FOOTNOTES:
[18] Shedd’s “Homiletics.”
[19] Perhaps Choate justified himself by the authority of Burke, who sometimes harnessed five adjectives to a noun; e.g., in his diatribe against the metaphysicians, he says: “Their hearts are like that of the principal of evil himself,—incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.”
[CHAPTER VII.]
SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC?
I cannot admire the constant use of French or Latin words, instead of your own vernacular. My Anglo-Saxon feelings are wounded to the quick ... by such words as chagrin instead of “grief,” malediction instead of “curse,” etc.—Count De Montalembert, in letter to Mrs. Oliphant.
The devil does not care for your dialectics and eclectic homiletics, or Germanic objectives and subjectives; but pelt him with Anglo-Saxon in the name of God, and he will shift his quarters.—Rev. C. H. Spurgeon.
Words have their proper places, just like men;
We listen to, not venture to reprove,
Large language swelling under gilded domes,
Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan.—Landor.
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 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 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 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 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
“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,”
is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin words, would not the fine thought that
“Nice customs courtesy to kings,”
be greatly injured by substituting any other words for “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
“Age cannot wither her.
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,”
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?—
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No! this my hand will rather
The multitudinous sea incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”
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 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:
“Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses that float in the waters above your town is a proof that they are devoid of strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen, how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness—how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion—how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage—how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awake its dormant thunders. Such as is one of those magnificent machines when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, such is England itself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently causes her power to be put forth on an adequate occasion.”
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:
“The accusing spirit that flew up to Heaven’s chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in, and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever.”
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:
“Suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies: and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry; no sudden burst of undisciplined valor, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the different cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as, foot by foot, and with a horrid carnage, it was driven by the incessant vigor of the attack to the furthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French reserves, joining with the struggling multitudes, endeavor to sustain the fight; their efforts only increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went headlong down the ascent. The rain poured after in streams discolored with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal field.”
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 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 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.” 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 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 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 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 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 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.