Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/256

248 he was trying to depict. But at that moment there must have been tens of thousands in Paris who were occupied "only with their own little domestic troubles and fears, and not with the political and moral convulsions which placed so many in fear of death. And yet language which describes as this does the dismay wrought in a city's closely-knit society by acts of violence, probably comes nearer to representing not only the dominant, but the most important aspect of things in that society, than language usually contrives to approach the external reality it is concerned with,—much nearer, indeed, than names of things and persons derived from the leading characteristic, of such things and persons approach the true description of those things or persons. For the most part, names—and this is especially true of graphic names, which fix on individual peculiarities—are mere buoys floating on the surface of the mind, to mark where a certain group of qualities and characteristics are submerged, like sunken rocks, beneath the particular quality or characteristic which the name conveys; and those who act as if the name conveyed the chief information needed about the things, act just as a sailor would who recognized the buoy, but was not aware that anything more important and formidable lay beneath it. And this is the real power of names over men,—that when applied to conscious beings, they tend, as a rule, to make the character gravitate in the direction of the name. Names often act as promissory notes, which the bearer does all in his power to redeem at maturity. A man of science will think he is bound to show the difference between himself and a man who does not profess to be a man of science; and not unfrequently, in justifying his title to be a man of science, he will do something to render his title to other human or humane qualities which are still more important, ambiguous. A man of the world, in the same way, is very careful not to do anything that will diminish his right to be called a man of the world, and in that anxiety, he may render his right to be called a man of scrupulous equity and sincerity rather doubtful. An acknowledged statesmen is apt to merge private in public duties, and an acknowledged thinker to make all life subservient to the effectiveness of his thoughts. We are swayed,—by pleasant names at all events,—towards the qualities which those names denote, too often to the exclusion of others quite as important, so that the name tends to verify itself, and sometimes even to absorb the man into the characteristic which gives him his name. This, even more than the tendency to mislead those who do not bear, but who only use the name, is the reason why we ought to be so slow to give a new name containing definite moral associations of its own, like "empress" or "emperor,"—which may, in the first instance, mislead those who apply, and finally more or less "educate" those who bear it.

 

epithets which commonly imply the existence of a feeling of slight approval or disapproval in the speaker's mind for the thing named are apt to be used very vaguely, and the term "affected" is no exception to this rule. Some people seem to call anything in another "affected" which they dislike, just as they term anything "nice" which they happen to like. Still even the most foggy minds probably attach some dim connotation to the term affectation, while by some few persons it is always used with a fairly distinct apprehension of its correct meaning. Hence it does not seem to be a hopeless task to attempt to define the term a little more exactly, and to find where its peculiar value as an ingredient of a well-sorted vocabulary really lies. In making this attempt we must obviously have recourse to the Socratic method of definition by an induction of various examples of the well-recognized application of the term.

Affectation is most commonly employed in reference to the details of external behaviour. To take a familiar instance, any trick of bodily gait or of manual or facial movement may be deemed affected. A man may have an affected way of bringing his forefinger to the side of his nose after the foreign manner, or a lady may have a way of seeming to relieve her trachea from some irritant by a characteristic "hm" which strikes us as being affected; or again a young girl may appear to be affected when she gives herself a certain dignity of deportment. Some people are able to keep up an affected condition of behaviour for a considerable period. Thus we know ladies who regularly assume and maintain a curiously unnatural tone of voice when entertaining their male visitors. In such a case as this it obviously requires intimate knowledge and 