Patronymic

“ The fact that, with but one or two exceptions, the usual pet addenda, ‘kin,’ ‘cock,’ and ‘ot,’ or ‘et,’ are absolutely wanting, or even the patronymic ‘son,’ shows decisively that they cannot be numbered among what we must call the popular names of the period. Introduced here and there in the community at large, they struggled on for bare existence, and have descended to us as surnames in their simple and unaltered form. ”

“ We may here briefly refer to a class of patronymics which, although small from the first, took its place, as if insensibly, among our hereditary surnames. It is a class of occupative or professional names, with the filial desinence attached. There is nothing wonderful 65in the fact of the existence of such. The wonder is that there are not more of them. ”

“ I am resolved that so far as lies in me, they shall not be; and I may say for those whose genius and learning have made the Messenger what it is, that they, too, are thus resolved. Let the hand of liberal patronage be opened and let the gifted minds pour forth their treasures, and the work shall prosper and shall be worthy of patronage. For myself, I desire only a fair compensation for my labors, on which I depend; and the rest shall gladly be given to the cause of literature and whatever credit there may be in the effort to promote its improvement and extension. ”

“ Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue, even to their legitimate posterity, and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my Lord, than the register of a marriage, or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character, by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. ”

“ Truly the word of a Queen and the patronage of the great are mighty factors in the world of letters!"
"As men of letters are fast learning, my young friend," replied the Duke with a smile. "Genius without a patron is like (as some wag remarked not long since) 'Paradise Lost' without the devil! ”

“ A hundred years ago, everbody patronized distinguished literary people, and in doing so displeased and degraded them. Today, the distinguished literary people patronize everybody else, and in so doing delight and elevate them—so that no questions can be raised as to whom the natural right of patronage belongs.
Perhaps some future historian of literature, seeking for the period of the change, will stop at the record of this reception, to read over the names of our guests, and he will write it down that the Papyrus belonged completely to the new order of things. ”

“ The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it—an invisible hand is suspended over it. ”

“ When the link between patronage and learning was entire, then all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it. When the great Somers was at the helm, patronage was fashionable among our nobility. The middle ranks of mankind, who generally imitate the Great, then followed their example ”

“ There is no denying that, while containing many excellent scenes, much shrewd observation of character, Patronage drags, and the reader is weary ere he has done. It is both artificial and common-place, and what is more unfortunate still, the whole fabric is built upon a confusion of premises. Its purpose is to demonstrate the evils that result from patronage, and to show how much more successful are those who rely only upon their own exertions. ”

“ That the rigid and definite dividing line between patrician and plebeian, which still exists so much more markedly upon the Continent, can only be traced most sketchily in this country is due to two causes— (1) the fact that in early days, when Society was slowly evolving itself, many younger sons of gentle families embarked upon commercial careers, natural family affection, because of such action, preventing a rigid exclusion from the ranks of Society of every one tainted by commerce ”

“ In each time circumstances and mutual sympathies brought men of letters into close and familiar contact both with one another and with men of affairs and of social eminence. And, while the relation of patronage to literature is not in any circumstances favourable to original invention, and though, except under most advantageous conditions, its tendency is to produce a tameness of spirit, or even an insincerity of tone, yet it has its compensating advantages. ”

“ People united by contiguity, and by the blind sentiment of kinship not yet brought into explicit consciousness, might mark themselves by a badge, and might thence derive a name, and, later, might invent a myth of their descent from the object which the badge represented. ”

“ I hate Traditions, ever since my narrow father, After my frolic with his tenant's girl, Made younger elder son, violated the whole Tradition of our land, and left his heir, Born, happily, with some sense of art, to live By brush and pencil. ”

“ It is the Patron, and the Price of all Wickedness: It Blinds all Eyes, and stops all Ears, from the Prince to the very Begger. It Corrupts Faith and Justice; and in one Word, ’tis the very Pick-Lock, that opens the way into all Cabinets and Councils. ”

“ They are well acquainted with the technical qualities of every master’s touch; and when their discrimination fails, plume themselves on indisputable tradition, and point triumphantly to the documents of pictorial genealogy. ”

“ It’s the basis of life, elemental. The very air you breathe is patronage. It costs you nothing, and you give nothing adequate in return. To characterize patronage as un-American, stultifying, is preposterous. ”

“ Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by the bards. They did much to make language what it is to the world to-day.
4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of pictorial record, human tradition was able to become fuller and much more exact. Verbal tradition, which had hitherto changed from age to age, began to be fixed. Men separated by hundreds of miles could now communicate their thoughts. An increasing number of human beings began to share a common written knowledge{v1-231} and a common sense of a past and a future. ”

“ Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers. The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis--what a transfiguration effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. ”

“ Meanwhile we need only notice that the patronage of authors did not mean the patronage of learned divines or historians, but merely the patronage of men who could use their pens in political warfare, or at most of men who produced the kind of literary work appreciated in good society. ”

“ It would be difficult to find a more perfect instance of the spontaneous, evolutional character of tradition contended for by what, in default of a better name, must be called the anthropological school of folk-lorists. ”

“ And is it possible, that a system like this could find patronage in the metropolis of New England, in that proud centre of arts and sciences, and in the proudest halls of learning and of legislation? Examine the gentleman's credentials, and take your choice between the adoption of his plan, as a great improvement in the management of syllables, and the certain conclusion that great men may be greatly duped respecting them. ”

“ It is tradition, the oral handing on of oral knowledge, that is the means by which the most of our folklore material has been, and is being, preserved. Tradition as a process deserves examination. We ought to know what are its conditions, its limits, its possibilities. ”

“ Construct your own table of the Patriarchs,—your own analysis of the Law,—your own descent of the Kings,—your own enumeration of the Miracles. A pedigree full of faults, made by yourself, will do you more good than the most accurate table drawn up by another: but if you are at all attentive and clever, it will not be full of faults.—You will perhaps make the parables 56 instead of 30: you will have gained 26 by your honest industry. Nay, keep a record of your difficulties, if you please ”

“ Authority, tradition, and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority, tradition, and custom are the cement of the social structure, there results a general dissolution of that structure into its component individuals. ”

“ The servants and artificers were of course taken from the lower ranks of society; all the rest were originally of the most various degrees of rank and social position. We constantly meet with instances of noble men and women, knights and ladies, minstrels and merchants, quitting their secular occupations at various periods of their life, and taking the religious habit; some of them continuing simply professed brethren, others rising to high offices in their order. ”

“ If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and that prophets have entirely disappeared. ”

“ From the exclusive enjoyment of the privileges of education, which were confined to the higher classes, and by them only moderately enjoyed, arose the system of patronage which, for nearly a century, regulated the commonwealth of letters. The benefits conferred proceeded solely from the nobility and richer gentry, amongst whom literature and the arts found that protection which is now derived from the common tribute of mankind. ”

“ Gifford. 401But there was a negative as well as a positive cause, the withdrawal of patronage. Literature, in order to flourish, requires the genial sunshine of human sympathy: it needs either the patronage of the great or the favour of the people. ”

“ Thus, to the historian of letters, the Lives have a special interest, for they afford a standing example of a great dead tradition—a tradition whose characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves. ”

“ A philologist who undertakes to explain English place-names by the rigid rules of modern philology, without taking into account the human element connected with the subject, the tendency of people to modify names into more familiar forms, or to modify their sound for the sake of change and variety alone, will find himself in difficulties with a considerable number of them. ”

“ This patronage is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy of the gentleman. ”

“ The smaller gentry and the merchant class rose in importance as the nobles fell. Religion and morality passed out of the hands of the priesthood into those of the laity. Knowledge became vulgarized, it stooped to lower and meaner forms that it might educate the whole people. ”

“ In law also, progressive practitioners and students have pointed out the well-known fact of the immense and beclogging ritual which has come to surround legal procedure. It is the contention of critics of one or another of our contemporary social habits and institutions that traditionalism, the persistence of custom simply because it is custom, is responsible for many of the anachronisms in our social, political, and industrial life. ”

“ Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack on to them any two or more honorary letters of the alphabet as a tail; they drop their surnames for a dignity, and change them for an estate or a title. ”

“ Among noblemen's followers there were many dependents, some, no doubt, parasites, but a number, especially if literary men, in need of patronage to help them to live as well as to pursue their vocation. ”

“ In those early and, in some senses, good old days, before the schoolmaster was abroad in the land, when learning was the possession of the aristocrats and the churchmen only, and consequently when handwriting was not in use among the people, families were distinguished by emblems which were known of all. ”

“ The hierarchical organization of society was faithfully reflected in the conventional organization of language,—in the ordination of pronouns, nouns, and verbs,—in the grades conferred upon adjectives by prefixes or suffixes. With the same merciless exactitude which prescribed rules for dress, diet, and manner of life, all utterance was regulated both negatively and positively,—but positively much more than negatively. ”

“ The laurels have either grown inordinately or perished, and the ‘busts of orators, poets, and philosophers’ ‘with Latin inscriptions,’ stand either bleakly exposed or else swallowed up, in a thicket. There is a pleasing struggle to translate the legends, and one gathers scholarship is not extinct in England. ”

“ Proving itself but a left-handed weapon in such debate, it became a court plaything, in which princes and great ladies, poets and wits, loved to see themselves figured and complimented, and the practice of assuming pastoral names becoming almost universal in polite circles, the convention, which had passed from the eclogue on to the stage, passed from the stage into actual existence, and court life became one continual pageant of pastoral conceit. ”

“ A new stage in comparative folklore must now be entered upon. It must be understood what the effective comparison of a [Pg 178] traditional peasant custom or belief with a savage custom or belief really amounts to. ”

“ Tradition is a collection of venerable and romantic blunders. But a tradition which clings to a permanent object in the landscape, a tall stone, a grassy, artificial tumulus, or even an old tree, may be unexpectedly correct."—Morning Post, 2 November, 1906.
[8] It is worth while referring to Mr. MacRitchie's article in Trans. International Folklore Congress on the historical aspect of Folklore; but Professor York Powell has said the strongest word in its favour in his all too short address as President of the Folklore Society, see Folklore, xv. ”