Part 20 (1/2)
”What have I done for you, England, my England, What is there I would not do, England, my own?
With your glorious eyes austere, As the Lord were walking near, Whispering terrible things and dear, As the song on your bugles blown, England-- Round the world on your bugles blown!”
Words thus become powerful provocatives of emotion.
They become loaded with all the energies that are aroused by the love, the hate, the anger, the pugnacity, the sympathy, for the persons, objects, ideas, a.s.sociated with them. People may be set off to action by words (just as a bull is set off by a red rag), although the words may be as little freighted with meaning as they are deeply weighted with emotion.
Poets and literary men in general exploit these emotional values that cling to words. Indeed, in epithets suggesting illimitable vistas, inexpressible sorrows, and dim-remembered joys, lies half the charm of poetry.
”Before the beginning of years, There came to the making of man, Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a gla.s.s that ran; Pleasure with pain for a leaven, Summer with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from Heaven, And madness risen from h.e.l.l, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath, Night the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Swinburne: _Atalanta in Calydon_ (David Mackay edition), p. 393.]
Swinburne does not, to be sure, give us much information, and what there is is mythical, but he uses words that are fairly alive with suggested feeling.
But this emotional aura in which words are haloed, beautiful though it is in literature, and facile though it makes the communication of common feelings, is a serious impediment in the use of words as effective instruments of communication.
Language oscillates, to speak metaphorically, between algebra and music. To be useful as an instrument of thought it should keep to the prosaic terseness of a telegraphic code. One should be able to pa.s.s immediately from the word to the thing, instead of dissolving in emotions at the a.s.sociations that the mere sound or music of the epithet arouses. Words should, so to speak, tend to business, which, in their case, is the communication of ideas. But words are used in human situations.
And they acc.u.mulate during the lifetime of the individual a great ma.s.s of psychological values. Thus, to take another ill.u.s.tration, ”brother” is a symbol of a certain relations.h.i.+p one person bears to another. ”Your” is also a symbolic statement of a relation. But if a telegram contains the statement ”Your brother is dead,” it is less a piece of information to act on than a deep emotional stimulus to which one responds. Bacon long ago pointed out how men ”wors.h.i.+pped words.” As we shall see presently, he was thinking of errors in the intellectual manipulation of words. Perhaps as serious is the inveterate tendency of men to respond to the more or less irrelevant emotions suggested by a word, instead of to its strict intellectual content. If the emotions stirred up by an epithet were always appropriate to the word's significance, this might be an advantage. But not infrequently, as we shall see immediately, words suggest and may be used to suggest emotions that, like ”the flowers that bloom in the spring,”
have nothing to do with the case.
In practice, political and social leaders, and all who have to win the loyalties and support of ma.s.ses of men have appreciated the use--and misuse--that might be made of the emotional fringes of words. Words are not always used as direct and transparent representations of ideas; they are as frequently used as stimuli to action. A familiar instance is seen in the use of words in advertis.e.m.e.nts. Even the honest advertiser is less interested in giving an a.n.a.lysis of his product that will win him the rational estimation and favor of the reader than in creating in the reader through the skillful use of words, emotions and sympathies favorable to his product.
The name of a talc.u.m powder or tobacco is the subject of mature consideration by the advertising expert, because he knows that the emotional flavor of a word is more important in securing action than its rational significance.[1] ”Ask Dad!
He knows!” does not tell us much about the article it advertises, but it gives us the sense of secure trust that we had as a boy in those mysterious things in an almost completely unknown world which our fathers knew and approved.
[Footnote 1: It has been pointed out that such an expression as ”cellar door,” considered merely from the viewpoint of sound, is one of the most romantically suggestive words in the English language. A consideration of some of the names of biscuits and collars will show a similar exploitation of both the euphony and the emotional fringes of words.]
On a larger scale, in political and social affairs words are powerful provocatives of emotion and of actions, determining to no small degree the allegiances and loyalties of men and the satisfaction and dissatisfactions which they experience in causes and leaders. A word remains the nucleus of all the a.s.sociations that have gathered round it in the course of an individual's experience, though the object for which it stands may have utterly changed or vanished. This is ill.u.s.trated in the history of political parties, whose personnel and principles change from decade to decade, but whose names remain stable ent.i.ties that continue to secure unfaltering respect and loyalty.
In the same way, the name of country has emotional reverberations for one who has been brought up in its traditions.
Men trust old words to which they have become accustomed just as they trust old friends. To borrow an ill.u.s.tration from Graham Wallas, for many who call themselves Socialists, Socialism is something more than
a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working cla.s.ses, the growing social sympathy of many members of all cla.s.ses, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.[1]
[Footnote 1: Wallas: _Human Nature in Politics._ p. 92.]
Rather
the need for something for which one may love and work has created for thousands of workingmen a personified Socialism: Socialism, a winged G.o.ddess with stern eyes and a drawn sword, to be the hope of the world, and the protector of those that suffer.[2]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 93.]
Political leaders and advertising experts, no less than poets, have recognized the importance of the suggestive power of words. Half the power of propaganda lies in its arousing of emotions through suggestion, rather than in its effectiveness as an instrument of intellectual conversion.[3]
[Footnote 3: During the recent Liberty Loan campaigns, for example, when it was of the most crucial practical importance that bonds be bought, the stimuli used were not in the form of reasoned briefs, but rather emotional admonition: ”Finish the lob,” ”Every miser helps the Kaiser,” ”If you were out in No Man's Land.”]
LANGUAGE AND LOGIC. Even where words are freed from irrelevant emotional a.s.sociations, they are still far from being adequate instruments of thought. To be effectively representative, words must be clean-cut and definitive; they must stand for one object, quality, or idea. Words, if they are to be genuine instruments of communication, must convey the same intent or meaning to the listener as they do to the speaker. If the significance attached to words is so vague and pulpy that they mean different things to different men, they are no more useful in inquiry and communication than the shock of random noise or the vague stir and flutter of music. Words must have their boundaries fixed, they must be terms, fixed and stable meanings, or they will remain instruments of confusion rather than communication. Francis Bacon stated succinctly the dangers involved in the use of words:
For men imagine that their reason governs words, whilst in fact words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary these lines, and adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men terminate frequently in mere disputes about words and names, in regard to which it would be better to proceed more advisedly in the first instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitions.
Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the evil ... for they consist themselves of words, and these words produce others....
[Footnote 1: _Novum Organum_. bk. I, aphorism 59.]
If, to take an extreme case, a speaker said the word ”chair,”