On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (great book club books .TXT) 📖

as we affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study. 'In a language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes Coleridge; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their portion,—so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever. The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil poetry'; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense, as of the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.

Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet—a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word which signifies 'that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the sunlight,' gave first its ethical signification of 'sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we sometimes say, 'transparent,' can we deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named.

But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great moral truths—God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know, asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against itself—obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and satisfying joy: [Footnote: Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God. Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same testimony out of the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives, than to let them run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk them, and as much as they can, to take no notice of them and to shun them, as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality. But I know it to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it, and nature has delivered it into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we commonly complain of ourselves, if it be troublesome to us or slide unprofitably away.'] they are only 'pastime'; they serve only, as this word confesses, to pass away the time, to prevent it from hanging, an intolerable burden, on men's hands: all which they can do at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their own internal poverty and dissatisfaction and want. He might have added that there is the same acknowledgment in the word 'diversion' which means no more than that which diverts or turns us aside from ourselves, and in this way helps us to forget ourselves for a little. And thus it would appear that, even according to the world's own confession, all which it proposes is—not to make us happy, but a little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to pass away our time, to divert us from ourselves. While on the other hand we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take three or four of these words—'transport,' 'rapture,' 'ravishment,' 'ecstasy,'—'transport,' that which carries us, as 'rapture,' or 'ravishment,' that which snatches us out of and above ourselves; and 'ecstasy' is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek. And not less, where a perversion of the moral sense has found place, words preserve oftentimes a record of this perversion. We have a signal example of this in the use, or rather misuse, of the words 'religion' and 'religious' during the Middle Ages, and indeed in many parts of Christendom still. A 'religious' person did not then mean any one who felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic Order, of a 'religion' as it was called. As little did a 'religious' house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits of thought in those ages! That then was 'religion,' and alone deserved the name! And 'religious' was a title which might not be given to parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world the duties of their several stations, but only to those who had devised a self-chosen service for themselves. [Footnote: A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, Dec. 1851, doubts whether I have not here pushed my assertion too far. So far from this, it was not merely the 'popular language' which this corruption had invaded, but a decree of the great Fourth Lateran Council (A.D. 1215), forbidding the further multiplication of monastic Orders, runs thus: Ne nimia religionum diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam religionem inveniat, sed quicunque voluerit ad religionem converti, unam de approbatis assumat.]

But language is fossil history as well. What a record of great social revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the one word 'frank' contains, which is used, as we all know, to express aught that is generous, straightforward, and free. The Franks, I need not remind you, were a powerful German tribe, or association of tribes, who gave themselves [Footnote: This explanation of the name Franks is now generally given up. The name is probably a derivative from a lost O.H.G. francho, a spear or javelin: compare A.S. franca, Icel. frakka; similarly the Saxons are supposed to have derived their name from a weapon—seax, a knife; see Kluge's Dict. (s.v. frank).] this proud name of the 'franks' or the free; and who, at the breaking up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honourably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom, their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name 'frank' indicated not merely a national, but involved a moral, distinction as well; and a 'frank' man was synonymous not merely with a man of the conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to any man possessed of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part appertained to, and were found only in, men of that stock; and thus in men's daily discourse, when they speak of a person as being 'frank,' or when they use the words 'franchise,' 'enfranchisement,' to express civil liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the record, and the result of great historic changes, bears testimony to facts of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never heard. [Footnote: 'Frank,' though thus originally a German word, only came back to Germany from France in the seventeenth century. With us it is found in the sixteenth; but scarcely earlier.] The word 'slave' has undergone a process entirely analogous, although in an opposite direction. 'The martial superiority of the Teutonic races enabled them to keep their slave markets supplied with captives taken from the Sclavonic tribes. Hence, in all the languages of Western Europe, the once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most degraded condition of men. What centuries of violence and warfare does the history of this word disclose.' [Footnote: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 55. [It is very doubtful whether the idea of 'glory' was implied originally in the national name of Slav. It is generally held now that the Slavs gave themselves the name as being 'the intelligible,' or 'the intelligibly speaking' people; as in the case of many other races, they regarded their strange-speaking neighbours as 'barbarian,' that is 'stammering,' or even as 'dumb.' So the Russians call their neighbours the Germans njemets, connected with njemo, indistinct. The old name Slovene, Slavonians, is probably a derivative from the substantive which appears in Church Slavonic in the form slovo, a word; see Thomsen's Russia and Scandinavia, p. 8. Slovo is closely connected with the old Slavonic word for 'fame'— slava, hence, no doubt, the explanation of Slave favoured by Gibbon.]]

Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make a few observations on a subject, which, if we would go at all to the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched,—I mean the origin of language, in which however we will not entangle ourselves deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been, two theories about this. One, and that which rather has been than now is, for few maintain it still, would put language on the same level with the various arts and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and enriched his life. It would make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he might have invented any of these, for himself; and from rude imperfect