The Most Dangerous Words

The most dangerous words are the ones that you think you understand. This is a trap of old books, where familiar words often hold strange meanings. Sometimes it is not the word, but its definition, that becomes archaic; the definition is discarded, the word acquires new meaning and endures.

It is often possible, when words change meaning, to see the connecting ideas, or to see the definition growing more general or more specific. Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, written in the middle of the fifteenth century, contains an abundance of such changed words. In each following example, I will give the familiar word, the archaic definition, and a quotation demonstrating the old use. All quotations are from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Volume I, published by Penguin Classics in 1986; the archaic definition was usually given in the glossary or footnotes of that book. The editor modernized spelling and punctuation.

1. Maims, wounds. This is a word that has grown more specific, indicating now a certain type of injury rather than injury in general; note as well that it is used, by Malory, as a noun rather than a verb.

“When King Lot had espied King Bors, he knew him well, then he said, ‘O Jehu, defend us from death and horrible maims!’ ”

2. Lightly, quickly. There is an obvious connection between (physical) lightness and swiftness of movement.

“Then the King of the Hundred Knights voided the horse lightly.”

3. Doubt, a fearful thing. There are two possible relations between the modern and archaic definitions. First, doubt breeds fear; second, doubt can itself be a thing to be feared or dreaded.

“Then they went to battle again so marvellously that doubt it was to hear of that battle.”

4. Bounty, excellence. Excellence is a bounty–an abundant amount–of some positive quality. This quotation (spoken by Merlin to King Arthur) is interesting for the idea expressed, too.

“A man of your bounty and noblesse should not be without a wife.”

5. Fault, lack. Even today, every fault is a lack of something, but it has a connotation of guilt, of commission rather than omission.

“I fault fifty [good knights], for so many have been slain in my day.”

6. Careful, mournful. Before its current use as a synonym for a worry, concern, or responsibility, care was a synonym for grief.

“And so he ascended up into that hill till he came to a great fire, and there he found a careful widow wringing her hands and making great sorrow, sitting by a grave new made.”

7. Warn, prevent. When we warn someone, it is to prevent something. The evolution of this word’s meaning is from prevent to attempt to prevent, in a specific way.

“I may not warn people to speak of me what it pleaseth them.”

8. Dissever, distinguish. To distinguish one thing from another is to understand that they are different—separate from each other, in some way. You are, intellectually, splitting them apart. Dissevering them.

“All men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and from a yeoman a villain.”

This final quotation offers a bonus lesson on the evolution of language. “A man of worship” is a man who has worship, in the old sense—honor or worth. Gentleman (man of gentle, or noble, birth), yeoman (freeholder beneath the nobility), and villain (a serf or peasant) are all used according to their original, class definition.

Charles Dickens’ First Drafts

We are reading Dickens’ first drafts.

That is the thought that struck me after reading The Old Curiosity Shop. This novel begins with a peculiarity: an unnamed observer who narrates the story while making no contribution to it and, after three short chapters, completely disappears. He has the decency to say good-bye: “I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.” That is, perhaps, sufficient explanation for his going, but not for his appearing in the first place.

Another character disappears more subtly, and yet rather more notably—Fred Trent, the older brother and moral opposite of Little Nell. Introduced by the vanishing narrator, Trent persisted in the story for perhaps 150 pages longer. He intended, evidently, to be a principal villain. He plotted to get his grandfather’s money, plotted to marry off his sister to his stooge of a friend, plotted to hunt down both relatives when they fled the city. He is attributed with some past entanglement with the young wife of the jealous, malignant Quilp. And it all comes to nothing, and Trent slips off the pages. Dickens remembers him only at the close of the novel, and only to give him a bad, thoroughly unconnected end.

Beyond the characters who disappear are the characters who transform. Dick Swiveller begins the story as nothing more than a fool; he ends as little less than a hero. Kit Nubbles walks into the narrative with “the most comical expression of face;” he “would have amused one anywhere,” and his weekly writing lesson is little more than an occasion to “wallow in blots, and to daub himself with ink up to the very roots of his hair.” From this comical dolt, Kit becomes a well-spoken, upstanding young man who secures a bright future.

Like these two characters, The Old Curiosity Shop developed from inauspicious beginnings to something quite creditable. The first chapter of the story was originally the fourth entry of another series. Titled Master Humphrey’s Clock, the series was a collection of miscellaneous stories and sketches, published in a weekly paper. But Dickens discovered that a miscellany was far less popular, and thus far less profitable, than a novel. He aborted Master Humphrey’s Clock early in its course, and that collection “became one of the lost books of the earth” (as Dickens wrote, with regret that seeps through the ink, in his preface to the 1848 edition of The Old Curiosity Shop). Leaving behind Master Humphrey, Dickens devoted himself to the story of Little Nell, and The Old Curiosity Shop transformed from one item in a collection to a bona fide novel. As Dickens noted—again, in the 1848 preface—the novel “was written and published from week to week, in weekly parts.”

I had known before that Dickens wrote and published weekly; I had even noticed its effects (Pickwick is likewise ennobled over the course of his serial). But The Old Curiosity Shop brought home to me the reality of what Dickens did. The unevenness of the novel is the unevenness of a first draft, when ideas and characters are still nebulous, and would have been smoothed out in a final draft. But there was no final draft. Dickens published as he wrote, and never had the opportunity to revise the parts in view of the whole.

So we read Dickens’ first drafts, and when you realize that, they are all that more impressive.

“God Knows”

[Minnie Louise Haskins wrote “God Knows” in 1907 and published it in 1912. The poem was popularized when King George VI quoted it in his Royal Christmas Message of 1939. A message of peace through faith, “God Knows” brought comfort to a nation plunging into World War II. Terrible things have come, and will come—but God knows, and His will is best. The poem is sometimes called “The Gate of the Year,” but I submit it to the reader under the name given by the author.]

 

‘God Knows’

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way”.
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

So heart be still:
What need our little life
Our human life to know,
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife
Of things both high and low,
God hideth His intention.

God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.

Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.

Contract Signed!

I am pleased to announce that I have signed a book contract with Enclave Publishing. I can’t give much information on the book yet, and the release is some time off—but I am looking forward to sharing this story.

For years, Enclave has been filling the niche of Christian speculative fiction with style, and I am honored to be offered a place among their authors. As the end of 2023 comes fast, I am reflecting on this contract—a source of gratitude for 2023, and of excitement for 2024.

The Quality of Love

When King Lear begins, in the play bearing his name, to realize the truth of his daughters’ love, he exclaims, “Ingratitude! Thou marble-hearted fiend!” Lear rated his daughters repeatedly for their lack of gratitude. He never understood that the quality of his love did not merit any gratitude from his children.

The play opens with Lear dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. Before making the partition, he asks which of them love him most, so that he may give her the greatest part of the kingdom. The older daughters oblige him with hyperbolic speeches. Cordelia, the youngest daughter, tells her father that she does love him, but will give half her love to her husband, and will not “love my father all.” For this response, Lear disowns and disinherits her.

In this one scene, Lear pits his children against each other, to compete for his gifts; extracts professions of love by dangling rewards; and punishes the one child who would not flatter him.

Having driven out one daughter, and given his kingdom to the remaining two, Lear sets the program for the rest of his life: to live with each older daughter a month at a time, bringing with him one hundred knights as his attendants. This went as well as any reasonable person would expect. Goneril, the eldest daughter, is soon complaining to her father of his behavior, and his attendants’ behavior, in her house: “You strike my people; and your disordr’d rabble / Make servants of their betters.” She asks him to reduce his attendants to fifty.

Lear—beginning and ending with a denunciation of his daughter’s ingratitude—calls down vivid curses upon her. He leaves in a rage and goes to Regan, the second daughter. Regan greets him: “I am glad to see your highness.” Lear answers, “If thou shouldst not be glad / I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, / Sepulchring an adultress.” In this, we see another method of Lear’s management of his children—threatened rejection, with insult or injury to another member of the family as well.

When Goneril arrives, a sort of family conference develops. The sisters close ranks—Regan telling Lear that he may stay with her with twenty-five attendants, and Goneril asking him why he needs even five. Lear erupts into incoherent threats: “No, you unnatural hags, / I will have such revenges on you both, / That all the world–I will do such things– / What they are, yet I know not;–but they shall be / The terrors of the earth.” And again he storms out, and no one would imagine that either sister regretted it.

Lear memorably declared that he was a man more sinned against than sinning. There is no doubt that the narrative agrees with him. One senses here a cultural mist. In Shakespeare’s day, the idea of duty or honor owed to a father—and even more to a king—was far more powerful than it is today. Even so, I would not disagree with Lear’s conviction that his daughters had sinned against him. But what is striking is Lear’s conviction of his own guiltlessness.

In truth, Lear’s sins were returning to him. He had attempted to compel his daughters’ love by threats and promises. Naturally, he had compelled only a pretense of love, and that pretense faded as soon as he resigned his power to punish and to reward. His daughters were selfish, but so was the man who had raised them.

Lear called his daughters unnatural because they did not act with what used to be called “natural love.” But Lear was not lovable, and it is not unnatural that his daughters should not love him. You cannot demand, by right or nature, a love that you have never shown.

The Feast of Hallowmas

You can tell the strange disconnect between the holidays of October 31 and November 1 by the fact that the first is popularly called Halloween, and the second All Saints’ Day. Hallowmas and All Hallows’ Day are among the other names for the church feast of November 1, and from these names, of course, Halloween is derived. Yet the holidays have parted ways, and so have their names.

The feast of Hallowmas was founded in honor of all the saints. The holiday’s antecedent was a day of commemoration for the martyrs, later broadened to honor all the saints in Heaven. Saints, as a religious term, has two meanings—first, that of dead Christians canonized by the Church, and sometimes the object of prayer or worship; second, that of all Christians, without qualification. I must note that the Bible uses saints in this second sense.

Because it was established under the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day was probably intended to celebrate saints in the first, qualified definition. Since the Protestant Reformation, some churches have broadened the holiday to commemorate all Christians who have died—who would together be called, in an old phrase, the Church Triumphant. In its broadest sense, Hallowmas is a holiday in which the Church Militant (in the world) honors the Church Triumphant (in Heaven). The only vestige of Hallowmas in Halloween, as it is currently celebrated, is the thought of death.

Some Christians, if belonging to traditions that incorporate All Saints’ Day, remember the recently departed on November 1. Following on that thought, I am going to conclude with a brief verse written by Alfred Tennyson; the friend mentioned is dead, and Tennyson is grieving for him.

 

CXXVI

of In Memoriam A. H.H.

Love is and was my Lord and King,
      And in his presence I attend
      To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.

Love is and was my King and Lord,
      And will be, tho’ as yet I keep
      Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompass’d by his faithful guard,

And hear at times a sentinel
      Who moves about from place to place,
      And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well.

Back

Well, I am back.

I could, I suppose, go over where I have been, or possibly where I am going–but for the moment, I will focus only on where I am.

I am currently reviewing books with Lorehaven. You can find me on the crew manifest, though it would be more interesting to explore the library or podcasts. I’ve also established my own corner on Twitter X Twitter–rather a small corner, but mine (be it ever so humble …).

Announcements to follow, in time. For now, I am going to resume regular, if not frequent, posting; the next post is planned for November 1.

The Principal Point

In a sign that nature is healing, Disney is once again blitzing the world with Marvel content. Disney released the trailers (and dates!) for its Marvel shows that have been coming and coming and may, in 2021, actually arrive. I will focus our attention particularly on the Loki series, it being an incontrovertible truth of modern American culture that the principal point of the Marvel franchise is Loki.

Now, I am not going to fangirl about this. In the first place, I have my dignity. In the second, I have noticed that becoming A Fan is the first step on the road to inevitable disappointment, a lesson constantly reinforced during football season. I will say that the trailer is unexpectedly chaotic and creative. A bit of it (the hooded figure, the battlefield) reminds me of the recent Star Wars films, which were polished, professional, and without inspiration. Most of it makes a better impression than that: kaleidoscopic, energetic, different. You feel that the people making it might actually be having fun.

The trailer is a mishmash of enticing fragments: the crash-land in the desert, post-apocalyptic New York, the mysterious time-control organization. We have a triumphant Avengers-era Loki, gloriously saying Glorious, and the TVA showing Loki his alternate life (and self?). There’s a brilliant suggestion that Loki is D.B. Cooper, and a mystifying shot of Loki surrounded by thugs scraped out of a seedy intergalactic bin and wearing Vote Loki campaign buttons. Between the corruption of democratic politics, and the leprechaunish suit Loki sports, it rather suggests Tammany Hall. The Black Widow seems to make an appearance, in an atmospherically devastated landscape, but probably Disney is just being mean.

Whether all of this comes together in a coherent and satisfying way is still unknown. The chance of emotional depth, and a genuine meaningfulness, is unlikelier yet. Marvel usually has more fun than it does heart, and always more action than it does reflection. I take caution, too, that Disney is capitalizing on the proven popularity of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. When Disney cashes in on past successes, it often does so tediously.

But still: I’m paying attention. I am even – tentatively, when I stop reminding myself of the inevitable road to disappointment – a little excited.

A Thanksgiving Thought

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton turned to fairy-tales for an analogy and made the following remark:

If the miller’s third son said to the fairy, “Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply, “Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.” If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?” If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth.

Chesterton’s point was that you cannot fairly object if a wild, magical gift (like a fairy palace, or life) comes with wild, magical prohibitions – or even mundane prohibitions, like coming home at midnight. But this charge to obey is equally a charge to gratitude. Explain the fairy palace. Explain the magical ball. Explain the gift you have, when you want the universe to explain the gift you don’t have. The grace is as inexplicable as the affliction.

It’s tedious to debate whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. The glass is both, and there is surely a time to regret the emptiness. But there is more often a time to be glad for the fullness. Gratitude and happiness live next door to each other. So be thankful, and be happy.

Two Classics

I read two classics this past summer: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Dostoevsky’s Devils. I was maybe two hundred pages into Devils when I realized, with a measure of surprise, that the book reminded me of Jane Austen. Not the political revolution, of course, or the atheism and murder; the book’s conclusion, in which Dostoevsky briskly mowed down half his cast, shows everything that Dostoevsky is and Jane Austen is not. But even after that bitter end, I am sure: Dostoevsky and Austen are like each other.

The characterization in their novels has a similar texture: at once sharp and deep. Both Dostoevsky and Austen stand outside their characters in their narration, taking the tone of an observer of rare acuity and no inclination to cover over anything. Neither ever saw a fool without observing and declaring the fact. They are unsparing. At the same time, they draw so comprehensive a sketch of their characters that it feels a little like empathy. The fools may have been lampooned, but they were at least understood.

A broader similarity also plays into this likeness in characterization. Austen and Dostoevsky share a keen awareness of the foibles that seam human nature. The ordinary foolishness and common weaknesses of humanity are fully understood by both writers, and finely displayed. Dostoevsky is amused by people behaving absurdly, and Austen is positively delighted. They catch the comedy of foolishness. They catch, with even greater skill, its darkness. In this Dostoevsky is stronger, but Austen captures the same truth, that workaday follies can be both laughable and destructive. They carry, sometimes, a surprising cost.

Most strikingly, Austen and Dostoevsky root their stories in society. In many novels, society – the broader community, with its rules and workings – exists as little more than background. Events play out, and characters live, at a distant remove from the community. There is no sense of what ordinary life might be like. But to read Austen and Dostoevsky is to enter a society. The shibboleths are different than our own, but the organism is the same: the requirements and prohibitions, the expectations and interactions, all the self-conscious fussiness. Austen and Dostoevsky make use of the broad conventions of society, such as who shall marry whom. Their mastery is in how they use the minor conventions. They bring forward the weight of trivialities. It doesn’t matter, really, whether you dance or don’t dance. What matters is what other people make of you for either one.

In Dostoevsky, all these things are shaded more darkly. His psychological portraits sketch the reasons of murderers, his fools descend into wickedness and ruin, his grand ball dissolves in panic as the city catches fire. The similarities between his works and Austen’s are subtle and fascinating. The differences are obvious, and ultimately more important. So profound is the divide that one cannot imagine Austen even touching the subjects that Dostoevsky wrestled. Dickens might have taken up Dostoevsky’s themes, though with far more sentiment and optimism. But if Jane Austen had written about revolution, or moral anarchy, or the psychology of suicide, she would not have been Jane Austen.

And the world would have lost something. One may prefer Jane Austen; one may prefer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Either position is fair. But it is good that Austen was herself, and not Dostoevsky, just as it is good that Dostoevsky was himself, and not Austen. Such is the diversity that makes the world rich.