Read Ebook: Words; Their Use and Abuse by Mathews William

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From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,--that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle's version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth's Cicero, Morris's Virgil, Martin's Horace, or Carter's Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller's "Wallenstein." All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,--the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,--are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,--the life and spirit,--all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,--all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,--evaporates in a translation.

The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,--a barely "good" original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.

"Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l'ar?ne,"

a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near to the original as to write

"Stirred with the noise of quivering wings,"

will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,

and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words we have italicized would be reproduced?

The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare with such a version as we might expect in another language:

A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, after some such fashion as the following:

"With what a charm the moon serene and bright Lends on the bank its soft reflected light! Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear The strains melodious, with a raptured ear; For soft retreats, and night's impressive hour, To harmony impart divinest power."

That there is a secret instinct which leads even the most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in "the black art." In the Island of Java, a fearful influence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is to write a man's name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier, an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed, will be wrought against the person whose name is so inscribed.

But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day, hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish examples of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth, that "a light flashes out of a word sometimes which frightens one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there were such meanings hidden in it." Shakespeare makes one of his characters say of another, "She speaks poniards, and every word stabs"; and there are, indeed, words which are sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. 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!

"I have known a word more gentle Than the breath of summer air; In a listening heart it nestled, And it lived forever there. Not the beating of its prison Stirred it ever, night or day; Only with the heart's last throbbing Could it ever fade away."

A late writer has truly said that "there may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence."

"Nothing," says Hawthorne, "is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface."

England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,--German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,--the common language in which we express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,--this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?

As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.

There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying "Mesopotamia!" probably only burlesques an actual fact.

"Let but a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens, how the style refines!"

says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that

"Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway."

Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat Ulysses to intercede for her; "for the arguments," says she, "which are uttered by men of repute, are very different in strength from those uttered by men unknown."

The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter the word "grand," and our sense of the word is modified according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are different from every other man's; and into this difference enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education, the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that distinguishes him from another man.

The fact that words are never taken absolutely,--that they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, but of natures,--that they are media for the emission and transpiration of character,--is one that cannot be too deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent young men who wonder that the words which they utter with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with their hearers, should ask themselves whether their characters are such as to give weight to their words. As in engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man's character should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the "universe," the word has quite another meaning than when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a man's friend gives him religious advice, and talks of "the solemn responsibilities of life," it makes a vast difference in the weight of the words whether they come from one who has been tried and proved in the world's fiery furnace, and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks of "trials and tribulations" which he has never felt. "Words," says the learned Selden, "must be fitted to a man's mouth. 'Twas well said by the fellow that was to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first to take measure of his lordship's mouth."

Few things are more interesting in the study of a language, than to note how much it gains by time and culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifications of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and refined. 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 M?ller 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. Before a novel term can be introduced into use, there must be some connection with a former term,--a bridge to enable the mind to pass over to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable has dropped out of the language,--has become dead or obsolete,--it is almost as impossible to call it back to life as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, it is true, speaks of commanding "old words that have long slept to wake;" and Horace declares that many words will be born again that have seemingly dropped into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik says, "very little revivification has ever taken place in human speech," and that one may more easily introduce into a language a dozen new words than restore to general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true that when Thomson published his "Castle of Indolence," he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words, of which not a few, as "carol," "glee," "imp," "appall," "blazon," "sere," are in good standing to-day. It is true, also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies with words taken from the more archaic and obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in use many words that were more or less neglected during the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and working condition, were never actually dead, but only in a state of suspended animation.

"In midnight's chill and murk Stitches her life into her work; Bending backwards from her toil, Lest her tears the silk might soil; Shaping from her bitter thought Heart's-ease and forget-me-not; Satirizing her despair With the emblems woven there!"

Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, and reputation,--with disease racking every limb,--for the definition of "remorse"; and go to the bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of "health." Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the force of the commonest terms; while to others their terrible significance comes home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the innermost fibres of their being.

To conclude,--it is one of the marvels of language, that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable, have been formed all the articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can estimate the misery that man would experience were his sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?

"If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heaven had left him still The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!"

FOOTNOTES:

Karl Hildebrand.

?????? and ?????.

"Companion to the Revised Version of the English New Testament," by Alexander Roberts, D.D.

"University Sermons," by J. H. Newman.

We have heard of an Englishman's deploring with the deepest pathos his having been named "James," asserting that it had to some extent made a flunkey of his very soul, against his will.

"Literature and Life," by Edwin P. Whipple.

THE MORALITY IN WORDS.

Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores.... Non potest alius esse ingenio, alius animo color.--SENECA.

The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the surface.--PASCAL.

Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in accounts, ciphers and symbols pass for real sums, so, in the course of human affairs, words and names pass for things themselves.--ROBERT SOUTH.

Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.--ISAIAH v, 20.

If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he has a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and hypocritical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in his speech. The door keeper of an alien household said to Peter, "Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth thee"; and so, in spite of all masks and professions, in spite of his reputation, the essential nature of every person will stamp itself on his language. How often do the words and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally to the church, prays long and loud in public, and attends rigidly to every outward observance, betray in some mysterious way,--by some impalpable element which we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,--the utter worldliness of his character! How frequently do words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution, affect us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and unreality of the speaker's character! How often does the use of a single word flash more light upon a man's motives and principles of action, give a deeper insight into his habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biography! How often, when a secret sorrow preys upon the heart, which we would fain hide from the world by a smiling face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or parenthetical word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is flowing across the door sill, telling of murdered hopes within.

A writer in the "Edinburgh Review" observes that the statement that a man's language is part of his character, holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but also in regard to a general vocabulary. "There is a school vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and passing now and then into general currency. In this age of examinations,--army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,--the verb 'to pluck' is well-nigh incorporated with the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries. The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being 'dry.' The connoisseur in painting tells you also of 'dryness' in a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite landscape may have 'tones' in it, as well as your violin. With shoulders that are 'broad,' and with cloth that is 'broad' covering those broad shoulders, you stand and observe that a painting is 'broad.' You sit down at dinner with a 'delicious bit' of venison before you on the table, and looking up see a 'delicious bit' of Watteau or Wouvermans before you on the wall."

As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with marvellous precision the rise or fall of the national life. The stock of words composing any language corresponds to the knowledge of the community that speaks it, and shows with what objects it is familiar, what generalizations it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,--all its cognitions and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of mind. "As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, public and private, become other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these days of railroads, steamboats and telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, articles of food and luxury of every description, how many words and phrases are in every one's mouth which would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk our streets!... Language is expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds." Every race has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted,--if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all lofty sentiments,--its mockery of virtue, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the opposite qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation of soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utterance "in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squandering of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular objects; and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of words implying the deepest moral guilt."

The author of "Pickwick" tells us that in America the sign vocal for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, etc., is "Go Ahead!" while with John Bull the ritual form is "All Right!"--and he adds that these two expressions are somewhat expressive of the respective moods of the two nations. The two phrases are, indeed, vivid miniatures of John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on the safety valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin into his steam furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have entered the station, and who would hardly object to being fired off from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there were one chance in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his journey. Let us hope that the day may yet come when our "two-forty" people will exchange a little of their fiery activity for a bit of Bull's caution, and when our Yankee Herald's College, if we ever have one, may declare "All Right!" to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with as much propriety as it might now inscribe "Go Ahead!" beneath that fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle, that hovers over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips its wings in two oceans, and has one eye on Cuba and the other on Quebec.

The climate of a country, as well as the mind and character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech. The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live, and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives, acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we should expect them to be, "are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious, as though they had received an impress from the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the pine branch over the cataract." The idiom of Sybaris cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the language of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid melody of a nightingale's song.

It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the New Testament there are whole chapters with no words ending in consonants, except the proper names of the original. Italian has been called the love-talk of the Roman without his armor. Fuller, contrasting the Italians and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the former, "whose country is called 'the country of good words,' love the circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as a sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle presently with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon, mount in language, soar high, fetch compasses of compliment, and then in due time stoop to game, and seize on the business propounded. Clean contrary, the Switzers count all words quite out which are not straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet perfume to such as are troubled with the mother; yea, generally, great soldiers have their stomachs sharp set to feed on the matter; loathing long speeches, as wherein they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they could conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind."

Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen, had no term for the Christian virtue of "humility"; and when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to employ a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek, the two richest of human languages, and without which we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word "humbug." "A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous and inexorable word."

Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but the very mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the beauty or ugliness of our inner selves.

A volume might be written on the mutual influence of language and opinion, showing that as

"Faults in the life breed errors in the brain, And these reciprocally those again,"

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