Single words too we plagiarise when we use them without realisation and mastery of their meaning.The best argument for a succinct style is this, that if you use words you do not need, or do not understand, you cannot se them well.It is not what a word means, but what it means to you, that is of the deepest import.Let it be a weak word, with a poor history behind it, if you have done good thinking with it, you may yet use it to surprising advantage.But if, on the other hand, it be a strong word that has never aroused more than a misty idea and a flickering emotion in your mind, here lies your danger.You may use it, for there is none to hinder; and it will betray you.The commonest Saxon words prove explosive machines in the hands of rash impotence.It is perhaps a certain uneasy consciousness of danger, a suspicion that weakness of soul cannot wield these strong words, that makes debility avoid them, committing itself rather, as if by some pre-established affinity, to the vaguer Latinised vocabulary.Yet they are not all to be avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on some occult ability in their employer.For every living person, if the material were obtainable, a separate historical dictionary might be compiled, recording where each word was first heard or seen, where and how it was first used.The references are utterly beyond recovery; but such a register would throw a strange light on individual styles.The eloquent trifler, whose stock of words has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would stand denuded of his plausible pretences as soon as it were seen how roguishly he came by his eloquence.There may be literary quality, it is well to remember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has been happily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be.Yet the voice will sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chance listeners, for a genuine utterance of humanity; and the like is true in literature.But writing cannot be luminous and great save in the hands of those whose words are their own by the indefeasible title of conquest.Life is spent in learning the meaning of great words, so that some idle proverb, known for years and accepted perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day, like a blow."If there were not a God," said Voltaire, "it would be necessary to invent him." Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word, but some of those who use it most, if they would be perfectly sincere, should enclose it in quotation marks.Whole nations go for centuries without coining names for certain virtues; is it credible that among other peoples, where the names exists the need for them is epidemic? The author of the ECCLESIASTIAL POLITY puts a bolder and truer face on the matter."Concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity," he writes, "without which there can be no salvation, was there ever any mention made saving only in that Law which God himself hath from Heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God." Howsoever they came to us, we have the words; they, and many other terms of tremendous import, are bandied about from mouth to mouth and alternately enriched or impoverished in meaning.
Is the "Charity" of St.Paul's Epistle one with the charity of "charity-blankets"? Are the "crusades" of Godfrey and of the great St.Louis, where knightly achievement did homage to the religious temper, essentially the same as that process of harrying the wretched and the outcast for which the muddle-headed, greasy citizen of to-day invokes the same high name? Of a truth, some kingly words fall to a lower estate than Nebuchadnezzar.
Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar.It is in this obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called it, that we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our mortal lives.To be overtaken by a master, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured skill and courage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gain fresh confidence from despair.He twines wreaths of the entangling ivy, and builds ramparts of the thorns.He blazes his mark upon the secular oaks, as a guidance to later travellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of mouldering rubbish.There is no sense of cheer like this.Sincerity, clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real and easy.In the light of great literary achievement, straight and wonderful, like the roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments the mind like a riddle.Yet there are the dusky barbarians! - fleeing from the harmonious tread of the ordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass of vulgar sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of low thought.
