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Title: History in english words
Author: Owen Barfield
Release date: August 3, 2023 [eBook #71332]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Methuen & Co, 1926
Credits: Tim Lindell, John Campbell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY IN ENGLISH WORDS ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of the book.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
HISTORY IN ENGLISH WORDS
HISTORY IN
ENGLISH WORDS
BY
OWEN BARFIELD
[Illustration: colophon]
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1926_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
PART I
THE ENGLISH NATION
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS 3
II. THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE 20
III. ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION 35
IV. MODERN ENGLAND 50
PART II
THE WESTERN OUTLOOK
V. MYTH 71
VI. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 85
VII. DEVOTION 107
VIII. EXPERIMENT 128
IX. PERSONALITY AND REASON 145
X. MECHANISM 167
XI. IMAGINATION 185
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
INDEX 209
PART I
THE ENGLISH NATION
CHAPTER I
PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS
_Electric._ _Quality._ _Garden._ _Mead._ _Timber._
If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished
letter of Dr. Johnson’s, and on reading it through we came across the
word “telephone”, we should be fairly justified in sending him about
his business. The fact that there was no such thing as a telephone
until many years after Johnson’s death would leave no doubt whatever
in our minds that the letter was not written by him. If we cared
to go farther, we could say with equal certainty that the letter
was written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the
telephone was invented.
Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the
letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If
in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer
had said that “the atmosphere was electric”, we could still be fairly
positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be
because the _thing_ of which the letter spoke had no existence in
Johnson’s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and
fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as
they are to-day; but if we look up the word _electric_ in the _Oxford
Dictionary_, we find that in Johnson’s time it simply was not used in
that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as:
A property in some bodies, whereby when rubbed so as to grow warm,
they draw little bits of paper, or such-like substances, to them.
The world was only just beginning to connect this mysterious property
of amber with the thunder and lightning, and however still and heavy
the air might have been, it would have been impossible for the
lexicographer to describe it by that word. Or again, supposing the
letter had said nothing about a storm, but that it had described a
conversation between Garrick and Goldsmith which was carried on “at
high tension”, we should still have little hesitation in pronouncing
it to be a forgery. The phrase “high tension”, used of the relation
between human beings, is a metaphor taken from the condition of the
space between two electrically charged bodies. At present many people
who use such a phrase are still half-aware of its full meaning, but
many years hence everybody may be using it to describe their quarrels
and their nerves without dreaming that it conceals an electrical
metaphor——just as we ourselves speak of a man’s “disposition” without
at all knowing that the reference is to astrology.[1] Nevertheless
by consulting an historical dictionary it will still be possible to
“date” any passage of literature in which the phrase occurs. We shall
still know for certain that the passage could not have been written
in a time before certain phenomena of static electricity had become
common knowledge.
Thus, the scientists who discovered the forces of electricity
actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them
to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness
of their relationship with one another. They made it possible for
them to speak of the “high tension” between them. So that the
discovery of electricity, besides introducing several new words (e.g.
_electricity_ itself) into our everyday vocabulary, has altered
or added to the meaning of many older words, such as _battery_,
_broadcast_, _button_, _conductor_, _current_, _force_, _magnet_,
_potential_, _tension_, _terminal_, _wire_, and many others.
But apart from the way in which it is used, there is a little mine
of history buried in the word _electric_ itself. If we look it
up in a dictionary we find that it is derived from a Greek word
‘ēlektron’, which meant ‘amber’. And in this etymology alone anyone
who was completely ignorant of our civilization could perceive
three facts—that at one time English scholars were acquainted with
the language spoken by the ancient Greeks, that the Greeks did not
know of electricity (for if they had there would have been nothing
to prevent our borrowing their word for it), and that the idea of
electricity has been connected in men’s minds with amber. Lastly, if
we were completely ignorant of the quality of amber itself, the fact
that ‘ēlektron’ is connected with ‘ēlektōr’, which means ‘gleaming’
or ‘the beaming sun’, might give us a faint hint of its nature. These
are some of the many ways in which words may be made to disgorge the
past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle
or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.
Now the deduction of information from the presence or absence of
certain words is a common practice which has been known to critics
and historians of literature, under some such name as “internal
evidence”, for many years. It is from such evidence, for instance,
that we deduce Shakespeare’s ignorance of the details of Roman
civilization. But until a few years ago—within the memory of men
still living—very little use had been made of language itself,
that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as
interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds. It
has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone,
not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is
spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral
earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is
this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets
which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us
a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the
bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has
preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals
the evolution of consciousness.
In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the
thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead,
but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden
of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler
its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which
it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort
which went to its making. Thus, the word _quality_ is used by most
educated people every day of their lives, yet in order that we should
have this simple word Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it
is perhaps the greatest effort known to man) of turning a vague
feeling into a clear thought. He invented the new word ‘poiotēs’,
‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’ and Cicero
translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language
becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves
realize, can even make ourselves feel how every time the word
_quality_ is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative
effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition of
such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it
circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life
about us. It is the kiss which brings the sleeping courtiers to life.
But in order to excavate the information which is buried in a word we
must have the means to ascertain its history. Until quite recently
(about a hundred years ago) philology, as an exact science, was still
in its infancy, and words were derived by ingenious guesswork from
all kinds of impossible sources. All languages were referred to a
Hebrew origin, since Hebrew was the language of the Bible. This was
taken for granted. Since then, however, two new developments have
revolutionized the whole study, made it accurate, and enormously
extended its scope. During the eighteenth century Sanskrit, the
ancient speech of the Hindoos, began for the first time to attract
the attention of European scholars. In 1767 a French Jesuit named
Coeurdoux pointed out certain resemblances between the European and
Sanskrit languages. In 1786 Sir William Jones described that language
as being
of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious
than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet
bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of
verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced
by accident—so strong that no philologer could examine all three
without believing them to have sprung from some common source
which, perhaps, no longer exists.
At the time it was no more than a brilliant conjecture, but with it
the comparative philology of the Aryan languages may be said to have
begun.
Secondly, with the advent of phonology certain immutable laws were
discovered governing the sounds made by the human throat, and the way
in which these sounds change with the passing of time and react upon
each other when they are knit together in a spoken word. Henceforward
it was possible to say for certain that, for example, the English
word _wit_ (from the old verb ‘witan’, to know) was not _derived_
from the Latin ‘videre’, but cognate, or related, with it. Many words
derived from ‘videre’, such as _advice_, _envy_, _review_, seem at
first sight infinitely farther off from the stem ‘vid-’ than _wit_,
but it was now possible for scholars to say for certain that a Latin
stem ‘vid’ adopted into English could not possibly have changed
into _wit_. They could be equally certain that, if the Romans had
_borrowed_ the Greek word ‘idein’ (to see) into their language, it
could never have changed its form to ‘_vid_ere’, so that, innumerable
as are the words which Rome borrowed from Greece, ‘videre’ is not
one of them. Thus, it was clear that such groups of three words as
_idein_, _videre_, and _wit_, or _astēr_, _stella_, and _star_, were
not father, son, and grandson (as is the case, for instance, with
_poenē_, _poena_, and _penal_), but three brothers or cousins all
descended from a common ancestor with a stem something like ‘weid’
belonging to some other language. This, put very briefly and with
many omissions, was the contribution made by phonology to the science
of comparative philology.
Perhaps it is not altogether insignificant that the study of that
seemingly dull subject—phonology—should be associated in our minds
with one of the most charming collection of fairy-tales in Europe.
It is thanks to the labours of Jacob Grimm during the first half
of the last century that we are now able to reconstruct the remote
pasts of words, not, it is true, with absolute certainty, but with
a degree of it which makes a chapter such as the present one worth
writing. And while Grimm was burrowing into the rich, loamy soil of
German speech and German folk-lore, another German scholar, Franz
Bopp, was laying the foundations, with the help of this knowledge and
of the results of the study of Sanskrit, of a genuinely scientific
comparative philology. Nor was it long before less scholarly but
more imaginative minds, such as Max Müller’s, were interpreting the
meaning of their researches to a wider public.
We can imagine the suppressed excitement of the philologists of that
time as they began to discover in that remote Eastern language, the
sacred language of the Vedic hymns, words such as ‘vid’ (to see),
‘tara’ (a star), ‘sad’ (to sit), ‘bhratar’ (a brother). For it
was not only the evident relation of Sanskrit to the languages of
Europe that was exciting. Sanskrit, which had preserved the forms
of its words more unchanged than any other Aryan tongue, threw a
brilliant light on the close relations existing between those other
languages themselves. For instance, although the sisterhood of words
such as the Greek ‘onoma’, Latin ‘nomen’, and _name_, had long
been suspected, yet there had been no way of distinguishing such a
sisterhood from purely accidental resemblances like Hebrew ‘gol’,
Greek ‘kaleo’, and _call_, and the connection between ‘brother’
and ‘frater’ was by no means obvious. But when the older Sanskrit
form ‘bhratar’ was brought to light, the gap between these words
was at once bridged. It could be seen at a glance how the three of
them, _brother_, _bhratar_, and _frater_, had started from the same
original form and diverged through the years. Gradually all doubt was
blown away, and Sanskrit, the language of a race with whom Europeans
had thought, and for the most part still think, that they had nothing
whatever in common, stood revealed as an obvious relative of Latin,
Greek, Modern English, and practically all the other languages of
Europe. It seemed, therefore, to follow that our ancestors and those
of the Hindoos were at one time living together, that our ancestors
and theirs were, in fact, the same.
At first it was thought that Sanskrit itself was the parent-language
from which all the others had derived, and that the nations of Europe
were descended from a body of Hindoos, some of whom had migrated
westwards. We called ourselves “Aryans” because the people who had
once spoken Sanskrit were known as “Aryas”, or worshippers of the
God of the Brahmins. But soon the accurate methods of analysis
which philology had now acquired made it plain that this could not
be so. Therefore a still older language was postulated and called
indifferently the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, or the Indo-European
parent-language. If there was a language, there must have been a
people who spoke it, and attention was soon focused on the character,
civilization, and whereabouts in space and time of the people who
spoke the lost Indo-European, or “Aryan” parent-language.
The fascination of this particular branch of philological research is
apparent when we recollect that in this case, in the case of these
remote Eastern ancestors of ours, philology is almost the only window
through which we can look out on them. In most subsequent periods
of history we have many other ways, besides the study of language,
of discovering the outward circumstances of men’s lives. Historical
records, archaeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature, all come
to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization;
but it is not so with the Aryans. Here ethnology and archaeology tell
us practically nothing, anthropology a little, and the rest nothing
at all. If we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from this
period we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately
over it. And in such romantic circumstances it is hardly surprising
that we should find a veritable army of scholars and philosophers,
both professional and amateur, jostling each other upon that plank
with such vigour that the bridge and its burden have often seemed in
danger of vanishing quietly together into the abyss.
The central principle upon which philologists have worked is this,
that if a word occurs to-day in a fair sprinkling of the Aryan
languages, then that word existed in the Aryan parent-language, and
therefore the thing of which it is the label existed in some form or
other in the primitive Aryan civilization. Conversely, if an object
or an idea is found to have a different name in most of the Aryan
languages, it was sometimes assumed that that object was not known
to the Aryans before their dispersion. But this negative deduction
soon came to be regarded as unsafe, and there are indeed many reasons
why the whole method is limited and uncertain. For instance, even
in one language it is constantly happening that when a new thing
or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is
described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing
object which most closely resembles it. This is inevitable. We have
to proceed from the known to the unknown in language as in life; but
language lags behind life and words change more slowly than things
or ideas. When railways first came in, their rolling-stock consisted
of a string of vehicles resembling the old horse coach so exactly
that it was said later that “the ghost of a horse stalked in front
of the engine”. Although this is no longer the case, we still call
these vehicles _carriages_ or _coaches_, and look like continuing to
do so. To take an even more patent example, when a modern Englishman
or American uses the very old Celtic word _car_, we all know what
he means: yet it would be an error to deduce from this that the
principle of internal combustion was known in pre-Christian times
in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and probably Rome (Latin
‘carrus’, a cognate word). Moreover, we can see at once that the
fraction of error is infinitely greater when we are dealing, not
with the development of a word in one language, but with its history
as it descended from one language to another; for example, from the
hypothetical parent-tongue into the languages with which we are
familiar to-day. Indeed, this kind of reasoning, if no other evidence
were available, would lead us to conclude that the Greeks were
acquainted with electricity.
Fortunately, however, it is not the object of this little book to
put forward theories and discuss the extent to which they can be
proved or disproved by words. And though it has been interesting
to observe that in some cases—and notably when we are endeavouring
to reconstruct the life and thought of our Aryan ancestors—our
knowledge, such as it is, is derived very largely from the evidence
of words, yet in these pages, even when that particular period is
being dealt with, the words chosen for description will by no means
necessarily be those which provide the most conclusive evidence
for what is said. A great deal has been done in quite recent years
by way of collating the results of comparative philology with
those of anthropology, ethnology, comparative mythology, etc., and
reconstructing from the combined data something of the past history
of our own and other races or cultures. We are concerned here, not
with the way in which those results were arrived at, but with the
results themselves. The reconstruction itself has been and is being
done by scholars; here the endeavour is rather to make use of their
labours; not to think about the past, as it were, but to look at it.
Consequently the words chosen are not the most useful ones, but those
which are the best telescopes; for while the nineteenth century spent
itself prodigally in multitudinous endeavours to know what the past
was, it is now possible for us, by penetrating language with the
knowledge thus accumulated, to feel how the past is.
Who are the Aryans? Where did they come from? Looking back down the
corridors of time from the particular perspective to which we have
attained in the twentieth century, far away in the past—it may be in
the Stone Age—we seem to be able to perceive a remarkable phenomenon.
At some particular spot in the vast plains stretching from Eastern
Europe to Central Asia it was as though a fresh spring bubbled up
into the pool of humanity. Whether it represented the advent of a
new “race-type”, what a race-type exactly is, and how it begins are
questions which we must leave to others to settle. That spring was
the Aryan culture.
Throughout much of Europe and Asia there were already in existence
different civilizations in different stages of development; such
were the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and farther west the great Minoan
civilization, which in its Bronze Age was to ray out an influence
from Crete all over the Aegean world. It may be that there was
something static[2] in the very nature of these pre-Aryan cultures,
or it may be that they were ageing and passing in the natural course
of events; what is certain is that there was something dynamic, some
organic, out-pushing quality in the waters of this Aryan spring. For
these waters spread. They have been spreading over the world ever
since that time, now quickly, now slowly, down into India and Persia,
north to the Baltic, west over all Europe and the New World, until
in the persons of the three Aryan explorers, Peary, Amundsen, and
Scott, their waves have licked the poles. It appears to have been
the tendency of the Aryan settler, whether he came as a conquering
invader or as a peaceful immigrant, to obliterate more than he
absorbed of the aboriginal culture on which he imposed himself. In
this the Celts and Teutons who ages ago overran most of Europe appear
to have resembled the English-speaking settlers who long afterwards
almost annihilated the North American Indian with his gods and
traditions. It is true that we English owe to this latter pre-Aryan
race the ability to express just that shade of contempt which is
conveyed by the word _skunk_, also the charming blend of whimsicality
and reprobation crystallized in _mugwump_. But such survivals really
only emphasize the extent to which, as the Aryan waters spread, the
pre-Aryan past has been covered over. The past does indeed live in
the language we speak and in those with which we are familiar, but
it is the past of the Aryans. If we dig down far enough into the
English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere
round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands
at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation.
There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe
as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important
customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used
cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan
culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. We may patronize
our less fortunate neighbours, but we do not “matronize” them. Yet
faint memories of such strange ways seem to have lingered on among
the Aryans in the widespread legend of a race of Amazons who once
dwelt in the lost continent of Atlantis, the western land, and in the
rumour of mighty female warriors in pre-Celtic[3] Gaul, while the
name of the River Marne (Matrona) is thought to be another relic of
the existence in pre-Aryan Europe of a race of men who deified their
trees and streams, and hoped, when they died, to be gathered to their
mothers.
With this brief glance at our forgotten predecessors, we may turn our
gaze upon that region near the banks of the Dnieper whence our own
ancestors first began to expand into the world. And we get a glimpse
of the kind of settlements in which these pastoral people must have
lived in the fact that the English word _garden_ has grown from the
same stem as the termination _-grad_ in _Petrograd_, where it means
‘town’, while on the other hand the Dutch for _garden_ is ‘tuin.’ We
see their villages, family settlements springing up in an enclosure
round the home of a patriarch. Households are large and cumbersome,
the sons, as they grow up, bring home wives from different villages,
and all live together under the roof and absolute dominion of the
mother and father-in-law. Both sexes wear _zones_ or loin-cloths,
and probably in addition one simple garment of fur or of some woven
material, which does not altogether hide their tattooed bodies,
adorned with armlets and necklaces of animals’ teeth, or it may be
of shells or amber beads. It is the business of the women in these
communities, not only to remain faithful to their husbands on pain
of the most appalling penalties, not only to bring up the children,
to keep house, and to _weave_ and spin, but also to till the fields
and look after the _bees_, _geese_, _oxen_, _sows_, and such other
animals as may have been domesticated. A hard enough life, but they
have their consolations as they grow older and become respected as
dames. Moreover, they have a religious cult of their own. In some
cases their imaginations are rich in myth, and they are looked up
to as knowing the secrets of Nature and possibly of the future
itself. It is the men’s business to make war, hold councils, and
hunt—possibly with horses[4] and _hounds_, both of which animals are
at any rate known to them. The family lives on a kind of unleavened
bread, _milk_, cheese,[5] cooked meats, vegetables, and some fruits.
There is much brutality. Widows may be expected to join their
husbands in the grave, and old men are sometimes killed off to make
room; nevertheless, life is not without its friendlier aspect. There
is little doubt, for instance, that our Aryan ancestors knew how
to get drunk. The liquor, made principally of honey, with which
they sent themselves to bed, appears to have been fraught with such
sweet associations that no branch of the Aryan family, however far
they went upon their travels, could forget it. The Angles and Saxons
brought this _mead_ into our country, and the word occurs in Dutch,
Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek
(‘methu’), Sanskrit, Zend, and modern Persian. As it threads its way
through this babel of tongues, ringing the changes on the meanings
of ‘honey’, ‘drunkenness’, and ‘enjoyment’, the little monosyllable
seems to give us a peculiarly intimate peep into the interior of an
Aryan home. Yet the connection of the word _bed_ with the Latin stem
‘fod-’ (fodio), ‘to dig’, should prevent us from forming an unduly
voluptuous image of the final stages of this prehistoric pastime. If
we call up before us a roof and walls of wood or wattles, bounding a
dark interior crowded with human beings and possibly some cattle, lit
only by a draughty hole in the roof—an arrangement which the Teutons
were evidently trying to express when they afterwards dubbed it a
‘wind’s eye’ or _window_—we have a picture which will serve. It is a
picture of our ancestors just before they began to spread out over
the world, and the time is before 2000 B.C.
But the question of the houses in which they lived takes us farther
back still. At some time, probably before they became acquainted
with agricultural modes of livelihood, the Aryans were living a
nomadic existence. _Axle_, _nave_, _wheel_, _yoke_, and a common
word for ‘waggon’ have convinced people that they once moved from
place to place in a kind of primitive caravan, running probably on
solid wheels (for there is no common word for ‘spoke’). Now the
English word _cove_, which in its Icelandic form means ‘hut’ and in
its Greek form (‘gupē’) a subterranean dwelling such as that which
was inhabited by the Cyclops, takes us back to a still older form
of residence. Again, _wand_ in English means a ‘slender rod’, but
in German and Dutch it means a ‘wall’, while the weightier and more
solid word _timber_ is connected with the Greek root ‘dem-’ (demein),
‘to build’, Latin ‘domus’, ‘a house’. In these words we can perhaps
see the most ancient house rising as time goes on out of a natural
cave in the ground to the dignity of a sort of dug-out with wattled
sides and roof—eventually to the estate of a firm, wooden hut. And
so, behind the picture of our ancestors as they lived together on
the spot from which they finally began to spread, we can discern
another less certain picture of the very beginnings; of a race, a
family perhaps, or some voluntary collection of men not tied by
blood, who were together in the Stone Age somewhere in Central Asia.
They increase in numbers and power, and, trekking westwards, live—for
how many years or centuries we cannot tell—as a race of pastoral
nomads, until somewhere in the region of the Dnieper they pass from
the wandering nomad existence to some more settled life such as that
which has been described.
In addition to the somewhat prosaic words from which we have
attempted to derive information, it is pleasant to us to think of
these ancestors of ours already uttering to one another in that
remote past great and simple words like _fire_, _night_, _star_,
_thunder_, and _wind_, which our children still learn to use as they
grow up. And we must think also how during all this time the new
thing, the force, the spirit which the Aryans were to bring into
the world, must have been simmering within them. Strengthening their
physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony,
working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon
some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the
Aryans became. And then they began to move. And the result was the
_Bhagavad Gita_, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy
Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare,
Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, the vast modern industrial
civilizations of Europe and America, and the British Empire touching
the Antipodes.
CHAPTER II
THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE
_Beech._ _Bard._ _Attic._ _Tragedy._ _Authority._ _Delirious._
_Wine._ _Church._
It would be a great mistake to picture the Aryans setting out in
some vast, organized expedition such as that of the Israelites under
Moses. The study of comparative grammar suggests rather that they
spread outwards from their centre in a series of little rills, each
one, as it flowed, either pushing the rill in front of it a stage
farther on, or flowing through it and passing beyond. During the
first thousand years of this process we have very little idea of
the extent to which the individual groups of these ever-widening
circles—the different “races” as they were now beginning to be—were
in communication with one another. After a time, however, we can
discern them pretty sharply divided into two streams, a north-western
and a south-eastern stream. It was the main stream which flowed
north-west, and it carried along with it the ancestors of the
powerful races which were afterwards to be called Greeks, Italians,
Slavs, Teutons, and Celts. The settlement of the Celts in Britain
and the subsequent arrival first of the Teutonic Angles and Saxons
and then of the Normans, the movement of the Celts westward to Wales
and Ireland, and the final streaming of their Teutonic successors
right through them and across the Atlantic—all these are excellent
examples of the way in which the separate rills of the north-western
stream have continued ever since the first central commotion to crawl
and mingle and overlap like the waves of an incoming tide.
Meanwhile the south-eastern stream flowed past the Himalayas down
into India and Persia, where their descendants became the Brahmanic
Hindoos and the Zoroastrian Persians of a later date.
That all connection was lost at a very early date between these two
main streams is plain from another interesting little group of words.
These are common to all the members of the north-western group, but
quite unknown to the south-eastern, and perhaps the most interesting
is _mere_, the Old English for ‘sea’, which is still used poetically
of inland waters, and in the word _mer_maid, while its Latin form
‘mare’ is equally familiar to most educated Englishmen. From the
distribution of this word among the Aryan nations, together with
similar equations such as _fish_ and _piscis_, we can deduce that
these two groups of travellers had already separated before either of
them reached the sea-board.
There is evidence, too, that this north-western group, comprising
as it did the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, as well as of the
Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, had reached before it dispersed a new
country of forests, such as must have covered most of Northern and
Western Europe at that time. At any rate we find words for trees—such
as _beech_, _elm_, and _hazel_—and for birds—_finch_, _starling_,
_swallow_, _throstle_—common to most of the languages spoken by their
descendants, yet absent from Persian and Sanskrit. It was at this
time, and amid these surroundings, that agriculture seems to have
appeared among the north-western Aryans. The old Aryan word from
which we have _acre_ lost its former meaning of ‘any enclosed piece
of land’ and acquired the new and special significance of _tilled_
land, as in the Latin ‘ager,’ etc. _Corn_, _furrow_, _bean_, _meal_,
_ear_ of corn, and the verb to _mow_ also date back to this period of
our history.
And then the north-western stream again subdivided; and we will
follow first of all that branch of it which dropped away southward
into the Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. This time
it is not a word, but a poet’s imagination which has fixed for us
in a passage of considerable beauty the historic moment when this
wave first lapped the farther shore, the prophetic shock of contact
between Aryan settler and aborigine:
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted Masters of the waves....
These young, light-hearted masters were called Greeks, or Hellenes;
they migrated southwards in a series of waves, the first of which
contained two tribes known as the Achaians and Danaans. These
were followed and overtaken at a later date by the Dorians, and
subsequently again by the Attic Greeks. We still make use of some of
the experiences undergone by these tribes, and of the characteristics
which they developed, in order to express more exactly our own inner
experiences. Through the channel of words and myths which have come
down to us from that time, the great poet who sang to the Achaians
and Danaans of the exploits of their ancestors has given us many
metaphors and images—special little reservoirs of feeling which we
could not have created for ourselves. Most people, for instance, like
to be called _Trojans_; _stentorian_ and _pander_ are from the names
of characters in his poems, and _nectar_ and _ambrosial_ from the
food and drink consumed by his gods. Speech was a more miraculous
and rhythmical thing to the Achaians than it is to us to-day, and
whether or no the Gaelic _bard_ is cognate with the Greek ‘phrazein’,
to ‘speak’, there is no doubt that ‘epos’, the ‘word’, had its other
meaning of ‘poem’. Long afterwards the adjective ‘epikos’ came to
be applied especially to lofty compositions such as those of the
great poet himself. Accordingly, in the European war the special
correspondent could often find no more vivid expression for his sense
of the vastness and grandeur of the catastrophe he was recording than
to call up by the word _epic_ vague memories of Homer’s gods and
heroes.
A single timid reference to ‘awful signs’,[6] together with the
absence of any ordinary word for ‘writing’, suggests that Homer’s
Achaians did not know how to write, and that his two long poems of
twenty-four books each had to be memorized from beginning to end by
that class of professional reciters from which our word _rhapsody_
is derived. The actual text of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ gives us
a vivid and majestic picture of early, but not the earliest, Aryan
culture. Of their author, in so far as there was one particular
author, we know very little except that he was probably blind. It
was the common thing for the bards who were to be found among all the
Aryan races, and survived as ‘Minstrels’ into the Middle Ages, to be
blind; and Homer’s own blindness, apart from a reference to it, has
been deduced by some from a preponderance in his poems of “audile”
epithets, such as the _clanging_ arrow and the _loud-sounding_ sea.
It may be mentioned that the Slavs once called their bards ‘sliepac’,
a word which also meant ‘blind’.
The Dorians who followed soon divided into two main groups with their
centres in Laconia and Attica respectively. The notorious taciturnity
of the inhabitants of Laconia has given us _laconic_, and we are
referring to their rigid ideas on infant welfare when we speak of a
‘_spartan_ mother’, for Sparta was the capital of Laconia.
But it was in Attica, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. that
the Hellenic culture reached its finest flower. We use the word
_Attic_[7] to describe a peculiarly finished work of art or an
exquisite literary style. No wonder. In the city state of Athens, for
the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something
which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a
civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a
social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan
moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was
absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years
into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have
never been wholly surpassed. Consequently, the names of many things
which we regard as the very hall-marks of a cultured society can
be traced back to the Attic dialect of this period, and no farther.
_Academy_, _school_, _history_, _philosophy_, _logic_, _grammar_,
_poetry_, _rhythm_, _harmony_, _melody_, _music_, are all from Greek
words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence
of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words,
_chorus_, _comedy_, _drama_, _theatre_, and _tragedy_, and the lesser
_catastrophe_, _episode_, _prologue_, and _protagonist_, all of which
draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great
Athenian dramatists.
Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into
Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded
the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which
the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash
into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into
contact with other races. It is just such a spark which, in the
famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, lights up for us one of
the early shocks of encounter between these Italiot Aryans and the
older inhabitants of Italy.
Most people know a little about the subsequent history of these
Italiots. The republic which they founded at Rome transformed itself
into an empire that extended its bounds until they were coterminous
with the civilized world—an empire of Europe and part of Asia which
retained its real authority over men’s persons until the fifth
century A.D., and its authority, as an idea, over their minds and
actions down to that day at the beginning of the last century when
Bonaparte first styled himself “Emperor of the French”. There is, in
fact, scarcely a word in our language expressing even remotely the
notion of “authority”, which does not come to us from the Latin:
_authority_, _chief_, _command_, _control_, _dictator_, _dominion_,
_empire_, _government_, _master_, _officer_, _rule_, _subordinate_,
are some of them; and it is significant that the two Greek words
which we use to express the same idea are _despot_ and _tyrant_.
Both these terms have a definite stigma attaching to them, and are
employed very much more often by the foes of authority than by her
friends. The Greeks were not the nation to establish a world-empire.
They would have combined to bury Caesar, not to praise him; and from
another point of view the odious _sybarite_ is good proof that they
were not the stuff of which colonists are made. The English _lord_
and _king_, on the other hand, retain about them a hint of the
possibility of affection. It is a mark of affection when sailors drop
the Latin _captain_ and adopt the Dutch _skipper_, just as it is when
landsmen substitute for Latin _manager_ the Old High German _boss_.
And lastly, when we wish to suggest a peculiar blend of dignity and
chill self-consciousness, we use the name of the most remarkable of
all the Roman emperors.
Rome not only extended her jurisdiction over all Europe; she was
responsible for the birth of a new idea in men’s minds—the idea
that “authority”, as such, based on an abstraction called “law” and
irrespective of real ties of blood or affection, of sympathy or
antipathy, of religion or ownership, can exist as a relation between
human beings.
But we have hurried on to the Empire and left out the Republic. What
were the beginnings and early occupations of this astonishing race,
of whose national hero we are reminded when we use the word _brute_?
In the previous chapter reference was made to certain words and
phrases which are now used for the purposes of everyday life, but
which were originally technical metaphors drawn from the phenomena
of electricity. If we examine such words as _calamity_, _delirious_,
_emolument_, _pecuniary_, _prevaricate_, _tribulation_, we shall
find that they possess a similar history. Although the Romans of
classical times used the Latin words from which they are derived in
much the same way as the English words are used now, yet if we trace
them a little farther back, we learn that ‘delirare’ had at one time
no other meaning than to ‘go out of the furrow,’ when ploughing;
‘praevaricari’ was to ‘plough in crooked lines’; ‘tribulare’ to
thrash with a ‘tribulum’, and so forth. In _interval_, on the
other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades),
_excel_, _premium_, _salary_, and many other words we have examples
of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding
word, _spoil_, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other
meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering
with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it
lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome.
Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life,
and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it
was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of
realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the
warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was
constantly melting both implements into ideas.
Wherever we turn in our language, we have only to scratch the surface
in order to come upon fresh traces of Rome and of her solid, concrete
achievements in the world. With Greece, however, it is different. It
was not the outer fabric of a future European civilization which the
Greeks were building up while their own civilization flourished, but
the shadowy, inner world of human consciousness. They were creating
our outlook. We shall see a little later how the language which is
used by the theologians, philosophers, and scientists of Europe was
the gradual and painful creation of the thinkers of ancient Greece;
and we shall see that, without that language, the thoughts and
feelings and impulses which it expresses could have no being. Rome’s
task was to erect across Europe a rigid and durable framework on
which the complicated texture of thought, feeling, and will, woven in
the looms of Athens and Alexandria, could be permanently outspread.
Yet the performance of this task, concrete as it was, was inseparably
connected with an event of tremendous import for that growing, inner
world to which we have already referred—the most significant event,
as many believe, in the whole history of mankind.
The first casual contact between Greek coaster and Semitic trader,
imaginatively portrayed in the stanza quoted above from Matthew
Arnold, was indeed prophetic. It proved afterwards to have been not
merely a memorable event, but a sort of fertilization of the whole
history of humanity. For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner
world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real
than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old
Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had
been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom
and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an
extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense.
The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart,
were destined to meet and intermingle. In 332 B.C., when Alexander
the Great sacked Sidon and Tyre, Aryans and Semites began for the
first time to live side by side. They did not intermarry, but subtle
influences must have passed from one to the other, for in Alexandria,
shortly afterwards, contact between the two grew so intimate that by
the second century B.C. Greek had become the official language of
the Hebrew Scriptures. In the same century a Roman Protectorate was
established over Syria, which in due course of time became a province
of the Roman Empire. In that province was born the individual who is
known to history as Jesus of Nazareth.
His teaching, as far as it has come down to us, was Semitic both
in its form and in its outlook on the past. Nevertheless, it was
His teaching, and the feelings and impulses (though in a somewhat
unrecognizable form) which He implanted in the hearts and wills of
men, which were spread by the organization of the Roman Empire all
over Europe; and it was, above all, that part of the Greek world of
thought which had crystallized round His teaching that was carried
over into the thought and feeling of modern Europe.
But all this could only happen very slowly; for while Greece and
Rome had been rising successively to pinnacles of civilization,
the rest of the north-western group of Aryans had remained plunged
in darkness. They had passed Italy by, and already, more than a
thousand years B.C., begun to spread themselves over the rest of
Europe and to develop in the different areas wherein they found a
final resting-place the distinctive characteristics of Teuton, Slav,
and Celt. The Slavs, although they occupied—and still occupy—the
whole vast east of Europe, and although they number something like
two hundred million souls have as yet had extraordinarily little
influence upon our national life. There are only two Slavonic words
which may be described as common in all our language, _trumpet_
and _slave_, and both have come to us by devious routes, the first
through German and French, the second through Greek and Latin. One
of the lesser Slavonic races, the Croatians, developed a kind of
neckwear which appealed to the fashionable French, who adopted it and
described it as ‘croate’, ‘crovate’, or ‘cravate’, from which we get
our _cravat_. Otherwise the words are mostly exotic both in sound and
meaning. Thus, those that come to us direct from Russia are _copek_,
_drosky_, _knout_, _rouble_, _samovar_, _steppe_, _verst_—all of
which, with the possible exception of _steppe_, are still only used
when we are speaking of life in Russia itself.
How different it is when we come to consider the Teutons! When we
have abstracted all the Latin words, the French words, the Celtic
words, etc., from our vocabulary, the “English” words which remain
are all Teutonic; for we, ourselves, are a branch of the Teutonic
race.[8] Accordingly some of our older and most English words contain
buried vestiges of the lives which our ancestors once lived in the
continental forests. _Fear_, which is thought to be derived from
the same word as _fare_, has been taken to suggest the dangers, and
_weary_, which is traced to an old verb meaning ‘to tramp over wet
ground’, the fatigues of early travel, while _learn_ goes back to
a root which meant ‘to follow a track’. As the Italiot Aryans, the
Romans, created and extended their great empire, they came into
contact with these barbaric Teutonic tribes, whom they regarded,
naturally enough, not as kinsmen, but as strangers. We find some
of the results of this contact in such words as _inch_, _kitchen_,
_mile_, _mill_, _pound_, _street_, _toll_, _wall_, and _table_—all
of which are Latin words borrowed by our ancestors while they were
still living on the Continent together with the ancestors of the
Scandinavian, Dutch, German, Austrian, and Swiss nations. By their
nature these words suggest civilizing influences, and we find in
their company the names of more portable articles, such as _chest_,
_dish_, _kettle_, _pillow_, and _wine_, which traders might have
brought with them on their beasts of burden. This hypothesis becomes
almost a certainty when it is seen that _mule_ and _ass_ were
borrowed from Latin at this time; that _-monger_ (in _costermonger_,
_fishmonger_, ...) is a corruption of ‘mango’, the Latin name for a
trader; and that the old English _ceapian_, ‘to buy’, which we still
keep in _chap_, _chapman_, _cheap_, ... goes back to ‘caupones’,
the Roman name for wine-dealers. A few words like _pepper_ even
seem to have come in at this time from the remote East, by way of
Rome, and altogether these old Teutonic words may indeed give us,
as Mr. Pearsall Smith has said, “a dim picture of Roman traders,
travelling with their mules and asses along the paved roads of the
German provinces, their chests and boxes and wine-sacks, and their
profitable bargains with our primitive ancestors”. Finally, the
military words _camp_ and _pile_ recall the heyday of the Empire,
when Rome would recruit vast armies from her provincial subjects; and
even _church_ (another word common to all the Teutonic languages)
may have been brought home by German mercenaries on service in the
East. The Greek ‘Kuriakon’, from which it is said to be derived,
was in use in the Eastern provinces, as opposed to the ‘ecclesia’
(French ‘église’, Italian ‘chiesa’ and _ecclesiastical_) of Latin
Christianity, and our pagan forefathers probably picked it up
accidentally while they were pillaging the sacred buildings in which
their posterity was to kneel.
The modern nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland cover most of the area over which
the Teutonic immigrants originally spread. In a good many cases they
found Celtic predecessors already in possession. These Celts had
been the first Aryans to arrive in Northern Europe, and they seem,
at one time, to have spread over most of the Continent. Later on,
in historical times, they were to be found chiefly throughout that
wide district—including most of modern France and a great part of
Spain and Portugal—which the Romans called “Gaul”, as well as all
over Great Britain and Ireland. In Spain and France they mingled
their blood extensively with that of the Italiots, the two together
becoming the ancestors of the present “Latin” races or speakers of
the “Romance”[9] languages. But already, long before the decline
of the Roman Empire, the Teutons were beginning to drive the Celts
westward and away, a process which is clearly marked in these islands
by the prevalence of Celtic place-names in the west country. Thus,
the percentage of Celtic place-names in Cornwall has been calculated
to be about 80; in Devon it is only 32, and in Suffolk 2. The
conflict between Celt and Teuton dragged on in Ireland until 1921,
and it is doubtful if it is quite finished yet. One contingent of
the old Celtic inhabitants of this island, or _Britons_, driven to
the tip of Cornwall, decided to leave these shores altogether. They
sailed back to the Continent, and there established themselves in
the sea-board district which still bears the name of _Brittany_.
It is said that a Welsh peasant and a Breton can still, to this
day, understand one another’s speech well enough for most practical
purposes.
The number of proved Celtic words which have found their way into
English is extraordinarily small—scarce above a dozen. _Bard_, _bog_,
and _glen_ are among those which have come to us direct, and _car_
had to travel through Latin and French before it reached us, the
original having been borrowed by Julius Caesar from the Gauls, who
had thus named their war chariots. But for the most part, Celtic
words like _banshee_, _eisteddfod_, _galore_, _mavourneen_, ... have
a remote and foreign look, even though we may have used them for
many years. When we reflect that the Welsh tongue is still spoken
within two hundred miles of London, and that another Celtic language,
the Cornish, has only just died out, this seems very difficult to
understand.
Such, then, in barest outline, was the distribution of the Aryan
races which formed the major part of that vague and loose-knit
organization, the later Roman Empire. But it must not be imagined
that this picture of Rome’s European subjects is anything like
complete. Evoking history from words is like looking back at our
own past through memory; we see it, as it were, from within.
Something has stimulated the memory—a smell, a taste, or a fragment
of melody—and an inner light is kindled, but we cannot tell how far
that light will throw its beams. Language, like the memory, is not an
automatic diary; and it selects incidents for preservation, not so
much according to their intrinsic significance as according to the
impression they happen to have made upon the national consciousness.
Thus, English words have little to tell us about the great migrations
and massacres in Europe during the first ten centuries of the
Christian era, for terms of abuse like _vandal_ and _hun_ draw their
emotional force from the imaginations of historians rather than from
actual contact with the tribes in question.[10] From a mathematically
impartial point of view, therefore, the small amount of space that
can be assigned here to events which absorbed such an enormous share
of time and energy and swallowed millions of human lives is indeed
misleading. There is, however, an interesting little group of words
still bearing the imprint of the mighty upheaval which took place
around the Mediterranean during the seventh and eighth centuries
A.D., when Mohammedan Arabs overran Persia, Syria, Egypt, North
Africa, Spain, and the south of France. As might be expected, these
words come to us mostly from Arabic, via Spanish and French, for it
was in Spain that Islam took her firmest hold on Europe. They include
_cotton_, _gazelle_, _giraffe_, _lacquey_, _masquerade_, _syrup_,
_tabby_ (originally a kind of silk), _tabor_, _talc_, _tambourine_,
and some very interesting technical terms to which we shall presently
return. Naturally the receding tide of invasion has left Arabic
place-names dotted about in all the countries mentioned, while Spain
herself is literally crammed with them; but to give examples would be
beyond the scope of this little volume, which now finds itself drawn
by the laws of its subject-matter to hover more closely about the
shores of these islands.
CHAPTER III
ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION
_Durbeck._ _Chester._ _Candle._ _Cross._ _Law._ _Person._ _Chair._
_Obligation._ _Size._
There could hardly be a better example of the uneasy movement of
Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British
Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look,
inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and
tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been
matriarchally organized, and who, if the name _Pict_ may be taken
as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing
their bodies. At length, several centuries before our era, the first
Aryan wave reaches these shores in the persons of the Celts, who
spread over England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where they have
been pointed out and variously described by historians as _Britons_,
_Ancient Britons_, _Welsh_, _Gaels_, _Celts_,... They settle down
and live for some centuries the primitive life of savages, till
half-way through the first century B.C. they are disturbed by a
little Aryan tongue reaching out from the well-nigh spent Italian
wave. Pagan Rome establishes a brief dominion over a small portion
of Britain, drives roads, builds camps and cities, and after some
four hundred years is sucked back again to the Continent. Another
century, and the Angles and Saxons, borne forward on the crest of
the Teutonic wave, overrun the main island, driving the Celts into
its extremities, whence they regurgitate, before finally settling
down, upon various military and missionary enterprises which have
played an important part in our history. But already another ripple
of the Teutonic wave is upon us, rocking over the seas in the long
boats of the Scandinavian Vikings, and almost before they have left
their impress on the eastern quarter of the land, a third—the Normans
this time—is breaking on Britain once again at Pevensey. The liquid
metaphor is unavoidable, for no other image seems adequate to express
what actually happened. To watch through the glasses of history the
gradual arrival and settlement of the Aryans in this country is to be
reminded irresistibly of the rhythmic wash and backwash, the little
accidental interplays of splash and ripple, which accompany the tide
as it fills an irregularly shaped pool.
Every one of these motions has left its mark on our language, though
the traces of the earliest immigration of all—that of the Celts—are
rather scarce. The clearest vestiges of it are to be found in the
proper names of our rivers, for a surprising number of these contain
one or other of the various Celtic terms for ‘water’ or ‘river’,
e.g. _avon_, _dwr_ (_ter_ or _der_), _uisge_ (_wye_, _usk_, _is_,
_ax_), while the other parts of the name are often composed of words
for ‘water’ taken from another Aryan language, as in _Derwentwater_,
_Windermere_, _Easeburn_, _Ashbourne_,... An ingenious theory has
been evolved to account for this. In the case of the _Dur-beck_ in
Nottinghamshire, and the _Dur-bach_ in Germany, it has been supposed
that in the first place a body of Celtic immigrants squatted by the
side of a stream which, as they were not extensive travellers, they
knew simply as the _dwr_—‘The Water’. Their Teutonic successors
inquired the name of the stream, and on learning that it was _dwr_,
naturally assumed that this was a proper name. They accordingly
adopted it, and tacked on one of their own words for ‘water’—‘bach’
or ‘beck’, just as we may speak of the ‘Avon River’ or the ‘River
Ouse’. The phenomenon occurs so persistently both in this country
and all over Europe that this explanation can hardly be altogether
fanciful.
The four hundred years of Roman colonization, following Julius
Caesar’s landing in 55 B.C.—years which left such permanent and
conspicuous vestiges on the face of England—have made little enough
impression on her language. Fresh as the memory of that civilization
must have been when the Angles and Saxons arrived, they seem to have
learnt nothing from it. A few towns, such as _York_ (Eboracum),
retain in a more or less corrupted form the particular titles given
to them by their Roman founders, but outside these almost the only
Latin words which our ancestors can be proved to have taken from
the Britons are _port_ and ‘castra’ (a camp), surviving to-day
in _Chester_ and in the ending of many other town names such as
_Winchester_, _Lancaster_, _Gloucester_,...
Then, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles and
Saxons began to flow in from the Continent, bringing with them old
Aryan words like _dew_, _night_, _star_, and _wind_, which they had
never forgotten, new words which they had coined or developed in
their wanderings, and Latin words which they had learnt as provincial
subjects of the Roman Empire,[11] bringing, in fact, that peculiar
Teutonic variant of the Aryan tongue which forms the rich nucleus
of our English vocabulary. Their arrival here was followed almost
immediately by their conversion to Christianity; and this moment in
our history was a pregnant one for the future of Europe. For now the
two great streams of humanity—Teutonic blood from the one side, and
from the other the old classical civilization, bearing in its dark
womb the strange, new Christian impulse—met. The Latin and Greek
words which entered our language at this period are concerned for the
most part with the dogma and ritual of the Church; such are _altar_,
_candle_, _clerk_, _creed_, _deacon_, _hymn_, _martyr_, _mass_,
_nun_, _priest_, _psalm_, _shrine_, _stole_, _temple_, and many
others. Far more important was the alteration which now gradually
took place in the _meanings_ of many old Teutonic words—words like
_heaven_, which had hitherto denoted a ‘canopy’, or _bless_, which
had meant to ‘consecrate with blood’. But to this we must return
later, when we come to consider what is called the “semantic” history
of English words—that is to say, the history of their meanings.
Although Christianity did not come officially from Rome to England
until Augustine landed in A.D. 597, it had already found its way
here indirectly during the Roman occupation. Obliterated by the
pagan Anglo-Saxons, it had continued to flourish in Ireland, and the
actual conversion of most of the English is believed to have been the
work of Celtic Christians, who returned from Ireland and established
missionary bases in Scotland and Northumbria. Their influence was so
extensive that ‘Scotia’, the old name for Ireland, came to be applied
to the country which we still know as _Scotland_. _Pat_ and _Taffy_,
the popular nicknames for an Irishman and a Welshman, are descended
from the Celtic saints, Patrick and David, and it is interesting
to reflect that the Celtic missionaries were starting their work in
Northumbria at almost exactly the same moment as St. Augustine landed
in Kent. Thus Christianity enfiladed England, as it were, from both
ends; and while the southern Anglo-Saxons were learning the Greek and
Latin words to which we have referred, the Irish Christians in the
north had been making the language a present of a few Celtic words,
two of which—_druid_ and _lough_—have survived. Again, although the
name for the instrument of the Passion comes to us ultimately from
the Latin ‘crux’, yet the actual form which the word _cross_ has
taken in our language is very largely due to these Irish Christians.
But for them it would probably have been something like _cruke_,
or _cruce_, or _crose_. This word has an interesting history. It
was adopted from the old Irish ‘cros’ by the Northmen, and it is
due to them that the final “s” took on that hissing sound which is
represented in modern spelling by “ss”. We may suppose, therefore,
that but for the Irish Christians the word would have been something
like _cruce_, and but for the Northmen it might have been _croz_ or
_croy_.
In the ninth and tenth centuries these Northmen, the Scandinavian
Teutons, whom our ancestors called Danes, established an ascendancy
over a large part of England. They seem to have mingled easily with
the English, and we can trace back to their dialect some of the
very commonest features of our language. Thus, the Scandinavian
pronouns, _they_, _them_, _their_, _she_, gradually replaced less
convenient Anglo-Saxon forms, and it is to the Northmen that we owe
that extremely useful grammatical achievement which has enabled
us to form both the genitive and the plural of nearly _all_ nouns
by merely adding the letter “s”. Other Scandinavian words are
_call_, _get_, _hit_, _husband_, _knife_, _leg_, _odd_, _same_,
_skin_, _take_, _want_, _wrong_; and there are many more hardly less
common. The mighty word _law_, together with _outlaw_, _hustings_,
_wapentake_, _moot_, and _riding_ (division of Yorkshire) serve to
remind us that the Danish ascendancy was no hugger-mugger affair, but
a firm political organization. The old Anglo-Saxon words which these
Northern intruders replaced, such as _niman_, ‘to take’, and _Rood_
(the Cross) have mostly fallen out of use; but in some cases the two
words survive side by side. Thus, our useful distinction between
_law_ and _right_ was once geographical rather than semantic, the two
words covering roughly the eastern and the western halves of England.
And now there followed an event which has had more influence on the
character of the English language than any other before or since.
The conquest of England by the Norman[12] invaders brought about an
influx of French words which went on increasing in volume for more
than three centuries. At first it was little more than a trickle.
For a long time the Norman conquerors did not mix much with their
Saxon subjects. There are plenty of indications of this; for the
languages, too, moved side by side in parallel channels. The custom
of having one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another
for the same beast, when it is killed and cooked, is often supposed
to be due to our English squeamishness and hypocrisy. Whether or
no the survival of this custom through ten centuries is due to the
national characteristics in question it would be hard to say, but
they have certainly nothing to do with its origin. That is a much
more blameless affair. For the Saxon neatherd who had spent a hard
day tending his _oxen_, _sheep_, _calves_, and _swine_, probably
saw little enough of the _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, and
_bacon_, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters. There is
something a little pathetic, too, in the thought that the homely old
word, _stool_, could be used to express any kind of seat, however
magnificent, until it was, so to speak, hustled into the kitchen by
the smart French _chair_. Even the polite, however, continued to use
the old word in the idiom “to fall between two stools.” _Master_,
_servant_, _butler_, _buttery_, _parlour_, _dinner_, _supper_, and
_banquet_ all came over with William, besides the names of our
titular ranks, such as _duke_, _marquis_, _viscount_, _baron_, and
_countess_. The French word ‘comte’ was evidently considered to
be equivalent to the one existing Anglo-Saxon title, _earl_, with
the result that _count_ never became an English rank. But since it
had not been the Saxon custom to give ladies titles corresponding
to those of their lords, the word _countess_ was able to fill an
important gap. That the Feudal System had an educative value and
played its part in creating modern ideals of conduct is suggested by
such words as _honest_, _kind_, and _gentle_, which meant at first
simply ‘of good birth or position’ and only acquired during the
Middle Ages their later and lovelier meanings.
Not the least interesting of the words that must have come over from
France about this time are such courtly flower-names as _dandelion_
and _pansy_, from ‘dent-de-lion’ (describing the ragged leaves)
and the sentimental ‘pensée’—remembrance. Many of these early
Norman words seem to have a distinctive character of their own,
and even now, after nearly a thousand years, they will sometimes
stand out from the printed page with peculiar appeal. Perhaps this
is especially true of the military vocabulary. That sharp little
brightness, as of a window-pane flashing just after sunset, which
belongs to the ancient, technical language of heraldry, such as
_argent_, _azure_, _gules_, ... sometimes seems to have spread to
more common Norman words—_banner_, _hauberk_, _lance_, _pennon_, ...
and—in the right mood—we can even catch a gleam of it in everyday
terms like _arms_, _assault_, _battle_, _fortress_, _harness_,
_siege_, _standard_, _tower_, and _war_. The Norman-French etymology
of _curfew_ (couvre-feu) is too well known to require comment.
It will be noticed that nearly all these words are directly descended
from the Latin, _beef_ going back through ‘boeuf’ to ‘bov-em’,
_master_ to ‘magister’, _duke_ to ‘dux’,... Thus already, by the
thirteenth century, we can trace in our vocabulary four distinct
layers of Latin words. There are the Latin words learnt by our
ancestors while they were still on the Continent, such as _camp_,
_mile_, and _street_;[13] there are the Latin words brought over
by the Roman invaders, of which _port_ and _Chester_ were given
as surviving examples; and thirdly there are those words—_altar_,
_candle_, _nun_, ... brought over by the Christian missionaries as
described earlier in this chapter. These three classes are reckoned
to account for about four hundred Latin words altogether; and lastly
there is this great deposit of Norman-French words, of which the
number must have been running into thousands. For it was not only
terms of general utility which were transferred from one language to
another. A second and entirely different kind of borrowing now sprang
up—the literary kind. For two or three centuries Poetry and Romance
had been making rapid strides in Italy and France. The medieval habit
of writing only in Latin was dying out and Dante in Italy and Du
Bellay in France had both written treatises extolling the beauties
of their native tongues. French lyric poetry burst into its early
spring blossom among the troubadours, with their curious “Rose”
tradition, and for two hundred years the English poets imitated and
translated them as fast as ever they could. It was just at the end of
this long period of receptiveness that an event occurred which fixed
the ingredients of our language in a way they had never been fixed
before. The printing press was invented.
A modern poet, looking back on that time, can scarcely help envying
a writer like Chaucer with this enormous store of fresh, unspoilt
English words ready to his hand and an unlimited treasury across the
channel from which he could pick a brand-new one whenever he wanted
it.
Thou hast _deserved_ sorer for to smart,
But _pitee_ renneth soone in _gentil_ heart.
Here are three Norman-French borrowings, three fine English words
with the dew still on them, in two lines. It was the May morning of
English poesy.
For these were not “French” words. Right at the beginning of the
thirteenth century the English kings had abandoned Normandy, and
the English Normans, separated from their brethren, began to blend
more and more completely with their neighbours. In England French
remained at first the exclusive language of the Court and the law,
but, as the blood of the two peoples mingled, the Norman words which
were not dropped gradually altered their shapes, developing various
English characteristics, which not only differentiated from their
original French forms the words already in the language, but served
as permanent moulds into which new borrowings could be poured as
they were made. _Gentil_ changed to _gentle_, _pitee_ to _pitie_
or _pity_; and it was the same with innumerable others. Familiar
French-English terminations like _-tion_, _-ty_, _-ance_, _-age_,
_-able_, _-on_, were already nearly as common in Chaucer as they are
in the pages of an average modern writer. Begotten on Latin words
by generations of happy-go-lucky French and English lips, they were
fixed for ever by the printing press, and to-day, if we want to
borrow a word directly from Latin, we still give it a shape which
tacitly assumes that it came to us through the French language at
about that time. As Nature takes the human embryo through repetitions
of its discarded forms—fish, reptile, mammal, and vertebrate—before
bringing it to birth, so whoever introduced, let us say, the word
_heredity_ in the nineteenth century went through the instinctive
process of deriving from the Latin ‘hereditare’ an imaginary French
word, ‘heredité’, and converting the latter into _heredity_. It is
usually done when we wish to borrow a new word from Latin.
We have borrowed so many that it has lately been calculated that as
many as one-fourth of the words which we can find in a full-sized
Latin dictionary have found their way directly or indirectly into the
English vocabulary. A large number of these are Greek words which the
Romans had taken from them. Thus, taking into account those Greek
words which have come to us by other channels, Greek and Latin form
a very large and a very important part of the English language. All
through the history of our nation the two threads can be seen running
together. At first sight they appear to be so inextricably twisted
round one another as to form but one solid cord, but in reality it
is not so difficult to unravel them. The fact, for instance, that
_hospital_, _parliament_, and _prison_ are Latin, while _church_ and
_school_ have only come _through_ Latin from the Greek, is symbolical
of the two main divisions into which the classical part of our
language falls; for words which are genuinely of Latin origin—unless
they have been especially used at some time to translate the thoughts
of Greek writers—are very often concerned with the material outer
world, but words of Greek origin are more likely to be landmarks in
the world of thoughts and feelings.
Rome had spent herself in building up the external, visible framework
on which European civilization was to hang; and this fact, observable
in the word-relics of her military and political exploits, is
observable still more intimately in the character and history of that
great institution, our common law. Dignified vocables like _justice_,
_jurisdiction_, _jurisprudence_, speak for themselves the lasting
influence of the great Roman conception of ‘jus’—that abstract ideal
of the relation between one free human being and another in so far as
it is expressed in their actions. It is not that in any sense we took
over the Roman system; lawyers as well as poets are keen to insist
that we built up our own. But as freedom slowly broadened down from
precedent to precedent, there was always before the early English
kings and judges a sort of pattern—more than that, a vital principle
which had outlived one body and was waiting to be clothed with
another. It was the spirit of Roman law living on in her language.
A whole chapter might be written on the numerous English words whose
meanings can be traced back to the usages of Roman law. Take, for
instance, the word _person_. Derived, probably, from an Etruscan
word meaning an actor’s mask, _person_ was used by the Roman
legislators to describe a man’s personal rights and duties, which
were defined according to his position in life. Its present meaning
of an individual human being is largely due to the theologians who
hit upon it when they were looking for some term that would enable
them to assert the trinity of Godhead without admitting more than one
“substance”. When we remember for how long a time Latin continued
to be the universal written language of educated Europe,[14] the
language of history and philosophy as well as of theology, we can
imagine how the subtle flavour of this word’s former meaning clung
to its syllables through all their ecclesiastical soarings and was
ready, as soon as it came to English earth, to assist the brains
of our early lawyers in their task of imagining and thus creating
that fortunate legal abstraction, the British subject. ‘Obligatio’
in early Latin meant merely the physical binding of someone to
something; but in the Roman law of that date a defaulting debtor
was literally bound and delivered a prisoner into the hands of his
creditor. Thus, when a little later on this crude practice was
abandoned, ‘obligatio’ came to mean the duty to pay—a duty which the
creditor could now only enforce against his debtor’s property; and in
this way the general meaning of our word _obligation_ was developed.
Similarly, retaliation came to us from the Latin ‘Lex Talionis’,
the latter word being associated with ‘talis’ (such or same)
and implying a punishment that fits the crime; while _advocate_,
_capital_,[15] _chattel_,[15] _classical_, _contract_, _emancipate_,
_formula_, _heir_, _peculiar_, _prejudice_, _private_, _property_,
and _testament_ are a few more examples of the same process, chosen
from a great many.
Naturally many of these words came into the English language just
after the Conquest. The French, being so much nearer to Rome, both
in blood and in space, were a century or two ahead of the Teutons in
their civilization, and the Normans, after their long sojourn on the
Continent, brought with them to England quite a complicated system
of legislature and executive. Besides the Latin words to which we
have referred, there are a large number of legal terms which are not
so easily recognizable as Latin, having passed through Late Latin,
Low Latin, and Early French colloquial speech before they reached
our shores. In some cases they only developed a specifically legal
sense in Late Latin or even Early French. Yet because the whole
spirit of Roman civilization had been so impregnated with legalism,
the capacity for expressing exact legal ideas seems to have remained
latent, through all their curious vicissitudes, in such words as
_assize_ (literally ‘a sitting down’), _court_, _judge_, _jury_,
_county_, _district_, _manor_, _rent_,... Lawyers have gone on
employing a queer kind of Anglo-French, in some cases, right down to
the present day. The official use of “Law French” in legal documents
was only recently abandoned, and such technical terms as _champerty_,
_feme sole_, _tort_, ... survive to remind us of the days when an
English-speaking lawyer would naturally write such a sentence as:
Arsons de measons felonisement faits est felony per le comen ley.
(Arson of houses committed with felonious intent is felony by the
common law.)
_Convey_, _felon_, _forfeit_, _lease_, _mortgage_, _perjury_,
_plaintiff_, and _defendant_, on the other hand, have acquired a
somewhat more general use; and indeed this Frenchified jargon, partly
imported and partly built up by English lawyers as they went along,
has produced in later times several words which the language as a
whole would find it hard to do without. Among them are _assets_
(French ‘assez’), _burglar_, _cancel_, _conventional_, _disclaim_,
_flotsam_ and _jetsam_, _jettison_, _improve_, _matter-of-fact_,
_mere_, “the _premises_”, _realize_, _size_, and—in its modern
sense—_franchise_; while _culprit_, which was used in court down to
the eighteenth century, has an interesting history of its own. In
former days, when the prisoner had pleaded “Not Guilty”, the Clerk of
the Crown would open proceedings by saying “Culpable: prest”, meaning
that the prisoner _is_ “guilty”, and I am “ready” to prove it. In the
official records of the case this formula was abbreviated, first to
‘cul-prest’ and afterwards to ‘cul-prit’, until later clerks formed
the habit of running the two words together.
Looking at such words as _cancel_, _improve_, _realize_, and _size_,
we can feel the force of Professor Maitland’s remark that in the
Middle Ages “Law was the point where life and logic met”. It served
another purpose besides that of establishing a secure polity; for
through it some of the new Latin words which were gradually being
created by its own, or translated from Greek, thought by the abstruse
scholastic philosophy of the day found their way into the vocabulary
of the people. Even the old word _cause_ seems to have reached us
by way of the law courts. They were thus the pipe through which
a little of that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every
great civilization, could flow into the common consciousness of the
many, and in their terminology we can see most clearly an example of
that never-pausing process by which the speculative metaphysics of
yesterday are transformed into the “common sense” of to-day.
CHAPTER IV
MODERN ENGLAND
_Sport._ _Caddie._ _Cannibal._ _Tory._ _Finance._
The English language has been facetiously described as “French badly
pronounced”. At the death of Chaucer, and for nearly a hundred years
afterwards, this description would have been very nearly a true one.
Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have
been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may
assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’
War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for
cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which
have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel
something of the way in which the genius of the English language
was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right
to a separate personality. At the Reformation, when England finally
shook herself free from the dangerous embraces of the Holy Roman
Empire, the period of excessive French influence came to an end. The
general effect of Protestantism on our language, subtle and profound
as it has been, will be dealt with later, but the Reformation
cannot be passed over here without recording one instance in which
a word—perhaps a misunderstood word—has had extraordinarily lasting
results. It is the confusion of the English _Sunday_ with the Jewish
_Sabbath_[16] and the consequent fastening upon that day of rest of
many of the sombre inhibitions entailed by Sabbatic Law.
There is, however, another historical event which had a far more
universal and direct bearing on English words, and that is the
Revival of Learning. The new intercourse with the ancient literatures
of Greece and Rome naturally brought into English a positive stream
of “literary borrowings”. At first these were mostly Latin words. If
we try to imagine an English from which such words as _accommodate_,
_capable_, _capacious_, _compute_, _corroborate_, _distinguish_,
_efficacy_, _estimate_, _experiment_, _insinuate_, _investigate_,
and a host of others equally common are as yet absent, we may partly
realize what an important part was played by the Renaissance in
producing the language in which we speak and think. There is indeed
good evidence that the stream of new words flowed too fast at this
time for ordinary people to keep up with it. For instance, many of
the Latin words that were borrowed have since fallen out of use.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, who is
not a fantastic writer, was using such unfamiliar expressions as
_contentation_, _contristation_, _digladiation_, _morigeration_,
_redargution_, _ventosity_, ... and somewhat before this, when
the Classical influx was at its height, it was conspicuous enough
to call forth several amusing parodies. We remember Shakespeare’s
Holofernes in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and Sir Thomas Wilson includes
in his _Arte of Rhetorike_ a fictitious letter applying for a church
benefice, in which he satirizes as follows the Klondyke rush after
fashionable Latinity:
Pondering, expending, and revoluting with myself, your ingent
affability, and ingenious capacity for mundane affairs: I cannot
but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other.
For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and
domestical superiority, if the fecundity of your ingeny had not
been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?...
Now this outcrop of linguistic parody is significant for other
reasons too. It reminds us that the English language had at last
become “self-conscious”. In former times the struggle between
different ways of saying the same thing, between the old and the new,
the native and the foreign, had generally worked itself out under the
surface, amid the unconscious preferences of the mass of the people.
Thus, the old English translators who rendered the Latin ‘exodus’
as _outfaring_ and ‘discipulus’ (disciple) as _learning-boy_, were
not consciously trying to keep the Latin words out; nor did the
fourteenth-century author of a book, which he called the _Againbite
of Inwit_, have any academic horror, as far as we know, of the new
Latin borrowings _remorse_ and _conscience_, with one of which, at
least, he must have been familiar. The same may be said of Wyclif,
who translated ‘resurrectio’ _againrising_ and ‘immortalitas’
_undeadliness_. These old writers anglicized because it came natural
to them to anglicize, just as the next generation began to prefer the
Latin words. But it was not so in Italy, nor in France, in both of
which countries poets had long ago written careful treatises on the
beloved medium of their art, their native language. And now, after
the Revival of Learning, in England, too, scholars and literary men
began to notice such things. Counterbalancing the enthusiasm for
Latin and Greek, there arose a “Purist” movement of just the kind
which has had such a powerful effect on the development of modern
German. People tried to expel all “foreign” words from the language;
Sir John Cheke began a translation of the New Testament in which
none but native words were to be used; and we find in his _Matthew_
_moond_ for _lunatic_, _hundreder_ for _centurion_, _frosent_
(from-sent) for _apostle_, _crossed_ for _crucified_, _freshman_ for
_proselyte_, and many other equally odd-sounding concoctions. To look
back in this way on the uncertainty and chaos which reigned at the
beginning of the seventeenth century is to intensify our admiration
for the scholarship and poetic taste displayed by the devout
compilers of the Authorised Version.
If we were to look for another symptom of this sometimes pedantic
self-consciousness, we could find it in the modern way of spelling
_debt_ and _doubt_. The old orthography, _det_ and _dout_, is a
perfectly correct English rendering of the French words from which
they are taken, but the scholars of the Renaissance, anxious to
show the ultimate derivation from the Latin stems ‘deb’ and ‘dub’,
inserted an entirely unnecessary “b” into the words, and there it
has stayed ever since. Sometimes, too, these Elizabethan dons made
learned howlers, as in the now abandoned spelling _abhominable_,
which arose from a quite false idea that that adjective is derived
from the Latin ‘ab’ (from) and ‘homo’ (man).
One can also get a curiously vivid sense of the way in which new
Latin words had been streaming into the language during the sixteenth
century from Bacon’s literary style. He is so fond of placing a
Latin and an English word side by side, in order to express what
is virtually a single idea, that two consecutive pages of the
_Advancement of Learning_ supply no less than ten examples of this
habit. Among them are _immoderate and overweening_, _action and
business_, _charge and accusation_, _eloquence and speech_. To
understand the exact effect which this kind of writing must have had
on the ears of his contemporaries we must try and realize the faintly
novel and difficult sound with which many of these Latin syllables
would still be ringing. No such effort is required, however, to
comprehend the way in which this deliberate duplication must have
helped to familiarize English people with the sound and meaning of
the new words.
Very soon the Greek language too began to be drawn upon, though never
to quite the same extent as Latin. Thus, English of the fifteenth
century must also be thought of as a language in which hundreds of
familiar words like _apology_, _apostrophe_, _bucolic_, _climax_,
_drama_, _emphasis_, _encyclopedia_, _epidemic_, _epilogue_,
_episode_, _hypothesis_, _hysterical_, _paragraph_, _parallel_,
_paraphrase_, _physical_, do not yet exist, for these are all
examples of words which came in with the Renaissance.[17] The number
of technical terms of art and literature is particularly noticeable,
and it was now that the foundations were laid of that almost
automatic system whereby a new Greek-English word is coined to mark
each advance that is made in science, and especially in mechanical
science. _Automatic_ is itself an example, and it is hardly necessary
to add _chronometer_, _dynamo_, _magneto_, _metronome_, _telescope_,
_theodolite_, _thermometer_,...
But though the stern lovers of their native tongue were thus
hopelessly outclassed, yet the mere existence of the conservative
feeling which they tried to voice must have acted as a useful
brake on the too indiscriminate adoption of new words. The English
language was, in fact, settling down. It was in the future to receive
countless additions—never to change its very essence as it had done
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And thus, as we look on
towards the modern period, we find only fewer and more scattered
historical vestiges. But if we can no longer expect etymology to tell
us anything approaching to a complete and coherent tale, it will
nevertheless still light up for us from different angles different
little portions of that dark, mysterious mass, the past.
By the sixteenth century, for example, that peculiarly English
characteristic, the love of sport, had already begun to make its mark
on the language. _Sport_ itself is an abbreviation of ‘disport’, a
French word meaning ‘to carry oneself in a different direction from
that of one’s ordinary business’. It is interesting to observe how
both the form and meaning of the English word have diverged from
their origin, and how they have since been reborrowed into French
and most of the other languages of Europe. Italian tailors will
even use the vocable to describe a roll of loud check cloth! Of the
older sports, hawking has given us _allure_, _haggard_, _rebate_,
and _reclaim_. The Latin ‘reclamare’ had meant ‘to cry out against’
or ‘to contradict’; it was only in hawking that it acquired its
present sense of ‘calling back’ from the cries that were uttered to
summon the hawk back to the wrist. _Allure_ is from the old _lure_,
an apparatus for recalling the birds, and _haggard_ is a word of
obscure etymology which was used of a wild hawk. _Forte_ and _foible_
are old fencing terms, describing the strong and weak (_feeble_)
points of a sword. _Couple_, _muse_, _relay_, _retrieve_ (French
‘retrouver’), _run riot_, _ruse_, _sagacious_, _tryst_, and _worry_
we owe to hunting, as also the development of the Latin ‘sentire’
into the English word _scent_. Of these the most interesting are
perhaps _muse_, which is supposed to be derived from the same word
as _muzzle_, and _ruse_, another form of _rush_. The hounds were
said to ‘muzzle’ when they sniffed the air in doubt about the scent,
and a _ruse_ was a doubling of the hunted animal on its own tracks.
_Rove_ (but not _rover_) is from archery, meaning in the first place
‘to shoot arrows at an arbitrarily selected target’. _Bias_, _bowl
over_, and _rub_ in the phrase ‘there’s the rub’ are from bowls,
_crestfallen_ and _white feather_ from cockfighting, and _chess_,
_check_, _checkmate_, _cheque_, and _chequer_ come to us through the
Arabian from Persian, the central word being a corruption of the
Persian ‘Shah mat’, meaning ‘The Shah (the King) is dead’. It is not
so generally known that all the varied meanings of these words are
metaphors taken either from the game or from the board on which it is
played.
The more modern sports do not yet seem to have provided us with many
new words, but there is a promising tendency to transmute some of
their technical terms into lively idiom. In this way we can use, for
example, to _sprint_, to _put on a spurt_, the _last lap_, _clean
bowled_, to _take his middle stump_, to _skate on thin ice_, to _kick
off_, to _tee off_, _one up_,...; and modern games have also been
instrumental in preserving from oblivion the odd old French word
_bisque_, of unknown origin, which came over to England with the
now nearly obsolete game of tennis, as well as the French-Scottish
_caddie_.
When we hear a golfer use this word, when we hear a Scotch person
ask for an _aschet_, instead of a dish, or see the queer expression
_petticoat-tales_ on a tin of Edinburgh shortbread, we are taken back
to the close connection between the French and Scottish Courts which
existed in the days of Mary Stuart. For _caddie_ is a corruption
of the French “cadet” (younger son), whence also modern English
_cad_ and _cadet_; _aschet_ is a form of the French ‘assiette’; and
_petticoat-tales_ a corruption of ‘petits gateaux’ (little cakes).
Another phenomenon of history which is very faithfully preserved in
the English language is our long-standing and not always creditable
nautical relations with the Dutch. From the fourteenth to the
seventeenth century Dutch sea words continued to trickle into the
language, the fourteenth seeing the arrival of _bowsprit_ and
_skipper_, the fifteenth of _freight_, _hoy_, _keel_, _lighter_,
_pink_, _pump_, _scout_, _marline_, and _buoy_, the sixteenth of
_aloof_, _belay_, _dock_, _mesh_, _reef_, _rover_, and _flyboat_,
while the seventeenth century, when Van Tromp nailed his broom
to the mast, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, and William
of Orange sat upon the English throne, gave us _avast_, _bow_,
_boom_, _cruise_, _cruiser_, _gybe_, and _keelhaul_. Besides these
maritime words English possesses certain military memories of the
Dutch. _Freebooter_ goes back to the war with Spain in the reign
of Elizabeth, and _cashier_, _domineer_, _drill_, _furlough_,
and _onslaught_ are also among the words brought back from the
Low Countries by English soldiers. A particularly freakish Dutch
borrowing is the apparently English _forlorn hope_, which is in
reality a popular corruption of the Flemish ‘verloren hoop’, a phrase
that has nothing to do with hope and means a ‘lost expedition’.
The Spanish words in the English language, like the Dutch, are few in
number, but often full of history. Those which came originally from
Arabic—the most interesting of all—will be dealt with in another
chapter. We received them for the most part through the French.
_Alligator_,[18] _chocolate_, _cocoa_, and _tomato_, which come
through Spanish from Mexican, commemorate the Spanish conquest of
Mexico, and the poetic _breeze_ is a sixteenth-century adaptation
of the Spanish ‘briza’, a name for the north-east trade wind in the
Spanish Main. Of the other words which come to us through Spanish
_cannibal_, _hammock_, _hurricane_, _maize_, and _savannah_ are
Caribbean, while _canoe_, _potato_, and _tobacco_ are South American.
_Cannibal_, like the names _West Indies_ and _Indian_ (meaning
‘aboriginal inhabitant of America’), hides a more detailed history.
It was brought back by Christopher Columbus, who believed, when
he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, that he had sailed
right round the world, back to the east coast of India. The name
‘Caniba’—a variant of ‘Carib’ or ‘Caribes’—he took as a proof that
the inhabitants were subjects of the Grand Khan of Tartary.
We can see, then, how the new impulse towards travel and exploration
which followed the Renaissance left behind, when it ebbed, many
exotic and exotic-sounding words whose etymologies can tell us not a
little of the nationality of those adventurous mariners who led the
way to the East and to the new world. The Spaniards were not the only
explorers. The Indian words _coolie_ and _curry_ come to us through
Portuguese; _banana_ and _negro_ reached us from Africa, possibly
by the same route; and _cocoanut_ is from the Portuguese ‘coco’, a
bugbear or bogy—alluding to the nut’s monkey-like face. _Drub_—once
used only of the bastinado—is thought to be an Arabic word brought
back by suffering Christians from the Barbary States. _Amuck_,
_bamboo_, and _cockatoo_, come from Malayan through Portuguese,
and _caddy_ (the receptacle) from Malayan direct. _Moccasin_,
_tomahawk_, and _hickory_ are among the words sent back to us by
the seventeenth-century English settlers in North America. _Taboo_,
_tattoo_, and _kangaroo_ came home with Captain Cook from the Pacific.
Meanwhile, the civil and political history of England has been
growing steadily. _Political_, _politics_, _politician_, and
_parliamentary_ first appear in the sixteenth century, and _Cabinet
Council_ seems to have been introduced at the accession of Charles
I. _Cabal_, one of the few Hebrew words in the English language,
probably owes its familiarity to two historical events. It was
applied in Charles II’s reign to a small committee of the Privy
Council, also known as the “Committee for Foreign Affairs”, which
afterwards became the Cabinet; moreover, a little later on it
happened that the names of the five Ministers who signed the Treaty
of Alliance with France against Holland were Clifford, Arlington,
Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Their initials thus arranged
spell the word _cabal_, which was humorously used to describe them.
Another far commoner expression which dates back to the Civil War is
the phrase ‘the _army_.’ It reminds us that we had no standing army
until after the foundation of the Parliamentary Forces. _Cavalier_
and _Roundhead_ are words which carry their history, so to speak,
on their sleeves. They were both coined as terms of abuse, and
among other uncivil relics of the Civil War which have found a more
extended application, _fanatic_ and _Puritan_ were invented by the
Royalists and _malignant_ by the Roundheads. _Independent_ and
_independence_ are also Puritan words, and the useful _demagogue_
first appeared in the _Eikon Basilike_, the famous pamphlet in
defence of the Crown, which Milton answered with his _Eikonoklastes_.
The expression _to send to Coventry_ is probably a gift from the
rebellious citizens of Birmingham, who, according to Clarendon,
frequently “rose upon small parties of the King’s” and either
killed them or sent them, as prisoners, to Coventry, which was a
Parliamentary stronghold.
Spite, which always loves a rich vocabulary, is also the father of
those venerable labels _tory_ and _whig_. The old Celtic word _tory_
was first applied in the seventeenth century to the unfortunate Irish
Catholics, dispossessed by Cromwell, who became savage outlaws living
chiefly upon plunder; after that it was used for some time of bandits
in general, and at the close of James II’s reign the “Exclusioners”
found it a conveniently offensive nickname for those who favoured
the succession of the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York. Thus,
when William of Orange finally succeeded in reaching the throne, it
became the approved name of one of the two great political parties
in Great Britain. _Whig_ is a shortened form of _whiggamore_, a
name given to certain Scotchmen from the word _whiggam_, which they
used in driving their horses. It was first used of the rebellious
Scottish Covenanters who marched to Edinburgh in 1648; then of
the Exclusioners, who were opposed to the accession of James; and
finally, from 1689 onwards, of the other great political party or one
of its adherents.
That the seventeenth century saw the true genesis of many of our
commercial and financial institutions is suggested by the fact
that their names first appear at this time. Such are _capital_,
which is a doublet of _cattle_—the very oldest Aryan form of
wealth[19]—_commercial_, _discount_, _dividend_, _insurance_,
_investment_, and lastly the modern meaning of _bank_, which, like
the names of so many protective and responsible institutions—the
_Assizes_, the _Bench_, the _Consulate_, the _Council_, the _Chair_
at a public meeting, a _Seat_ in Parliament, and the _Throne_—is
based etymologically on what we may call one of the oldest and safest
of human occupations. The old Teutonic word which subsequently
became modern English _bench_ was adopted into Italian, probably
from the Teutonic Lombards of northern Italy, in the form ‘banco’.
It soon acquired the special sense of a moneychanger’s ‘bench’ or
table and found its way, together with the object it represents,
into most of the countries of Europe. Thus, like the name _Lombard
Street_, the little word carries us back with it to the origin of
banking in northern Italy and to Edward I’s substitution of Italian
_bankers_ for Jewish moneylenders. _Bankruptcy_, _currency_, and
_remittance_ appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century,
and in the second _bonus_, _capitalist_, _consols_, and _finance_.
The history of _finance_ is again interesting. The word goes right
back to the Latin ‘finis’ (end). When it first appeared in English,
it had the sense of a ‘fine’ or forfeit, but its modern significance
was developed in eighteenth-century France among the tax-farmers
or ‘financiers’, as they were called, to whom the king delegated
the duty of collecting his taxes. As time went on, these shrewd
individuals amalgamated into a sort of limited company, which, by a
judicious application of the principles of usury, gradually gained
more and more control over the revenue, until “toutes les finances
du royaume”, as Voltaire says, “dépendirent d’une compagnie de
commerce”. In England the phrase _Bank of England_ first appears in
1694, describing a body of individuals associated for the purpose of
lending money to the Government; and about thirty years later this
still (1925) outstanding loan began to be known as the _National
Debt_.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century commercial and financial
considerations seem to have played a steadily increasing part in
determining the nation’s policy. Horace Walpole is the first person
known to have used _speculation_ in the sense of buying and selling
stocks and shares; and _budget_ (a little bag or pocket) may owe
its modern political meaning to a pamphlet sarcastically entitled
_The Budget Opened_, in which his brother Robert’s financial policy
received some severe handling. _Prime Minister_ also takes us back to
Sir Robert Walpole, to whom it was applied with derisive innuendo,
for it had in those days more the sense of ‘Grand Vizier’ or despot’s
tool. In the old-fashioned _nabob_, as a synonym for ‘plutocrat’, we
have a memory of the latter days of the East India Company when the
squandering of large sums of money in London often rounded off a life
of empire-building in Bombay or Calcutta. The dictionary suggests,
however, that later generations of Anglo-Indians preferred to bring
back with them less questionable impedimenta, such as _pyjamas_ and
_shampoo_.
The phrase, the _Rights of Man_, takes us back to the American
Declaration of Independence. The borrowing of _aristocrat_ and
_democrat_ from French, the French word _guillotine_, and the
appearance in English of _revolutionize_ and _terrorize_ are enduring
relics of the French Revolution, and the word _sectional_, which came
in in the nineteenth century, is closely bound up with the history
of France, for it is derived (together with the geographical use of
_section_) from the division of France into electoral sections under
the Directory. The military meaning of _conscription_ goes back to
the France of the same period. To the campaigns in the Soudan we owe
_zareeba_, and to the Boer War the Dutch words _kopje_ and _spoor_.
It is too early yet to say what verbal legacy the European War has
left us, but the anonymous _stunt_ and _gadget_ (small mechanical
contrivance), and the French _camouflage_ seem to have taken a fairly
firm hold, while the expressions _eyewash_, to _scrounge_ (meaning
to ‘steal’), to _get the wind up_, to _go west_, and possibly to
_swing the lead_ (to be idle at somebody else’s expense), are idioms
which show no signs of departing from us yet. President Wilson’s
_self-determination_ has probably been added to half the languages of
the world.
A list of new words like _anaesthetic_, _galvanometer_, _morse_,
_railroad_, _telephone_, _turbine_, ... which appeared in the
nineteenth century, would tell a full and fairly accurate story of
its extraordinarily sudden mechanical and scientific development, but
such a list has yet to be compiled. More interesting in many ways
are the appearance of new metaphors and idioms, such as to _peter
out_, to _pan out_ (from mining), to _blow off_ or _get up steam_,
and to _go off the rails_ from the steam engine, and many electrical
metaphors such as those mentioned in Chapter I. For new ways of doing
are bound up with new ways of knowing and thinking, and the true
story of the nineteenth century, as of every other century, is the
story of its mental and emotional outlook. To this long and intricate
story the rest of this book is devoted, but before passing on to it
a few aspects of our subject, with which there is not space to deal
fully, may perhaps be mentioned.
The light thrown by certain words on the social history of England,
as opposed to her political history, is a clear and often a new one.
To look up in the _Oxford Dictionary_ such words as _blackguard_,
_carol_, _club_, _morris_, _teetotal_, or a thousand others which
seem to have no particular historical significance, and to read
through the many illustrative quotations, is to take a wonderfully
easy and intimate peep into the past; while the dates at which
such words as _magazine_, _news-letter_, _newspaper_, _novelist_,
_press_, or again, _callers_, _small talk_, _tea-party_, _snob_,
_antimacassar_, ... appeared, together with quotations showing the
particular shades of meaning with which they have been used, are in
themselves a little history of the English people. What could be more
suggestive, for instance, than the fact that the adjective _improper_
was first applied to human beings in the early fifties?
Words which are derived from the names of real individuals,
as _bowdlerize_, _boycott_, _burke_, _derrick_, _dunce_,[20]
_galvanize_, _mesmerism_, _morse_, _sandwich_, _tawdry_, or
fictitious ones, as _gamp_, _knickerbocker_, _lilliputian_,
_quixotic_, _pamphlet_, _pickwickian_, are sometimes, but not always
historically interesting. Again, the place-names of England, whether
of country villages or London streets, are heavily loaded with the
past, but the subject is such a vast and disconnected one that it
would require a volume to itself.
The characteristics of nations, as of races, are fairly accurately
reflected linguistically in the metaphors and idioms they choose, in
their tricks of grammar, in their various ways of forming new words.
It is, for obvious reasons, easier to apply this principle to other
nations than to one’s own; nevertheless there are a few such points
which English people can observe even in the English language. The
number of words and expressions drawn from sport is a phenomenon
which has already been touched upon, and it is at any rate a question
whether humour has not played a larger part in the creation of
English and American words than in those of other languages. The
French ‘tête’[21] is humorous in origin, and there must be other
French and Latin-French words with a similar history, but English has
really quite a number of words in which humour has taken a hand. One
way in which this comes about is the process known as back-formation.
We realize the humorous intention when somebody invents from the noun
_swashbuckler_ a verb to _swashbuckle_, or to _buttle_ and _cuttle_
from _butler_ and _cutler_, but it is not so well known that the same
process (probably with the same humorous intent behind it) gave us
such sober words as _burgle_, _sidle_, _edit_, _grovel_, _beg_, and
_greed_. One of the most interesting back-formations is the verb to
_maffick_, formed from the supposed present participle _mafficking_,
which was coined to describe the festivities that greeted the arrival
in London of the news of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War.
The well-known humorous device of understatement is responsible for
the modern meaning of _hit_ and most of its synonyms. The notion
of striking was once conveyed by the verb to _slay_; by Tudor
times, however, _smite_, which in Old English meant to ‘smear’ or
‘rub over’, had become the commoner word. _Strike_ itself in Old
English meant ‘to stroke’ or ‘to rub gently’, and _hit_, which is
now universal in serious colloquial speech, meant to ‘meet with’ or
‘light upon’—‘not to miss’, in fact; just as to _win_ (‘not to lose’)
something means, or recently meant, in the British Army, to _steal_
it. _Blow_ and _thrash_ are both sly agricultural metaphors, and the
present popularity of such slang phrases as _wipe_, meaning a blow,
and to _wipe out_, suggests that this pleasing and rather simple form
of humour is still active in English word-formation.
But the number of these little etymological sidetracks is almost
infinite. We might, for instance, ask ourselves whether the
colloquial use of _chap_ for ‘individual’ (from the Old English
‘cheapen’ to ‘buy’, cognate with _chapman_, _cheap_, _Cheapside_,
...) is really the unconscious self-expression of a nation of
shopkeepers, or whether it is purely accidental; in which connection
we should have to notice the modern tendency to renew a faded
metaphor by substituting the word _merchant_, and so on. But the
truly scientific way of approaching this part of our subject is to
study the various English words which have been adopted by foreign
nations, and the meanings they have developed there.
These were few enough up to the end of the seventeenth century, but
from then on their number and importance increased; and we cannot
help being interested in them, whether on the one hand the foreigner
has merely employed them in despair of finding any word in his own
language adequate to describe the object or idiosyncrasy in question,
or whether his adoption of them implies that he has also borrowed the
things of which they are the names. In the first of these classes
we should probably put _cant_, _comfort_, _gentleman_, _humbug_,
_humour_, _respectability_, _romantic_, _sentimental_, _snobbism_,
_spleen_,...; in the second, _ale_, _beefsteak_, _gin_, _grog_,
_mackintosh_, _pudding_, _riding-coat_ (redingote), _roast-beef_,
_rum_, _sport_, _sportsman_, _waterproof_, _whisky_, and various
technical terms of sport such as _box_, _Derby_, _handicap_,
_jockey_,...
To the second group also would belong our most important
contributions to foreign languages—the political words. When we
find _bill_, _budget_, _committee_, _jury_, _lock-out_, _meeting_,
_pamphlet_, _speech_, _strike_, _trade-union_, ... on the Continent,
and realize that the modern meanings of European words such as
_constitution_, _represent_, _vote_, or of Old French words like
_address_, _majority_, _minority_, _motion_, _parliament_, ...
are derived from English, we feel ourselves in the presence, not
so much of something peculiarly English as of something universal
which England has been the means of bringing to earth. That vast
theoretical terms like _liberty_, _equality_, and _fraternity_
should be borrowed by England from France in return for _committee_,
_jury_, _meeting_, ... that the French _idéalogue_ and _doctrinaire_
should be bartered for _utilitarian_ and _experimental_—these
facts have been taken to indicate a certain division of function
in the economy of European social evolution, the Frenchman
producing the abstract moral ideals and the Englishman attempting
to clothe them with reality. And it may be that in such important
loan-words as _club_ and _freemason_ and _sport_, but, above all, in
_committee_—that sensitive instrument for maintaining the balance as
between individual and associative personality—we can perceive the
Englishman’s secret: his power of voluntary co-operation, and his
innate understanding of the give-and-take it requires.
While we can hardly expect to see an undistorted reflection of
ourselves in the first group of words mentioned above, yet the
grotesque meanings which many of them have acquired abroad are
interesting partly for that very reason. They enable us, if studied
carefully, to see ourselves not only as others see us, but as others
saw us. And from both groups together we can re-create, as Mr.
Pearsall Smith has pointed out, something of the curious England
which was ‘discovered’ about the middle of the eighteenth century
by the rest of Europe, can rejoice with Voltaire in her atmosphere
of religious toleration and personal liberty, and admire with
Montesquieu her haphazard constitution; we can take back to our
native France or Germany romantic and sentimental memories of _le
‘lovely moon’ des Anglois_, or, better still, delving farther into
the past, we can stride across the Italian stage in our top boots and
our _redingote_, a moody and spleenful English _milord_, liable to
commit suicide at any moment.
Important as they are, however, we must not be misled by this little
group of words into supposing that English is a language which has
given away much. On the contrary, surveying it as a whole, we are
struck, above all, by the ease with which it has itself appropriated
the linguistic products of others. Like Mr. Shaw’s Shakespeare,
its genius seems to have lain not so much in originality as in the
snapping up of unconsidered trifles; and where it has excelled all
the other languages of Europe, possibly of the world, is in the grace
with which it has hitherto digested these particles of foreign matter
and turned them into its own life’s blood. Historically, the English
language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and
highly sensitive creature.
PART II
THE WESTERN OUTLOOK
CHAPTER V
MYTH
_Panic._ _Tuesday._ _Money._ _Sorcery._ _Man._
Let us take two common English words, _panic_ and _cereal_, and
compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages
of classical mythology. _Cereal_ comes to us from Ceres, the Roman
goddess of corn and flowers, and _panic_ is from Pan, a Greek
Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds.
But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the
other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch
and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human
consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important
to notice that the _word_ is very much more closely connected with
the _thing_ in the case of _panic_ than in the case of _cereal_.
Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn
is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that
it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact,
that a study of the word _cereal_ will tell us something about Rome,
but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With _panic_ it
is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as
it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are,
but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their form as the
inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered,
express with the same configuration a developed personality. “Human
speech and human thought,” said the psychologist, Wundt, “are
everywhere coincident.... The development of human consciousness
includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language
is an essential element of the function of thinking.”
There was a time when no such word as _panic_ existed, just as there
was a time when no such word as _electric_ existed, and in this
case, as in the other, before the word first sprang into life in
somebody’s imagination, humanity’s whole awareness of the phenomenon
which we describe as ‘panic’ must have been a different thing. The
word marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness,[22] just
as _electric_[23] marks a discovery in the outer world of physical
phenomena. Now it was said that the connection of the latter word, in
its Greek form, with _amber_ would be informative if we had no other
means of determining the electrical properties of that substance.
Words like _panic_ are important, because we really have no other
means of determining how the ancients, who lived before the days of
literature and written records, thought and felt about such matters.
The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks could become
conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name it, because they felt
the presence of an invisible being who swayed the emotions of flocks
and herds. And it also reveals how this kind of outlook[24] changed
slowly into the abstract idea which the modern individual strives to
express when _he_ uses the word _panic_. At last, as that idea grows
more abstract still, the expression itself may change; yet, just as
the power to think of the “quality” of an article was shown to be
the gift of Plato, so it would be impossible for us to think, feel,
or say such things as ‘crowd-psychology’ or ‘herd-instinct’ if the
Greeks had not thought, felt, said ‘Pan’—as impossible as it would
be to have the leaf of a plant without first having a seed tucked
into the warm earth. _Hero_, which originally meant a being who
was half-human and half-divine, is a similar descendant from Greek
religion which could not be extinguished from our vocabulary without
restricting our outlook.
As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from
prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them.
We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced,
the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems
at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence
or malignance—what may be called the soul-qualities—of natural
phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid
impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.[25]
Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical
influence. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning
of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch
during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that
we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but
the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind
of outlook which we loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind
which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’. To
comprehend the process fully, we must build up the rest of it in the
imagination, just as, from seeing a foot of cliff crumble away at
Dover, we may set wings to time and call up the immemorial formation
of the English Channel.
The English words _diurnal_, _diary_, _dial_ are derived from the
Latin ‘dies’ (day), while _journal_ comes to us, via the French
language, from the same word. These syllables conceal among
themselves the central religious conception common to the Aryan
nations. As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word ‘dyaus’,
the Greek ‘zeus’ (accusative ‘dia’), and the Teutonic ‘tiu’ were all
used in contexts where we should use the word _sky_; but the same
words were also used to mean _God_, the Supreme Being, the Father
of all the other gods—Sanskrit ‘Dyaus pitar’, Greek ‘Zeus pater’,
Illyrian ‘Deipaturos’, Latin ‘Juppiter’ (old form ‘Diespiter’). We
can best understand what this means if we consider how the English
word _heaven_ and the French ‘ciel’ are still used for a similar
double purpose, and how it was once not a double purpose at all.
Indeed, there must still be English and French people for whom the
spiritual ‘heaven’ is identical with the visible sky. But if we
are to judge from language, we must assume that when our earliest
ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not
merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture,
as it were, of a living Being. And this fact is still extant in the
formal resemblance between such words as _diary_ and _divine_.
The French ‘Dieu’, with its close resemblance to ‘dies’, retains the
luminous suggestion of _day_ and _sky_ very much more vividly than
any of our words from the same stem, but we have kept the Teutonic
form nearly intact in _Tuesday_. The fact that ‘Tiu’s day’ came in
as a translation of the Latin ‘Dies Martis’ (surviving in French
‘mardi’) also suggests that for the Teutons, alone among the Aryans,
the supreme Father-God afterwards became their god of war; and this
may throw some light both on their fundamental character and on the
nature of the experiences which they encountered during the thousand
odd years of their sojourn in the northern forests.
It must not be assumed that the “ancestors” spoken of above are
identical with the Aryans described in Chapter I. By the time of
the dispersion the thought of “sky” may have been quite separated
in the average Aryan mind from the thought of “God”, or it may not
have been. We cannot say; we only know that at one time, among the
speakers of the Aryan language, these two thoughts were one and the
same. It is impossible to fix a point in time, and then to cut a kind
of cross-section, and define the exact relation between language and
thought at that particular moment. This relation—and especially
in the domain of religion—is a fluid and flickering thing, varying
incredibly in individual minds, leaping up and sinking down like a
flame from one generation to another. Consequently no two theories on
the religious beliefs held by the Aryans in the third millennium B.C.
are alike; and we are concerned here only with those modern words
which are the product of Aryan religious consciousness at some time
or another in its history.
They come to us, naturally, by different routes, a few by the
south-eastern and any number by the north-western group. _Pariah_,
a non-Aryan word which has come into our language from the East,
derives its peculiar forcibility from the age-old division of India’s
population into castes. _Ignite_ is from the Latin ‘ignis’, which
is derived from the same parent word as the Sanskrit ‘Agni’, the
fire-god. In _magic_ we have a reminiscence of the Persian ‘Magi’,
mighty prophets and interpreters of dreams, of whom three were
said to have found their way to Bethlehem; but unless it be in the
modern trade-name _Mazda_, there is little, if any, trace in our
language of the great Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, with its
everlasting conflict between light and darkness, Ahura Mazdao and
Ahriman. The meagreness in our language of these relics of Hindoo
and Persian religion is again eloquent of the total separation of
the north-western and south-eastern Aryans. The whole vast structure
of Eastern philosophy, with its intricate classifications cutting
completely across our own, was practically a sealed book to the West
until after the French re-established a commercial connection with
India in the eighteenth century. Signs are not wanting, however, that
the rapid growth of interest in this ancient and lofty outlook, which
has taken place in Europe during the last fifty years, may enrich
our vocabulary with some extracts from the ancient terminology, such,
for example, as _maya_—the soul’s external environment considered
as being ‘illusion’, or as obscuring and concealing the spiritual
reality, and _karma_, the destiny of an individual as it is developed
from incarnation to incarnation.
To turn from these nations to a member of the north-western group,
such as Greece, is like passing from an arid desert into a land
flowing with milk and honey. _Panic_ and _hero_ have already been
mentioned. _Iris_ (the flower, and also the part of the human
eye), together with the beautiful word _iridescent_, have come to
us from the Greek goddess Iris, whose outer form was the rainbow.
_Titanic_ is from the Titans, huge earth-beings who rebelled against
God much as did the fallen angels in Genesis. _Hermetically_ (in
‘hermetically sealed’) comes to us from the Greek messenger-god,
Hermes, by a roundabout route (see Chapter VII); and in more or less
common use are _Aphrodisiac_, _Apolline_, _Asia_, _Atlas_, _chimera_,
_daedal_, _Dionysiac_, _Elysian_, _Europe_, _Hades_, _harmony_,
_lethal_, _Muse_ and _music_, _mystery_, _nemesis_, _nymph_, _paean_,
_panacea_, _phaeton_, _protean_, _satyr_, _siren_, _stygian_. The
word _erotic_, from Eros, a Greek god of love, is an interesting
example of the way in which the experiences of past civilizations
evaporate into essential refinements of modern speech. Because of
differences between Greece and Rome, which it took about two thousand
years to work out on the stage of history, we are now able to make a
fine distinction, such as that between _erotic_ and _amorous_.
The true Roman god of love, however, though in the world of phantasy
he still survives in his original form, _Cupid_, has only actually
entered our language in the word _cupidity_. In the difference
between the material associations of _cupidity_ and the more
imaginative ones of _erotic_ we begin already to divine a fundamental
dissimilarity between Greek and Roman mythology. Other words which
come to us from Roman religion are _cereal_, _genius_, _fate_,
_fortune_, _fury_, _grace_, _June_, _mint_, _money_, _Saturday_,
_vesta_, the names of the planets, _contemplate_, _sacrifice_,
_temple_, _Host_ (from ‘hostia’, the victim which was sacrificed),
_augury_, and _auspice_. The last two words take us back to the Roman
custom of divining the will of the gods by watching the flights
of birds. ‘Aves-specere’ meant ‘to see birds’, and we still have
the first word preserved to us in _aviary_. _Fury_ and _grace_ are
translations of Greek names; but in some of the others—especially
_money_ and _mint_, from the goddess Moneta—we behold the late
reflection of a highly significant process. It is this: As time went
on, Roman religious feeling quickly changed in two almost opposite
ways. On the one hand it attached itself more and more to concrete
and material objects, and, on the other, its gods and goddesses
were felt less and less as living beings, and more and more as mere
abstract intellectual “conceptions”. Yet these two changes were not
really opposite, but complementary. For as the visible part of a
goddess like Ceres became more and more solid, as she came more and
more to be used simply as a synonym for _corn_, the invisible part of
her naturally grew more and more attenuated. Thus, the mythical world
was much less real to the Romans than it had been to the Greeks. It
was more like a world of mental abstractions.
Soon there was a “god”, or part of a god, for every object and every
activity under the sun, and when the empire was founded, each
emperor, as he died, automatically became a divinity. To-day the
first two “divine” emperors, _Julius_ and _Augustus_, take their
places beside _Juno_, the Queen of Heaven, in our monthly calendar.
We may say, in fact, that by the time Christianity began to spread
in the Roman Empire, Roman official religion had become divorced
from feeling altogether, its dry bones remaining little more than
a convenient system of nomenclature. Not that the new religion had
no serious rivals; but the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans, the
Mystery Schools, and cults such as that of Mithras, had little
historical connection with Roman mythology. Yet if Rome contributed
no discoveries of value concerning the relations of human beings to
the gods, it was perhaps for this very reason that she was able to
concentrate more exclusively upon working out their relations with
each other; and in so doing she created jurisprudence.
But in the later days of the empire, when this attenuation of the
imaginative and supernatural element in Roman mythology had already
gone beyond its logical conclusion, when Rome had absorbed the myths
of Greece and Egypt and sterilized them both, the soul of Europe was
stirring afresh in the north. Contact between the Roman tongue and
that of their subjects, the Celtic “Galli” in north Italy and beyond
the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into
being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and
the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic
notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to
be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology;
but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old
Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans
into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But
up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became
a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went
on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves,
until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was
formed, and so our English _sorcery_. It is strange to think how far
this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern
poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into
a sort of mysterious realm:
Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer;
Foot-sore and sad was he;
And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside,
Looked out of sorcery....
It was much the same with ‘Fata’. For the Romans themselves the
old goddesses called the Fata, or _Fates_, turned quickly into an
abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts
breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in Late Latin
became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and
abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’
(Modern English _fay_), and so _fa-ery_ and _fairy_. _Demon_ is the
result of a similar metamorphosis.
Now in dealing with mythology nothing is more misleading than to
compare the gods of different nations, assuming that those who
have etymologically similar names meant the same thing to their
worshippers. For instance, it has been pointed out that the name
Tiu descends from a word which also developed elsewhere into Dyaus
and Zeus, but to suggest that Tiu was the “same god” as Zeus would
be quite meaningless. And it is the same with the other persons of
northern mythology, such as Thor, the thunder-god, from whom we
have _Thursday_, or Wotan (Odin) who taught men language and gave
up his eye in order to possess his beloved Fricka (_Wednesday_ and
_Friday_). There are many external resemblances, etymological and
otherwise, between this Teutonic mythology and the mythology of
Greece, but for the historical study of human consciousness it is the
differences between them which are really significant. Here there
is no room to consider either the resemblances or the differences,
except in so far as they are preserved for us in the words we use.
And we notice at once how small is the number of our words which
refer to the Teutonic myths. Where relics still remain they seem to
be either—like _elf_, _goblin_, _pixy_, _puck_, _troll_—the names of
the creatures themselves, still used but no longer felt to exist, or
else—like _cobalt_ and _nickel_, the names given by German miners to
demoniac spirits—they have lost all memory of their original meaning.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as _Easter_, from an old
Teutonic goddess of the spring, _Old Nick_ from ‘nicor’, a fabulous
sea-monster, and _nightmare_ from the demon Mara, while the concepts
_earth_ and _lie_ (untruth) may possibly have been brought to birth
in men’s minds by the divinities Erda and Loki. But compared with the
number of derivations from older myths these examples are practically
negligible. There is an accidental quality about them, and few have
entered very deeply into our language. The Aryan family was now
growing older and more firmly knit. While Slavs, Teutons, and Celts
were still uncivilized, their cousins, the Greeks and Romans, had
already developed an elaborate culture. Had the former been left
alone like the latter, their mythology, too, might in time have grown
down into the language. But that was not to be. The great Aryan
family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her
Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in
Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they
did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old
Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of
ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know
it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which
they held in equal abhorrence. The classical gods and goddesses faded
so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was
hardly perceived, but the Nibelungs and Valkyries, the Siegfrieds and
Fafnirs of Teutonic myth, were doomed while they were still alive.
Thus our fathers beheld the death of Baldur with their own eyes, and
were awake during the twilight of the gods.
Of course, where the events of Teutonic myth and legend were
associated with a particular locality, they have left their mark in
the names of places. These, naturally enough, are found for the most
part in Germany. In Great Britain—apart from _Asgardby_, _Aysgarth_,
_Wayland Smith_, _Wansdyke_, _Wednesbury_, and some others—the
place-names that have come to us from pre-Christian religion are
principally Celtic, and are usually found—like _Cader Idris_, _Cader
Arthur_, _Arthur’s Seat_, _Kynance Cove_, ...—in Scotland, Wales,
and Cornwall. Apart from place-names, _galahad_ is a relic of Celtic
legend which has found a permanent place and a modern usage in the
language; and there may be one or two others. But not many. In
England the whole Celtic nation and language died early out of the
common consciousness, and it died even more suddenly than the persons
of Teutonic myth. This explains the freshness and delight which many
young writers of the last generation found in the language and legend
of Irish antiquity. To resuscitate, as Keats did, the invisible
beings of classical mythology was to dig down into the roots of our
present everyday outlook; to take part in the Celtic revival was to
feel that you were looking out on the world through an entirely new
window—or at any rate through one which had not been cleaned for
centuries.
We only owe one English word to the Slavonic myths, and that is
the unpleasant _vampire_, which was brought back from the East by
travellers in the eighteenth century.
The general relation between language and myth is, as the word
_myth_ (Greek ‘muthos’—word) suggests, almost unfathomable; but
before leaving the limited Aryan aspect, which is all we have had
space to touch on here, one interesting etymology ought to be
mentioned, which has sometimes been taken to conceal the whole root
and purpose of Aryan culture in the history of mankind. The Hindoos
look back to a great teacher called Manu. Whether this individual
himself, or his name, is historical or mythical is not particularly
important. Hindoo sacred language and literature reveal at any rate
a prehistoric _belief_ among certain classes of society that Manu
was the originator of their culture and religion. Now ‘manu’ is also
their word for _man_; and about this word, as it appears in the
different Aryan languages, there are two interesting points. The
first is that wherever it crops up it bears the double meaning of
‘human being’ and ‘member of the male sex’; the second that it is
thought to be cognate with the root ‘men’, implying ‘to think’, which
appears also in English _mind_, Latin ‘mens’,... We have seen that to
the external view one of the most remarkable characteristics in which
Aryans differed from the races they supplanted was their patriarchal
system. The etymology of the word _man_ suggests the inner reason for
this, for it hints at a dim consciousness among the Aryans that the
essential function of the human being—at any rate of the Aryan human
being—is to think.
Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”,
we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially
represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we
find it, the human being is _man_, and God is God the Father. What
exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to
worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws
light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history
which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races; and, in doing
so, it suggests that, in spite of their tendency towards monogamy
and a rigid family organization, the “subjection” of women has its
roots very deep in Aryan psychology. In this respect Greece and Rome
differed but little in essence from India and Persia. The impulse
towards a different conception of women, both in their own minds and
in the minds of men, which has been giving an increasing amount of
trouble to the European races for the last two thousand years, was
really, as we shall see, implanted in the Aryan outlook by foreign
religions.
CHAPTER VI
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
_Paper._ _Mystery._ _Idea._ _Analogy._ _Analysis._ _Logic._
_Quantity._ _Heresy._
The difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked
so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two
peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident
in many other English words besides those which we can actually
trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek ‘scandalizein’
and the Latin ‘offendere’ both meant to ‘cause to stumble’, but for
us there is a subtle difference between _scandalize_ and _offend_;
for while _scandalize_ and _scandal_ merely hint at the liveliness
of an emotion, _offend_ and _offence_ convey a sober warning of its
probable results. ‘Discere’ in Latin and ‘mathein’ in Greek both
meant to ‘learn’; but the substantives which are derived from these
verbs have come down into our language, the one as _discipline_
and the other as _mathematics_. Rome turned instinctively to the
external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression
of her impulses. And just as ‘learning’ for the Roman gradually
came to mean ‘learning to be a soldier’, so the ordinary Latin word
for ‘teacher’ (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher
of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words
which have hurried out of school in this way. ‘Magister’, for
instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and
left behind the Greek ‘paidagόgos’ (pedagogue) to express the most
schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps
the most significant of all is _school_ itself. Words for ‘teaching’
and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic
ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had
to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough,
the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not _school_ at all.
What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and
disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to
us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which
we have taken _school_. But to a Greek all this had been merely the
natural way of spending his spare time. ‘Scholē’ was the common Greek
word for ‘leisure.’
Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and
philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as
sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on
the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century
B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a
developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and
thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own
tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in
the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves
allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of
abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as
late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember
that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization
and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between
Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we
find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost
indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are
the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting,
therefore, to observe that our word _alphabet_ comes to us, through
Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and
‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words.
Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder
of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians
did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took
it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. _Jot_,
in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the
translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’,
which is also of Phoenician origin. _Bible_, on the other hand,
is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the
papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and _paper_ was borrowed by the Angles
and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the
Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing
material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian
origin.
External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before
the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in
constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are
told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”.
But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of
the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by
myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept
religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared
to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded
carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force
among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their
philosophy to institutions called _Mysteries_, which were evidently
felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual
life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without
which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a
miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we
must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought
and feeling have passed over into our language.
We have adopted from Latin the word _initiate_, which meant ‘to admit
a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy
is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to _initiate_‘,
meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive
‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so
the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded
so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very
little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas
attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they
revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances,
and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense
different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through
symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over,
he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what
had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations
which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations
of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold,
I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs
elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for
it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the
Christian era.[26]
The first man—as far as we know—to call himself a ‘philosophos’, or
lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and
his followers. _Philosophy_ among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis
on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian;
but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built
up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words
that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are
numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in
Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but
which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used
to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration
of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary,
varying from such highly technical terms as _homonym_ and _noumena_
to common ones like _individual_, _method_, and _subject_.
Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be “Greek
thought”, for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the
distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches
of study such as history. The Greek word ‘historia’ meant at first
simply ‘knowledge gained by inquiry’, and some of the words which
follow are first found in the works of Hesiod and Herodotus.
Among the words which have come to us from earlier Greek thought are
_cosmos_[27]—the name applied by the Pythagoreans to the universe,
which they perceived as a “shapely” and harmonious whole—geometrical
terms such as _pyramid_ (probably of Egyptian origin), _hypotenuse_
and _isosceles_; many of the technical terms of music, as _chord_,
_harmony_, _melody_, _tone_; of literature: _hyperbole_, _metaphor_,
_rhetoric_, _syntax_, _trope_; and a host of common words of
wider significance, such as _academy_, _analogy_, _aristocracy_,
_astronomy_, _cosmogony_, _critic_, _democracy_, _eclipse_,
_economic_, _enthusiasm_, _ethical_, _genesis_, _grammatical_,
_hypothesis_, _mathematical_, _method_, _phenomenon_, _physical_,
_poetic_, _politics_, _rhythm_, _theology_, _theory_. Of those
which were translated into Latin by Cicero and other Latin writers,
and possibly by Greek schoolmasters in Rome, we may mention _air_,
_element_, _essence_, _ideal_, _individual_, _quality_, _question_,
_science_, _species_, and _vacuum_, together with most of the
terminology of grammar, such as _adjective_, _case_, _gender_,
_noun_, _number_, _verb_,... _Type_ comes from ‘tupos’, the name of
the preliminary sketch made by a Greek painter before he started on
the work itself.
In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said
to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in
the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his
works are the Greek originals of _analogy_, _antipodes_, _dialectic_,
_enthusiasm_, _mathematical_, _synthesis_, and _system_; while he
imparted a new and special meaning to many others like _method_,
_musical_, _philosopher_, _sophist_, _theory_, _type_, _irony_ (the
name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance
in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, _idea_ and _ideal_.
Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or
semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28],
and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin
word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with
‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day _idea_ does
not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole
history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative
use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get
outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about
things from the things themselves.
Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the
meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. _Love_ and _good_, for
instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and _beauty_ is only Latin
remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them,
and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of
these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms
as _idea_ and _dialectic_. Let us try and trace the origin of some
of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word _love_. As
in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two
fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid
behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought
to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception
that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or
“ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions,
are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter
came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away.
The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality.
The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part
of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind
the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to
contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part
of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question
of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the
contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates
evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in
its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object
is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and
eternal. It is not only in the New Testament and the Prayer Book, in
the _Divine Comedy_, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_, and all great Romantic
poetry that the results of this thinking are to be seen. Through the
Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through
them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad,
no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall
of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is
brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a
moment forlornly out upon us.
In the latter days of Plato’s life there came to the “Academy” where
he taught a young man from Stagira, in Macedonia. His name was
Aristotle, and after he left Plato he became for a time the tutor of
Alexander the Great. In spite of their proximity in time and space,
the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian
or _peripatetic_ system can hardly be exaggerated. While Plato had
concentrated his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should
now call the “inner” world of human consciousness; starting from the
point of view of ancient tradition and myth, and working outward;
relating his thoughts to one another in accordance, as it were, with
their own inherent qualities; and deducing the sense-world from the
spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition of knowledge
about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that
part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and
the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the
importance of cultivating immortality—or rather of “immortalling”
(for they used a special verb which we have lost), but otherwise
there were few resemblances indeed. To Plato the soul of the universe
had seemed inseparable from his own soul, and natural phenomena
such as the revolutions of the planets had interested him rather as
tangible, outward pictures of the life within that soul. To Aristotle
the world outside himself was interesting more for its own sake.
Plato had looked up to “Ideas”—real Beings with an existence of their
own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within them.
Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine, maintaining that the
Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible
Nature, nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could
only be arrived at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When
Aristotle laid down his pen after writing the _Metaphysics_, the
word _idea_ had taken a long step towards its present meaning.
Thus in Aristotle’s imagination the two worlds, outer and inner, met
and came into contact in quite a new way. The mind was, as it were,
put at the absolute disposal of matter; it ceased to brood on what
arose from within, and turned its attention outwards. The result of
this was, of course, an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge
concerning the material processes of the outer world. But that was
not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result was
a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind’s own outlines.
Struggling to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause
and effect observed in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly
conscious of her own shape. She was astonished and delighted. She had
discovered _logic_. The actual Greek word ‘logic’ (ή λογική τέχνη) is
first found with its present meaning in Cicero, but he is speaking
of Aristotle; the thing itself and the technique of it was the
invention of Aristotle, and it was Aristotle who first used the word
_syllogism_ in its modern sense.
Perhaps the most significant of all those words which are first
found in Aristotle’s treatise on _Logic_ is _analytic_. Here is
indeed a new word made to express a new kind of thinking. _Energy_,
_entelechy_, _ethics_, _physiology_, and _synonym_, are further
examples of words which, as far as we know, were actually created
by Aristotle, while we owe _metaphysics_ to the accident of his
having treated that subject after (‘meta’) his treatise on _Physics_.
_Axiom_, _category_, _mechanics_, _organic_, _physics_, and
_synthesis_ are Greek words which take their modern meanings chiefly
from Aristotle; but his emphasis on the concrete and his constant
gravitation towards a kind of knowledge which might turn out to be
practically useful evidently made him a favourite with the Roman
mind. Consequently many of his words have come down to us translated
into Latin. Among those which we can actually trace are _absolute_,
_actual_, _definition_, _equivocal_, _induction_, _instance_,
_moral_, _potential_, _property_, _quintessence_, _subject_,[29]
_substance_, _virtual_, and the grammatical term _particle_; of the
plentiful number which have flown more indirectly from his mind we
may mention _conceit_ and _concept_, _deduction_, _difference_,
_experiment_, _principle_, and _universal_. In _quantity_ (a
translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly
formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which
we have _quality_) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest
in the _calculable_ aspect of the objects of the visible world from
which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun
to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and
measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries.
Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of
Socrates, proving by _analogy_ the immortality of the soul of man and
the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his
heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously
investigating by _analysis_ the structure and composition of the
body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with
Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities
for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge,
often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the
civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above
all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After
his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice.
Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to
the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal
of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at
this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science.
Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back
to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken
from the first half of the alphabet: _aconite_, _amaranth_, _balsam_,
_balm_, _box_, _calamint_, _celandine_, _cherry_, _chestnut_,
_chicory_, _germander_, _heliotrope_, _marjoram_, _melilot_.
Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and
though most of them, including the word _botany_ itself, were created
later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with
such learned labels as _calyx_, _perianth_, and _gymnosperm_.
When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember
that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down
to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs
in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created
by him or his contemporaries. _Anemone_, _asparagus_, _bugloss_,
_celery_, _centaury_, _clematis_, _coriander_, _crocus_, _lily_,
_medlar_, and _mint_ all go right back to Classical Greek, while
_petal_ and possibly _spore_ are botanical terms which were already
in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged,
and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.
This is even truer in the case of medicine. The _analytical_ method
of thought led naturally in Alexandria to the actual dissection of
bodies, living and dead. Aristotle himself is still regarded as the
founder of comparative _anatomy_ (cutting up), and it was he who
first used this word in its medical sense. The peculiar meaning of
the word _empirical_, moreover, derives from a set of physicians
who held that practice was the one thing necessary in their art. It
might be thought that with this foreshadowing of modern “methods”
there would have been a great influx of new information and new
terminology. In actual fact we find that the Greek words (and their
name is legion) in the terminology of medical science were either
created later by the different European peoples, or else they
appear in the works of Hippocrates, a physician who had a large
practice in Attica before Plato was born. Among the words found in
Hippocrates are the Greek originals of _arthritis_, _bronchial_,
_catalepsy_, _catarrh_, _diarrhoea_, _dropsy_, _dysentery_,
_epidemic_, _erysipelas_, _haemorrhage_, _hypochondriac_, _hysteria_,
_nephritis_, _ophthalmia_, _paregoric_, _phlebotomy_, _phthisis_,
_quinsy_, _rheum_, _sciatica_, and _hypochondriac_; while _apoplexy_
is particularly interesting because its Latin translation,
‘sideratio’, shows that it originally had the sense of ‘star-struck’
or ‘planet-struck’. _Crisis_ is Hippocrates’s name for the crucial
point at which a disease takes a turn for the worse or the better.
It came to England with this meaning in the sixteenth century, and
was gradually extended to cover first “the conjunction of stars on
which this ‘crisis’ depended”, and then “any critical situation”.
_Anaemia_, however, and possibly _enteric_, seem to have been first
used by Aristotle.
The centre of all this furious intellectual activity was the city
of Alexandria. Nor was it confined to scientific spheres; for the
results of religious and philosophical developments which now took
place in and around the cosmopolitan city in the north of Egypt were,
if anything, more far-reaching than those of empirical science.
Indeed, it was from this point in history that theology and science
first[30] began to be two separate studies, science following
eagerly in the footsteps of Aristotle and religion brooding over the
profundities of Platonic philosophy and saturating them with feeling.
Between Aristotle and Plato is the great divide from which flowed in
two different directions two separate streams, as it were, of human
outlook; and just as the modern European, whether or no he possesses
any genuine scientific knowledge, can trace the general shape and
method of his thinking back to the former, so, whether or no he calls
himself a Christian, he must trace much of what he regards as his
ordinary “feelings” back to the latter.
For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with
other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One
of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language
is _ammonia_. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have
been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there
was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind
us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the
Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career
of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before
founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be
expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek
in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more
enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third
influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable
ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate
the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called,
was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of
the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the
synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version
which was read by Jesus of Nazareth.
Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how
passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold
and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly
into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words
to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’,
‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best
they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied
something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable
practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found.
The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (_idol_), which had formerly meant
any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly
found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into
outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian
nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian
legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may
well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more
than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which
went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and
which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within
the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important
document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we
can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of
Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played
in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in
building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever
become fully conscious, but which we all instinctively bring into
play when we are speaking under the influence of emotion.
And later, in the work of a writer like Philo the Jew, who lived and
wrote about A.D. 50, we can discern some of the religious activities
which had followed the translation of the Septuagint; how the Jew,
with his expectation of the Messiah, the Egyptian devotee, with his
reverence for Horus—the child of a virgin mother, Isis—who died and
rose again as the sun-god Osiris, and the Greek, with his elaborated
Platonic doctrine, met together, speaking Greek; how innumerable
sects, ascetic and licentious, philosophical and superstitious,
wise and foolish, had been springing up and dying down all over
the Alexandrian world—all of them, to whatever extravagant lengths
they may have carried their philosophies and their dreams, working
unconsciously at the long task of altering the meaning, the emotional
colour, the evocative power of common Greek words. Concepts such as
‘God’, ‘world’, ‘love’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘spirit’, ‘self’,
and a hundred others were first resolved by the chemical action upon
them of similar concepts from the minds of other nations and races,
and then they began to be built up anew and to take on the form
in which they are presented, as he learns to speak, to the modern
European child.
Greek philosophy had developed in many directions since Plato’s day.
We hear of _Cynics_, _Sceptics_, _Epicureans_, _Stoics_, all of which
words originated as the names of different schools of philosophy.
The last two, whose doctrines were to take such a firm hold on the
educated classes of imperial Rome, have given us one or two important
words. Apart from their moral teachings, they appear to have directed
their philosophical inquiries more especially to the point of
contact between thoughts and things or, as we should say, between
objective and subjective. ‘Phantasia’, from which we have _fantasy_
and _fancy_, was a popular word with the Stoics, who gave it much
of its modern meaning; _notion_ and _comprehension_ are Cicero’s
translations of Stoic terms; while _image_ in the sense of ‘mental
image’ and _spectre_ are Latin renderings of Epicurean expressions.
Epicurus had founded his doctrines on those of Democritus, and
these last two words were employed by Cicero and one of his friends
in discussing that philosopher’s odd theory of perception. He had
held that the surfaces of all objects are continually throwing off
‘images’—a kind of films or husks which float about in space and at
last penetrate to the mind through the pores of the body. Both the
Stoic ‘phantasia’ and this Democritan word ‘eidōlon’, which Cicero
translated by ‘imago’, seem to have contributed a part of their
meaning to the later ‘imaginatio’, from which, of course, we have
taken our _imagination_.
It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek
word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the
relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always
meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’,
as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using
words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty
with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had
perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first
to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a
part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them
accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of
words and their origin, that we owe the word _etymology_, the first
half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning
‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing
into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this
mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’.
It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens
were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece
in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious
traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and
legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted
the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything
at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in
Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity
and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances
demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much
about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course
of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the
thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and
the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.
In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the
years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers
began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually
occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously
believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance,
admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and
followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus
had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some
of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into
the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically
within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way
on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for
all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal
life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes,
most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last
the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid
had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could
admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not
rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win
immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they
could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler
way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every
one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying
to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is
necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites,
and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during
his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death.
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of
Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in
human form, the Word made Flesh.
Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become
embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a
hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the
four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose,
in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church,
and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and
feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern
Europeans and Americans.
Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have
realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were
passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations
of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among
themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal
life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was
beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly,
that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the
Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite
incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to
spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits
gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long
and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language
of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most
shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion
and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover,
in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is
often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority.
Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing
and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred
semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold
on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and
incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued
at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and
invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution,
gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal
manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within
the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries,
creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and
physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder
forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine,
and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the
Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid
excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the
ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (_heresy_) is a fair indication of
the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging
from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and
all understanding of its external connections; while their success
may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an
Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the
Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third
century, would have incurred serious disabilities.
Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging
in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned
the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of
a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that
outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of
words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly
do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark
Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools,
and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present
with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this
is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge
edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and
began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us
to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our
friends.
CHAPTER VII
DEVOTION
_Passion._ _Lady._ _Love-longing._ _Conscience._ _Inquisition._
_Authority._ _Individual._ _Influence._
Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught
also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at
once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus
Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these
views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became
the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry
and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the
figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions.
The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes
included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or
religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself
a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great
part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the
consequences of these events.
... The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner
world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became
wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the
wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its
creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
_Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse._—SHELLEY: _A Defence of
Poetry_.
Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and
fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In
their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in
procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses
rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with
powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already
in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons;
while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated
raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous
fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are
only one or two common English words which throw any direct light
on this period. _Martyr_, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a
witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the
Church, as _heresy_ of the later. The name _Constantinople_ has a
double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman
emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of
the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial
capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal
foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an
eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day
in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may
be called the starting-point of European history.
For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ and
Kingsley’s _Hypatia_, while Merejkowski, in his _Death of the Gods_,
has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the _inner_ surface
of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking
place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful
movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations
of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our
language in the various ways described in Chapter III were being
built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St.
Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also
by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers,
by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular,
an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which
had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner
suggested in the last chapter were gradually decanted, either by
actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables.
Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the
Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished
by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman
Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint.
Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which
we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of
the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no
doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of
incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed
the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’
instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared
altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word,
as is often the case, split up into two, _sacrament_ remaining
within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old
technical meaning of _mystery_, while _mystery_ itself, freed
from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew
wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for _suffering_, used
in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross,
gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new
meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’.
From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way
into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything
else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and
the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know
to-day.
For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the
civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on,
say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable
transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to
trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human
thought and feeling, such as _God_ and _love_, _life_ and _death_,
_heaven_ and _hell_,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is
necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a
fifteenth-century English carol:
I sing of a maiden
That is makeless;[31]
King of all kings
To her son she ches.[32]
He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
He came al so still
To his mother’s bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.
He came al so still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
In such a poem we have once more a kind of cross-section of the
growth of European outlook. Between its lines we seem to be able to
hear, as in a dream, the monotonous intonings of Egyptian priests,
the quiet words of Socrates in the Academy, and the alert speculative
hum of the Alexandrian world. It is so graceful that for the moment
it seems as though all these things, with all the pillages and
massacres and crucifixions and vast imperial achievements of Rome,
had been conspiring together merely to load the homely old Teutonic
word ‘loaf-kneader’ with new semantic significance, to transform it
into that mystery and symbol in the imaginations of men, a _lady_.
The medieval lyric, as it gradually loses its exclusive preoccupation
with ecclesiastical subjects, becomes more and more concerned with
woman, and concerned with her in a new way. Through the poetry of
Italy, where the Renaissance was already stirring, the troubadour
literature of France, and that strange “Rose” tradition which is
preserved to us in Chaucer’s translation of the _Roman de la Rose_,
there grew up during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a small
special vocabulary defining the landmarks in that new region of the
imagination which the poets, and even the scholars, of Europe were
just discovering; we might call it the region of devotional love.
Indeed, it was more than a vocabulary; it developed at one time
into a sort of miniature mythology, for the various conflicting
elements in a lady’s disposition which the lover had to meet with and
overcome were actually personified, ‘Danger’ being a kind of mixture
of modesty and haughtiness—an ill-omened creature whom ‘Pity’ or
‘Mercy’, if the lover was fortunate, finally put to rout:
Al founde they Daunger for a tyme a lord,
Yet Pitee, thurgh his stronge gentle might
Foryaf[33] and made Mercy passen Ryght.
In these three lines from Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_ the four
Anglo-French words _Danger_, _Pity_, _Gentle_, and _Mercy_ are all
Latin terms whose forms had altered, and whose meanings had received
the Christian stamp during the Dark Ages. _Pity_ comes from ‘pietas’
(compare _piety_); _gentle_ from ‘gentilis’ meaning ‘of the same
family’ and later ‘of noble birth’; and _mercy_ from ‘merces’, ‘a
reward’, then ‘a reward in heaven for kindness displayed on earth’.
None of them—with the exception of _mercy_ in its theological
sense—are known to have been used in English before the thirteenth
century. _Anguish_, _beauty_, _bounty_, _charity_, _comfort_,
_compassion_, _courtesy_, _delicate_, _devotion_, _grace_, _honour_,
_humble_, _passion_, _patience_, _peace_, _purity_, _tender_ are
further examples of this new vocabulary of tenderness which came to
us from Latin through Early French. Some of them, such as _charity_,
_delicate_, and _passion_, were probably brought to England by the
preaching friars before the Conquest; others came with the devout
Normans, and did not develop a secular meaning until after they had
reached our shores (_devotion_ remaining purely theological until as
late as the sixteenth century); while yet a third class had already
been secularized by nimble spirits like Petrarch and Ronsard a
century or two before they reached us by the Norman route along with
more frivolous terms, _amorous_, _dainty_, _dalliance_, _debonair_,
_delight_, _pleasure_, _pleasance_, and the like, in which there is
no particular reason to perceive a strong ecclesiastical influence.
All of them, apart from the last group, are alike in that they
started with a theological meaning and subsequently developed an
affectionate one alongside of it. We may think of them as gifts
presented to the lyric lover by the Bride of Christ—well-chosen
gifts; for were they not the ardent creations of her own early
passion?
Thus, side by side with such lyrics as the carol quoted above,
we find in the Middle Ages charming little secular poems almost
indistinguishable from them in tone and manner:
Sweet rose of vertew and of gentilness,
Delightsome lily of everie lustyness,
Richest in bountie and in bewtie clear,
And everie vertew that is wened dear,
Except onlie that ye are mercyless.
Into your garth this day I did pursew;
There saw I flowris that fresh were of hew;
Both white and red most lusty were to seene
And halesome herbis upon stalkis greene;
Yet leaf nor flowr find could I none of rew.
I doubt that Merche, with his cauld blastis keene,
Has slain this gentil herb, that I of mene;
Whose piteous death does to my heart such paine
That I would make to plant his root againe,—
So comforting his leavis unto me bene.
And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic
changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old
English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to
throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume
of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle
English _love-longing_ is certainly one of them.
A new element had entered into human relationships, for which perhaps
the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness’. And so—at any rate
in the world of imagination—children as well as women gradually
became the objects of a new solicitude. We do not find in all
literature prior to the Middle Ages quite that _pathetic_ sense of
childhood which Chaucer has expressed so delicately in the story of
Ugolino of Pisa in his _Monk’s Tale_:
But litel out of Pize stant[34] a tour
In whiche tour in prisoun put was he,
And with hym been his litel children three,
The eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of age.
Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
Swiche briddes[35] for to put in swiche a cage!
Quotations are scarcely needed to intimate how such colourless
words as _little_—here sentimentally repeated—_children_, and even
_cruelty_, had gradually been laden with fresh emotional significance
by the Roman Church’s worship of the baby Jesus and its popular
expression in carol and drama. We still have a few examples of these
old Nativity Plays, from the individual scenes of which we take the
word _pageant_, and about the same time that Chaucer wrote we know
that the tailors of Coventry composed and sang the beautiful carol
which begins:
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By by lully, lullay.
Herod the King
In his raging
Charged he hath this day
His men of might
In his own sight
All young children to slay....
Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of
the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a
vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place
from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many
cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to
secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to
the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and
thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and
young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection,
as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations
as Coverdale’s _lovingkindness_ and _tender mercy_, Tindale’s
_long-suffering_, _mercifulness_, _peacemaker_, and _beautiful_ (for
it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the
majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version.
In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history
of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially
important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification.
For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which
we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the
Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still,
through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters
of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the
philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood
more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it.
But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition
which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something
quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters
into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to
mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of
understanding history.
If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative
conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her
abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated,
there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no
means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must
have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a
new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the
sense of its independent _being_ and activity, of bottomless depths
and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling
or with hope and joy—with _delight_ and _mirth_, or with _agony_,
_anguish_, _despair_, _repentance_—and on the other hand that feeling
of its being an _inner_ world, which has since developed so fully
that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.
In this connection it is particularly interesting to note the
appearance of _conscience_ in the thirteenth century. In classical
times the Latin ‘conscientia’ seems to have meant something more
like ‘consciousness’ or ‘knowledge’; it was generally qualified by
some other word (‘virtutum, vitiorum’—‘consciousness of virtues, of
vices,’ ...), and its termination, similar to that of _science_,
_intelligence_, ... suggests that it was conceived of by the Romans
more as a general, _abstract_ quality, which one would partake of,
but not actually possess—just as one has knowledge or happiness, but
not “a knowledge” or “a happiness”. Used in ecclesiastical Latin and
later in English, _conscience_ seems to have grown more and more
real, until at last it became that semi-personified and perfectly
private mentor whom we are inclined to mean to-day when we speak of
“my _conscience_” or “his _conscience_”.
The movement towards “individualism”, like many other phenomena of
modern civilization, has long ago shifted its centre of gravity
outside the walls of the Church. Once it was felt as the peculiar
glory of the Christian religion. In the Dark Ages heresies which
attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s
simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost
rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the
individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which
now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction.
This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each
individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was
a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul
almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even
the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only
be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain
uniformity of pattern. Thus, while the influence of Christianity
had ensured to all men—not merely to a small slave-owning class—a
modicum of personal liberty, it deprived them in the same breath
of that dearest of all possessions, freedom of thought. The grim
meaning gradually acquired by the Latin word _Inquisition_, meaning
an ‘inquiry’, still signifies to us the ruthless pains that were now
taken, for the first time in the world’s history, to pry into and
endeavour to control that private thinking life of men which had
suddenly acquired such a vast importance in their eyes. The still
grimmer _auto-da-fé_ began life as a Spanish phrase meaning simply an
‘act of faith’.
* * * * *
It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active
discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages
were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this
was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence.
The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and
towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious
of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer
without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to
“olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the
written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in
many other curious ways as well. We still use the word _authority_
in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the
power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and
from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to
have included the latter within it. Again, our word _glamour_, a
later form of _gramarye_, suggests an almost mystical reverence for
the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval
learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The
popularity and general use of _term_, which began life as a subtle
technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal
study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and _spice_—a corrupted form
of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon
of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.
The change from Greek and Roman civilization to the civilization of
modern Europe is often represented as having been more abrupt than
it really was. We have deduced some of the intermediate stages in
the alterations of feeling. In the world of thought there are actual
written documents for our information, philosophical treatises and
counter-treatises, which, by revealing to us the very moment of
impact, enable us to trace more easily the reverberation of thought
from mind to mind. Very soon after the break up of Rome, when the
Empire was being partially re-organized under Teutonic dynasties and
the defunct Latin _Caesar_ rising again as the Germanic _Kaiser_,
the great medieval “Schools”, of which the most famous was at Paris,
began to arise out of the traditions of monastic learning. Their
classical library apparently consisted of one Platonic dialogue and
two or three works of Aristotle, all of them translated; but the
authority of these translations was absolute. At first Plato was
considered the greater “authority”, but from the beginning of the
thirteenth century it seems to have been accepted almost as a matter
of course that the one great object of all philosophy for all time
was the harmonization of Aristotelian logic and Catholic dogma.
But though the Aristotelian method (as they understood it) was all
in all, the actual Platonic system, with the help of Neoplatonism
and the Mystics, lingered in sufficient strength to divide medieval
philosophy for several hundred years into two rival camps. The one
party, known as “Realists”, held with Plato that “ideas”—now usually
called _universals_—had existed before, and could exist quite apart
from, things; while the “Nominalists” held that universals had no
separate or previous existence. But as time passed, many of the
Nominalists went farther still, maintaining that these universals
did not exist at all, that they were mere intellectual abstractions
or classifications made by the human mind—in fact “ideas” in the
sense in which, owing to them, we use the word to-day. One of the
reasons—perhaps the chief reason—why so many Schoolmen carried
Aristotle beyond himself in this way is a particularly interesting
one.
Reference has already been made to the wave of Arabic civilization
which surged into Europe early in the Dark Ages. It was a
civilization in every sense of the word; for in the ninth century
learning had developed under the Caliphs of Baghdad to a degree
unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and _rapprochements_ between the
two races and civilizations, which had already begun in the world
of philosophy, were soon strengthened and increased by those great
medieval experiments, the Crusades.[36] Now Arabic scholars were,
if anything, more enthusiastic Aristotelians than the scholars of
Europe. The curious word _arabesque_, and the fact that words like
_algebra_, _cipher_, _zero_, and some others to be mentioned in
the next chapter are among the few Arabic words which reached our
language before the fourteenth century, are both symptomatic of a
certain peculiarity of the Arabic mind which we may perhaps call the
tendency to abstraction. The Arab seems to have possessed something
of that combination of materialism on the one hand and excessive
intellectual abstraction on the other which we have already noticed
in the later stages of Roman mythology. Just as he made Mohammedanism
out of the Jewish sacred traditions, so he made Nominalism out of
Greek philosophy. The influence upon Christian thought of great
Arabic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna is one of the most
astonishing chapters in its history. But it is not difficult to
see how it occurred. The learning of the Middle Ages was founded
entirely on translations, and this was an activity in which, as far
as Aristotle’s works were concerned, the Arabs had got in first.
According to Renan, some of the current versions of Aristotle were
“Latin translations from a Hebrew translation of a Commentary of
Averroes made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a
Greek text”.
To the Popes and those who had the power and interest of the Church
most at heart the problem appeared in quite a different light. It
was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla
of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical
conclusion, scepticism. Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism
we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism
and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church,
in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance
between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient
dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum,
Tweedledee, and the “Monstrous Crow” of nursery legend. But it is no
disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the
chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate
instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word
_accident_ is an excellent example. We use it every day without
realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable
efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with
the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The _accidents_, when
they first came into the English language, meant that part of the
sacred bread and wine which remained after the _substance_ had been
transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.
On the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most
contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are
the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these
Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations
are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of
the passing age. Much fun has been made of medieval philosophy for
discussing such matters as how many angels can stand on the point
of a needle, and whether Christ could have performed His cosmic
mission equally well if He had been incarnated as a pea instead of
as a man. The growth of a rudimentary historical sense has, it is
true, made it fashionable lately to take these ancient thinkers a
little more seriously, but it is still the rarest thing to find
a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is
consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the
exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such
key-words of thought as _absolute_, _actual_, _attribute_, _cause_,
_concept_, _deduction_, _essence_, _existence_, _intellect_,
_intelligence_, _intention_, _intuition_, _motive_, _potential_,
_predicate_, _substance_, _tendency_, _transcend_; _abstract_ and
_concrete_, _entity_ and _identity_, _matter_ and _form_, _quality_
and _quantity_, _objective_ and _subjective_, _real_ and _ideal_,
_general_, _special_, and _species_, _particular_, _individual_, and
_universal_. ‘Free will’ is the translation of a Latin phrase first
used by a Church Father, and ‘argumentum ad hominem’ is an example
of a scholastic idiom which has remained untranslated. Many of these
words, it is true, are in the first instance Latin translations
of Greek terms introduced by pagan writers before the days of the
Schoolmen; some, like _quality_ and _species_, by Cicero himself,
and others, like _accident_, _actual_, and _essence_, by later Latin
writers such as Quintilian or Macrobius. But it must be remembered
that, even in these cases, the words, as we use them to-day, are not
_mere_ translations. By their earnest and lengthy discussions the
Schoolmen were all the time defining more strictly the meanings of
these and of many other words already in use, and so adapting them to
the European brain that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
it was an easy matter for the lawyers and for popular writers like
Chaucer and Wyclif to stamp them with the authentic genius of the
English language and turn them into current coin.[37] Nobody who
understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation
of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the
philosophy of the Middle Ages.
If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of
Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought
of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a
single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations
of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor
and interpreter, Galen. But the way in which its terms have entered
right into the heart of our language is proof enough that this
medieval science arose, not merely from blind subservience to
tradition, but also from an actual survival of the kind of feeling,
the kind of outlook which, ages ago, had created the tradition. In
spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man
was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated
from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely his
mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent
upon, his body. Intellectual classifications were accordingly less
dry and clear, and science—that general speculative activity which a
later age has split up into such categories as astronomy, physics,
chemistry, physiology, psychology, ...—was as yet almost an undivided
whole. Common words like _ascendant_, _aspect_, _atmosphere_,
_choleric_, _common sense_, _complexion_, _consider_, _cordial_,
_disaster_, _disposition_, _distemper_, _ether_, _hearty_, _humour_,
_humorous_, _indisposed_, _influence_, _jovial_, _lunatic_,
_melancholy_, _mercurial_, _phlegmatic_, _predominant_, _sanguine_,
_saturnine_, _spirited_, _temper_, _temperament_, with _heart_,
_liver_, _spleen_, and _stomach_ in their psychological sense, most
of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the
fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations
between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval
scientist.
Thus, the physical body was said to contain four _humours_ (Latin
‘humor’, ‘moisture’)—_blood_, _phlegm_, _bile_ or _choler_,
and _black bile_ (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the
_hypochondria_. Not only diseases, or _distempers_, but qualities of
character were intimately connected with the proper ‘mixture’ (Latin
‘temperamentum’) of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees
a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might
be good _humoured_ or bad _humoured_; he might have a good _temper_
or a bad _temper_; and according to which _humour_ predominated in
his _temperament_ or _complexion_, he was _choleric_, _melancholy_,
_phlegmatic_, or _sanguine_. His character depended on other things
as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that
the _arteries_ (Greek ‘aēr’, ‘air’) were ducts through which there
flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of _ether_ (Greek
‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’) or _spirits_ (Latin ‘spiritus’, ‘breath’,
‘life’), viz. the _animal_[38] (Latin ‘anima’, ‘soul’), the _vital_,
and the _natural_. But the stars and the planets were also living
bodies; they were composed of that ‘fifth essence’ or _quintessence_,
which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the
character and the fate of men were determined by the _influences_
(Latin ‘influere’, ‘to flow in’) which came from them. The Earth had
its _atmosphere_ (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the
Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with
_lunacy_, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury
was _predominant_ or in the _ascendant_ in the general _disposition_
of stars at a man’s birth, he would be _jovial_, _saturnine_, or
_mercurial_. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the
same _influences_, or which _influenced_ each other in this occult
way, were said to be in _sympathy_ or _sympathetic_.
_Test_ is an alchemist’s word, coming from the Latin ‘testa’, an
earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word
was once used as a slang term for ‘head’, and in its French form,
‘tête’, still retains that meaning. The phrase _hermetically sealed_
reminds us that alchemy, known as the ‘hermetic art’, was traced back
by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself
took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists’
words are _amalgam_, _alcohol_, _alembic_, _alkali_, _arsenic_, and
_tartar_. The last five, together with the word _alchemy_ itself, all
come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs
of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of
modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of
chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science
of drugs. Moreover, that old ‘humoral’ pathology which has shaped so
many of our conceptions of human character—in so far as it was based
on ancient authority and tradition—came from Hippocrates to Europe,
for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.
The more intimate and indispensable such conceptions are, the more
effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to
realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are
reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness
the different meanings which have since gathered round the words.
If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck
by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When
we reflect on the history of such notions as _humour_, _influence_,
_melancholy_, _temper_, and the rest, it seems for the moment as
though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside
ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside
world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy
realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology
has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars
glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind
watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after
four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.
CHAPTER VIII
EXPERIMENT
_Zenith._ _Law._ _Investigate._ _Conceit._ _Gentleman._ _Love._
_Protestant._
Philosophy, alchemy, and mathematics were not the only branches of
learning in which the Arabs had excelled. The appearance in English
of such words as _azimuth_, _nadir_, and _zenith_ towards the end of
the fourteenth century suggests among other things that the thinking
of this Syrian race contributed in no small degree to the rise in
Europe of the new astronomy. These three Arabic words (two of them
for the first time in English) are to be found in Chaucer’s _Treatise
on the Astrolabe_, written in 1391 for the instruction of his little
son, “Lowis”; and this interesting document contains many other words
also for which the _Oxford Dictionary_ does not give any earlier
quotation, such as _almanac_, _ecliptic_, _equinox_, _equator_,
_horizon_, _latitude_, _longitude_, _meridian_, _minute_ (meaning
one-sixtieth of a degree), while _zodiac_ was used by Gower a few
years before.
Such words show us that the Europe of the Dark Ages had been
experiencing once more what the ancient scientists had known. Its
learned men had been marking down recurrences of natural phenomena
and orientating themselves on the earth by dividing its face up
into imaginary rings and segments. For such purposes they had found
Latin and Greek terms ready to their hand, and the survival of
the Greek _zodiac_ reminds us that they had, moreover, adopted the
ancient system of mapping out the heavens into twelve “signs.”
When, therefore, we find three Arabic words among these relics of
classical wisdom, we need not be surprised to see that they express
something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of
expressing—that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the
visible heavens. These are conceived of as a vast sphere encircling
the earth; the _zenith_ and the _nadir_ are its poles, while the
_azimuths_ are meridians of celestial longitude.
It is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the
first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing
himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects. Of
course, the Arab astronomer of the Dark and Middle Ages still saw
the earth as the centre round which the universe revolved, and he
would no more have dreamed of doubting the “astral” quality of the
planets than the schoolmaster of to-day who instructs his pupils to
write down “Let _x_ = 20 oranges” doubts whether oranges have any
taste. Nevertheless we may feel pretty sure that those minds which
were apparently the first to think of cutting up the sky without
reference to the constellations, and which could, moreover, develop
so fully the great and novel system of abstraction which they called
_algebra_, did their part in bringing about that extraordinary
revolution in astronomical thought which is associated with the
name of Copernicus. It is true that the astronomy of Plato’s time
had been intimately connected with arithmetic and geometry; but
Plato’s “number” and his geometry do not appear to have been quite
the abstract sciences which these things are to-day. What we call
their “laws” seem to have been felt, not as intellectual deductions,
but rather as real activities of soul—that human soul which, as we
saw, the philosopher could not yet feel to be wholly separate from
a larger world Soul, or planetary Soul. The Zodiacal signs, for
instance, had been as much, if not more, classifications of this Soul
as they had been sections of space. The word comes from the Greek
‘zōdion’, a little animal, and not only was every sign distinguished
by a constellation, of which the majority were associated with some
beast, but human character and human destiny were believed to be
bound up inextricably with the position of the sun and the planets
among these signs.
If, therefore, there is any truth in the belief of the old Greek
philosophers and of some modern historians that the study of
mathematics has its origin in the observed movements of the stars,
the progress is of the same nature as that which we noticed at the
end of the last chapter. Is it too fanciful to picture to ourselves
how, drawn into the minds of a few men, the relative positions
and movements of the stars gradually developed a more and more
independent life there until, with the rise in Europe first of
trigonometry and then of algebra, they detached themselves from
the outside world altogether? And then by a few great men like
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, these abstract mathematics were
re-fitted to the stars which had given them birth, and the result
was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth in which our
imaginations roam to-day? When the Aryan imagination had at last
succeeded in so detaching its “ideas” about the phenomena of the
universe that these could be “played with,” as mathematicians say, in
the form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly easy matter
to turn them inside out.
The alterations wrought in the meanings of many of our common words
by this revolution of physical outlook are not difficult to perceive
and yet not easy to realize. As the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo
slowly filtered through to the popular consciousness, first of all
simple words like _atmosphere_, _down_, _earth_, _planet_, _sky_,
_space_, _sphere_, _star_, _up_, ... underwent a profound yet subtle
semantic change. And then, in the eighteenth century, as Newton’s
discoveries became more widely known, further alterations took place.
_Weight_,[39] for instance, acquired a new significance, differing
from _mass_, which also changed, having formerly meant simply a lump
of matter.[40] _Gravity_,[41] (from the Latin ‘gravitas’ ‘heaviness’)
took on its great new meaning, and the new words _gravitation_ and
_gravitate_ were formed, the later being soon adapted to metaphorical
uses. If we cared to examine them closely enough, we should probably
find that from this point a certain change of meaning gradually
spread over all words containing the notion of attraction, or
ideas closely related to it. The twin phenomena of gravitation and
magnetism, contemplated by most of us at an early age, and impalpably
present in the meanings of so many of the words we hear spoken around
us, make the conception of one lifeless body acting on another from
a distance easy and familiar.[42] But the very word _attraction_
(from the Latin ‘ad-trahere’, ‘to draw’ or ‘drag towards’) may well
serve to remind us that until the discovery of gravitation this
conception must have been practically beyond the range of human
intellection. There was formerly no half-way house in the imagination
between actual dragging or pushing and forces emanating from a living
being, such as love or hate, human or divine, or those “influences”
of the stars which have already been mentioned.
A good illustration of this fact—and one which takes us back again to
the seventeenth century—is the word _law_. The Latin ‘lex’ was first
applied to natural phenomena by Bacon. Later in the century _law_ was
used in the same sense, but it did not then mean quite what it does
to-day. The “laws of Nature” were conceived of by those who first
spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we
still speak of Nature “obeying” these laws, though we really think of
them now rather as abstract principles—logical deductions of our own
which we have arrived at by observation and experiment.
Some account of Francis Bacon’s general influence, as a writer, on
our language has already been given in Chapter IV. His influence on
thought was far greater, for he was in some sense the moving spirit
of that intellectual revolution which began to sweep over Europe in
the sixteenth century. It was a revolution comparable in many ways
to the change inaugurated by Aristotle twenty centuries earlier, and
there is accordingly much in Bacon’s work that reminds us of the
Greek philosopher. To begin with, he was thoroughly dissatisfied with
the whole _method_ of thought as he found it in his day, and, like
Aristotle, he strove first of all to effect a reformation in this.
Aristotle had written the _Organum_—that is to say, the “Instrument”
(of Thought)—and Bacon intended his _Novum Organum_ to go one step
farther. He proclaimed himself satisfied with Aristotle’s legacy—the
prevailing logical system of syllogism and deduction—as far as it
went. Given the “premises,” it was the correct line of further
discovery. What he questioned was the Scholastic premises themselves,
and he propounded accordingly a new and surer method of establishing
fresh ones. It is known as the “inductive method.” This is not the
place to expound Bacon’s logical system, and it will suffice that it
was based on an extensive and, above all, a systematic observation of
Nature herself. Aristotle had indeed (though the Schoolmen had nearly
forgotten it) pointed the way to such an observation, but it was left
for Bacon to try and construct a prejudice-proof system of arranging
and classifying the results. These _instances_, as they were called,
were, on the one hand, to be manufactured by means of _experiment_,
and on the other to be arranged and weeded out according to their
significance. The word _crucial_ comes to us from Bacon’s Latin
phrase ‘instantia crucis’—the _crucial instance_—which, like a
sign-post, decided between two rival hypotheses by proving one and
disproving the other; and it may be said that he endeavoured, but
failed, to alter the meaning of _axiom_ itself from “a self-evident
proposition” to “a proposition established by the method of
experimental induction”.
Once more men turned the light of their curiosity upon the stubborn
phenomena of the outside world, and as it was Aristotle’s works in
which we first found the Greek _anatomy_, ‘cutting up’, so it is
Bacon who first uses _dissection_ (from the Latin for the same thing)
in its modern technical meaning. After an interval of about 1,500
years, the weighing, measuring, examining, and cutting up had now
begun again, and they have gone on ever since. How far Francis Bacon
was responsible for the form subsequently taken by scientific thought
will probably remain a matter of dispute. His views on ecclesiastical
authority, on Scholastic philosophy, on Aristotle, on the Alchemists,
certainly suggest that he possessed what the nineteenth century has
called the “scientific attitude” to an extent which distinguishes
him startlingly from any previous or contemporary writer; _acid_,
_hydraulic_, and _suction_ are among the words first found in his
pages; but, above all, his consciousness of greater changes afoot
is manifested linguistically in such things as his use of the words
_progressive_ and _retrograde_ in an historical sense unknown, as
we shall see, to the majority of thinkers until the middle of the
eighteenth century, or his equally innovating distinction between
_ancient_ and _modern_. A marked increase over the second quarter
of the seventeenth century in the number of words expressing the
notion of doubt, such as _dubious_ (used of opinions), _dubiousness_,
_dubitable, ceptic_, _sceptical_, _sceptically_, _scepticism_,
_scepticity_, _scepticize_, compares with an increase of only one or
two during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And at about the
same time the words _curious_, _curiosity_, and _inquisitive_ seem
to have lost the air of pious disapproval which they had previously
carried with them when used to express the love of inquiry. How much
of this is due to novel combinations, such as “a natural _curiosity_
and _inquisitive_ appetite”, which we find in Bacon’s _Advancement
of Learning_? We cannot say. There are symptoms of the coming
metamorphosis already, before his time, in the appearance in English
of the sixteenth century of such significant new terms as _analyse_,
_distinguish_, _investigate_, together with the semantic change of
_observe_ from “to obey a rule”, or “to inspect auguries” into its
modern meaning, and similar changes in the case of _experiment_ and
_experimental_. It is impossible to prove these things. As with
Aristotle, so with Bacon, it is impossible to say whether his own
intellectual volume displaced the great wave or whether he merely
rose upon its early crest.
There are other influences, too, that must be taken into
account. _Discovery_ (it was a new word) was in the very air of
sixteenth-century England. From the West came tidings of a new
world; from the East news yet more marvellous of an old one; and
the rebirth of Science was, in its infancy, but a single aspect
of that larger Renaissance which played such an important part
in moulding the subsequent life and outlook of Europe. Italy had
felt the shock first, and we have a special group of words in our
language to remind us of the visual arts in which the new impulse
drove her to excel. _Cameo_, _cupola_, _fresco_, and _model_ all
reached us in the sixteenth century from or through the Italian,
and the next saw the arrival of _attitude_, _bust_, _chiaroscuro_,
_dado_, _dome_, _filigree_, _intaglio_, _mezzotinto_, and _pastel_.
If these are of a somewhat technical nature, words like _antic_,
_canto_, _capriole_, _galligaskins_, _sonnet_, and _stanza_ build a
bridge in the imagination from Renaissance Italy to Tudor England,
and _ducat_, _incarnadine_, and _madonna_ are three Italian words
with pleasant Shakespearian associations. They remind us, too,
that by the time the Renaissance reached England it was already in
full swing. No wonder the literary world was swept off its feet.
First-hand acquaintance with the works of Classical writers gradually
substituted an affectionate, an almost passionate, familiarity for
that religious awe with which the Middle Ages had honoured their
garbled translations. One of the first results—an immediate and
violent intellectual revolt against the Schoolmen and all things
connected with them—is faithfully preserved to us in the unenviable
immortality achieved about this time by the luckless Duns Scotus,
whose patronymic has given us _dunce_. The history of the word
_conceit_, which in Chaucer merely meant ‘anything conceived’, tells
its tale of the wild, undiscriminating rush after elegance of thought
and diction. By Shakespeare’s time the tasteless habit of piling
fanciful conceit upon conceit had already become a thing to parody,
the merest affectation of wit, and so the word lives to-day chiefly
as a synonym for personal vanity, the language having been obliged by
its degradation to re-borrow the Latin original ‘conceptus’ in the
more exact form of _concept_.
It can readily be imagined that the restless activity which these
little symptoms betoken had a remarkable effect in altering,
developing, and indeed modernizing, the English vocabulary. The
genius of the language sprouted and burgeoned in the genial warmth
of Elizabethan and Jacobean fancy, and—most effective of all—it
passed through the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is an
unobtrusiveness about Shakespeare’s enormous influence on his native
tongue which sometimes recalls the records of his private life. This
is no doubt partly due to the very popularity of his plays, which has
preserved the direct influence in every age. Where the word which he
employs is a new one, it has usually become so common in the course
of years that we find it hard to conceive of the time when it was
not. Where it is a meaning or a shade of meaning which he has added,
as likely as not that very shade was the one most familiar to our
own childhood before we had ever read a line of his poetry. Phrases
and whole lines from the plays and sonnets are as much a part of the
English vocabulary as individual words. Such are _pitched battle_,
_play on words_, _give him his due_, _well on your way_, _too much
of a good thing_, _to the manner born_, _the glass of fashion_,
_snapper-up of unconsidered trifles_, _more honoured in the breach
than the observance_,... The influence of such a mind on the language
in which it expresses itself can only be compared to the effect of
high temperatures on solid matter. As imagination bodies forth the
forms of things unknown, each molecule of suggestiveness contained
in each word gains a mysterious freedom from its neighbours; the old
images move to and fro distinctly in the listener’s fancy, and when
the sound has died away, not merely the shape, but what seemed to be
the very substance of the word has been readjusted.
Examples are found readily enough with the help of a volume of
Shakespeare and the _Oxford Dictionary_. As to new words themselves,
it has been said that there are more in Shakespeare’s plays than
in all the rest of the English poets put together. _Advantageous_,
_amazement_, _critic_ and _critical_, _dishearten_, _dwindle_,
_generous_, _invulnerable_, _majestic_, _obscene_, _pedant_, _pious_,
_radiance_, _reliance_, and _sanctimonious_ are a few examples,
but it is still more interesting to trace the subtler part of his
influence. As an instance of what we may call his literary alertness
let us take the word _propagate_. It is not found in English before
1570, and is thus a new word in Shakespeare’s time. Yet he handles
it four times, now literally, now figuratively, with as much ease
and grace as if it had been one of the oldest words in the language.
Listen to Romeo:
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine.
Again, the figurative—that is to say, the only modern use of
_influence_—is first quoted from his works, and we can watch
him gradually taking the meaning of the word sphere through its
historical developments of planetary ‘_sphere_’, high social rank,
any sort of category. A certain curious intransitive use of the verb
_take_, as when a doctor says “the vaccination _took_ very well,” can
also be traced back to Shakespeare, and a few more of the innumerable
new uses of words which appear to have begun from him are _sequence_
and _creed_, with purely secular meanings; _real_, in its ordinary
modern sense of ‘actual’; _magic_, _magical_, and _charm_[43], used
figuratively; _apology_ as the personal and verbal expression of
compunction; _positive_ in its psychological sense; _function_, used
biologically; _fashion_ and _fashionable_ with their modern meanings;
and _action_, meaning a battle. The fact that the first examples
of these new uses quoted in the _Oxford Dictionary_ are taken from
Shakespeare cannot, of course, be taken as absolute proof that he
introduced them. But there are so many of them, and the _Dictionary_
is so thorough, that there can be no doubt of his being the first in
most cases and among the first in every case.
Shakespeare’s influence on the personal relations between the sexes,
as they have developed in subsequent periods of English history, is a
matter for the literary and social historian; but it is interesting
to reflect how the meanings of that group of Norman French words
mentioned in the last chapter, and of others which were slowly drawn
into their circle, must have expanded under the warm breath of his
vivacious and human heroines. The ideal atmosphere of gracious
tenderness which was the contribution to humanity of the Middle
Ages was to some extent realized by the Elizabethans. The women
towards whom it was directed became less and less mere ecclesiastical
symbols, existing only in the imagination of the lover, and more and
more creatures of real flesh and blood. Once again it is a case of a
later age striving to live out what an earlier age—or its few best
minds—have dreamed. Thus, the Blessed Virgin is partly supplanted
in men’s hearts by the virgin Queen; the charming figure of
Sidney—personified gentleness and chivalry—actually passes across the
stage of history; the peculiarly English word _gentleman_ appears.
And we can hardly help holding Shakespeare partly responsible for
what is going forward when we find him writing “the devout religion
of mine eye” and making Richard III implore Anne to “let the soul
forth that adoreth thee”—where the words _religion_ and _adore_ are
both applied to humanity for the first time, as far as we know, in
English literature.
Moreover, the new access to the Classics added to all this the
direct influence of the Platonic philosophy which now played,
through Spenser and his circle, upon the thought and feeling of
the Elizabethan age. A careful reading of Spenser’s four hymns to
_Love_, _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_, and _Heavenly Beauty_ will throw
much light on the subsequent semantic history of the title words and
of many others. We find in them the Platonic antithesis between the
Eternal and its for-ever-changing outward garment:
For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves so fairely spread
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay.
That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright
Shall turne to dust, and loose their goodly light.
But that faire lampe, from whose celestial ray
That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers’ fire,
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay,
But when the vitall spirits doe expyre,
Unto her native planet shall retyre,
For it is heavenly borne and can not die,
Being a parcell of the purest skie.
and the conception of contemplation rising, through love, from the
one to the other, as in
For love is Lord of truth and loialtie,
Lifting himselfe out of the lowly dust,
On golden plumes up to the purest skie....
or:
But they which love indeede, look otherwise,
With pure regard and spotless true intent,
Drawing out of the object of their eyes
A more refyned forme, which they present
Unto their minde....
until finally, in the _Hymne of Heavenly Beauty_, Spenser reveals the
source of his faith:
Faire is the heaven, where happy soules have place,
In full enjoyment of felicitie....
More faire is that where those _Idees_ on hie,
Enraunged be, which _Plato_ so admyred,
And pure _Intelligences_ from God inspyred.
When we recall the great influence which Spenser’s poetry has exerted
on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can
clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism—a direct Platonism, and a
Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions
of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and
Middle Ages—combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is
now contained in such words as _love_ and _beauty_. Let us remember,
then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly,
we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist
or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a
vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual
capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.
The fact that a great deal of what had formerly been religious
emotion was being secularized in this way does not, however, mean
that the Church had ceased to play an all-important part in the
life of the people. The Reformation seems, with its insistence
on the _inwardness_ of all true grace, to have been but another
manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of
gravity of human consciousness which we have already observed in
the scientific outlook. That shift is, in a larger sense, the story
told by the whole history of the Aryan languages. Thus _religion_
itself, which had formerly been used only of external observances or
of monastic orders, took on at about this time its modern, subjective
meaning. Now it was that _piety_, differentiating itself from _pity_,
began to acquire its present sense. _Godly_, _godliness_, and
_godless_ are first found in Tindale’s writings, and _evangelical_
and _sincere_ are words which have been noted by a modern writer as
being new at this time and very popular among the Protestants. The
great word _Protestant_ itself was applied formerly to the German
princes who had dissented from the decision of the Diet of Spires in
1529, and together with _Reformation_ it now acquired its new and
special meaning, while the old words, _dissent_ and _disagree_, were
transferred at about the same time from material objects to matters
of opinion.
Another little group of words which appeared in the language at about
this time is interesting in its suggestion that human emotions,
like the forces of Nature, are usually accompanied by their equal
and opposite reactions. The well-known phrases, _odium theologicum_
and _odium philosophicum_, survive to remind us of a new kind of
bitterness and hatred which had slowly been arising in men’s hearts,
and which were also, it would seem, the gifts of Christianity and
the Dark Ages. Very soon after the Reformation we find alongside the
syllables of tenderness and devotion a very pretty little vocabulary
of abuse. _Bigoted, action_, _factious_, _malignant_, _monkish_,
_papistical_, _pernicious_, _popery_ are among the products of the
struggle between Catholic and Protestant; and the terms _Roman_,
_Romanist_, and _Romish_ soon acquired such a vituperative sense
that it became necessary to evolve _Roman Catholic_ in order to
describe the adherents of that faith without giving offence to them.
The later internecine struggles among the Protestants themselves
gave us _Puritan_, _precise_, _libertine_—reminiscent of a time when
“liberty” of thought was assumed as a matter of course to include
licence of behaviour—_credulous_, _superstitious_, _selfish_,
_selfishness_, and the awful Calvinistic word _reprobate_. It
was towards the end of the Puritan ascendancy that _atone_ and
_atonement_ (_at-one-ment_) acquired their present strong suggestion
of legal expiation, and it may not be without significance that the
odious epithet _vindictive_ was then for the first time applied
approvingly to the activities of the Almighty Himself.
As the language grows older, when all the principal tributaries have
met at last in the main stream, it begins, unfortunately, to tell
a less and less coherent tale of the people who speak it. The few
large groups of new words and meanings which we have hitherto been
tracing give way to a much greater number of small groups—or even of
single words—for the vocabulary is now so capacious that important
new movements of thought are likely to find the old terms adaptable
to their use with very slight semantic alterations, or perhaps with
the formal addition of an _-arian_, an _-ism_, or an _-ology_. These
become accordingly harder to trace, and a book of these dimensions is
obliged to select a word here and a word there in almost arbitrary
fashion. It must be remembered, then, in this and the succeeding
chapters that only a few of the tendencies and changes at work have
been picked out for inspection, though it is probable that a study
of words, which should be at the same time subtle and comprehensive
enough, would throw some light on them all.
CHAPTER IX
PERSONALITY AND REASON
_Prig._ _Pressure._ _Period._ _Consciousness._ _Character._
_Amusing._ _Sentimental._ _Arrange._ _Personify._
When Charles II returned from France to an England which had long
been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of
a middle-aged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings
of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising
to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new
expressions such as to _banter_, to _burlesque_, to _ridicule_, to
_prim_, _travesty_, _badinage_, and, above all, _prig_, helps to
fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ and the _Country Wife_. Even to those totally unacquainted
with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words
might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the
submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been
repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its
families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain
respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits;
weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the
material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as
hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and
round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to
lay a finger on it, for it is a process in which the question of the
meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact,
one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists
nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the
words they must use. “Morality”, said the late Sir Walter Raleigh,
“colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers
of distinction”; and so, when any significant change takes place in
the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a
general shifting of the meanings of common words.
One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed
with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the
demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War:
Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity:
shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness:
voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good
education: lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed
hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune.
Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must
have been at work when _silly_ lost its old meaning of ‘blessed’;
when _demure_ changed from ‘grave’ or ‘sober’ to ‘affectedly modest’;
and when the kindly _officious_ acquired its modern sense of bustling
interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character
that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for
‘simple’ never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of
its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have
another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly
suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a
Semitic incubus:
As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until
we call it folly we never shall have done with it. The conception
of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that
cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal
creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet
in pursuit of our personal aims—that we have it in our power
to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous,
delightful fancy....
It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more
illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little
of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he
prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his
own list of test words—and the lists themselves, if we were foolish
enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate
diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is
too long to elaborate.
_Ogle_ is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration;
and at the same time _intrigue_, which had come into the language
earlier in the century in the general sense of ‘intricacy’, was
seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of
“polite” society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is also—curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of
_bearish_, _countrified_, _fatuous_, _flippant_, _gawky_, _mawkish_,
_prude_, and other such terms. _Hoyden_ was first used of a girl by
Wycherley in 1676.
But outside the limelit circle this period was one of rapid
intellectual development. That the novel interest in the external
world, typified in the sixteenth century by such new words as
_analyse_, _distinguish_, _investigate_[44], expanded continuously
during the next hundred years is suggested by the addition to
our vocabulary of _inspect_, _remark_, and _scrutinize_, together
with the modern meanings of _perception_ and _scrutiny_, which had
meant up till then respectively ‘the collection of rents’ and ‘the
taking of a vote.’ We also find a group of new words to describe
the inherent conditions and qualities of external objects, such as
_acid_, _astringency_, _cohesion_, _elasticity_, _equilibrium_,
_fluid_ (as a noun), _intensity_, _polarity_, _pressure_,
_spontaneous_, _static_, _temperature_, _tendency_, _tension_,
_volatile_, besides the physical and impersonal meanings of _energy_
and _force_. The old verb to _discover_, which originally signified
simply to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal,’[45] was used attributively in the
sixteenth century of travellers ‘discovering’ foreign lands and
customs. Shortly after the Restoration the new metaphor, so it
would seem, was itself applied metaphorically to the results of a
chemical experiment, and in this way the ordinary modern meaning
arose. The creation of the new word _gas_ by the Dutch chemist van
Helmont marks a definite epoch in the evolution of the scientific
outlook. He used it, however, to describe an occult principle—a
sort of ultra-rarefied water—which he supposed to be contained in
all matter. It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth
century that the word acquired its modern meaning of ‘matter in the
condition of an aeriform fluid’, at which time the word _gaseous_
also appeared. _Ether_ (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the _upper_ air’ above the
clouds), which had been practically a synonym for the Aristotelian
_quintessence_[46], was now adopted to express the mechanical
substitute for that spiritual medium required by modern science in
order to explain the phenomenon of action at a distance. These are
among the first attempts which were made to describe the outer world
objectively—from its own point of view instead of from the point of
view of divinity or of human souls; it is interesting, therefore, to
reflect that the success achieved is really only a relative one, as
all the words mentioned, with the possible exception of _gas_,[47]
are in the first place metaphors drawn from human activities such as
those of ‘cutting’, ‘stretching’, and ‘pulling’.
In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad
prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its
title announced, of “Improving Natural Knowledge,” and it is notable
that the word _improve_ should have been employed. Originating, as we
saw, in Lawyer’s French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote
merely “the enclosure and cultivation of waste land”. So that when
we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is
reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the
front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression
that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they
were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly.
We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook
from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in
England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an
unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the
European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet
always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed
that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body.
The first appearance of a distinction between _ancient_ and _modern_,
and of the word _progressive_, in Bacon’s _Essays_ has already been
noted, and we find that _progress_ itself had only begun to emerge
a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal
journey’ or, as we still say, ‘progress’. To the seventeenth century,
as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, we owe the words _antiquated_,
_century_, _decade_, _epoch_, _Gothic_, _out-of-date_, _primeval_,
and we may add to these _contemporary_, _contemporaneous_,
_synchronise_, _synchronous_, and a queer jungle-growth of words with
similar meanings which sprang up about the middle of the seventeenth
century and has since vanished: _contemporal_, _co-temporary_,
_contemporize_, _isochronal_, _synchronal_, _synchronical_,
_synchronism_, _synchronistic_. A curious feature about these latter
words is the number of them which first appeared in theological
writings, the mystic philosopher, Henry More, being alone responsible
for three. They seem to have arisen chiefly from an interest in
comparing the dates of different events recorded in Scripture, and
they may thus be placed beside the epithet _primitive_, applied by
the Reformers to the early Church, which Mr. Pearsall Smith has
pointed to as “probably the first word in which our modern historical
sense finds expression”.
When we try combing the dictionaries—Greek, Latin, English, and
others—for words expressing a sense of the “march of history”, or
indeed of a past or future differing at all essentially from the
present, we are forced to the conclusion that this kind of outlook
on time is a surprisingly recent growth. We saw how the Greek
‘historia’ could mean practically any kind of knowledge; in the
same way, when ‘periodos’ (literally ‘way round’) was used of time,
it meant a cycle, one of a recurring series; it was not till the
eighteenth century that a _period_ of history acquired its modern
sense of an indefinite portion cut from a continuous process. Labels
like _Middle Ages_, _Renaissance_, ... are none of them earlier
than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions
_develop_ and _development_, and the fact that the significant words
_anachronism_,[48] _evolution_,[48] and _prehistoric_, with the new
perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century
may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen
wholly from our eyes.
In order to enter sympathetically into the outlook of an educated
medieval gentleman, we have to perform the difficult feat of
undressing, as it were, our own outlook by divesting it of all those
seemingly innate ideas of progress and evolution, of a movement of
some sort going on everywhere around us, which make our cosmos what
it is. This is more difficult even than it sounds, because so many
of these thoughts and feelings have become sub-conscious. We have
imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and
research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of
our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our
imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our
fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time,
and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever
to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to _progress_ or to
_evolve_ into something different, but merely to become once more
exactly like the first man and woman. Where we speak of _progress_
and _evolution_, the Middle Ages could speak only of _regeneration_
and _amendment_. Their evolution was like Alice’s race with the Red
Queen. It took all their energies to keep still; and even in this
they had very little hope of succeeding, for they believed that the
world was getting steadily worse.
But perhaps their total lack of historical imagination is brought
home to us most forcibly by the prevalent belief that—apart from the
Chosen People—all the inhabitants of the pre-Christian world were
doomed to eternal exclusion from paradise. When we recollect that for
some time the doctors of medieval universities were obliged to swear
upon oath that they would teach nothing contrary to the doctrines of
a Greek philosopher who must already have been in this situation for
three hundred years at the birth of the Redeemer, and when we further
reflect that it was the acute brains of these very doctors which were
engaged in building up our present thinking apparatus, we may well
feel inclined to give up as hopeless the task of sympathetically
recreating the medieval cosmos in our imaginations—unless we realize,
as indeed the history of meanings clearly shows, that it is not
merely ideas and theories and feelings which have changed, but
the very method of forming ideas and of combining them, the very
channels, apparently eternal, by which one thought or feeling is
connected with another. Possibly the Middle Ages would have been
equally bewildered at the facility with which twentieth-century minds
are brought to believe that, intellectually, humanity languished for
countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of
crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific
dictum of the last century.
There is another difference between the past and the present which
it is hard for us to realize; and perhaps this is the hardest of
all. For with the seventeenth century we reach the point at which
we must at last try to pick up and inspect that discarded garment
of the human soul, intimate and close-fitting as it was, into
which this book has been trying from the fifth chapter onwards to
induce the reader to re-insert his modern limbs. The consciousness
of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other
selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the
external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of
experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point
of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of
training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different
kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words
that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a
recent achievement of the human spirit. It was absent from the old
mythological outlook; absent, in its fullness, from Plato and the
Greek philosophers; and, though it was beginning to light up in the
Middle Ages, as we see in the development of Scholastic words like
_individual_ and _person_, yet the medieval soul was still felt to
be joined by all sorts of occult ties both to the physical body and
to the world. Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first
dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation, and
it was not till the seventeenth century that the new light really
began to spread and brighten. One of the surest signs that an idea
or feeling is coming to the surface of consciousness—surer than the
appearance of one or two new words—is the tendency of an old one
to form compounds and derivatives. After the Reformation we notice
growing up in our language a whole crop of words hyphened with
_self_; such are _self-conceit_, _self-liking_, _self-love_, and
others at the end of the sixteenth century, and _self-confidence_,
_self-command_, _self-contempt_, _self-esteem_, _self-knowledge_,
_self-pity_, ... in the next.
From a full list of such words as the above the historical student
of words and their meanings could almost predict, apart from any
other source of knowledge, the appearance at about this time of
some philosopher who should do intellectually to the cosmos what
Copernicus and Kepler had already done astronomically—that is, turn
it inside out. And in Descartes, with his doctrine of “Cogito, ergo
sum”, we do, in fact, find just such a philosopher. His influence
was immense. Practically all philosophy since his day has worked
outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos
to the soul. In England, not long afterwards, we find the brand-new
expressions, ‘the _ego_’ and _egoism_, coming into the language from
French philosophy, while the English thinker, Locke, adopts the new
(1632) word _consciousness_, defining it as ‘perception of what
passes in a man’s own mind’, and at the same time impresses on the
still newer _self-consciousness_[49] its distinctive modern meaning.
Though these two developments—the birth of an historical sense and
the birth of our modern self-consciousness—may seem at first sight
to have little connection with one another, yet it is not difficult,
on further consideration, to perceive that they are both connected
with that other and larger process which has already been pointed to
as the story told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole.
If we wish to find a name for it, we should have to coin some such
ugly word as “internalization”. It is the shifting of the centre of
gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal
human being himself. The results are twofold: on the one hand the
peculiar freedom of mankind, the _spontaneous_[50] impulses which
control human behaviour and destiny, are felt to arise more and
more from _within_ the individual, as we saw in the semantic change
of such words as _conscience_, _disposition_, _spirit_, _temper_,
... in the application to inner processes of words like _dissent_,
_gentle_, _perceive_, _religion_, and in the Protestant Reformation;
on the other the spiritual life and activity felt to be immanent
in the world outside—in star and planet, in herb and animal, in
the juices and “humours” of the body, and in the outward ritual of
the Church—these grow feebler. The conception of “laws” governing
this world arises and grows steadily more impersonal; words like
_consistency_, _pressure_, _tension_, ... are found to describe
matter “objectively” and disinterestedly, and at the same time the
earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves. All
this time the European ‘ego’ appears to be engaged, unawares, in
disentangling itself from its environment—becoming less and less
of the actor, more and more of both the author and the spectator.
In the eighteenth century the word _outlook_ is used for the first
time in the sense in which it has been used here; in the nineteenth
_environment_ is introduced by Carlyle. And so it goes on; and as,
on the one hand, it is only when that detachment has progressed to
a certain point that man becomes able to observe the changes which
constitute history, so it is only as he begins to observe them that
he becomes fully conscious of himself—the observer.
Thus, the general process which we have called “internalization” can
be traced working itself out into all kinds of details; not only
in that intimate, metaphysical change of outlook which it is so
hard for us to realize now that the change has taken place—in the
appearance of words betokening a sharper self-consciousness—but also
in the moral and personal sphere. We could, for instance, take such
a common word as _duty_ and mark its expansion of meaning at about
the time of Shakespeare. By its derivation it carries the sense of
‘owing’ and it meant in Chaucer’s time an act of obedience which was
owed to some other person—usually to a feudal superior.[51] It is
not till the close of the sixteenth century that it begins to take
on its modern sense of a more or less _abstract_ moral obligation—an
obligation owed, if to any being, to oneself or to a sort of ideal
of manhood—such an ideal, for instance, as is expressed in the word
_gentleman_. Later on, as with _conscience_, there is a tendency to
personify it. At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first
find the word _Nature_ employed in contexts where medieval writers
would certainly have used the single word _God_. _Spontaneous_ has
already been mentioned, and it is interesting to note a certain
tendency, which seems to have been inherent, before Shakespeare’s
time, in the adjective _voluntary_, to connote disapproval when it
was applied to human actions or feelings. Later in the century the
word _character_[52] was first used in its modern personal sense by
the historian Clarendon.
Students of the period know well the sudden, extraordinary craze
for “character-drawing” which swept over France and England at
this time. In France literary “portraits” of oneself and one’s
friends were produced in hundreds, the first as a hobby, the second
actually as a round game; and Clarendon, whose _History of the
Great Rebellion_ is a string of such character-studies, was only
doing systematically what men like Hall, Overbury, Earle, and
others had already done in a more disjointed and dilettante way. To
the medieval observer a _person_ or a _soul_ had been interesting
chiefly in its relation to Society, to the Church, to the Cosmos.
“All the personality of man,” said Wyclif, “standeth in the spirit
of him.” But these new writers and their readers were interested in
_characters_ and _characteristics_ for their own sakes. We begin to
hear of people’s _autographs_, of their _foibles_ and their _fortes_;
_eccentric_ is taken from astronomy and mathematics; the Greek word
_idiosyncrasy_—signifying an ‘individual mixture’ (of ‘humours’)—is
borrowed from Galen; but with the new point of view the astrological
and physical meanings of this and other words, like _disposition_,
_humour_, _spirits_, _temperament_, ...[53] gradually fade away,
and their modern meanings arise instead. One relic of these ancient
physics, however—the _vapours_ which were supposed to rise into
the head from the region of the stomach—lingered well on into the
eighteenth century; and from the way in which Boswell and Johnson
write of their fits of _melancholy_, it seems that they had just
reached a point at which they could not be sure, from their feelings
at any rate, whether their common malady was physical in its origin
or purely mental.
The same difference is observable in the names for feelings and
passions. The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views
them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral
significance—_envy_, _greedy_, _happy_ (i.e. ‘lucky’), _malice_,
_mercy_, _mildheartness_, _peace_, _pity_[54], _remorse_,
_repentance_, _rue_, _sin_,... Even the old word _sad_ had not
long lost its original sense of ‘sated’, ‘heavy’ (which it still
retains in _sad bread_), and _fear_ continued for a long time to
mean, not the emotion, but a ‘sudden and unexpected event’. Hardly
before the beginning of the seventeenth century do we find expressed
that sympathetic or “introspective” attitude to the feelings which
is conveyed by such labels as _aversion_, _dissatisfaction_,
_discomposure_, ... while _depression_ and _emotion_—further lenient
names for human weaknesses—were used till then of material objects.
In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a
considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt
to portray character or feeling from within; such are _apathy_,
_chagrin_, _diffidence_, _ennui_, _homesickness_, together with
the expression ‘the _feelings_‘, while _agitation_, _constraint_,
_disappointment_, _embarrassment_, _excitement_ are transferred from
the outer to the inner world. _Outlook_, which meant ‘a place from
which a good view is obtained’, was first employed figuratively by
Dr. Young in 1742.
This brings us to another class of words—appropriate enough
to the century which produced Berkeley’s _Principles of Human
Knowledge_—describing external things not objectively, from their
own point of view, but purely by the _effects_ which they produce
on human beings, such, for instance, as _affecting_, _amusing_,
_boring_, _charming_, _diverting_, _entertaining_, _enthralling_,
_entrancing_, _exciting_, _fascinating_, _interesting_, and
_pathetic_ in its modern sense, none of which are found before the
seventeenth and only a few before the eighteenth century. These
adjectives can be distinguished sharply—indeed they are in a sense
the very opposite of those older words, which can also be said,
though less accurately, to describe external objects “from the human
point of view”. Thus, when a Roman spoke of events as _auspicious_ or
_sinister_, or when some natural object was said in the Middle Ages
to be _baleful_, or _benign_, or _malign_, a herb to possess such and
such a _virtue_, an eye to be _evil_, or the bones of a saint to be
_holy_, or even, probably, when Gower wrote:
The day was _merry_ and _fair_ enough,
it is true that these things were described from the human point of
view, but the activity was felt to emanate from the object itself.
When we speak of an object or an event as _amusing_, on the contrary,
we know that the process indicated by the word _amuse_ takes place
within ourselves; and this is none the less obvious because some of
the adjectives recorded above, such as _charming_, _enchanting_, and
_fascinating_, are the present participles of verbs which had implied
genuine, occult activity.
The change is an important one; it is a reverberation into wider and
wider circles of the scholastic progress from Realism to Nominalism,
and inside the walls of the Church we can perceive the same movement
going on at the Reformation in the Protestant and Dissenting tendency
to abandon belief in the Real Presence. Perhaps the somersault
was turned most neatly by the old Aristotelean word _subjective_,
which developed in the seventeenth century from its former meaning
of ‘existing in itself’ to the modern one of ‘existing in human
consciousness’. _Objective_ made a similar move in the opposite
direction. When using such words as “progress” and “develop” in this
connection, however, we must remember that the semantic histories of
words merely inform us of changes which have actually occurred in a
large number of minds or “outlooks”. They tell us of what is earlier
and what is later, but not of truth and error. In this direction all
that a knowledge of them can do is to equip us a little better for
forming opinions of our own.
At the same time we find a few words to denote the kind of people
who are easily “affected” in this way. _Susceptible_ is first found
in Clarendon, and in the eighteenth century the words _sensible_ and
_sensibility_ acquire their special sense of ‘easily affected’ or
‘having the emotions easily aroused’; and as this kind of experience
grows more familiar, clearer heads become conscious of it, and the
new words _sentiment_ and _sentimental_ appear. _Sentimental_, which
was first used in the title of Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_,
published in 1768, was found so convenient that the French language
borrowed and the German translated it. No doubt these new notions of
‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimentality,’ of a variety of emotions lying
dormant in the bosom and waiting eagerly to be called forth, combined
with the recently developed interest in character to produce the
curious _personality_, which acquired its modern meaning a few years
later and has gone on increasing in popularity ever since.
It is impossible in the short space that is left to us to do justice
to that extraordinary interlude in England’s literary and social
history—the eighteenth century. The age of powder and platitudes, of
_charmers_ with automatically heaving bosoms, ogling and simpering
at their corseted _swains_; the age of ugly shaven heads secretly
perspiring under fashionable periwigs; the age when country gentlemen
erected artificial “ruins” at the bottom of their gardens, and
serious poets could hardly mention the sea without adding a reference
to the _finny drove_—this age seems to us now to have faded away as
suddenly and inexplicably as it arose, leaving only the faintest
traces upon our language. Those half-hidden vestiges, however—the
just slightly different shades of meaning with which sundry familiar
words were used a hundred and fifty years ago—sometimes seem to
fascinate us by the very paradox of their proximity and elusiveness.
We feel that, if we could only bring them out in some way, we might
take from them the very form and pressure of the age. And so,
when we come across some particularly popular word like _reason_
in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay
down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the
impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies
between words and their meanings.
If we would seek for the genesis of the curious clockwork cosmos
through which the minds and imaginations of the period seem to have
moved with a measure of contentment, we should find it, perhaps,
not so very far back in the past. Emotionally, the age was still
dominated by a pronounced reaction against religious fanaticism—an
attitude we see reflected in the changeable meaning of _enthusiasm_,
which in Plato’s Greek meant ‘possessed by a god’. Spenser uses it
in its Greek form in a good sense, but by the end of the seventeenth
century we find Henry More writing: “If ever Christianity be
exterminated, it will be by enthusiasm”; and even as late as 1830 a
certain zealous, if dogmatic, Churchman thought it worth while to
write and publish a _Natural History of Enthusiasm_, in which that
dreadful vice, especially in its theological aspect, is castigated
with much vigour. _Fanatic_, which had also meant ‘possessed by
a god or demon,’ underwent the same change of meaning and gave
birth to _fanaticism_ about the middle of the seventeenth century.
_Extravagant_, which had formerly meant ‘non-codified’, got its
new meaning and produced _extravagance_. And the way in which the
word _Gothic_ was used to describe anything barbarous and uncouth
reminds us of how the eighteenth century perceived barbarity and
uncouthness in many places where we no longer see it—such as medieval
architecture, much of which was pulled down at this time and replaced
by buildings which were felt to be more “correct” and classical.
Intellectually, on the other hand, men’s minds seem to have been
influenced above all things by that conception of impersonal “laws”
governing the universe which, as we saw in the last chapter,
was scarcely apprehended before the previous century. Poets and
philosophers alike were delighted by the perfect _order_ in which
they perceived the cosmos to be arranged. They sought everywhere for
examples of this orderliness. Pope, for instance, praises Windsor
Forest on the ground that it is a place:
Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d;
But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.
This appreciation of Nature’s neatness—from which we do not ourselves
so easily derive poetic inspiration—is now so familiar that it is
difficult for us to realize its freshness at that time. Yet this
is unquestionably demonstrated by the dates at which such crucial
words as _arrange_, _category_, _classify_, _method_, _organize_,
_organization_, _regular_, _regulate_, _regularity_, _system_,
_systematic_, ... or their modern meanings, appeared in the language.
Only two of these are earlier than the seventeenth, and most of them
are not found till the eighteenth century. Thus, _arrange_ was a
military term like _array_ until that time, and _regular_ was only
used of monastic “orders” until the close of the sixteenth century.
It is this universal conformity to laws, then, this perfect order
reigning everywhere undisturbed, which the eighteenth century seems
to have had in mind when it used, and sometimes personified, the word
_Reason_. Reason explained everything.
Let godlike Reason from her sovereign throne
Speak the commanding word—I will—and it is done,
wrote James Thomson, and Pope expressed the same idea even more
slickly when he announced in his _Essay on Man_: “Whatever is, is
right.” Thus, rapt in adoration of the radiant new lady, the poets
lost all interest in dame Nature. Only when she was arranged and
regulated and organized into a park or a landscape garden would they
consent to have anything to do with her, and then it was chiefly as
a foil to the superior attractions of her rival. She became a stage,
a “pleasing” background to a sort of everlasting human boxing-match
between reason and “the passions”; and the dictionary dates from
this time our curious custom of describing her face as _scenery_.
And then, after having quietly murdered her, poetry proceeded to
galvanize the poor corpse into a shameful, marionette-like semblance
of life by switching into it that supposititious _personal_ sympathy
with human affairs which mars so much of the verse of the eighteenth
century. We can, however, mark the beginning of this practice at an
earlier date.
The word _conscious_, like _consciousness_, was unknown until the
seventeenth century, when its newfangledness was ridiculed by Ben
Jonson. It is odd, therefore, that the first recorded uses are
figurative, applying it to inanimate objects. When we find Denham
writing in 1643:
Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves,
The scenes of his past Triumphs and his Loves....
and Milton a few years later:
So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night
Secret they finishèd....
we can almost fancy, by their readiness to seize upon the new word,
that our poets were beginning, even so soon, to feel the need of
restoring “subjectively” to external Nature—of “projecting into”
her, as we can now say—a fanciful substitute for that voluntary life
and inner connection with human affairs which Descartes and Hobbes
were draining from her in reality. The tendency we can see here,
carried to extravagant lengths, at last produced the extraordinary
poetic conventions of the eighteenth century, by which fictitious
personality was attributed to every object and idea under the sun.
Finally the complicated machinery of classical mythology was applied
in the same subjective and purely fanciful way to English society and
the English countryside. It is in the same Windsor Forest that we are
asked to
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned,
Here blushing Flora paints the enamel’d ground,
Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand.
At first sight this state of affairs looks like an exact repetition
of the later stages of Roman mythology, but in point of fact the
two outlooks are sharply distinguished by the new element of
self-consciousness. Myth was in some way in the blood of the Romans;
it was a living part of their national history, and in spite of all
their artificiality and scepticism there is no evidence that they
ever deliberately created gods and goddesses of the fancy, in whom
they neither believed themselves nor expected anyone else to believe.
We imagine them incapable of grasping, for instance, such an idea
as that which found expression in the brand-new eighteenth-century
verb, to _personify_. One wonders, therefore, to what extent the dawn
of a mechanical age was reflecting itself in this new outlook, this
new cosmos controlled by dead laws rather than instinct with living
spirit, and therefore requiring to be peopled by the fancy.
We have spoken of the eighteenth-century mind as living in a
“clockwork” cosmos, and it is interesting to reflect that even this
simplest form of mechanical contrivance was a thing quite unknown to
the ancient world. Was the rhythmical mimicry of organic life, which
is the characteristic of machinery, already having its unperceived
effect on men’s minds and philosophies? The influences which go
to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most
powerfully—though beneath the surface—in the very minds which believe
themselves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing
years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a
popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator,
at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past.
But this is a subject which can be more usefully considered in the
next chapter. Thither we must now turn in order to trace the further
development of the eighteenth-century gentleman’s imaginative double
life—his life in the order and reason of the moral and material
universe and of “sensibility” in the little universe of himself—into
two divergent directions.
CHAPTER X
MECHANISM
_Automatic._ _Spring._ _Species._ _Cause._ _Agnostic._ _Unction._
_Spiritualism._ _Humanitarianism._
“The material universe is the complement of the intellect,
and without the study of its laws reason would never have
awoke to its higher forms of self-consciousness at all. It
is the non-ego, through and by which the ego is endowed with
self-discernment.”—TYNDALL: _Fragments of Science_.
“Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular
question [respiration], it is a complicated piece of mechanism,
built up out of materials supplied by its mother; and in the course
of such building-up, provided with a set of motors—the muscles.
Each of these muscles contains a stock of substance capable of
yielding energy under certain conditions, one of which is a change
of state in the nerve fibres connected with it. The powder in a
loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding
energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the
lock....
“The infant is launched into altogether new surroundings; and these
operate through the mechanism of the nervous machinery, with the
result that the potential energy of some of the work-stuff in the
muscles which bring about inspiration is suddenly converted into
actual energy; and this, operating through the mechanism of the
respiratory apparatus, gives rise to an act of inspiration. As the
bullet is propelled by the ‘going-off’ of the powder, so it might
be said that the ribs are raised and the midriff depressed by the
‘going-off’ of certain portions of muscular work-stuff.”—HUXLEY:
_Science and Morals_.
The two most interesting points about the above passage are firstly,
that it was written, not by an engineer, but by a natural scientist;
and secondly, that the title of the essay from which it is taken is
_Capital and Labour_. That is to say, the abundance of mechanical
simile in it is neither the natural colouring of an imagination
subdued to what it works in, nor a deliberate system of metaphors
fabricated with the object of figuring forth a biological process to
the uninitiated. On the contrary, the notion of child-birth is itself
only introduced for the purpose of illustration. The images by which
it is conveyed are thus revealed as the natural furniture of the
writer’s imagination. They can no longer have been images to him, but
rather his normal outlook on the chain of facts in which he was most
interested; and the passage is, of course, only one of thousands in
which we can see nineteenth-century imagination working in a similar
way.
It would be of small general interest to give a list of all the
mechanical and technical words which had come into our vocabulary
since the middle of the seventeenth century—words like _calculus_,
_centrifugal_, _dynamic_, _galvanize_, _inertia_, _momentum_,
_oscillate_, _polarity_, _reciprocating_, _rotate_, _vibrate_ (except
in the sense ‘to brandish’),[55]... We are concerned more with their
influence on the meanings of older words. And from this point of
view the passage quoted from Huxley can indeed give us a fair idea
of the untold changes that were secretly brewing when, for instance,
the word _mechanic_ (Greek ‘mēchanē’, a ‘device’, or ‘contrivance’)
lost its old meaning of ‘pertaining to manual labour’, and began to
be applied to machines. This happened in the seventeenth century,
when also the word _machine_, which had formerly been used of plots
and intrigues, or for any kind of erection, was first used with its
modern meaning. We begin to hear of the six “Mechanick Faculties” or
“Simple Machines”, i.e. the _Balance_, _Lever_, _Pulley_, _Screw_,
_Wedge_, and _Wheel_; and in a little book called _Mathematicall
Magick_, by Bishop Wilkins, one of the first members of the Royal
Society, these are discussed with great enthusiasm and many
respectful references to Aristotle. It is in the same work that we
first hear in English of a science of _Mechanics_. This new science,
foreshadowed to some extent by Aristotle, from whose treatise with
that title we take the word, had quickly been carried farther by
his successor, Archimedes. Most civilizations seem to have produced
towards their close mechanical devices of one kind or another, but
more especially “engines” of war. What distinguishes our own is the
way in which mechanism has gradually entered into our outlook—a fact
which is marked, among other things, by our use of the Greek prefix
‘auto-’ (self) for things worked by machinery. In a Greek dictionary
we find upwards of two hundred words beginning with this prefix, but
not one of them is applied to anything mechanical.
Let us consider the word _automatic_. The Greek ‘automatos’, which
meant ‘self-moved’,[56] was Latinized in the form ‘automatus’ at
about the beginning of our era, and _automatous_—now obsolete—is
actually found in the works of the seventeenth-century writer, Sir
Thomas Browne. This old adjective had the sense of “spontaneous”, “of
one’s own free will”, and was used of the animal and vegetable worlds
as opposed to the mineral, or of events which came about “by chance”;
while in Plato’s philosophy the distinction between that which is
“self-moved”, and that which can only be moved by something outside
itself had been taken as the very antithesis between spirit and
matter, between eternal and perishable. _Automatic_ is first found
in English in the eighteenth century. The earliest quotation given
by the _Oxford Dictionary_ is taken from David Hartley, who wrote in
1748:
“The motions of the body are of two kinds, automatic and voluntary.
The automatic motions are those which arise from the mechanism
of the body in an evident manner. They are called automatic from
their resemblance to the motions of automata, or machines, whose
principle of motion is within themselves. Of this kind are the
motions of the heart and peristaltic motion of the bowels.”
In 1802 Paley pointed out “the difference between an animal and an
automatic statue”, and sixty years later a writer on physics, after
speaking of the amoeba as being “irritable and automatic”, added a
note to the effect that—
Automatic ... has recently acquired a meaning almost exactly
opposite to that which it originally bore, and an automatic action
is now by many understood to mean nothing more than an action
produced by some machinery or other. In this work I use it in the
older sense, as denoting an action of a body, the causes of which
appear to lie in the body itself.
The reason for this semantic _volte face_ may perhaps be detected
in the history of the parallel word _automaton_. This had long ago
(about 10 B.C.) been applied to the few primitive mechanical devices
which Aryan civilization had then evolved, and its appearance
in English seems to have preceded that of _automatic_ by nearly
two centuries, as it is found in 1611 describing “a picture of a
gentlewoman” made with eyes that open and shut. Then, later on in the
same century, it began to be applied to clocks and watches, and there
seems every reason to suppose that the presence of this particular
kind of apparent “self-mover” on so many mantelpieces and in so many
vest-pockets must have determined the peculiarly dead and mechanical
meaning which _automatic_ now possesses.
The ancients measured time by the regulated flow of water. Striking
clocks of some kind were known in Europe as far back as the twelfth
or thirteenth century. But they seem to have been unreliable,
costly, and rare until the discovery by Galileo of the “isochronism”
of pendulums. _Pendulum_ is first found in 1660, in Boyle’s
writings, _vibrate_ and _vibration_ in 1667. The new toy seems to
have taken hold of Europe’s imagination in the most extraordinary
way. Both _clockwork_ and _mainspring_ were used figuratively the
first time they are known to have been used in English at all, a
sixteenth-century writer even anticipating Paley so far as to write:
God’s the main spring, that maketh every way
All the small wheels of this great Engin play.
We hear talk almost at once of the _springs_[57] of people’s actions.
Descartes compared the souls of brutes to watches, and Leibnitz
actually compared the souls and bodies of men to _two_ watches! It
seems as though the works had started going in our heads.
And since then, so far from stopping, they have accelerated,
especially during the last century—to what extent it is difficult for
us to realize fully, simply because it has all happened so recently.
Differences of outlook on such matters as biology and physiology
between ourselves and the Middle Ages we readily perceive, though
we may not properly understand them; here we stand a long way off,
and can often see quite plainly how the old words have altered
their meanings. But from the way in which our great grandfathers
used such words as _energy_, _midriff_, _motor_, _muscle_, _nerve_,
_respiration_, _work_—to take examples only from the passage quoted
at the beginning of this chapter—we sometimes find it hard, even
when we have traced the history of their meanings up to that date,
to feel what different associations they must have called up to
the generations which died before Huxley was born. At this time,
thirty years after his death, it is only our own imagination,
working introspectively on such a phrase as “nervous machinery”, and
grasping, as it can do, how the meanings of the two words have been
running into one another, which can bring this difference before
us. When it has done so, we are again reminded of the simple yet
striking truth that all knowledge which has been conveyed by means of
speech to the reason has travelled in metaphors taken from man’s own
activities and from the solid things which he handles. The present
is no different from the past. Only the metaphors get buried deeper
and deeper beneath one another; they interact more subtly, and do
not always leave any _outward_ trace on the language. It would be
interesting, for example, were it possible, to discover just how
much of the average man’s idea of blood circulation is due to the
invention of that elementary mechanical device, the pump;[58] or how
much of the mental image which he has formed of the interaction of
muscle, nerve, and brain would fade from his consciousness if there
were no such thing as the electric telegraph.
We think by means of words, and we have to use the same ones for so
many different thoughts that as soon as new meanings have entered
into one set, they creep into all our theories and begin to mould
our whole cosmos; and from the theories they pass into more words,
and so into our lives and institutions. Thus, not only were the
Newtonian heavens the playground of just those forces which had been
used for the working of the six “simple machines”, but Montesquieu
insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they
were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this
in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact
that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the
same principle. “They [writers in the _Federalist_] speak of the
_checks_ and _balances_ of the Constitution,” he said, “and use to
express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe,
and particularly of the solar system....” And we notice that the
late President, when he went on to speak of reconstructing the
Constitution, was fain to lean on another analogy, reminding his
hearers that government is “not a machine, but a living thing”; that
it is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped
to its functions by the sheer pressure of life”; and again that it
is a body of men “with highly differentiated functions”. In fact, we
are merely launched into another set of metaphors, of which, however,
the speaker is in this case conscious, for he explicitly affirms that
government is “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton”.
_Environment_, _evolution_, _development_, _instinct_, _species_,
_spontaneous_, _variation_ are some of the more important words,
whose modern meanings, if we look at their semantic history, are
found to bear the unmistakable stamp of Darwinism, and we ought
perhaps to add _ooze_[59] and _slime_.[59] To Darwin we should have
to attribute the tendency of _evolution_ to lose its etymological
suggestion of a vegetable growth, an unfolding from the centre
outwards. _Species_ (Latin ‘species’, ‘form’ or ‘appearance’) was
used by Cicero to translate Plato’s “Idea” (Chapter VI). It held an
important place in the logic of the Middle Ages as one of the five
“predicables” by which an object could be defined, and for centuries
its biological meaning was only one among many. This particular
interpretation did not begin to come into prominence until the
eighteenth century, when Addison, for instance, used the phrase “the
species” of the human race; but since Darwin published his _Origin
of Species_ (in which the word is, of course, given an exclusively
biological sense) it has, for the ordinary man, had practically no
other. It is interesting to observe that here again, as the words are
commonly employed, the Latin form has grown more concrete and the
Greek more abstract and intellectual.
But the change did not confine itself to such technical words as
these. One has only to pick up a journalistic article on almost
any subject and read it, endeavouring to let the words mean only
what they did a hundred years ago, to see how the whole scheme of
Natural Selection can lurk unseen, but not unfelt, behind some
colourless little word like _adapt_, _competition_, _gregarious_,
_modification_, _protective_, _selection_, and even _animal_,
_facts_, _law_, _life_, _man_, _Nature_,... Or we can see it in the
curious, absolute use of the word _fit_, in the sense of ‘physically
healthy’, which, appearing first in the seventies, is obviously due
to the famous phrase, the “survival of the fittest” (i.e. the fittest
to survive in a struggle for existence). How modern the new meanings
are may be gauged by the fact that the word _heredity_, the basic
principle of modern natural scientific theory, is recorded by Francis
Galton as having been considered “fanciful and unusual” in 1859,
while _atavism_ first appears in 1833.
But when a little more time has elapsed and the nineteenth century
can be properly studied from the semantic point of view, there
is little reason to doubt that the interfusion of mechanical and
biological conceptions and the penetration of both into meaning
will present one of its most striking features. One of the greatest
triumphs of mechanism—greater than the Forth Bridge or the St.
Gothard Tunnel—is the fact that it has wormed itself into the meaning
of the word _cause_. This is, of course, a word which tends to alter
its meaning a little every time it is used, and there is evidence
that in former times, while there were separate words to express
such separate ideas as “bringing to birth”, “making to grow”, “being
guilty of”, ... there was no general term into which the one single
essence common to all these relations had been distilled. The Greek
and Latin words for _cause_, for example, were both closely connected
from the earliest times with their legal procedure (cf. _ac-cuse_,
etc., and the modern use of _cause_ in the same sense). At some
period, however—perhaps in the last two centuries before our era—such
a concept must have been precipitated, and we find Cicero defining
the Latin ‘causa’, with mathematical precision, simply as ‘that which
effects the thing of which it is the cause’. The fascination which
this abstraction exerted on the medieval imagination may be judged
from the fact that the writer of a fifteenth-century treatise on Love
introduced into it the sentence: “Every cause of a cause is cause of
thing caused”; and we soon find the philosophers seeking through a
“chain” of causes for that First Cause, which they identified with
the Almighty. By the nineteenth century this thought-system of an
abstract _causality_, brought about by means of abstract “laws”, lay,
like an empty house, ready to be taken over by a new owner. The new
owner was mechanism.
“The great abstract law of mechanical causality” (mechanischen
kausalität), wrote Haeckel in 1899, “now rules the entire universe,
as it does the mind of man. It is the steady, immutable pole-star,
whose clear light falls on our path through the dark labyrinth of
the countless separate phenomena.”
Under its influence even consciousness itself was, and still is,
often conceived of as being _caused_ by mechanical movements taking
place within the body. We also find thought described as a _function_
of the brain. This curious word had become extremely popular; and
somewhere about the sixties the noun began to be used as a verb.
We hear of nerves, brain, heart, ... _functioning_ or refusing
to _function_, an expression in which the mechanical flavour is
especially strong.
Thus, in the light of words, the historical relation between
mechanics and physiology looks not unlike that relation between
mathematics and astronomy which was suggested in a previous chapter.
We drew from out our own bodies, it would seem, the sense-experiences
of _force_ and _pressure_ and the like,[60] on which mechanics are
based; then we externalized them in tools and machines, and turned
them into abstract “laws”; finally, we proceeded to re-apply the
“laws” to the familiar objects from which we had first extracted
them, and the result was that we turned our previous notions of
these inside out. For the typical intellectual position towards
the end of the nineteenth century was exactly the reverse of the
typical Academic position. Plato had deduced the sense-world from
what we have called the inner world, and, while he had worked out
an elaborate and wise knowledge of this inner world, with its moral
impulses and aspirations, his philosophy had remained admittedly
bankrupt as far as detailed knowledge of the mechanism of the outer
world was concerned. Nineteenth-century science, on the other hand,
deduced the inner from the outer; it had mapped and charted the
mechanical part of Nature to a tenth of a millimetre,[61] but it
was well-nigh bankrupt as far as the inner world was concerned.
Huxley invented the word _agnostic_ (not-knowing) to express his own
attitude, and that of many millions since his day, to the nature and
origin of all this part of the cosmos. One of the few things about
which practically all “men of science”, as the phrase now went,
besides all those laymen who took the trouble to follow out the
various scientific discoveries and to listen to their metaphysical
reverberations, were agreed upon was that his senses and his reason
had succeeded in placing man in a material environment which appeared
to bear no relation whatever to his inner feelings and moral impulses.
For the expression of these, his proper humanity, he continued,
irrespective of his conscious belief, to live on what had been
developed through Plato and the Gospels, the Church and the poets.
For it was these, as we have seen, which had built up the meanings
of those old words in terms of which he learnt to think and feel
about his fellow-men. Whenever the biologico-mechanical meanings did
creep into human relationships—as, for example, into the economic
relationship through the word _competition_ and otherwise—the result
was, almost without exception, disastrous. The famous Encyclical
Letter and Syllabus of 1864, in which modern movements of thought
were condemned and anathematized wholesale from the Vatican, was thus
in some sense an attempt to express in dogmatic form a principle
which was, in fact, already active throughout Europe. And the
pathetic impotence of this papal gesture probably marks the maximum
point of that divergence between science and religion, as modes of
experience, which first became noticeable in the Alexandrian world,
and of which nineteenth-century philosophy had become sufficiently
conscious to create the word _Dualism_.
The rapid conquest of intellectual Europe, which was achieved,
not only by the general idea of evolution, but by the particular
Darwinian theory of mechanical natural selection, is a matter of some
surprise when we consider that a full acceptance of it necessitated
a reversal of practically every metaphysical idea and feeling likely
to be present in a nineteenth-century soul. No doubt one could point
to a variety of causes. There is evidence, for instance, in a certain
class of word which had recently begun to multiply that even in
Protestant countries the custodians of the ancient outlook were not
always fortresses of wisdom and enlightenment. _Religionism_ appears
towards the close of the eighteenth century, and then _religiosity_
(in a bad sense),[62] and in the next century the now obsolete
_religiose_. The word _pious_, which had long been degenerating
towards an imputation of feeble-mindedness, formed an unpleasant
derivative, _pietism_, which in turn produced its adjective
_pietistic_; and in 1864—an appropriate year—we first come up against
_clericalism_. _Unction_—the name of one of the deepest mysteries
of the Catholic Church—is first recorded by the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ with an offensive meaning in 1870, when Lowell writes of
“that clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates
into greasiness”. _Unctuous_ was not long in following suit, and
instances could no doubt be multiplied. The extension towards the
priesthood of this particular shade of disapproval seems to have
been the product of the age. Possibly the single earlier example is
the old word _cant_, which dates back to the Middle Ages, and is
said to have been born of exasperation at the whining tone adopted
by the mendicant friars in their “chants” (cantare). In the same
way may we not suppose that the words quoted above grew up out of
that extraordinary atmosphere of partly bovine, partly hypocritical,
acquiescence in obsolete dogma which Stuart Mill hit off in his
famous phrase[63]?
Nevertheless, we should have to look deeper than all this for the
true causes of a change of outlook as rapid and emphatic as that
which swept through the last century. If we did so, we should
probably discern, as one of the most efficient, that vivid sense
of orderliness and _arrangement_ which had grown up during the
eighteenth century, the reverence for Reason, and especially for
Reason reflected[64] in the impartial laws which govern the working
of Nature. To minds thus attuned direct intervention by the divine
at any one point in the natural process could only seem like an
intolerable liberty; and feeling as well as thought began to
revolt at the conjuring-tricks apparently reported in the Gospels.
Perhaps there is a faint indication of the new point of view in the
nineteenth-century use of the word _freak_ to describe a _lusus
naturae_, instead of the old _monster_, which is derived from the
Latin ‘moneo’, and implies that the oddity is sent as a divine
warning or portent.
The new cosmos—a complex of matter and forces proceeding mechanically
from spiral nebula to everlasting ice—took such a firm hold
on the imagination of Europe that labels like _spiritualism_,
_spiritualist_, _spiritualistic_[65] were employed to describe those
who believed it was anything more, and even _Vitalism_ and _Vitalist_
to distinguish those who held that life, as such, had any purpose or
significance. It is a curious remark that the erection within men’s
imaginations of this severely mechanical framework for themselves
was accompanied by, and may have been partly responsible for, an
increase in their sense of self-consciousness. The more automatic the
cosmos, apparently, the more the vital ego must needs feel itself
detached. At any rate, we find upwards of forty words hyphened with
_self_ created in the nineteenth century, and of these only about six
(_self-acting_, _self-regulating_, ...) are mechanical. Nor was it
only the material world from which men felt themselves more aloof.
Herbert Spencer remarked on the recent extension of the meaning of
the word _phenomenon_ to cover the thoughts of human beings—a point
of view which suggests an increased degree of detachment even from
thought itself; and an enormous number of words with terminations
such as _-ism_, _-ist_, _-ite_, _-ology_, _-arian_, are indications
of a more contemplative attitude to all that we ourselves do and
feel and think. What a difference between being _feminine_ and
being a _feminist_, between _hope_ and _optimism_, _romance_ and
_romanticism_, between _Christianity_ and _Christology_, between
liking _vegetables_ and being a _vegetarian_! We are hardly
conscious at all of being _human_, more of being _humane_, more
still of being _humanitarian_, and very conscious indeed of being
_humanitarianists_.
Detachment, however, spells freedom; and words are not wanting to
remind us of that enhanced sense of the value of individual liberty
which now found expression in the writings of the great Romantics
and of men like John Stuart Mill. _Autonomy_ had not been applied to
individuals, but only to states and societies, until the close of
the eighteenth century, and in the following century the adjective
_autonomous_ was introduced. We may compare _liberalism_ and
_liberal-minded_ with the old _libertine_; _authoritarian_ implies
a feeling in him who uses the word that all authority, as such,
is bad; the nineteenth century also saw the distinction between
_broad-minded_ and _narrow-minded_, and between _obscurantism_ and
_enlightenment_—a word which met with some opposition, according to
FitzEdward Hall, who records in his _Modern English_ (1873) that:
Enlightenment is, to this day, always used by a certain class of
English writers with a manifest sneer. The writers referred to are
those who would rather have been born under the rule of the barons
than under the inchoate rule of reason, and would gladly exchange
the age of science for the ages of faith and folly. Those who
object to the word will ordinarily be found to object to all that
it stands for.
Since the sense of freedom often appeared at its strongest in
imaginations which were most possessed with the mechanical view of
the universe, the paradox was not infrequent—especially in Germany—of
philosophers and scientists insisting fiercely on the freedom of
thought and using it to deny the possibility of any freedom at all!
Such thinkers found the word _Determinism_ useful to express the
mechanical part of the old _predestination_ without the latter’s
theological assumptions.
Other words which seem to be connected with the same trend of
thought are those that confine themselves to expressing a sense of
the worth and dignity of man, _as_ man, and irrespective of his
cosmic connections. Such are _humanism_,[66] _humanitarian_,[66]
_humanitarianism_, _individualism_, _individualist_,
_individualistic_, and many of the _self_ words, such as Carlyle’s
_self-help_, or the semantic change of _self-respect_, which is
first recorded as used with a praiseworthy meaning in Wordsworth’s
_Prelude_. Now the consciousness of the absolute value and infinite
potentiality of each human soul is revealed, as we saw, by the
words in which it first began to take verbal form, as having been
essentially an attribute of Christianity. Yet how differently these
nineteenth-century words sound from the Christian vocabulary of
the human and social virtues—_charity_, _lovingkindness_, _mercy_,
_pity_, and the like! The modern words seem to be related to
these glowing old Christian terms as the unemphasized, because
unquestioned, mutual affection of a happy couple is related to the
voluble ardours of courting. They preserve, we may say—they have
even greatly developed—that divine sense of the value and autonomy
of each individual human soul. But it is now more of a _political_
autonomy. It is as though they respected it rather from a manly sense
of obligation, and the sense of obligation is even extended, as we
see in the later semantic development of _humane_, _humanity_, and
_humanitarian_, to the brutes.
Thus, if the one outlook is indeed a lineal descendant of the other,
we are constrained to ask a little sadly what had become of a certain
sunny element, a suppressed poetic energy, a wonder and a wild
surprise, which lurks in the former words, but somehow—with all our
respect for them—not in the latter. And for light upon this question
we must turn to yet another group of words—small, yet of such
far-reaching implications as to demand a final chapter to themselves.
CHAPTER XI
IMAGINATION
_Art._ _Fiction._ _Creative._ _Genius._ _Romantic._ _Fancy._
_Imagination._ _Dream._
Early Christianity, with its delighted recognition of the soul’s
reality, its awful consciousness of inner depths unplumbed, had
produced, as we saw, many words describing human emotions by their
_effects_, and especially by their effects on the soul’s relation
to the Divine. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the
increase of self-consciousness among the leisured classes, a more
sympathetic, “introspective”[67] attitude to the emotions grew up,
and this we traced to its development in the romantic _sensibility_
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did it fare, then,
with this tender nursling in the years that followed? Was it crushed
and dissected into a neatly labelled little corpse, or was it
suffered to grow up unchecked, uneducated, into the middle-aged and
well-fed _sentimentalism_ of our Victorian ancestors? Fortunately
it avoided both these fates. Carefully tended by small groups of
earnest men, now in this academy and now in that, it had escaped
the dissection of Nature because it had learned not to draw its
nourishment from Nature and the God of Nature, but from man himself.
And on this diet it had thriven and waxed until it was a veritable
young giant, able to stand up and confront Nature as her equal. But
we must retrace our steps a little.
Attentive readers of Jane Austen’s novels will have noticed the
slightly unfamiliar way in which she employs the two words _romantic_
and _picturesque_. A closer examination reveals the fact that in
her time they still bore traces of their origin. These adjectives
are taken from the arts, _romantic_ meaning in the first instance
‘like the old Romances’, and _picturesque_ ‘like a picture’ or
‘reminding one of a picture.’ They are thus members of a quite
considerable group of words and phrases, _attitude_, _comic_,
_dramatic_, _lyrical_, _melodramatic_, _point of view_, and the
like, in which terms taken in the first place from the arts are
subsequently applied to life. Nowadays we sometimes go farther and
use the name of a particular artist, speaking, for instance, of a
_Turneresque_ sunset, a _Praxitelean_ shape; or we even call to our
aid a writer’s fictitious creatures, as in “_Falstaffian_ morality”,
“the _Pickwickian_ sense”,... Such a figure of speech looks at first
sight like any other kind of imagery, and we perhaps imagine it in
use since the beginnings of art. In point of fact, however, it is
probable that it was not known before the time of the Renaissance,
when men’s notions of art changed so suddenly, when, indeed, their
very consciousness of it as a separate, unrelated activity, something
which can be distinguished in thought from a “craft”, a “trade”, or a
religious ceremony, seems to have first sprung into being. Moreover,
the ancient word _art_ used to include in its purview not only these
meanings, but also most of those which we now group under the heading
_science_. In the Middle Ages the Seven Liberal Arts[68]—_Grammar_,
_Logic_, _Rhetoric_, _Arithmetic_, _Geometry_, _Music_, and
_Astronomy_—were contrasted with the “servile” or “mechanical”
arts—that is, handicrafts involving manual labour. And thus, though
_art_ in this wide sense is old, _artist_ first occurs in Sir Philip
Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_. _Artisan_ appeared at about the same
time, and was not then, as now, confined to mechanical and manual
labourers.
O, what a world of profit and delight
wrote the poet, Marlowe,
Is promis’d to the studious artisan.
In the light of two or three familiar words let us try and trace
the development, from Sidney’s time onwards, of some of our modern
notions of “art”, and in particular of poetry. Criticism—the
branch of literature or journalism with which our daily and weekly
reviews make us so familiar—does not date very far back into the
past. Its parents were the medieval arts of grammar and philology,
which, among the commentators on classical texts, had already
sometimes blossomed into the rudiments of aesthetic. The actual
words _critic_ and _critical_, however, have been traced no farther
back than Shakespeare; _critic_ in its aesthetic sense is first
found in Bacon; and _criticism_ and _criticize_ are neither of them
earlier than the seventeenth century. Based for the most part on
Aristotle’s _Poetics_, serious criticism began to take shape in
England at the Renaissance. From Elizabethan critical essays, such
as Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_, we can get an idea of the light
in which poetry and the other arts had begun to be viewed at that
time. To Sidney, for example, the distinguishing mark of poetry
was, not metre, but a certain “feigning.” The first philosophers
and historians, he affirmed, were also poets, not indeed because
of what we should magnificently call their “creative imagination”,
but simply because they “invented” certain fictitious persons and
events. We should not now regard this as a virtue in an historian.
Sidney, however, points out the derivation of _poetry_ from the Greek
‘poiein’, ‘to make’,[69] and shows how this distinguishes it from
all the other arts and sciences, which in the last analysis merely
“follow Nature”, while only the poet,
disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted with the
vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in
making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite
anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods,
Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in
hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her
gifts, but freely ranging only within the Zodiac of his own wit.
And Sidney adds that this fact is not to be made light of merely
because the works of Nature are “essential” while the poet’s are only
“in imitation or fiction”. The poet has contemplated the “Ideas”
behind Nature, and it is those which he “delivers forth, as he hath
imagined them”. With ten or twenty new novels appearing on the
bookstalls every week it is not so easy for us to realize the dignity
and glory which were once felt to distinguish this great human
achievement of _fiction_—that is, of ‘making’ or ‘making up’ (from
the Latin ‘fingere’, to ‘form’ or ‘make’) purely imaginary forms,
instead of merely copying Nature.
Now the presence of a made-up element, especially when it comprised
supernatural beings such as giants and fairies, was held to be
one of the distinguishing marks of a _romance_. The old medieval
romances, as their name suggests, had been nursed to life in that
curious period of contact between Roman and Celtic myth which also
gave us such words as _fairy_ and _sorcery_.[70] They were so called
because they were written or recited in the _romance_ vernacular[71]
instead of in literary Latin, and they seem to have developed out
of an increasing tendency among the medieval bards to embroider, on
their own responsibility, the traditional accounts of historical
and mythical events. This tendency, wherever it had hitherto been
detected among the western Aryans, had been strenuously opposed in
the interests of learning and morality. It was one of the reasons
why Plato decided to expel poets from his Republic, and it is
remarkable that the earlier uses of a word like _fable_ in twelfth-
and thirteenth-century French and fourteenth-century English should
have been all condemnatory. Now by the time the Renaissance dawned on
England this word had come to be applied, in one instance at least,
not merely to the embroidery, but to the garment itself, so that, for
example, the whole prodigious fabric of classical mythology might
be implicit in the disparaging phrase “fables of poets”. And after
the Revival of Learning, when the most able men began to have a very
different feeling towards the myths of Greece and Rome, such a phrase
became the very opposite of disparaging. _Fiction_ and _romance_
were gradually recognized as a legitimate and noble expression of the
human spirit.
Gradually: to Sidney, poetry was still, after Aristotle’s definition,
“an art of imitation”; only poets must “to imitate, borrow nothing
of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range ... into the divine
consideration of what may be and should be”. And during the
seventeenth century all art continued to be regarded as imitation,
of which, however, there were two kinds—the imitation of other arts
and the imitation of Nature herself. The second kind, by analogy
from picture-dealing, was called _original_, and the faculty which
achieved it was named _invention_ (Latin, ‘invenire’, ‘to find’),
a word implying that something had been found in Nature which had
not _yet_ been imitated by man. Early in the eighteenth century
the substantive _originality_ was formed from _original_, and an
increasing importance began to be attached to the element of novelty
in experiences of all kinds, Addison placing it on a level with
greatness and beauty as a source of pleasure to the imagination.
At the same time another word appeared in the vocabulary of aesthetic
criticism. An Elizabethan critic had already pointed out that, if
poets could indeed spin their poetry entirely out of themselves they
were as “_creating_ gods”, and Dryden soon used the same verb of
Shakespeare, because, in Caliban, he had _invented_ “a person not in
Nature”. So also Addison:
... this Talent of affecting the Imagination ... has something in
it like Creation: It bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to
the Reader’s View several Objects which are not to be found in
Being. It makes Additions to Nature, and gives greater Variety to
God’s Works.
This word, too, with its derivative _creative_, is used far too
often and too lightly[72] now to allow us to easily perceive its
importance. ‘Creare’ was one of those old Latin words which had been
impregnated through the Septuagint and the Vulgate with Hebraic and
Christian associations; its constant use in ecclesiastical Latin
had saturated it with the special meaning of _creating_, in divine
fashion, out of nothing, as opposed to the merely human _making_,
which signified the rearrangement of matter already created, or
the imitation of “creatures”. The application of such a word to
human activities seems to mark a pronounced change in our attitude
towards ourselves, and it is not surprising that, in the course of
its career, the new use should have met with some opposition on the
grounds of blasphemy.
Once established, however, the conception evidently reacted on other
terms embodying theories of art, such, for example, as _original_
and _originality_ (already mentioned), _art_, _artist_, _genius_,
_imagination_, _inspiration_, _poesy_, _poetry_, and others. The
meaning which _inspiration_ possessed up to the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical
outlook in Greece and elsewhere, when poets and prophets were
understood to be the direct mouthpieces of superior beings—beings
such as the Muses, who inspired or “breathed into” them the divine
afflatus. Through Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England
at the Renaissance and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well
on into the eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out
altogether even now. But, like so many other words, this one began in
the seventeenth century to suffer that process which we have called
“internalization”. Hobbes poured etymologically neat scorn on the
senseless convention “by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from
the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be
thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe”. And we may suppose
that from about this time _inspiration_, like some of the “character”
words which we traced in a previous chapter, began to lose its old
literal meaning and to acquire its modern and metaphorical one.
Like _instinct_, it was now felt, whatever its real nature, to be
something arising from within the human being rather than something
instilled from without.
Such a revised notion of the immediate source of human activities
inevitably concentrated attention on the individual artist—a fact
which may perhaps be reflected in the use from the seventeenth
century onwards of the word _genius_ to describe not merely the
“creative” faculty, but its possessor. For we can speak now of such
and such a man being “a _genius_”. This little word, on which a
whole chapter might be written, comes from the Latin ‘genius’[73]
(from ‘gign-o’, ‘to bring into being’, a stem appearing also in
_ingenious_, _engine_, ...), which in Roman mythology meant a
person’s tutelary spirit, or special angel attending him everywhere
and influencing his thoughts and actions. Its early meaning in
English was much the same as that of _talent_,[74] which, of course,
takes its meaning from the New Testament parable. That is to say,
_genius_ signified an ability implanted in a man by God at his birth.
But from about the seventeenth century this meaning began to ferment
and expand in the most extraordinary way; it was distinguished from,
and even opposed to, _talent_, and in the following century its force
and suggestiveness were much enhanced by the use which was made of
it to translate the Arabic ‘Djinn’, a powerful supernatural being.
Although nowadays we generally distinguish this particular sense by
the spelling _Genie_, the temporary fusion of meanings certainly
deepened the strength and mystery of the older word, and may even
have procreated the later Byronic tradition of mighty, lonely _poets_
with open necks and long hair and a plethora of mistresses and
photographs.
Before, however, these words could acquire the potent meanings
which they bear to-day, they had to run the gauntlet of the Age of
Reason, with its hatred of all enthusiasm and fanaticism. And it
was out of the ridicule and distrust which they encountered at its
hands that the important new epithet _romantic_, together with some
obsolete terms like _romancy_, _romancical_, _romantical_, ... was
born. With its meaning of ‘like the old romances’ (and therefore
barbarous, fantastic), _romantic_ was one of those adjectives,
like _enthusiastic_, _extravagant_, _Gothic_, by which the later
seventeenth, and the eighteenth century expressed their disapproval
of everything which did not bear the stamp of reason and polite
society. It was soon applied to people whose heads were stuffed
out with the ballooning extravagancies of the old romances, just
as _enthusiastic_ was employed to describe superstitious people
who believed themselves distended with a special variety of divine
inspiration. Above all, it had the sense of fabulous, unreal,
unnatural. “Can anything,” asked Bishop South, “be imagined more
profane and impious, absurd, and indeed romantic?” But at the
beginning of the eighteenth century this meaning developed a little
farther. _Romantic_ was now used of places, or aspects of Nature, of
the kind among which the old Romances had been set. It was noticed
that “romantic” people displayed a preference for wild landscapes
and ruined castles, and would even “fancy” these things, where more
rational people could see nothing more exciting than a tumbledown
barn and a dirty ditch. And it is this particular shade of meaning,
together with a strong suggestion of absurdity and unreality,
which the word seems still to have conveyed to Jane Austen, who
preferred to use _picturesque_ in contexts where we should now employ
_romantic_ in its approving or non-committal sense.
Had one of her heroines, however, succeeded in emerging from that
endless round of incredibly dull activities which she contrives to
make so incredibly interesting, and had this enterprising young woman
then attempted to breast the intellectual currents of the age, she
would have been startled to find that that sarcastic consciousness
of a war between sense and sensibility, which was her creator’s
inspiration, was a spent stream flowing from the remote past. For
while echoes of the original thinking of men like Bacon, Hobbes,
and Locke continued to rumble and reverberate on in the disparaging
implications carried by a word like _romantic_, a new note had
already become audible beneath them as long ago as the beginning
of the century. It was an undertone of reluctant approval. These
“romantic” notions might be absurd, but they were at least pleasant.
“We do not care for seeing through the falsehood,” wrote Addison,
“and willingly give ourselves up to so agreeable an imposture.”
It was in the second half of the eighteenth century that this
aesthetic[75] vocabulary—_genius_, _original_, _romantic_, ...—whose
meanings had up to the present been developed largely by the English,
began to make a stir on the Continent. The words were talked of in
France; they were taken up by the critics, poets, and philosophers of
Germany; and after much handling by men like Kant, Hegel, Schelling,
Goethe, and others, the further and partly popularized meanings
which they thus acquired were, in a sense, again inserted into their
English forms by one or two Englishmen who, towards the close of
the century, felt a strong affinity between their own impulses and
the _Sturm und Drang_ which had been agitating Germany. The most
influential of these was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and just before
the turn of the century there burst, with his help, upon England
that strange explosion which received, naturally enough, the name of
the Romantic Movement. At first it took the form of a sort of cult
of the Middle Ages. _Ballad_ is another word which added several
cubits to its stature by travelling in France and Germany, where it
also gave birth to the musical _ballade_; and we find medieval words
like _bard_, _foray_, _gramarye_[76] (and its Scotch derivative,
_glamour_), and _raid_, revived by Walter Scott after having fallen
out of use for two or three hundred years. _Derring-do_—another of
these revivals—is interesting because it originates in a mistake made
by Spenser about Chaucer. He had described how Troilus was second
to nobody in “daring do that belongeth to a knight”—that is to say,
“in daring to do that which belongs to a knight”—or, in Cornish
idiom, “that which a knight ‘belongs to do’”. It is easy to see the
nature of Spenser’s error. The mysterious substantive _derring-do_
(desperate courage), which he created and used several times, is not
found again until Scott’s _Ivanhoe_.
Very soon the Romantic Movement was resuscitating the Elizabethan
world as well as the “Gothic”—a word, by the way, which now, for
the first time in its history, began to connote approval. It was
Coleridge himself who invented the word _Elizabethan_, and his
magnificent lectures on Shakespeare must be very largely responsible
for that renewed and deepened interest in the great dramatist in
which Germany once more set us the example. It is also noteworthy
that the word _fitful_, which Shakespeare had probably coined in the
famous line from _Macbeth_, was never used again until the close
of the eighteenth century; and another word which expired when the
Elizabethan spirit expired in Milton, to be resurrected in the
nineteenth century, is _faery_, with that spelling, and with the
meaning, not so much of an individual sprite as of a magic realm or
state of being—almost “the whole supernatural element in romance”.
This supernatural element—as we saw in the history of the words
_creative_ and _genius_—is connected very intimately indeed with the
origin of the Romantic Movement. And we shall see the connection
even more clearly in the semantic development of two more words—the
last to be examined in this book—_fancy_ and _imagination_. The
various Greek words which the Latin ‘imago’ was used to translate
acquired their special meanings among the Stoics, where, as we saw in
Chapter VI, that teasing sense of a contrast, a lack of connection,
between the “objective” and “subjective” worlds appears first to
have developed. One of these words was ‘phantasia’, from which we
have taken indirectly the divergent forms _fantasy_, _phantasy_,
and _fancy_. By the third century A.D. the Greek ‘phantasia’ was
predominantly used, so we are told, “in cases where, carried away
by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and
you place it before the eyes of your hearers”.[77] ‘Phantasia’ and
‘imaginatio’ were in use among the Schoolmen, and _fantasy_ and
_imagination_ are both found in Chaucer in the sense of ‘a mental
image or reflection’, or more particularly ‘an image of something
which either has no real existence or does not yet exist’. After the
Renaissance Shakespeare suddenly transfigured one of the two words in
one of those extraordinary passages which make us feel that genius is
indeed something more than earthly:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
In such a passage we seem to behold him standing up, a figure of
colossal stature, gazing at us over the heads of the intervening
generations. He transcends the flight of time and the laborious
building up of meanings, and, picking up a part of the outlook of
an age which is to succeed his by nearly two hundred years, gives
it momentary expression before he lets it drop again. That mystical
conception which the word embodies in these lines—a conception which
would make imagination the interpreter and part creator of a whole
unseen world—is not found again until the Romantic Movement has begun.
And then it had to be reached slowly. Seventy years after Shakespeare
wrote we find the philosopher, Henry More, cautiously distinguishing
from other kinds of imagination “that Imagination which is most
free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions”. “Imagining”, wrote
Dryden “is in itself the very height and life of poetry”; and in 1712
Addison published in the _Spectator_ his papers on “The Pleasures
of the Imagination”, in which he used the two words _fancy_ and
_imagination_ synonymously, describing in one of the essays how,
because of the faculty of which they are the names,
... our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a
pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the inchanted Hero of a
Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the
same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams;
but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastic Scene
breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren
Heath, or in a solitary Desart.
The tendency among critics to use this sort of imagery, or words
suggestive of it, when writing of the _fancy_ and the _imagination_,
rapidly increased. Dryden had already distinguished the “fairy”
way of writing, and from Addison’s time we constantly hear writers
and their art referred to in terms of _fairyland_, _enchantments_,
_magic_, _spells_, _wands_,... Shakespeare, we are told by one
writer, is “a more powerful magician than his own Prospero”. “The
world is worn out to us,” wrote Young. “Where are its formerly
sweet delusions, its airy castles, and glittering spires?” And five
years later he assured us that “the pen of an original writer, like
Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring”.
But as the Romantic impulse grew older and crystallized into a
philosophy—when the child which had germinated, as feeling, among the
ignorant many who spoke the Romance languages, after passing through
its Elizabethan adolescence, achieved self-conscious maturity, as
thought, among the learned few who were familiar with the complicated
literary languages of modern Europe—the need was felt for some way
of distinguishing what were merely “sweet delusions” from the more
eternal productions of the Romantic spirit. And this Coleridge
achieved by his famous distinction between _fancy_ and _imagination_.
_Fancy_, since his day, has meant rather the power of inventing
illustrative imagery—the playful adornment, as it were, of Nature;
but _imagination_ is the power of creating from within forms which
themselves become a part of Nature—“Forms”, as Shelley put it,
more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
The next step in the meaning of this word was really taken on the day
upon which Coleridge, with his head full of ancient witchery, was
introduced to another poet with his heart full of mountains. Under
their joint influence we can behold that despised habit of looking
at life through the spectacles of the old Romances, the mysterious
faculty of superimposing on Nature a magical colour or mood created
in the observer by the _fictions_ of genius or the myths of bygone
ages, expanding until it includes the contemplation of Nature
impassioned by any effluence arising from within—it may be emotion or
it may be the individual memory. It was the philosophy of the Lake
School that the perception of Nature—that is to say of all in Nature
that is not purely mechanical—depends upon what is brought to it by
the observer. Deep must call unto deep. To a creation apprehended as
automatic by the senses and the reason, only _imagination_ could
Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land;
for imagination was “essentially vital, even as all objects (_as_
objects) are essentially fixed and dead”.[78]
Imagination was, in fact, _organic_; and the application of this
adjective to the inner world has not been traced farther back than
Coleridge, who, in his lectures on Shakespeare’s plays, emphasized
the mistake of confounding “mechanical regularity with organic form”.
But perhaps the most brilliant, even epigrammatic, expression which
has ever been given to the everlasting war between the unconscious,
because creative, vital principle and the conscious, because
destructive, calculating principle, is contained in four lines from a
little poem of Wordsworth’s called _The Tables Turned_:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.
And so it is in the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism that we
first feel a true understanding, not indeed of the process itself,
but of the results of that process, which has been traced in this
book under the name of “internalization”. Slowly the divers of the
Romantic expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that
vast new cosmos which had so long been blindly forming in the depths.
It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved
out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece,
the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance—all
these had been locked safely in man’s bosom, there to sleep until the
trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back
their teeming life to Nature. “O Lady”, wrote Coleridge in that most
heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight
awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this
very power:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element.
And this re-animation of Nature was possible because the imagination
was felt as _creative_ in the full religious sense of the word. It
had itself assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses
were now contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters.
For it was “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation”—the Word made human.
In tracing the semantic history of important words like these,
we must not forget that nine-tenths of the words comprising the
vocabulary of a civilized nation are never used by more than about
one-tenth of the population; while of the remaining tithe nine-tenths
of those who use them are commonly aware of about one-tenth of their
meanings. Nevertheless it is just by following those meanings up to
the high-water mark which they have reached in a few eager minds
that we can observe what may fairly be called changes in the general
consciousness. It is true that the new meanings must filter through a
graduated hierarchy of imaginative literature, literary journalism,
reviews, sermons, journalism, popular novels, advertisements, and
cinema captions before what is left of them reaches the general
public; but the amount that is left, and the spell which is
accordingly exerted on the many, depends on how far they have first
been carried by the few.
Thus, to take one example, the extraordinary load of meaning often
borne by the word _dream_, in phrases like _dreamland_, _my dreams_,
_the land of my dreams_, ... is no doubt traceable ultimately to the
use of this word by the great Romantics. When Shelley wrote:
Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his[79] dreams pass....
and
He hath awakened from the dream of life....
he was also, we might say, writing the greater part of a good many
twentieth-century drawing-room ballads. But to feel the _full_ weight
of the semantic burden which this little word can be made to bear
in our time we must turn to a modern philosopher, Mr. Santayana,
who has brought the use of it to a fine art. “The _Divine Comedy_,”
he writes, “marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s
_Dialogues_ mark the beginning....”
Others to-day are fascinated by their _dreams_, because they regard
them as messengers from that mysterious inner world in which,
like the Christians of old, they are beginning to divine depths
hitherto unimagined. They feel “forces” at work there which they are
tempted to personify in terms of ancient myth—_Ahriman_, _Lucifer_,
_Oedipus_, _Psyche_, and the like. But outside the significant
adjective _sub-conscious_, which has almost certainly come to stay,
the effect which such tendencies may have on the English language
remains a tale to be told a hundred years hence. The numerous
secondary implications unfolding within _dream_, however, its
popularity, and its obvious power of suggesting images, must interest
us as further symptoms of a now almost universal consciousness
of at any rate the existence of such an “inner” world. In some
lines written as a preface to the _Recluse_—the long, unfinished
philosophical poem of which the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_ were to
form parts—Wordsworth has described the holy awe which he, for one,
entertained as he realized that he must now set out to explore this
world:
Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form—
Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones,
I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The immense debt which the foregoing pages owe to the _Oxford English
Dictionary_—now practically complete—is, I hope, too obvious from
the text to need further emphasis. Without access to that unrivalled
monument of imaginative scholarship a great deal of the first part,
and nearly all the second part, of this book could never have
been even attempted. Readers who wish to study history in English
words for themselves should lose no opportunity of consulting its
fascinating volumes. And in case the fear of wearisome repetition
has induced me to mislead, I should like to take advantage of
this opening to point out that the _O.E.D._ is the authority for
practically all the English etymological and semantic material on
which my book is based. For example, the incautious but conveniently
brief statement that such a word “was first used by” Chaucer or
“first appeared in” the fourteenth century must be regarded as
the abbreviated form of a longer statement to the effect that the
earliest illustrative quotation given in the _O.E.D._ under the
heading of the word in question is drawn from Chaucer or from a book
written during that century.
On the subject as a whole—history, and the outlook of men upon the
world, as they are embodied in the histories of words—comparatively
few people seem to have written in English. Trench led the way with
his little book _On the Study of Words_, which is interesting, both
for itself and because the Archbishop was the first to attach as much
or more importance to the semantic than to the etymological side of
his subject, being, in fact, himself the originator of the _Oxford
Dictionary_. Max Müller’s numerous essays and writings are fresh and
keen and full of interest. The material adduced by both these writers
should always be verified by reference to the _Dictionary_.
I do not know if anyone has hitherto attempted to treat the subject
chronologically and systematically, apart from one solitary
English writer, Mr. Pearsall Smith. To his invaluable little book,
_The English Language_ (Home University Library), I am indebted
throughout, not only for very much of my material, but also for many
extremely fruitful suggestions as to the best way of dealing with
it. I have also made extensive use of two essays (“English Words
Abroad” and “Four Romantic Words”), printed in _Words and Idioms_
(Constable), of which, as of _The English Language_, it would, in my
opinion, be very difficult to speak too highly, partly because of the
imaginative treatment of the material and partly because of its solid
background of careful scholarship and wide reading. It is a great
pleasure to acknowledge here the more direct and personal help which
I have been fortunate enough to receive from time to time from this
distinguished writer.
For the rest, I have attempted to skim over such a wide area that
a full bibliography is impossible. As an introduction to a closer
study of the English language, the late Henry Bradley’s _The Making
of English_ is practically indispensable. Skeat’s _Etymological
Dictionary_ and _Concise Etymological Dictionary_ (of which it is
important to get the latest editions), and Weekly’s _Etymological
Dictionary of Modern English_ are extremely useful works of
reference, while for those who wish to acquire some sort of _feeling_
for the relationship between apparently dissimilar Aryan words, such
as _wheel_ and ‘kuklos’, _brother_ and ‘frater’, Skeat’s _Primer of
Classical and English Philology_ (Clarendon Press) is inexpensive,
brief, and to the point.
In conclusion, out of the very large number of books which I have
looked into, I append a list of a few which, either in whole or
in part, seem to have proved especially useful for my particular
purpose. But before laying down my pencil I must say a word on the
somewhat sweeping title given to the second part of this book. The
choice lay between an accurate and unwieldy title and a brief but
inaccurate one. I chose the latter evil, and the result, I believe,
is at any rate less misleading than a limiting phrase such as _The
English Outlook_ would have been.
It remains to add that such efficiency and precision as this little
volume may possess have been increased by the kindness of my wife,
who assisted me in the irksome task of indexing it, and of my father,
who undertook the equally exacting business of reading the sheets.
The list follows:
O. SCHRADER (translated by Jevons): The Prehistoric Antiquities of
the Aryan Peoples.
A. CARNOY: Les Indo-Européens.
WEISE: The Language and Character of the Roman People.
I. TAYLOR: Words and Places.
SKEAT: Place-names of Hertfordshire.
G. H. MCKNIGHT: English Words and their Background.
M. MÜLLER: Biographies of Words; On Comparative Mythology;
Theosophy.
L. NOIRÉ: The Origin and Philosophy of Language.
L. GEIGER (translated): Language and its Importance in the History
of the Development of the Human Race.
O. JESPERSEN: The Philosophy of Grammar; Language, its Nature,
Development, and Origin.
BRÉAL (translated): Semantics.
R. R. MARETT: Anthropology (Home University Library). (The chapter
on Language.)
LEWIS AND SHORT: A Latin Dictionary.
LIDDELL AND SCOTT: Greek-English Lexicon.
E. WALLACE: An Outline of the Philosophy of Aristotle (Cambridge
University Press).
R. STEINER (translated): Christianity as Mystical Fact.
J. S. REID: The Academica of Cicero. (The excellent notes and
indexes with which this book is provided make it a work of
reference concerning the terms in use in Greek philosophy and their
Latin translations.)
R. EUCKEN: Geschichte der Philosophischen Terminologie.
R. EUCKEN (translated): Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic
Thought.
A. S. PRINGLE-PATTISON: Article on “Scholasticism” in the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
S. T. COLERIDGE: Biographia Literaria.
M. W. STEINKE: Edward Young’s _Conjectures on Original Composition_
in England and Germany. (F. C. Stechert Co., Inc., New York.) The
appendices, consisting of long quotations from English and German
writers, together with a few from Longinus, are excellent.
INDEX
_Absolute_, 95, 123
_abstract_, 123
_academy_, 25, 90
_accident_, 122
_accuse_, 176-7
_acid_, 134, 148
_acre_, 22
_action_, 139
_actual_, 95, 123
_adapt_, 175
Addison, 174, 190, 195, 198
_address_, 67
_adore_, 140
_advantageous_, 138
_advice_, 8
_advocate_, 47
_aesthetic_, 195_n._
_affecting_, 158
_agitation_, 158
_agnostic_, 178
_agony_, 116
_air_, 90
_alchemy_, 126
_alcohol_, 126
_ale_, 66
_alembic_, 126
Alexander, 28, 93, 95, 98
Alexandria, 28-9, 96-102, 111, 179
_algebra_, 121, 129
_alkali_, 126
_alligator_, 58
_allure_, 55
_almanac_, 128
_aloof_, 57
_alphabet_, 87
_altar_, 38, 42
_amalgam_, 126
_amazement_, 138
Amazons, 15
_amber_, 72
_ambrosial_, 23
_amendment_, 152
_ammonia_, 98
_amorous_, 77, 113
_amuck_, 59
_amusing_, 158-9
_anachronism_, 151
_analogy_, 90, 91, 95
_analyse_, _-sis_, _-tic_, 94-5, 135, 147
_anatomy_, 97, 134
_ancient_, 134, 150
_anguish_, 116
_animal_, 125, 175
_animal spirits_, 125_n._
_antic_, 136
_antimacassar_, 64
_antipodes_, 91
_antiquated_, 150
_apathy_, 158
_aphrodisiac_, 77
_Apolline_, 77
_apology_, 54, 138
_apostrophe_, 54
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 122
Arabs, the, 34, 56, 58, 120-1, 126, 128-9, 193
_arabesque_, 121
Archimedes, 169
_argent_, 42
_argumentum ad hominem_, 123
_aristocrat_, _-cracy_, 62, 90
Aristotle, 87, 93-8, 119-24, 131_n._, 133-5, 148, 159, 169, 187, 190-1
_arms_, 42
_army, the_, 59
_arrange_, 163, 180
_arsenic_, 126
_art_, _-ist_, 186-7, 191, (192)
_arteries_, 125
_artisan_, 187
_ascendant_, 124, 126
_aschet_, 56-7
_Asia_, 77
_aspect_, 124
_ass_, 31
_assassin_, 120_n._
_assault_, 42
_assets_, 48
_assize_, 47, 61
_astringency_, 148
Astrology, 4, 125-7
_astronomy_, 90
_atavism_, 175
Atlantis, 15
_atlas_, 77
_atmosphere_, 124, 126, 131
_atom_, 98_n._, 132_n._
_atone_, 143
_attic_, 24
_attitude_, 136, 186
_attraction_, 132
_attribute_, 123
_augury_, 78
Augustine, Saint, 39, 109
Augustus, 26
_auspice_, _-ious_, 78, 159
Austen, Jane, 186, 194
_authoritarian_, 182
_authority_, 26, 118
_auto-da-fé_, 118
_autograph_, 157
_automatic_, 54, 169, 170-1, (200)
_automaton_, 171
_autonomy_, 182
_avast_, 57
_aversion_, 158
_axiom_, 94, 134
_axle_, 17
_azure_, 42, 120_n._
Bacon, Francis, 51, 53, 132-5, 150, 173_n._, 187, 194
_bacon_, 41
_badinage_, 145
_balance_, 169, 173
_baleful_, 159
_ballad_, 195
_bamboo_, 59
_banana_, 58
_bank_, 61
_banner_, 42
_banquet_, 41
_banshee_, 33
_banter_, 145
_bard_, 23, 33, 195
_battery_, 5
_battle_, 42
Baumgarten, 195_n._
_bean_, 22
_bearish_, 147
_beautiful_, 115
_beauty_, 91, 141
_bed_, 17
_beech_, 21
_beef_, 41-2
_beefsteak_, 66
_bees_, 16
_beg_, 65
_belay_, 57
_Bench_, 61
_benign_, 159
Berkeley, Bishop, 158
_bias_, 56
Bible, the, 7, 28, 53, 77, 87-8, 92, 99, 104-5, 109, 115-16, 178,
180, 192
_Bible_, 87
_bigot_, 34_n._, 142
_bile_, 125
_bill_, 67
_blackguard_, 64
_bless_, 38
_blood_, 125
_blow_, 65
_bog_, 33
Bonaparte, 25
_bonus_, 61
_boom_, 57
_boring_, 158
_boss_, 26
Boswell, 157
Botanical Terms, 96
_botany_, 96
_bow_, 57
_bowdlerize_, 64
_bowsprit_, 57
_box_, 66
_boycott_, 64
_Boyle, Robert_, 171
_breeze_, 58
_Britons_, 33
_broadcast_, 5
_broad-minded_, 182
_brother_, 10
Browne, Sir Thomas, 170
_brute_, 26
_budget_, 62, 67
_buoy_, 57
_burglar_, 48
_burgle_, 65
_burke_, 64
_burlesque_, 145
_bust_, 136
_butler_, 41, 65
_butter_, 16_n._
_buttery_, 41
_button_, 5
Byron, 193
_Cabal_, 59
_Cabinet Council_, 59
_cad_, 57
_caddie_, 56-7
_caddy_, 59
_cadet_, 57
Caesar, Julius, 15_n._, 33, 37
_calamity_, 27
_call_, 9, 40
_calf_, 41
_cameo_, 135
_camouflage_, 63
_camp_, 31, 42
_cancel_, 48
_candle_, 38, 42
_cannibal_, 58
_canoe_, 58
_cant_, 66, 180
_canto_, 136
_capital_, 47, 60
_capitalist_, 61
_capriole_, 136
_captain_, 26
_car_, 12, 33
Carlyle, 155, 183
_carol_, 64
_carriage_, 12
_case_, 90
_cashier_, 57
_catastrophe_, 25
_category_, 94, 163
_cattle_, 47_n._, 60
_cause_, 49, 123, 176-7
_cavalier_, 59
Celts, the, 14, 20-1, 29, 32, 35-6, 38-9, 60, 79-83, 107, 189
_century_, 150
_cereal_, 71, 78
Ceres, 165
_chagrin_, 158
_chair_, 41, 61
_chaos_, 149_n._
_chap_, 31, 66
_character_, 156-7
_charity_, 113, 183
_charm_, 138, 138_n._, (201)
_charmer_, 160
_charming_, 158-9
_chattel_, 47
Chaucer, 43, 50, 111-12, 114-15, 118, 123, 128, 136, 156, 196-7
_cheap_, 31
_check_, 56, 173
_checkmate_, 56
_cheque_, 56
_chequer_, 56
_chess_, 56
_chest_, 31
_Chester_, 37, 42
_chiaroscuro_, 136
_chief_, 26
_children_, 114
_chimera_, 77
_chocolate_, 58
_choler_, _-ic_, 124-5
_chord_, 90
_chorus_, 25
Christianity, 29, 38, 79, 82, 89, 98, 102, 104-13, 117-18, 121,
141-2, 152, 161, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191-2_n._, 203
Church, the, 29, 38, 50, 92, 104-6, 108-10, 113-17, 121-3, 141, 150,
155, 157, 159, 178-9, 180
_church_, 31, 45
Cicero, 6, 90-1, 94, 101, 123, 174, 176
_cipher_, 121
Civil War, the, 59
Clarendon, Lord, 60, 156_n._-7, 160
_classical_, 47
_classify_, 163
_clericalism_, 179
_clerk_, 38
Clockwork, 165, 171-2
_club_, 64, 67
_coach_, 12
_cobalt_, 81
_cockatoo_, 59
_cocoa_, 58
_cocoanut_, 58
_cohesion_, 148
Coleridge, 154_n._, 195-6, 199, 200
Columbus, 58
_comedy_, _-ic_, 25, 186
_comfort_, 66
_command_, 26
_commercial_, 61
_committee_, 67
_common sense_, (49), 124
_compassion_, 110
_competition_, 175, 178
_complexion_, 124-5
_comprehension_, 101
_conceit_, 95, 136
_concept_, 95, 123, 136
_concrete_, 123
_conductor_, 5
_conscience_, 52, 117, 155-6
_conscious_, 164
_consciousness_ (72_n._), (73_n._), (90_n._), 154, 164
_conscription_, 63
_consider_, 124
_consistency_, 155
_consols_, 61
_Constantinople_, 108
Constitution, British, 40, 45-9, 59-61, 67, 68, 173
_constitution_, 67
_constraint_, 158
_Consulate_, 61
_contemplate_, 78
_contemporary_, 150
_contract_, 47
_control_, 26
_conventional_, 48
_convey_, 48
Cook, Captain, 59
_coolie_, 58
Copernicus, 129-30, 154
_cordial_, 124
_corn_, 22, 78
_corroborate_, 51
_cosmos_, 90
_costermonger_, 31
_cotton_, 34, 120_n._
_council_, 61
_count_, 41
_countrified_, 147
_county_, 47
_couple_, 55
_court_, 47
_Coventry, send to_, 60
_cove_, 18
_cravat_, 30
_create_, _etc._, 174_n._, 90-1, 96, 201
_credulous_, 143
_creed_, 38, 138
_crestfallen_, 56
Crete, 14
_critic_, _etc._, 90, 138, 187
_cross_, 39
_crucial_, 133-4
_cruelty_, 114
_cruise_, 57
Crusades, the, 120_n._
_cupidity_, 78
_culprit_, 48
_cupola_, 135
_curfew_, 42
_curious_, 135
_currency_, 61
_current_, 5
_curry_, 58
Cyclops, 18, 188
_cynic_, 101
_Dado_, 136
_daedal_, 77
_dainty_, 113
_dalliance_, 113
_damask_, 120_n._
_dandelion_, 41
Danes, the, 39-40
_danger_, 112
Dante, 43, 92, 203
Darwin, Charles, 174-5, 179
_day_, 75
_deacon_, 38
_death_, 110
_debt_, 53
_decade_, 150
_deduction_, 95, 123
_defendant_, 48
_definition_, 95
Degrees, University, 187_n._
_delicate_, 113
_delight_, 113, 116
_delirious_, 27
_demagogue_, 59
_democrat_, _-cy_, 62, 90
Democritus, 98_n._, 101
_demon_, 80, 192_n._
_demure_, 146
_depression_, 158
_Derby_, 66
_derrick_, 64
Descartes, 154, 164, 171
_despair_, 116
_despot_, 26
_Determinism_, 183
_develop_, _-ment_, 151, 160, 174
_devotion_, 113
_dew_, 37
_dial_, 74
_dialectic_, 91
_diary_, 74-5
_dictator_, 26
_difference_, 95
_diffidence_, 158
_dinner_, 41
_Dionysiac_, 77
_disagree_, 142
_disappointment_, 158
_disaster_, 124
_discipline_, 85
_disclaim_, 48
_discomposure_, 158
_discount_, 61
_discover_, _-y_, 135, 148
Diseases, 97
_dish_, 31
_dishearten_, 138
_disposition_, 4, 124, 126, 155, 157
_dissatisfaction_, 158
_dissection_, 134
_dissent_, 142, 155
_distemper_, 124-5
_distinguish_, 51, 135, 147
_district_, 47
_diurnal_, 74
_diverting_, 158
_dividend_, 61
_divine_, 75
_dock_, 57
_doctrinaire_, 67
_dome_, 136
_domineer_, 57
_dominion_, 26
_doubt_, 53
_down_, 131
_drama_, _-tic_, 25, 54, 186
_dream_, 202-3
_drill_, 57
_drub_, 58
_druid_, 39
Dryden, 185_n._, 190, 197_n._, 198
_Dualism_, 179
_dubious_, 134
_ducat_, 136
_duke_, 41-2
_dunce_, 136
Dutch, the, 57
_duty_, 156
_dwindle_, 138
_Ear_, 22
_earl_, 41
_earth_, 81, 131
_Easter_, 81
_eccentric_, 157
_ecclesiastical_, 32
_eclipse_, 90
_ecliptic_, 128
_economic_, 90
_edit_, 65
_ego_, _-ism_, 154
Egypt, 11, 13, 24, 73_n._, 79, 86-90, 98-100, 102-3, 108, 111, 116
_eisteddfod_, 33
_elasticity_, 148
_electric_, _-ity_, 3, 5, 72
_element_, 90
_elf_, 81
_elm_, 21
_Elysian_, 77
_emancipate_, 47
_embarrassment_, 158
_emolument_, 27
_emotion_, 158
_empire_, 26
_empirical_, 97
_enchant_, _-ment_, 159, 98, (201)
Encyclical Letter, 178
_energy_, 94, 148, 167, 172
_engine_, 192
English language, 68
English words abroad, 66-8
_enlightenment_, 182
_ennui_, 158
_entelechy_, 94
_entertaining_, 158
_enthralling_, 158
_enthusiasm_, _-tic_, 90-1, 161, 193
_entity_, 123
_environment_, 155, 174
_envy_, 8, 158
Epicureans, 79, 101
_epidemic_, 54, 97
_episode_, 25, 54
_epoch_, 150
_equality_, 67
_equator_, 128
_equilibrium_, 148
_equinox_, 128
_equivocal_, 95
_erotic_, 77-8
_essence_, 90, 123
_ether_, 124-5, 132_n._, 148
_ethical_, _-s_, 90, 94
_etymology_, 102
_Europe_, 77
_evangelical_, 142
_evil_, 159
_evolution_, 151-2, 174
_excel_, 27
_excitement_, 158-9
_existence_, 123
_experiment_, _-al_, 51, 67, 95, 133, 135
_extravagant_, 162, 193
_eyewash_, 63
_Fable_, 189
_facts_, 175
_faction_, 143
_fairy_ (_faery_), 80, 189, 196, (201)
_fare_, 30
_fancy_, 101, 197-9
_fanatic_, 59, 162
_fantasy_, 101, 197
_fascinating_, 159
_fashion_, 139
_fate_, 78
_fatuous_, 147
_fear_, 30, 158
_fee_, 47_n._
“_feelings_,” 158
_felon_, 48
_feminist_, 181
Feudal System, 41
_fiction_, 189-90, 200
_filigree_, 136
_finance_, 61
_finch_, 21
“_finny drove_,” 161
_fire_, 18
_fish_, 21
_fit_, 175
_fitful_, 196
_flippant_, 147
_flotsam_, 48
_fluid_, 148
_flyboat_, 57
_foible_, 55, 157
_foray_, 195
_force_, 5, 132_n._, 148, 177
_forfeit_, 48
_forlorn hope_, 57
_form_, 123
_formula_, 47
_forte_, 55, 157
_fortress_, 42
_fortune_, 78
_franchise_, 48
_fraternity_, 67
_freak_, 180
_free will_, 123
_freebooter_, 57
_freemason_, 67
_freight_, 57
French Revolution, 62
French words in Scottish, 57
_fresco_, 135
_Friday_, 81
_function_, 139, 177
_furlough_, 57
_furrow_, 22
_fury_, 78
_Gadget_, 63
Galen, 124, 157
Galileo, 130-1, 171
_galligaskins_, 136
_galore_, 33
Galton, F., 175
_galvanize_, 64
_gamp_, 64
_garden_, 15-16
_gas_, _-eous_, 148-9_n._
Garrick, 4
_gawky_, 147
_gazelle_, 34
_geese_, 16
_general_, 123
_generous_, 138
_genesis_, 90
_genius_, 78, 191-3, 195-6
_gentle_, 41, 44, 112, 155
_gentleman_, 66, 139, 156
_get_, 40
_gin_, 66
_giraffe_, 34
_glamour_, 118, 195
_glen_, 33
_goblin_, 81
_God_, 74, 110, 156
_godly_, 142
Goethe, 195
Goldsmith, 4
_good_, 91
_Gothic_, 150, 162, 193
_government_, 26
Gower, 128, 159
Gnostics, 104
_grace_, 78
Grammar, 7, 90
_grammar_, 25, 90
_gravity_, _-ate_, 131
_greed_, _-y_, 65, 158
Greeks (Greece), 5, 12, 20-2, 27, 29, 71-4, 77, 81, 84-104, 116, 119,
146, 150-1, 169, 176, 189, 191
Greek Language, 7-9
Greek words in English, 44-5, 54
_gregarious_, 175
Grimm, J., 9
_grog_, 66
_grovel_, 65
_guillotine_, 62
_gules_, 42
_gybe_, 57
_Hades_, 77
Haeckel, 176
_haggard_, 55
_hammock_, 58
_handicap_, 66
_happy_, 158
_harmony_, 25, 77, 90
_harness_, 42
Hartley, David, 170
Harvey, William, 173_n._
_hauberk_, 42
_hazard_, 121_n._
_hazel_, 21
_heart_, 125
_hearty_, 124
_heaven_, 38, 74, 110
Hebrew (_see_ Semitic)
Hegel, 195
_heir_, 47
_hell_, 110
_heredity_, 44, 175
_heresy_, 105, 108
_hermetically sealed_, 77, 126
_hero_, 77
Herodotus, 90
Hesiod, 90
_hickory_, 59
Hindoos, the, 7, 10, 21, 62, 76, 83-4
Hippocrates, 97, 124-5
History, 89, 123, 50-2, 88
_history_, 25, 89
_hit_, 40, 65
Hobbes, 155_n._, 164, 192, 194
_holy_, 159
Homer, 23-4, 87, 169_n._
_homesickness_, 158
_honest_, 41
_horizon_, 128
_hospital_, 45
_Host_, 78
_hounds_, 16
_hoy_, 57
_hoyden_, 147
_humane_, 182-3
_humanism_, 183
_humanitarian_, _-ist_, 182-3
_humbug_, 66
Humour in word-formation, 65
_humour_, 66, 124-5, 127, 157
_hun_, 34
_hurricane_, 58
_husband_, 40
Huxley, 132_n._, 167-8, 172, 178, 180_n._
_hydraulic_, 134, 173_n._
_hymn_, 38
_hyperbole_, 90
_hypochondria_, 125
_hypotenuse_, 90
_hypothesis_, 54, 90
_hysteria_, _-cal_, 54, 97
Ideas, 120, 141, 188
_idea_, _-l_, 90-1, 94, 123
_idealogue_, 67
_identity_, 123
_idiosyncrasy_, 157
_ignite_, 76
_image_, 101
_imagination_, 101, 191, 197-9
_improper_, 64
_improve_, 48, 149
_incarnadine_, 136
_inch_, 31
_independent_, 59
_Indian_, 58
_indisposed_, 124
_individual_, 89-90, 123, 153, 183
Individualism, 117-18, 153-4, 182
_induction_, 95
_influence_, 124, 126, 127, 138
_ingenious_, 192
_initiate_, 88
_Inquisition_, 118
_inquisitive_, 135
_inspect_, 148
_inspiration_, 191-2
_instance_, 95, 133-4
_instinct_, 174, 192
_insurance_, 61
_intaglio_, 136
_intelligence_, 117, 123
_intensity_, 148
_intention_, 123
_interesting_, 159
“Internal Evidence,” 5
“Internalization,” 124-7, 153-60, 164, 192, 201
_interval_, 27
_intrigue_, 147
_introspection_, 185_n._
_intuition_, 123
_invention_, 190
_investigate_, 51, 135, 147
_investment_, 61
_invulnerable_, 138
_iridescent_, 77
_iris_, 77
_isosceles_, 90, 178_n._
Jerome, Saint, 109
Jesus Christ, 29, 99, 103-4, 107, 110, 114, 115, 117, 122-3, 152, 183
_jetsam_, 48
_jettison_, 48
_jockey_, 66
Johnson, Dr., 3, 157
Jonson, Ben, 164
_jot_, 87
_journal_, 74
_jovial_, 124-6
_judge_, 47
_June_, 78
_jurisdiction_, 45
_jurisprudence_, 45
_jury_, 47, 67
_justice_, 45
_Kangaroo_, 59
Kant, 195
_karma_, 77
Keats, 83
_keel_, 57
Kepler, 130-1, 154
_kettle_, 31
_kind_, 41
_king_, 26
_kitchen_, 31
_knickerbocker_, 64
_knife_, 40
_knout_, 30
_kopje_, 63
_Laconic_, 24
_lacquey_, 34
_lady_, 111
_lance_, 42
Latin language, 7-9
Latin words in English, 25-6, 42, 44-5, 51
_latitude_, 128
Law, 45-9
_law_, 40, 132
Laws of Nature, 132, 162, 175-7, 180
_learn_, 30, 86
_lease_, 48
_leg_, 40
Leibnitz, 132_n._, 172
_lethal_, 77
_lever_, 169
_liberalism_, 182
_libertine_, 143, 182
_liberty_, 67
_lie_, 81
_life_, 110, 175
_lighter_, 57
_lilliputian_, 64
_little_, 114
_liver_, 125
_lock-out_, 67
Locke, 154, 194
_logic_, 25, 94, (180_n._)
_long-suffering_, 115
Longinus, 197_n._
_longitude_, 128
_lord_, 26
_lough_, 39
_love_, 91-2, 110, 141
_love-longing_, 114
_lovingkindness_, 115, 183
_lunatic_, 53, 124, 126
_lyrical_, 186
_Machine_, 169
_madonna_, 136
_maffick_, 65
_magazine_, 64
_magic_, _-al_, 76, 138, 198, (201)
_magnet_, 5
_mainspring_, 171
_maize_, 58
_majestic_, 138
_majority_, 67
_make_ (_maker_), 188_n._, 191
_malice_, 158
_malign_, 159
_malignant_, 59, 143
_man_, 83-4, 175
_manager_, 26
_manor_, 47
_marline_, 57
_marquis_, 41
_martyr_, 38, 108
_mass_, 38
_Mass, the_, 131
_master_, 26, 41-2
_mathematics_, _-al_, 85, 90-1
Matriarchies, 15
_matter_, 123
_matter-of-fact_, 48
_mavourneen_, 33
_mawkish_, 147
_maya_, 77
_mead_, 17
_meal_, 22
_mechanic_, _-al_, _-s_, 94, 168, (187)
Mechanical terms, 168
_meeting_, 67
_melancholy_, 125, 127, 157
_melodramatic_, 186
_melody_, 25, 90
Memory, language compared to, 33
_merchant_, 66
_mercifulness_, 115
_mercurial_, 126
_mercy_, 112, 158, 183
_mere_, 21, 48
_meridian_, 128
_mermaid_, 21
_mesh_, 57
_mesmerism_, 64
_metaphor_, 90
_metaphysics_, 94
_method_, 89-90, 133, 163
_mezzotinto_, 136
_Middle Ages_, 151
_midriff_, 167, 172
_mildheartness_, 158
_mile_, 31, 42
Mill, J. S., 180, 182
_mill_, 31
_milk_, 16
Milton, 60, 164, 196
_mind_, 84
_minority_, 67
_mint_, 78
_minute_, 128
_mirth_, 116
_miscreant_, 120_n._
Mithras, 79
_moccasin_, 59
_model_, 135
Modern metaphors, 63
_modern_, 134, 150
_modification_, 175
Mohammedanism, 121
_money_, 78
_-monger_, 31
_monkish_, 143
_monster_, 180
Montesquieu, 68, 173
_moot_, 40
_moral_, 95
Morality in language, 145-7
More, Henry, 150, 161, 198
_morris_, 64
_morse_, 63-4
_mortgage_, 48
_motion_, 67
_motive_, 123
_motor_, 167, 172
_mow_, 22
Mozart, 89_n._
_mugwump_, 14
_mule_, 31
Müller, Max, 9
_muscle_, 167, 173
_muse_, to, 55-6
Muses, the, 77, 191, 201
_music_, 25, 77, 91
_mutton_, 41
_muzzle_, 56
Mysteries, 79, 88-9, 91, 103, 108-10
_mystery_, 77, 88, 110, 174_n._
_myth_, 83
_Nabob_, 62
_nadir_, 128-9
_name_, 9
_narrow-minded_, 182
_natural_, 125
_Nature_, 156, 175, 180_n._
_nave_, 17
_nectar_, 23
_negro_, 58
_nemesis_, 77
Neoplatonism, 106, 120
_nerve_, 167, 173
_newspaper_, 64
Newton, Isaac, 130-2, 173-4
_nickel_, 81
_night_, 18, 37
_nightmare_, 81
Nominalism, 120-1, 159
_non-entity_, 124_n._
Normans, the, 20, 36, 40-1, 43, 113
_notion_, 101
_novelist_, 64
_number_, 90
_nun_, 38, 42
_nymph_, 77
_Objective_, 123, 160, (197)
_obligation_, 46
_obscene_, 138
_obscurantism_, 182
_observe_, 135
_odd_, 40
_odium theologicum_, 142
_odium philosophicum_, 142
_offend_, 85
_officer_, 26
_officious_, 146
_ogle_, 147
_Old Nick_, 81
_onslaught_, 57
_ooze_, 174
_optimism_, 181
_orange_, 120_n._
_organic_, 94, 200
_organize_, 163
Origen, 105
_original_, _-ity_, 190-1, 195
_out-of-date_, 150
_outlaw_, 40
_outlook_, (73_n._), (90_n._), 155, 158
_oxen_, 16, 41
_Paean_, 77
_pageant_, 115
Paley, 165, 170-1
_pamphlet_, 64, 67
_Pan_, 165
_panacea_, 77
_pander_, 23
_panic_, 71-3, 77
_pansy_, 41
_paper_, 87
_papistical_, 143
_paradise_, 99
_Pariah_, 76
_parliament_, 45, 59, 67
_parlour_, 41
_particle_, 95
_particular_, 123
_passion_, 110, 113
_pastel_, 136
‘_Pat_,’ 38
_pathetic_, 114, 159
Paul, Saint, 88
_peace_, 158
_peacemaker_, 115
_peculiar_, 47
_pecuniary_, 27, 47_n._
_pedant_, 138
_penal_, 8
_pendulum_, 171
_pennon_, 42
_perceive_, 155
_period_, 151
_peripatetic_, 93
_perjury_, 48
_pernicious_, 143
Persians, the, 21, 76, 99
_person_, 46, 153, 157
_personality_, 160
_personify_, 164-5
Petrarch, 113
_petticoat-tales_, 57
_phaeton_, 77
_phantasy_, 197
_phenomenon_, 90, 181
Philo, 102, 104
_philosophy_, 25, 89, 91
_phlegmatic_, 125
Phonology, 8
_physical_, _-s_, 54, 90, 94
_physiology_, 94
_Pickwickian_, 64
_picturesque_, 186, 194
_pietism_, 179
_piety_, 142
_pile_, 31
_pillow_, 31
_pink_, 57
_pious_, 138, 179
_pity_, 44, 112, 142, 158, 183
_pixy_, 81
Place-names, 15, 32, 36, 61, 64, 66, 82
_plaintiff_, 48
_planet_, 131
Planets, the, 78, 124-7
Plato, 6, 7, 73, 86, 91-3, 95, 98-101, 103, 107, 119-20, 124, 129,
140-1, 153, 161, 170, 174, 177-8, 189, 191
_pleasure_, 113
_poesy_, _-tic_, _-try_, 25, 90, 191
Poetry, 187-8
_point of view_, 186
_polarity_, 148
_politics_, 59, 90
Pope, Alexander, 162-3
_popery_, 143
_pork_, 41
_port_, 37, 42
“Portraits,” 157
Portuguese, the, 58-9
_positive_, 139
_potato_, 58
_potential_, 95, 123
_pound_, 31
Pre-Aryan culture, 14
_precise_, 143
_predestination_, 183
_predicament_, 124_n._
_predicate_, 123
_predominant_, 125-6
_prehistoric_, 151
_prejudice_, 47
_premises_, 48, 124_n._
_premium_, 27
_press_, 64
_pressure_, 148, 155, 177
_prevaricate_, 27
_priest_, 38
_prig_, 145
_prim_, 145
_Prime Minister_, 62
_primal_, 174_n._
_primeval_, 150, 174_n._
_principle_, 95
Printing press, 43-4
_prison_, 45
_private_, 47
_progress_, _-ive_, 134, 150-2, (160)
_prologue_, 25
_propagate_, 138
_property_, 47, 95
_protagonist_, 25
_protean_, 77
_protective_, 175
_Protestant_, 142
_prude_, 147
_psalm_, 38
_puck_, 81
_pudding_, 66
_pulley_, 169
_pump_, 57, 173_n._
_Puritan_, 59, 143
Puritanism, 143, 145
_pyjamas_, 62
_pyramid_, 90
Pythagoras, 86, 89-90, 107
_Quality_, 6, 7, 90, 95, 123, 131_n._
_quantity_, 95, (98_n._), 123, 131_n._
_question_, 90
_quintessence_, 95, 125, 148
_quixotic_, 64
_Radiance_, 138
_Raid_, 195
Railway, the, 12
_real_, _-ize_, 48, 123, 138
Realism, 120, 122, 159
_Reason_, 161, 163
_rebate_, 55
_reclaim_, 55
_reef_, 57
Reformation, 50, 142-3, 150, 153, 155, 159
_regeneration_, 152
_regular_, 163
_relay_, 55
_reliance_, 138
Religion, Aryan, 75-6, 80
_religion_, _-ism_, 140, 155, 179
_remark_, 148
_remittance_, 61
_remorse_, 52, 158
Renaissance, 51, 111, 135-6, 149, 151, 186-7, 189, 191, 197
_rent_, 47
_repentance_, 116, 158
_represent_, 67
_reprobate_, 143
_respectability_, 66
_respiration_, 167, 172
Restoration, the, 145-7
_retaliation_, 46
_retrieve_, 55
_retrograde_, 134
_review_, 8
_revolutionize_, 62
_rhapsody_, 23
_rhetoric_, 90
_rhythm_, 25, 90
_ridicule_, 145
_riding_, 40
_riding-coat_, 66
_right_, 40
_Rights of Man_, 62
_roast-beef_, 66
_Roman Catholic_, 143
Romance and the Romantics, 92, 182, 185-6, 189, 193-204
_romance_, 32, 181, 189, 190
Romance languages, 32, 79
_romantic_, _-ism_, 66, 181, 186, 193-5
Rome (Romans), 19, 21, 25-6, 29-33, 35, 37-8, 45-7, 71, 74, 77-82,
84-6, 90, 95, 100-1, 108, 109, 116-17, 119, 121, 146, 150, 159,
165, 176, 189, 192
Ronsard, 113
_Rood_, 40
_rouble_, 30
_Roundhead_, 59
_rove_, 56
_rover_, 57
Royal Society, the, 149, 169
_rub_, 56
_rue_, 158
_rule_, 26
_rum_, 66
_run riot_, 56
_ruse_, 56
_rush_, 56
Sabine women, 25
_sacrament_, 110, 174_n._
_sacrifice_, 78
_sad_, 158
_saffron_, 120_n._
_sagacious_, 56
_salary_, 27
_same_, 40
_sanctimonious_, 138
_sandwich_, 64
_sanguine_, 125
Sanskrit language, 7, 9, 10
Santayana, G., 203
_Saturday_, 78
_saturnine_, 125-6
_satyr_, 77
_scandalize_, 85
_scarlet_, 120_n._
_scenery_, 163
_scent_, 56
_sceptic_, _etc._, 101, 135
Schelling, 195
_school_, 25, 45, 86
Schools (Scholasticism), 48, 106, 110-24, 133-4, 136, 153, 197
Science, 95, 128-35, 147-9, 152, 167-79, 200
_science_, 90, 117, 186
_Scotland_, 38
Scott, Walter, 195-6
Scotus, Duns, 122, 136
_scout_, 57
_screw_, 169
_scrounge_, 63
_scrutinize_, 148
_section_, 62
_selection_, 175
_self_, 153-4, 181, 183
_self-determination_, 63
_selfish_, 143
_“semantic” (defined)_, 38
Semitic—race, etc., 28, 51, 59, 61, 87, 99, 100, 102-3, 121, 146,
152, 191
_sensible_, _-ility_, 160, 185
_sentimental_, _-ism_, 66, 160, 185
Septuagint, 99-100, 109, 191
_sequence_, 138
_servant_, 41
Shakespeare, 5, 51, 68, 92, 136-40, 156, 187, 190, 196-8, 200
_shampoo_, 62
Shaw, Bernard, 68
_she_, 39
_sheep_, 41
Shelley, 107, 199, 202
_shrine_, 38
_sidle_, 65
Sidney, Sir Philip, 139, 187-8, 190
_siege_, 42
_silly_, 146
_sin_, 99, 147, 158
_sincere_, 142
_sinister_, 159
_siren_, 77
_size_, 48
_skin_, 40
_skipper_, 26, 57
_skunk_, 14
_sky_, 74-5, 131
_slave_, 30
Slavery, 117, 118
Slavs, the, 20-1, 24, 29, 81, 83
_slay_, 65
_slime_, 174
_small talk_, 64
_smite_, 65
_snob_, _-ism_, 64, 66
Socrates, 91-2, 95, 111, 192_n._
_sonnet_, 136
_sophist_, 91
_sorcery_, 80, 189
_soul_, 157
South Eastern Group of Aryans, 20-1
_sow_, 16
_space_, 131
Spaniards, the, 57-8
_spartan_, 24
_special_, 123
_species_, 90, 123, 174
_spectre_, 101
_speculation_, 62
_speech_, 67
_spell_, 198
Spencer, Herbert, 181
Spenser, Edmund, 140-1, 161, 196
_sphere_, 131, 138
_spice_, 119
_spirit_, 125, 155, 157
_spiritism_, _-ualism_, 181, 181_n._
_spleen_, 66, 125
_spoil_, 27
_spontaneous_, 148, 155-6, 174
_spoor_, 63
Sport, words from, 55-6, 64
_sport_, 55, 66-7
_spring_, 171_n._
_sprint_, 56
_standard_, 42
_stanza_, 136
_star_, 8, 18, 37, 131
_starling_, 21
_static_, 148
_stentorian_, 23
Sterne, Laurence, 160
Stoics, 79, 101-2, 197
_stole_, 38
_stomach_, 125
_stool_, 41
_street_, 31, 42
_strike_, 65, 67
_stunt_, 63
_Stygian_, 77
_sub-conscious_, 203
_subject_, _-ive_, 89, 95, 95_n._, 123, 159, 197
_subordinate_, 26
_substance_, 95, 122-3
_suction_, 134, 173_n._
_suffering_, 110
_sugar_, 120_n._
_superstitious_, 143
_supper_, 41
_susceptible_, 160
_swain_, 160
_swallow_, 21
_swine_, 41
_Sybarite_, 26
_syllogism_, 94
_sympathy_, 126
_synchronize_, 150
_synonym_, 94
_synthesis_, 91, 94
_syrup_, 34
_system_, _-atic_, 91, 163
_Table_, 31
_taboo_, 59
_tabor_, 34
‘_Taffy_,’ 38
_take_, 40, 138
_talc_, 34
_talent_, 192-3
_tambourine_, 34
_tartar_, 126
_tattoo_, 59
_tawdry_, 64
_teacher_, 85-6
_teetotal_, 64
_temper_, _-ament_, _-ature_, 125, 127, 148, 155, 157
_temple_, 38, 78
_tendency_, 123, 148
_tension_, 5, 148, 155
_term_, 119
_termagant_, 121_n._
_terminal_, 5
_terrorize_, 62
Tertullian, 109-10
_test_, 126
_testament_, 47
Teutonic—race, etc., 14, 17, 20-1, 29, 30-2, 35-9, 74-5, 81-3, 87,
119, 173_n._
_theatre_, 25
_their_, 39
_them_, 39
_theology_, 90
_theory_, 90-1
_they_, 39
Thomson, James, 163
_thrash_, 65
_throne_, 61
_throstle_, 21
_thunder_, 18
_Thursday_, 81
_timber_, 18
Time, 148-52
Tindale, 115, 142
_titanic_, 77
_tobacco_, 58
_toll_, 31
_tomahawk_, 59
_tomato_, 58
_tone_, 90
_tory_, 60
_tower_, 42
_trade-union_, 67
_tragedy_, 25
_transcend_, 123
_travesty_, 145
_tribulation_, 27
_Trojan_, 23
_troll_, 81
_trope_, 90
_trumpet_, 30
_tryst_, 56
_Tuesday_, 75
Tyndall, 167
_type_, 90-1
_tyrant_, 26
_Unction_, 179
_universal_, 95, 120, 123
_up_, 131
_utilitarian_, 67
_Vacuum_, 90
_valve_, 173_n._
_vapours, the_, 157
_vampire_, 83
_vandal_, 34
_variation_, 174
_veal_, 41
Vedic hymns, 9
_vegetarian_, 182
_Vesta_, 78
_vibrate_, _-ion_, 168, 171
_vindictive_, 143
Virgin Mary, 106, 115-16, 139
_virtual_, 95
_virtue_, 159
_viscount_, 41
_vital_, 125
_Vitalism_, 181
_volatile_, 148
Voltaire, 61, 68
_voluntary_, 156
_vote_, 67
Vulgate, 109, 191
_Wall_, 31
_wand_, 18, 198
_want_, 40
War, the European, 23, 63
_war_, 42
_waterproof_, 66
_weary_, 30
_weave_, 16
_wedge_, 169
_Wednesday_, 81
_weight_, 131
_West Indies_, 58
_wheel_, 17, 169
_Whig_, 60
_whisky_, 66
_white feather_, 56
Wilkins, Bishop, 131_n._, 169
Wilson, Woodrow, 63, 173-4
_wind_, 18, 37
_window_, 17
_wine_, 31
_wipe_, 65
_wire_, 5
_wit_, 8
Word, the, 101-2, 104, 174_n._, 202
_word_, 71
Wordsworth, 32_n._, 183, 199, 200, 203
_work_, 167, 172
_worry_, 56
_wrong_, 40
Wycherley, 145, 147
Wyclif, 52, 123, 157, 179_n._
_Yoke_, 17
_York_, 37
Young, Edward, 158, 199
_Zareeba_, 63
_zenith_, 128-9
_zero_, 121
_zodiac_, 128-30
_zone_, 16
Zoroastrianism, 76
N.B.—Words printed in italics in the Index will be found italicized
in the text also, unless the page-number is between brackets.
This signifies that on the page in question the word is used or
referred to _incidentally_, and may or may not be typographically
distinguished.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
PRINTERS, LONDON AND WOKING
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See p. 126.
[2] The linear writing of Cretan inscriptions has been pointed to
by one writer as a sign of this passivity. Philologists have also
pointed out the important position occupied by the verb in Aryan
speech.
[3] Gaul was inhabited by Celts at least as early as the third
century B.C. The _Galli_, against whom Caesar fought, were Celtic
tribes.
[4] Greek ‘hippos’; Lithuanian ‘asva’, etc.
[5] Greek ‘turos’, from which was formed ‘bouturon’ (butter).
[6] σήματα λυγρά.
[7] The modern sense of ‘a small room at the top of the house’
goes back to the time when _Attic_ was also used of architectural
refinements, especially that which is achieved by placing a smaller
order above a larger one.
[8] But with a good deal of the Celt in us. There is no exact
correspondence between language and blood, the one being a measure of
an intellectual, the other of a more directly spiritual heritage. Cf.
the influence of the Celts upon the _meanings_ of Romance words, pp.
32, 79, 107, 189.
[9] Students of the Wordsworthian theory of poetic diction will be
interested to learn that the origin of this curious word is believed
to be a Late Latin phrase, ‘romanice loqui,’ meaning ‘to speak the
vulgar Latin of everyday life, as distinguished from book-Latin.’
[10] _Bigot_, which is found in French as early as the twelfth
century, has been connected with _Visigoth_, but this derivation is
not regarded as probable.
[11] See p. 31.
[12] These Normans, or _North-men_, were the descendants of a
Teutonic Danish tribe, which had taken possession of Normandy about a
hundred and fifty years before.
[13] See p. 31.
[14] At least down to the fourteenth century. Even in Milton’s time
it was the language of international scholarship.
[15] Latin ‘capitalis’ from ‘caput’—a head, and thus “the status of
Roman citizenship”. Under the old Roman law each citizen was assessed
according to the number of beasts which he possessed. Thus, the word
_cattle_ is also derived, through French, from ‘capitalis’. Compare
the derivation of _pecuniary_ from ‘pecus’—a head of cattle, and
_fee_ from Old English ‘feoh’ (cattle).
[16] First found with the meaning of _Sunday_ in an edict of the Long
Parliament.
[17] Two of the words quoted are first found, according to the
_Oxford Dictionary_, in Sir Thomas More, one (_apostrophe_) in the
text and the other in the title of his _Apologie of Syr Thomas More,
Knyght_, “made by him, after he had geven over the Office of Lord
Chancellor of Englande.” It is not surprising that the creator of a
European success like _Utopia_ should have had a fine taste in real
Greek words too.
[18] A corrupted form of ‘al-lagarto’—‘the lizard’.
[19] See p. 47, note.
[20] See p. 136.
[21] See p. 126.
[22] There is as yet no satisfactory word in English to express quite
what is meant. The German ‘Weltanschauung’ (world-outlook) is nearer
to it. If, however, the word _consciousness_ is taken not simply in
its finite sense, as ‘the opposite of unconsciousness’, but rather
as including a man’s whole awareness of his environment, the sum
total of his intellectual and emotional experiences as an individual,
perhaps it may serve.
[23] See p. 3.
[24] Like _consciousness_, this word must be taken here in its very
widest, metaphorical sense, as of a human ego “looking out” upon
the world through the windows of memory, recognition, the senses,
etc., and of the cosmos which it “sees” through those windows. It
is obvious that the _outlook_ of every individual will be slightly
different from that of every other, also that there will be a great
difference between the average _outlook_ of broad contemporary
classes, such, for instance, as learned and ignorant, artist and
scientist, agnostic and Roman Catholic. The widest gulf of all
is likely to be that between the average outlooks of different
historical periods, and this will be increased if we are dealing with
different races—such as, for example, ancient Egyptians and modern
Americans—for in this case the dissimilarity will extend over nearly
every experience of which the human _outlook_ is composed.
[25] We may compare, unless we are enthusiastic naturalists, the
enormously different impression made upon ourselves by two such
outwardly similar creatures as a cockroach and a ladybird.
[26] P. 109. The Temple scenes in Mozart’s _Magic Flute_ are a
Freemason’s attempt to depict the proceedings within an Egyptian
Mystery School, and the opera itself is plainly a fanciful treatment
of the drama of initiation. (Incidentally, the noises made by
Papageno when he attempts to sing with the padlock on his lips are
an excellent illustration of the possibly natural origin of the root
‘mu-’ in ‘mu-ein’.)
[27] This word has been used by English writers in various
ways—generally as a synonym for _universe_. Of late, however, there
has perhaps been a slight tendency to differentiate it by making it
mean the universe _as seen and felt by a particular individual or
body of individuals_—‘the cosmos of our experience.’ This distinction
appears to be a fruitful one and will be adopted here. As the words
are used in this book, therefore, we should say that there is only
one _universe_, but as many _cosmoses_ as there are individuals.
In this way the word _cosmos_ becomes a sort of tool with which we
can detach, and objectify for the purpose of inspection, the purely
subjective _consciousness_ or _outlook_ (see pp. 72 and 73, notes).
[28] See p. 8.
[29] It is curious how many of these would-be precise terms have
since reversed their meanings. For the adjective derived from
_subject_ see p. 159; _virtual_, which was once allied with
_potential_ as the opposite of _actual_, is now practically a synonym
for the latter term; and the Greek word from which _instance_ is
taken was originally an objection to an argument, not an example of
it.
[30] The striking exception is the fifth-century philosopher,
Democritus, who definitely foreshadowed the Atomic Theory and,
in fact, gave to the word _atom_ its modern meaning. With his
exclusively _quantitative_ explanation of all phenomena, he was
far more “scientific,” in the now accepted sense of the word than
Aristotle.
[31] Matchless.
[32] Chose.
[33] Forgave.
[34] Stands.
[35] Birds.
[36] More direct products of the Crusades may be found in our
language in the words _azure_, _cotton_, _orange_, _saffron_,
_scarlet_, _sugar_ and _damask_ (from the town of Damascus), all of
which come to us either from Arabic or, through Arabic, from some
Oriental language. _Miscreant_ (misbeliever) was applied to the
Mohammedans by the French Crusaders. _Assassin_ (hashish-eaters) was
used by the Christians to describe the secret murderers sent out by
the Old Man of the Mountains against their leaders, because they
used to intoxicate themselves with hashish before the interview.
_Hazard_—originally a game played with dice—has been traced to
Asart, the name of a castle in Palestine, during the siege of which
it is said to have been invented; and _termagant_ was first used in
medieval romances as the name of one of the idols which the Saracens
were supposed to worship.
[37] In many cases, such as “the _premises_,” _predicament_,
_non-entity_, ... these austere old words have acquired colloquial
meanings a long way removed from the exact philosophical thoughts
which they were originally coined to express.
[38] Hence _animal spirits_. It is interesting to observe how this
word, and the phrase, practically reversed their meanings in the
seventeenth century.
[39] “Heaviness or weight is not here considered, as being such a
naturall _quality_, whereby condensed bodies do of themselves _tend
downwards_; but rather as being an affection whereby they may be
measured. And in this sense Aristotle himself referres it amongst the
other _species_ of _quantity_, as having the same proper essence,
which is to be compounded of integrall parts. So a pound doth consist
of ounces....” (Bishop Wilkins: _Mathematicall Magick_, 1648.)
[40] Probably cognate with a Greek verb ‘massein’, meaning ‘to knead’.
[41] “With this kinde of Ballance, it is usuall ... to measure sundry
different gravities.” (_Mathematicall Magick._)
[42] To the ordinary, untrained imagination. Philosophers and
scientists, however, have continued to boggle at this notion of
action at a distance. Thus Leibnitz, shortly after Newton published
his discovery: “’Tis also a supernatural thing that bodies should
_attract_ one another at a distance without any intermediate means.”
And Huxley in 1886, on the terms _atom_ and _force_: “As real
entities, having an objective existence, an indivisible particle
which nevertheless occupies space is surely inconceivable; And with
respect to the operation of that atom, where it is not, by the aid
of a ‘force’ resident in nothingness, I am as little able to imagine
it as I fancy anyone else is.” Hence the invention of a hypothetical
_ether_, in order that space might be supposed filled with a
continuum of infinitely attenuated matter (p. 148). In the world of
scientific theory the question of action at a distance is still, so
it seems, an appetizing bone of contention.
[43] The transition of meaning is beautifully visible in the
following passage from _The Merry Wives of Windsor_:
_Mistress Quickly_: “I never knew a woman so dote upon a man:
surely, I think you have charms, la; yes, in truth.”
_Falstaff_: “Not I, I assure thee: setting the attraction of my
good parts aside, I have no other charms.”
[44] See p. 135.
[45] A meaning which it still retains in stage directions—e.g. “The
curtain rises, _discovering_ N—— seated in an arm-chair”.
[46] See p. 125.
[47] Even gas, though it is an arbitrary creation, was intended by
van Helmont to resemble _chaos_, a Greek word which is derived from a
verb ‘chaskein’, meaning to ‘yawn’ or ‘gape’.
[48] Except in old, particular senses, which they have now lost.
[49] The adjective _self-conscious_ was first used by Coleridge.
[50] First used by Hobbes in 1656.
[51] Thus we still describe certain sums of money as a _duty_ on
goods, or, in Scotland, as a _feu duty_ on land.
[52] A Greek word; literally a mark “stamped” or “impressed” on some
yielding material. Shakespeare used it of handwriting.
[53] See pp. 124 and 155.
[54] See p. 112.
[55] Used once in 1632 of sea-waves.
[56] Its earliest appearance is in Homer’s _Iliad_, where it occurs
twice, and is applied to divine phenomena, viz. the gates of heaven
and the tripod of the god Hephaestus.
[57] The meaning of this metaphor has probably been affected by the
other meaning of _spring_ (as in _well-spring_), but this did not
occur till later.
[58] Not only is the word _pump_ constantly used to describe the
heart’s action, but one must also consider its reaction on the
meaning of older physiological terms such as _valve_. _Pump_, with
the meaning ‘ship’s pump’, is found in English in the fifteenth
century, but in the sense of ‘instrument for raising water’ it is
unknown to the Teutonic languages before the sixteenth century,
though instruments of some sort had been used for that purpose in
classical times. An understanding of the underlying mechanical
principle, however, only developed, as we should expect, in the
seventeenth century, when the words _suction_ and _hydraulic_
appeared in, for instance, Bacon’s writings. Harvey published his
treatise, _De motu cordis e sanguinis_, in 1628.
[59] Especially in conjunction with such epithets as _primeval_ or
_primal_, in which combination these words have frequently been made
to bear a considerable part of the suggestiveness and meaning long
ago worked into such words as _creation_, _mystery_, _sacrament_,
_the Word_, ... (see previous chapters).
[60] See p. 149.
[61] Of English words beginning with ‘iso-‘—a Greek prefix meaning
‘of equal measurement’ (_isosceles_, ‘equal legged’, _isobar_, ‘equal
pressure’, ...), about twelve came in before the nineteenth century,
about seventy in the course of it.
[62] Wyclif had used it in a good sense.
[63] “There is no God—but this is a family secret.”
[64] Huxley, in whose imagination was to some extent epitomized what
was proceeding in varying degrees of intensity in minds all over
Europe, describes Nature as a “materialized logical process”.
[65] _Spiritualist_, however, is found as early as the middle
of the seventeenth century; but it was employed in the sense of
‘fanatical’, etc., or with the more technical meaning of ‘one who
supports ecclesiastical authority’. Its use as a purely philosophical
designation seems to date from about the middle of the nineteenth
century, and the modern “table-rapping” implication is later still.
There is now a tendency to substitute _spiritism_, _spiritist_, ...
in the latter sense.
[66] Both these words referred at the time of their introduction to
the new doctrine that Christ was a purely human figure.
[67] 1820; but _introspection_ was given its modern meaning by Dryden.
[68] Hence the titles of our University Degrees—_Bachelor of Arts_,
_Master of Arts_,...
[69] Poets were regularly called _makers_ in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. “I know not”, says Sidney, “whether by luck
or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him a
‘maker’.”
[70] See pp. 79-80.
[71] See p. 32.
[72] London emporiums even advertise themselves in chatty essays
entitled _The Creative Aspect of a Store_.
[73] _Demon_ is the Greek name for the same being, its present
infernal associations having been merely imported by the hostility
and superstition of early Christianity. Socrates, for instance,
attributed all his wisdom to his ‘daimonion’, and _genius_ must
undoubtedly have been affected by this word through the assiduous
translation of Greek philosophy into Latin which began in the
Augustan period.
[74] A Greek monetary unit.
[75] To the beginning of this period in Germany we owe the word
_aesthetic_, which we take from the German philosopher Baumgarten’s
use of ‘aesthetik’ to describe a “criticism of taste” considered
as part of a complete philosophy. Needless to say, the word chosen
(Greek ‘aisthētos’, ‘perceived by the senses’) bears a relation to
the nature of Baumgarten’s theory.
[76] See p. 118.
[77] Longinus, _On the Sublime_, a treatise which exerted a
remarkable influence on English criticism from the time of Dryden
onwards.
[78] Coleridge: _Biographia Literaria_.
[79] I.e. man’s; the allusion is, of course, to plastic and visual
art.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Footnote [15] is referenced twice from page 47.
Footnote [48] is referenced twice from page 151.
Footnote [59] is referenced twice from page 174.
Footnote [66] is referenced twice from page 183.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg 35: ‘wellnigh spent’ replaced by ‘well-nigh spent’.
Pg 129: ‘are meridans of’ replaced by ‘are meridians of’.
Pg 178: ‘wellnigh bankrupt’ replaced by ‘well-nigh bankrupt’.
Pg 217 Index: ‘mezzotint’ replaced by ‘mezzotinto’.
Pg 219 Index: ‘radiance’ replaced by ‘Radiance’ (first in group ‘R’).
Footnote [58]: ‘contantly used’ replaced by ‘constantly used’.
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