[CHAPTER II.]
THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores.... Non potest alius esse ingenio, alius animo color.—Seneca.
The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the surface.—Pascal.
Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in accounts, ciphers and symbols pass for real sums, so, in the course of human affairs, words and names pass for things themselves.—Robert South.
Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.—Isaiah v, 20.
The fact that a man’s language is a part of his character,—that the words he uses are an index to his mind and heart,—must have been noted long before language was made a subject of investigation. “Discourse,” says Quintilian, “reveals character, and discloses the secret disposition and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks teach that as a man lived so would he speak.” Profert enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta detegit. Nec sine causa Græci prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiam dicere. When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or cogs broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, while the disorder continues, will continually betray its own infirmity. So when a man’s mind is disordered or his heart corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his language an expression corresponding to the irregularities within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as well as in the face. As physicians judge of the state of the body, so may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except under peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or delicacy seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart,—the pet words, phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing our strongest appetencies and antipathies,—will rise most frequently to the lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not exaggerate in saying that no glass renders a man’s form and likeness so true as his speech. “As a man speaks, so he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he has a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and hypocritical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in his speech. The door keeper of an alien household said to Peter, “Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth thee”; and so, in spite of all masks and professions, in spite of his reputation, the essential nature of every person will stamp itself on his language. How often do the words and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally to the church, prays long and loud in public, and attends rigidly to every outward observance, betray in some mysterious way,—by some impalpable element which we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,—the utter worldliness of his character! How frequently do words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution, affect us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and unreality of the speaker’s character! How often does the use of a single word flash more light upon a man’s motives and principles of action, give a deeper insight into his habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biography! How often, when a secret sorrow preys upon the heart, which we would fain hide from the world by a smiling face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or parenthetical word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is flowing across the door sill, telling of murdered hopes within.
Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by our English vocabulary,—embracing over a hundred thousand distinct terms,—each man selects his own favorite expressions, his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is part of the essential difference between him and all other men; and in the verbal stock in trade of each individual we should find, could it once be laid open to us, a key that would unlock many of the deepest mysteries of his humanity,—many of the profoundest secrets of his private history. How often is a man’s character revealed by the adjectives he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these words of themselves reveal the temperament. The conscientious man weighs his words as in a hair-balance; the boaster and the enthusiast employ extreme phrases, as if there were no degree but the superlative. The cautious man uses words as the rifleman does bullets; he utters but few words, but they go to the mark like a gunshot, and then he is silent again, as if he were reloading. The dogmatist is known by his sweeping, emphatic language, and the absence of all qualifying terms, such as “perhaps” and “it may be.” The fact that the word “glory” predominates in all of Bonaparte’s dispatches, while in those of his great adversary, Wellington, which fill twelve enormous volumes, it never once occurs—not even after the hardest won victory,—but “duty,” “duty,” is invariably named as the motive for every action, speaks volumes touching their respective characters. It was to work out the problem of self-aggrandizement that Napoleon devoted all his colossal powers; and conscience, responsibility, and kindred terms, seem never to have found their way into his vocabulary. Men, with their physical and moral force, their bodily energies, and their passions, prejudices, delusions, and enthusiasms, were to him but as fuel to swell the blaze on the altar of that ambition of which he was at once the priest and deity. Of duties to them he never for a moment dreamed; for, from the hot May-day of Lodi to the autumnal night of Moscow, when he fled the flaming Kremlin, he seemed unconscious that he was himself a created and responsible being.