Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

And sweetly melt into just shade and light;

When mellowing years their full perfection give

And each bold figure just begins to live.

The treacherous colors the fair art betray,

And all the bright creation fades away.”

Not so with words. The language which embodies the ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and, when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men by the power of his thought,—not “from his urn,” like a dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. Look at the “winged words” of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long have they kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. “The ‘Venus’ of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the ‘chained Prometheus’ has outlived the ‘Cupid’ of Praxiteles, and the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.”

“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A word fitly spoken,” says Solomon, “is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” No artificer’s hand, however cunning, can contrive a mechanism comparable with those masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums one will sometimes see the analysis of a man,—that is, the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? “Scholars,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.”

The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”

Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s melodies,—

“Untwisting all the links that tie