Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.”

In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who among them could have answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination, which some English author has not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression, which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell which some of these mighty magicians of language are able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement of the right words is the whole secret of the witchery,—a charm within the reach of any one of equal genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in riches,—exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in ‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says:

“Be thine to seek the honest gain,

No shallow-sounding fool;

Sound sense finds utterance for itself,

Without the critic’s rule;

If to your heart your tongue be true,

Why hunt for words with much ado?”

But we hear some one say,—is this the only secret of apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by one who would obtain a command of language? Does not Dr. Blair tell us to study the “Spectator,” if we would learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare that “whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes, and it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own advice. That it is well for a writer to familiarize himself with the best models of style (models sufficiently numerous to prevent that mannerism which is apt to result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar with but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary depends largely on the company lie keeps; and without a proper vocabulary no man can he a good writer. Words are the material that the author works in, and he must use as much care in their selection as the sculptor in choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors. By listening to those who speak well, by profound study of the masterpieces of literature, by exercises in translation, and, above all, by frequent and careful practice in speaking and writing, he may not only enrich his vocabulary, learn the secret of the great writer’s charm, and elevate and refine his taste as he can in no other way, but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall become, at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient to the lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and telling, will then flow spontaneously, though the result of the subtlest art, like the waters of our city fountains, which, with much toil and at great expense, are carried into the public squares, yet appear to gush forth naturally. But to suppose that a good style can be acquired by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a supposition is based on the notion that fine writing is an addition from without to the matter treated of,—a kind of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged in, by one who has sufficient genius; whereas the brilliant or powerful writer is not one who has merely a copious vocabulary, and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something to say, and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off his compositions at a heat, or elaborates them with fastidious nicety and care, he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and that is to give forth what is in him. From this very earnestness it follows that, whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the harmony of his style,—whether it blaze with the splendors of a gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical surprises,—he never makes these an end, but has always the charm of an incommunicable simplicity.

Such a person “writes passionately because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among the people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.”[22]