CHAPTER IV.

SMALL WORDS.

It is with words as with sunbeams,--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.--SOUTHEY.

Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps splitting itself into halves.--COLERIDGE.

Among the various forms of ingratitude, one of the commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music of our tongue, sneers at them as low:

“While feeble expletives their aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.”

“How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and, truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of such a line as that quoted. “Small words,” he elsewhere says, “are generally stiff and languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of

“---- the ladder Whereto the climber upward turns his face, But when he once attains the utmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.”

The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,--in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,--are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,--the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,--is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’--well might Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what ‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the impregnable fortress,--the very Malakoff of the will; it is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar.”

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most expressive in the language, of which the great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as “the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains that, “because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been suffered to usurp a place among words. “Where will you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; “will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,--namely, the Bible. But the use of this part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.

What word in the English language is fuller of significance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assembly, perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most famous of interjections originated,--we mean the cry of “Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb, is now “nothing more or less than a great historical interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or derision. It has been truly said that when a large assembly is animated by a common sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only through interjections.

Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! “The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word ‘O.’” This “O,” the sign of the vocative, must not be confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by Wordsworth:

“She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be! Now she is in her grave,--and oh! The difference to me.”

What possible combination of words could be more significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s theory, or the contemptuous “Fudge!” with which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs:

“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?”

“Fudge!”

How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What volumes of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying ‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those almost infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of human life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: “‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection of sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as consisting only in the transposition of what is no substantial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath, is our mirth changed to mourning!”

“Nature in many tones complains, Has many sounds to tell her pains; But for her joys has only three, And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he!”

The truth is that, so far is this class of words from being, as Max Müller contends, the mere _outskirts_ of language, they are more truly words than any others. These little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic isles,--these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to all lips, and are understood by all men,--these “silver fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of Tennyson’s, “the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the dictionaries of all races,”--

“The only words Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”--

are emphatically and preëminently language. It is doubtless true that civilization, with its freezing formalities, tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on the other hand, it should be noted, that there are certain interjections which are the fruits of the highest and most mature forms of human culture. Interjections, in truth, are not so much “_parts_ of speech” as entire expressions of feeling or thought. They are preëminently pictorial. If I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,” “beautifully,” without other words or explanatory gestures, I say nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things; but if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or sorrow, surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows at once by what affection I am moved. I communicate a fact by a single syllable. Instead of ranking below other words, the interjection stands on a higher plane, because its significance is more absolute and immediate. Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the natural interjection “ah”! _ach!_ we have the root of a large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as ἄχος, _achen!_ “ache,” “anguish,” “anxious,” _angustus_, and the word “agony” itself. Many words are used interjectionally which are not interjections, such as “Farewell!” “Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbreviated sentences, resembling the Ο for οὐ, “not,” with which the poet Philoxenus is said to have replied in writing to the tyrant Dionysius who had invited him to the court of Syracuse. The true interjection is an apostrophe, condensed into a syllable. It is the effort of Nature to unburden herself of some intense, pressing emotion. It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value till it lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks of certain deeds as “little more than interjections, which give vent to the long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry, and the drama, the interjection plays an important part. Public speakers, especially, find it indispensable to their success. “As the most eloquent men are apt to find their language inadequate to their needs,--as still, after they have exhausted their vocabulary of other words,

‘There hover in these restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best, Which into words no virtue can digest,’

they find great need of the interjection. In their hands it deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense longings, carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities, and expresses the most passionate emotions in the instant of their most overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar with the history of oratory, does not remember instances when these little words, so despised by grammarians, have been more impressive, more to the point, more eloquent than a long speech? The interjections of Whitefield,--his “Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and his “Oh!” of encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted listener,--were words of tremendous power, and formed a most potent engine in his pulpit artillery.[11] Garrick used to say that he would give a hundred guineas if he could say “Oh!” as Whitefield