WORDS.*

WORDS, we are told, are the signs of ideas. This definition at best is faulty, and, in a majority of cases, untrue. Nothing is more common than to see words without any sign of ideas at all. Besides, those who understand the nature of language, and wield uncontrolled dominion over all its powers, have been careful to tell us that the true use of words is not to express but to conceal ideas. Words, moreover, are of such inherent value in themselves, and in the concerns of the world exercise such untrammeled influence, that it is unjust to degrade them from sovereigns into representatives. It would be much more modest for lovers of definition to say, not that words are, but that they should be, the signs of ideas. The moralist is more philosophical. He distinguishes carefully between qualities and their application. He defines the laws of ethics, and informs us that men should obey them, not that they do.

The true ruler of this big, bouncing world is the Lexicon. Every new word added to its accumulated thousands, is a new element of servitude to mankind. We should therefore look sharply at all axioms which seem to fix the signification of these little substantives and sovereigns. The notion that they are the signs of thought can be disposed of without any train of tedious argument; because the originators and de

* American Review, February, 1845.

fenders of that notion are found inconsistent, when we unite any two of their propositions. For instance, the remark is often heard that certain words in certain connections are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Now if words be full of sound, they must necessarily be sound words, and if words are the signs of ideas, sound words must represent sound thoughts. Here is a logical dilemma for these axiomatic gentlemen.

Indeed words, in themselves, are nothing more than "mouthfuls of spoken wind," the sons and daughters of the tongue and lungs. They are hardened into consistency by a process of pens, ink and paper. In this state they take form. But naturally they are immaterial substances like thoughts. The sculptor embodies an idea in marble, and we discriminate between the essence and the form. Why should we not also distinguish between a word printed or written, and a word spoken or conceived-between the body and the soul of an expulsion of air? Words, in truth, are entities, real existences, immortal beings; and though I would not go the whole length of Hazlitt, in saying that they are the only things that live forever, I would vindicate their title to a claim in the eternities of this world, and defend them from the cavils of presumption and ignorance.

Shakspeare, speaking through Lorenzo, regrets with much feeling the thickness of ear which prevents us from drinking in the music of the spheres. But how much more, in a moral and intellectual point of view, should we lament that hard condition of our faculty of hearing, by which we are prevented from enjoying all the sweet noises of the past, and compelled to hear only the harsh gutturals of the present. Every disturbance of the atmosphere, caused by the ejection of a word, does not cease with our perception of it, but is everlastingly active. All around us now are the words of

Noah, and Moses, and Plato, and Socrates, and Shakspeare, and Milton; and if our ears were only delicate enough to convey the sounds into our minds, we might hear, with our outward organ, Plato converse on the soul's immortality, Socrates gravel a sophist with his interrogative logic, Shakspeare sting Ben Jonson or Master Dekkar with a joke worthy of Thersites, and Milton ask Quaker Ellwood to read Homer to him, or rebuke his daughters for unkindness and inattention. The air is a more faithful chronicler of words than books. Every whisper of wickedness, which has fallen from the white lips of a tyrant or murderer, and which has never passed into but one human heart, is still alive in the air, and circling the earth in company with the song of Miriam, and the invectives of Luther, and the low prayer of Ridley, and the scoff of D'Holbach, and the profaneness of Rochester, and the denunciations of Burke. Truly are we surrounded with Voices. The sacredness and awful responsibilities of speech-the latent importance of idle words-consist in their ever present existence. No sound that goes from the lip into the air, can ever die even in a sensual sense, until the atmosphere, which wraps our planet in its huge embrace, has passed into nothingness. Words, then, have a being of their own; they exist after death, or rather they continue to exist after all memory of them has departed from the minds into which they originally entered.

Leaving, however, these lofty notions of words, and coming down to the every-day world of books and men, we observe many queer developments of the cozenage of language. The most fluent men seem the most influential. All classes seem to depend upon words. Principles are nothing in comparison with speech. A politician is accused of corruption, inconsistency, and loving number one more than number ten thousand. Straightway he floods the country with words, an

is honorably acquitted. A gentleman of far-reaching and purse-reaching intelligence concocts twenty millions of pills, and "works" them off to agents, and, in the end, transfers the whole from his laboratory to the stomachs of an injured and oppressed people, by means of-words. Miss A. stabs the spotless name of Mrs. P. with a word-stiletto. The poisonous breath of a venomous fanatic moulds itself into syllables, and, lo! a sect of Christians is struck with leprosy. An author wishes to be sublime, but has no fire in him to give sparkle and heat to his compositions. His ideas are milk and water-logged,-feeble, commonplace, nerveless, witless, and soulless; or his thoughts are ballasted with lead instead of being winged with inspiration. "What shall I do?" he cries, in the most plaintive terms of aspiring stupidity. Poor poetaster! do not despair! take to thy dictionary-drench thy thin blood with gin-learn the power of words. Pile the Ossa of Rant on the Pelion of Hyperbole, and thy small fraction of the Trite shall be exalted to the heights of the Sublime, and the admiring gaze of many people shall be fixed upon it, and the coin shall jingle in thy pocket, and thou shalt be denominated Great! But if thy poor pate be incapable of the daring, even in expression, then grope dubiously in the dismal swamps of verbiage, and let thy mind's fingers feel after spungy and dropsical words, out of which little sense can be squeezed, and arrange the oozy epithets and unsubstantial substantives into lines, and out of the very depths of Bathos, thou shalt arise a sort of mud-Venus, and men shall mistake thee for her that rose from the sea, and the coin shall still clink in thy fob, and thou shalt be called Beautiful! Such is the omnipotence of words! They can exalt the little; they can depress the high; a ponderous polysyllable will break the chain of an argument, or crack the pate of a thought, as a mace or a

battle-axe could split the crown of a soldier in the elder time.

To cover a man with contempt or obloquy, it is only ne cessary to apply to him some catchword of theology or politics. Society will say with the sagacious Polonius, that such a word is good or bad, and judge of the living noun by the character of verbal tin-pail, that wit or malice has appended to its tail. A man or woman, who has had certain impertinent or degrading adjectives applied to his or her name, will feel their sting and rattle long after they have been proved false and malignant. "A person with a bad name is already half hanged," saith the old Proverb.

Words are most effective when arranged in that order which is called style. The great secret of a good style, we are told, is to have proper words in proper places. To marshal one's verbal battalions in such order, that they may bear at once on all quarters of a subject, is certainly a great art. This is done in different ways. Swift, Temple, Addison, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Burke, are all great generals in the discipline of their verbal armies, and the conduct of their paper wars. Each has a system of tactics of his own, and excels in the use of some particular weapon. The tread of Johnson's style is heavy and sonorous, resembling that of an elephant or a mail-clad warrior. He is fond of levelling an obstacle by a polysyllabic battering-ram. Burke's words are continually practising the broad-sword exercise, and sweeping down adversaries with every stroke. Arbuthnot "plays his weapon like a tongue of flame." Addison draws up his light infantry in orderly array, and marches through sentence after sentence, without having his ranks disordered or his line broken. Luther is different. His words are "half-battle ;"" his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter." Gibbon's legions are