FOOTNOTES:
[13] Ulhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94.
[14] Mill’s “Logic.”
[15] Sermons, by Rev. F. W. Robertson.
[16] Professor J. H. Newman.
[17] “Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson.”
[CHAPTER VI.]
SOME ABUSES OF WORDS.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words.—Proverbs xvii, 27.
Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions, and you know him.... He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great or small.—Lavater.
Words are women; deeds are men.—George Herbert.
He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.—Ray.
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 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 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 “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 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
“Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne,”
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 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 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 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 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 couched in plain and temperate language, too often bristle
“With terms unsquared
Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped,
Would seem hyperboles.”
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 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, 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 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 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 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:—
“Over all there hung a cloud of fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper to the ear,
‘The place is haunted!’”
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 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 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.
“You should not speak to think, nor think to speak;
But words and thoughts should of themselves outwell
From inner fulness; chest and heart should swell
To give them birth. Better be dumb a week
Than idly prattle; better in leisure sleek
Lie fallow-minded, than a brain compel
To wasting plenty that hath yielded well,
Or strive to crop a soil too thin and bleak.
One true thought, from the deepest heart upspringing,
May from within a whole life fertilize;
One true word, like the lightning sudden gleaming,
May rend the night of a whole world of lies.
Much speech, much thought, may often be but seeming,
But in one truth might boundless ever lies.”