The French Revolution of 1789 was fruitful of examples showing the ease with which ignorant men are led and excited by words whose real import and tendency they do not understand, and illustrating the truth of South’s remark, that a plausible and insignificant word in the mouth of an expert demagogue is a dangerous and destructive weapon. Napoleon was aware of this, when he declared that “it is by epithets that you govern mankind.” Destroy men’s reverence for the names of institutions hoary with age, and you destroy the institutions themselves. “Pull down the nests,” John Knox used to say, “and the rooks will fly away.” The people of Versailles insulted with impunity in the streets, and at the gates of the Assembly, those whom they called “Aristocrats”; and the magic power of the word was doubled, when aided by the further device of calling the usurping Commons the “National Assembly.” When the title of Frondeurs, or “the Slingers,” was given to Cardinal de Retz’s party, he encouraged its application, “for we observed,” says he, “that the distinction of a name healed the minds of the people.” The French showman, who, when royalty and its forms were abolished in France, changed the name of his “Royal Tiger,” so called,—the pride of his menagerie,—to “National Tiger,” showed a profound knowledge of his countrymen and of the catchwords by which to win their patronage.
A nickname is the most stinging of all species of satire, because it gives no chance of reply. Attack a man with specific, point-blank charges, and he can meet and repel them; but a nickname baffles reply by its very vagueness; it presents no tangible or definite idea to the mind, no horn of a dilemma with which the victim can grapple. The very attempt to defend himself only renders him the more ridiculous; it looks like raising an ocean to drown a fly, or firing a cannon at a wasp, to meet a petty gibe with formal testimony or elaborate argument. Or, if your defence is listened to without jeers, it avails you nothing. It has no effect,—does not tell,—excites no sensation. The laugh is against you, and all your protests come like the physician’s prescription at the funeral, too late.
The significance of nicknames is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, as a late writer suggests, you cannot properly hate a man of different opinions from your own till you have labelled him with some unpleasant epithet. In theological debates, a heretic may be defined as a man with a nickname. Till we have succeeded in fastening a name upon him, he is confounded among the general mass of the orthodox; his peculiarities are presumably not sufficient to constitute him into a separate species. But let the name come to us by a flash of inspiration, and how it sticks to the victim through his whole life! There is a refinement of cruelty in some nicknames which resembles the barbarity of the old heathen persecutors, who wrapped up Christians in the skins of wild beasts, so that they might be worried and torn in pieces by dogs. “Do but paint an angel black,” says an old divine, “and that is enough to make him pass for a devil.” On the other hand, there are loving nicknames, which are given to men by their friends,—especially to those who are of a frank, genial, companionable nature. The name of Charles Lamb was ingeniously transformed into the Latin diminutive Carlagnulus; and the friends of Keats, in allusion to his occasional excess of fun and animal spirits, punned upon his name, shortening it from John Keats into “Junkets.”
That prince of polemics, Cobbett, was a masterly inventor of nicknames, and some of his felicitous epithets will not be forgotten for many years to come. Among the witty labels with which he ticketed his enemies were “Scorpion Stanley,” “Spinning Jenny Peel,” “the pink-nosed Liverpool,” “the unbaptized, buttonless blackguards” (applied to the Quakers), and “Prosperity Robinson.” The nickname, “Old Glory,” given by him, stuck for life to Sir Francis Burdett, his former patron and life-long creditor. “Æolus Canning” provoked unextinguishable laughter among high and low; and it is said that of all the devices to annoy the brilliant but vain Lord Erskine, none was more teasing than being constantly addressed by his second title of “Baron Clackmannon.” One of the literary tricks of Carlyle is to heap contemptuous nicknames upon the objects he dislikes; as, “The Dismal Science” of Political Economy, “The Nigger Question,” “Pig Philosophy,” “Horse-hair and Bombazine Procedure,” etc.
The meaning of nicknames, as of many other words, is often a mystery. Often they are apparently meaningless, and incapable of any rational explanation; yet they are probably due, in such cases, to some subtle, imperceptible analogy, of which even their authors were hardly conscious, When the English and French armies were encamped in the Crimea, they, by common consent, called the Turks “Bono Johny;” but it would not be easy to tell why. A late French prince was called “Plomb-plomb”; yet there is no such word in the French language, and different accounts have been given of its origin. To explain, again, why nicknames have such an influence,—so magical an effect,—is equally difficult; one might as well try to explain why certain combinations of colors or musical sounds impart an exquisite pleasure. All we know, upon both these points, is, that certain persons are doomed to be known by a nickname; at the time of life when the word-making faculty is in the highest activity, all their acquaintances are long in labor to hit off the fit appellation; suddenly it comes like an electric spark, and it is felt by everybody to be impossible to think of the victim without his appropriate designation. In vain have his godfathers and godmothers called him Robert or Thomas; “Bob,” or “Tom,” or something wholly unrelated to these, he is fated to be to the end of his days.
Many of the happiest of these headmarks, which stick like a burr from the moment they are invented, are from sources utterly unknown; they appear, they are on everybody’s lips, but whence they came nobody can tell. One of the commonest ways in which nicknames are suggested is by some egregious blunder which one makes. Thus, I knew a schoolboy to be asked who demolished Carthage, and upon his answering “Scorpio Africanus,” to be promptly nicknamed “Old Scorp.” Another way is by a glaring contradiction between a man’s name and his character,—when he is ridiculed as sailing under false colors, or claiming a merit which does not belong to him. There is in all men, as Trench has observed, a sense of the significance of names,—a feeling that they ought to be, and in a world of absolute truth would be, the utterance of the innermost character or qualities of the persons that bear them; and hence nothing is more telling in a personal controversy than the exposure of a striking incongruity between a name and the person who owns it. I have been told that the late President Lincoln, on being introduced to a very stout person by the name of Small, remarked, “Small, Small! Well, what strange names they do give men, to be sure! Why, they’ve got a fellow down in Virginia whom they call Wise!” In the same spirit, Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church, being engaged in controversy with one Vigilantius, i.e., “the Watchful,” about certain vigils which the latter opposed, stigmatized him as Dormitantius, or “the Sleeper.” But more frequently the nickname is suggested by the real name where there is no such antagonism between them,—where the latter, as it is, or by a slight change, can be made to contain a confession of the ignorance or folly of the bearer. Thus, Tiberius Claudius Nero, in allusion to his drunkenness, was called “Biberius Caldius Mero”; and the Arians were nicknamed “Ariomanites.” What can be happier in this way than the “Brand of Hell,” applied to Pope Hildebrand; the title of “Slanders,” affixed by Fuller to Sanders, the foul-mouthed libeller of Queen Elizabeth; the “Vanity” and “Sterility,” which Baxter coined from the names of Vane and Sterry; and the term “Sweepnet,” which that skilful master of the passions, Cicero, gave to the infamous Prætor of Sicily, whose name, Verres (verro), was prophetic of his “sweeping” the province,—declaring that others might be partial to the jus verrinum (which might mean verrine law or boar sauce), but not he? On the other hand, the nickname Schinokephalos, or “onion-head,” which the Athenians gave to Pericles on account of the shape of his head, was unredeemed by wit or humor.
The people of Italy are exceedingly fond of nicknames; and it is an odd peculiarity of many which they give that the persons so characterized are known only by their nicknames. In the case of many celebrated persons the nickname has wholly obliterated the true name. Thus Guercino “Squint Eye,” Masaccio “Dirty Tom,” Tintoretto “The Little Dyer,” Ghirlandaio “The Garland-Maker,” Luca del Robbia “Luke of the Madder,” Spagnoletto “The Little Spaniard,” and Del Sarto “The Tailor’s Son,” would scarcely be recognized under their proper names of Barbieri, Guido, Robusti, Barbarelli, Corradi, Ribera, and Vannachi. The following, too, are all nicknames of eminent persons derived from their places of birth: Perugino, Veronese, Aretino, Pisano, Giulio Romano, Correggio, Parmegiano.[40]
There is probably no country, unless it be our own, in which nicknames have flourished more than in England. Every party there has had its watchwords with which to rally its members, or to set on its own bandogs to worry and tear those of another faction; and what is quite extraordinary is, that many of the names of political parties and religious sects were originally nicknames given in the bitterest scorn and party hate, yet ultimately accepted by the party themselves. Thus “Tory” originally meant an Irish freebooting bog-trotter,—an outlaw who favored the cause of James II; and “Whig” is derived from the Scotch name for sour milk, which was supposed aptly to characterize the disposition of the Republicans. “Methodists” was a name given in 1729, first to John and Charles Wesley at Oxford, on account of their close observance of system and method in their studies and worship, and afterward to their followers. So in other countries, the “Lutherans” received their name, in which they now glory, from their antagonists. “Capuchin” was a jesting name given by the boys in the streets to certain Franciscan monks, on account of the peaked and pointed hood (capuccio) which they wore. The Dominicans gloried all the more in their name when it was resolved by their enemies into Domini canes; they were proud to acknowledge that they were, indeed, “the Lord’s watchdogs,” who barked at the slightest appearance of heresy, and strove to drive it away. Finally, the highest name which any man can bear was originally a nickname given by the idle and witty inhabitants of Antioch, in Asia Minor. In the early days of Christianity, when the new faith was preached with all the vigor of intense conviction, and the enthusiasm attendant upon a fresh experiment in private and social morality; when the apostles were said to be “turning the world upside down,” and were, indeed, promulgating a religion which was soon to revolutionize civilized society; there was, for a long time, great difficulty in finding a name for the new faith and its professors. The apostles, indeed, had no name for it whatever; they spoke of the nascent religion simply as “the way,” or “this way.” Paul says that he “persecuted this way unto the death,” and at Ephesus, it is said, “there arose no small stir about the way.” By the Jews the converts to the new religion were called “Nazarenes,” a term of contempt which they could not, of course, adopt. The Jews believed in the coming of a Messiah, though they rejected the true one; but the appearance of any Christ was a wholly new and original idea to the pagan world, and the constant repetition of the striking name of Christ in the discourses of the missionaries at Antioch, would have naturally suggested to the keen-witted Greek pagans around them to call them after the name of their Master. The Antiochenes were famous in all antiquity for their nicknames, for inventing which they had a positive genius; and it is altogether probable,—indeed, there is hardly a doubt,—that the name “Christian” was originally a term of ridicule or of reproach, given by them to the first converts from paganism. It was, in fact, a nickname, designed to intimate that the teachers and the taught, who talked continually about their Christ, were a set of fanatics who deserved only to be laughed at for their infatuation. But what was thus meant as an insult was instantly accepted by the believers in Christ as a title of honor, implying that devotion to Christ was not an accident, but the very essence and soul of their religion. “Nothing else,” says Canon Liddon, “expressed so tersely the central reason for the fierce antagonism of the pagans to the new religion: it was the religion of the divine, but crucified Christ; nothing else expressed so adequately the Christian sense of what Christianity was and is,—a religion not merely founded by Christ, but centring in Christ, so that, apart from Him, it has, properly speaking, no existence, so that it exists only as an extension and perpetuation of His life.”
The Dutch people long prided themselves on the humiliating nickname of Les Gueulx, “the Beggars,” which was given in 1566 to the revolters against the rule of Philip II. Margaret of Parma, then governor of the Netherlands, being somewhat disconcerted at the numbers of that party, when they presented a petition to her, was reassured by her minister, who remarked to her that there was nothing to be feared from a crowd of beggars. “Great was the indignation of all,” says Motley, “that the state councillor (the Seigneur de Berlaymont) should have dared to stigmatize as beggars a band of gentlemen with the best blood of the land in their veins. Brederode, on the contrary, smoothing their anger, assured them with good humor that nothing could be more fortunate. ‘They call us “beggars!”’ said he; ‘let us accept the name. We will contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the king, till compelled to wear the beggar’s sack.... Long live the beggars!’ he cried, as he wiped his beard, and set the bowl down; ‘Vivent les gueulx!’ Then, for the first time, from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell, which was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace or hovel, as the deeds of the ‘wild beggars’ the ‘wood beggars,’ and the ‘beggars of the sea,’ taught Philip at last to understand the nation which he had driven to madness.”
In like manner the French Protestants accepted and gloried in the scornful nickname of the “Huguenots,” as did the two fierce Italian factions in those of “Guelphs,” or “Guelfs,” and “Ghibellines.” It was in the twelfth century, at the siege of Weinsberg, a hereditary possession of the Welfs, that the war-cries, “Hurrah for Welf!” “Hurrah for Waibling!” which gave rise to the party names, “Welfs” and “Waiblings” (Italicé, “Guelfs” and “Ghibellines”), were first heard. Even the title of the British “Premier,” or “Prime Minister,” now one of the highest dignity, was at first a nickname, given in pure mockery,—the statesman to whom it was applied being Sir Robert Walpole, as will be seen by the following words spoken by him in the House of Commons in 1742: “Having invested me with a kind of mock dignity, and styled me a ‘Prime Minister,’ they (the opposition) impute to me an unpardonable abuse of the chimerical authority which they only created and conferred.” It is remarkable that the nickname Cæsar has given the title to the heads of two great nations, Germany and Russia (kaiser, czar).