When we recall the great influence which Spenser’s poetry has exerted on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism—a direct Platonism, and a Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages—combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is now contained in such words as love and beauty. Let us remember, then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly, we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.
The fact that a great deal of what had formerly been religious emotion was being secularized in this way does not, however, mean that the Church had ceased to play an all-important part in the life of the people. The Reformation seems, with its insistence on the inwardness of all true grace, to have been but another manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of gravity of human consciousness which we have already observed in the scientific outlook. That shift is, in a larger sense, the story told by the whole history of the Aryan languages. Thus religion itself, which had formerly been used only of external observances or of monastic orders, took on at about this time its modern, subjective meaning. Now it was that piety, differentiating itself from pity, began to acquire its present sense. Godly, godliness, and godless are first found in Tindale’s writings, and evangelical and sincere are words which have been noted by a modern writer as being new at this time and very popular among the Protestants. The great word Protestant itself was applied formerly to the German princes who had dissented from the decision of the Diet of Spires in 1529, and together with Reformation it now acquired its new and special meaning, while the old words, dissent and disagree, were transferred at about the same time from material objects to matters of opinion.
Another little group of words which appeared in the language at about this time is interesting in its suggestion that human emotions, like the forces of Nature, are usually accompanied by their equal and opposite reactions. The well-known phrases, odium theologicum and odium philosophicum, survive to remind us of a new kind of bitterness and hatred which had slowly been arising in men’s hearts, and which were also, it would seem, the gifts of Christianity and the Dark Ages. Very soon after the Reformation we find alongside the syllables of tenderness and devotion a very pretty little vocabulary of abuse. Bigoted, action, factious, malignant, monkish, papistical, pernicious, popery are among the products of the struggle between Catholic and Protestant; and the terms Roman, Romanist, and Romish soon acquired such a vituperative sense that it became necessary to evolve Roman Catholic in order to describe the adherents of that faith without giving offence to them. The later internecine struggles among the Protestants themselves gave us Puritan, precise, libertine—reminiscent of a time when “liberty” of thought was assumed as a matter of course to include licence of behaviour—credulous, superstitious, selfish, selfishness, and the awful Calvinistic word reprobate. It was towards the end of the Puritan ascendancy that atone and atonement (at-one-ment) acquired their present strong suggestion of legal expiation, and it may not be without significance that the odious epithet vindictive was then for the first time applied approvingly to the activities of the Almighty Himself.
As the language grows older, when all the principal tributaries have met at last in the main stream, it begins, unfortunately, to tell a less and less coherent tale of the people who speak it. The few large groups of new words and meanings which we have hitherto been tracing give way to a much greater number of small groups—or even of single words—for the vocabulary is now so capacious that important new movements of thought are likely to find the old terms adaptable to their use with very slight semantic alterations, or perhaps with the formal addition of an -arian, an -ism, or an -ology. These become accordingly harder to trace, and a book of these dimensions is obliged to select a word here and a word there in almost arbitrary fashion. It must be remembered, then, in this and the succeeding chapters that only a few of the tendencies and changes at work have been picked out for inspection, though it is probable that a study of words, which should be at the same time subtle and comprehensive enough, would throw some light on them all.
CHAPTER IX
PERSONALITY AND REASON
Prig. Pressure. Period. Consciousness. Character. Amusing. Sentimental. Arrange. Personify.
When Charles II returned from France to an England which had long been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of a middle-aged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new expressions such as to banter, to burlesque, to ridicule, to prim, travesty, badinage, and, above all, prig, helps to fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Country Wife. Even to those totally unacquainted with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits; weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to lay a finger on it, for it is a process in which the question of the meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact, one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the words they must use. “Morality”, said the late Sir Walter Raleigh, “colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers of distinction”; and so, when any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.
One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War:
Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity: shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness: voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good education: lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune.