Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/255

Rh may and often do degrade a thing by misnaming it, as you elevate it by naming it aright. Indeed, for one case in which actions change gradually the meaning of names, there are probably dozens of cases in every nation's history in which names alter more rapidly the drift and tendency of actions, or else so misconstrue them to the imagination, that men do not know them for what they really are. Thus, in relation to any man usually described as a statesmen, or a poet, or a scholar, there are, no doubt, a few cases now and then where what you know of the man helps to give a new and deeper significance to the names by which you describe him, but there are a great many more in which the phrase invests the man with a characteristic which far overshoots anything which you really know of him, and so puts a false image of him in his place in your memory. Every name which is not a depreciated bit of verbal currency, acts either as a ray of light bringing out the true form and colour of the object to which it is applied, or else as a bit of stained glass, which throws upon it an artificial dye not intrinsically belonging to it, but only imputed to it by the imagination of the person who thus attributes it; and in the latter case, the name is clearly a power which disguises the thing, instead of revealing it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which literature has to deal is to appreciate correctly the truth or falsehood in the literary use of names introduced by any great master of names,—like Mr. Carlyle, for instance, who bespangles history with his brilliant little imaginative lamps, sometimes shedding a true white light on the figure which he is contemplating, sometimes, again, wrapping it in the blue, or green, or rose-coloured flame of a Chinese paper lanthorn, and so giving a totally false impression, of the moral complexion at least, of the character delineated. The imagination of vivid minds naturally finds more fault with the inadequacies of language than with its excesses. We are always hearing poets complain of the poverty of words. As Mr. Arnold says of the poet,— Hardly his voice at its best Gives you a glimpse of the awe, The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom, In the unlit gulf of himself. But the opposite complaint would be quite as just, and far oftener to the point,—that hardly our life at its best gives us a glimpse of the awe, the vastness, the grandeur, the gloom, which the human imagination has depicted and embodied io words. Realities, no doubt, go far beyond any names we can find for them in one way, but they fall far short of the life we suppose names to express in another way. Thus, to say nothing of the little child who supposed she must get well if the queen kissed her, since clearly she had a notion of queens which is not shared by grown-up people of even the most ignorant class, it is quite certain that almost every one attributes to high rank a sort of interior power and grandeur which it does not and cannot possess, and that most men's imaginations are very much influenced indeed, and very erroneously influenced, by the degree of the rank,—"duke" expressing a much larger amount of inward dignity than "baron," and "empress" a great deal more than "queen." In short, names always overweight the meaning of the thing to which they are applied, in the direction of the particular characteristic to which they specially apply. We forget that kings and queens are in the main men and women, and kings and queens, relatively at least, only to a very slight extent; that "constitutional, thin-lipped Hampden" was a sturdy Englishman in the main, and constitutional or thin-lipped only when you came to define in what it was that he differed from other sturdy Englishmen, like Strafford or Cromwell; that the poetry of love describes only a certain part of certain moods of human life, and leaves undescribed other most important parts even of the same moods, which last often more than neutralize the effect of those parts on which the poet dilates—that, in short, the more expressive a word is for its purpose, the more it diverts the mind from everything in that for which it stands, except the particular quality which it was selected to commemorate. One great reason of the delight which imaginative writers like Carlyle give, is that they make us forget the dim, ungraphic parts of life, and so turn the dull, opaque realities of the world into brilliant transparencies, all of which are vivid as well as visible, and which yet for that very reason are mere aspects, and often, indeed, not the most important, though much the most easily imagined and remembered aspects, of the truth. If we remember rightly Carlyle somewhere describes Paris on one of the nights of the Reign of Terror as "a naphtha-lighted city of the dead, traversed here and there by a flight of perturbed ghosts." Nothing surely could be more graphic, and nothing could give a better impression of the ghastly side of the terror