On the Study of Words Part 6

as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star, and of happiest augury of all: [Footnote: 'Jovial' in Shakespeare's time (see _Cymbeline_, act 5, sc. 4) had not forgotten its connexion with Jove.] a gloomy severe person is said to be 'saturnine,' born, that is, under the planet Saturn, who makes those that own his influence, having been born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself: another we call 'mercurial,' or light- hearted, as those born under the planet Mercury were accounted to be.

The same faith in the influence of the stars survives in 'disastrous,'

'ill-starred,' 'ascendancy,' 'lord of the ascendant,' and, indeed, in 'influence' itself. What a record of old speculations, old certainly as Aristotle, and not yet exploded in the time of Milton, [Footnote: See _Paradise Lost_, iii. 714-719.] does the word 'quintessence' contain; and 'a.r.s.enic' the same; no other namely than this that metals are of different s.e.xes, some male ([Greek: a.r.s.enika]), and some female. Again, what curious legends belong to the 'sardonic' [Footnote: See an excellent history of this word, in Rost and Palm's _Greek Lexicon_, s.

v. [Greek: sardonios].] or Sardinian, laugh; a laugh caused, as was supposed, by a plant growing in Sardinia, of which they who ate, died laughing; to the 'barnacle' goose, [Footnote: For a full and most interesting study on this very curious legend, see Max Muller's _Lectures on Language_, vol. ii. pp. 533-551; [for the etymology of the word _barnacle_ in this connexion see the _New English Dictionary_ (s.

v.).]] to the 'amethyst' esteemed, as the word implies, a preventive or antidote of drunkenness; and to other words not a few, which are employed by us still.

A question presents itself here, and one not merely speculative; for it has before now become a veritable case of conscience with some whether they ought to use words which originally rested on, and so seem still to affirm, some superst.i.tion or untruth. This question has practically settled itself; the words will keep their ground: but further, they have a right to do this; for no word need be considered so to root itself in its etymology, and to draw its sap and strength from thence, that it cannot detach itself from this, and acquire the rights of an independent existence. And thus our _weekly_ newspapers commit no absurdity in calling themselves 'journals,' or 'diurnals'; and we as little when we name that a 'journey' which occupies not one, but several days. We involve ourselves in no real contradiction, speaking of a 'quarantine' of five, ten, or any number of days more or fewer than _forty_; or of a population 'decimated' by a plague, though exactly a tenth of it has not perished. A stone coffin may be still a 'sarcophagus,' without thereby implying that it has any special property of consuming the flesh of bodies which are laid within it. [Footnote: See Pliny, _H. N._ ii. 96; x.x.xvi. 17.] In like manner the wax of our 'candles' ('candela,' from 'candeo') is not necessarily _white_; our 'rubrics' retain their name, though seldom printed in _red_ ink; neither need our 'miniatures' abandon theirs, though no longer painted with _minium_ or carmine; our 'surplice' is not usually worn over an undergarment of skins; our 'stirrups' are not ropes by whose aid we climb upon our horses; nor are 'haversacks' sacks for the carrying of oats; it is not barley or bere only which we store up in our 'barns,' nor hogs' fat in our 'larders'; a monody need not be sung by a single voice; and our lucubrations are not always by candlelight; a 'costermonger' or 'costardmonger' does not of necessity sell costards or apples; there are 'palaces' which are not built on the Palatine Hill; and 'nausea' [Footnote: [From _nausea_ through the French comes our English _noise_; see Bartsch and Horning, Section 90.]] which is not sea-sickness. I remember once asking a cla.s.s of school-children, whether an announcement which during one very hard winter appeared in the papers, of a '_white_ _black_bird' having been shot, might be possibly correct, or was on the face of it self-contradictory and absurd. The less thoughtful members of the cla.s.s instantly p.r.o.nounced against it; while after a little consideration, two or three made answer that it might very well be, that, while without doubt the bird had originally obtained this name from its blackness, yet 'blackbird'

was now the name of a species, and a name so cleaving to it, as not to be forfeited, even when the blackness had quite disappeared. We do not question the right of the '_New_ Forest' to retain this t.i.tle of New, though it has now stood for eight hundred years; nor of 'Naples' to be _New_ City (Neapolis) still, after an existence three or four times as long.

It must, then, be esteemed a piece of ethical prudery, and an ignorance of the laws which languages obey, when the early Quakers refused to employ the names commonly given to the days of the week, and subst.i.tuted for these, 'first day,' 'second day,' and so on. This they did, as is well known, on the ground that it became not Christian men to give that sanction to idolatry which was involved in the ordinary style--as though every time they spoke of Wednesday they were rendering homage to Woden, of Thursday to Thor, of Friday to Friga, and thus with the rest; [ Footnote: It is curious to find Fuller prophesying, a very few years before, that at some future day such a protest as theirs might actually be raised (_Church History_, b. ii. cent. 6): 'Thus we see the whole week bescattered with Saxon idols, whose pagan G.o.ds were the G.o.dfathers of the days, and gave them their names. This some zealot may behold as the object of a necessary reformation, desiring to have the days of the week new dipt, and called after other names. Though, indeed, this supposed scandal will not offend the wise, as beneath their notice; and cannot offend the ignorant, as above their knowledge.'] or at all events recognizing their existence. Now it is quite intelligible that the early Christians, living in the midst of a still rampant heathenism, should have objected, as we know they did, to 'dies _Solis_,' or Sunday, to express the first day of the week, their Lord's-Day. But when the later Friends raised _their_ protest, the case was altogether different. The false G.o.ds whose names were bound up in these words had ceased to be worshipped in England for about a thousand years; the words had wholly disengaged themselves from their etymologies, of which probably not one in a thousand had the slightest suspicion. Moreover, had these precisians in speech been consistent, they could not have stopped where they did. Every new acquaintance with the etymology or primary use of words would have entangled them in some new embarra.s.sment, would have required a new purging of their vocabulary. 'To charm,' 'to bewitch,' 'to fascinate,' 'to enchant,'

would have been no longer lawful words for those who had outlived the belief in magic, and in the power of the evil eye; nor 'lunacy,' nor 'lunatic,' for such as did not count the moon to have anything to do with mental unsoundness; nor 'panic' fear, for those who believed that the great G.o.d Pan was indeed dead; nor 'auguries,' nor 'auspices,' for those to whom divination was nothing; while to speak of 'initiating' a person into the 'mysteries' of an art, would have been utterly heathenish language. Nay, they must have found fault with the language of Holy Scripture itself; for a word of honourable use in the New Testament expressing the function of an interpreter, and reappearing in our 'hermeneutics,' is directly derived from and embodies the name of Hermes, a heathen deity, and one who did not, like Woden, Thor, and Friga, pertain to a long extinct mythology, but to one existing in its strength at the very time when he wrote. And how was it, as might have been fairly asked, that St. Paul did not protest against a Christian woman retaining the name of Phoebe (Rom. xvi. I), a G.o.ddess of the same mythology?

The rise and fall of words, the honour which in tract of time they exchanged for dishonour, and the dishonour for honour--all which in my last lecture I contemplated mainly from an ethical point of view--is in a merely historic aspect scarcely less remarkable. Very curious is it to watch the varying fortune of words--the extent to which it has fared with them, as with persons and families; some having improved their position in the world, and attained to far higher dignity than seemed destined for them at the beginning, while others in a manner quite as notable have lost caste, have descended from their high estate to common and even ign.o.ble uses. t.i.tles of dignity and honour have naturally a peculiar liability to be some lifted up, and some cast down.

Of words which have risen in the world, the French 'marechal' affords us an excellent example. 'Marechal,' as Howell has said, 'at first was the name of a smith-farrier, or one that dressed horses'--which indeed it is still--'but it climbed by degrees to that height that the chiefest commanders of the gendarmery are come to be called marshals.'

But if this has risen, our 'alderman' has fallen. Whatever the civic dignity of an alderman may now be, still it must be owned that the word has lost much since the time that the 'alderman' was only second in rank and position to the king. Sometimes a word will keep or even improve its place in one language, while at the same time it declines from it in another. Thus 'demoiselle' (dominicella) cannot be said to have lost ground in French, however 'donzelle' may; while 'damhele,'

being the same word, designates in Walloon the farm-girl who minds the cows. [Footnote: See Littre, _Etudes et Glanures_, p. 16; compare p. 30.

Elsewhere he says: Les mots ont leurs decheances comme les families.]

'Pope' is the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the Latin Church; every parish priest is a 'pope' in the Greek. 'Queen' (gunae) has had a double fortune. Spelt as above it has more than kept the dignity with which it started, being the t.i.tle given to the lady of the kingdom; while spelt as 'quean' it is a designation not untinged with contempt. [Footnote: [_Queen_ and _quean_ are not merely different spellings of the same Old English word; for _queen_ represents Anglo- Saxon _cwe:n_, Gothic _qens_, whereas _quean_ is the phonetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon _cwene_ Gothic _qino_]] 'Squatter' remains for us in England very much where it always was; in Australia it is now the name by which the landed aristocracy are willing to be known. [Footnote: Dilke, _Greater Britain_, vol. ii. p. 40]

After all which has thus been adduced, you will scarcely deny that we have a right to speak of a history in words. Now suppose that the pieces of money which in the intercourse and traffic of daily life are pa.s.sing through our hands continually, had each one something of its own that made it more or less worthy of note; if on one was stamped some striking maxim, on another some important fact, on the third a memorable date; if others were works of finest art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of some ancient sage or hero king; while others, again, were the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame; what a careless indifference to our own improvement--to all which men hitherto had felt or wrought--would it argue in us, if we were content that these should come and go, should stay by us or pa.s.s from us, without our vouchsafing to them so much as one serious regard. Such a currency there is, a currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner worth, and one with which we have to transact so much of the higher business of our lives.

Let us take care that we come not in this matter under the condemnation of any such incurious indifference as that which I have imagined.

LECTURE V.

ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.

If I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth.

And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never played a part so important in the world's story. A volume might be written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words employed in a new sense--being such words as the world subsequently heard much of--first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the pa.s.sages in proof. A great English poet, too early lost, 'the young Marcellus of our tongue,' as Dryden so finely calls him, has very grandly described the emotion of

'some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.'

Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of its rising above the horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play its part in the world's story, to take its place for ever among the luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.

But a caution is necessary here. We must not regard as certain in every case, or indeed in most cases, that the first rise of a word will have exactly consented in time with its first appearance within the range of our vision. Such ident.i.ty will sometimes exist; and we may watch i the actual birth of some word, and may affirm with confidence that at such a time and on such an occasion it first saw the light--in this book, or from the lips of that man. Of another we can only say, About this time and near about this spot it first came into being, for we first meet it in such an author and under such and such conditions. So mere a fragment of ancient literature has come down to us, that, while the earliest appearance there of a word is still most instructive to note, it cannot in all or in nearly all cases be affirmed to mark the exact moment of its nativity. And even in the modern world we must in most instances be content to fix a period, we may perhaps add a local habitation, within the limits of which the term must have been born, either in legitimate scientific travail, or the child of some flash of genius, or the product of some _generatio aequivoca_, the necessary result of exciting predisposing causes; at the same time seeking by further research ever to narrow more and more the limits within which this must have happened.

To speak first of words religious and ecclesiastical. Very noteworthy, and in some sort epoch-making, must be regarded the first appearance of the following:--'Christian'; [Footnote: Acts xi. 26.] 'Trinity'; [Footnote: Tertullian, _Adv. Prax._ 3.] 'Catholic,' as applied to the Church; [Footnote: Ignatius, _Ad Smyrn_. 8.] 'canonical,' as a distinctive t.i.tle of the received Scriptures; [Footnote: Origen, _Opp_.

vol. iii. p. 36 (ed. De la Rue).] 'New Testament,' as describing the complex of the sacred books of the New Covenant; [Footnote: Tertullian, _Adv. Marc._ iv. I; _Adv. Prax._ xv. 20.] 'Gospels,' as applied to the four inspired records of the life and ministry of our Lord. [Footnote: Justin Martyr, _Apol_. i. 66.] We notice, too, with interest, the first coming up of 'monk' and 'nun,' [Footnote: 'Nun' (nonna) first appears in Jerome (_Ad Eustoch. Ep._ 22); 'monk' (monachus) a little earlier: Rutilius, a Latin versifier of the fifth century, who still clung to the old Paganism, gives the derivation: Ipsi se _monachos_ Graio cognomine dic.u.n.t, Quod _soli_ nullo vivere teste volunt.] marking as they do the beginnings of the monastic system;--of 'transubstantiation,' [Footnote: Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours (d. 1134), is the first to use it (_Serm_. 93).] of 'concomitance,' [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas is reported to have been the first to use this word.] expressing as does this word the grounds on which the medieval Church defended communion in one kind only for the laity; of 'limbo' in its theological sense; [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas first employs 'limbus' in this sense.]

witnessing as these do to the _consolidation_ of errors which had long been floating in the Church.

Not of so profound an interest, but still very instructive to note, is the earliest apparition of names historical and geographical, above all of such as have since been often on the lips of men; as the first mention in books of 'Asia'; [Footnote: Aeschylus, _Prometheus Vinctus_, 412.] of 'India'; [Footnote: Id. _Suppl_. 282.] of 'Europe'; [Footnote: Herodotus, iv. 36.] of 'Macedonia'; [Footnote: Id. v. 17.] of 'Greeks'; [Footnote: Aristotle, _Meteor_, i. 14. But his _Graikoi_ are only an insignificant tribe, near Dodona. How it came to pa.s.s that Graeci, or Graii, was the Latin name by which all the h.e.l.lenes were known, must always remain a mystery.] of 'Germans' and 'Germany'; [Footnote: Probably first in the _Commentaries_ of Caesar; see Grimm, _Gesch. d.

Deutschen Sprache_, p. 773.] of 'Alemanni'; [Footnote: Spartian, _Caracalla_, c. 9.] of 'Franks'; [Footnote: Vopiscus, _Aurel_. 7; about A.D. 240.] of 'Prussia' and 'Prussians'; [Footnote: 'Pruzia' and 'Pruzzi' first appear in the _Life of S. Adalbert_, written by his fellow-labourer Gaudentius, between 997-1006.] of 'Normans'; [Footnote: The _Geographer of Ravenna_.] the earliest notice by any Greek author of Rome; [Footnote: Probably in h.e.l.lanicus, a contemporary of Herodotus.]

the first use of 'Italy' as comprehending the entire Hesperian peninsula; [Footnote: In the time of Augustus Caesar; see Niebuhr, _History of Rome_, Engl. Translation, vol. i. p. 12.] of 'Asia Minor' to designate Asia on this side Taurus. [Footnote: Orosius, i. 2: in the fifth century of our era.] 'Madagascar' may hereafter have a history, which will make it interesting to know that this name was first given, so far as we can trace, by Marco Polo to the huge African island. Neither can we regard with indifference the first giving to the newly-discovered continent in the West the name of 'America'; and still less should we Englishmen fail to take note of the date when this island exchanged its earlier name of Britain for 'England'; or again, when it resumed 'Great Britain' as its official designation. So also, to confirm our a.s.sertion by examples from another quarter, it cannot be unprofitable to mark the exact moment at which 'tyrant' and 'tyranny,' forming so distinct an epoch as this did in the political history of Greece, first appeared; [Footnote: In the writings of Archilochus, about 700 B.C. A 'tyrant'

was not for Greeks a bad king, who abused a rightful position to purposes of l.u.s.t or cruelty or other wrong. It was of the essence of a 'tyrant' that he had attained supreme dominion through a violation of the laws and liberties of the state; having done which, whatever the moderation of his after-rule, he would not escape the name. Thus the mild and bounteous Pisistratus was 'tyrant' of Athens, while a Christian II. of Denmark, 'the Nero of the North,' would not in Greek eyes have been one. It was to their honour that they did not allow the course of the word to be arrested or turned aside by occasional or partial exceptions in the manner of the exercise of this ill-gotten dominion; but in the hateful secondary sense which 'tyrant' with them acquired, and which has pa.s.sed over to us, the moral conviction, justified by all experience, spake out, that the ill-gotten would be ill-kept; that the 'tyrant' in the earlier sense of the word, dogged by suspicion, fear, and an evil conscience, must, by an almost inevitable law, become a 'tyrant' in our later sense of the word.] or again, when, and from whom, the fabric of the external universe first received the t.i.tle of 'cosmos,' or beautiful order; [ Footnote: Pythagoras, born B.C.

570, is said to have been the first who made this application of the word. For much of interest on its history see Humboldt, _Kosmos_, 1846, English edit., vol. i. p. 371.] a name not new in itself, but new in this application of it; with much more of the same kind.

Let us go back to one of the words just named, and inquire what may be learned from acquaintance with the time and place of its first appearance. It is one the coming up of which has found special record in the Book of life: 'The disciples,' as St. Luke expressly tells us, 'were called Christians first in Antioch' (Acts xi. 26). That we have here a notice which we would not willingly have missed all will acknowledge, even as nothing can be otherwise than curious which relates to the infancy of the Church. But there is here much more than an interesting notice. Question it a little closer, and how much it will be found to contain, how much which it is waiting to yield up.

What light it throws on the whole story of the apostolic Church to know where and when this name of 'Christians' was first imposed on the faithful; for imposed by adversaries it certainly was, not devised by themselves, however afterwards they may have learned to glory in it as the name of highest dignity and honour. They did not call themselves, but, as is expressly recorded, they 'were called,' Christians first at Antioch; in agreement with which statement, the name occurs nowhere in Scripture, except on the lips of those alien from, or opposed to, the faith (Acts xxvi. 28; I Pet. iv. 16). And as it was a name imposed by adversaries, so among these adversaries it was plainly heathens, and not Jews, who were its authors; for Jews would never have called the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, 'Christians,' or those of Christ, the very point of their opposition to Him being, that He was _not_ the Christ, but a false pretender to the name. [Footnote: Compare Tacitus (_Annal_, xv. 24): Quos _vulgus_ ... Christianos appellabat. It is curious too that, although a Greek word and coined in a Greek city, the termination is Latin. Christianos is formed on the model of Roma.n.u.s, Alba.n.u.s, Pompeia.n.u.s, and the like.]

Starting then from this point, that 'Christians' was a t.i.tle given to the disciples by the heathen, what may we deduce from it further? At Antioch they first obtained this name--at the city, that is, which was the head-quarters of the Church's missions to the heathen, in the same sense as Jerusalem had been the head-quarters of the mission to the seed of Abraham. It was there, and among the faithful there, that a conviction of the world-wide destination of the Gospel arose; there it was first plainly seen as intended for all kindreds of the earth.

Hitherto the faithful in Christ had been called by their adversaries, and indeed often were still called, 'Galileans,' or 'Nazarenes,'--both names which indicated the Jewish cradle wherein the Church had been nursed, and that the world saw in the new Society no more than a Jewish sect. But it was plain that the Church had now, even in the world's eyes, chipped its Jewish sh.e.l.l. The name 'Christians,' or those of Christ, while it told that Christ and the confession of Him was felt even by the heathen to be the sum and centre of this new faith, showed also that they comprehended now, not all which the Church would be, but something of this; saw this much, namely, that it was no mere sect and variety of Judaism, but a Society with a mission and a destiny of its own. Nor will the thoughtful reader fail to observe that the coming up of this name is by closest juxtaposition connected in the sacred narrative, and still more closely in the Greek than in the English, with the arrival at Antioch, and with the preaching there, of that Apostle, who was G.o.d's appointed instrument for bringing the Church to a full sense that the message which it had, was not for some men only, but for all. As so often happens with the rise of new names, the rise of this one marked a new epoch in the Church's life, and that it was entering upon a new stage of its development. [Footnote: Renan (_Les Apotres_ pp. 233-236) has much instruction on this matter. I quote a few words; though even in them the spirit in which the whole book is conceived does not fail to make itself felt: L'heure ou une creation nouvelle recoit son nom est solennelle; car le nom est le signe definitif de l'existence. C'est par le nom qu'un etre individuel ou collectif devient lui-meme, et sort d'un autre. La formation du mot 'chretien' marque ainsi la date precise ou l'Eglise de Jesus se separa du judasme.... Le christianisme est completement detache du sein de sa mere; la vraie pensee de Jesus a triomphe de l'indecision de ses premiers disciples; l'Eglise de Jerusalem est depa.s.see; l'Arameen, la langue de Jesus, est inconnue a une partie de son ecole; le christianisme parle grec; il est lance definitivement dans le grand tourbillon du monde grec et romain; d'ou il ne sortira plus.] It is a small matter, yet not without its own significance, that the invention of this name is laid by St. Luke,--for so, I think, we may confidently say,--to the credit of the Antiochenes. Now the idle, frivolous, and witty inhabitants of the Syrian capital were noted in all antiquity for the invention of nicknames; it was a manufacture for which their city was famous. And thus it was exactly the place where beforehand we might have expected that such a t.i.tle, being a nickname or little better in their mouths who devised it should first come into being.

This one example is sufficient to show that new words will often repay any amount of attention which we may bestow upon them, and upon the conditions under which they were born. I proceed to consider the causes which suggest or necessitate their birth, the periods when a language is most fruitful in them, the sources from which they usually proceed, with some other interesting phenomena about them.

And first of the causes which give them birth. Now of all these causes the n.o.blest is this--namely, that in the appointments of highest Wisdom there are epochs in the world's history, in which, more than at other times, new moral and spiritual forces are at work, stirring to their central depths the hearts of men. When it thus fares with a people, they make claims on their language which were never made on it before.

It is required to utter truths, to express ideas, remote from it hitherto; for which therefore the adequate expression will naturally not be forthcoming at once, these new thoughts and feelings being larger and deeper than any wherewith hitherto the speakers of that tongue had been familiar. It fares with a language then, as it would fare with a river bed, suddenly required to deliver a far larger volume of waters than had hitherto been its wont. It would in such a case be nothing strange, if the waters surmounted their banks, broke forth on the right hand and on the left, forced new channels with a certain violence for themselves. Something of the kind they must do. Now it was exactly thus that it fared--for there could be no more ill.u.s.trious examples--with the languages of Greece and Rome, when it was demanded of them that they should be vehicles of the truths of revelation.

These languages, as they already existed, might have sufficed, and did suffice, for heathenism, sensuous and finite; but they did not suffice for the spiritual and infinite, for the truths at once so new and so mighty which claimed now to find utterance in the language of men. And thus it continually befell, that the new thought must weave a new garment for itself, those which it found ready made being narrower than that it could wrap itself in them; that the new wine must fashion new vessels for itself, if both should be preserved, the old being neither strong enough, nor expansive enough, to hold it. [ Footnote: Renan, speaking on this matter, says of the early Christians: La langue leur faisait defaut. Le Grec et le Semitique les trahissaient egalement. De la cette enorme violence que le Christianisme naissant fit au langage (_Les Apotres_, p. 71)] Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters, which would claim an utterance, how could the Greek language possess a word for 'idolatry,' so long as the sense of the awful contrast between the worship of the living G.o.d and of dead things had not risen up in their minds that spoke it? But when Greek began to be the native language of men, to whom this distinction between the Creator and the creature was the most earnest and deepest conviction of their souls, words such as 'idolatry,' 'idolater,' of necessity appeared. The heathen did not claim for their deities to be 'searchers of hearts,'

did not disclaim for them the being 'accepters of persons'; such attributes of power and righteousness entered not into their minds as pertaining to the objects of their worship. The Greek language, therefore, so long as they only employed it, had not the words corresponding. [Footnote: [Greek: Prosopolaeptaes, kardiognostaes.]]

It, indeed, could not have had them, as the Jewish h.e.l.lenistic Greek could not be without them. How useful a word is 'theocracy'; what good service it has rendered in presenting a certain idea clearly and distinctly to the mind; yet where, except in the bosom of the same Jewish Greek, could it have been born? [Footnote: We preside at its birth in a pa.s.sage of Josephus, _Con. Apion._ ii. 16.]

These difficulties, which were felt the most strongly when the thought and feeling that had been at home in the Hebrew, the original language of inspiration, needed to be transferred into Greek, reappeared, though not in quite so aggravated a form, when that which had gradually woven for itself in the Greek an adequate clothing, again demanded to find a suitable garment in the Latin. An example of the difficulty, and of the way in which the difficulty was ultimately overcome, will ill.u.s.trate this far better than long disquisitions. The cla.s.sical language of Greece had a word for 'saviour' which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a t.i.tle of honour not merely on the false G.o.ds of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled 'destroyers' than 'saviours' of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world to _save_ it. The word might be likened to some profaned temple, which needed a new consecration, but not to be abolished, and another built in its room. With the Latin it was otherwise. The language seemed to lack a word, which on one account or another Christians needed continually to utter: indeed Cicero, than whom none could know better the resources of his own tongue, remarkably enough had noted its want of any single equivalent to the Greek 'saviour.' [Footnote: Hoc [Greek: soter] quantum est? ita magnum ut Latine uno verbo exprimi non possit.] 'Salvator' would have been the natural word; but the cla.s.sical Latin of the best times, though it had 'salus' and 'salvus,' had neither this, nor the verb 'salvare'; some, indeed, have thought that 'salvare' had always existed in the common speech. 'Servator' was instinctively felt to be insufficient, even as 'Preserver' would for us fall very short of uttering all which 'Saviour' does now. The seeking of the strayed, the recovery of the lost, the healing of the sick, would all be but feebly and faintly suggested by it, if suggested at all. G.o.d '_preserveth_ man and beast,'

but He is the 'Saviour' of his own in a more inward and far more endearing sense. It was long before the Latin Christian writers extricated themselves from this embarra.s.sment, for the 'Salutificator'

of Tertullian, the 'Sospitator' of another, a.s.suredly did not satisfy the need. The strong good sense of Augustine finally disposed of the difficulty. He made no scruple about using 'Salvator'; observing with a true insight into the conditions under which new words should be admitted, that however 'Salvator' might not have been good Latin before the Saviour came, He by his coming and by the work had made it such; for, as shadows wait upon substances, so words wait upon things.

[Footnote: _Serm_. 299. 6: Christus Jesus, id est Christus Salvator: hoc est enim Latine Jesus. Nec quaerant grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed Christiani, quam verum. Salus enim Latinum nomen est; salvare et salvator non fuerunt haec Latina, antequam veniret Salvator: quando ad Latinos venit, et haec Latina fecit. Cf. _De Trin_. 13. 10: Quod verb.u.m [salvator] Latina lingua antea non habebat, sed habere poterat; sicut potuit quando voluit. Other words which we owe to Christian Latin, probably to the Vulgate or to the earlier Latin translations, are these--'carnalis,' 'clarifico,' 'compa.s.sio,' 'deitas' (Augustine, _Civ.

Dei_, 7. i), 'glorifico,' 'idololatria,' 'incarnatio,' 'justifico,'

'justificatio,' 'longanimitas,' 'mortifico,' 'magnalia,' 'mundicors,'

'pa.s.sio,' 'praedestinatio,' 'refrigerium' (Ronsch, _Vulgata_, p. 321), 'regeneratio,' 'resipiscentia,' 'revelatio,' 'sanctificatio,'

'soliloquium,' 'sufficientia,' 'supererogatio,' 'tribulatio.' Many of these may seem barbarous to the Latin scholar, but there is hardly one of them which does not imply a new thought, or a new feeling, or the sense of a new relation of man to G.o.d or to his fellow-man. Strange too and significant that heathen Latin could get as far as 'peccare' and 'peccatum,' but stopped short of 'peccator' and 'peccatrix.'] Take another example. It seemed so natural a thing, in the old heathen world, to expose infants, where it was not found convenient to rear them, the crime excited so little remark, was so little regarded as a crime at all, that it seemed not worth the while to find a name for it; and thus it came to pa.s.s that the word 'infanticidium' was first born in the bosom of the Christian Church, Tertullian being the earliest in whose writings it appears.

Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt.

The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece, [Footnote: See Lobeck, _Phrynichus_, p. 350.] the transplantation of the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic, theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many, too, have pa.s.sed over from the laboratory and the school, from the cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.

Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a manner they belong to all. Where, on the contrary, the movement is more strictly theological, or has for its sphere those regions of science and philosophy, where, as first pioneers and discoverers, only a few can bear their part, there the additions to the language and extensions of it will lack something of the freedom, the unconscious boldness, which mark the others. Their character will be more artificial, less spontaneous, although here also the creative genius of a single man, as there of a nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word will come forth, which will be the result of profound meditation, or of intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination--many a word, which shall as a torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the yet unexplored darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all the acquisitions in a particular direction of the past, shall furnish a mighty vantage- ground from which to advance to new conquests in those realms of mind or of nature, not as yet subdued to the intellect and uses of man.

'Cosmopolite' has often now a shallow or even a mischievous use; and he who calls himself 'cosmopolite' may mean no more than that he is _not_ a patriot, that his native country does _not_ possess his love. Yet, as all must admit, he could have been no common man who, before the preaching of the Gospel, launched this word upon the world, and claimed this name for himself. Nor was he a common man; for Diogenes the Cynic, whose sayings are among quite the most notable in antiquity, was its author. Being demanded of what city or country he was, Diogenes answered that he was a 'cosmopolite'; in this word widening the range of men's thoughts, bringing in not merely a word new to Greek ears, but a thought which, however commonplace and familiar to us now, must have been most novel and startling to those whom he addressed. I am far from a.s.serting that contempt for his citizenship in its narrower sense may not have mingled with this his challenge for himself of a citizenship wide as the world; but there was not the less a very remarkable reaching out here after truths which were not fully born into the world until _He_ came, in whom and in whose Church all national differences and distinctions are done away.

As occupying somewhat of a middle place between those more deliberate word-makers and the mult.i.tude whose words rather grow of themselves than are made, we must not omit him who is a _maker_ by the very right of his name--I mean, the poet. That creative energy with which he is endowed, 'the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,' will not fail to manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to extend that also of language, which does not willingly lag behind. And the loftier his moods, the more of this maker he will be. The pa.s.sion of such times, the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and justify audacities in speech, upon which in calmer moods he would not have ventured, or, venturing, would have failed to carry others with him: for it is only the fluent metal that runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. Nor is it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the poet's hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent before--non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein, to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.

But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that they ceased to make it the standard of value--Holland for instance did so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been found convenient to invent a word, 'to demonetize' to express this process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose n.o.body ever heard of 'extradition' till within the last few years; nor of 'neutralization'

except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the 'neutralization' of the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations. 'Secularization,' in like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it the need of a word which should describe the process, and 'transliteration' is the result.

We have long had 'a.s.similation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation'

has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat's _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _truffle_). Pott (_Etym. Forsch_. vol. ii. p. 65) introduced the word 'dissimilation' into German.]] Advances in philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo, and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of 'a.s.similation' going on very extensively in language; the organs of speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not 'a_df_iance,' but 'a_ff_iance,' not 're_n_ow_m_,' as our ancestors did when 'renom' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'; we say too, though we do not write it, 'cu_b_board' and not 'cu_p_board,'

'su_t_tle' and not 'su_b_tle.' But side by side with this there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for euphony or ease in speaking, were the strict form of the word too closely held fast; and where consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus 'cae_r_uleus' was once 'cae_l_uleus,' from caelum [Footnote: The connexion of _caeruleus_ with _caelum_ is not at all certain.] 'me_r_idies' is for 'me_d_idies/ or medius dies. In the same way the Italians prefer 've_l_eno' to 've_n_eno'; the Germans '_k_artoffel' to '_t_artuffel,' from Italian 'tartufola' = Latin terrae tuber, an old name of the potato; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form). So too in 'turtle,'

'marble,' 'purple,' we have shrunk from the double '_r_' of 'turtur,'

'marmor,' 'purpura.' [Footnote: See Dwight, _Modern Philology_, 2nd Series, p. 100; Heyse, _System der Sprachwissenschaft_, Section 139- 141; and Peile, _Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology_, pp. 357- 379.] New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because in an anterior period they were not required. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses, 'singer' (aoidos) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each of its parts so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then 'poet' or 'maker,' a word unknown to the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study, the name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out and obtained a new name for itself.

But it is not merely new things which will require new names. It will often be discovered that old things have not got a name at all, or, having one, are compelled to share it with something else, often to the serious embarra.s.sment of both. The manner in which men become aware of such deficiencies, is commonly this. Comparing their own language with another, and in some aspects a richer, compelled, it may be, to such comparison through having undertaken to transfer treasures of that language into their own, they become conscious of much worthy to be uttered in human speech, and plainly utterable therein, since another language has found utterance for it; but which hitherto has found no voice in their own. Hereupon with more or less success they proceed to supply the deficiency. Hardly in any other way would the wants in this way revealed make themselves felt even by the most thoughtful; for language is to so large an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to contemplate things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that the absence of words from a language almost necessarily brings with it the absence of any sense of that absence. Here is one advantage of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the inst.i.tution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co- extensive with things (and by 'things' I mean subjects as well as objects of thought, whatever one can _think_ about), that innumerable things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all pa.s.sion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so speak' with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, sufficiently declares. [Footnote: _Fin_. ii. 4; and for 'qualitas' see _Acad_. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero, [Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine happily terms him.] will have noticed even apart from this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own, which thereupon he will endeavour to supply. Thus the Latin had two adjectives which, though not kept apart as strictly as they might have been, possessed each its peculiar meaning, 'invidus' one who is envious, 'invidiosus' one who excites envy in others; [Footnote: Thus the monkish line: _Invidiosus_ ego, non _invidus_ esse laboro.] at the same time there was only one substantive, 'invidia' the correlative of them both; with the disadvantage, therefore, of being employed now in an active, now in a pa.s.sive sense, now for the envy which men feel, and now for the envy which they excite. The word he saw was made to do double duty; under a seeming unity there lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confusions might follow. He therefore devised 'invidentia,' to express the active envy, or the envying, no doubt desiring that 'invidia'

should be restrained to the pa.s.sive, the being envied. 'Invidentia' to all appearance supplied a real want; yet Cicero himself did not succeed in giving it currency; does not seem himself to have much cared to employ it again. [Footnote: _Tusc._ iii. 9; iv. 8; cf. Doderlein, _Synon._ vol. iii, p. 68.] We see by this example that not every word, which even an expert in language proposes, finds acceptance; [Footnote: Quintilian's advice, based on this fact, is good (i. 6. 42): Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qui ut.i.tur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multum tamen refert non solum quid _dixerint_, sed etiam quid _persuaserint_. He himself, as he informs us, invented 'vocalitas'

to correspond with the Greek [Greek: euphonia] (_Inst.i.t._ i. 5. 24), but I am not conscious that he found any imitators here.] for, as Dryden, treating on this subject, has well observed, 'It is one thing to draw a bill, and another to have it accepted.' Provided some words live, he must be content that others should fall to the ground and die.

Nor is this the only unsuccessful candidate for admission into the language which Cicero put forward. His 'indolentia' which I mentioned just now, hardly pa.s.sed beyond himself; [Footnote: Thus Seneca a little later is unaware, or has forgotten, that Cicero made any such suggestion. Taking no notice of it, he proposes 'impatientia' as an adequate rendering of [Greek: apatheia]. There clung this inconvenience to the word, as he himself allowed, that it was already used in exactly the opposite sense (_Ep_. 9). Elsewhere he claims to be the inventor of 'essentia' (_Ep_. 38;.)] his 'vitiositas,' [Footnote: _Tusc_. iv. 15.]

'indigentia,' [Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. 9. 21.] and 'mulierositas,'

[Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. ii.] not at all. 'Beat.i.tas' too and 'beat.i.tudo,'

[Footnote: Nat. Dear. i. 34.] both of his coining, yet, as he owns himself, with something strange and unattractive about them, found almost no acceptance at all in the cla.s.sical literature of Rome: 'beat.i.tude,' indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the Christian Church, but 'beat.i.tas' none. Coleridge's 'esemplastic,' by which he was fain to express the all-atoning or unifying power of the imagination, has not pleased others at all in the measure in which it pleased himself; while the words of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas Browne and Henry More, born only to die, are mult.i.tudinous as the fallen leaves of autumn. [Footnote: See my _English Past and Present_, 13th edit. p. 113.] Still even the word which fails is often an honourable testimony to the scholarship, or the exactness of thought, or the imagination of its author; and Ben Jonson is over-hard on 'neologists,' if I may bring this term back to its earlier meaning, when he says: 'A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is a.s.sured,' [Footnote: Therefore the maxim: Moribus antiquis, praesentibus utere verbis.]

I spoke just now of comprehensive words, which should singly say what hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which a higher term has been reached than before had been attained. The value of these is incalculable. By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would often have been nearly or quite impossible without them; and such as have invented or put these into circulation, are benefactors of a high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of life, unless our dealings are on the smallest scale, we willingly have about us our money in the shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our transactions are at all extensive, rather in gold than in silver: while, if we were setting forth upon a long and costly journey, we should be best pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest denomination of money which it was capable of a.s.suming. How many words with which we are now perfectly familiar are for us what the circular note or bill of exchange is for the traveller or the merchant. As innumerable pence, a mult.i.tude of shillings, not a few pounds are gathered up and represented by one of these, so have we in some single word the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other, until all have been at length summed up for us in that single word. This last may be compared to nothing so fitly as to some mighty river, which does not bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of these affluents having lost its separate name and existence in that which at last represents and contains them all.