English Past and Present Part 12

{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]

{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of 'thou', see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even at the present day a Wess.e.x matron has been known to resent the too familiar address of an inferior with the words, "Who bist thou _a-theein'_ of"? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]

{196} What the actual position of the compellation 'thou' was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this pa.s.sage in Fuller's _Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: "In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is pa.s.sable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt".

{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott, _Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._

IV

CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS

I propose, according to the plan sketched out in my first lecture, to take for my subject in the present those changes which in the course of time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our forefathers employed them of old. You observe that it is not _obsolete_ words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, but with meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life, than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character.

They const.i.tuted a part of the intellectual money with which our ancestors carried on the business of their life; but now they are rather medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so that they are "_winged_ words" no more; the spark of thought or feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along the electric wires of the soul.

{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}

And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these obsolete English words, as 'frampold', or 'garboil', or 'brangle'{198}; he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary, of if he guesses from the context at the word's signification, still his guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer, and conveyed to _his_ contemporaries, when indeed it is quite otherwise.

The old life has gone out of them and a new life entered in.

Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights upon such a pa.s.sage as the following (it is from the _Preface_ to Howell's _Lexicon_, 1660): "Though the root of the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock". He may know that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he will hardly know what to make of the a.s.sertion; perhaps he ascribes it to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.

But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following statement, this time in Fuller's _Holy War_, being a history of the Crusades: "The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded".

If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that Fuller with the writers of his time used 'Dutch' for German; even as it was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book, persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.

{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}

And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a 'miscreant', how coa.r.s.e a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare, even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put into his mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York means when he calls her a 'miscreant', and not what we should intend by the name.

In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what forces lost, through this a.s.sumption that the present of a word is always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the "_tinsel-slippered_ feet" to Thetis, the G.o.ddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this 'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French 'etincelle', and the Latin 'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw, 'the sparkling', and how exquisitely beautiful a t.i.tle does this become applied to a G.o.ddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of sun or moon{200}. It is Homer's 'silver-footed' (??????pe?a), not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further grace of his own.

{Sidenote: '_Influence_'}

Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the word 'influence' occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a pa.s.sage starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is present with us; even Milton's

"store of ladies, whose bright eyes Rain _influence_",

as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and valour into the hearts of their knights.

{Sidenote: '_Baffle_'}

The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author, but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher's _King and no King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out, and stripped of his lion's skin:--"They hung me up by the heels and beat me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a _baffled_, whipped fellow". The word to which I wish here to call your attention is 'baffled'. Were you reading this pa.s.sage, there would probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to 'baffled' a sense which sorts very well with the context--"hung up by the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were _baffled_ and defeated". But "baffled" implies far more than this; it contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be 'baffled'{202}.

Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a portion of the shorter pa.s.sage, in which this infamous punishment is described:

"And after all, for greater infamy He by the heels him hung upon a tree, And _baffled_ so, that all which pa.s.sed by The picture of his punishment might see"{203}.

Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from the days of chivalry, or at any rate from the literature of chivalry, but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those words I just quoted have conveyed?

{Sidenote: '_Religion_'}

There are several places in the Authorized Version of Scripture where those who are not aware of the changes which have taken place during the last two hundred and fifty years in our language, can hardly fail of being to a certain extent misled as to the intention of our Translators; or, if they are better acquainted with Greek than with early English, will be tempted to ascribe to them, though unjustly, an inexact rendering of the original. Thus the altered meaning of a word involves a serious misunderstanding in that well known statement of St. James, "Pure _religion_ and undefiled before G.o.d and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction". "There", exclaims one who wishes to set up St. James against St. Paul, that so he may escape the necessity of obeying either, "listen to what St. James says; there is nothing mystical in what he requires; instead of harping on faith as a condition necessary to salvation, he makes all religion to consist in practical deeds of kindness from one to another". But let us pause for a moment. Did 'religion', when our translation was made, mean G.o.dliness? did it mean the _sum total_ of our duties towards G.o.d? for, of course, no one would deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part of our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is abundant evidence to show that 'religion' did not mean this; that, like the Greek ???s?e?a, for which it here stands, like the Latin 'religio', it meant the outward forms and embodiments in which the inward principle of piety arrayed itself, the _external service_ of G.o.d; and St. James is urging upon those to whom he is writing something of this kind: "Instead of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which consisted in divers washings and in other elements of this world, let our service, our ???s?e?a, take a n.o.bler shape, let it consist in deeds of pity and of love"--and it was this which our Translators intended, when they used 'religion' here and 'religious' in the verse preceding. How little 'religion' once meant G.o.dliness, how predominantly it was used for the _outward_ service of G.o.d, is plain from many pa.s.sages in our _Homilies_, and from other contemporary literature.

Again, there are words in our Liturgy which I have no doubt are commonly misunderstood. The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in our own language, and in words which we have constantly in our mouths, and at most solemn times, it is certainly better to be right than wrong. In the Litany we pray G.o.d that it would please Him, "to give and preserve to our use the _kindly_ fruits of the earth". What meaning do we attach to this epithet, "the _kindly_ fruits of the earth"? Probably we understand by it those fruits in which the _kindness_ of G.o.d or of nature towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy explanation, but still it is not the right one. The "_kindly_ fruits" are the "_natural_ fruits", those which the earth according to its _kind_ should naturally bring forth, which it is appointed to produce. To show you how little 'kindly' meant once benignant, as it means now, I will instance an employment of it from Sir Thomas More's _Life of Richard the Third_.

He tells us that Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews in the Tower to make himself accounted "a _kindly_ king"--not certainly a 'kindly' one in our present usage of the word{204}; but, having put them out of the way, that he should then be lineal heir of the Crown, and should thus be reckoned as king _by kind_ or natural descent; and such was of old the constant use of the word.

{Sidenote: '_Worship_'}

A phrase in one of our occasional Services "with my body I thee _worship_", has sometimes offended those who are unacquainted with the early use of English words, and thus with the intention of the actual framers of that Service. Clearly in our modern sense of 'worship', this language would be unjustifiable. But 'worship' or 'worthship' meant 'honour' in our early English, and 'to worship' to honour, this meaning of 'worship' still very harmlessly surviving in the t.i.tle of "your worship", addressed to the magistrate on the bench. So little was it restrained of old to the honour which man is bound to pay to G.o.d, that it was employed by Wiclif to express the honour which G.o.d will render to his faithful servants and friends. Thus our Lord's declaration "If any man serve Me, him will my Father _honour_", in Wiclif's translation reads thus, "If any man serve Me, my Father shall _worship_ him". I do not say that there is not sufficient reason to change the words, "with my body I thee _worship_", if only there were any means of changing anything which is now antiquated and out of date in our services or arrangements. I think it would be very well if they were changed, liable as they are to misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still they did not mean at the first, and therefore do not now really mean, any more than, "with my body I thee _honour_", and so you may reply to any fault-finder here.

Take another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now from Scripture or the Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, "Oh the _painfulness_ of his preaching!" If we did not know the former uses of 'painfulness', we might take this for an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the _pain_ which he caused to others, but of the _pains_ which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more 'painful' preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who _took_ pains themselves, we should have fewer 'painful' ones in the modern sense, who _cause_ pain to their hearers.

So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as "the _painful_ writer of two hundred books"--not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.

Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote a pamphlet, or, as he called it, a _Letter to the Lord Treasurer_, with this t.i.tle, "A proposal for correcting, improving, and _ascertaining_ the English Tongue". Who that brought a knowledge of present English, and no more, to this pa.s.sage, would doubt that "_ascertaining_ the English Tongue"

meant arriving at a certain knowledge of what it was? Swift, however, means something quite different from this. "_To ascertain_ the English tongue" is not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in our own minds of what that tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to that tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall not alter nor change. For even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work itself{205}.

{Sidenote: '_Treacle_'}

In other places unacquaintance with the changes in a word's usage will not so much mislead as leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in respect of the intention of an author whom you may be reading. It is evident that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable to divine, even though all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to the present day. For example, the poet Waller is congratulating Charles the Second on his return from exile, and is describing the way in which all men, even those formerly most hostile to him, were now seeking his favour, and he writes:

"Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin To strive for grace, and expiate their sin: All winds blow fair that did the world embroil, _Your vipers treacle yield_, and scorpions oil".

Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a moment's perplexity at the now courtly poet's a.s.sertion that "_vipers treacle yield_"--who yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the opportunity, to search out what his meaning might be. There is in fact allusion here to a curious piece of legendary lore. 'Treacle', or 'triacle', as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word, and wrapped up in itself the once popular belief (an antic.i.p.ation, by the way, of h.o.m.opathy), that a confection of the viper's flesh was the most potent antidote against the viper's bite{206}. Waller goes back to this the word's old meaning, familiar enough in his time, for Milton speaks of "the sovran _treacle_ of sound doctrine"{207}, while "Venice treacle", or "viper wine", as it sometimes was called, was a common name for a supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply that regicides themselves began to be loyal, vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but rather healing for the old hurts which they themselves had inflicted. To trace the word down to its present use, it may be observed that, designating first this antidote, it then came to designate any antidote, then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup; and lastly that particular syrup, namely, the sweet syrup of mola.s.ses, to which alone it is now restricted.

{Sidenote: '_Blackguard_'}

I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one more example. In his _Holy War_, having enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for one cause or another with heaviest censures of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaimed, "A lamentable case that the devil's _black guard_ should be G.o.d's soldiers"! What does he mean, we may ask, by "the devil's _black guard_"? Nor is this a solitary mention of the "black guard". On the contrary, the phrase is of very frequent recurrence in the early dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives as one of his stage directions in _Don Sebastian_, "Enter the captain of the rabble, with the _Black guard_". What is this "black guard"? Has it any connexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? We feel that probably it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor indeed the exact force of the phrase. Let me trace its history. In old times, the palaces of our kings and seats of our n.o.bles were not so well and completely furnished as at the present day: and thus it was customary, when a royal progress was made, or when the great n.o.bility exchanged one residence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also carried with them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted these, the lowest, meanest, and dirtiest of the retainers, were called 'the black guard'{208}; then any troop or company of ragam.u.f.fins; and lastly, when the origin of the word was lost sight of, and it was forgotten that it properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one would compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the 'blackguard'.

The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to prove that it is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor yet one altogether without entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and thus with advantage and pleasure, our earlier cla.s.sics, who would avoid continual misapprehension in their perusal, and would not often fall short of, and often go astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some attention on the altered significance of English words. And if this is so, we could not more usefully employ what remains of this present lecture than in seeking to indicate those changes which words most frequently undergo; and to trace as far as we can the causes, mental and moral, at work in the minds of men to bring these changes about, with the good and evil out of which they have sprung, and to which they bear witness.

For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain cla.s.ses, being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it is true, will escape any cla.s.sification of ours, the changes which have taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and with these we will occupy ourselves now.

{Sidenote: '_Duke_', '_Corpse_', '_Weed_'}

And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign allotted to it{209}. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country, where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district; while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called 'meat'; it is so in our Bible, and 'horse-meat' for fodder is still no unusual phrase; yet 'meat' is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or writing was a 'libel' once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and injurious. Any leader was a 'duke' (dux); thus "_duke_ Hannibal" (Sir Thomas Eylot), "_duke_ Brennus" (Holland), "_duke_ Theseus"

(Shakespeare), "_duke_ Amalek", with other 'dukes' (Gen. x.x.xvi.). Any journey, by land as much as by sea, was a 'voyage'. 'Fairy' was not a name restricted, as now, to the _Gothic_ mythology; thus "the _fairy_ Egeria" (Sir J. Harrington). A 'corpse' might be quite as well living as dead{210}. 'Weeds' were whatever covered the earth or the person; while now as respects the earth, those only are 'weeds' which are noxious, or at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other 'weeds'

but the widow's{211}. In each of these cases, the same contraction of meaning, the separating off and a.s.signing to other words of large portions of this, has found place. 'To starve' (the German 'sterben', and generally spelt 'sterve' up to the middle of the seventeenth century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says, Christ "_sterved_ upon the cross for our redemption"; it now is restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once applied to both s.e.xes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It is so even with 'girl', which was once a young person of either s.e.x{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as 'hoyden'{213} (Milton, prose), 'shrew' (Chaucer), 'coquet' (Phillips, _New World of Words_), 'witch' (Wiclif), 'termagant' (Bale), 'scold', 'jade', 's.l.u.t' (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive appropriation to the female s.e.x as evidences of men's rudeness, and not of women's deserts.

{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}

The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure, number, size. Almost all such words as 'acre', 'furlong', 'yard', 'gallon', 'peck', were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an 'acre'; and this remains so still with the German 'acker', and in our "G.o.d's acre", as a name for a churchyard{214}; it was not till about the reign of Edward the First that 'acre' was commonly restricted to a determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a glebeland will be called "the acre"; and this, even while it contains not one but many of our measured acres. A 'furlong' was a 'furrowlong', or length of a furrow{215}. Any pole was a 'yard', and this vaguer use survives in 'sail_yard_', 'hal_yard_', and in other sea-terms. Every pitcher was a 'galon' (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a 'peck' was no more than a 'poke' or bag{216}. And the same has no doubt taken place in all other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek 'drachm' was at first a handful (d?a?? = 'manipulus', from d??ss?, to grasp); its later word for 'ten thousand' (?????) implied in Homer's time any great mult.i.tude; and with the accent on a different syllable always retained this meaning.

{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}

Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted.

Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing; and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word's meaning is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay which are at work in a language. Men forget a word's history and etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own.

Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.