Parts of Speech: Essays on English

Plutarch tells us that the tragedian Æsopus, when he spoke the opening lines of the ‘Atreus,’ a tragedy by Attius,

I’m Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops’ crown.
As far as Helle’s sea and Ion’s main
Beat on the Isthmus,

entered so keenly into the spirit of this lofty passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave who approached too near to the person of royalty; and Professor Tyrrel notes how these verses affect us with “the weight of names great in myth-land and hero-land,” and he suggests that they produce “a vague impression of majesty,” like Milton’s

Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban,
Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric’s shore,
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia.

It is a question how far the beauty of the resonant lines of the ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus, where the news of the fall of Troy is flashed along the chain of beacons from hilltop to promontory, is due even more to the mere sounds of the proper names than it is to the memories these mighty names evoke. Far inferior to this, and yet deriving its effect also from the sonorous roll of the lordly proper names (which had perhaps lingered in the poet’s memory ever since the travels of his childhood), is the passage in the ‘Hernani’ of Victor Hugo, when, the new emperor ordering all the conspirators to be set free who are not of noble blood, the hero steps forward hotly to declare his rank:

Puisqu’il faut être grand pour mourir, je me lève.
Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
M’a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
Marquis de Mouroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j’ignore le compte.
Je suis Jean d’Aragon, grand maître d’Avis, né
Dans l’exil, fils proscrit d’un père assassiné
Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille!

Lowell, after telling us that “precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain any more than we can describe a perfume,” proceeds to point out that it is a prosaic passage of Drayton’s ‘Polyolbion’ which gave a hint to Wordsworth, thus finely utilized in one of the later bard’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’:

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again;
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn, far into the clear blue sky,
Carried the Lady’s voice,—old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet;—back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

Not a little of this same magic is there in many a line of Walt Whitman; especially did he rejoice to point out the beauty of Manahatta:

I was asking something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

Longfellow has recorded his feeling that

The destined walls
Of Cambalu and of Cathain Can

(from the eleventh book of ‘Paradise Lost’) is a “delicious line.” Longfellow was always singularly sensitive to the magic power of words, and not long after that entry in his journal there is this other: “I always write the name October with especial pleasure. There is a secret charm about it, not to be defined. It is full of memories, it is full of dusky splendors, it is full of glorious poetry.” And Poe was so taken with the melody of this same word that in ‘Ulalume’ he invented a proper name merely that he might have a rime for it:

It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid-region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

The charm of these lines is due mainly to their modulated music, and to the contrast of the vowel sounds in Auber and Weir, just as a great part of the beauty of Landor’s exquisite lyric, ‘Rose Aylmer,’ is contained in the name itself. Is there any other reason why Mesopotamia should be a “blessed word,” save that its vowels and its consonants are so combined as to fill the ear with sweetness? Yet Mr. Lecky records Garrick’s assertion that Whitefield could pronounce Mesopotamia so as to make a congregation weep. And others have found delight in repeating a couplet of Campbell’s:

And heard across the waves’ tumultuous roar
The wolfs long howl from Oonalaska’s shore—

a delight due, I think, chiefly to the unexpected combination of open vowels and sharp consonants in the single Eskimo word, the meaning of it being unknown and wholly unimportant, and the sound of it filling the ear with an uncertain and yet awaited pleasure.

Just as Oonalaska strikes us at once as the fit title for a shore along which the lone wolf should howl, so Atchafalaya bears in its monotonous vowel a burden of melancholy, made more pitiful to us by our knowledge that it was the name of the dark water where Evangeline and Gabriel almost met in the night and then parted again for years. Charles Sumner wrote to Longfellow that Mrs. Norton considered “the scene on the Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each other, so typical of life that she had a seal cut with that name upon it”; and shortly afterward Leopold, the King of the Belgians, speaking of ‘Evangeline,’ “asked her if she did not think the word Atchafalaya was suggestive of experience in life, and added that he was about to have it cut on a seal”—whereupon, to his astonishment, she showed him hers.

It would be difficult indeed to declare how much of the delight our ear may take in these words—Atchafalaya, Oonalaska, Mesopotamia,—is due simply to their own melody, and how much to the memories they may stir. Here we may see one reason why the past seems so much more romantic than the present. In tales of olden time even the proper names linger in our ears with an echo of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” Here is, in fact, an unfair advantage which dead-and-gone heroes of foreign birth have over the men of our own day and our own country. “If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment,” said Emerson in his essay on ‘Heroism,’ and he added that the first step of our worthiness was “to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times.” And he asks, “Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves the names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if we hurry a little, we may come to learn that here is best.... The Jerseys were honest ground enough for Washington to tread.”

Emerson penned these sentences in the first half of the nineteenth century, when we Americans were still fettered by the inherited shackles of colonialism. Fifty years after he wrote, it would have been hard to find an American who thought either Boston Bay or Massachusetts a paltry place. And Matthew Arnold has recorded that to him, when he was an undergraduate, Emerson was then “but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away; but so well he spoke that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar.”

As for the Connecticut River, had not Thoreau done it the service Irving had rendered long before to the Hudson?—had he not given it a right to be set down in the geography of literature? It is well that we should be reminded now and again that the map which the lover of letters has in his mind’s eye is different by a whole world from the projection which the school-boy smears with his searching finger, since the tiny little rivers on whose banks great men grew to maturity, the Tiber and the Po, the Seine and the Thames, flow across its pages with a fuller stream than any Kongo or Amazon. And on this literary map the names of not a few American rivers and hills and towns are now inscribed.

It is fortunate that many of the American places most likely to be mentioned in the poetic gazetteer have kept the liquid titles the aborigines gave them. “I climbed one of my hills yesterday afternoon and took a sip of Wachusett, who was well content that Monadnock was out of the way,” wrote Lowell in a letter. “How lucky our mountains (many of them) are in their names, tho they must find it hard to live up to them sometimes! The Anglo-Saxon sponsor would Nicodemus ’em to nothing in no time.” It will be pitiful if the Anglo-Saxons on the Pacific coast allow Mount Tacoma to be Nicodemused to Mount Rainier, as the Anglo-Saxons of the Atlantic coast allowed Lake Andiatarocte to be Nicodemused into Lake George. Fenimore Cooper strove in vain for the acceptance of Horicon as the name of this lovely sheet of water, which the French discoverer called the Lake of the Holy Sacrament.

Marquette spoke of a certain stream as the River of the Immaculate Conception, altho the Spaniards were already familiar with it as the River of the Holy Spirit; and later La Salle called it after Colbert; but an Algonquin word meaning “many waters” clung to it always; and so we know it now as the Mississippi. The Spaniard has been gone from its banks for more than a hundred years, and the Frenchman has followed the Indian, and the Anglo-Saxon now holds the mighty river from its source to its many mouths; but the broad stream bears to-day the name the red men gave it. And so also the Ohio keeps its native name, tho the French hesitated between St. Louis and La Belle Rivière as proper titles for it. Cataraqui is one old name for an American river, and Jacques Cartier accepted for this stream another Indian word, Hochelaga, but (as Professor Hinsdale reminded us) “St. Lawrence, the name that Cartier had given to the Gulf, unfortunately superseded it.”

Much of the charm of these Indian words, Atchafalaya, Ohio, Andiatarocte, Tacoma, is due no doubt to their open vowels; but is not some of it to be ascribed to our ignorance of their meanings? We may chance to know that Mississippi signifies “many waters” and that Minnehaha can be interpreted as “laughing water,” but that is the furthermost border of our knowledge. If we were all familiar with the Algonquin dialects, I fancy that the fascination of many of these names would fade swiftly. And yet perhaps it would not, for we could never be on as friendly terms with the Indian language as we are with our own; and there is ever a suggestion of the mystic in the foreign tongue.

We engrave Souvenir on our sweetheart’s bracelet or brooch; but the French for this purpose prefer Remember. “The difficulty of translation lies in the color of words,” Longfellow declared. “Is the Italian ruscilletto gorgoglioso fully rendered by gurgling brooklet? Or the Spanish pojaros vocingleros by garrulous birds? Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds; and to the Italian and Spanish ear the English words may seem equally beautiful.”

After the death of the Duke of Wellington, Longfellow wrote a poem on the ‘Warden of the Cinque Ports’; and to us Americans there was poetry in the very title. And yet it may be questioned whether the Five Ports are necessarily any more poetic than the Five Points or the Seven Dials. So also Sanguelac strikes us as far loftier than Bloody Pond, but is it really? I have wondered often whether to a Jew of the first century Aceldama, the field of blood, and Golgotha, the place of a skull, were not perfectly commonplace designations, quite as common, in fact, as Bone Gulch or Hangman’s Hollow would be to us, and conveying the same kind of suggestion.

We are always prone to accept the unknown as the magnificent,—if I may translate the Latin phrase,—to put a higher value on the things veiled from us by the folds of a foreign language. The Bosporus is a more poetic place than Oxford, tho the meaning of both names is the same. Montenegro fills our ears and raises our expectations higher than could any mere Black Mountain. The “Big River” is but a vulgar nickname, and yet we accept the equivalent Guadalquivir and Rio Grande; we even allow ourselves sometimes to speak of the Rio Grande River—which is as tautological as De Quincey declared the name of Mrs. Barbauld to be. Bridgeport is as prosaic as may be, while Alcantara has a remote and romantic aroma, and yet the latter word signifies only “the bridge.” We can be neighborly, most of us, with the White Mountains; but we feel a deeper respect for Mont Blanc and the Weisshorn and the Sierra Nevada.

Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily to force them into an imported falsehood. Elberon, where Garfield died, was founded by one L. B. Brown, so they say, and the homely name of the owner was thus contorted to make a seemingly exotic appellation for the place. And they say also that the man who once dammed a brook amid the pines of New Jersey had three children, Carrie, Sally, and Joe, and that he bestowed their united names upon Lake Carasaljo, the artificial piece of water on the banks of which Lakewood now sits salubriously. In Mr. Cable’s ‘John March, Southerner,’ one of the characters explains: “You know an ancestor of his founded Suez. That’s how it got its name. His name was Ezra and hers was Susan, don’t you see?” And I have been told of a town on the Northern Pacific Railroad which the first comers called Hell-to-Pay, and which has since experienced a change of heart and become Eltopia.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a thirst for self-improvement raged among the villages of the lower Hudson River, and many a modest settlement thought to better itself and to rise in the world by the assumption of a more swelling style and title. When a proposition was made to give up the homely Dobbs Ferry for something less plebeian, the poet of ‘Nothing to Wear’ rimed a pungent protest:

They say “Dobbs” ain’t melodious;
It’s “horrid,” “vulgar,” “odious”;
In all their crops it sticks;
And then the worse addendum
Of “Ferry” does offend ’em
More than its vile prefix.
Well, it does seem distressing,
But, if I’m good at guessing,
Each one of these same nobs
If there was money in it,
Would ferry in a minute,
And change his name to Dobbs!

That’s it—they’re not partic’lar
Respecting the auric’lar
At a stiff market rate;
But Dobbs’s special vice is
That he keeps down the prices
Of all their real estate!
A name so unattractive
Keeps villa-sites inactive,
And spoils the broker’s jobs;
They think that speculation
Would rage at “Paulding’s Station,”
Which stagnates now at “Dobbs.”

In the later stanzas Mr. Butler denounces changes nearer to New York:

Down there, on old Manhattan,
Where land-sharks breed and fatten,
They wiped out Tubby Hook.
That famous promontory,
Renowned in song and story,
Which time nor tempest shook,
Whose name for aye had been good,
Stands newly christened “Inwood,”
And branded with the shame
Of some old rogue who passes
By dint of aliases,
Afraid of his own name!

See how they quite outrival
Plain barn-yard Spuyten Duyvil
By peacock Riverdale,
Which thinks all else it conquers,
And over homespun Yonkers
Spreads out its flaunting tail!

No loyal Manhattaner but would regret to part with Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers and Harlem, and the other good old names that recall the good old Dutchmen who founded New Amsterdam. Few loyal Manhattaners, I think, but would be glad to see the Greater New York (now at last an accomplished fact) dignified by a name less absurd than New York. If Pesth and Buda could come together and become Budapest, why may not the Greater New York resume the earlier name and be known to the world as Manhattan? Why should the people of this great city of ours let the Anglo-Saxons “Nicodemus us to nothing,” or less than nothing, with a name so pitiful as New York? “I hope and trust,” wrote Washington Irving, “that we are to live to be an old nation, as well as our neighbors, and have no idea that our cities when they shall have attained to venerable antiquity shall still be dubbed New York and New London and new this and new that, like the Pont Neuf (the new bridge) at Paris, which is the oldest bridge in that capital, or like the Vicar of Wakefield’s horse, which continued to be called the colt until he died of old age.”

Whenever any change shall be made we must hope that the new will be not only more euphonious than the old, but more appropriate and more stately. Perhaps Hangtown in California made a change for the better many years ago when it took the name of Placerville; but perhaps Placerville was not the best name it could have taken. “We will be nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the old world or in the new,” wrote Matthew Arnold when he was declaring the beauty of Celtic literature; “and when our race has built Bold Street in Liverpool, and pronounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlantic, and builds Nashville and Jacksonville and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs of Providence in an incomparable manner.” In this sentence the criticism cuts both British habits and American. Later in life Matthew Arnold sharpened his knife again for use on the United States alone. “What people,” he asked, “in whom the sense for beauty and fitness was quick, could have invented or tolerated the hideous names ending in ville—the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles—rife from Maine to Florida?”

Now, it must be confessed at once that we have no guard against a thrust like that. Such names do abound and they are of unsurpassed hideousness. But could not the same blow have got home as fatally had it been directed against his own country? A glance at any gazetteer of the British Isles would show that the British are quite as vulnerable as the Americans. In fact, this very question of Matthew Arnold’s suggested to an anonymous American rimester the perpetration of a copy of verses, the quality of which can be gaged by these first three stanzas:

Of Briggsville and Jacksonville
I care not now to sing;
They make me sad and very mad—
My inmost soul they wring.
I’ll hie me back to England,
And straightway I will go
To Boxford and to Swaffham,
To Plunger and Loose Hoe.

At Scrooby and at Gonerby,
At Wigton and at Smeeth,
At Bottesford and Runcorn,
I need not grit my teeth.
At Swineshead and at Crummock,
At Sibsey and Spithead,
Stoke Poges and Wolsoken
I will not wish me dead.

At Horbling and at Skidby,
At Chipping Ongar, too,
At Botterel Stotterdon and Swops,
At Skellington and Skew,
At Piddletown and Blumsdown,
At Shanklin and at Smart,
At Gosberton and Wrangle
I’ll soothe this aching heart.

To discover a mote in our neighbor’s eyes does not remove the mote in our own, however much immediate relief it may give us from the acuteness of our pain. When Matthew Arnold animadverted upon “the jumbles of unnatural and inappropriate names everywhere,” he may have had in mind the most absurd medley existing anywhere in the world—the handful of Greek and Roman names of all sorts which was sown broadcast over the western part of New York State. Probably this region of misfortune it was that Irving was thinking about when he denounced the “shallow affectation of scholarship,” and told how “the whole catalog of ancient worthies is shaken out of the back of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, and a wide region of wild country is sprinkled over with the names of heroes, poets, sages of antiquity, jumbled into the most whimsical juxtaposition.”

Along the road from Dublin, going south to Bray, the traveler finds Dumdrum and Stillorgan, as tho—to quote the remarks of the Irish friend who gave me these facts—a band of wandering musicians had broken up and scattered their names along the highway. For sheer ugliness it would be hard to beat two other proper names near Dublin, where the Sallynoggin road runs into the Glenageary.

It may be that these words sound harsher in our strange ears than they do to a native wonted to their use. We take the unknown for the magnificent sometimes, no doubt; but sometimes also we take it for the ridiculous. To us New-Yorkers, for instance, there is nothing absurd or ludicrous in the sturdy name of Schenectady; perhaps there is even a hint of stateliness in the syllables. But when Mr. Laurence Hutton was in the north of Scotland some years ago there happened to be in his party a young lady from that old Dutch town; and when a certain laird who lived in those parts chanced to be told that this young lady dwelt in Schenectady he was moved to inextinguishable laughter. He ejaculated the outlandish sounds again and again in the sparse intervals of his boisterous merriment. He announced to all his neighbors that among their visitors was a young lady from Schenectady, and all who called were presented to her, and at every repetition of the strange syllables his violent cachinnations broke forth afresh. Never had so comic a name fallen upon his ears; and yet he himself was the laird of Balduthro (pronounced Balduthy); his parish was Ironcross (pronounced Aron-crouch); his railway-station was Kilconquhar (pronounced Kinŏcher); and his post-office was Pittenweem!

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotchman who had changed his point of view more often than the laird of Balduthro; he had a broader vision and a more delicate ear and a more refined perception of humor. When he came to these United States as an amateur immigrant on his way across the plains, he asked the name of a river from a brakeman on the train; and when he heard that the stream “was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.”

And then Stevenson breaks from his narrative to sing the praises of our place-names. The passage is long for quotation in a paper where too much has been quoted already; and yet I should be derelict to my duty if I did not transcribe it here. Stevenson had lived among many peoples, and he was far more cosmopolitan than Matthew Arnold, and more willing, therefore, to dwell on beauties than on blemishes. “None can care for literature in itself,” he begins, “who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas.... Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrow-head under a steam-factory, below Anglified New York. The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear; a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.”

As Campbell had utilized the innate beauty of the word Wyoming, so Stevenson himself made a ballad on the dreaded name of Ticonderoga; and these are two of the proper names of modern America that sing themselves. But there is nothing canorous in Anglified New York; there is no sonority in its syllables; there is neither dignity nor truth in its obvious meaning. It might serve well enough as the address of a steam-factory in a business circular; but it lacks absolutely all that the name of a metropolis demands. Stevenson thought that the new Homer would joy in working into his strong lines the beautiful nomenclature of America; but Washington Irving had the same anticipation, and it forced him to declare that if New York “were to share the fate of Troy itself, to suffer a ten years’ siege, and be sacked and plundered, no modern Homer would ever be able to elevate the name to epic dignity.” Irving went so far as to wish not only that New York city should be Manhattan again, but that New York State should be Ontario, the Hudson River the Mohegan, and the United States themselves Appalachia. Edgar Allan Poe, than whom none of our poets had a keener perception of the beauty of sounds and the fitness of words, approved of Appalachia as the name of the whole country.

Perhaps we must wait yet a little while for Appalachia and Ontario and the Mohegan; but has not the time come to dig up that old red arrow-head Manhattan, and fit it to a new shaft?