ay, young man; you can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made a more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions of “the first finder of our faire language” contain much admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are simply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,—above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, the exquisite tone of naïveté, which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his verse,—utterly vanish. Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply because failure was inevitable,—because this aroma of antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language, is sure to evaporate.

All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,—the essence, the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give the expression of one of Raphael’s or Titian’s masterpieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a manner of his own, without which the identity and truth of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of[38] a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must it not a fortiori be impossible to transport them faithfully across the barriers which divide one language from another, and antiquity from modern times?

How many ineffectual attempts have been made to translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imitation. All experience shows that the traduttore must necessarily be tradittore,—the translator, a traducer of the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric. The special imagination of the poet, it has been well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympathies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which another never could have extracted from them. It is of the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in the highest exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the rendering of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are a simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full-grown, in its panoply of radiant utterance.

The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody[39] ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,—a barely “good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.

The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of whose onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders are made in translating even from one living language into another. Few English-speaking persons can understand the audacity of Racine, so highly applauded by the French, in introducing the words chien and sel into poetry; “dog” and “salt” may be used by us without danger; but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “entrails” in the way the French do. Every one has heard of the Frenchman, who translated the majestic exclamation of[40] Milton’s Satan, “Hail! horrors, hail!” by “Comment vous portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs, comment vous portez-vous?” “How do you do, horrors, how do you do?” Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage from Shakespeare in his own tongue,

translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off with you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth” in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian polto inferno. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with kingdoms,” into “me fait un vêtement de royaumes,”—“makes me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the Succession in Spain,” translates the French word abbé by “abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into a foreign language is that, though every word the translator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the words arène and rive are both to be found in the best French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the niceties of that language, should write

he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom will not admit of the expression sur la rive du fleuve, correct though each word may be taken singly, but requires the phrase sur le bord de la rivière, as it does amasser du sable, and not amasser de l’arène. What can be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton[41] describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, where, he says, the air was

a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near to the original as to write

will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,

and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words we have italicized would be reproduced?

The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare with such a version as we might expect in another language:

A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, after some such fashion as the following:

In view of all these considerations what can be more untrue than the statement so often made, that to be capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of[42] a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed, goes upon the assumption that one language is just like another language,—that every language has all the ideas, turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associations, abstractions, points of view which every other language has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true that all languages are pretty much alike for the purposes of Science; but even in this respect some are more suitable than others, which have to coin words or to borrow them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for those universal and eternal truths in which Science consists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of some original and fertile mind, who has availed himself of one of them? * * *

“It seems that a really great author must admit of translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as in his own. Then Shakespeare is a genius because he can be translated into German, and not a genius because he cannot be translated into French. The multiplication table is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to belong to any one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and recondite, they would be difficult to put into words, and that the very fact of their having insinuated themselves into one language would diminish the chance of that happy accident being repeated in another. In the language of savages you can hardly express any idea or[43] act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hottentot or Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes?”[4]

The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French critic: “You are that ignorant musician who plays his part exactly, not skipping a single note, nor neglecting a rest,—only what is written in the key of fa, he plays in the key of sol. Faithful translator!”

When we think of the marvellous moral influence which words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them, “a certain bewitchery or fascination,” indicating that language is of mystic origin. The Jews, believing that God had revealed a full-grown language to mankind, attached a divine character to language, and supposed that there was a natural and necessary connection between words and things. The name of a person was not a mere conventional sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part of the person himself. Hence we find in Genesis no less than fifty derivations of names, in almost all of which the derivation connects the name, prophetically or otherwise, with some event in the person’s life. Hence, also, the practice, under certain conditions, of changing men’s names, as illustrated in the histories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joshua and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara (bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech. “Even in the New Testament we find our Lord Himself in[44] a solemn moment fixing on the mind of His greatest apostle a new and solemn significance given to the name he bore. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.’ St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a name when, in Phil. iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend as γνήσιε Σύζυγε, ‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and very probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even their mysterious alphabetical characters, called “Runes,” possessed magical powers; that they could stop a sailing vessel or a flying arrow,—that they could excite love or hate, or even raise the dead. The Greeks believed that there was a necessary, mysterious connection between words and the objects they signified, so that man unconsciously expressed, in the words whereby he named things or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as though in a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The accidental good omen in the name of an envoy who was called Hegesistratos, or “leader of an army,” decided a Greek general to assist the Samians, and led to the battle of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius, Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Cæsar gave a command in Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the omen which his name involved. When an expedition had been planned under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the soldiers absolutely refused to proceed under a commander of so ill-omened a name,—dux abominandi nominis,—it being, as De Quincey says, “a pleonasm of darkness.” The same deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the favete linguis and bona verba quæso of the Romans, by which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any[45] word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so suggested to the imagination should actually occur. So they were careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying vixit instead of mortuus est, and “be the event fortunate or otherwise,” instead of “adverse.” The name Egesta they changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axeinos into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum, or detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has prevailed,—an illustration of which we have in the life of Pope Adrian VI, who, when elected, dared not retain his own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardinals that every Pope who had done so had died in the first year of his reign.[5]

That there is a secret instinct which leads even the most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in “the black art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is to write a man’s name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier, an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed, will be wrought against the person whose name is so inscribed.

But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day,[46] hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish examples of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth, that “a light flashes out of a word sometimes which frightens one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one of his characters say of another, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a sublime yet undecided purpose,—a word of sympathy opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect of heaven,—a word of truth fired a man of action to do a deed which has saved a nation or a cause,—or a genius to write words which have gone ringing down the ages!

A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”

[47]

“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.”

The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, government, or interests; and nations of one speech, though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of Arndt, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which the song was received showed that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, and this can be done only by killing its language; for it[48] is through its language that its national prejudices, its loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,—if, indeed, it dies at all,—has time to convey the national traditions into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population.

The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle ages, appear to be glebæ adscriptitiæ, and to extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his[49] sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as had Charlemagne before him.

England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,—German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,—the common language in which we[50] express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,—this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?

As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, the man who makes them potent. As it was not the famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of the Prussian soldier,—the man behind the gun, educated in the best common schools in the world,—so it is the latent heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives[51] them momentum and projectile force. The same words, coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their destination, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than upon the degree in which they have been organized into the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored away in their formation, which is liberated in their publication.

There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “Mesopotamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact.

Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that[52] “every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and constitution, the trip-hammer momentum with which he makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense current of his physical energy.” When the great champion of New England said, in the United States Senate, “There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of character, and of all the associations connected with it, which changed that which, uttered by another, would have been the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened the pulse even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It was this which gave such prodigious power to the words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and,[53] above all, the evidence which these furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.

In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the creative individuality projected into the words that makes the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by the simple words, “Who said that?” An acute American writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke glaring through it.[6] What can be more effective than the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers not merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he says it.

says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet[54] says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that

Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat Ulysses to intercede for her; “for the arguments,” says she, “which are uttered by men of repute, are very different in strength from those uttered by men unknown.”

The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter the word “grand,” and our sense of the word is modified according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are different from every other man’s; and into this difference enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education, the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that distinguishes him from another man.

Mr. Whipple says truly that “there are no more simple words than ‘green,’ ‘sweetness,’ and ‘rest,’ yet what depth and intensity of significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’; what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ‘sweetness,’ as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards; what celestial repose beams from ‘rest’ as it lies on the page of Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of language; yet they are expressed in common words, transfigured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking of style as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that “the marvel of Shakespeare’s diction is its immense suggestiveness,—his power of radiating through new verbal[55] combinations, or through single expressions, a life and meaning which they do not retain in their removal to dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the emotion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it cannot be flashed upon the ‘inward eye,’ it is hinted to the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. An American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing it describes. ‘The recitation,’ he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes!’ He who has not felt this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read him. He may have looked at the words, but has never looked into them.”

The fact that words are never taken absolutely,—that they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, but of natures,—that they are media for the emission and transpiration of character,—is one that cannot be too deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent young men who wonder that the words which they utter with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with their hearers, should ask themselves whether their characters are such as to give weight to their words. As in engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s character should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the “universe,” the word has quite another meaning than when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a[56] man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “the solemn responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference in the weight of the words whether they come from one who has been tried and proved in the world’s fiery furnace, and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks of “trials and tribulations” which he has never felt. “Words,” says the learned Selden, “must be fitted to a man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the fellow that was to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”

Few things are more interesting in the study of a language, than to note how much it gains by time and culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifications of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and refined. The language of an old and highly civilized people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max Müller has observed, since the beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent an entirely new word. Before a novel term can be introduced[57] into use, there must be some connection with a former term,—a bridge to enable the mind to pass over to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable has dropped out of the language,—has become dead or obsolete,—it is almost as impossible to call it back to life as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, it is true, speaks of commanding “old words that have long slept to wake;” and Horace declares that many words will be born again that have seemingly dropped into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik says, “very little revivification has ever taken place in human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce into a language a dozen new words than restore to general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true that when Thomson published his “Castle of Indolence,” he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words, of which not a few, as “carol,” “glee,” “imp,” “appall,” “blazon,” “sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is true, also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies with words taken from the more archaic and obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in use many words that were more or less neglected during the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and working condition, were never actually dead, but only in a state of suspended animation.

It has been calculated that our English language, including the nomenclature of the arts and sciences, contains one hundred thousand words; yet of this immense number it is surprising how few are in common use. It is a common opinion that every Englishman and American[58] speaks English, every German German, and every Frenchman French. The truth is, that each person speaks only that limited portion of the language with which he is acquainted. To the great majority even of educated men, three-fourths of these words are almost as unfamiliar as Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon all the obsolete or obsolescent words; all the words of special arts or professions; all the words confined in their usage to particular localities; all the words of recent coinage which have not yet been naturalized; all the words which even the educated speaker uses only in homœopathic doses,—and it is astonishing into what a manageable volume your plethoric Webster or Worcester will have shrunk. It has been calculated that a child uses only about one hundred words; and, unless he belongs to the educated classes, he will never employ more than three or four hundred. A distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers or writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary persons, of fair intelligence, not over three or four thousand. Even the great orator, who is able to bring into the field, in the war of words, half the vast array of light and heavy troops which the vocabulary affords, yet contents himself with a far less imposing display of verbal force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges with using a “Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thousand; and Shakespeare himself, “the myriad-minded,” only fifteen thousand. Each word, however, has a variety of meanings, with more or fewer of which every man is familiar, so that his knowledge of the language, which has practically over a million of words, is far greater than it appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the difficulty[59] of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is greatly overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the boast of every new dictionary-maker that his vocabulary contains so many thousand words more than those of his predecessors. This may, or may not, be a merit; but it is certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson that does not contain some word—obsolete, un-English, or purely scientific—that has no business there; while Webster and Worcester cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a time; each doing his best to load and deform his pages, and all the while triumphantly challenging the world to observe how prodigious an advantage he has gained over his rivals.

We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the meaning of words; but it is life that discloses to us their significance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is the actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible meanings—meanings not to be found in Worcester or Webster. Does the young and light-hearted maiden know the meaning of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a business career understand the significance of the words “failure” and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many-storied building under a July sun, for the meaning of “toil”; and, for a definition of “overwork,” go to the pale seamstress who

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Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, and reputation,—with disease racking every limb,—for the definition of “remorse”; and go to the bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of “health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the force of the commonest terms; while to others their terrible significance comes home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the innermost fibres of their being.

To conclude,—it is one of the marvels of language, that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable, have been formed all the articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can estimate the misery that man would experience were his sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would[61] give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?

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The fact that a man’s language is a part of his character,—that the words he uses are an index to his mind and heart,—must have been noted long before language was made a subject of investigation. “Discourse,” says Quintilian, “reveals character, and discloses the secret disposition and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks teach that as a man lived so would he speak.” Profert enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta detegit. Nec sine causa Græci prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiam dicere. When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or cogs broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, while the disorder continues, will continually betray its own infirmity. So when a man’s mind is disordered or his heart corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his language an expression corresponding to the irregularities within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as well as in the face. As physicians judge of the state of the[63] body, so may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except under peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or delicacy seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart,—the pet words, phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing our strongest appetencies and antipathies,—will rise most frequently to the lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not exaggerate in saying that no glass renders a man’s form and likeness so true as his speech. “As a man speaks, so he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he has a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and hypocritical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in his speech. The door keeper of an alien household said to Peter, “Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth thee”; and so, in spite of all masks and professions, in spite of his reputation, the essential nature of every person will stamp itself on his language. How often do the words and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally to the church, prays long and loud in public, and attends rigidly to every outward observance, betray in some mysterious way,—by some impalpable element which we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,—the utter worldliness of his character! How frequently do words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution, affect us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and unreality of the speaker’s character! How often does the use of a single word flash more light upon a man’s motives and principles of action, give a deeper insight into his habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biography! How often, when a secret sorrow preys upon the heart,[64] which we would fain hide from the world by a smiling face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or parenthetical word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is flowing across the door sill, telling of murdered hopes within.

Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by our English vocabulary,—embracing over a hundred thousand distinct terms,—each man selects his own favorite expressions, his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is part of the essential difference between him and all other men; and in the verbal stock in trade of each individual we should find, could it once be laid open to us, a key that would unlock many of the deepest mysteries of his humanity,—many of the profoundest secrets of his private history. How often is a man’s character revealed by the adjectives he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these words of themselves reveal the temperament. The conscientious man weighs his words as in a hair-balance; the boaster and the enthusiast employ extreme phrases, as if there were no degree but the superlative. The cautious man uses words as the rifleman does bullets; he utters but few words, but they go to the mark like a gunshot, and then he is silent again, as if he were reloading. The dogmatist is known by his sweeping, emphatic language, and the absence of all qualifying terms, such as “perhaps” and “it may be.” The fact that the word “glory” predominates in all of Bonaparte’s dispatches, while in those of his great adversary, Wellington, which fill twelve enormous volumes, it never once occurs—not even after the hardest won victory,—but “duty,” “duty,” is invariably named as[65] the motive for every action, speaks volumes touching their respective characters. It was to work out the problem of self-aggrandizement that Napoleon devoted all his colossal powers; and conscience, responsibility, and kindred terms, seem never to have found their way into his vocabulary. Men, with their physical and moral force, their bodily energies, and their passions, prejudices, delusions, and enthusiasms, were to him but as fuel to swell the blaze on the altar of that ambition of which he was at once the priest and deity. Of duties to them he never for a moment dreamed; for, from the hot May-day of Lodi to the autumnal night of Moscow, when he fled the flaming Kremlin, he seemed unconscious that he was himself a created and responsible being.

An author’s style is an open window through which we can look in upon him, and estimate his character. The cunning reader reads between the lines, and finds out secrets about the writer, as if he were overhearing his soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase or epithet, draws conclusions from asseveration and emphasis, notes the half-perceptible sneer or insinuation, detects the secret misery that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s idiosyncrasies even when he tries hardest to mask them. We know a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a Rembrandt or a Dürer. Macaulay is betrayed by his antitheses, and Cicero by his esse videatur.

Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of a historian by his style, his language being an infallible index to his character. “If it is very heavy and cumbrous, it indicates either a dull man or a pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, the[66] writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly antithetical and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways of stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected man. If it be plain and simple, always clear, but never eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible man, but is too hard and dry to be a very great man. If, on the other hand, it is always elegant, rich in illustrations, and without the relief of simple and great passages, we must admire the writer’s genius in a very high degree, but we may fear that he is too continually excited to have attained to the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily calm. In this manner the mere language of a historian will furnish us with something of a key to his mind, and will tell us, or at least give us cause to presume, in what his main strength lies, and in what he is deficient.” It has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in which it was impossible to speak the truth.

A writer in the “Edinburgh Review” observes that the statement that a man’s language is part of his character, holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but also in regard to a general vocabulary. “There is a school vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and passing now and then into general currency. In this age of examinations,—army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,—the verb ‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries. The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the[67] fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’ The connoisseur in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite landscape may have ‘tones’ in it, as well as your violin. With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with cloth that is ‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and observe that a painting is ‘broad.’ You sit down at dinner with a ‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table, and looking up see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or Wouvermans before you on the wall.”

As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with marvellous precision the rise or fall of the national life. The stock of words composing any language corresponds to the knowledge of the community that speaks it, and shows with what objects it is familiar, what generalizations it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,—all its cognitions and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, public and private, become other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these days of railroads, steamboats and telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, articles of food and luxury of every description, how many words and phrases are in every one’s mouth which would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk our streets!... Language is expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those[68] who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds.”[7] Every race has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted,—if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all lofty sentiments,—its mockery of virtue, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the opposite qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation of soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utterance “in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squandering of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular objects; and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of words implying the deepest moral guilt.”

Could anything be more significant of the profound degradation of a people than the abject character of the complimentary and social dialect of the Italians, and the pompous appellations with which they dignify things in themselves insignificant, as well as their constant use of intensives and superlatives on the most trivial occasions?[69] Is it not a notable fact that they, who for so long a time had no country,—on whose altars the fires of patriotism have, till of late, burned so feebly,—use the word pellegrino, “foreign,” as a synonym for “excellent”? Might we not almost infer a priori the servile condition to which, previous to their late uprising, centuries of tyranny had reduced them, from the fact that with the same people, so many of whom are clothed in rags, a man of honor is “a well dressed man”; that a man who murders in secret is “a brave man,” bravo; that a virtuoso, or “virtuous man,” is one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpture,—arts which should be the mere embroidery, and not the web and woof, of a nation’s life; that, in their magnificent indigence, they call a cottage with three or four acres of land un podere, “a power”; that they term every house with a large door un palazzo, “a palace,” a lamb’s fry una cosa stupenda, “a stupendous thing,” and that a message sent by a footman to his tailor through a scullion is una ambasciata, “an embassy”?

Let us not, however, infer the hopeless depravity of any people from the baseness of the tongue they have inherited, not chosen. It makes a vast difference, as Prof. Marsh justly observes, whether words expressive of noble thoughts and mighty truths do not exist in a language, or whether ages of soul-crushing tyranny have compelled their disuse, and the employment of the baser part of the national vocabulary. The mighty events that have lately taken place in Italy “show that a tone of hypocrisy may cling to the tongue, long after the spirit of a nation is emancipated, and that where grand words are found in a speech, there grand thoughts, noble purposes, high resolves exist also; or, at least, the spark slumbers which[70] a favoring breath may, at any moment, kindle into a cherishing and devouring flame.”[8]

A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French language, while it has such positive expressions as “drunk” and “tipsy,” conveyed by ivre and gris, contains no such negative term as “sober.” Sobre means always “temperate” or “abstemious,” never the opposite condition to intoxication. The English, it is argued, drink enough to need a special illustrative title for a man who has not drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol freely during the sieges, the French have never yet felt the necessity of forming any such curious subjective appellation, consequently they do not possess it. Again, the French boast that they have no such word as “bribe,” as if this implied their exemption from that sin; and such, indeed, may be the fact. But may not the absence of this word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offense, just as the lack of the word “humility,” in the language of the Greeks, usually so rich in terms, proves that they lacked the thing itself, or as the fact that the same people had no word corresponding to the Latin ineptus, argues, as Cicero thought, not that the character designated by the word was wanting among them, but that the fault was so universal with them that they failed to recognize it as such? Is it not a great defect in a language that it lacks the words by which certain forms of baseness or sinfulness, in those who speak it, may be brought home to their consciousness? Can we properly hate or abhor any wicked act till we have given it a specific objective existence by giving it a name which shall at once designate[71] and condemn it? The pot-de-vin, and other jesting phrases which the French have coined to denote bribery, can have no effect but to encourage this wrong.

What shall we think of the fact that the French language has no word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national character, that among thirty-seven millions of talkers, no provision, except the awkward paraphrase, celui qui écoute, “he who hears,” should have been made for hearers? Is there any other explanation of this blank than the supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure love of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the proverb, he believes that silence is silver, but talking is golden; and that, not caring whether he is listened to or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remarkable that, among the French, bonhomme, “a good man,” is a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word, “gehenna,” has been condensed into gêne, and means only a petty annoyance; and that honnêteté, which once meant honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV that the word honnête exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then, according to good authority, when a man’s descent was said to be honnête, he was complimented on the virtuousness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity of their condition; and when the same term was applied to his family, it was an acknowledgment that they belonged to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion that they were plebeians. Again, how significant is the fact that the French has no such words as “home,” “comfort,” “spiritual,” and but one word for “love” and[72] “like,” compelling them to put Heaven’s last gift to man on a par with an article of diet; as “I love Julia,”—“I love a leg of mutton”! Couple with these peculiarities of the language the circumstance that the French term spirituel means simply witty, with a certain quickness, delicacy, and versatility of mind, and have you not a real insight into the national character?

It is said that the word oftenest on a Frenchman’s lips is la gloire, and next to that, perhaps, is brillant, “brilliant.” The utility of a feat or achievement in literature or science, in war or politics, surgery or mechanics, is of little moment in his eyes unless it also dazzles and excites surprise. It is said that Sir Astley Cooper, the great British surgeon, on visiting the French capital, was asked by the surgeon en chef of the empire how many times he had performed some feat of surgery that required a rare union of dexterity and nerve. He replied that he had performed the operation thirteen times. “Ah! but, Monsieur, I have performed him one hundred and sixty time. How many time did you save his life?” continued the curious Frenchman, as he saw the blank amazement of Sir Astley’s face. “I,” said the Englishman, “saved eleven out of the thirteen. How many did you save out of a hundred and sixty?” “Ah! Monsieur, I lose dem all;—but de operation was very brillant!”

The author of “Pickwick” tells us that in America the sign vocal for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, etc., is “Go Ahead!” while with John Bull the ritual form is “All Right!”—and he adds that these two expressions are somewhat expressive of the respective moods of the two nations. The two phrases are, indeed, vivid miniatures of John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on the[73] safety valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin into his steam furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have entered the station, and who would hardly object to being fired off from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there were one chance in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his journey. Let us hope that the day may yet come when our “two-forty” people will exchange a little of their fiery activity for a bit of Bull’s caution, and when our Yankee Herald’s College, if we ever have one, may declare “All Right!” to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with as much propriety as it might now inscribe “Go Ahead!” beneath that fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle, that hovers over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips its wings in two oceans, and has one eye on Cuba and the other on Quebec.

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth that the language of nations is a mirror, in which may be seen reflected with unerring accuracy all the elements of their intellectual as well as of their moral character. What scholar that is familiar with Greek and Latin has failed to remark how indelibly the contrariety of character in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is impressed on their languages, distinguished as is the one by exuberant originality, the other by innate poverty of thought? In the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of all the European tongues,—which surpasses every other alike in its metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate shades of meaning,—the thought controls and shapes the language; while the tyrannous objectivity of the Latin, rigid and almost cruel, like the nation whose voice it is, and whose words are always Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro[74] ratione voluntas, coerces rather than simply syllables the thought. “Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes himself. And Latin,—the voice of Empire and of Law, of War and of the State,—the best language for the measured research of History, and the indignant declamation of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.”

It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the most majestic of nations, so theirs is the only ancient language that contains the word “majesty,” the Greek having nothing that exactly corresponds to it; and the Latin language is as majestic as were the Romans themselves. Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds an argument to show that the intellectual character of the Romans was[75] higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word convivium means “a living together,” while the corresponding Greek term, συμπόσιον, means “a drinking together.” While the Romans retained their early simplicity and nobility of soul, their language was full of power and truth; but when they became luxurious, sensual, and corrupt, their words degenerated into miserable and meaningless counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as a conventional medium of exchange. It has been said truly that “in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who would go into emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap-dog and the apotheosis of a eunuch’s hair, we read the hand-writing of an empire’s condemnation.”

The climate of a country, as well as the mind and character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech. The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live, and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives, acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious, as though they had received an impress from the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and[76] more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the language of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid melody of a nightingale’s song.

It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the New Testament there are whole chapters with no words ending in consonants, except the proper names of the original. Italian has been called the love-talk of the Roman without his armor. Fuller, contrasting the Italians and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the former, “whose country is called ‘the country of good words,’ love the circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as a sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle presently with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon, mount in language, soar high, fetch compasses of compliment, and then in due time stoop to game, and seize on the business propounded. Clean contrary, the Switzers (who sent word to the king of France not to send them an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet perfume to such as are troubled with the mother; yea, generally, great soldiers have their stomachs sharp set to feed on the matter; loathing long speeches, as wherein they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they could conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.”

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It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of expression, and the modifications of meaning which its borrowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius is most strikingly seen. The forms of salutation used by different nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies, and of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective characters. How clearly is the innermost distinction between the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” How vividly are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny, world-enjoying temper of the one people with the profound religious feeling of the other! The formula of the robust, energetic, valiant Roman,—with whom virtue was manliness, and whose value was measured by his valor,—was Salve! Vale! that is, “Be well,” “Be strong.” In the expression, “If God will it, you are well,” is betrayed the fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of the Turk, “May your shadow never be less!” speaks of a sunny clime. In the hot, oppressive climate of Egypt perspiration is essential to health, and you are asked, “How do you perspire?” The Italian asks, Come sta? literally, “How does he stand?” an expression originally referring to the standing of the Lombard merchants in the market place, and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, however, have regarded the word “stand” in this formula as meaning no more than “exist”; mere life itself, in the land of far niente, being a blessing. The Genoese, a trading people, and at one time the bankers of Europe, used in former days to say, Sanita e guadagno, or “Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of the countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The[78] dreamy, meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and abstractions, salutes you with the vague, impersonal, metaphysical Wie gehts?—“How goes it?” Another salutation which he uses is, Wie befinden sie sich?—“How do you find yourself?” A born philosopher, he is so absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco smoke, that he thinks you cannot tell him of the state of your health till you have searched for and found it.

The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks, Hoe vaart’s-ge? “How do you go?” an expression eminently characteristic of a trading, travelling people, devoted to business, and devoid of sentiment. The thoughtful Swede inquires, “How do you think?” They also inquire, Hur mär ni?—literally “How can you?” that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless, vivacious Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and is more anxious about appearances than about realities,—who has never to hunt himself up like the German, and desires less to do, like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be lively, to show himself,—says frankly, Comment vous portez-vous?—“How do you carry yourself?” In these few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul, of the French character. Externals, the shapes and shows of things,—for what else could we expect a people to be solicitous, who are born actors, and who live, to a great extent, for stage effect; who unite so much outward refinement with so much inward coarseness; who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and an almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented, as Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to add the shirt? It has been said that a man would be owl-blind, who in the “Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye” of the kindly[79] Scot, could not perceive the mixture of national pawkiness with hospitable cordiality. “One sees, in the mind’s eye, the canny chield, who would invite you to dinner three days in the week, but who would look twice at your bill before he discounted it.” What can be more unmistakably characteristic than the Irish peasant’s “Long life to your honor; may you make your bed in glory!” After such a grandiose salute, we need no mouser among the records of antiquity to certify to us that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we need any other key to his peculiar vivacity and impressionableness of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-loving enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms of salutation, the most signally characteristic,—the one which reveals the very core, the inmost “heart of heart” of a people,—is the Englishman’s “How do you do?” In these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of his character, are revealed as by a lightning’s flash. To do! Not to think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to do; and this doing is so universal among the English,—its necessity is so completely recognized,—that no one dreams of asking whether you are doing, or what you are doing, but all demand, “How do you do?”

It has been well observed by the learned German writer, J. D. Michaelis, that “some virtues are more sedulously cultivated by moralists, when the language has fit names for indicating them; whereas they are but superficially treated of, or rather neglected, in nations where such virtues have not so much as a name. Languages may obviously do injury to morals and religion by their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from[80] the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native language of Van Dieman’s Land has four words to express the idea of taking life, not one of which indicates the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to murder; while any word for love is wanting to it altogether. One of the most formidable obstacles which Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has been the absence from their languages of a spiritual and ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the religious teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or ethical system inculcating virtues and addressed to faculties, whose very existence their language, and consequently the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize. Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have no name by which they can be described and denounced, as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in translating the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the translators have been compelled to employ merely provisional phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and “nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about[81] two centuries ago no word for “selfishness,” the root of all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to the allurements of sensual pleasure; and virtue, literally “manliness,” was the determined spirit, the courage and vigor with which it resisted such temptations. But the idea of “holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been impossible to express them in either of the classical tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strikingly observed, man knew well that he could “irritate” God or “a god,” but not that he could “offend” him. The words “crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those of “sin” and “sinner” belong only to the Christian tongue. For a similar reason, man could always call God “Father,” which expresses only a relation of creation and of power; but no man, of his own strength, could say “my Father”! for this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai, and which belongs only to Calvary.

Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen, had no term for the Christian virtue of “humility”; and when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to employ a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek, the two richest of human languages, and without which we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually[82] recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word “humbug.” “A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous and inexorable word.”

There is no way in which men so often become the victims of error as by an imperfect understanding of certain words which are artfully used by their superiors. Cynicism is seldom shallower than when it sneers at what it contemptuously calls the power of words over the popular imagination. If men are agreed about things, what, it is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about names? But while it is true that in the physical world things dominate over names, and are not at the mercy of a shifting vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas,—of history, philosophy, ethics and poetry,—words triumph over things, are even equivalent to things, and are as truly the living organism of thought as the eyes, lips, and entire physiognomy of a man, are the media of the soul’s expression. Hence words are the only certain test of thought; so much so that we often stop in the midst of an assertion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by the form it assumes in words. Thus, in Shakespeare, King John says to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign’s order for putting the young prince to death, that if, instead of receiving the order in signs,

Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but the very mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the beauty or ugliness of our inner selves.

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A volume might be written on the mutual influence of language and opinion, showing that as

so the sentiments we cherish mould our language, and our words react upon our opinions and feelings. Let a man go into a foreign country, give up his own language, and adopt another, and he will gradually and unconsciously change his opinions, too. He will neither be able to express his old ideas adequately in the new words, nor to prevent the new words of themselves putting new ideas in his brain. Who has failed to notice that the opinion we entertain of an object does not more powerfully influence the mind in applying to it a name or an epithet, than the epithet or name influences the opinion? Call thunder “the bolt of God’s wrath,” and you awaken a feeling of terror; call it, with the German peasant, das liebe gewitter, “the dear thunder,” and you excite a different emotion. As the forms in which we clothe the outward expression of our feelings react with mighty force upon the heart, so our speculative opinions are greatly confirmed or invalidated by the technical terms we employ. Fiery words, it has been truly said, are the hot blast that inflames the fuel of our passionate nature; and formulated doctrine, a hedge that confines the discursive wanderings of the thoughts. In personal quarrels, it is the stimulus men give themselves by stinging words that impels them to violent deeds; and in argumentative discussions it is the positive affirmation and reaffirmation of our views which, more than the reasons we give, deepen our convictions. The words that have helped us to conquer the truth often become the very tyrants of our convictions;[84] and phrases once big with meaning are repeated till they “ossify the very organs of intelligence.” False or partial definitions often lead into dangerous errors; an impassioned polemic falls a victim to his own logic, and a wily advocate becomes the dupe of his own rhetoric.

Words, in short, are excellent servants, but the most tyrannical of masters. Some men command them, but a vast majority are commanded by them. There are words which have exercised a more iron rule, swayed with a more despotic power, than Cæsar or the Russian Czar. Often an idle word has conquered a host of facts; and a mistaken theory, embalmed in a widely received word, has retarded for centuries the progress of knowledge. Thus the protracted opposition in France to the Newtonian theory arose chiefly from the influence of the word “attraction”; the contemptuous misnomer, “Gothic,” applied to northern mediæval architecture, perpetuated the dislike with which it was regarded; and the introduction of the term “landed proprietor” into Bengal caused a disorganization of society which had never been caused by its most barbarous invaders.

Macaulay, in his “History of England,” mentions a circumstance strikingly illustrative of the connection between language and opinion,—that no large society of which the language is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails. “Men believe,” says Bacon, “that their reason is lord over their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect.... Words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert[85] the judgment.” Not only every language, but every age, has its charmed words, its necromantic terms, which give to the cunning speaker who knows how to ring the changes upon them, instant access to the hearts of men, as at “Open Sesame!” the doors of the cave flung themselves open to the thieves, in the Arabian tale. “There are words,” says Balzac, “which, like the trumpets, cymbals and bass drums of mountebanks, attract the public; the words ‘beauty,’ ‘glory,’ ‘poetry,’ have witcheries that seduce the grossest minds.” At the utterance of the magic names of Austerlitz and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a forlorn hope, and met death at the cannon’s mouth.

When Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem was exhibited in London in 1820, Mrs. Siddons, the famous actress, entering the exhibition room, said: “The paleness of your Christ gives it a supernatural look.” This, says the painter, settled its success. There is great value in the selection of terms; many a man’s fortune has been made by a happy phrase. Thousands thronged to see the great work with “a supernatural look.”

South, in his eloquent sermons on “The Fatal Imposture and Force of Words,” observes that any one who wishes to manage “the rabble,” need never inquire, so long as they have ears to hear, whether they have any understanding whereby to judge. With two or three popular, empty words, well tuned and humored, he may whistle them backward and forward, upward and downward, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he is so. When Cæsar’s army mutinied, no argument from interest or reason could persuade them; but upon his addressing them as Quirites, the tumult was instantly hushed, and they took that word in payment of all. “In[86] the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah we find some arrived at that pitch of sottishness, and so much in love with their own ruin, as to own plainly, and roundly say, what they would be at. In the tenth verse, ‘Prophesy not unto us,’ say they, ‘right things, but prophesy to us smooth things.’ As if they had said, ‘Do but oil the razor for us, and let us alone to cut our own throats.’ Such an enchantment is there in words; and so fine a thing does it seem to some to be ruined plausibly, and to be ushered to destruction with panegyric and acclamation; a shameful, though irrefragable argument of the absurd empire and usurpation of words over things; and that the greatest affairs and most important interests of the world are carried on by things, not as they are, but as they are called.”

The Romans, after the expulsion of Tarquin, could not brook the idea of being governed by a king; yet they submitted to the most abject slavery under an emperor. Cromwell was too sagacious to disgust the republicans by calling himself King, though he doubtless laughed grimly in his sleeve as, under the title of Lord Protector, he exercised all the regal functions. We are told by Saint Simon that at the court of the grand monarch, Louis XIV, gambling was so common that even the ladies took part in it. The gentlemen did not scruple to cheat at cards; but the ladies had a peculiar tenderness on the subject. No lady could for a moment think of retaining such unrighteous gains; the moment they were touched, they were religiously given away. But then, we must add, the gift was always made to some other winner of her own sex. By carefully avoiding the words “interchange of winnings,” the charming casuists avoided all self-reproach, and all sharp censure by their discreet and lenient confessors.[87] There are sects of Christians at the present day that protest vehemently against a hired ministry; yet their preachers must be warmed, fed and clothed by “donation parties”; reminding one of the snob gentleman in Molière, whose father was no shop-keeper, but kindly “chose goods” for his friends, which he let them have for—money.

Party and sectarian leaders know that the great secret of the art of swaying the people is to invent a good shibboleth or battle cry, to be dinned continually in their ears. Persons familiar with British history will remember certain talismanic vocables, such as “Wilkes and Liberty,” the bare utterance of which has been sufficient at times to set a whole population in a flame; while the solemn and sepulchral cadences in which Pitt repeated the cuckoo song of “thrones and altars,” “anarchy and dissolution of social order,” were more potent arguments against revolution than the most perfect syllogism that was ever constructed in mood and figure. So in our own country this verbal magic has been found more convincing than arguments in “Barbara” or “Baralipton.” Patriots and demagogues alike have found that it was only necessary, in South’s phrase, to take any passion of the people, when it was predominant and just at the critical height of it, “and nick it with some lucky or unlucky word,” and they might “as certainly overrule it to their own purpose as a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder, will infallibly blow it up.” “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” “No More Compromise,” “The Higher Law,” “The Irrepressible Conflict,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” and other similar phrases, have roused and moved the public mind as much as the pulpit and the press.

Gouverneur Morris, in his Parisian journal of 1789,[88] tells an anecdote which strikingly illustrates this influence of catch-words upon the popular mind. A gentleman, in walking, came near to a knot of people whom a street orator was haranguing on the power of a qualified veto (veto suspensif), which the constituent assembly had just granted to the king. “Messieurs,” said the orator, “we have not a supply of bread. Let me tell you the reason. It has been but three days since the king obtained this qualified veto, and during that time the aristocrats have bought up some of these suspensions, and carried the grain out of the kingdom.” To this profound discourse the people assented by loud cheers. Not only shibboleths, but epithets, are often more convincing than syllogisms. The term Utopian or Quixotic, associated in the minds of the people with any measure, even the wisest and most practicable, is as fatal to it as what some one calls the poisonous sting of the American (?) humbug.

So in theology; false doctrines and true doctrines have owed their currency or non-currency, in a great measure, to the coinage of happy terms, by which they have been summed up and made attractive or offensive. Trench observes that “the entire secret of Buddhism is in the ‘Nirvâna.’ Take away the word, and it is not too much to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone.” When the Roman Catholic Church coined the term “transubstantiation,” the error which had so long been held in solution was precipitated, and became henceforth a fixed and influential dogma. What a potent watchword was the term “Reformation,” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Who can estimate the influence of the phrases “Broad Church,” “Liberal Church,” “Close Communion,” in advancing or retarding the growth of certain religious sects[89] at this day? Many of even the most “advanced thinkers,” who reject the supernatural element of the Bible, put all religions upon the same level, and deem Shakespeare as truly inspired as the Apostles, style themselves “Christians.”

Even in science happy names have had much to do with the general reception of truth. “Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects,” says a writer, “ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper proportions even in the minds of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.” How much is the study of the beautiful science of botany hindered by such “lexical superfetations” as chrysanthemum leukanthemum, Myosotis scorpioeides,—“scorpion-shaped mouse’s ear”; and how much is that of astronomy promoted by such popular terms as “the bear,” “the serpent,” “the milky way”! How much knowledge is gathered up in the compact and easily remembered phrase, “correlation of forces”; and to what an extent the wide diffusion of Darwin’s speculations is owing to two or three felicitous and comprehensive terms, such as “the struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” “the process of natural selection”! Who that has felt the painfulness of doubt has not desired to know something of “the positive philosophy” of Comte? On the other hand, the well-known anatomist, Professor Owen, complains with just reason of the embarrassments produced in his science by having to use a long description instead of a name. Thus a particular bone is called by Soemmering “pars occipitalis stricte sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis[90] spheno-occipitalis,” a description so clumsy that only the direst necessity would lead one to use it.

Even great authors, who are supposed to have “sovereign sway and masterdom” over words, are often bewitched and led captive by them. Thus Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not because they knew anything of that locality, but because Susquehanna was “such a pretty name.” Again, to point an epigram or give edge to a sarcasm, a writer will stab a rising reputation as with a poniard; and, even when convicted of misrepresentation, will sooner stick to the lie than part with a jeu d’esprit, or forego a verbal felicity. Thus Byron, alluding to Keats’s death, which was supposed to have been caused by Gifford’s savage criticism in the “Quarterly,” said:

Though he was afterward informed of the untruth of these lines, Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth and wit, could not willingly let them die; and so the witticism yet remains to mislead and provoke the laughter of his readers.

Again, there are authors who, to meet the necessities of rhyme, or to give music to a period, will pad out their sentences with meaningless expletives. They employ words as carpenters put false windows into houses; not to let in light upon their meaning, but for symmetry. Or, perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act with its full powers,—just as some of the Russian peasantry mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as[91] hay and straw, as well as corn, are given to horses, to supply the necessary bulk. Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating Juvenal, says:

This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to saying: “Let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind extensively.” If the Spartans, as we are told, fined a citizen because he used three words where two would have done as well, how would they have punished such prodigality of language?

It is an impressive truth which has often been noticed by moralists, that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads to corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of any mean, sensual, or criminal practice in a familiar or flippant tone, the delicacy of his moral sense is almost sure to be lessened, he loses his horror of the vice, and, when tempted to do the deed, he is far more likely to yield. Many a man, without dreaming of such a result, has thus talked himself into vice, into sensuality, and even into ruin. The apostle James was so impressed with the significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerring sign of character. “If any man offend not in word,” he declares, “the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” Again he declares that “the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison”; commenting upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes: “The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known; there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds.... In that drop of venom which distils from the sting of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf,[92] there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and convert night and day into restless misery.” So, he adds, there are words of calumny and slander, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and deadly that they not only inflame hearts and fever human existence, but poison human society at the very fountain springs of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of the utterers of such words, by one who had smarted under their sting: “Adders’ poison is under their lips.”

Who can estimate the amount of misery which has been produced in society by merely idle words, uttered without malice, and by words uttered in jest? A poet, whose name is unknown to us, has vividly painted the effects of such utterances:

How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, and kindled furious wars among nations! It was one of the virtues of George Washington that he knew how to be silent. John Adams said he had the most remarkable mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of controlling his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which David[93] Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack made upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him that he had no anxiety to have “the last word,”—that which in family circles has been pronounced to be “the most dangerous of infernal machines.”

It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship? Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent than “tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need any one be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made judges without law, and diplomatists without French; which has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a cannon from a mortar, and to the legislature men who could not tell a bank note from a bill of exchange; which, according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt, who never opened Vattel, and which was near making a Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,” says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s novels, “you must know all the ins and outs of speechifying. It’s words that make another man’s mare go your road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; wants a missus,—talks her over; wants your horse,—talks you out of it; wants a place,—talks himself into it.... Words make even them ’ere authors, poor creatures, in every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note of the words, and the things will take care of themselves.”

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It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a man struggles often through his own words, so that even truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said, “makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of reform.”[9] But though the truth often leaks out through the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive, and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the symbols of words, not words as the symbols of things. There is, in short, “a besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man.... Words are able to persuade men out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience.”[10]

All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of the word monomania: “When a poor fellow takes a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a [95]wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called monomania.” There is biting satire as well as naïveté and dry humor in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of language; how the same act may be made to appear in wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it. The same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of language. “Timidus,” says Seneca, “se cantum vocat; sordidus parcum.” Thousands who would shrink back with disgust or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led “first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. A singular but most instructive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “industrious chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poisoning was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who[96] stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was called “succession powder”?

Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the national deterioration, by perversions of the customary meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed as “manliness” and esprit de corps, and prudent caution for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. “Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “contributions”; the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a disburdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in perfecting this “devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.

The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.

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Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, and added that he left his former home in New Jersey under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar Misfortune.” About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was spoken of by “the chivalry” as the young man “who had lately met with an accident.” Is it not an alarming sign of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked by another member for his vote, and told that he would get “five hundred reasons for giving it”; thus making the highest word in our language, that which signifies divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the synonym of bribery?

Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been more debased than “gentleman.” Originally the word meant a man born of a noble family, or gens, as the Romans called it; but as such persons were usually possessed of wealth and leisure, they were generally distinguished by greater refinement of manners than the working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the course of ages their riches and legal privileges diminished, and the gulf which separated them from the citizens of the trading towns was bridged by the increasing wealth and power of the latter, the term “gentleman” came at last to denote indiscriminately all persons who kept up the state and observed the social forms which had once characterized men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that the[98] acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning. Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment assume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied to the vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants, as well as to the poorest and most illiterate persons in the community.

In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of society have so far disappeared that even the porter who lounges in his big chair, and condescends to show you out, is the “gentleman in the hall”; Jeames is the “gentleman in uniform”; while the valet is the “gentleman’s gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV, who was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in heart and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon the ground of his grand and suave manners, “the first gentleman of Europe.” But in the United States the term has been so emptied of its original meaning,—especially in some of the southern states, where society has hardly emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot each other in a street fray still babble of being “born gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”—that most persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and barbarian, the gentleman. Cowper declared, a hundred years ago, in regard to duelling:

A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “gentleman” was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, and remarked that “it was the most quiet, peaceable place he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no fighting about the streets. If a gentleman insulted another,[99] he was quietly shot down, and there was the last of it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders: “I asked the gentlemen if he desired to address the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, when he was surrounded in the barn, where he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his word “as a gentleman,” to come out and try to shoot one or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was asked by a hackman: “Are you the man that’s going to ride with me; for I am the gentleman that’s to drive?”

When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his “generosity,” his “big-heartedness,” and “contempt for trifles”; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms “economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! Many a man has blown out another’s brains in “an affair of honor,” who, if accused of murder, would have started back with horror. Many a person stakes his all on a public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he does not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “hell,” and as much a gambler as if he were staking his money on rouge-et-noir or roulette. Hundreds of officials have been tempted to defraud the government by the fact that the harshest term applied to the offence is the[100] rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted without compunction the downfall of the government, and plundered its treasury, as “secessionists,” who would have expected to dangle at the rope’s end, or to be shot down like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”—“convey the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging themselves, Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression that they are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “connoisseurs in good living,” whose cheeks would tingle with indignation and shame if they were accused, in point-blank terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance or gluttony. “I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As You Like It,” “though I thank the gods I am foul.”

Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to juggle with words, none better than auctioneers understand how much significance lies in certain shades of expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auctioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he described a certain ancient gallows as a “hanging wood.” At another time, having made the beauties of the earthly paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault or two, lest it should prove “too good for human nature’s daily food,” the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and reluctantly added: “But candor compels me to add, gentlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid property,—the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”

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It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is done to society by the debasement of its language in the various ways we have indicated. When the only words we have by which to designate the personifications of nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systematically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ultimately share in the debasement to which their proper names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! In reading the literature of former days, we are shocked occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our fathers; but even their coarsest terms,—the “naked words, stript from their shirts,”—in which they denounced libertinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy which has taught men to abuse each other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsomeness of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in the most modest terms.

It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He commits a crime against every individual of a nation, for he poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the[102] poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “Let the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an Italian scholar, “be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility?”

Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or employed, and other classes of men, in their mutual relations, is indicated by the names they give each other. Some years ago the legislature of Massachusetts made a law requiring that children of a certain age, employed in the factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain number of weeks in the year. While visiting the factories to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State government was complied with, an officer of the State inquired of the agent of one of the principal factories at New Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything for the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the work people. The reply would not have been inappropriate from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my work people as I regard my machinery.... They must look out for themselves, as I do for myself. When my machinery gets old and useless, I reject it and get new: and these people are a part of my machinery.” Another agent in another part of the State replied to a similar question, that “he used his mill hands as he used his horse;[103] as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of him as soon as he could, and what became of him afterward was no affair of his.”

But we need not multiply illustrations to show the moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau says: “Power they certainly have. They are alive with sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look at you with strangeness or with response. They are even creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or sentiment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal characteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements from ages of various affection and experience, does it become less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or dispense with its function by any act of will.”

To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with[104] words, which should make all men ponder what they utter. Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we inhabit. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air, once set in motion, never cease; its waves, raised by each sound, travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and in less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere takes up the altered movement resulting from that sound. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are written in imperishable characters all that man has spoken, or even whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere which wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever, and the heavens are no more. There, till the heavens are rolled together as a scroll, will still live the jests of the profane, the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the atheist, “keeping company with the hours,” and circling the earth with the song of Miriam, the wailing of Jeremiah, the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of Demosthenes, and the denunciations of Burke.

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It is a trite remark that words are the representatives of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. You carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped by the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp upon a word? No prince or potentate was ever strong enough to make or unmake a single word. Cæsar confessed that with all his power he could not do it, and Claudius could not introduce even a new letter. He attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct from U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both; but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter, though he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero tried his hand at word-coining; but though he proved a skilful mint-master, and struck some admirable trial pieces, which were absolutely needed to facilitate mental exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and were thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the power of Cæsar and of Cicero does not transcend the[106] ability of many writers of our own day, some of whom are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are daily minting terms and phrases which must make even Noah Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these persons do so much damage to our noble English language as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner phrases. There is a large and growing class of speakers and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently despising the homely but terse and telling words of their mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find what Lord Brougham calls a “long-tailed word in ’osity or ’ation” to do its work.

What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the comparative inattention given to correct diction by the teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made pungent, and, in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall we believe that it is because there is little individuality and independence in these days, that the words of so few persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick out their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by means of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long feather, a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might try to pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or is it because of the prevalent mania for the sensational,—the craving for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in these days,—that so many persons make sense subservient[107] to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names? Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case, is it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the exact truth, and describe a thing just as they have seen it,—to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures and proportions, and define a sensation as it was felt? Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appearance of meaning; and, since nobody can be “so wise as Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as Thurlow while uttering the veriest truisms?

Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of simplicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more marked than in the prevailing forms of expression. “The curse and the peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country,” says an American critic, who may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has done much good service as a literary policeman in the repression of verbal licentiousness, “is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well, according to their honest ignorance, use it ill, according to their affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, would seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-crackers in an empty barrel.” In the estimation of many writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in the use of words is, apparently, to employ plain, straightforward English. The simple Saxon is not good enough[108] for their purposes, and so they array their ideas in “big, dictionary words,” derived from the Latin, and load their style with expletives as tasteless as the streamers of tattered finery that flutter about the person of a dilapidated belle. The “high polite,” in short, is their favorite style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most common things by the most uncommon names. Provided that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or far-fetched,—and especially if it is one of many syllables,—they care little whether it is apt and fit or not.

With them a fire is always “the devouring element,” or a “conflagration”; and the last term is often used where there is no meeting of flames, as when a town is fired in several places, but when only one building is burned; the fire never burns a house, but it always “consumes an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which case “its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always “a holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death roll.” A man who is the first to do a thing “takes the initiative.” Instead of loving a woman, a man “becomes attached” to her; instead of losing his mother by death, he “sustains a bereavement of his maternal relative.” A dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his “caudal appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopædist”; and a fish-pond they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine preserve.” Ladies, in their classic pages, have ceased to be married, like those poor, vulgar creatures, their grandmothers; they are “led to the hymeneal altar.” Of the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though[109] they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “characters,” and “parties,” and often recognize the existence of “juveniles” and “juvenile members of the community.” “Individual” is another piece of pompous inanity which is very current now. In “Guesses at Truth” mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to call our Saviour “this eminent individual.” “Individual” is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an eminens individuum? These “individuals,” strange to say, are never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off their clothes, but “divest themselves of their habiliments,” which is so much grander.

“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Not so think some of the preachers of the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge them by the language they use in their discourses. To give their sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is not to their taste, they invest their discourses with the technicalities of science and philosophy. They never speak of so old-fashioned a thing as the will, but always of “volition”; duty, with them, is never duty simply, but always “moral obligation”; and their sermons abound in “necessary relations,” “moral and physical necessities,” “intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments a priori and a posteriori.” It was a preacher of this class, who having occasion to tell his hearers that there was[110] not one Gospel for the rich and another for the poor, informed them that, “if they would not be saved on ‘general principles,’ they could not be saved at all.” Who can doubt that such language as this is not only poorly understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer, but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which might be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago a white minister preached in a plain, direct style to a church of negroes in the South, whose “colored” pastor was greatly addicted to the use of high-flown language in his sermons. In the season of exhortation and prayer that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and especially, he added, “we thank Thee that to-day we have been fed from a low crib.” Would it not be well for preachers generally to remember that many of Christ’s flock are “little ones,” whose necks are short, and that they may consequently starve, if their food, however nutritious, is placed in too lofty a crib?

But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day; we may find them in nearly all the classes of society,—persons who never tell us that a man is asleep, but say that he is “locked in slumber”; who deem it vulgar, and perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal was hanged, but very elegant to say that he was “launched into eternity.” A person of their acquaintance never does so low a thing as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They never see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual precipitated.” Our Latin friends,—fortunate souls,—never have their feelings hurt, though it must be confessed that their “sensibilities” are sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.” Above the necessities of their poor fellow-creatures, they[111] never do so vulgar a thing as to eat a meal; they always “partake of a repast,” which is so much more elegant. They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk; they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with them is a “prestidigitator”; a fortune-teller, a “vaticinator.” As Pascal says, they mask all nature. There is with them no king, but an “august monarch”; no Paris, but a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our barbers have got upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and shaving-soap, like the old fogies, their fathers, but “odonto,” and “dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves, from the barber-ous persons they once were, have been transformed into “artists in hair.” The medical faculty, too, have caught the spirit of the age. Who would suspect that “epistaxis” means simply bleeding at the nose, and “emollient cataplasm” only a poultice? Fancy one schoolboy doubling up his fist at another, and telling him to look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that “anheidrohepseterion” (advertised in the London “Times”) means only a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it not remarkable that tradesmen have ceased “sending in” their “little bills,” and now only “render their accounts”?

“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten the language in which their fathers and mothers used to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau:

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and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for clad,—all of which have so learned an air, and are preferred to the simpler words for the same reason, apparently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” to “circumvented,” as having a deeper meaning.

Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epithets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sympathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching words, “Jesus wept,”—“Jesus, the Saviour of the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”? “Puppy!” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the book in a rage; and had the author been present, Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: “Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes,[113] you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated by a wit of his own time who calls it

One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech is the substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good old English “woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden letters, “Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had sung

would not the lines have been far more touching? An English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words are decent and which are not.... It really seems as if the old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were fast getting proscribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of[114] as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own affairs.”

Can any person account for the apparent antipathy which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words “to commence” and “to essay,” and the tendency is strong to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in our day is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.” In their fondness for the French words, many persons are betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, while “to begin” may be followed by an infinitive or a gerund, “to commence” is transitive, and must be followed by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “commencing to do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it is even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”; and the latter is not only content with the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth:

What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old familiar words, the following: “In the commencement God created the heavens and the earth,”—“The fear of the[115] Lord is the commencement of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge say: “Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.” “Commence” is a good word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm or variety.

Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington, or a prospective quarrel with France or England, be called an “imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to us the meaning of “interpellation,” so often used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word properly means an interruption; yet when an opposition member of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question of a minister, he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why should an army be said to be “decimated,” without regard to the number or nature of its losses? The original meaning of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons, slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions; and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought battle, and comes off the field only decimated,—that is to say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on the field,—might be accounted rather fortunate than the reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to “give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “donate[116] the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charitable? Why should “elect” be preferred to “choose,” when there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” preferable to “remainder”? As a writer has well said: “Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the balance of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote ‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery, and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘they all fell in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘the balance ran away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indignant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and commentators at loggerheads?”

Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance, “enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: “We are the naked Truth.” Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shocking their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”; and had any person clothed them, he would have been said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than any of these grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of “drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be intoxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by quantity, but by quality,—by drinking liquor that has[117] been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables; drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation” is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor, empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, is said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,” which can be applied only to something which has reached the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate” in the lowest depths of degradation.

Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing ornaments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’ but ‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games, but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and a race, ‘the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man is not bountiful, but the ‘artificer of universal largess.’” Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops, who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should[118] have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years ago?

The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In “Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility.”

The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in which a man called himself “Illuminating Artist to Her Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language had few friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England, he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by “hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had made way for the “lessee of the establishment.” A gentleman going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourning goods was referred by the shopman to “the mitigated affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the ablest British writers of this century is their lack of simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,”[119] he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North, approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man.”

Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation, an artificial style and language, which were fit only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of simple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, whether the testator was “a man of intellectual capacity,”—“an intelligent, shrewd man,”—“a man of capacity?” “Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, testily, “was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” replied the chafed and mystified witness,—“Wad ye say the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled, Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned Tammas ——?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].” “Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but[120] what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “Would you have trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted a review article to the subject, he could not have given a more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his own affairs.

Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle; the seventh is written in the English language.” Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so[121] much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!—yon’s something for a body to come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty particulars in ilka head—and sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!—an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid.”

The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.” A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground;[122] now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber of the English classics,—that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” “Cruel as the cemetery!”

Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition.

It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true, that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables[123] from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon,—in the language we hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the time of the great Methodist movement in the last century, when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, familiar way of preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed that this rough private was always in his place, mouth open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a better reason, and was able to give it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.” “Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.”

Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at[124] Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon discovered that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, he became “a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,—whether demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,—on all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,” said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard words, no Latin phrases, no fieri facias; and that is the secret of my style, if I have any.”

Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that

and if any one would write or speak well, his English should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can be simpler and yet more sublime than the “Let there be light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible Ourgos which had created all things, we might think it very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier[125] leaps upon his horse. “Trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!” roars Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think of driving them before me with this crutch.” “I know,” says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that the light has spread, and that even the bayonets think.” “You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts!” When a Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,—“Well,” said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred and eighty; but when I’m mad I weigh a ton!” “Were I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle of the Nile, “‘more frigates’ would be found written on my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars, and the glory of America, the words might have been historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacularly, as they have been, for over threescore years and ten.

There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in[126] our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name, but, as if they believed with Butler, that

they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. In their dialect people are blasés, and passés, or have un air distingué; in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boquet for bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of a sous, instead of a sou, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s “un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable novelists and writers of books of travel have even shown so bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian, whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans, Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, making the book, though an English book, unintelligible to an Englishman, however familiar with his native tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and that not in its purity, but “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for exotics is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when[127] they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that the parent language would not know it again. They strip it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into bifteck; “plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into pouding de plomb; “partner” becomes partenaire; “riding-coat” becomes redingote; and now fashionable English tailors advertise these “redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming that they are borrowing an expression which the French stole from the English. It was their contempt for the practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age.

It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names,—the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man. There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off his hat in token of respect to himself,—that is, as the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian name of “Bubb,” was once nominated to represent Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister remarked,—“My dear fellow, your name will damn[128] you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” “What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily managed,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all the Spanish Court at your feet.”

The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magniloquent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer, “long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, shaming our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from real and modest worth. Let there be added to these complaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its beauty and power.”

When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple[129] things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the books over which generation after generation of readers has hung with the deepest delight,—which have retained their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,—have been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is beauty. Simplicity is power.”

It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force their way in these days into the[130] language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,” “monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,” and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in the language of literature and common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” “exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:

[131]

It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the language of common life were equally invariable and unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers in our treatises on botany, when compared with such popular names as “Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!” To express the results of science without the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can communicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a law case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Almost invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a witness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you not, sir?”—at the same time translating his scientific barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do, my Lord.” “Then why can’t you say so?” He had said so, but in a foreign tongue.

To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, we would say, as Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college[132] professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a schoolmaster. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near his house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a political tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician, but found no one at home but his niece, who presided at the tea-table. Having never conversed with “great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. “Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,—“Will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt, but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was “horridly vulgar.”

The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon, Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in[133] which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet, portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profoundest researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed; “the fact is, you have no music in your soul.”

We are aware that the English tongue,—our own cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,—has been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute. It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles V, three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of birds; and others since, from the predominance of the s, to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water. Madame de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,—whose own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,—turns[134] traitor to his native language, and in a moment of caprice denounces it for its harshness:

It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures. What can be softer, more musical, or more beautifully descriptive, than the “gentle liquids gliding,” and the words “breathe of the sweet South”; and where among all the languages of the “sweet South” would he have found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm, so saturated with harshness, as the terms “harsh,” “uncouth,” “northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,” “spit,” and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the hand that possesses strength and power may have as delicate a touch, when needed, as the hand of nervous debility. The English language can drop the honeyed words of peace and gentleness, and it can visit with its withering, scathing, burning, blasting curse.” Again, even Addison, who wrote so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its sensuous merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares that

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Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in impairing keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially to that of scorn.

The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas More long ago declared: “It is plenteous enough to expresse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers tongues given them a language which is one of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language has been made the ground of an accusation against it; and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that he “has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps”; that his dialect is “the alms-basket of wit,” made up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in originality.

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It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip him of his borrowings,—or “annexations,” if you will,—and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin, and French, which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance far more than it loses in apparent originality. Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual as the French or the German. Though the rough materials are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are as speedily identified with its own independent existence[137] as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance,—the breast, leg, or arm,—of an Illinois farmer.

In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners “stare and gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous in Greek than in Latin,—in French or Italian than in Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained him who soared “above all Greek, above all Roman fame”; and the same “well of English undefiled” did not fail the myriad-minded dramatist, when

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has “combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the[138] plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.” To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert:

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Among the various forms of ingratitude, one of the commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music of our tongue, sneers at them as low:

“How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and, truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of such a line as that quoted. “Small words,” he elsewhere[140] says, “are generally stiff and languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of

The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,—in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,—are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,—the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,—is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’—well might Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what ‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the impregnable fortress,—the very Malakoff of the will; it[141] is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar.”

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most expressive in the language, of which the great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as “the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains that, “because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been suffered to usurp a place among words. “Where will you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; “will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,—namely, the Bible. But the use of this part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest[142] authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.

What word in the English language is fuller of significance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assembly, perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most famous of interjections originated,—we mean the cry of “Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb, is now “nothing more or less than a great historical interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or derision. It has been truly said that when a large assembly is animated by a common sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only through interjections.

Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! “The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word ‘O.’” This “O,” the sign of the vocative, must not be confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by Wordsworth:

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What possible combination of words could be more significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s theory, or the contemptuous “Fudge!” with which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs:

How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What volumes of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying ‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those almost infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of human life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: “‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection of sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as consisting only in the transposition of what is no substantial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath, is our mirth changed to mourning!”

The truth is that, so far is this class of words from being, as Max Müller contends, the mere outskirts of language, they are more truly words than any others. These[144] little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic isles,—these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to all lips, and are understood by all men,—these “silver fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of Tennyson’s, “the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the dictionaries of all races,”—

are emphatically and preëminently language. It is doubtless true that civilization, with its freezing formalities, tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on the other hand, it should be noted, that there are certain interjections which are the fruits of the highest and most mature forms of human culture. Interjections, in truth, are not so much “parts of speech” as entire expressions of feeling or thought. They are preëminently pictorial. If I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,” “beautifully,” without other words or explanatory gestures, I say nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things; but if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or sorrow, surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows at once by what affection I am moved. I communicate a fact by a single syllable. Instead of ranking below other words, the interjection stands on a higher plane, because its significance is more absolute and immediate. Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the natural interjection “ah”! ach! we have the root of a large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as ἄχος,[145] achen! “ache,” “anguish,” “anxious,” angustus, and the word “agony” itself. Many words are used interjectionally which are not interjections, such as “Farewell!” “Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbreviated sentences, resembling the Ο for οὐ, “not,” with which the poet Philoxenus is said to have replied in writing to the tyrant Dionysius who had invited him to the court of Syracuse. The true interjection is an apostrophe, condensed into a syllable. It is the effort of Nature to unburden herself of some intense, pressing emotion. It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value till it lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks of certain deeds as “little more than interjections, which give vent to the long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry, and the drama, the interjection plays an important part. Public speakers, especially, find it indispensable to their success. “As the most eloquent men are apt to find their language inadequate to their needs,—as still, after they have exhausted their vocabulary of other words,

they find great need of the interjection. In their hands it deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense longings, carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities, and expresses the most passionate emotions in the instant of their most overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar with the history of oratory, does not remember instances when these little words, so despised by grammarians, have been more impressive, more to the point, more eloquent than a long speech? The interjections of Whitefield,—his[146] “Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and his “Oh!” of encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted listener,—were words of tremendous power, and formed a most potent engine in his pulpit artillery.[11] Garrick used to say that he would give a hundred guineas if he could say “Oh!” as Whitefield did. The condensed force of interjections,—their inherent expressiveness,—entitles them, therefore, to be regarded as the appropriate language, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the effect of good acting depends largely on the proper introduction and just articulation of this class of words.

Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth except by one who has mastered the whole play. What a profound insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required of him who would adequately utter the word “indeed” in the following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,” says an English writer, “the gist of the chief action of the play, and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be spoken with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic scheme of Iago’s conduct. There is no thought of the grammatical structure of the compound, consisting of the preposition ‘in’ and the substantive ‘deed,’ which is equivalent to ‘act,’ ‘fact,’ or ‘reality.’ All this vanishes and is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.”

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The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections, which are used by the orators and poets with great effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the cup of affliction to the very last dregs, Æschylus, in his “Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in which abject misery can be expressed.

The English language is preëminently a language of small words. It has more monosyllables than any other modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly direct and straightforward character, equally removed from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering German. Its fondness for this class of words is even greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,” “beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were, in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the narrowest possible limits,—lopping and condensing, never expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in “gin” for “engine,” “van” for “caravan,” “prentice” for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig” for “periwig”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,” “tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “last” for “latest,” “lark” for “laverock,” “since” for “sithence,” “fortnight” for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for “hlaford,” “morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,” “chirp” for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,”[148] “consols” for “consolidated annuities.” The same abbreviating processes are followed, when English words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable extraneus; “spend” from expendo; “scour” from exscorio; “stop” from obstipo; “funnel” from infundibulum; “ply” from plico; “jetty” from projectum; “dean” from decanus; “count” from computo; “stray” from extravagus; “proxy” from procurator; “spell” from syllabare, etc. Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when converted into English, and their letters changed, transposed, or omitted, but often two English words are clipped and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud” and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and “rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll” comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,” we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive monosyllables the English language manifests the same economy, and forms words of a totally different meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg, big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll, bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight, light, might, night, right, tight,—dash, hash, lash, gash, rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles is rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or algebraic condensation of thought,—a pemmican of ideas. Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown[149] itself in rendering the final e in English always mute. In Chaucer the final e must often be sounded as a separate syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we owe such expressions as “ten o’clock,” instead of “of the clock,” or “on the clock,” and the hissing s, so offensive to foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, th, has given way to s in the third person singular, and en to a single letter in the third person plural.

The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern English, is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the grandest passages in our literature are made up almost exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel, which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest,”—contains seventeen monosyllables to three others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in energetic brevity that which describes the death of Sisera,—“At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down dead”? Here are twenty-two monosyllables to one dissyllable thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any similar passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very large proportion of these touching words are of one or two syllables:—“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places; how are the mighty fallen!... Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offering.... Saul and Jonathan[150] were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.... They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.... How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Occasionally a long word is used in the current version, where a more vivid or picturesque short one might have been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims: “Oh, ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” In one of the older versions “brood” is used in place of “generation,” with far greater effect.

The early writers, the “pure wells of English undefiled,” abound in small words. Shakespeare employs them in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth:

Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the “Thane of Cawdor”:

Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!

Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking[151] of the vanity of “adding house to house and field to field,” has these beautiful lines:

“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same writer, equally musical and equally expressive.

Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account of the journey of the fallen angels:

In what other language shall we find in the same number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell to receive its new possessor:

Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the sentiment that “poetry is the short-hand of thought” is strikingly illustrated:

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Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we find anything more perfect than these lines? What a quantity and variety of thought are here condensed into two verses, like a cluster of rock crystals, sparkling and distinct, yet receiving and reflecting lustre by the combination! Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy, grandeur and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine words in these lines, sixty-two are monosyllables.

Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of monosyllables is often the very secret of his charm. It is true that he too frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and outlandish terms, thinking thereby to render his style more gorgeous or grand. But his chief strength lies in his despotic command over the simplest forms of speech. Listen to the words in which he describes the destruction of Sennacherib:

Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are monosyllables; and yet how exquisitely are all these monosyllables linked into the majestic and animated movement of[153] the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more musical and more melancholy than the opening verse of the lines in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land?

Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, “adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one are monosyllables.

How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic music is one of the principal charms:

[154]

The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable:

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all[155] languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,—yardlongtailed, like fiends.”

I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident from the passages I have cited, that these Liliputians,—these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary,—play as important a part in our literature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for high treason, he said that he was “the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great family of words.

The class of small words which were once contemptuously called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and modify its ideas,—in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries, and to reason logically,—the microscopic parts of[156] speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary. What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.” When a man half understands the subject of which he speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, use words of “learned length and thundering sound.” But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can understand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it sends its bullets straight to the point.[12] When, after wearily waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp, and stinging terms.

In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five hundred; by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel i, about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even[157] the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,—themselves a happy example of the thing he commends:

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Some years ago the author of the “Biographical History of Philosophy,” in a criticism of a certain public lecturer in London, observed that one of his most marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. “He accepts no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does not in his soul admire. He pretends to be nothing that he is not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it? Oh, if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas,—pretending to admire, pretending to believe, and all in sheer respectability!”

Who does not admire the quality here commended, and yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how few persons is the tongue an index to the heart! What a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of[159] social intercourse! Everybody knows that “How d’ye do?” and “Good morning!” are parroted in most cases without a thought of their meaning, or at least, without any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we secretly detest with “My dear sir,” and at the end subscribe ourselves his “obedient servant,” though we should resent a single word from him which implied a belief in our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a command. But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollowness of which may be excused on the ground that they sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet startling to reflect how large a proportion of human speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words the meaning of which they have never weighed or discriminated, is bad enough; but that they should habitually use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in which man can be placed toward man, that does not call into play more or less of language without meaning. The “damnable iteration” of the lawyer in a declaration of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than is the asseveration of one petitioner that he “will ever pray,” etc., and of another that he “will be a thousand times obliged,” if you will grant his request. Who does not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling kindness done by one person to another often gives occasion on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for words and phrases in which to express his pretended gratitude, while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by having to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently disclaims[160] any merit in the grant, which he really grudged, and will never think of without feeling that he made a great sacrifice.

The secret feeling of many a “public benefactor,” loudly praised by the newspapers, was finely let out by Lord Byron when he sent four thousand pounds to the Greeks, and privately informed a friend that he did not think he could well get off for less. How many wedding and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials and to public enterprises, are made by those who secretly curse the occasion that exacts them! With the stereotyped “thanks” and “grateful acknowledgments” of the shopkeeper all are familiar, as they are with “the last,” the “positively the last,” and the “most positively the very last” appearances of the dramatic stars that shine for five hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As nobody is deceived by these phrases, it seems hypercritical to complain of them, and yet one can hardly help sympathizing with the country editor who scolds a celebrated musician because he is now making farewell tours “once a year,” whereas formerly he made them “only once in five years.” Considering the sameness of shop-keepers’ acknowledgments, one cannot help admiring the daring originality of the Dutch commercial house of which the poet Moore tells, that concluded a letter thus: “Sugars are falling more and more every day; not so the respect and esteem with which we are your obedient servants.” The cant of public speakers is so familiar to the public that it is looked for as a matter of course. When a man is called on to address a public meeting, it is understood that the apology for his “lack of preparation” to meet the demand so “unexpectedly” made upon him, will[161] preface the “impromptu” which he has spent weeks in elaborating, as surely as the inevitable “This is so unexpected” prefaces the reply of a maiden to the long-awaited proposal of marriage from her lover.

Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that cant in them seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find more of it than in books, magazines, and newspapers? How many reasons are assigned by authors for inflicting their works on the public, other than the true one, namely, the pleasure of writing, the hope of a little distinction, or of a little money! How many writers profess to welcome criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe to spite, envy, or jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is intrinsically more deceptive than the multitudinous “we” in which every writer, great and small, hides his individuality,—whether his object be, as Archdeacon Hare says, “to pass himself off unnoticed, like the Irishman’s bad guinea in a handful of halfpence,” or to give to the opinions of a humble individual the weight and gravity of a council? “Who the —— is ‘We’?” exclaimed the elder Kean on reading a scathing criticism upon his “Hamlet”; and the question might be pertinently asked of many other nominis umbræ who deliver their vaticinations and denunciations as oracularly as if they were lineal descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. Who can estimate the diminution of power and influence that would result should the ten thousand editors in the land, who now assume a mystic grandeur and speak with a voice of authority, as the organs of the public or a party, come down from their thrones, and exchange the regal “we” for the plebeian and egotistic “I”? “Who is ‘I’?” the reader might exclaim, in tones even more contemptuous[162] than Kean’s. The truth is, “I” is a nobody. He represents only himself. He may be Smith or Jones,—the merest cipher. He may weigh but a hundred pounds, and still less morally and intellectually. He may be diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom Thumb. Who cares what such a pygmy thinks? But “we” represents a multitude, an imposing crowd, a mighty assembly, a congress, or a jury of sages; and we all quail before the opinions of the great “we.” As a writer has well said: “‘We have every reason to believe that beef will rise to starvation prices’ is a sentiment which, when read in a newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach tremble; but substitute an ‘I’ for the ‘we,’ and nobody cares a copper for the opinion. It has been well said that what terrified Belshazzar was the hand on the wall, because he couldn’t see to whom it belonged; and the same may be said of the editorial ‘we.’ It is the mystery in which it is involved that invests it with potency.”

The history of literature abounds with examples of words used almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. There is a time in the history of almost every literature when language apparently loses its vitality, and becomes dead, by being divorced from the living thought that created it. Many of the most effete and worn-out forms of expression, when first introduced, pleased by their novelty, and manifested originality in their inventors; but by dint of continual repetition, the delicate bloom has been rubbed off, and they have lost their power. A great deal of what is preserved in books, and is called fine writing, is made up of these lifeless parts of language, which are like the elements of a decayed and rotten tree, of which the organic form and[163] structure are perfect, but the life of which has departed. It is the outward form of literature without the soul; an abundance of fine writing, but no ideas. It has been truly said that it is amazing to see how much of this dead material is accumulated at the present day; whole books filled to repletion with words without thoughts, standing like dead forests, upright indeed, and regular in form and structure, but presenting no fruit nor verdure, sheltering no life, monuments only of past vitality, and soon to crumble into oblivion. “Wandering through these catacombs of the mind, one meets everywhere with the most admirable ‘styles,’ which, doubtless, when first constructed, were the vehicles of as admirable thought, the fit language of great and stately minds, but which, transported from the past, and made to represent the little and despicable ‘notions’ of their plunderers, become a very mockery.”

Who does not know how feeble and hollow British poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just before the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear in the costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; and dealing with the conventional manners and outside aspects of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the proper haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated into a mere trick of art,—a hand-organ operation, in which one man could grind out tunes nearly as well as another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a perpetually recurring assortment of images, had become so much the traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set himself up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply himself with his stock in trade. The style that prevailed[164] has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell “the Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called the wine “rosy,” sleep “balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen always employ a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express the commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain, almanac name, but always “Phœbus,” or “the orb of day.” The moon was known only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the refulgent lamp of night.” Naïads were as plenty in every stream as trout or pickerel. If these poets wished to say tea, they would write

Coffee would be nothing less than

A boot would be raised to

A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St. Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and a magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than “Minos” or “Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of a young man’s falling in love, he set himself to relate how Cupid laid himself in ambush in the lady’s eye, and from that fortress shot forth a dart at the breast of the unhappy youth, who straightway began to writhe under his wound, and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile upon him. All women in that golden age were “nymphs”; “dryads” were as common as birds; carriages were “harnessed pomps”; houses, humble or stately “piles”; and not a wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or “Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “a gentle zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the well known lines:

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Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Expressing his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of such verse, in which sentiment was so often

he cried:

The charm of Cowper’s letters, acknowledged by all competent judges to be the best in the English language, lies in the simplicity and naturalness,—the freedom from affectation,—by which they are uniformly characterized. Contrasting them with those of Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew Combe observes in a letter to a friend: “Cowper’s letters, to my mind, do far more to excite a deep sense of religion, than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one gives expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feelings which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The other forces in the one topic in all his letters, and lashes himself up to a due fervor of expression, whether the mind wills or not. On one occasion Wilberforce dispatched a[166] very hurried letter on Saturday night, without any religious expressions in it. In the night-time his conscience troubled him so much for the omission, that he could not rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with the piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure from his rule! Only think what a perversion of a good principle this was!”

It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of words of which we have spoken are used most frequently. Sir Henry Wotton long since defined an ambassador as “a gentleman sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country.” In Europe, so indissolubly has diplomacy been associated with trickery, that it is said Talleyrand’s wonderful success with the representatives of foreign courts was owing largely to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody believing it possible that he was striving for that for which he seemed to be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in which he spoke of and dealt with all public matters, completely puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate from diplomacy the mysterious devices that distinguish the hack from the true diplomatist. In the titles and styles of address used by Kings and Emperors, we have examples of cant in its most meaningless forms. One sovereign is His Most Christian Majesty; another, Defender of the Faith, etc. A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue a commission of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his “well-beloved,” though in his heart he detests them.

Everybody knows that George I of England obtained his crown, not by hereditary title, but by an Act of Parliament; yet, in his very first speech to that body, he had the effrontery to speak of ascending the throne of his ancestors. Well might Henry Luttrell exclaim:

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So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “wire-pulling,” and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank his fellow-citizens for having sent him there “by their voluntary, unbiased suffrages.” When the patriot, Patkul, was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII of Sweden, the following sentence was read over to him: “It is hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our most merciful sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc. “What mercy!” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the profession of extreme humility by men who are full of pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman Pontiffs styled himself “the servant of the servants of God,” at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing the language of piety and benevolence, especially when about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the Fourteenth’s paroxysms of repentance and devotion were always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots;[168] and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace, and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neighbors. While the French revolutionists were shouting “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed in Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by cartloads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robespierre’s fellow-cutthroats, was the rearing of doves. The contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm of his existence, in consoling him for the wickedness of men. Even when he had reached the height of his “bad preëminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband’s life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel’s tail, he cried out, “Good heavens, Madam! have you no humanity?”

“My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice, many of them would be likely to find their occupation clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of patriotism,—to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down the throats of the people,—that the voters, whom the old party hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he[169] rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch-words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his “head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency.

Offensive as are all these forms of speech without meaning, they are not more so than the hollow language of—strange to say,—some moral philosophers. Many persons have been so impressed by the ethical essays of Seneca, in which he sings the praises of poverty, and denounces in burning language the corruption of Rome and the extortion in the provinces, that they could account for the excellence of these writings only on the theory of a Christian influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul. But what are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading them by the light of the author’s life and character, we find they are only words. A late German historian tells us that the same Seneca who could discourse so finely upon the abstemiousness and contentment of the philosopher, and who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt for earthly things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the four years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of three hundred millions of sesterces,—over fifteen millions of dollars. While writing his treatise on “Poverty,” he had in his house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined wood brought from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost as much as twenty-five, and even seventy thousand dollars. The same Seneca, who denounced extortion with so virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens with the[170] gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who preached so much about purity of morals, was openly accused of adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his pupil Nero into still more shameful practices. He wrote a work upon “Clemency,” yet had, beyond question, a large part of Nero’s atrocities upon his conscience. It was he who composed the letter in which Nero justified before the Senate the murder of his own mother.[13]

Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the stump and platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered so true that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their full meaning. Gradually the terms most vital to belief cease to mean what they meant when first used; the electric life goes out of them; and, for all practical purposes, they are dead. Hence it is that “the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education[171] expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning alive are barely found sufficient to counteract.”[14]

There can be little doubt that many a man whose life is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this day apparently without a thought of their meaning? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing “the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is not weary of the ding-dong of “our Zion” and the solecism of “in our midst”; and who does not long for a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “feel to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” says Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They must ‘improve’ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a ‘prayerful’ way; and so on. A young lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.” The language of prayer, both public and private, being made up more or less of technical expressions, tends continually to become effete. The scriptural and other phrases, which were used with good taste and judgment several generations ago, may have lost their significance to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others which have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it has been truly said, are imperilled by the continued use[172] of conventional phraseology after the life of it has gone out, so that nothing in the real experience of the people responds to it, when they hear it or when they use it. Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,” remarks that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation, and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling; in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded in the blinding influence of this expression, that he exclaimed, ‘O Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes,’ the utterance was forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted, perverted, and abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own element the better.”

Many persons have very erroneous ideas of what constitutes religious conversation. That is not necessarily religious talk which is interlarded with religious phrases, or which is solely about divine things; but that which is permeated with religious feeling, which is full of truth, reverence, and love, whatever the theme may be. Who has not heard some men talk of the most worldly things in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting his whole spiritual being? And who has not heard other men talk about the divinest things in so dry, formal, and soulless a way that their words seemed a profanation, and chilled him to the core? It is almost a justification of slang that it is generally an effort to obtain relief from words worn bare by the use of persons who put neither[173] knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable of expressing anything real.

When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had recanted, she replied, “No; he has only canted.” Often, when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use language so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm than the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking upon this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of Boston, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant and shams. “There’s Dr. ——,” said he, about the time of the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “who went all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had an intense abhorrence of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was visiting him spent a day in sighing and in begging pardon for his suspirations, saying that they were caused by grief that he had so hard a heart. The great divine bore with him all the first day, but when the lamentations were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said: “Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensating principle, and be thankful and still.” “Compensating principle!” exclaimed the young man; “what can compensate for a hard heart?” “Why, a soft head, to be sure,” said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great provocation. Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A great many men would be positive forces of goodness in the world, if they did not let all their principles and enthusiasm escape in words. They are like locomotives which let off so much steam through the escape valves, that, though they fill the air with noise, they have not[174] power enough left to move the train. There is hardly anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without deeds. “The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest before the enemy; it is well said to him that his courage is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; so much indignation as is expressed has found vent; it is wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.”[15]

It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, “I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,” he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of [175]exhibiting on his cards “J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,” and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief, with the words, “Let us weep.” On the other hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,—to cheat one’s self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of what they felt in other and better years,—above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in the shock of conflict,—they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion commands respect; but intense words should never be used when the religious life is not intense. “Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the ‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has found for itself a vent in words.”[17]

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Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied, “I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the gloss off my own impression,—if I have any.”

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The old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing three languages that he used to declare that he had three hearts. The Emperor Charles V expressed himself still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility,—left no trace of his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder[178] at his gifts, as we wonder at the Belgian giant or a five-legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions, De Quincey suggests that the following would be an appropriate epitaph for his eminence: “Here lies a man who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,—absconding from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot dictionary.” Enormous, however, as were the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of his acquirements,—priding himself, as he did, less upon his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of a single tongue. “What am I,” said he to a visitor, “but an ill-bound dictionary?” The saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood twenty different languages,—“That’s twenty words for one idea,” said she; “I had rather have twenty ideas for one word.” In this reply she foreshadowed the great error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated man is too often one who knows more of language than of idea,—more of the husk than of the kernel,—more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a heap of symbols,—of mere counters,—with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,—paper like bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless[179] in exchange, and repudiated in real traffic. The great scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the spiritual energy that might make him a hero upon the detection of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate word.

In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed in so large a measure to the people, and every third man is an orator, it is easier to find persons with the twenty words for one idea, than persons with twenty ideas for one word. Of all the peoples on the globe, except perhaps the Irish, Americans are the most spendthrift of language. Not only in our court-houses and representative halls, but everywhere, we are literally deluged with words,—words,—words. Everybody seems born to make long speeches, as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian theory that Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a universal belief, and all are laboring to fill up the realms of space with “mouthfuls of spoken wind.” The quantity of breath that is wasted at our public meetings,—religious, political, philanthropic, and literary,—is incalculable. Hardly a railroad or a canal is opened, but the occasion is seized on as a chance for speeches of “learned length and thundering sound”; and even a new hotel cannot throw open its doors without an amount of breath being expended, sufficient, if economically used, to waft a boat across a small lake.

One is struck, in reading the “thrilling” addresses on various occasions, which are said to have “chained as with hooks of steel the attention of thousands,” and which confer on their authors “immortal reputations” that die within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes with many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine’s[180] “Plaideurs,” by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded lawyer, “to skip to the deluge,” might wisely be repeated to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian art of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,—raising an ocean to drown a fly,—loading cannon to shoot at humming-birds. Thought and expression are supplanted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sentences,—the value of a thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,—we have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous elocution. Instead of ideas brought before us, as South expresses it, like water in a well, where you have fulness in a little compass, we have the same “carried out into many petty, creeping rivulets, with length and shallowness together.”

It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached the highest climax. A member may have a thought or a fact which may settle a question; but if it may be couched in a sentence or two, he thinks it not worth delivering. Unless he can wire-draw it into a two-hours speech, or at least accompany it with some needless verbiage to plump it out in the report, he will sit stock still, and leave the floor to men who have fewer ideas and more words at command. The public mind, too, revolts sometimes against nourishment in highly concentrated forms; it requires bulk as well as nutriment, just as hay, as well as corn, is given to horses, to distend the stomach, and enable it to act with its full powers. Then, again,—and this, perhaps, is one of the main causes of long-winded speeches,—there is a sort of reverence entertained for[181] a man who can “spout” two or three hours on the stretch; and the wonder is heightened, if he does it without making a fool of himself. Nothing, however, can be more absurd than to regard mere volubility as a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from being the case that it may be doubted whether any large-thoughted man, who was accustomed to grapple with the great problems of life and society, ever found it easy upon the rostrum to deliver his thoughts with fluency and grace.

Bruce, the traveller, long ago remarked of the Abyssinians, that “they are all orators, as,” he adds, “are most barbarians.” It is often said of such tonguey men that they have “a great command of language,” when the simple fact is that language has a great command of them. As Whately says, they have the same command of language that a man has of a horse that runs away with him. A true command of language consists in the power of discrimination, selection, and rejection, rather than in that of multiplication. The greatest orators of ancient and modern times have been remarkable for their economy of words. Demosthenes, when he

rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even less time to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There are some of the Greek orator’s speeches which were spoken, as they may now be read with sufficient slowness and distinctness, in less than half an hour; yet they are the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius the effect of whose words the ancients exhausted their language in describing; which they could adequately describe only[182] by comparing it to the workings of the most subtle and powerful agents of nature,—the ungovernable torrent, the resistless thunder. Chatham was often briefer still, and Mirabeau, the master-spirit of the French tribune, condensed his thunders into twenty minutes.

It is said that not one of the three leading members of the convention that formed the Constitution of the United States spoke, in the debates upon it, over twenty minutes. Alexander Hamilton was reckoned one of the most diffuse speakers of his day; yet he did not occupy more than two hours and a half in his longest arguments at the bar, nor did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over half that time. A judge who was intimately acquainted with Burr and his practice declares that he repeatedly and successfully disposed of cases involving a large amount of property in half an hour. “Indeed,” says he, “on one occasion he talked to the jury seven minutes in such a manner that it took me, on the bench, half an hour to straighten them out.” He adds. “I once asked him, ‘Colonel Burr, why cannot lawyers always save the time, and spare the patience of the court and jury, by dwelling only on the important points in their cases?’ to which Burr replied, ‘Sir, you demand the greatest faculty of the human mind, selection.’” To these examples we may add that of a great English advocate. “I asked Sir James Scarlett,” says Buxton, “what was the secret of his preëminent success as an advocate. He replied that he took care to press home the one principal point of the case, without paying much regard to the others. He also said that he knew the secret of being short. ‘I find,’ said he, ‘that when I exceed half an hour, I am always doing mischief to my client. If I drive into[183] the heads of the jury unimportant matter, I drive out matter more important that I had previously lodged there.’”

Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy to such an extreme that he tried almost to do without words. “If there is a man on earth,” said he, “tormented by the cursed desire to get a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and this phrase into one word,—that man is myself.” The ambition of many American speakers, and not a few writers, is apparently the reverse of this. We do not seem to know that in many cases, as Hesiod says, a half is more than the whole; and that a speech or a treatise hammered out painfully in every part is often of less value than a few bright links, suggestive of the entire chain of thought. Who wants to swallow a whole ox, in order to get at the tenderloin?

Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now than it once was, because men think more rapidly. They are not more thoughtful than their ancestors, but they are more vivid, direct, and animated in their thinking. They are more impatient, therefore, of long-windedness, of a loose arrangement, and of a heavy, dragging movement in the presentation of truth. “A century ago men would listen to speeches and sermons,—to divisions and subdivisions,—that now would be regarded as utterly intolerable. As the human body is whisked through space at the rate of a mile a minute, so the human mind travels with an equally accelerated pace. Mental operations are on straight lines, and are far more rapid than they once were. The public audience now craves a short method, a distinct, sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating movement, upon the part of its teachers.”[18] It is, in [184] short, an age of steam and electricity that we live in, not of slow coaches; an age of locomotives, electric telegraphs, and phonography; and hence it is the cream of a speaker’s thoughts that men want,—the wheat, and not the chaff,—the kernel, and not the shell,—the strong, pungent essence, and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even well said, on a subject, but the very apices rerum, the tops and sums of things reduced to their simplest expression,—the drop of oil extracted from thousands of roses, and condensing all their odors,—the healing power of a hundred weight of bark in a few grains of quinine.

“Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever issued from the mind of man,” says South, “have been couched under, and delivered in, a few close, home, and significant words.... Was not the work of all the six days [of creation] transacted in so many words?... Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were, dropped from God’s mouth, and nature itself was but the product of a word.... The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. And γνῶθι σεαυτὸν still lives and flourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast volumes are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion.”

Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many speeches, is the habitual exaggeration of language which deforms both our public and our private discourse. The most unmanageable of all parts of speech, with many persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly said that the adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the substantives, though they may agree in gender, number, and[185] case. Generally the weakness of a composition is just in proportion to the frequency with which this class of words is introduced. As in gunnery the force of the discharge is proportioned, not to the amount of powder that can be used, but to the amount that can be thoroughly ignited, so it is not the multitude of words, but the exact number fired by the thought, that gives energy to expression. There are some writers and speakers who seem to have forgotten that there are three degrees of comparison. The only adjectives they ever use are the superlative, and even these are raised to the third power. With them there is no gradation, no lights and shadows. Every hill is Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue is godlike, every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their vocabulary; epithets are heightened into superlatives; superlatives stretch themselves into hyperboles; and hyperboles themselves get out of breath, and die asthmatically of exhaustion.

Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe, our Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably the most addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our mountains, lakes and rivers are all on a gigantic scale, we seem to think our speech must be framed after the same pattern. Even our jokes are of the most stupendous kind; they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies, or suggest the immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in portraying the most trivial incident, rolls along a Mississippian flood of eloquence, and the vastness of his metaphors makes you think you are living in the age of the megatheriums and saurians, and listening to one of a pre-Adamite race. Our political speeches, instead of being[186] couched in plain and temperate language, too often bristle

In ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our poverty of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most ordinary themes, except in the most extravagant and enraptured terms. Everything that pleases us is positively “delicious,” “nice,” or “charming”; everything handsome is “elegant,” or “splendid”; everything that we dislike is “hateful,” “dreadful,” “horrible,” or “shocking.” Listen to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and you will learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours, they have met with more marvellous adventures and hairbreadth escapes,—passed through more thrilling experiences, and seen more gorgeous spectacles,—endured more fright, and enjoyed more rapture,—than could be crowded into a whole life-time, even if spun out to threescore and ten.

Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy season, and he will tell you that “it rains cats and dogs,” or that “it beats all the storms since the flood.” If his clothes get sprinkled in crossing the street, he has been “drenched to the skin.” All our winds blow a hurricane; all our fires are conflagrations,—even though only a hen-coop is burned; all our fogs can be cut with a knife. Nobody fails in this country; he “bursts up.” All our orators rival Demosthenes in eloquence; they beat Chillingworth in logic; and their sarcasm is more “withering” than that of Junius himself. Who ever heard of a public meeting in this country that was not “an immense[187] demonstration”; of an actor’s benefit at which the house was not “crowded from pit to dome”; of a political nomination that was not “sweeping the country like wild-fire”? Where is the rich man who does not “roll in wealth”; or the poor man who is “worth the first red cent”? All our good men are paragons of virtue,—our villains, monsters of iniquity.

Many of our public speakers seem incapable of expressing themselves in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any subject whatever. A great deal of our writing, too, is pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key. Quiet ease of style, like that of Cowley’s “Essays,” Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” or White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” is almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming more and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if it would come to consist of head-lines and exclamation points. Some of the most popular correspondents are those whose communications are a perfect florilegium of fine words. They rival the “tulipomania” in their love of gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care little how trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they have dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of Rufus Choate, whose brain teemed with a marvellous wealth of words, and who was very prodigal of adjectives, that he “drove a substantive-and-six” whenever he spoke in public, and that he would be as pathetic as the grand lamentations in “Samson Agonistes” on the obstruction of fish-ways, and rise to the cathedral music of the universe on the right to manufacture India-rubber suspenders. When Chief-Justice Shaw, before whom he had often pleaded, heard that there was a new edition of “Worcester’s Dictionary,” containing two thousand five hundred new words,[188] he exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let Choate get hold of it!”[19]

Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at some exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness, describing microscopic things by colossal metaphors. Thus a French naturalist represents the blood of a louse as “rushing through his veins like a torrent!” Even in treating on this very subject of exaggeration, a writer in an English periodical, after rebuking sharply this American fault, himself outrages truth by declaring that “he would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that never caricatures the subject on which he speaks!” To a critic who thus fails to reck his own rede, one may say with Sir Thomas Browne: “Thou who so hotly disclaimest the devil, be not thyself guilty of diabolism.”

Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of amplification and exaggeration,—of blowing up molehills into Himalayas and Chimborazos? Can anything be more obvious than the dangers of such a practice? Is it not evident that by applying super-superlatives to things petty or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so that, when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpardonable sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is not necessary that our “good Homers” should be always electrifying us with a savage intensity of expression. There is nothing of which a reader tires so soon as of a continual blaze of brilliant periods,—a style in which a “qu’il mourut” and a “let there be light” are crowded[189] into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where all men are giants, there are no giants; where all is emphatic in style, there is no emphasis. Travel a few months among the mountains, and you will grow as sick of the everlasting monotony of grandeur, of beetling cliffs and yawning chasms, as of an eternal succession of plains. Yet, in defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational writer thinks the reader will deem him dull unless every sentence blazes with meaning, and every paragraph is crammed with power. His intellect is always armed cap-a-pie, and every passage is an approved attitude of mental carte and tierce. If he were able to create a world, there would probably be no latent heat in it, and no twilight; and should he drop his pen and turn painter, his pictures would be all foreground, with no more perspective than those of the Chinese.

De Quincey, speaking of the excitability of the French, says that, having appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and ordinary life, they have no language of passion for the service of poetry, or of occasions really demanding it, because it has been already enfeebled by continual association with cases of an unimpassioned order. “Ah, Heavens!” or “O my God!” are exclamations so exclusively reserved by the English for cases of profound interest that, on hearing a woman even utter such words, they look round expecting to see her child in some situation of danger. But in France “Ciel!” and “O mon Dieu!” are uttered by every woman if a mouse does but run across the floor. There is much suggestive truth in this. By the habitual use of strong language men may blunt and petrify their feelings, as[190] surely as by the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants they may deaden the sensibility of the palate. “Naturally the strongest word ought to be used to give expression to the strongest feeling. But strong words have been so blunted through frequent use that they have lost their sharp edge, and pass over our thick skin without even pricking our sensibility; while, at moments when we expect a heavy blow, the light tickling of the socially polite feather may far more vividly stimulate our sensibility.”

It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse, whether oral or written, that it is the subdued expression of conviction and feeling, when the speaker or writer, instead of giving vent to his emotions, veils them in part, and suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, that is the most powerful. It is the man who is all but mastered by his excitement, but who, at the very point of being mastered, masters himself,—apparently cool when he is at a white heat,—whose eloquence is most conquering. When the speaker, using a gentler mode of expression than the case might warrant, appears to stifle his feelings and studiously to keep them within bounds, a reaction is produced in the hearer’s mind, and, rushing into the opposite extreme, he is moved more deeply than by the most vehement and passionate declamation. The jets of flame that escape now and then,—the suppressed bursts of feeling,—the partial eruptions of passion,—are regarded as but hints or faint intimations of the volcano within. Balzac, in one of his tales, tells of an artist, who, by a few touches of his pencil, could give to a most commonplace scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a[191] bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some death-struggle, over an undefined object which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and these hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more powerfully than the most elaborate detail, because the imagination of man is more powerful than art itself. So with Hood’s description of the Haunted House:—

Thoreau, describing an interview he had at Concord with John Brown, notices as one of the latter’s marked peculiarities, that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. “He referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue.” In one of the published letters of the late Rev. F. W. Robertson, there are some admirable comments on a letter, full of strongly expressed religious sentiments, pious resolutions, etc., which he had received from a fashionable lady. The letter, he says, “is in earnest so far as it goes; only that fatal facility of strong words expresses feeling which will seek for itself no other expression. She believes or means what she says, but the very vehemence of the expression injures her, for really it expresses the penitence of a St. Peter, and would not be below the mark if it were meant to describe the bitter tears with which he bewailed his crime; but when such language is used for trifles, there remains nothing stronger for the awful crises of human life. It is like[192] Draco’s code,—death for larceny; and there remains for parricide or treason only death.”

Let us then be as chary of our superlatives as of our Sunday suit. Hardly a greater mistake can be made in regard to expression, than to suppose that a uniform intensity of style is a proof of mental power. So far is this from being true, that it may safely be said that such intensity not only implies a want of truthfulness and simplicity, but even of earnestness and real force. Intensity is not a characteristic of nature, in spirit or in matter. The surface of the earth is not made up of mountains and valleys, but, for the most part, of gentle undulations. The ocean is not always in a rage, but, if not calm, its waves rise and fall with gentle fluctuation. Hurricanes and tempests are the extraordinary, not the usual, conditions of our atmosphere. Not only the strongest thinkers, but the most powerful orators, have been distinguished rather for moderation than for exaggeration in expression. The great secret of Daniel Webster’s strength as a speaker lay in the fact that he made it a practice to understate rather than to overstate his confidence in the force of his own arguments, and in the logical necessity of his conclusions. The sober and solid tramp of his style reflected the movements of an intellect that palpably respected the relations and dimensions of things, and to which exaggeration would have been an immorality. Holding that violence of language is evidence of feebleness of thought and lack of reasoning power, he kept his auditor constantly in advance of him, by suggestion rather than by strong asseveration, and by calmly stating the facts that ought to move the hearer, instead of by making passionate appeals, the man being always felt to be greater than the man’s[193] feelings. Such has been the method of all great rhetoricians of ancient and modern times.

The most effective speakers are not those who tell all they think or feel, but those who, by maintaining an austere conscientiousness of phrase, leave on their hearers the impression of reserved power. Great bastions of military strength must lie at rest in times of peace, that they may be able to execute their destructive agencies in times of war; and so let it be with the superlatives of our tongue. Never call on the “tenth legion,” or “the old guard,” except on occasions corresponding to the dignity and weight of those tremendous forces. Say plain things in a plain way, and then, when you have occasion to send a sharp arrow at your enemy, you will not find your quiver empty of shafts which you wasted before they were wanted.

[194]

It is a question of deep interest to all public speakers and writers, and one which has provoked not a little discussion of late years, whether the Saxon or the Romanic part of our language should be preferred by those who would employ “the Queen’s English” with potency and effect. Of late it has been the fashion to cry up the native element at the expense of the foreign; and among the champions of the former we may name Dr. Whewell, of Cambridge, and a modern rector of the University of Glasgow, whom De Quincey censures for an erroneous direction to the students to that effect. We may also add Lord Stanley,—one of the most brilliant and polished speakers in the British Parliament,—who, in an address some years ago to the students of the same university, after expressing his surprise that so few persons, comparatively, in Great Britain, have acquainted themselves with the origin, the history, and the gradual[195] development of that mother tongue which is already spoken over half the world, which is destined to yet further geographical extension, and which embodies many of the noblest thoughts that have ever issued from the brain of man,—adds: “Depend upon it, it is the plain Saxon phrase, not the term borrowed from Greek or Roman literature, that, whether in speech or writing, goes straightest and strongest to men’s heads and hearts.” On the other hand “the Opium-Eater,” commenting on a remark of Coleridge that Wordsworth’s “Excursion” bristles beyond most poems with polysyllabic words of Greek or Latin origin, asserts that so must it ever be in meditative poetry upon solemn, philosophic themes. The gamut of ideas needs a corresponding gamut of expressions; the scale of the thinking, which ranges through every key, exacts for the artist an unlimited command over the entire scale of the instrument he employs.

It has been computed, he adds, that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary; so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are those emotions disposed to expand themselves into any variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. “Pass from these narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects are so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which Shakespeare careers,—co-infinite with life itself,—yes, and with something more than life. Here is the other pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of diction? What is the lexis? Is it Saxon exclusively, or is it Saxon by preference? So far from that, the Latinity[196] is intense,—not, indeed, in his construction, but in his choice of words; and so continually are these Latin words used, with a critical respect to their earliest (and where that happens to have existed, to their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument I would rely for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to Shakespeare’s learning.... These ‘dictionary’ words are indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to subtlety of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakespeare was; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things into its sphere; not multiform; repulsion was the law of his intellect,—he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur,—unapproachable grandeur,—his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity into his diction.” De Quincey concludes, therefore, that the true scholar will manifest a partiality for neither part of the language, but will be governed in his choice of words by the theme he is handling.

This we believe to be the true answer to the question. The English language has a special dowry of power in its double-headed origin: the Saxon part of the language fulfils one set of functions; the Latin, another. Neither is good or bad absolutely, but only in its relation to its subject, and according to the treatment which the subject is meant to receive. The Saxon has nerve, terseness, and simplicity; it smacks of life and experience, and “puts small and convenient handles to things,—handles that are easy to grasp;” but it has neither height nor breadth[197] for every theme. To confine ourselves to it would be, therefore, a most egregious error. The truth is, it is no one element which constitutes the power and efficiency of our noble and expressive tongue, but the great multitude and the rich variety of the elements which enter into its composition. Its architectural order is neither Doric, Ionic, nor Corinthian, but essentially composite; a splendid mosaic, to the formation of which many ancient and modern languages have contributed; defective in unity and symmetrical grace of proportion, but of vast resources and of immense power. With such a wealth of words at our command, to confine ourselves to the pithy but limited Saxon, or to employ it chiefly, would be to practise a foolish economy,—to be poor in the midst of plenty, like the miser amid his money bags. All experiments of this kind will fail as truly, if not as signally, as that of Charles James Fox, who, an intense admirer of the Saxon, attempted to portray in that dialect the revolution of 1688, and produced a book which his warmest admirers admitted to be meagre, dry, and spiritless,—without picturesqueness, color, or cadence.

It is true that within a certain limited and narrow circle of ideas, we can get along with Saxon words very well. The loftiest poetry, the most fervent devotion, even the most earnest and impassioned oratory, may all be expressed in words almost purely Teutonic; but the moment we come to the abstract and the technical,—to discussion and speculation,—we cannot stir a step without drawing on foreign sources. Simple narrative,—a pathos resting upon artless circumstances,—elementary feelings,—homely and household affections,—these are all most happily expressed by the old Saxon vocabulary; but[198] a passion which rises into grandeur, which is complex, elaborate, and interveined with high meditative feelings, would languish or absolutely halt, without aid from the Romanic part of the vocabulary. If Anglo-Saxon is the framework or skeleton of our language, the spine on which the structure of our speech is hung,—if it is the indispensable medium of familiar converse and the business of life,—it no more fills out the full and rounded outline of our language, than the skeleton, nerves, and sinews form the whole of the human body. It is the classical contributions, the hundreds and thousands of Romanic words which during and since the sixteenth century have found a home in our English speech, that have furnished its spiritual conceptions, and endowed the material body with a living soul.

These words would never have been adopted, had they not been absolutely necessary to express new modes and combinations of thought. As children of softer climes and gentler aspect than our harsh but pithy Teutonic terms, they have been received into the English family of words, and add grace and elegance to the speech that has adopted them. The language has gained immensely by the infusion, not only in richness of synonym and the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but, more than all, in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. If the saying of Shakespeare, that

is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin words, would not the fine thought that

be greatly injured by substituting any other words for[199] “nice” and “courtesy”? Because Shakespeare’s “oak-cleaving thunderbolts” is so admirable, shall we fail to appreciate Milton’s “fulmined over Greece,” where the idea of flash and reverberation is conveyed, without that of riving and shattering? It has been observed that Wordsworth’s famous ode, “Intimations of Immortality,” translated into “Hints of Deathlessness,” would hiss like an angry gander. Instead of Shakespeare’s

say “her boundless manifoldness,” and would not the sentiment suffer in exact proportion with the music? With what terms equally expressive would you supply the place of such words as the long ones blended with the short in the exclamation of the horror-stricken Macbeth?—

As the poet Lowell justly asks, could anything be more expressive than the huddling epithet which here implies the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than does Æschylus its rippling sunshine? “‘Multitudinous sea,’—what an expression! You feel the wide weltering waste of confused and tumbling waves around you in that single word. What beauty and wealth of color too in ‘incarnadine,’ a word capable of dyeing an ocean! and then, after these grand polysyllables, how terse and stern comes in the solid Saxon, as if a vast cloud had condensed into great heavy drops,—the deep one red.”[20] Is it not plain that if you substitute any less massive words for the[200] sesquipedalia verba, the sonorous terms “multitudinous” and “incarnadine,” the whole grandeur of the passage would collapse at once?

Among the British orators of this century few have had a greater command of language, or used it with nicer discrimination, than Canning. What can be happier than the blending of the native and the foreign elements in the following eloquent passage? Most of the italicized words are Saxon:

In the famous passage in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” which has been pronounced the most musical in our language, nearly all the words are Saxon:

On the other hand, in the following passage from Napier’s history of the Peninsular War,—in which the impetuosity of the style almost rivals that of the soldiers it describes, and in reading which we seem almost to hear the tramp and the shouts of the charging squadrons, and the sharp rattle of the musketry,—how indispensable to the effect of the description are the Romance words, which we have italicized:

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It is true, as we have already said, that the Saxon has the advantage of being the aboriginal element, the basis, and not the superstructure, of the language; it is the dialect of the nursery, and its words therefore, being consecrated to the feelings by early use, are full of secret suggestions and echoes, which greatly multiply their power. Its words, though not intrinsically, yet to us, from association, are more concrete and pictorial than those derived from the Latin; and this is particularly true of many beautiful words we have lost. How much more expressive to us is “sea-robber” than “pirate”; “sand-waste” than “desert”; “eye-bite” than “fascinate”; “mill-race” than “channel”; “water-fright” than “hydrophobia”; “moonling” than “lunatic”; “show-holiness” than “hypocrisy”; “in-wit” than “conscience”; “gold-hoard” than “treasure”; “ship-craft” than “the art of navigation”; “hand-cloth” than “towel”; “book-craft” than “literature”! Therefore, as De Quincey says, “wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, presumes, or postulates the[202] ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the ‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry,—Young’s, for instance, or Cowper’s) the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the thinking,—there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that, while the flesh, the blood, and the muscle will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will be Anglo-Saxon.”

Let us be thankful, then, that our language has other elements than the Saxon, admirable as that is. The circumstances under which this element had its origin were such as to impart strength rather than beauty or elegance. The language of our continental forefathers was the language of fierce barbarians, hemmed in by other barbarous tribes, and having no intercourse with foreign nations, except when roving as sea wolves to plunder and destroy. It was the speech of a taciturn people living only in gloomy forests and on stormy seas, and was naturally, therefore, harsh and monosyllabic. It was full, nevertheless, of pithy, bold, and vigorous expressions, and needed only that its hardy stock should receive the grafts of sunnier and softer climes, to bear abundant and beautiful fruit. Let us be thankful that this union took place. Let us be grateful for that inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by engrafting our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dialect of Normandy, caused ultimately the whole opulence of Roman, and even of Grecian thought, to play freely through the veins of our native tongue. No doubt the immediate result was anything but pleasant. For a long time after the language[203] was thrown again into the crucible, Britons, Saxons and Normans talked a jargon fit neither for gods nor men. It was a chaos of language, hissing, sputtering, bubbling like a witch’s caldron. But luckily the Saxon element was yet plastic and unfrozen, so that the new elements could fuse with its own, thus forming that wondrous instrument of expression which we now enjoy, fitted fully to reflect the thoughts of the myriad-minded Shakespeare, yet, at the same time, with enough remaining of its old forest stamina for imparting a masculine depth to the sublimities of Milton or the Hebrew prophets, and to the Historic Scriptures that patriarchal simplicity which is one of their greatest charms.

We are aware that, in reply to all this, it may be asked, “Are not ninety-three words out of every hundred in the Bible Anglo-Saxon; and where are the life, beauty and freshness of our language to be found in so heaped a measure as in that ‘pure well of English,’ the Bible?” Nothing can be plainer or simpler than its vocabulary, yet how rich is it in all that concerns the moral, the spiritual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity! Is it logic that we ask? What a range of abstract thought, what an armory of dialectic weapons, what an enginery of vocal implements for moving the soul, do we find in the epistles of St. Paul! Is it rhetoric that we require? “Where,” in the language of South, “do we find such a natural prevailing pathos as in the lamentations of Jeremiah? One would think that every letter was written with a tear, every word was the noise of a breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted of sorrow, disciplined to grief from his infancy, one who never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan.”[204] Yet, while our translation owes much of its beauty to the Saxon, there are passages the grandeur of which would be greatly diminished by the substitution of Saxon words for the Latin ones. In the following the Latin words italicized are absolutely necessary to preserve one of the sublimest rhythms of the Bible: “And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, ‘Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’”

The truth is, the translators of the Bible, while they have employed a large percentage of Saxon words, have hit the golden mean in their version, never hesitating to use a Latin word when the sense or the rhythm demanded it; and hence we have the entire volume of revelation in the happiest form in which human wit and learning have ever made it accessible to man. This an English Catholic writer, a convert from the Anglican church, has mournfully acknowledged, in the following touching passage:—“Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness.... The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft[205] and gentle, and pure and penitent and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled.... In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”[21]

It is a very striking and suggestive fact that those very writers who award the palm for expressiveness to the Saxon part of our language, cannot extol the Saxon without the help of Latin words. Dr. Gregory tells us that when, in the company of Robert Hall, he chanced to use the term “felicity” three or four times in rather quick succession, the latter asked him: “Why do you say ‘felicity’? ‘Happiness’ is a better word, more musical, and genuine English, coming from the Saxon.” “Not more musical,” said Dr. Gregory. “Yes, more musical,—and so are all words derived from the Saxon, generally. Listen, sir: ‘My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.’ There is plaintive music. Listen again, sir: ‘Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.’ There is cheerful music.” “Yes, but ‘rejoice’ is French.” “True, but all the rest is Saxon; and ‘rejoice’ is almost out of time with the other words. Listen again: ‘Thou hast delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ All Saxon, sir, except ‘delivered.’ I could think of the word ‘tear’ till I wept.” But whence did Robert Hall get the words “musical” and “plaintive music”? Are they not from the Greek and the French? Is not this stabbing a man with his own weapons? It is a curious fact, that, in spite of this eulogy on Saxon[206] words, a more than ordinary percentage of the words used in Mr. Hall’s writings are of Romanic origin. Again, even Macaulay, one of the most brilliant and powerful of all English writers, finds it impossible to laud the Saxon part of the language without borrowing nearly half the words of his famous panegyric from the Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article on Bunyan, in a passage written in studied commendation of the “pure old Saxon” English, we find, omitting the particles and wheelwork, one hundred and twenty-one words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent, are classical or alien. In other words, this great English writer, than whom few have a more imperial command over all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon insufficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is obliged to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the most emphatic ones, from the imported stock!

It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles,—the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure,—must be Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson’s conversational language with that of his writings, has vividly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a highly Latinized diction. “The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. ‘When we were taken up stairs,’ says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides, ‘a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.’ This incident is recorded in his published Journey as follows: ‘Out of one of the beds on which[207] we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as black as a Cyclops from the forge.’ Sometimes,” Macaulay adds, “Johnson translated aloud. ‘The Rehearsal,’ he said, ‘has not wit enough to keep it sweet;’ then, after a pause, ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’” Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by straining it through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues, and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity rather springs from such words as are our own, and peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing to the language; for by pushing the artificial or classic system to an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, and led men to cultivate again the native idiom.

In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we would say to every young writer: Give no fantastic preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an affluence of synonyms and a nicety of discrimination which no homogeneous tongue can boast. To know how to use each in due degree, and on proper occasions,—when to aim at vigor and when at refinement of expression,—to be energetic without coarseness, and polished without affectation,—is the highest proof of a cultivated taste. Never use a Romanic word when a Teutonic one will do as well; for the former carries a comparatively cold and conventional signification to an English ear. Between the sounding Latin and the homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is often as much difference in respect to a power of awakening[208] associations, as between a gong and a peal of village bells. Pleasant though it be to read the pages of one who writes in a foreign tongue, as it is pleasant to visit distant lands, yet there is always the charm of home, with all its witchery, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of our fathers. Of the words that we heard in our childhood, there are some which have stored up in them an ineffable sweetness and flavor, which make them precious ever after; there are others which are words of might, of power,—old, brawny, large-meaning words, heavily laden with associations,—which, when they strike the imagination, awaken tender and tremulous memories, obscure, subtle, and yet most powerful. The orator and the poet can never employ these terms without great advantage; their very sound is often a spell “to conjure withal.” Our language is essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it is thoroughly so; all its grammatical forms, all its most common and necessary words, are still identical with that old mother tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips of Arminius and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and of Harold of England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles the Great. On the other hand, never scruple to use a Romanic word when the Saxon will not do as well; that is, do not over-Teutonize from any archaic pedantry, but use the strongest, the most picturesque, or the most beautiful word, from whatever source it may come. The Latin words, though less home-like, must nevertheless be deemed as truly denizen in the language as the Saxon,—as being no alien interlopers, but possessing the full right of citizenship. Some of them came so early into the language, and are, therefore, so thoroughly naturalized, that we hardly recognize them as foreign words, unless our[209] attention is particularly called to their origin. When a person speaks of “paying money” or “paying a debt,” we are no more sensible of an exotic effect than if he had spoken of “eating bread,” “drinking water,” or “riding a horse.” That “pay” is derived from pacare, “debt” from debitum, or “money” from (Juno) Moneta, scarcely suggests itself even to the scholar. Perhaps of all our writers Shakespeare may be deemed, in this matter of the choice of words, the student’s best friend. No one better knows how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weakness; and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar themes he uses simple words, and shows, by his total abstinence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it is on the broad pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and we shall find, if we regard him closely, that every feather is plucked from its wing.

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It was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same opinion,—sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “loom up through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is sometimes called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, “What a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible English!”—whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the[211] clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendentalists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual nakedness,—the convenient shelter for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates the shallow.

But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,—thoughts so swift and so many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one’s study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid declamation:

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So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:

De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.

“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express;—or rather, languages express nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning-like rapidity.”

The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,—gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term[213] men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, however “well-languaged” the thinker may be.

It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it, “la pensée devenue matière”; for the very expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols,—imperfect, too, at best,—and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to express,—shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.”

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Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in the lines of Boileau:

In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who among them could have answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination, which some English author has not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression,[215] which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell which some of these mighty magicians of language are able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement of the right words is the whole secret of the witchery,—a charm within the reach of any one of equal genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in riches,—exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in ‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says:

But we hear some one say,—is this the only secret of apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by one who would obtain a command of language? Does not Dr. Blair tell us to study the “Spectator,” if we would learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare that “whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes, and it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own advice. That it is well for a writer to familiarize himself with the best models of style (models sufficiently numerous to prevent that mannerism which is apt to result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar with but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary[216] depends largely on the company lie keeps; and without a proper vocabulary no man can he a good writer. Words are the material that the author works in, and he must use as much care in their selection as the sculptor in choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors. By listening to those who speak well, by profound study of the masterpieces of literature, by exercises in translation, and, above all, by frequent and careful practice in speaking and writing, he may not only enrich his vocabulary, learn the secret of the great writer’s charm, and elevate and refine his taste as he can in no other way, but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall become, at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient to the lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and telling, will then flow spontaneously, though the result of the subtlest art, like the waters of our city fountains, which, with much toil and at great expense, are carried into the public squares, yet appear to gush forth naturally. But to suppose that a good style can be acquired by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a supposition is based on the notion that fine writing is an addition from without to the matter treated of,—a kind of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged in, by one who has sufficient genius; whereas the brilliant or powerful writer is not one who has merely a copious vocabulary, and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something to say, and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off his compositions at a heat, or elaborates them with fastidious nicety and care, he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and that is to give forth what[217] is in him. From this very earnestness it follows that, whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the harmony of his style,—whether it blaze with the splendors of a gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical surprises,—he never makes these an end, but has always the charm of an incommunicable simplicity.

Such a person “writes passionately because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among the people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.”[22]

It follows from all this that there is no model style, and that the kind of style demanded in any composition depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of good writing is that it should be an expression of a man’s self,—a reflected image of his own character. If we know what the man is, we know what his style should be. If it[218] mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is not a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its periods, or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries of expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily, termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth long ago declared, the incarnation of thought. In Greek, the same word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,—and why? Because they cannot be divided; because thought and expression are one. They each co-exist, not one with the other, but in and through the other. Not till we can separate the soul and the body, life and motion, the convex and concave of a curve, shall we be able to divorce thought from the language which only can embody it. But allowing, for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing of ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility, simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess, just as all good clothing will have certain qualities in common. But for all men to clothe their thoughts in the same manner would be as foolish as for a giant to array himself in the garments of a dwarf, a stout man in those of a thin, or a brunette in those of a blonde. Robert Hall, when preaching in early life at Cambridge, England, for a short time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it. “I might as well have attempted,” said he, “to dance a hornpipe in the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could not sustain the load of words in which I tried to clothe them.”

It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are[219] obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are very slight,—so minute and subtle, as almost to defy characterization; yet, like the differences in musical styles which closely resemble each other, they are felt by the discerning reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of similar natures will have similar styles; but think of Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker’s style as slipshod,—of Dryden’s as feeble and obscure,—of Gibbon’s as mean and vulgar,—of Burke’s as timid and creeping,—of Carlyle’s as dainty and mincing,—of Emerson’s as diffuse and pointless,—or of Napier’s as lacking picturesqueness, verve, and fire?

There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant, that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one place, and shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unfordable, and there full of sand bars,—now hurrying on with rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed with forests and overhung with hills; another, always brimming with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, which rolls onward the same vast volume, with no apparent diminution, from Cairo to New Orleans. “Sydney Smith, concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how would Lord Bacon look in Smith’s sentences? How grandly[220] the soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and labyrinths of his involved and magnificent diction, waking musical echoes at every new turn and variation of its progress; but how could the thought of such a light trifler as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze, without being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly language of John Locke could hardly be translated into the terminology of Kant,—would look out of place in the rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin’s periods,—and would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart.”[23]

Not only has every original writer his own style, which mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as men wrote in the time of Louis XIV, their style would lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A woman who should write like Madame Sévigné would be ridiculous, because she is not Madame Sévigné. The more one’s writing smacks of his own character and of the manners of his time, the more widely must his style diverge from that of the writers who were models only because they excelled in manifesting in their works either the manners of their own age or their own character. Who would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, however successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mellifluous lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be dense with meaning and full of color; it must be suggestive, sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert[221] says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with manners,—“Le bon goût lui-même, en ce cas, permet qu’on s’écarte du meilleur goût, car le goût change avec les mœurs, même le bon goût.”

Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer has his own ideas and feelings,—his own conceptions, judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,—which are personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force and keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged in his language. It follows, therefore, as Ruskin says, that all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral: it becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear, if he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense of rhythm and order.

This sensibility of language to the impulses and qualities of him who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and aspirations which pass within him, so as to become the faithful expression of his personality, indicating the very pulsating and throbbing of his intellect, and attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow; and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where[222] thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language, to suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey, and to give forth an aroma which no analysis of word or expression reveals,—is one of the marvels of human speech. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own way, but is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of sentence and turns of expression, confesses his barrenness. The only way to make another’s style one’s own is to possess one’s self of his mind and soul. If we would reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we must first acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,” says Goldwin Smith, “is not a musical instrument into which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought; and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence is always the glow of truth.” As Sainte-Beuve says of the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s style,—“Prétendre imiter le precédé de diction du héros qui sut abréger Cæsar lui-même ... il convient d’avoir fait d’aussi grandes choses pour avoir le droit d’être aussi nu.”

It is not imitation, but general culture,—as another has said, the constant submission of a teachable, apprehensive mind to the influence of minds of the highest order, in daily life and books,—that brings out upon style its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitage. “So in the making of a fine singer, after the voice has been developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have been learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But the frequent hearing of the best music given by the best singers and instrumentalists,—the living in an atmosphere of art and literature,—will develop and perfect a[223] vocal style in one who has the gift of song; and, for any other, all the instruction of all the musical professors that ever came out of Italy will do no more than teach an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.”[24]

The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes master of the word fitted to express it, while he who has but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies not in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”—not in having a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for every idea,—but in having something that you earnestly wish to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch a grace of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of others. So he who has thoroughly possessed himself of his thought will not have to hunt through his dictionary for apt and expressive words,—a method which is but an outside remedy for an inward defect,—but will find language eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say,

and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble and airy servitors, will trip about him at command, and, in well-ordered files, fall aptly into their own places.”[224] It was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what it would not; and so will every writer, who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme, be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret of power or pathos.

The question has been sometimes discussed whether the best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass, only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it imparts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There are those who hold that when language is simply transparent,—when it comes to us so refined of all its dross, so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness in all its proportions,—we are at the very summit of the literary art. This is the character of Southey’s best prose, and of Paley’s writing, whose statement of a false theory is so lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers, however, who charm us by their language, apart from the ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has not admired, independently of the sense, its “jewels, five words long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time, sparkle forever”? There are passages in which the mere cadence of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear, though we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a brook tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. Sir Philip Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy[225] Chase without his blood being stirred as by the sound of a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he never repeated particular lines of delicate modulation without a shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not sensible of certain magical effects, altogether distinct from the thoughts, in some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s “Nightingale,” and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey?

Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly, the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted whether vividness, which was the ruling conception of the Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite as essential. Style, it has been well said, “is not only a medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must be bounded and defined by sharply cut lines.”[25]

A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet the thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme, and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite material through which we gaze from our windows on the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after undergoing the furnace,—as it was melted by fire before the rough particles of sand disappeared,—so it is with language. It is only a burning invention that can make it transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the[226] harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest emotions of the heart are visible.

How many human thoughts have baffled for generations every attempt to give them expression! How many opinions and conclusions are there, which form the basis of our daily reflections, the matter for the ordinary operations of our minds, which were toiled after perhaps for ages, before they were seized and rendered comprehensible! How many ideas are there which we ourselves have grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere just above us, and found the arm of our intellect just too short to reach them; and then comes a happier genius, who, in a lucky moment, and from some vantage ground, arrests the meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating phantom, drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and, having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession and heritage on mankind!

The arrangement of words by great writers on the printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrangement of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see how a great general marshals his regiments, it is certainly not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,—almost[227] crowding each other, so close are their files,—and all moving in irresistible array, without confusion or chasm, now holding some Thermopylæ of new truth against some scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient Malakoff of error, but always with “victory sitting eagle-winged on their crests.” A strain of music bursts on your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s dazzling files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their gorgeous ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming to the wind,” “breathing united force and fixed thought,” come moving on “in perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders.” Next comes Chillingworth, with his glittering rapier, all rhetorical rule and flourish, according to the schools,—passado, montanso, staccato,—one, two, three,—the third in your bosom. Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword, striking with the edge, while he pierces with the point, and stuns with the hilt, and wielding the ponderous weapon as easily as you would a flail. Next strides Johnson with elephantine tread, with the club of logic in one hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right and left with antithetical blows, and, “when his pistol misses fire, knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke, with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun; he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and ringing roar, missiles of every conceivable description,—chain shot, stone, iron darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes, and balls, that cut down everything before them. Close after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie,—carrying a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other,—steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “playing it[228] like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims. There is Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once with a tremendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running under his opponent’s guard, and stabbing him to the heart with the heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls with a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with fancy and pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli, armed with an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while it kills; Emerson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade of transcendental temper, snatched from the scabbard of Plato; and Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who “gangs his ain gait,” armed with an antique stone axe, with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you would drugs with a pestle and mortar.

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It is an interesting question connected with the subject of style, whether a knowledge of other languages is necessary to give an English writer a full command of his own. Among the arguments urged in behalf of the study of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of the commonest is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of those tongues to one who would speak and write his own language effectively. The English language, we are reminded, is a composite one, of whose words thirty per cent are of Roman origin, and nearly five per cent of Greek; and is it not an immense help, we are asked, to a full and accurate knowledge of the meanings of the words we use, to know their entire history, including their origin? Is not the many-sided Goethe an authority on this subject, and does he not tell us that “wer fremde sprache nicht kennt weiss nichts von seinen eigenen,”—“He who is acquainted with no foreign tongues, knows nothing of his own”? Have we not the authority of one[230] of the earliest of English schoolmasters, Roger Ascham, for the opinion that, “even as a hawke fleeth not hie with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue”?

In answering the general question in the negative, we do not mean to question the value or profound interest of philological studies, or to express any doubt concerning their utility as a means of mental discipline. The value of classical literature as an instrument of education has been decided by an overwhelming majority of persons of culture. We cannot, without prejudice to humanity, separate the present from the past. The nineteenth century strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws nutriment from them. Our whole literature is closely connected with that of the ancients, draws its inspiration from it, and can be understood only by constant reference to it. As a means of that encyclopedic culture, of that thorough intellectual equipment, which is one of the most imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance with foreign, and especially with classic, literature, is absolutely indispensable; for the records of knowledge and of thought are many-tongued, and even if a great writer could have wreaked his thoughts upon expression in another language, it is certain that another mind can only in a few cases adequately translate them. It is only by the study of different languages and different literatures, ancient as well as modern, that we can escape that narrowness of thought, that Chinese cast of mind, which characterizes those persons who know no language but their own, and learn to distinguish what is essentially, universally, and eternally good and true from what is the result of accident, local opinion, or the fleeting circumstances of the[231] time. It is useless to say that we know human nature thoroughly, if we know nothing of antiquity; and we can know antiquity only by study of the originals. Mitford, Grote, and Mommsen differ, and the reader who consults them with no knowledge of Greek or Latin is at the mercy of the last author he has perused. It has been frequently remarked that every school of thinkers has its mannerism and its mania, for which there is no cure but intercourse with those who are free from them. To study any class of writers exclusively is to bow slavishly to their authority, to accept their opinions, to make their tastes our tastes, and their prejudices our prejudices. Only by qualifying their ideas and sentiments with the thoughts and sentiments of writers in other ages, shall we be able to resist the intense pressure which is thus exercised upon our convictions and feelings, and avoid that mental slavery which is baser than the slavery of the body.

The question, however, is not about the general educational value of classical studies, but whether they are indispensable to him who would write or speak English with the highest force, elegance, and accuracy. I think they are not. In the first place, I deny that a knowledge of the etymologies of words,—of their meanings a hundred or five hundred years ago,—is essential to their proper use now. How am I aided in the use of the word “villain” by knowing that it once meant peasant,—in the use of “wince” by knowing that it meant kick,—in the use of “brat,” “beldam,” and “pedant,” by knowing that they meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and tutor,—in the use of “meddle,” by knowing that formerly it had no offensive meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own affairs? Am I more or less likely to use “ringleader”[232] correctly to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly spoken of by an old divine as “the ringleader of our salvation”? Shall I be helped in the employment of the word “musket” by knowing that it was once the name of a small hawk, or fly, or in the use of the word “tragedy” by knowing that it is connected in some way with the Greek word for a goat? Facts like these are of deep interest to all, and of high value to the scholar; but how is the knowledge of them necessary that one may speak or write well?

The question with the man who addresses his fellow-man by tongue or pen to-day, is not what ought to be, or formerly was, the meaning of a word, but, what is it now? Indeed, it may be doubted whether a reference to the roots and derivations,—the old original meanings of words,—which have grown obsolete by the fluctuations of manners, customs, and a thousand other causes, does not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to confusion, and prove rather a hindrance than a help to the correct use of our tongue. Words not only, for the most part, ride very slackly at anchor on their etymologies, borne, as they are, hither and thither by the shifting tides and currents of usage, but they often break away from their moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man’s antecedents may help us sometimes to estimate his present self: but the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty centuries ago may only mislead us as to its meaning now. Spenser uses the word “edify” in the sense of “to build”; but would any one speak of a house being edified to-day? “Symbol” and “conjecture” are words that etymologically have precisely the same signification; and the same is true of “hypostasis,” “substance,” and[233] “understanding,” derived respectively from the Greek, Latin, and Saxon; yet have either the two former, or the three latter words, as they are now used, the least similarity of meaning? Is it desirable to call a suffering man a “passionate” man,—to say with Bishop Lowth that “the Emperor Julian very ‘judiciously’ planned the overthrow of Christianity,”—to speak with Paley of the “judiciousness” of God,—and with Guizot of the “duplicity” of certain plays of Shakespeare (meaning their dual structure),—merely because we find these significations lying at the remote and dead roots of the words which we now employ in wholly different significations? The effect of a constant reference to etymology, in the use of words, is seen in the writings of Milton, whose use of “elate” for “lifted on high,” “implicit” for “entangled,” “succinct” for “girded,” “spirited” for “inspired,” and hundreds of other such perversions of language, may please the scholar who loves to crack philological nuts, but is fitted only to perplex, confound, and mislead the ordinary reader. It is seen still more plainly in the writings of Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, who not only imported Latin words by wholesale into the language, only giving them an anglicized form and termination, but sometimes employed in a new sense words already adopted into English, and used in their original sense. Thus Taylor uses “immured” for “encompassed,” “irritation” for “making void”; and in referring to “the bruising of the serpent’s head,” he ludicrously speaks of the “‘contrition’ of the serpent.” Again, he uses the word “excellent” for “surpassing,” and even perverts the meaning of the word so far as to speak of “an ‘excellent’ pain!”

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Will it be said that words become more vivid and picturesque,—that we get a firmer and more vigorous grasp of their meaning,—when, as Coleridge advises, we present to our minds the visual images that form their primary meanings? The reply is, that long use deadens us to the susceptibility of such images, and in not one case in a thousand, probably, are they noticed. How many college graduates think of a “miser” as being etymologically a “miserable” man, of a “savage” as one living in “a wood,” or of a “desultory” reader as one who leaps from one study to another, as a circus rider leaps from horse to horse? A distinguished poet once confessed that the Latin imago first suggested itself to him as the root of the English word “imagination” when, after having been ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define this most important term in the critical vocabulary of his art. “We have had to notice over and over again,” says Mr. Whitney in his late work on “The Life and Growth of Language,” “the readiness on the part of language-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie. This is one of the most fundamental and valuable tendencies in name-making; it constitutes an essential part of the practical availability of language.”

If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him who would command all the resources of our tongue, how comes it that the most consummate mastery of the English language is exhibited by Shakespeare? Will it be said that his writings prove him to have been a classical scholar; that they abound in facts and allusions which imply an intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of[235] Greek and Roman literature? We answer that this is a palpable begging of the question. By the same reasoning we can prove that scores of English authors, who, we know positively, never read a page of Latin or Greek, were, nevertheless, classical scholars. By similar logic we can prove that Shakespeare followed every calling in life. Lawyers vouch for his acquaintance with law; physicians for his skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge of the phenomena of mental disease; naturalists assert positively, from the internal evidence of his works, that he was a botanist and an entomologist; bishops, that he was a theologian; and claims have been put forth for his dexterity in cutting up sheep and bullocks. Ben Jonson tells us that he had “small Latin and less Greek”; another contemporary, that he had “little Latin and no Greek.” “Small Latin,” indeed, it must have been which a youth could have acquired in his position, who married and entered upon the duties of active life at eighteen. The fact that translations were abundant in the poet’s time, and that all the literature of that day was steeped in classicism, will fully account for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Greek and Roman history, as well as for the classical turns of expression which we find in his plays.

But it may be said that Shakespeare, the oceanic, the many-souled, was phenomenal, and that no rule can be based on the miracles of a cometary genius who has had no peer in the ages. What shall we say, then, to Izaak Walton? Can purer, more idiomatic, or more attractive English be found within the covers of any book than that of “The Complete Angler”? Among all the controversialists of England, is there one whose words hit harder,—are more like cannon-balls,—than those of Cobbett?[236] By universal concession he was master of the whole vocabulary of invective, and in narration his pen is pregnant with the freshness of green fields and woods; yet neither he, nor “honest Izaak,” ever dug up a Greek root, or unearthed a Latin derivation. Let any one compare a page of Cobbett with a page of Bentley, the great classical critic, and he will find that the former writer excels the latter alike in clearness and precision of terms, in grammatical accuracy, and in the construction of his periods. Again, what shall we say of Keats, who could not read a line of Greek, yet who was the most thoroughly classical of all English authors,—whose soul was so saturated with the Greek spirit, that Byron said “he was a Greek himself”? Or what will the classicists do with Lord Erskine, confessedly the greatest forensic orator since Demosthenes? He learned but the elements of Latin, and in Greek went scarcely beyond the alphabet; but he devoted himself in youth with intense ardor to the study of Milton and Shakespeare, committing whole pages of the former to memory, and so familiarizing himself with the latter that he could almost, like Porson, have held conversations on all subjects for days together in the phrases of the great English dramatist. It was here that he acquired that fine choice of words, that richness of thought and gorgeousness of expression, that beautiful rhythmus of his sentences, which charmed all who heard him.

If one must learn English through the Greek and Latin, how shall we account for the admirable,—we had almost said, inimitable,—style of Franklin? Before he knew anything of foreign languages he had formed his style, and gained a wide command of words by the study of the best English models. Is the essayist, Edwin P.[237] Whipple, a master of the English language? He was not, we believe, classically educated, yet few American authors have a greater command of all the resources of expression. His style varies in excellence,—sometimes, perhaps, lacks simplicity; but, as a rule, it is singularly copious, nervous, and suggestive, and clear as a pebbled rill. What is the secret of this command of our tongue? It is his familiarity with our English literature. His sleepless intellect has fed and fattened on the whole race of English authors, from Chaucer to Currer Bell. The profound, sagacious wisdom of Bacon, and the nimble, brilliant wit of Sydney Smith; the sublime mysticism of Sir Thomas Browne, and the rich, mellow, tranquil beauty of Taylor; Jonson’s learned sock and Heywood’s ease; the gorgeous, organ-toned eloquence of Milton, and the close, bayonet-like logic of Chillingworth; the sweet-blooded wit of Fuller, and Butler’s rattling fire of fun; Spenser’s voluptuous beauty, and the lofty rhetoric, scorching wit, and crushing argument of South; Pope’s neatness, brilliancy, and epigrammatic point, and Dryden’s energy and “full resounding line”; Byron’s sublime unrest and bursts of misanthropy, and Wordsworth’s deep sentiment and sweet humanities; Shelley’s wild imaginative melody, and Scott’s picturesque imagery and antiquarian lore; the polished witticisms of Sheridan, and the gorgeous periods of Burke,—with all these writers, and every other of greater or lesser note, even those in the hidden nooks and crannies of our literature, he has held converse, and drawn from them expressions for every exigency of his thought.

To all these examples we may add one, if possible, still more convincing,—that of the late Hugh Miller, who, as Professor Marsh justly remarks, had few contemporaneous[238] superiors as a clear, forcible, accurate, and eloquent writer, and who uses the most cumbrous Greek compounds as freely as monosyllabic English particles. His style is literally the despair of all other English scientific writers; yet it is positively certain that he was wholly ignorant of all languages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern provincial dialects.

As to the oft-quoted saying of Goethe, to which the objector is so fond of referring, we may say with Professor Marsh, that, “if by knowledge of a language is meant the power of expressing or conceiving the laws of a language in formal rules, the opinion may be well founded; but, if it refers to the capacity of understanding, and skill in properly using our own tongue, all observation shows it to be very wide of the truth.” Goethe himself, the same authority declares, was an indifferent linguist; he apparently knew little of the remoter etymological sources of his own tongue, or the special philologies of the cognate languages; and “it is difficult to trace any of the excellencies of his marvellously felicitous style to the direct imitation, or even the unconscious influence of foreign models.”[26] But he was a profound student of the great German writers of the sixteenth century; and hence his works are a test example in refutation of the theory that ascribes so exaggerated a value to classical studies.

It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light upon this subject, that the greatest masters of style in all the ages were the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any language but their own. In the most flourishing period of their literature, they had no grammatical system, nor did they ever make any but the most trivial researches[239] in etymology. “The wise and learned nations among the ancients,” says Locke, “made it a part of education to cultivate their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks counted all other nations barbarous, and had a contempt for their languages. And though the Greek learning grew in credit among the Romans, ... yet it was the Roman tongue that was made the study of their youth; their own language they were to make use of, and therefore it was their own language they were instructed and exercised in.” Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language, and one of the mightiest masters of expression the world has seen, knew no other tongue than his own. He modelled his style after that of Thucydides, whose wonderful compactness, terseness, and strength of diction were derived from no study of old Pelasgic, Phœnician, Persian, or other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech,—of which he knew nothing,—but were the product of his own marvellous genius wreaking itself upon expression.

No riches are without inconvenience. The men of many tongues almost inevitably lose their peculiar raciness of home-bred utterance, and their style, like their words, has a certain polyglot character. It has been observed by an acute Oxford professor that the Romans, in exact proportion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign languages, because it was his business to write German, and he thought that, by reading other languages, he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley’s defects to his continental associations, and said that his losses at home overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore,[240] who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language was justly attributed to their entire abstinence from every other. It is a saying as old as Cicero that women, being accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing those of men. “A man who thinks the knowledge of Latin essential to the purity of English diction,” says Macaulay, “either has never conversed with an accomplished woman, or does not deserve to have conversed with her. We are sure that all persons who are in the habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that the orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no means the most scrupulous about marring their native tongue. We could mention several members of Parliament, who never fail to usher in their scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords.”

Mr. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” does not hesitate to express the opinion that “our great English scholars have corrupted the English language by jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled dialect strives to hide.” He then adds that the principal reason why well educated women write and converse in a purer style than well educated men, is “because they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted for them.” To nearly the same effect is the declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic[241] propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the women’s letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on “Paradise Lost”? What prose style, always excepting that of the “Areopagitica,” is worse for imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved, half-rhythmical periods, “dragging, like a wounded snake, their slow length along”? Yet Bentley and Milton, whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek literature through and through, were probably the profoundest classical scholars that England can boast. Let the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and beware lest while he is wandering in fancy along the banks of the Meander, the Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drinking at the fountains of Helicon, he heedlessly and profanely trample under foot the beautiful, fragrant, and varied productions of his own land.

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Whatever opinion we have of the onomatopœia theory of the origin of language, so ably advocated by Farrar, Wedgwood, and Whitney, and so keenly ridiculed by Max Müller and others, it is impossible to deny that there is a natural relationship between thought and articulate sound,—in other words that certain sounds are the natural expression of certain sensations, and of mental states that are analogous to those sensations. All languages contain words which, in their very structure as composite sounds, more or less nearly resemble in quality, as soft or harsh, the sounds they designate. Such, in our language, are words representing animal sounds, as quack, cackle, roar, whinny, bellow, caw, croak, hiss, screech, etc.; words representing inarticulate human sounds, as laugh, cough, sob, shriek, whoop, etc.; sounds representing the collision of hard bodies, as clap, rap, tap, slap, etc.; sounds representing the collision of softer bodies, as dab, dub, thud, dub-a-dub; sounds representing motion through the air, as whizz, buzz, sough, etc.; sounds representing resonance, as clang, knell, ring, twang, etc.; and sounds representing[243] the motion of liquids, as clash, splash, dash, etc.[27] Even the various degrees of intensity in sound are expressed by modifications of the vowels,—high notes being represented by i, low, broad sounds by a, and diminution by the change of a or o to i; while continuance is expressed by a reduplication of syllables, as in murmur, etc., and by the addition of r and l, as in grab, grapple, wrest, wrestle, crack, crackle, dab, dabble. Animals are often named, upon the same principle, from their cries, birds especially, as we see in whip-poor-will, cuckoo, crow, quail, curlew, chough, owl, peewit, turtle, and many others. Again, we find that, independently of all confusion between a word and its associations, words having a harsh signification generally have a rough, harsh form, while words that denote something soft and pleasing, or sweet and tender, seem to breathe the very sensation they describe. The various passions of men naturally find expression in different sounds. Anger, vehemence, gentleness, etc., have each a language, a style of utterance, peculiar to themselves. Love and sorrow prompt smooth, melodious expressions, while violent emotions express themselves in words that are hurried, abrupt and harsh.

Were further proof wanting of this connection between external sounds and the processes of the mind, it is supplied in the strongest form by the fact that the different languages of the earth are stamped with marks of predominant local influences,—of the climate, scenery, and other physical conditions amid which they have been evolved. Rousseau, a century ago, called attention to the fact that the languages of the rich and prodigal South, being the[244] daughters of passion, are poetic and musical, while those of the North, the daughters of necessity, bear a trace of their hard origin, and express by rude sounds rude sensations. Who does not discern in the “soft and vowelled undersong” of the Italian the effect of a climate altogether different from that which has produced the stridulous, hirrient roughness of the German, the Dutch, and the Russian tongues? What but different geographical positions has made the language of the South-Sea Islanders so different from the dissonant clicks of the Hottentot, or the guttural polysyllables of the Cherokee? What other cause has made the language of the Tlascalans, the hardy and independent mountaineers dwelling in the high volcanic regions between Mexico and Vera Cruz, so much rougher than the polished Tezucan, or the popular dialect of the Aztecs, who are of the same family as the mountaineers? It is because the vocal organs, which are formed with exceeding delicacy, are affected by the most trifling physical influences, that English is spoken in Devonshire, England, with a splutter, and in Suffolk with an attenuated whine; that the language spoken in the northern counties is harsher than that spoken in the southern; and that in the mountainous regions we find a harsher dialect than we hear in the plains.

The manner in which words are formed by means of the imitations of natural sounds is illustrated by the word “cock” which is considered by etymologists to be an abbreviated imitation of chanticleer’s “cock-a-doodle-doo!” From the name of the animal, which is thus derived from its cry, and then generalized and made fruitful in derivatives, come, by allusion to the bird’s pride and strut, the words “coquette,” “cockade,” the “cock” of a gun, to[245] “cock” one’s eye, to “cock” the head on one side, a “cocked” hat, a “cock” of hay, a “cock”-swain, a “cock”-boat, the “cock” of a balance, and so on. It is in all probability by this method more than by any other, that words were produced in all the earlier stages of language, while the interjectional or exclamatory principle was, doubtless, next in importance.

It is sometimes objected to the theory of the extensive use of onomatopœia in the formation of language, that, were it true, we should find in the different languages of the earth a greater identity than actually exists in the terms expressive of physical facts. We should not find words so unlike as “bang” in English and pouf in French, employed to denote the sound of a gun; or γρύλλοϛ in Greek, quirquirra in the Basque, and sirsor in Chinese, used as names for the grasshopper. Why, if the theory in question be true, do we find a clap of thunder called in Sanscrit vaǵraǵvala, in Gaelic tàirneanach, in Bohemian hromobitz, in Icelandic thruma? Why does Coleridge sing of the nightingale’s “murmurs musical and sweet jug-jug,” while Tennyson says that “Whit, whit, whit, in the bush beside me, chirrupt the nightingale”?

The answer to this is, that man in naming things does not attempt to reproduce the identical sound which he hears, but artistically to reproduce it, or rather the impression which it has made, just as a painter often deviates from the actual colors of nature, and paints a picture more or less ideal, to enhance the effect of his art. The imitation is not a dull, literal echo of the sound, but an echo of the impression produced by it on the human intelligence; not a mere spontaneous repercussion of the perception received, but a repercussion modified organically by the[246] configurations of the mouth, and ideally by the nature of the analogy perceived between the sound and the object it expresses.[28] These repercussions, moreover, have been greatly blurred by the lapse of ages,—so much so, in many cases, as to be indistinguishable. Again, we must remember that the impressions made by the same sounds on different minds, and even on the same mind in different moods, will greatly vary; and that in naming objects from other characteristics than the sound, different characteristics are chosen by different peoples. According to the mental constitution, the preponderance of reason or imagination, for example, in the name-giver, or particular experiences in connection with the object, the designating quality which is deemed most fit to furnish the name for it will vary. Thus it happens that in Sanscrit there is a great variety of names for the elephant, such as the “hand-possessing” animal, the “toothed,” the “two-tusked,” the “great-toothed,” the “pounder,” the “roarer,” the “forest-roarer,” the “mailed,” the “twice-drinking,” the “mountain-born,” the “vagabond,” and many others. Thus it happens that in Arabic there are five hundred names for the lion, two hundred for the serpent, and not less than a thousand for the sword. The nightingale is said to have twenty distinct articulations; and if this is true, we should expect that in the different languages of Europe it would have different names. The old poets all speak of the nightingale’s song as “most melancholy,” but in modern verse we read of

So with thunder; the impression it makes upon hearers[247] varies with the varying qualities of their minds. To one man it is a dull rumble, to another a crackling explosion, and to a third a sudden flashing of light. As Archdeacon Farrar finely says: “What the eye sees and the ear hears depends in no small measure on the brain and the heart. The hieroglyphics of nature, like the inscriptions on the swords of Vathek, vary with every eye that glances on them; her voices, like the voice of Helen to the ambushed Greeks, take not one tone of their own, but the tone that each hearer loves best to hear.”[29]

Though a large part of language has been formed in the way I have named, yet it must be admitted that few words, compared with the whole number, bear upon their face unmistakable traces of their origin. The explanation of this lies in the great changes which phonetic corruption effects in language. No sooner do men coin a word, than they instinctively and unconsciously seek to rid it of its superfluous letters, and in other ways to economize the time and labor expended upon its utterance; and if they are obliged to use a new or strange word, which conveys no intrinsic meaning to them, they try to give it a meaning by so changing it as to remove its arbitrary character. (See “Words of Illusive Etymology,” in Chapter on the “Curiosities of Language.”) Thus words, in the course of ages, are rolled and rubbed out of shape, like the pebbles which are rubbed and rounded into smoothness by the sea waves on a shingly beach, until at last, though once plainly imitative, they lose all trace of their sensuous origin. Who, without knowledge of the intermediate diurnus and giorno, would for a moment suspect that jour could be derived from dies; or would suppose, if he had not traced[248] the etymology of “musket,” that it is derived from the onomatope, musso, “I buzz”? But, notwithstanding all this, and though in the progress of scientific culture language becomes more and more abstract,—that is, words having no natural connection with the thoughts are used more and more arbitrarily to represent them, just as algebraic signs represent mathematical relations,—still language never loses wholly its original imitative character. It will always, therefore, be a signal excellence of style when thought and emotion are represented by imitative expressions,—that is, by means of pictures or images of sensible things and events. The sound then points to the external object or event, or some sensible property or characteristic of it, and this, again, to the mental state or thought which it is taken to represent. It is for this reason that the poets, from Homer to Tennyson, abound in onomatopes,—in words and combinations of words in which the sound is an echo to the sense. These words are not only the most vivid, the most passionate, and the most picturesque, but they are the only ones which are instantly intelligible, and which possess an inherently graphic power. The power of poetry lies largely in the fact that, as Bunsen says, it “reproduces the original process of the mind in which language originates. The coinage of words is the primitive poem of humanity, and the imagery of poetry and oratory is possible and effective only because it is a continuation of that primitive process which is itself a reproduction of creation.”

Dyer, in his “Ruins of Rome,” thus exemplifies, in a passage quoted with praise by Johnson, the beauty and force imparted to style by the adaptation of the sounds to the object described:

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Not only single words, but an entire sentence, or a series of sentences, may resemble the sound represented; as in the following description of the abode of Sleep, in Spenser:

An intelligent writer reminds us that in reading this stanza, we ought to humor it with a corresponding tone of voice, lowering or deepening it, “as though we were going to bed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy night that had lulled us.” He suggests also that attention to the accent and pause in the last line will make us feel the depth and distance of the scene. Another illustration is furnished by the well known lines of Pope:

More striking still, in some respects, is Christopher Pitt’s translation of the corresponding passage in Vida’s “Art of Poetry”:

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The overflowing of the fourth line in this passage, the abrupt termination of the middle of the next line, the pause at “Be quick!” and the rapidity of the last four lines, are exceedingly happy. The illustration of rapid motion is far superior to the last long and sprawling line of Pope, in which the preponderance of liquids and sibilants detains the voice too much, while it is further impeded by the word “unbending,”—one of the most sluggish, as Johnson truly says, in the language.

How felicitous are “the hoarse Trinacrian shore” of Milton, and his description of the rapid motion and grating noise with which Hell’s gates are opened!—

What can be more expressive than this representation of the sounds of a battle in ancient times?—

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How effective is the pause after the word “shook” in these lines!—

Discordant sounds are vividly described in this line from “Lycidas”:

Two of the most perfect examples of imitative harmony in our literature are Wordsworth’s couplet,

and Byron’s vivid description of a storm among the mountains:

The numerous adaptations of sound to sense in Dryden’s “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day” are familiar to all. The following verse, from a song in his “King Arthur,” is less hackneyed:

No modern poet has made a more frequent or a more judicious use of onomatopœia than Tennyson. “The Bugle Song,” “The Brook,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” and “Break, Break, Break,” will at once occur to the poet’s admirers as masterpieces of representative art. The second stanza of the “Bugle Song” has few equals in ancient or modern verse:

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What can be more perfect of its kind than the picture of the shock of a melée, when the combatants

or the picture of a fleet of glass wrecked on a reef of gold, in the lines,—

Motion, as well as sound, has been happily imitated in language,—of which we have signal examples in the progress of Milton’s fiend, whose wearisome journey is portrayed by this artful arrangement of words:

and in Pope’s translation of the noted passage in the “Odyssey” describing Sisyphus:

In reading the second line, with its frequent recurrence of the aspirate, one seems to hear the giant pantings and groanings of Sisyphus; and a similar feeling is experienced in reading the following line:

Crowe, the now forgotten author of “Lewisdon Hill,” fairly rivals Pope in the closing line of a version of the foregoing passage in the “Odyssey”:

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An able literary critic,—the Rev. Robert A. Willmott,—has thus contrasted the majestic and easy verse of Dryden with the “mellifluence” of Pope. “‘The mellifluence of Pope,’ as Johnson called it, has the defect of monotony. Exquisite in the sweet rising and falling of its clauses, it seldom or never takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise. If Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden cage, and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement. But Dryden’s versification has the freedom and the freshness of the fields.... This is a great charm. He preserved the simple, unpremeditated graces of the earlier couplet, its confluence and monosyllabic close, while he added a dignity and a splendor unknown before. Pope’s modulation is of the ear; Dryden’s of the subject. He has a different tone for Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by the fountain side; for the startled knight, who listens to strange sounds within the glooms of the wood; and for the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a compliment.”

In the following lines from “Il Penseroso,” the effect combines both sound and motion:

How admirably does the quick and joyous movement of the following lines from “L’Allegro” portray the thing described!—

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Huge, unwieldy bulk, implying slowness of movement, has been happily expressed by Milton in the subjoined passages:

How inflated with bulky meaning are these lines from Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”!—

The greatest of the Greek and Roman poets have employed those “echoes of nature,” the onomatopes, as freely as the modern. Every schoolboy is familiar with the words in which Virgil describes thunder,—“Iterum atque iterum fragor intonat ingens,” as well as with those in which he represents the rapid clatter of horses’ hoofs:

and the vivid words in which Homer recalls the snapping of a sword:

Who does not catch the hurtling of battle in the same poet’s

and a murmur of ocean in

A similar effect is produced by his

the first word of which was perhaps intended to represent the roaring of the wave as it mounts on the sea-shore, and the second the hissing sound of a receding billow.

Virgil’s description of the Cyclopses toiling at the anvil; his picture of the Trojans laboriously hewing the foundations[255] of a tower on the top of Priam’s palace, and its sudden and violent fall; Ennius’s imitation of a trumpet blast; and the imitation by Aristophanes of the croaking of frogs,—will recur to the classic reader as other examples of the felicitous use of this figure by the Greek and Roman writers.

Paronomasia and alliteration owe their subtle beauty to the fact that in using them the writer has reference to words considered as sounds. Though an excess of either is offensive, yet, charily used, it adds a surprising force to expression. How much is the grandeur of the effect enhanced by the repetition of the s in the following lines from Macbeth!—

Dr. Johnson, in speaking of imitative harmony, observes that the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense “has produced many wild conceits and imaginary beauties.” This is only saying that the poet, like the painter, may exaggerate the importance of his accessories, while he gives too little heed to his main theme. But this is no argument against the legitimate use of any subtle or peculiar beauty in either the pictorial or the metrical art. There are many cases where it is impossible to use language which is specific, vivid, and appropriate, without employing imitative words. For the choice of these words no rules can be given; only an instinctive and exquisite taste can enable one to decide when they may be consciously used, and when they should be shunned. But he who can use onomatopœia with skill and judgment,—who can call into play, on proper occasions, that swift and subtle law of association whereby[256] a reproduction of the sounds at once recalls to the mind the images or circumstances with which they are connected,—has mastered one of the greatest secrets of the writer’s art. It was a saying of Shenstone, which experience confirms, that harmony and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in our judgments upon writing and writers; and, as a proof of this, he says that the lines of poetry, the periods of prose, and even the texts of Scripture we most frequently recollect and quote, are those which are preëminently musical. The following magical lines, which owe their interest to the cadence hardly less than to their imagery, illustrate Shenstone’s remark:

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On some of the great American rivers, where lumbering operations are carried on, the logs, in floating down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter, down the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his terms accurately performs for the dead-locked questions of the day. Half the controversies of the world are disputes about words. How often do we see two persons engage in what Cowper calls “a duel in the form of a debate,”—tilting furiously at each other for hours,—slashing with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hooking with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites,—with no apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means[258] by a term on which the discussion hinges; when it is found that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions,—that is, such as may be taken in two different meanings, using a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a controversy turns is unconsciously made to do double duty, and under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately to define such a term is to provide one’s self with a master-key which unlocks the whole dispute.

Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the Middle Ages? Though turning upon refinements of abstraction so subtle that one would think they never could stir in the human bosom the faintest breath of passion, the dispute roused the combatants on both sides to the most frenzied fury. Beginning with words, these two metaphysical sects came at last to blows, and not only shed blood, but even sacrificed lives for the question, whether an abstract name (as man, for example) represented any one man in particular, or man in general. Yet, properly understood, they maintained only opposite poles of the same truth; and were, therefore, both right, and both wrong. The Nominalists, it has been said, only denied what no one in his senses would affirm, and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair’s breadth parted those who, had they understood each other’s language, would have had no altercation. Again, who can tell how far the clash of opinions among political economists has been owing to the use in opposite[259] senses of a very few words? Had Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus, M’Culloch, Mill, begun framing their systems by defining carefully the meanings attached by them to certain terms used on every page of their writings,—such as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value, Supply and Demand, Over-trading,—it may be doubted whether they would not, to some extent, have harmonized in opinion, instead of giving us theories as opposite as the poles.

How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity of the word “money,” which, instead of being a simple and indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different meanings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or both together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for loan. A merchant is said to fail “for lack of money,” when, in fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or merchandise, money having no more to do with the matter than the carts or railway wagons by which the merchandise is transported. Again: money is spoken of as yielding “interest,” which it cannot do, since wherever it is, whether in a bank, in one’s pocket, or in a safe, it is dead capital. The confusion of the terms “wealth” and “money” gave birth to “the mercantile system,” one of the greatest curses that ever befell Europe. As in popular language to grow rich is to accumulate “money,” and to grow poor is to lose “money,” this term became a synonym for “wealth”; and, till recently at least, all the nations of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. To accomplish this they prohibited the exportation of money, gave bounties on the importation, and restricted the importation of other commodities, expecting thus to produce a “favorable balance of trade,”—a conduct as wise as that of a[260] shop-keeper who should sell his goods only for money, and hoard every dollar, instead of replacing and increasing his stock, or putting his surplus capital at interest. France, under Colbert, acted upon this principle, and Voltaire extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the accumulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for articles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The effect of this fallacy has been to make the nations regard the wealth of their customers as a source of loss instead of profit, and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a blessing, by which errors the improvement of Europe has been more retarded than by all other causes put together.

So with the mortal theological wars in which so much ink has been shed. Who has not read of the disputes between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies, when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed to make a man a heretic,—when every heresy produced a new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never would have been published but for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,—terms vital in theology,—the more they argued, the farther they were apart, and while fancying they were battling with real adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or fighting with shadows, till at last utter

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The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, touching the doctrine of “efficacious” and “sufficient” grace. The question was, “Whether all men received from God sufficient grace for their conversion.” The Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted that this sufficient grace would never be efficacious, unless accompanied by special grace. “Then the sufficient grace, which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms,” cried the Jesuits; “and, besides, it is a heresy!” We need not trace the history of the logomachy that followed, which Pascal has immortalized in his “Provincial Letters,”—letters which De Maistre denounces as “Les Menteurs,” but which the Jesuits found to be both “sufficient” and “efficacious” for their utter discomfiture. The theological student will recall the microscopic distinctions; the fine-spun attenuations; the spider-like threads of meaning; the delicate, infinitesimal verbal shavings of the grave and angelic doctors; how one subtle disputant, with syllabical penetration, would discover a heresy in his opponent’s monosyllables, while the other would detect a schism in his antagonist’s conjunctions, till finally, after having filled volumes enough with the controversy to form a library, the microscopic point at issue, which had long been invisible, was whittled down to nothing.