Some years ago the author of the “Biographical History of Philosophy,” in a criticism of a certain public lecturer in London, observed that one of his most marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. “He accepts no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does not in his soul admire. He pretends to be nothing that he is not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it? Oh, if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas,—pretending to admire, pretending to believe, and all in sheer respectability!”

Who does not admire the quality here commended, and yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how few persons is the tongue an index to the heart! What a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of social intercourse! Everybody knows that “How d’ye do?” and “Good morning!” are parroted in most cases without a thought of their meaning, or at least, without any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we secretly detest with “My dear sir,” and at the end subscribe ourselves his “obedient servant,” though we should resent a single word from him which implied a belief in our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a command. But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollowness of which may be excused on the ground that they sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet startling to reflect how large a proportion of human speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words the meaning of which they have never weighed or discriminated, is bad enough; but that they should habitually use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in which man can be placed toward man, that does not call into play more or less of language without meaning. The “damnable iteration” of the lawyer in a declaration of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than is the asseveration of one petitioner that he “will ever pray,” etc., and of another that he “will be a thousand times obliged,” if you will grant his request. Who does not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling kindness done by one person to another often gives occasion on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for words and phrases in which to express his pretended gratitude, while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by having to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently disclaims any merit in the grant, which he really grudged, and will never think of without feeling that he made a great sacrifice.

The secret feeling of many a “public benefactor,” loudly praised by the newspapers, was finely let out by Lord Byron when he sent four thousand pounds to the Greeks, and privately informed a friend that he did not think he could well get off for less. How many wedding and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials and to public enterprises, are made by those who secretly curse the occasion that exacts them! With the stereotyped “thanks” and “grateful acknowledgments” of the shopkeeper all are familiar, as they are with “the last,” the “positively the last,” and the “most positively the very last” appearances of the dramatic stars that shine for five hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As nobody is deceived by these phrases, it seems hypercritical to complain of them, and yet one can hardly help sympathizing with the country editor who scolds a celebrated musician because he is now making farewell tours “once a year,” whereas formerly he made them “only once in five years.” Considering the sameness of shop-keepers’ acknowledgments, one cannot help admiring the daring originality of the Dutch commercial house of which the poet Moore tells, that concluded a letter thus: “Sugars are falling more and more every day; not so the respect and esteem with which we are your obedient servants.” The cant of public speakers is so familiar to the public that it is looked for as a matter of course. When a man is called on to address a public meeting, it is understood that the apology for his “lack of preparation” to meet the demand so “unexpectedly” made upon him, will preface the “impromptu” which he has spent weeks in elaborating, as surely as the inevitable “This is so unexpected” prefaces the reply of a maiden to the long-awaited proposal of marriage from her lover.

Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that cant in them seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find more of it than in books, magazines, and newspapers? How many reasons are assigned by authors for inflicting their works on the public, other than the true one, namely, the pleasure of writing, the hope of a little distinction, or of a little money! How many writers profess to welcome criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe to spite, envy, or jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is intrinsically more deceptive than the multitudinous “we” in which every writer, great and small, hides his individuality,—whether his object be, as Archdeacon Hare says, “to pass himself off unnoticed, like the Irishman’s bad guinea in a handful of halfpence,” or to give to the opinions of a humble individual the weight and gravity of a council? “Who the —— is ‘We’?” exclaimed the elder Kean on reading a scathing criticism upon his “Hamlet”; and the question might be pertinently asked of many other nominis umbrÆ who deliver their vaticinations and denunciations as oracularly as if they were lineal descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. Who can estimate the diminution of power and influence that would result should the ten thousand editors in the land, who now assume a mystic grandeur and speak with a voice of authority, as the organs of the public or a party, come down from their thrones, and exchange the regal “we” for the plebeian and egotistic “I”? “Who is ‘I’?” the reader might exclaim, in tones even more contemptuous than Kean’s. The truth is, “I” is a nobody. He represents only himself. He may be Smith or Jones,—the merest cipher. He may weigh but a hundred pounds, and still less morally and intellectually. He may be diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom Thumb. Who cares what such a pygmy thinks? But “we” represents a multitude, an imposing crowd, a mighty assembly, a congress, or a jury of sages; and we all quail before the opinions of the great “we.” As a writer has well said: “‘We have every reason to believe that beef will rise to starvation prices’ is a sentiment which, when read in a newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach tremble; but substitute an ‘I’ for the ‘we,’ and nobody cares a copper for the opinion. It has been well said that what terrified Belshazzar was the hand on the wall, because he couldn’t see to whom it belonged; and the same may be said of the editorial ‘we.’ It is the mystery in which it is involved that invests it with potency.”

The history of literature abounds with examples of words used almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. There is a time in the history of almost every literature when language apparently loses its vitality, and becomes dead, by being divorced from the living thought that created it. Many of the most effete and worn-out forms of expression, when first introduced, pleased by their novelty, and manifested originality in their inventors; but by dint of continual repetition, the delicate bloom has been rubbed off, and they have lost their power. A great deal of what is preserved in books, and is called fine writing, is made up of these lifeless parts of language, which are like the elements of a decayed and rotten tree, of which the organic form and structure are perfect, but the life of which has departed. It is the outward form of literature without the soul; an abundance of fine writing, but no ideas. It has been truly said that it is amazing to see how much of this dead material is accumulated at the present day; whole books filled to repletion with words without thoughts, standing like dead forests, upright indeed, and regular in form and structure, but presenting no fruit nor verdure, sheltering no life, monuments only of past vitality, and soon to crumble into oblivion. “Wandering through these catacombs of the mind, one meets everywhere with the most admirable ‘styles,’ which, doubtless, when first constructed, were the vehicles of as admirable thought, the fit language of great and stately minds, but which, transported from the past, and made to represent the little and despicable ‘notions’ of their plunderers, become a very mockery.”

Who does not know how feeble and hollow British poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just before the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear in the costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; and dealing with the conventional manners and outside aspects of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the proper haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated into a mere trick of art,—a hand-organ operation, in which one man could grind out tunes nearly as well as another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a perpetually recurring assortment of images, had become so much the traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set himself up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply himself with his stock in trade. The style that prevailed has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell “the Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called the wine “rosy,” sleep “balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen always employ a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express the commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain, almanac name, but always “Phoebus,” or “the orb of day.” The moon was known only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the refulgent lamp of night.” NaÏads were as plenty in every stream as trout or pickerel. If these poets wished to say tea, they would write

Coffee would be nothing less than

A boot would be raised to

A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St. Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and a magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than “Minos” or “Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of a young man’s falling in love, he set himself to relate how Cupid laid himself in ambush in the lady’s eye, and from that fortress shot forth a dart at the breast of the unhappy youth, who straightway began to writhe under his wound, and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile upon him. All women in that golden age were “nymphs”; “dryads” were as common as birds; carriages were “harnessed pomps”; houses, humble or stately “piles”; and not a wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or “Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “a gentle zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the well known lines:

Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Expressing his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of such verse, in which sentiment was so often

he cried:

The charm of Cowper’s letters, acknowledged by all competent judges to be the best in the English language, lies in the simplicity and naturalness,—the freedom from affectation,—by which they are uniformly characterized. Contrasting them with those of Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew Combe observes in a letter to a friend: “Cowper’s letters, to my mind, do far more to excite a deep sense of religion, than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one gives expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feelings which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The other forces in the one topic in all his letters, and lashes himself up to a due fervor of expression, whether the mind wills or not. On one occasion Wilberforce dispatched a very hurried letter on Saturday night, without any religious expressions in it. In the night-time his conscience troubled him so much for the omission, that he could not rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with the piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure from his rule! Only think what a perversion of a good principle this was!”

It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of words of which we have spoken are used most frequently. Sir Henry Wotton long since defined an ambassador as “a gentleman sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country.” In Europe, so indissolubly has diplomacy been associated with trickery, that it is said Talleyrand’s wonderful success with the representatives of foreign courts was owing largely to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody believing it possible that he was striving for that for which he seemed to be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in which he spoke of and dealt with all public matters, completely puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate from diplomacy the mysterious devices that distinguish the hack from the true diplomatist. In the titles and styles of address used by Kings and Emperors, we have examples of cant in its most meaningless forms. One sovereign is His Most Christian Majesty; another, Defender of the Faith, etc. A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue a commission of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his “well-beloved,” though in his heart he detests them.

Everybody knows that George I of England obtained his crown, not by hereditary title, but by an Act of Parliament; yet, in his very first speech to that body, he had the effrontery to speak of ascending the throne of his ancestors. Well might Henry Luttrell exclaim:

So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “wire-pulling,” and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank his fellow-citizens for having sent him there “by their voluntary, unbiased suffrages.” When the patriot, Patkul, was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII of Sweden, the following sentence was read over to him: “It is hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our most merciful sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc. “What mercy!” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the profession of extreme humility by men who are full of pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman Pontiffs styled himself “the servant of the servants of God,” at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing the language of piety and benevolence, especially when about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the Fourteenth’s paroxysms of repentance and devotion were always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots; and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace, and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neighbors. While the French revolutionists were shouting “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed in Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by cartloads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robespierre’s fellow-cutthroats, was the rearing of doves. The contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm of his existence, in consoling him for the wickedness of men. Even when he had reached the height of his “bad preËminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband’s life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel’s tail, he cried out, “Good heavens, Madam! have you no humanity?”

“My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice, many of them would be likely to find their occupation clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of patriotism,—to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down the throats of the people,—that the voters, whom the old party hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch-words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his “head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency.

Offensive as are all these forms of speech without meaning, they are not more so than the hollow language of—strange to say,—some moral philosophers. Many persons have been so impressed by the ethical essays of Seneca, in which he sings the praises of poverty, and denounces in burning language the corruption of Rome and the extortion in the provinces, that they could account for the excellence of these writings only on the theory of a Christian influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul. But what are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading them by the light of the author’s life and character, we find they are only words. A late German historian tells us that the same Seneca who could discourse so finely upon the abstemiousness and contentment of the philosopher, and who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt for earthly things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the four years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of three hundred millions of sesterces,—over fifteen millions of dollars. While writing his treatise on “Poverty,” he had in his house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined wood brought from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost as much as twenty-five, and even seventy thousand dollars. The same Seneca, who denounced extortion with so virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens with the gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who preached so much about purity of morals, was openly accused of adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his pupil Nero into still more shameful practices. He wrote a work upon “Clemency,” yet had, beyond question, a large part of Nero’s atrocities upon his conscience. It was he who composed the letter in which Nero justified before the Senate the murder of his own mother.[13]

Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the stump and platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered so true that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their full meaning. Gradually the terms most vital to belief cease to mean what they meant when first used; the electric life goes out of them; and, for all practical purposes, they are dead. Hence it is that “the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning alive are barely found sufficient to counteract.”[14]

There can be little doubt that many a man whose life is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this day apparently without a thought of their meaning? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing “the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is not weary of the ding-dong of “our Zion” and the solecism of “in our midst”; and who does not long for a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “feel to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” says Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They must ‘improve’ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a ‘prayerful’ way; and so on. A young lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.” The language of prayer, both public and private, being made up more or less of technical expressions, tends continually to become effete. The scriptural and other phrases, which were used with good taste and judgment several generations ago, may have lost their significance to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others which have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it has been truly said, are imperilled by the continued use of conventional phraseology after the life of it has gone out, so that nothing in the real experience of the people responds to it, when they hear it or when they use it. Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,” remarks that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation, and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling; in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded in the blinding influence of this expression, that he exclaimed, ‘O Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes,’ the utterance was forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted, perverted, and abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own element the better.”

Many persons have very erroneous ideas of what constitutes religious conversation. That is not necessarily religious talk which is interlarded with religious phrases, or which is solely about divine things; but that which is permeated with religious feeling, which is full of truth, reverence, and love, whatever the theme may be. Who has not heard some men talk of the most worldly things in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting his whole spiritual being? And who has not heard other men talk about the divinest things in so dry, formal, and soulless a way that their words seemed a profanation, and chilled him to the core? It is almost a justification of slang that it is generally an effort to obtain relief from words worn bare by the use of persons who put neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable of expressing anything real.

When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had recanted, she replied, “No; he has only canted.” Often, when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use language so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm than the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking upon this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of Boston, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant and shams. “There’s Dr. ——,” said he, about the time of the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “who went all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had an intense abhorrence of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was visiting him spent a day in sighing and in begging pardon for his suspirations, saying that they were caused by grief that he had so hard a heart. The great divine bore with him all the first day, but when the lamentations were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said: “Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensating principle, and be thankful and still.” “Compensating principle!” exclaimed the young man; “what can compensate for a hard heart?” “Why, a soft head, to be sure,” said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great provocation. Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A great many men would be positive forces of goodness in the world, if they did not let all their principles and enthusiasm escape in words. They are like locomotives which let off so much steam through the escape valves, that, though they fill the air with noise, they have not power enough left to move the train. There is hardly anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without deeds. “The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest before the enemy; it is well said to him that his courage is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; so much indignation as is expressed has found vent; it is wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.”[15]

It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, “I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,” he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on his cards “J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,” and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief, with the words, “Let us weep.” On the other hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,—to cheat one’s self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of what they felt in other and better years,—above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in the shock of conflict,—they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion commands respect; but intense words should never be used when the religious life is not intense. “Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the ‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has found for itself a vent in words.”[17]

Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied, “I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the gloss off my own impression,—if I have any.”