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Leader (1850-1860), 20th September 1851, Edition Country of 2, Page 17

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      Sept. 20, 1851.] &F» * Fltouft* 901

      Sept . , 1851 . ] & f » * fLtOUft * 901

      ^Nrtfalin.

      ^ nrtfalin .

      We Should Do Our Utmost To Encourage The...

      We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautifu for the Useful encourages itself .-GoimiE .

      The Socialists' Apology. Our Name Should...

      THE SOCIALISTS' APOLOGY . Our name should be a name for Hope to utter ; A watchword for the chosen of the land ; A bloodless nation-flag , beneath whose flutter The earnest soldiers of the world should stand : But gentle eyes look doubtingly upon us ; Warmest of hearts are cold if we be mgh ; Softest of voices breathe no whisper of us , Or link it with the sweet condemning sigh . It may be that they read our purpose wrongly , And ere they learn to know them , learn to fear The unresting hands , which silently , but strongly , Carve the broad pathway of the coming year . If ' t is a dream to seek , in bonds unbreaking , To link the many-peopled homes of earth—One God , one Law , one Love , one Worship taking , — Then , statesman , curl the lip in cynic mirth ! If ' t is a crime to ask for youth ' s deep yearning , Access unpurchased to the great old books , Where the soul ' s thirst is slaked with draughts ot learning , — Then , noble , we have earn'd those angry looks ! If it be mad to beg for starving Beauty Some other home than the rude glaring streets ; Some other love than feign'd love ' fearful duty ; Some other bread than that the harlot eats : Look sadly on us , lady ! They wiU borrow Deeds of wild wickedness to lie to thee ; Will stain our fame with many a tale of horror , And treason done to woman ' s majesty . But oh ! believe them not . The deed that frightens Oneblush into thy cheek—the words that shame One tear into the eye which Pity brightens—Is not of us—wears not our holy name . E . Arnold .

      •'Talented" Again! If You Tread On A Man...

      •' TALENTED" AGAIN ! If you tread on a man ' corns , how he cries out ! Not unnaturally ; though to the man of untrodden corns smiling opposite , the incident only forms an agreeable variety of omnibus travelling . By the onslaught upon " talented" I have made many wince and more chuckle . Smith thinks me an " intolerable pedant , " and tells me so ; Brown is " delighted " to see me " slashing " at the vulgarism ! Smith I quietly crush by a quotation from Sophocles : — " 7 . evq yap fA € yot \ -ri <; y \ cD < rcr' / j <; kq ^ ttov ^ vntpexOottpei . ( If I aw a pedant , why should I not fling Greek at him and overwhelm him ? I feel convinced he can ' t translate it , and I won ' t help him . *) You would be quite amused with the " sensation" caused among our readers by this " talented " controversy . The Big-endians and the Littleendians rush into the field , " their souls in arms and eager for the fray ; " some of them forgetting , in their haste , to comply with the fastidious exigencies of syntax and orthography—e ' est si pen de chose ! To print these letters is out of the question : if for no better reason than their number , I should be forced to decline that . But there are two among them of so superior an order that 1 feel our readers would be glad to seo them , and they happen to take opposite sides : — " London , Kcptcinbcr If ) , lHf > l . " I was very glad to nee Mr . Kelly ' s clever and amusing letter ; for I could not by any means agree . with our brilliant friend Vivf , vn in his estimation of tho word talented , nor in his view of the Knglish language generally . It seems to me the very spirit of that language that one word iw to play many parts ; that in particular , verb , noun , mid adjective are to be identical ; although pedantry and timidity haVo prevented the proper development of hucIi tendency . Thus , to love , a constant love ; , n lovo poem ; to paper a room , paper for a room , upnpor-vvar ; t , o water a lily , water for a lily , a water-lily , & e . " This rule I should like to hoc universal , and much extraneous aid to words removed thereby . Why nhould we not way to bright a plate , innti ; ad of to brighten ; a . s / wyj-druught , instead of a sleejnngdniught ; an induce , instead of an induvemenft A 4 favourite aversion' of Vivian is , probably , tho 1 vulgarism' an invite , for mi invitation , and yot an invite seems to mo in tho spirit of Knglish , and an invitation cumbrous and foreign . " Why may we not nay rohu-otto , iiiKteud of otto of * Brown , who is milder ( and on my Hide ) , deserves to have attention paid to liin blunliiiig avovvul that ho hun " forgotten Iuh cliujsioH , " so I will murmur in hit ) car that it meani : — "Jovo enpeoially oau't abide tho bragging of big-tongued oovob . "

      roses ; moon rainbow , instead of lunar rainbow ; gas matter , instead of gaseous matter ; a troop inspect , instead of an inspection of troops ? " By such a plan , words already formed would not so much be destroyed as used less often . We should s ; iy that we had seen a moon-rainbow , and that the rainbow which we saw was lunar ; that gas-matter was foirned , and that the matter which was formed was gaseous . 7 " The instincts of the vulgar in grammar appear to

      me to be generally the truth . One of the most common mistakes amongst * uneducated ' people is , the use of who for whom—they do not in fact recognize the existence of the word whom ; and is not its existence quite against the almost invariable rule of the language which makes accusative the same as nominative ? The countryman ' s ' I like he , and he likes I , ' ought to be as c orrect as the townsman s « You do as is done to you . '

      " The lady in the Pickwick Papers who speaks of another lady * which keeps a mangle , ' is only too correct to be right . She understands that , in English , gender is not discriminated by auxiliary words ; she feels therefore that the use of who for persons and which for things is unenglish—and knowing that one of them , only , should exist , she chooses which . " Is not the frequent error of adjective for adverb significant too ? He runs slow' is more simple than he runs slowly , ' and quite as clear . Why should not the very same word be used to qualify noun and verb : why any distinction between adjective and adverb ? Are not the expressions a slowmoving body , a high-mettled racer , fill high ! to go fast , & c . & c , correct—and , if so , why ?

      " According to my rule , I should say a goodintention man , and that the man was good-intentioned ; a many-head monster , the monster being many-headed , & c . " The use of compound words in English , imitated from the German , is extending , and will extend . How much better ice-cold is than as cold as ice ! " New words are often formed half in jest , and then seriously adopted as expressive and convenient . Vivian says , if * talented , ' why not « geniused ' or « ideaed' ? I will remind him that the word ' ideaed' is already duly formed , and that we owe it to no less an authority than Doctor Johnson . In Boswell ' s Life Johnson speaks of ' wretched , imideaed girls . ' *

      ?• Since pedants and dandies went out of fashion , the upper classes have taken as many words from the lower classes as the lower classes have taken from the upper , and speakers have originated as many new words as writers . The Americans are giving valuable aid to the construction of the English language ; which is a fact not accomplished , but accomplishing . " W . "

      W . has opinions on Language so extremely removed from mine , that I cannot venture to open a discussion here with him , not seeing the limits it would require ; the desire he expresses for a liberal infusion of compound words , more Germanico , is the only point on which we are agreed . Against all the rest I enter a simple protest , and pass on to the second letter : — " Manchester . " Will you allow a very humble philologist , who wnrmly sympathises in your di-like of the epithet 1 talented , ' to give a suggestion towards explaining our common antipathy ? It must be allowed , I think ,

      after reading Mr . Kelly ' s letter , that the objection on the score of imanalogous formation is untenable ; in fact , many of the parallel instances which he so humorously enumerates occurred to me on reading the original article in Fraser ; and on the other hand , the word has apparently been long enough in the language to enable it to plead on its behalf that custom upon winch the arbitrium , et jus , et nornia loquendi , are said to depend . Still 1 hate the word ; perhaps for the same no-reason that Martial hated Sahidius , but not the less fervently on that uccount . An attempt to analj'se my dislike haw , however , led me to suspect that tho cause of offence resides more in the original substantive than its derivative ; and I urn only puz / . lcd by observing that so excellent u judge tin yourself iscema to have no natural nhrinking

      ' ' ' ' ¦ ' from the word ' talent . 1 refer my distaste- lor that unpleasant duosyllabh ; partly to its vagueness and innnpoMitcneus , but principally to its Scriptural origin . The bitter objection seems , to my mind , particularly well founded ; not , of course , that it implies a corresponding antipathy to the Scriptures , but because we know that the most odious people in tho world pride themselves upon drawing as much of their daily language as possible from this source . In fact , there is at least as strong an objection to many words and figures of speech introduced to the language under this disadvantage , as there is to tho cant of tho lawyer or tho critic ; and I have no doubt that yon , and every other honest man of sound tawte , instinctively avoid them a dozen times a day . ? ( July in jeat ; ho never uued the word in writing . — Vivian . b

      " While touching on the purity of English , which you are laudably desirous to maintain , allow me to say that I was thrown , out of my reckoning by seeing in the first line of a letter from Mr . Francis W . Newman , published in your last number , the words •* a mutual friend . " This expression is so often condemned now-a-days , that it would be pedantic to point out wherein its inaccuracy is supposed to consist , in fact it is just the point on which small critics in grammarye' are delighted to catch country gentlemen , and members of

      the old school , tripping . In common , however , with all who have had the rare advantage of being Mr . Newman ' s pupils I can scarcely think it possible for him to have written a barbarism through carelessness , and have been troubling myself to ascertain whether this use of the word mutual ( where no idea of exchange is conveyed ) may be defensible upon any grounds that have not hitherto occurred to me . I have not succeeded , and should be glad to know whether it is worth while pursuing the search any further . Yours obediently , H . M . A . "

      I do not share H . M . A ' s . antipathy to the word " talent "; it has a full weighty sound with it agreeable to my ear , and a meaning- as precise as most metaphorical words . It may be that herein lies my objection to " talented "—viz ., that the beauty of the word talent is destroyed . " A man of talent " flatters the ear , a " talented man " with its tripping flippancy offends the ear j and hence , perhaps , the direct phrase of which " talented man" is the metaphorical , viz ., " a moneyed man "—seems to me perfectly admissible ; the more so because it has the further merit of greater distinctness in marking the idea— " a moneyed man " being somewhat different from " a rich man . "

      Let me , for the sake of its illustrations , recur to W . ' s position respecting the desirableness of the literati borrowing from the vulgar—a Democracy in the Republic of Letters which would need a very refined Congress , or it would end in obliterating the delicacies , the beauties , and the precision of language—that is to say , in ruining language as an instrument of thought . If language were only needed as the telegraph of our ordinary desires , no doubt the vulgar instinct would suffice ; but for Literature , Philosophy , for the higher needs of intellectual life , the careless , haphazard , irregular dashes at expression which the vulgar use , would never suffice .

      I am often interested in tracing the perversions of words , caused by the aforesaid tendency to dash at an expression . Somebody having heard that an offence was aggravated by the abuse which accompanied it , called the next offender " an aggravating person "—the resemblance of " aggravated " to " aggrieved" no doubt facilitating the transmutation . The perversions of pronunciation

      are still more amusing , in all cases the process being one of abbreviation . How soon Omnibus became 'Bus in our hurried mouths . Half our words are usually clipped or blurred , after a little circulation among the busy crowd ; and Alfieri haa an amusing sonnet descriptive of Italian , French , and English in their pronunciation of the word Captain . The Italian , he says , has la cosa e il nome

      grande—II , Capitano ! The Frenchman ( whom he elsewhere describes as screwing up his mouth to speak as if eternally blowing his soujt maiyre ) narrows and degrades it to— L < : Capitnine ! But the hurried Englishman reduces it to its briefest possible form— Ki > n ! The force of abbreviation can no farther go ! I am wrong . It Arts- gone farther . The word Madame has shrivelled into a thickened half of the letter M in the mouths of servants who say " Yes ' in , " for " yes in ' . un , " which is an abbreviation of " yea Madam . " But 1 am wandering from " talented "; the discussion has lasted long enough , and unless some very novel or conclusive suggestion be offered on the subject , the dispute must close here . It is u ( Uiestion of Taste ; if you make Language a question of convenience—if carelessness and ignorance may coin at will—then , of course , we must submit to hear of " talented p ictures , " of " talented novels , " and of '' talented discoveries" until intoxicated by success , our noble Language wallows in mud of such depth that from it wo may expect to hear our most illustrious contributor spoken of aa a talented individual ! Vivian .

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), Sept. 20, 1851, page 17, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_20091851/page/17/