It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a man struggles often through his own words, so that even truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said, “makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of reform.”[9] But though the truth often leaks out through the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive, and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the symbols of words, not words as the symbols of things. There is, in short, “a besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man.... Words are able to persuade men out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience.”[10]
All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of the word monomania: “When a _poor_ fellow takes a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called _monomania_.” There is biting satire as well as _naïveté_ and dry humor in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of language; how the same act may be made to appear in wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it. The same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of language. “_Timidus_,” says Seneca, “_se cantum vocat; sordidus parcum_.” Thousands who would shrink back with disgust or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led “first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. A singular but most instructive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “industrious chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poisoning was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was called “succession powder”?