CHAPTER IX PERSONALITY AND REASON Prig. Pressure. Period. Consciousness. Character. WHEN Charles II returned from France to an W England which had long been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of a middleaged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new expressions such as to banter, to burlesque, to ridicule, to prim, travesty, badinage, and, above all, prig, helps to fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the Pilgrim's Progress and the Country Wife. Even to those totally unacquainted with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits; weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to lay a finger on it, for it is a process L in which the question of the meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact, one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the words they must use. "Morality", said the late Sir Walter Raleigh, "colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers of distinction"; and so, when any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words. One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War : Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity: shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness: voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good education lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune. Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must have been at work when silly lost its old meaning of ' blessed'; when demure changed from ' grave' or 'sober' to 'affectedly modest '; and when the kindly officious acquired its modern sense of bustling interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for 'simple' never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a Semitic incubus : on As for sin, let us call it folly and have d until we call it folly we never shall have done conception of sin flatters us grossly. There grandiose in it that cannot but appeal to the c man. That we infinitesimal creatures, scramblin over the face of this minor planet in pursuit of ou aims-that we have it in our power to affront the of the universe is a most preposterous, delightful fanc 148 It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his own list of test words-and the lists themselves, if we were foolish enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is too long to elaborate. Ogle is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration; and at the same time intrigue, which had come into the language earlier in the century in the general sense of intricacy', was seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of polite" society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is also-curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of bearish, countrified, fatuous, flippant, gawky, mawkish, prude, and other such terms. Hoyden was first used of a girl by Wycherley in 1676. But outside the limelit circle this period was one of rapid intellectual development. That the novel interest in the external world, typified in the sixteenth century by such new words as analyse, distinguish, investigate, expanded continuously during the next I See p. 135. in ndred years is suggested by the addition to our vocabulary of inspect, remark, and scrutinize, together with the modern meanings of perception and scrutiny, which had meant up till then respectively 'the collection of rents' and 'the taking of a vote.' We also find a group of new words to describe the inherent conditions and qualities of external objects, such as acid, astringency, cohesion, elasticity, equilibrium, fluid (as a noun), intensity, polarity, pressure, spontaneous, static, temperature, tendency, tension, volatile, besides the physical and impersonal meanings of energy and force. The old verb to discover, which originally signified simply to uncover' or 'reveal,' was used attributively in the sixteenth century of travellers discovering' foreign lands and customs. Shortly after the Restoration the new metaphor, so it would seem, was itself applied metaphorically to the results of a chemical experiment, and in this way the ordinary modern meaning arose. The creation of the new word gas by the Dutch chemist van Helmont marks a definite epoch in the evolution of the scientific outlook. He used it, however, to describe an occult principle-a sort of ultra-rarefied water--which he supposed to be contained in all matter. It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the word acquired its modern meaning of 'matter in the condition of an aeriform fluid', at which time the word gaseous also appeared. Ether (Greek 'aithēr', 'the upper air' above the clouds), which had been practically a synonym for the Aristotelian quintessence 2, was now adopted to express the mechanical substitute for that spiritual medium required by A meaning which it still retains in stage directions-e.g. curtain rises, discovering N― seated in an arm-chair ". * See p. 125: modern science in order to explain the phenomenon of action at a distance. These are among the first attempts which were made to describe the outer world objectively—from its own point of view instead of from the point of view of divinity or of human souls; it is interesting, therefore, to reflect that the success achieved is really only a relative one, as all the words mentioned, with the possible exception of gas,1 are in the first place metaphors drawn from human activities such as those of 'cutting', 'stretching', and 'pulling'. In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its title announced, of "Improving Natural Knowledge," and it is notable that the word improve should have been employed. Originating, as we saw, in Lawyer's French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote merely "the enclosure and cultivation of waste land". So that when we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly. We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet always felt itself to be at Even gas, though it is an arbitrary creation, was intended by van Helmont to resemble chaos, a Greek word which is derived from a verb chaskein', meaning to ' yawn' or ' gape'. |