3.—On Words And Style.
There are a number of words which, unlocked from their absurd imprisonment, would become extensively useful. We should say, for instance, 'condign honours,' 'condign treatment' (treatment appropriate to the merits), thus at once realizing two rational purposes, viz., giving a useful function to a word, which at present has none, and also providing an intelligible expression for an idea which otherwise is left without means of uttering itself except through a ponderous circumlocution. Precisely in the same circumstances of idle and absurd sequestration stands the term polemic. At present, according to the popular usage, this word has some fantastic inalienable connection with controversial theology. There cannot be a more childish chimera. No doubt there is a polemic side or aspect of theology; but so there is of all knowledge; so there is of every science. The radical and characteristic idea concerned in this term polemic is found in our own Parliamentary distinction of the good speaker, as contrasted with the good debater. The good speaker is he who unfolds the whole of a question in its affirmative aspects, who presents these aspects in their just proportions, and according to their orderly and symmetrical deductions from each other. But the good debater is he who faces the negative aspects of the question, who meets sudden objections, has an answer for any momentary summons of doubt or difficulty, dissipates seeming inconsistencies, and reconciles the geometrical smoothness of à priori abstractions with the coarse angularities of practical experience. The great work of Ricardo is of necessity, and almost in every page, polemic; whilst very often the particular objections or difficulties, to which it replies, are not indicated at all, being spread through entire systems, and assumed as precognita that are familiar to the learned student.
Writing to scholastic persons, I should be ashamed to explain, but hoping that I write to many also of the non-scholastic, and even of the unlearned, I rejoice to explain the proper sense of the word implicit. As the word condign, so capable of an extended sense, is yet constantly restricted to one miserable association, viz., that with the word punishment (for we never say, as we might say, 'condign rewards'), so also the word implicit is in English always associated with the word faith. People say that Papists have an implicit faith in their priests. What they mean is this: If a piece of arras, or a carpet, is folded up, then it is implicit according to the original Latin word; if it is unfolded and displayed, then it is explicit. Therefore, when a poor illiterate man (suppose a bog-trotter of Mayo or Galway) says to his priest (as in effect always he does say), 'Sir, I cannot comprehend all this doctrine; bless you, I have not the thousandth part of the learning for it, so it is impossible that I should directly believe it. But your reverence believes it, the thing is wrapt up (implicit) in you, and I believe it on that account.' Here the priest believes explicitly: he believes implicitly.
Modern.—Is it not shameful that to this hour even literary men of credit and repute cannot for the life of them interpret this line from 'As You Like It'—
'Full of wise saws and modern instances'?
A man as well read as Mr. Theodore Hook, and many a hundred beside, have seriously understood it to mean 'Full of old proverbs, the traditionary wisdom of nations, and of illustrative examples drawn from modern experience.' Nonsense! The meaning is, 'Full of old maxims and proverbs, and of trivial attempts at argument.' That is, tediously redundant in rules derived from the treasury of popular proverbs,' and in feeble attempts at connecting these general rules with the special case before him. The superannuated old magistrate sets out with a proverb, as for instance this, that the mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing. That proverb forms his major proposition. In his minor proposition he goes on to argue that the trespass charged upon the particular prisoner before him was very little bigger than a midge's wing. And then in his conclusion triumphantly he infers, Ergo, the prisoner at the bar is the mother of mischief. But says the constable, 'Please, your worship, the prisoner is a man, a hulking clodhopper, some six or seven feet high, with a strong black beard.' 'Well, that makes no odds,' rejoins his worship; 'then he's the father of mischief. Clerk, make out his mittimus.'
The word 'instance' (from the scholastic instantia) never meant example in Shakespeare's age. The word 'modern' never once in Shakespeare means what it means to us in these days. Even the monkish Latin word 'modernus' fluctuated in meaning, and did not always imply recens, neotericus; but in Shakespeare never. What does it mean in Shakespeare? Once and for ever it means trivial, inconsiderable. Dr. Johnson had too much feeling not to perceive that the word 'modern' had this value in Shakespeare's acceptation; practically, he felt that it availed for that sense, but theoretically he could not make out the why. It means that, said the Doctor; but feebly and querulously, like one sick of the pip, he added, 'Yet I don't know why.' Don't you? Now, we do. The fact is, Dr. Johnson was in a fit of the dismals at that time; he had recently committed a debauch of tea, having exceeded his usual allowance by seventy-five cups, so that naturally he had a 'curmurring' in the stomach. Else he could not have failed to see what we are now going to explain with a wet finger. Everybody is aware that to be material is the very opposite of being trivial. What is 'material' in a chain of evidence, or in an argument, can never be trifling. Now, therefore, if you can find a word that will flatly contradict this word material, then you have a capital term for expressing what is trivial. Well, you find in the word immaterial all that you are seeking. 'It is quite immaterial' will suit Mr. Touts's purpose just as well as 'It is really of no consequence, of no consequence in the world.' To say in a law court that the objection is immaterial is otherwise to say that it is trivial. Here, then, is the first step: to contradict the idea of material is effectually to express the idea of trivial. Let us now see if we can find any other contradiction to the idea of material, for one antithesis to that idea will express as well as any other antithesis the counterpole of the trivial. Now, clearly the substance of a thing, the material out of which it is made, is oftentimes of great importance by comparison with its shape, fashion, or mode. It is of value in your eyes to know whether your family plate is in substance of gold or of silver; but whether such a vessel is round or square, ornamented with a wreath of acanthus or ivy, supported by tigers or by fawns, may be a trivial consideration, or even worse; for the fashion of your plate, after it has once become obsolete, may count against you for so much loss as something that will cost a good deal of money to alter. Here, then, is another contradiction to the material, and therefore another expression for the trivial: matter, as against vacancy or the privation of matter, yields the antithesis of material or immaterial, substantial and unsubstantial; matter, as against form, yields the antithesis of substance and shape, or otherwise of material and modal—what is matter and what is the mere modification of matter, its variation by means of ornament or shape.
The word 'modern' is therefore in Shakespeare uniformly to be pronounced with the long o, as in the words modal, modish, and never with the short o of mŏderate, mŏdest, or our present word mŏdern. And the law under which Shakespeare uses the word is this: whatsoever is so trivial as to fall into the relation of a mere shape or fleeting mode to a permanent substance, that with Shakespeare is modish, or (according to his form) modern.[29] Thus, a weak, trivial argument (or instantia, the scholastic term for an argument not latent merely, or merely having the office of sustaining a truth, but urged as an objection, having the polemic office of contradicting an opponent) is in Shakespeare's idiom, when viewed as against a substantial argument, a modern argument.
Again, when Cleopatra, defending herself against the perfidy of her steward, wishes to impress upon Octavius that any articles which she may have kept back from the inventory of her personal chattels are but trifles, she expresses this by saying that they are but