FOOTNOTES:
[22] “The Idea of a University,” by J. H. Newman.
[23] “Essays and Reviews,” by Edwin P. Whipple.
[24] “Words and Their Uses,” by Richard Grant White.
[25] “Homiletics and Pastoral Theology,” by W. G. Shedd, D.D.
[CHAPTER IX.]
THE SECRET OF APT WORDS—(continued).
“To acquire a few tongues,” says a French writer, “is the task of a few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of a life.”—Colton.
When words are restrained by common usage to a particular sense, to run up to etymology, and construe them by a dictionary, is wretchedly ridiculous.—Jeremy Collier.
Where do the words of Greece and Rome excel,
That England may not please the ear as well?
What mighty magic’s in the place or air,
That all perfection needs must centre there?—Churchill.
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 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 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” 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 “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!”
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 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? 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. 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 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 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, 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 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.