SARDONIC SMILES.
A few words on the Γέλως σαρδάνιος, or Sardonius Risus, so celebrated in antiquity, may not be amiss, especially as the expression "a Sardonic smile" is a common one in our language.
We find this epithet used by several Greek writers; it is even as old as Homer's time, for we read in the Odyssey, μείδησε δὲ θυμῷ σαρδάνιον μάλα τοῖον, "but he laughed in his soul a very bitter laugh." The word was written indifferently σαρδάνιος and σαρδόνιος; and some lexicographers derive it from the verb σαίρω, of σέσηρα, "to show the teeth, grin like a dog:" especially in scorn or malice. The more usual derivation is from σαρδόνιον, a plant of Sardinia (Σαρδώ), which was said to distort the face of the eater. In the English of the present day, a Sardonic laugh means a derisive, fiendish laugh, full of bitterness and mocking; stinging with insult and rancour. Lord Byron has hit it off in his portraiture of the Corsair, Conrad:
"There was a laughing devil in his sneer,
That rais'd emotions both of rage and fear."
In Izaak Walton's ever delightful Complete Angler, Venator, on coming to Tottenham High Cross, repeats his promised verse: "it is a copy printed among some of Sir Henry Wotton's, and doubtless made either by him or by a lover of angling." Here is the first stanza:—
"Quivering fears, heart-tearing cares,
Anxious sighs, untimely tears,
Fly, fly to courts,
Fly to fond worldlings' sports,
Where strained Sardonic smiles are glosing still,
And Grief is forced to laugh against her will;
Where mirth's but mummery,
And sorrows only real be."
In Sir J. Hawkins's edition is the following note on the word "Sardonic" in these lines:
"Feigned, or forced smiles, from the word Sardon, the name of an herb resembling smallage, and growing in Sardinia, which, being eaten by men, contracts the muscles, and excites laughter even to death. Vide Erasmi Adagia, tit. RISUS."
Sardonic, in this passage, means "forced, strained, unusual, artificial;" and is not taken in the worst sense. These lines of Sir H. Wotton's bring to mind some of Lorenzo de Medici's in a platonic poem of his, when he contrasts the court and country. I quote Mr. Roscoe's translation:—
"What the heart thinks, the tongue may here disclose,
Nor inward grief with outward smiles is drest;
Not like the world—where wisest he who knows
To hide the secret closest in his breast."
The Edinburgh Review, July, 1849, in an article on Tyndale's Sardinia, says:
"The Sardonic smile, so celebrated in antiquity, baffles research much more than the intemperie, nor have modern physiologists thrown any light on the nature of the deleterious plant which produces it. The tradition at least seems still to survive in the country, and Mr. Tyndale adduces some evidence to show that the Ranunculus sceleratus was the herb to which these exaggerated qualities were ascribed. Some insular antiquaries have found a different solution of the ancient proverb. The ancient Sardinians, they say, like many barbarous tribes, used to get rid of their relations in extreme old age by throwing them alive into deep pits; which attention it was the fashion for the venerable objects of it to receive with great expressions of delight: whence the saying of a Sardinian laugh (vulgo), laughing on the wrong side of ones mouth. It seems not impossible, that the phenomenon may have been a result of the effects of 'Intemperie' working on weak constitutions, and in circumstances favourable to physical depression—like the epidemic chorea, and similar complaints, of which such strange accounts are read in medical books."