To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang. For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth. Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of slang, which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world’s dictionaries and of compass to the world’s range of thought. Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of property. For this reason, and by no special masonic precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque confession of the culprit, made in proud humility, that he “clicked a red ’un” must needs be interpreted, to save the good faith of the court, into the vaguer and more general speech of the classic convention. Those who dislike to have their watches stolen find that the poorest language of common life will serve their simple turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabulary that has grown around an art. They can abide no rendering of the fact that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-owners. They carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing all glitter and finish in the matter of expression.
This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street, secure of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship. Of the same lazy stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many. For the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite; the average talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called on to describe or to define, must constantly be furnished with the materials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes and dislikes. Why should he alienate himself from the sympathy of his fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression of his emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of the day is on all lips, and what was “vastly fine” last century is “awfully jolly” now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate. Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast its fashion-plates. The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, as they run hither and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the prize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of good breeding. Like those famous modern poets who are censured by the author of Paradise Lost, the talkers of slang are “carried away by custom, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them.” The poverty of their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their paltry conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events. Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or social circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do the work of talk. There are few families, or groups of familiars, that have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted by affection, passing current only within those narrow and privileged boundaries. This wealth is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material such “as, buried once, men want dug up again.” A few happy words and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the wider world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into oblivion with the other perishables of the age.
A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence, then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on the other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark rather of authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one age. The accretions of time bring round a word many reputable meanings, of which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain. It is a counsel of perfection—some will say, of vainglorious pedantry—but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn to the head, and he who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from the fourteenth. To know them is of service, if only for the piquancy of avoiding them. But many times they cannot wisely be avoided, and the auspices under which a word began its career when first it was imported from the French or Latin overshadow it and haunt it to the end.
Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like “nice,” “quaint,” or “silly,” of all flavour of their origin, as if it were of no moment to remember that these three words, at the outset of their history, bore the older senses of “ignorant,” “noted,” and “blessed.” It may be granted that any attempt to return to these older senses, regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry; but a delicate writer will play shyly with the primitive significance in passing, approaching it and circling it, taking it as a point of reference or departure. The early faith of Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of “silly”; the history of the word is contained in that cry of St. Augustine, Indocti surgunt et rapiunt coelum, or in the fervent sentence of the author of the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet “quaint” to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of “nice” to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous and diverse enough; it must not be cruelly burdened with all the laudatory occasions of an undiscriminating egotism.
It would be easy to cite a hundred other words like these, saved only by their nobler uses in literature from ultimate defacement. The higher standard imposed upon the written word tends to raise and purify speech also, and since talkers owe the same debt to writers of prose that these, for their part, owe to poets, it is the poets who must be accounted chief protectors, in the last resort, of our common inheritance. Every page of the works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with examples of felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible word. Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a word only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and etymological meaning. Thus the seraph Abdiel, in the passage that narrates his offer of combat to Satan, is said to “explore” his own undaunted heart, and there is no sense of “explore” that does not heighten the description and help the thought. Thus again, when the poet describes those
Eremites and friars,
White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery,
who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise of Fools, he seems to invite the curious reader to recall the derivation of “trumpery,” and so supplement the idea of worthlessness with that other idea, equally grateful to the author, of deceit. The strength that extracts this multiplex resonance of meaning from a single note is matched by the grace that gives to Latin words like “secure,” “arrive,” “obsequious,” “redound,” “infest,” and “solemn” the fine precision of intent that art can borrow from scholarship.
Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Milton himself is bold to write “stood praying” for “continued kneeling in prayer,” and deft to transfer the application of “schism” from the rent garment of the Church to those necessary “dissections made in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built.” Words may safely veer to every wind that blows, so they keep within hail of their cardinal meanings, and drift not beyond the scope of their central employ, but when once they lose hold of that, then, indeed, the anchor has begun to drag, and the beach-comber may expect his harvest.
Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart of sameness, such is the estate of language. According as they endeavour to reduce letters to some large haven and abiding-place of civility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugal tendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writers dubbed Classic or Romantic. The Romantics are individualist, anarchic; the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or invent strange jargons. They furbish up old words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it. They are at odds with the idiom of their country in that it serves the common need, and hunt it through all its metamorphoses to subject it to their private will. Heretics by profession, they are everywhere opposed to the party of the Classics, who move by slower ways to ends less personal, but in no wise easier of attainment. The magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice done to it by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol of a world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards order and reason;—this was surely an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice. Both have been freely given, and the end is yet to seek. The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship with the ancients and the œcumenical authority of letters? Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil. It was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of language cried out against the monotony of their Utopia, and the crowds who were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams went straying after the feathered chiefs of the rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come, themselves received apotheosis and the honours of a new motley pantheon. The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as “a dead Romantic.”
In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed, through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories. Even the irresistible novelty of personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or in Shakespeare had as good not be. He is a replica and a shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was never guilty of tautology. This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality. Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends, should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences. There words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless, scentless, dried weeds, a hortus siccus of proper names, each individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea. No wind blows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to discompose the melancholy workers at their task of tying Latin labels on to withered sticks. Definition and division are the watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and creation. Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no value to the stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a study of anatomy, or an architect by a knowledge of the strains and stresses that may be put on his material. The exact logical definition is often necessary for the structure of his thought and the ordering of his severer argument. But often, too, it is the merest beginning; when a word is once defined he overlays it with fresh associations and buries it under new-found moral significances, which may belie the definition they conceal. This is the burden of Jeremy Bentham’s quarrel with “question-begging appellatives.” A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as “codification” and “international,” Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it of those “affections of the soul” wherein Burke had found its highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of such a word as “innovation,” it was hardly prejudice in general that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own figures,—although he had the courage of his convictions, and laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his style,—bears witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded weapons. He will pack his text with grave argument on matters ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, in the notes with a pleasant description of the flesh and the spirit playing leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holy precincts of the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough from his own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words. The claim of reason and logic to enslave language has a more modern advocate in the philosopher who denies all utility to a word while it retains traces of its primary sensuous employ. The tickling of the senses, the raising of the passions, these things do indeed interfere with the arid business of definition. None the less they are the life’s breath of literature, and he is a poor stylist who cannot beg half-a-dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous revolt.