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.”
[13] Ulhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94.
[17] “Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson.”
He that hath knowledge spareth his words.--PROVERBS XVII, 27.
Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions, and you know him.... He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great or small.--LAVATER.
Words are women; deeds are men.--GEORGE HERBERT.
He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.--RAY.
The old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing three languages that he used to declare that he had three hearts. The Emperor Charles V expressed himself still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility,--left no trace of his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder at his gifts, as we wonder at the Belgian giant or a five-legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions, De Quincey suggests that the following would be an appropriate epitaph for his eminence: “Here lies a man who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,--absconding from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot dictionary.” Enormous, however, as were the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of his acquirements,--priding himself, as he did, less upon his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of a single tongue. “What am I,” said he to a visitor, “but an ill-bound dictionary?” The saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood twenty different languages,--“That’s twenty words for one idea,” said she; “I had rather have twenty ideas for one word.” In this reply she foreshadowed the great error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated man is too often one who knows more of _language_ than of _idea_,--more of the husk than of the kernel,--more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a heap of symbols,--of mere counters,--with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,--paper like bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless in exchange, and repudiated in real traffic. The great scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the spiritual energy that might make him a hero upon the detection of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate word.