Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1663/The Power of Names
From The Spectator.
THE POWER OF NAMES.
The discussion which has been going on as to the royal title seems to be merely a discussion with regard to names, but the intense feeling it has provoked shows clearly that discussions with regard to names are not unfrequently as important as discussions with regard to things,—indeed, are discussions with regard to things in another form. For instance, in this case of India, while the discussion has seemed to be merely whether a title denoting the suzerainty of the queen over the Indian princes should be assumed by her in relation to India, the real point in dispute has probably been this,—whether, by crystallizing into a magnificent addition to the royal title, the queen's style as an Indian potentate, we should not be diverting popular attention from that which is most solid, historic, and enduring in the English throne,—that indeed which is and always must be at the basis of its power in India,—only to fix it on the comparatively accidental prestige that it has acquired in the last few years, by entering into the labours of a great commercial company, which had discovered for itself and utilized the governing capacities of our middle classes. No doubt, the many heroic and unheroic actions which led to the consolidation of our Indian government have altered the meaning attached to all phrases which denote British power, much more than we could easily alter the nature of that power by giving it a false name. Still, that is also possible. You may and often do degrade a thing by misnaming it, as you elevate it by naming it aright. Indeed, for one case in which actions change gradually the meaning of names, there are probably dozens of cases in every nation's history in which names alter more rapidly the drift and tendency of actions, or else so misconstrue them to the imagination, that men do not know them for what they really are. Thus, in relation to any man usually described as a statesmen, or a poet, or a scholar, there are, no doubt, a few cases now and then where what you know of the man helps to give a new and deeper significance to the names by which you describe him, but there are a great many more in which the phrase invests the man with a characteristic which far overshoots anything which you really know of him, and so puts a false image of him in his place in your memory. Every name which is not a depreciated bit of verbal currency, acts either as a ray of light bringing out the true form and colour of the object to which it is applied, or else as a bit of stained glass, which throws upon it an artificial dye not intrinsically belonging to it, but only imputed to it by the imagination of the person who thus attributes it; and in the latter case, the name is clearly a power which disguises the thing, instead of revealing it.
One of the greatest difficulties with which literature has to deal is to appreciate correctly the truth or falsehood in the literary use of names introduced by any great master of names,—like Mr. Carlyle, for instance, who bespangles history with his brilliant little imaginative lamps, sometimes shedding a true white light on the figure which he is contemplating, sometimes, again, wrapping it in the blue, or green, or rose-coloured flame of a Chinese paper lanthorn, and so giving a totally false impression, of the moral complexion at least, of the character delineated. The imagination of vivid minds naturally finds more fault with the inadequacies of language than with its excesses. We are always hearing poets complain of the poverty of words. As Mr. Arnold says of the poet,—
Hardly his voice at its best
Gives you a glimpse of the awe,
The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom,
In the unlit gulf of himself.
But the opposite complaint would be quite as just, and far oftener to the point,—that hardly our life at its best gives us a glimpse of the awe, the vastness, the grandeur, the gloom, which the human imagination has depicted and embodied io words. Realities, no doubt, go far beyond any names we can find for them in one way, but they fall far short of the life we suppose names to express in another way. Thus, to say nothing of the little child who supposed she must get well if the queen kissed her, since clearly she had a notion of queens which is not shared by grown-up people of even the most ignorant class, it is quite certain that almost every one attributes to high rank a sort of interior power and grandeur which it does not and cannot possess, and that most men's imaginations are very much influenced indeed, and very erroneously influenced, by the degree of the rank,—"duke" expressing a much larger amount of inward dignity than "baron," and "empress" a great deal more than "queen." In short, names always overweight the meaning of the thing to which they are applied, in the direction of the particular characteristic to which they specially apply. We forget that kings and queens are in the main men and women, and kings and queens, relatively at least, only to a very slight extent; that "constitutional, thin-lipped Hampden" was a sturdy Englishman in the main, and constitutional or thin-lipped only when you came to define in what it was that he differed from other sturdy Englishmen, like Strafford or Cromwell; that the poetry of love describes only a certain part of certain moods of human life, and leaves undescribed other most important parts even of the same moods, which last often more than neutralize the effect of those parts on which the poet dilates—that, in short, the more expressive a word is for its purpose, the more it diverts the mind from everything in that for which it stands, except the particular quality which it was selected to commemorate. One great reason of the delight which imaginative writers like Carlyle give, is that they make us forget the dim, ungraphic parts of life, and so turn the dull, opaque realities of the world into brilliant transparencies, all of which are vivid as well as visible, and which yet for that very reason are mere aspects, and often, indeed, not the most important, though much the most easily imagined and remembered aspects, of the truth. If we remember rightly Carlyle somewhere describes Paris on one of the nights of the Reign of Terror as "a naphtha-lighted city of the dead, traversed here and there by a flight of perturbed ghosts." Nothing surely could be more graphic, and nothing could give a better impression of the ghastly side of the terror he was trying to depict. But at that moment there must have been tens of thousands in Paris who were occupied "only with their own little domestic troubles and fears, and not with the political and moral convulsions which placed so many in fear of death. And yet language which describes as this does the dismay wrought in a city's closely-knit society by acts of violence, probably comes nearer to representing not only the dominant, but the most important aspect of things in that society, than language usually contrives to approach the external reality it is concerned with,—much nearer, indeed, than names of things and persons derived from the leading characteristic, of such things and persons approach the true description of those things or persons. For the most part, names—and this is especially true of graphic names, which fix on individual peculiarities—are mere buoys floating on the surface of the mind, to mark where a certain group of qualities and characteristics are submerged, like sunken rocks, beneath the particular quality or characteristic which the name conveys; and those who act as if the name conveyed the chief information needed about the things, act just as a sailor would who recognized the buoy, but was not aware that anything more important and formidable lay beneath it. And this is the real power of names over men,—that when applied to conscious beings, they tend, as a rule, to make the character gravitate in the direction of the name. Names often act as promissory notes, which the bearer does all in his power to redeem at maturity. A man of science will think he is bound to show the difference between himself and a man who does not profess to be a man of science; and not unfrequently, in justifying his title to be a man of science, he will do something to render his title to other human or humane qualities which are still more important, ambiguous. A man of the world, in the same way, is very careful not to do anything that will diminish his right to be called a man of the world, and in that anxiety, he may render his right to be called a man of scrupulous equity and sincerity rather doubtful. An acknowledged statesmen is apt to merge private in public duties, and an acknowledged thinker to make all life subservient to the effectiveness of his thoughts. We are swayed,—by pleasant names at all events,—towards the qualities which those names denote, too often to the exclusion of others quite as important, so that the name tends to verify itself, and sometimes even to absorb the man into the characteristic which gives him his name. This, even more than the tendency to mislead those who do not bear, but who only use the name, is the reason why we ought to be so slow to give a new name containing definite moral associations of its own, like "empress" or "emperor,"—which may, in the first instance, mislead those who apply, and finally more or less "educate" those who bear it.