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:

“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 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:

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:

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!”

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,”—

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 ????, 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 ? for ??, “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,

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 did. The condensed force of interjections,—their inherent expressiveness,—entitles them, therefore, to be regarded as the appropriate language, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the effect of good acting depends largely on the proper introduction and just articulation of this class of words.

Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth except by one who has mastered the whole play. What a profound insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required of him who would adequately utter the word “indeed” in the following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,” says an English writer, “the gist of the chief action of the play, and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be spoken with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic scheme of Iago’s conduct. There is no thought of the grammatical structure of the compound, consisting of the preposition ‘in’ and the substantive ‘deed,’ which is equivalent to ‘act,’ ‘fact,’ or ‘reality.’ All this vanishes and is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.”

The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections, which are used by the orators and poets with great effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the cup of affliction to the very last dregs, Æschylus, in his “Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in which abject misery can be expressed.

The English language is preËminently a language of small words. It has more monosyllables than any other modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly direct and straightforward character, equally removed from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering German. Its fondness for this class of words is even greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,” “beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were, in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the narrowest possible limits,—lopping and condensing, never expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in “gin” for “engine,” “van” for “caravan,” “prentice” for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig” for “periwig”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,” “tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “last” for “latest,” “lark” for “laverock,” “since” for “sithence,” “fortnight” for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for “hlaford,” “morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,” “chirp” for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,” “consols” for “consolidated annuities.” The same abbreviating processes are followed, when English words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable extraneus; “spend” from expendo; “scour” from exscorio; “stop” from obstipo; “funnel” from infundibulum; “ply” from plico; “jetty” from projectum; “dean” from decanus; “count” from computo; “stray” from extravagus; “proxy” from procurator; “spell” from syllabare, etc. Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when converted into English, and their letters changed, transposed, or omitted, but often two English words are clipped and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud” and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and “rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll” comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,” we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive monosyllables the English language manifests the same economy, and forms words of a totally different meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg, big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll, bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight, light, might, night, right, tight,—dash, hash, lash, gash, rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles is rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or algebraic condensation of thought,—a pemmican of ideas. Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown itself in rendering the final e in English always mute. In Chaucer the final e must often be sounded as a separate syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we owe such expressions as “ten o’clock,” instead of “of the clock,” or “on the clock,” and the hissing s, so offensive to foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, th, has given way to s in the third person singular, and en to a single letter in the third person plural.

The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern English, is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the grandest passages in our literature are made up almost exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel, which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest,”—contains seventeen monosyllables to three others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in energetic brevity that which describes the death of Sisera,—“At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down dead”? Here are twenty-two monosyllables to one dissyllable thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any similar passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very large proportion of these touching words are of one or two syllables:—“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places; how are the mighty fallen!... Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offering.... Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.... They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.... How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Occasionally a long word is used in the current version, where a more vivid or picturesque short one might have been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims: “Oh, ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” In one of the older versions “brood” is used in place of “generation,” with far greater effect.

The early writers, the “pure wells of English undefiled,” abound in small words. Shakespeare employs them in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth:

Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the “Thane of Cawdor”:

Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!

Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking of the vanity of “adding house to house and field to field,” has these beautiful lines:

“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same writer, equally musical and equally expressive.

Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account of the journey of the fallen angels:

In what other language shall we find in the same number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell to receive its new possessor:

Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the sentiment that “poetry is the short-hand of thought” is strikingly illustrated:

Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we find anything more perfect than these lines? What a quantity and variety of thought are here condensed into two verses, like a cluster of rock crystals, sparkling and distinct, yet receiving and reflecting lustre by the combination! Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy, grandeur and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine words in these lines, sixty-two are monosyllables.

Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of monosyllables is often the very secret of his charm. It is true that he too frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and outlandish terms, thinking thereby to render his style more gorgeous or grand. But his chief strength lies in his despotic command over the simplest forms of speech. Listen to the words in which he describes the destruction of Sennacherib:

Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are monosyllables; and yet how exquisitely are all these monosyllables linked into the majestic and animated movement of the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more musical and more melancholy than the opening verse of the lines in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land?

Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, “adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one are monosyllables.

How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic music is one of the principal charms:

The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable:

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,—yardlongtailed, like fiends.”

I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident from the passages I have cited, that these Liliputians,—these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary,—play as important a part in our literature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for high treason, he said that he was “the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great family of words.

The class of small words which were once contemptuously called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and modify its ideas,—in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries, and to reason logically,—the microscopic parts of speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary. What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.” When a man half understands the subject of which he speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, use words of “learned length and thundering sound.” But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can understand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it sends its bullets straight to the point.[12] When, after wearily waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp, and stinging terms.

In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five hundred; by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel i, about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,—themselves a happy example of the thing he commends: