Parts of Speech: Essays on English

When Taine was praising that earliest of analytical novels, the ‘Princess of Cleves,’ he noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette’s style. “Half of the words we use are unknown to Madame de Lafayette,” he declared. “She is like the painters of old, who could make every shade with only five or six colors.” And he asserts that “there is no easier reading” than this story of Madame de Lafayette’s; “a child could understand without effort all her expressions and all her phrases.... Nowadays every writer is a pedant, and every style is obscure. All of us have read three or four centuries, and three or four literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criticism have weighted us with their discoveries and their jargons.”

This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the strange phenomenons of the nineteenth century was the sudden and enormous swelling of our vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dictionary is even more obvious in English than in French, for there are now three times as many human beings using the language of Shakspere as there are now using the language of Molière; and while the speakers of French are compacted in one country and take their tone from its capital, the speakers of English are scattered in the four quarters of the earth, and they use each man his own speech in his own fashion. From the wider variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be, since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at home.

Perhaps the French are at times even too inhospitable to the foreign phrase. A friend of mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bourget’s ‘Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,’ fresh from the perusal of the German philosophers, told me that he was pained by M. Bourget’s vain effort to express the thoughts the French author had absorbed from the Germans. It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for speech, and could not say what was in his mind for lack of words in his native tongue capable of conveying his meaning. Of course it must be remembered that German philosophy is vague and fluctuating, and that the central thought is often obscured by a penumbra, while French is the most precise of languages. Those who are proud of it have declared that what is not clear is not French. When Hegel was asked by a traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his system of philosophy, he smiled and answered that it could not be explained summarily—“especially in French!”

The English language extends a warmer welcome to the foreign term, and also exercises more freely its right to make a word for itself whenever one is needed. The manufactured article is not always satisfactory, but if it gets into general use, no further evidence is required that it was made to supply a genuine want. Scientist, for example, is an ugly word (altho an invention of Whewell’s), and yet it was needed. How necessary it was can be seen by any reader of the late F. W. H. Myers’s essay on ‘Science and a Future Life,’ who notes that Myers refused resolutely to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning the author wanted, and that the British writer preferred to employ instead the French savant, which does not—etymologically at least—contain his full intention. Myers’s fastidiousness did not, however, prevent his using creationist as an adjective, and also bonism as a substitute for optimism, “with no greater barbarism in the form of the word and more accuracy in the meaning.”

Just as Myers used savant so Ruskin was willing to arrest the rhythm of a fine passage by the obtrusion of two French words: “A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they hold among the national noblesse of words, at any time and in any country.” There seems to be little or no excuse for the employment here of noblesse=nobility; and as for canaille, perhaps Ruskin held that to be a French word on the way to become an English word—a naturalization not likely to take place without a marked modification of the original pronunciation, which is difficult for the English mouth.

Every one who loves good English cannot but have a healthy hatred for the style of a writer who insists on bespattering his pages with alien words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more tolerant, I think, toward a term taken from one of the dead languages than toward one derived from any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop who liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sentence was oversanguine in his explanation that “everybody knows a little Hebrew.” It is said that even a Latin quotation is now no longer certain to be recognized in the British House of Commons; and yet it was a British statesman who declared that, altho there was no necessity for a gentleman to know Latin, he ought at least to have forgotten it.

For a bishop to quote Hebrew is now pedantic, no doubt, and even for the inferior clergy to quote Latin. It is pedantic, but it is not indecorous; whereas a French quotation in the pulpit, or even the use of a single French word, like savant, for example, would seem to most of us almost a breach of the proprieties. It would strike us, perhaps, not merely as a social solecism, but somehow as morally reprehensible. A preacher who habitually cited French phrases would be in danger of the council. To picture Jonathan Edwards as using the language of Voltaire is impossible. That a French quotation should seem more incongruous in the course of a religious argument than a Latin, a Greek, or a Hebrew quotation, is perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that many of us hold the Parisians to be a more frivolous people than the Romans, the Athenians, or the Israelites; and as the essay of Mr. Myers was a religious argument, this may be one reason why his employment of savant was unfortunate.

Another reason is suggested by Professor Dowden’s shrewd remark that “a word, like a comet, has a tail as well as a head.” An adroit craftsman in letters is careful always that the connotations of the terms he chooses shall be in accord with the tone of his thesis. It may be disputed whether savant denotes the same thing as scientist, but it can hardly be denied that the connotations of the two words are wholly different. For my own part, some lingering memory of Abbott’s ‘Napoleon,’ absorbed in boyhood, links the wise men of France with the donkeys of Egypt, because whenever the Mameluke cavalry threatened the French squares the cry went up, “Asses and savants to the center!”

After all, it is perhaps rather a question whether or not savant is now an English noun. There are many French words knocking at the door of the English language and asking for admission. Is littoral for shore now an English noun? Is blond an English adjective meaning light-haired and opposed to brunette? Is brunette itself really Anglicized? (I ask this in spite of the fact that a friend of mine once read in a country newspaper a description of a brunette horse.) Has inedited for unpublished won its way into our language finally? Lowell gave it his warrant, at least by using it in his ‘Letters’; but I confess that it has always struck me as liable to confusion with unedited.

Foreign words must always be allowed to land on our coasts without a passport; yet if any of them linger long enough to warrant a belief that they may take out their papers sooner or later, we must decide at last whether or not they are likely to be desirable residents of our dictionary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we may fairly enough insist on their renouncing their foreign allegiance. They must cast in their lot with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws only. The French chaperon, for example, has asked for admission to our vocabulary, and the application has been granted, so that we have now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller was chaperoned by Becky Sharp at the last ball given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we have even changed the spelling of the noun to correspond better with our Anglicized pronunciation, thus chaperone. Thus technique has changed its name to technic, and is made welcome; so early as 1867 Matthew Arnold used technic in his ‘Study of Celtic Literature,’ but even now his fellow-islanders are slow in following his example. Thus employé is accepted in the properly Anglicized form of employee. Thus the useful clôture undergoes a sea-change and becomes the English closure. And why not cotery also? I note that in his ‘Studies in Literature,’ published in 1877, Professor Dowden put technique into italics as tho it was still a foreign word, while he left coterie in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted into English.

So toilette has been abbreviated to toilet; at least, I should have said so without any hesitation if I had not recently seen the foreign spelling reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant’—and this in the complete Edinburgh edition prepared by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling in the British prose of Stevenson is a surprise, especially since the author of the ‘Dynamiter’ is on record as a contemner of another orthographic Gallicism. In a foot-note to ‘More New Arabian Nights’ Stevenson declares that “any writard who writes dynamitard shall find in me a never-resting fightard.”

I should like to think that the naturalized literator was supplanting the alien littérateur, but I cannot claim confidence as to the result. Literator is a good English word: I have found it in the careful pages of Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’; and I make no doubt that it can prove a much older pedigree than that. It seems to me a better word by far than literarian, which the late Fitzedward Hall manufactured for his own use “some time in the fifties,” and which he defended against a British critic who denounced it as “atrocious.” Hall, praising the word of his own making, declared that “to literatus or literator, for literary person or a longer phrase of equivalent import, there are obvious objections.” Nobody, to the best of my belief, ever attempted to use in English the Latin literatus, altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by his series of papers on the ‘Literati of America.’ Since Poe’s death the word has ceased to be current, altho it was not uncommon in his day.

Perhaps one of the obvious objections to literatus is that if it be treated as an English word the plural it forms is not pleasant to the ear—literatuses. Here, indeed, is a moot point: How does a foreign word make its plural in English? Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing, writing in Harper’s Bazar on the college education of young women, spoke of foci. Mr. Churton Collins, preparing a book about the study of English literature in the British universities, expressed his desire “to raise Greek, now gradually falling out of our curricula and degenerating into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pedants, to its proper place in education.” Here we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins treating focus and curriculum as words not yet assimilated by our language, and therefore required to assume the Latin plural.

Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on the part of these writers? If focus and curriculum are not good English words, what need is there to employ them when you are using the English language to convey your thoughts? There are occasions, of course, where the employment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they must always be very rare. The imported word which we really require we had best take to ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treating it thereafter absolutely as an English word, and giving it the regular English plural. If the word we use is so foreign that we should print it in italics, then of course the plural should be formed according to the rules of the foreign language from which it has been borrowed; but if it has become so acclimated in our tongue that we should not think of underlining it, then surely it is English enough to take an English plural. If cherub is now English, its plural is the English cherubs, and not the Hebrew cherubim. If criterion is now English, its plural is the English criterions, and not the Greek criteria. If formula is now English, its plural is the English formulas, and not the Latin formulæ. If bureau is now English, its plural is the English bureaus, and not the French bureaux.

What is the proper plural in English of cactus? of vortex? of antithesis? of phenomenon? In a volume on the ‘Augustan Age,’ in Professor George Saintsbury’s ‘Periods of European Literature,’ we find lexica—a masterpiece of petty pedantry and of pedantic pettiness. As Landor made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon Hare, “There is an affectation of scholarship in compilers of spelling-books, and in the authors they follow for examples, when they bring forward phenomena and the like. They might as well bring forward mysteria. We have no right to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their grammars: we need no vortices when we have vortexes before us; and while we have memorandums, factotums, and ultimatums, let our shepherd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as have wandered from the flock.”

Landor’s own scholarship was too keen and his taste was too fine for him not to abhor such affectation. He held that Greek and Latin words had no business in an English sentence unless they had been frankly acclimated in the English language, and that one of the conditions of this acclimatizing was the shedding of their original plurals. And that this is also the common-sense view of most users of English is obvious enough. Nobody now ventures to write factota or ultimata; and even memoranda seems to be vanishing. But phenomena and data still survive; and so do errata and candelabra. Whatever may be the fate of phenomena, that of the three other words may perhaps be like unto the fate of opera—which is also a Latin plural and which has become an English singular. We speak unhesitatingly of the operas of Rossini; are we going, in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the candelabras of Cellini? In his vigorous article on the orthography of the French language—which is still almost as chaotic and illogical as the orthography of the English language—Sainte-Beuve noted as a singular peculiarity the fact that errata had got itself recognized as a French singular, but that it did not yet take the French plural; thus we see un errata and des errata.

It is true also that when we take over a term from another language we ought to be sure that it really exists in the other language. For lack of observance of this caution we find ourselves now in possession of phrases like nom de plume and déshabille, of which the French never heard. And even when we have assured ourselves of the existence of the word in the foreign language, it behooves us then to assure ourselves also of its exact meaning before we take it for our own. In his interesting and instructive book about ‘English Prose,’ Professor Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe is not yet an extinct species; and he adds in a note that “the word levée seems to be another genuine instance of the same insular dialect,” since it is not French of any date, but an English improvement upon the verb (or substantive) lever, “getting up in the morning.”

An example even more extraordinary than any of these, I think, will occur to those of us who are in the habit of glancing through the theatrical announcements of the American newspapers. This is the taking of the French word vaudeville to designate what was once known as a “variety show” and what is now more often called a “specialty entertainment.” For any such interpretation of vaudeville there is no warrant whatever in French. Originally the “vaudeville” was a satiric ballad, bristling with hits at the times, and therefore closely akin to the “topical song” of to-day; and it is at this stage of its evolution that Boileau asserted that

Le Français, né malin, créa le vaudeville.

In time there came to be spoken words accompanying those sung, and thus the “vaudeville” expanded slowly into a little comic play in which there were one or more songs. Of late the Parisian “vaudeville” has been not unlike the London “musical farce.” At no stage of its career had the “vaudeville” anything to do with the “variety show”; and yet to the average American to-day the two words seem synonymous. There was even organized in New York, in the fall of 1892, a series of subscription suppers during which “specialty entertainments” were to be given; and in spite of the fact that the organizers were presumably persons who had traveled, they called their society the “Vaudeville Club,” altho no real “vaudeville” was ever presented before the members during its brief and inglorious career. Of course explanation and protest are now equally futile. The meaning of the word is forever warped beyond correction; and for the future here in America a “vaudeville performance” is a “variety show,” no matter what it may be or may have been in France. When the people as a whole accept a word as having a certain meaning, that is and must be the meaning of the word thereafter; and there is no use in kicking against the pricks.

The fate in English of another French term is even now trembling in the balance. This is the word née. The French have found a way out of the difficulty of indicating easily the maiden name of a married woman; they write unhesitatingly about Madame Machin, née Chose; and the Germans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a hint from the French and the Germans, and thus of speaking about Mrs. Brown, born Gray, as they do, not a few English writers have simply borrowed the actual French word, and so we read about Mrs. Black, née White. As usual, this borrowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems to be irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of née by using it in the sense of “formerly.” Thus in the ‘Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88,’ collected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell, the editor supplies in foot-notes information about the persons whose names appear in the correspondence. In one of these annotations we read that the wife of Sir Anthony de Rothschild was “née Louisa Montefiore” (i. 165), and in another that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was “née Annie de Rothschild” (ii. 160). Now, neither of these ladies was born with a given name as well as a family name. It is obvious that the editor has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning of née to suit his own convenience, a proceeding of which I venture to think that Matthew Arnold himself would certainly have disapproved. In fact, I doubt if Mr. Russell is not here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious as that charged against a wealthy western lady now residing at the capital of the United States, who is said to have written her name on the register of a New York hotel thus: “Mrs. Blank, Washington, née Chicago.”

Why is it that the wandering stars of the theatrical firmament are wont to display themselves in a répertoire when it would be so much easier for them to make use of a repertory? And why does the teacher of young and ambitious singers insist on calling his school a conservatoire when it would assert its rank just as well if it was known as a conservatory? What strange freak of chance has led so many of the women who have made themselves masters of the technic of the piano to announce themselves as pianistes in the vain belief that pianiste is the feminine of pianist? How comes it that a man capable of composing so scholarly a book as the ‘Greek Drama’ of Mr. Lionel D. Barnett really is should be guilty of saying that certain declamations in the later theater “were adapted to the style of popular artistes”? And why does Mr. Andrew Lang (in his ‘Angling Sketches’) write about the asphalte, when the obvious English is either asphalt or asphaltum?

And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this dereliction, has no hesitation in objecting to a “delightful grammatical form which closes a scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The author gets his characters off the stage with the announcement: ‘They exit.’ He seems to think that exit is a verb. I exit, he exits, they exit. It would be interesting to learn how he translates exeunt omnes. One is accustomed to ‘a penetralia’ from young lions, and to ‘a strata,’ but ‘they exit’ is original.”

But the verb to exit is not original with the writer in the new rag-bag journal. It has been current in England for three quarters of a century at least, and it can be found in the pages of that vigorously written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trollope’s ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans’ (published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in which she describes how the American women, left alone, “all console themselves together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake, waffle-cake and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.”

The verb to exit, with the full conjugation Mr. Lang thought so strange, has long been common among theatrical folk. The stage-manager will tell the leading lady “You exit here, and she exits up left.” The theatrical folk, who probably first brought the verb into use, did not borrow it from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose; they simply made a verb of the existing English noun exit, meaning a way out. We old New-Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum’s Museum stood at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, remember also the signs which used to declare

and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of the countryman who went wonderingly to discover what manner of strange beast the “exit” might be, and who unexpectedly found himself in the street outside.

The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due to his happening not to recall the fact that exit had become, first, an English noun, and, second, an English verb. When once it was Anglicized, it had all the rights of a native; it was a citizen of no mean country. The principle which it is well to keep in mind in any consideration of the position in English of terms once foreign is that no word can serve two masters. The English language is ever ravenous and voracious; its appetite is insatiable. It is forever taking over words from strange tongues, dead and alive. These words are but borrowed at first, and must needs conform to all the grammatical peculiarities of their native speech. But some of them are sooner or later firmly incorporated into English; and thereafter they must cease to obey any laws but those of the language into which they have been adopted. Either a word is English or it is not; and a decision on this point is rarely difficult.