William Mathews

“ No two things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the “inarticulate ones” of the world, there may be, for aught we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand, pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to themselves, they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons” forever. ”

“ At elections they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of patriotism,—to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down the throats of the people,—that the voters, whom the old party hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. ”

“ How often has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a sublime yet undecided purpose,—a word of sympathy opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect of heaven,—a word of truth fired a man of action to do a deed which has saved a nation or a cause,—or a genius to write words which have gone ringing down the ages! ”

“ If Anglo-Saxon is the framework or skeleton of our language, the spine on which the structure of our speech is hung,—if it is the indispensable medium of familiar converse and the business of life,—it no more fills out the full and rounded outline of our language, than the skeleton, nerves, and sinews form the whole of the human body. It is the classical contributions, the hundreds and thousands of Romanic words which during and since the sixteenth century have found a home in our English speech, that have furnished its spiritual conceptions, and endowed the material body with a living soul. ”

“ Power they certainly have. They are alive with sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look at you with strangeness or with response. They are even creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic whom it deserts. ”

“ The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,—in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,—are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,—the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,—is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. ”

“ But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,—thoughts so swift and so many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? ”

“ There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.” ”

“ Language is not only “fossil poetry,” but it is also fossil philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre-Adamite rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are locked up truths once known but now forgotten,—the thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues and vices of men long since in their graves. Language is, in short, “the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated man is too often one who knows more of language than of idea,—more of the husk than of the kernel,—more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a heap of symbols,—of mere counters,—with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has not an eagle. ”

“ Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! ”

“ Our sentences are not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative signs, which can put another only into a partial possession of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought of another man, even one who uses language with the utmost nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individuality, his entire past history; we must interpret and supplement his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking ”

“ Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s charm ”

“ Many of our orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,—raising an ocean to drown a fly,—loading cannon to shoot at humming-birds. Thought and expression are supplanted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sentences,—the value of a thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,—we have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous elocution. ”

“ The language of an old and highly civilized people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max Müller has observed, since the beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent an entirely new word. ”

“ In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression,—ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,—are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers possess over language. ”

“ We are no friends to hypercriticism, or to that finical niceness which cares more for the body than for the soul of language, more for the outward expression than for the thought which it incarnates. Too much rigor is as unendurable as laxity. It is, no doubt, possible to be so over-nice in the use of words and the construction of sentences as to sap the vitality of our speech. We may so refine our expression, by continual straining in our critical sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flexibility of our noble English tongue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who has not read of the disputes between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies, when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed to make a man a heretic,—when every heresy produced a new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never would have been published but for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. ”

“ All experience shows that the traduttore must necessarily be tradittore,—the translator, a traducer of the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric. The special imagination of the poet, it has been well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings of words ”

“ It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse, whether oral or written, that it is the subdued expression of conviction and feeling, when the speaker or writer, instead of giving vent to his emotions, veils them in part, and suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, that is the most powerful. It is the man who is all but mastered by his excitement, but who, at the very point of being mastered, masters himself,—apparently cool when he is at a white heat,—whose eloquence is most conquering. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we would say to every young writer: Give no fantastic preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an affluence of synonyms and a nicety of discrimination which no homogeneous tongue can boast. To know how to use each in due degree, and on proper occasions,—when to aim at vigor and when at refinement of expression,—to be energetic without coarseness, and polished without affectation,—is the highest proof of a cultivated taste. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by straining it through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues, and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity rather springs from such words as are our own, and peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing to the language; for by pushing the artificial or classic system to an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, and led men to cultivate again the native idiom. ”

“ Men have borne names which they have felt to be stigmas, an active cause of discouragement and failure to their dying day; and they have borne names, inherited from their ancestors, which have lifted them above themselves, by bringing them into fellowship with a past of high effort or generous sacrifice.
In politics, it has long been observed that no orator can compare for a moment in effect with him who can give apt and telling nicknames. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise and irresistible. ”

“ De Quincey strikingly observes: “People that have practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infinite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word even. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the august faculty of sight in a human eye,—the heavens shall be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself,—and the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment of a council. ”

“ The whole inner life of men moulds the forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules of speech into their service ”

“ In naming a child his individuality should, first of all, be recognized. Instead of being invested with the cast-off appellation of some dead ancestor, as musty as the clothes he wore,—a ghostly index-finger forever pointing to the past,—he should have a fresh name, free from all ridiculous or unpleasant associations, congruous with his probable destiny, and suggestive of a history to be filled, a life of usefulness to be lived. ”