Making the green one red.”
As the poet Lowell justly asks, could anything be more expressive than the huddling epithet which here implies the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than does Æschylus its rippling sunshine? “‘Multitudinous sea,’—what an expression! You feel the wide weltering waste of confused and tumbling waves around you in that single word. What beauty and wealth of color too in ‘incarnadine,’ a word capable of dyeing an ocean! and then, after these grand polysyllables, how terse and stern comes in the solid Saxon, as if a vast cloud had condensed into great heavy drops,—the deep one red.”[20] Is it not plain that if you substitute any less massive words for the sesquipedalia verba, the sonorous terms “multitudinous” and “incarnadine,” the whole grandeur of the passage would collapse at once?
Among the British orators of this century few have had a greater command of language, or used it with nicer discrimination, than Canning. What can be happier than the blending of the native and the foreign elements in the following eloquent passage? Most of the italicized words are Saxon:
“Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses that float in the waters above your town is a proof that they are devoid of strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen, how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness—how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion—how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage—how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awake its dormant thunders. Such as is one of those magnificent machines when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, such is England itself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently causes her power to be put forth on an adequate occasion.”
In the famous passage in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” which has been pronounced the most musical in our language, nearly all the words are Saxon:
“The accusing spirit that flew up to Heaven’s chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in, and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever.”
On the other hand, in the following passage from Napier’s history of the Peninsular War,—in which the impetuosity of the style almost rivals that of the soldiers it describes, and in reading which we seem almost to hear the tramp and the shouts of the charging squadrons, and the sharp rattle of the musketry,—how indispensable to the effect of the description are the Romance words, which we have italicized:
“Suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies: and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry; no sudden burst of undisciplined valor, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the different cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as, foot by foot, and with a horrid carnage, it was driven by the incessant vigor of the attack to the furthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French reserves, joining with the struggling multitudes, endeavor to sustain the fight; their efforts only increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went headlong down the ascent. The rain poured after in streams discolored with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal field.”
It is true, as we have already said, that the Saxon has the advantage of being the aboriginal element, the basis, and not the superstructure, of the language; it is the dialect of the nursery, and its words therefore, being consecrated to the feelings by early use, are full of secret suggestions and echoes, which greatly multiply their power. Its words, though not intrinsically, yet to us, from association, are more concrete and pictorial than those derived from the Latin; and this is particularly true of many beautiful words we have lost. How much more expressive to us is “sea-robber” than “pirate”; “sand-waste” than “desert”; “eye-bite” than “fascinate”; “mill-race” than “channel”; “water-fright” than “hydrophobia”; “moonling” than “lunatic”; “show-holiness” than “hypocrisy”; “in-wit” than “conscience”; “gold-hoard” than “treasure”; “ship-craft” than “the art of navigation”; “hand-cloth” than “towel”; “book-craft” than “literature”! Therefore, as De Quincey says, “wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, presumes, or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the ‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry,—Young’s, for instance, or Cowper’s) the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the thinking,—there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that, while the flesh, the blood, and the muscle will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will be Anglo-Saxon.”