On the Study of Words Part 1

On the Study of Words.

by Richard C Trench.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

These lectures will not, I trust, be found anywhere to have left out of sight seriously, or for long, the peculiar needs of those for whom they were originally intended, and to whom they were primarily addressed. I am conscious, indeed, here and there, of a certain departure from my first intention, having been in part seduced to this by a circ.u.mstance which I had not in the least contemplated when I obtained permission to deliver them, by finding, namely, that I should have other hearers besides the pupils of the Training-School. Some matter adapted for those rather than for these I was thus led to introduce--which afterwards I was unwilling, in preparing for the press, to remove; on the contrary adding to it rather, in the hope of obtaining thus a somewhat wider circle of readers than I could have hoped, had I more rigidly restricted myself in the choice of my materials. Yet I should greatly regret to have admitted so much of this as should deprive these lectures of their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in publishing I had mainly in view, namely schoolmasters, and those preparing to be such.

Had I known any book entering with any fulness, and in a popular manner, into the subject-matter of these pages, and making it its exclusive theme, I might still have delivered these lectures, but should scarcely have sought for them a wider audience than their first, gladly leaving the matter in their hands, whose studies in language had been fuller and riper than my own. But abundant and ready to hand as are the materials for such a book, I did not; while yet it seems to me that the subject is one to which it is beyond measure desirable that their attention, who are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach, others should be directed; so that they shall learn to regard language as one of the chiefest organs of their own education and that of others. For I am persuaded that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for many a young man 'his first discovery that words are living powers, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world,'--while yet all this may be indefinitely deferred, may, indeed, never find place at all, unless there is some one at hand to help for him, and to hasten the process; and he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him as one of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever may be Horne Tooke's shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet, with all this, what an epoch in many a student's intellectual life has been his first acquaintance with _The Diversions of Purley_. And they were not among the least of the obligations which the young men of our time owed to Coleridge, that he so often himself weighed words in the balances, and so earnestly pressed upon all with whom his voice went for anything, the profit which they would find in so doing. Nor, with the certainty that I am antic.i.p.ating much in my little volume, can I refrain from quoting some words which were not present with me during its composition, although I must have been familiar with them long ago; words which express excellently well why it is that these studies profit so much, and which will also explain the motives which induced me to add my little contribution to their furtherance:

'A language will often be wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths, which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have pa.s.sed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought lying at the root of many a metaphorical term, employed for the designation of spiritual things, even of those with regard to which professing philosophers have blundered grossly; and often it would seem as though rays of truth, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking up to heaven. Hence they who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their countrymen, should deem it an important part of their duty to draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in their native language, to purify it from the corruptions which Time brings upon all things, and from which language has no exemption, and to endeavour to give distinctness and precision to whatever in it is confused, or obscure, or dimly seen'--_Guesses at Truth, First Series_, p. 295.

ITCHENSTOKE: Oct. 9, 1851.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

LECTURE II. ON THE POETRY IN WORDS

LECTURE III. ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS

LECTURE IV. ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS

LECTURE V. ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS

LECTURE VI. ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS

LECTURE VII. THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS

INDEX OF WORDS

ON THE STUDY OF WORDS

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

There are few who would not readily acknowledge that mainly in worthy books are preserved and h.o.a.rded the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the world has acc.u.mulated; and that chiefly by aid of books they are handed down from one generation to another. I shall urge on you in these lectures something different from this; namely, that not in books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of pa.s.sion and imagination, laid up--that from these, lessons of infinite worth may be derived, if only our attention is roused to their existence. I shall urge on you how well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things, or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better than you can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world; he is never able to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side, and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.

We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in the region of nature, which is the region of G.o.d's wonders, or in the region of art, which is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind; even as some traveller pa.s.ses unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of ancient renown--unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty deeds which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight which would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no less that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and nowhere more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.'

And this subject upon which we are thus entering ought not to be a dull or uninteresting one in the handling, or one to which only by an effort you will yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall prove so, this I fear must be through the fault of my manner of treating it; for certainly in itself there is no study which _may_ be made at once more instructive and entertaining than the study of the use and abuse, the origin and distinction of words, with an investigation, slight though it may be, of the treasures contained in them; which is exactly that which I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned scholar, to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which must have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of such toils as those which had engaged him so long,--toils irksome, forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any part with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good of the literary world. He declares that the task of cla.s.sing, sorting, grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words, had been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labour of love. [Footnote: It is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant _causerie_ of Littre 'Comment j'ai fait mon Dictionnaire.' It is to be found pp. 390-442 of his _Glanures_.]

And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' 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 pa.s.sion 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 a.n.a.logy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to ill.u.s.trate 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--G.o.d having pressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know, a.s.serting mighty principles, it may be a.s.serting 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d_.

Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same testimony out of the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pa.s.s-time, and pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 _pa.s.s_ 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 _pa.s.s_ 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 _s.n.a.t.c.hes_ 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sumat.]

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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.s 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,' 'enfranchis.e.m.e.nt,' 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 a.n.a.logous, 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 antic.i.p.ation this handful of examples in ill.u.s.tration 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 beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of natural objects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to him now.

It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that language would then be an _accident_ of human nature; and, this being the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken so low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or Papuan cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with one another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter is, that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis, and every notice of our actual experience--the 'urang-utang theory,' as it has been so happily termed--that, I mean, according to which the primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded; whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything n.o.bler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child with the latent capabilities of manhood, he is himself rather the man prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.

But the truer answer to the inquiry how language arose, is this: G.o.d gave man language, just as He gave him reason, and just because He gave him reason; for what is man's _word_ but his reason, coming forth that it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the same that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him, because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it. Yet this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first furnished with a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with his first dictionary and first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did not thus begin the world _with names_, but _with the power of naming_: for man is not a mere speaking machine; G.o.d did not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot, from without; but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He gave. Here, as in everything else that concerns the primitive const.i.tution, the great original inst.i.tutes, of humanity, our best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will observe that there it is not G.o.d who imposed the first names on the creatures, but Adam-- Adam, however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator. _He_ brought them all, we are told, to Adam, 'to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof' (Gen. ii. 19). Here we have the clearest intimation of the origin, at once divine and human, of speech; while yet neither is so brought forward as to exclude or obscure the other.

And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being, one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one (and in this differing from those which have produced in various people various arts of life) which could not remain dormant in him, for man could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared before his eyes, each relation of things to one another arose before his mind. It was not merely the possible, but the necessary, emanation of the spirit with which he had been endowed. Man makes his own language, but he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its nest; he cannot do otherwise. [Footnote: Renan has much of interest on this matter, both in his work _De l'Origine du Langage_, and in his _Hist. des Langues Semitiques_. I quote from the latter, p. 445: Sans doute les langues, comme tout ce qui est organise, sont sujettes a la loi du developpement graduel. En soutenant que le langage primitif possedait les elements necessaires a son integrite, nous sommes loin de dire que les mecanismes d'un age plus avance y fussent arrives a leur pleine existence. Tout y etait, mais confus.e.m.e.nt et sans distinction.

Le temps seul et les progres de l'esprit humain pouvaient operer un discernement dans cette obscure synthese, et a.s.signer a chaque element son role special. La vie, en un mot, n'etait ici, comme partout, qu'a la condition de l'evolution du germe primitif, de la distribution des roles et de la separation des organes. Mais ces organes eux-memes furent determines des le premier jour, et depuis l'acte generateur qui le fit etre, le langage ne s'est enrichi d'aucune fonction vraiment nouvelle. Un germe est pose, renfermant en puissance tout ce que l'etre sera un jour; le germe se developpe, les formes se const.i.tuent dans leurs proportions regulieres, ce qui etait en puissance devient en acte; mais rien ne se cree, rien ne s'ajoute: telle est la loi commune des etres soumis aux conditions de la vie. Telle fut aussi la loi du langage.]

_How_ this latent power evolved itself first, how this spontaneous generation of language came to pa.s.s, is a mystery; even as every act of creation is of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest inquirers into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and what it was not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing out of, and unfolding itself from, a root, and according to a necessary law--that root being the divine capacity of language with which man was created, that law being the law of highest reason with which he was endowed: if we liken it to this rather than to the rearing of a house, which a man should slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead timbers combined after his own fancy and caprice; and which little by little improved in shape, material, and size, being first but a log house, answering his barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and pain growing for his sons' sons into a stately palace for pleasure and delight.

Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a n.o.bler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one n.o.bler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus after a while have been wholly lost.

Moffat, in his _Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa_, gives us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the notion of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language of the present generation, although here and there he could meet with an old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his youth to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so- called rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous ghost, of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.

And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. You cannot impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now contain, or can be made, intelligibly to him, to contain. Language is as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other side that which feeds and unfolds thought. Thus it is the ever- repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are well-nigh or wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him heavenly truths; and not these only; but that there are equally wanting those which should express the n.o.bler emotions of the human heart.

Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious _History of the Abipones,_ tells us that neither these nor the Guarinies, two of the princ.i.p.al native tribes of Brazil, possessed any word in the least corresponding to our 'thanks.' But what wonder, if the feeling of grat.i.tude was entirely absent from their hearts, that they should not have possessed the corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay, how should they have had it there? And that in this absence lies the true explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that, although inveterate askers, they never showed the slightest sense of obligation or of grat.i.tude when they obtained what they sought; never saying more than, 'This will be useful to me,' or, 'This is what I wanted.' Dr. Krapf, after laborious researches in some widely extended dialects of East Africa, has remarked in them the same absence of any words expressing the idea of grat.i.tude.

Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost, but also in what they have retained or invented, that these languages proclaim their degradation and debas.e.m.e.nt, and how deeply they and those that speak them have fallen. For indeed the strange wealth and the strange poverty, I know not which the strangest and the saddest, of the languages of savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their shame, poor in those which should attest the workings of any n.o.bler life among them, not seldom absolutely dest.i.tute of these last, are a mournful and ever- recurring surprise, even to those who were more or less prepared to expect nothing else. Thus I have read of a tribe in New Holland, which has no word to signify G.o.d, but has one to designate a process by which an unborn child may be destroyed in the bosom of its mother. [Footnote: A Wesleyan missionary, communicating with me from Fiji, a.s.sures me I have here understated the case. He says: 'I could write down several words, which express as many different ways of killing an unborn child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send me dreadful confirmation of all which I have here a.s.serted. It is a list of some Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts which they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one domain of human wickedness--that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain, which borders close on this, and which, he a.s.sures me, would yield proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty.

A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten; for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an enemy; if only they have shed blood--it may have been the life of a woman or a child--the t.i.tle has been earned. It has a hideous word to express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any part of his body--his nose or tongue, for instance--cooking and eating it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek: hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote: This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the past.] four words to express the taking of human life--one to express a father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a word for 'love' is wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once.

The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway.

[Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, _Early History of Mankind_, pp.

150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, _On Primeval Man_; and on this same survival of the fragments of an elder civilization, Ebrard, _Apologetik_, vol. ii. p. 382. Among some of the Papuans the faintest rudiments of the family survive; of the tribe no trace whatever; while yet of these one has lately written:--'Sie haben religiose Gebrauche und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen Erscheinungen in ihrem Leben, mit ihrem jetzigen Culturzustande ganz unvereinbar erscheinen, wenn man darin nicht die Spuren einer fruher hohern Bildung erkennen will.'

Sayce agrees with this.]

But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all those that have chosen the downward path, while with every impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debas.e.m.e.nt of language; so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know, where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said, 'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise, unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end.

"Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other minds, a fixed and scientific quant.i.ty.' [Footnote: Shedd, _History of Christian Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 362; compare _Guesses at Truth_, 1866, p. 217; and Gerber, _Sprache als Kunst_, vol. i. p. 145.] And on the necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or a.s.sume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.' [Footnote: Mill, _System of Logic_, vol. ii. p. 291.]