Elfride Swancourt is one of several characters in Hardy’s novels whose lives unfold in the shadow of the railway. Empire had created fresh opportunities for travel, and so now did the steamship and the locomotive. Besides diplomats, natural historians, missionaries and soldiers, there were many travellers who simply craved adventure and the status that came with it. Some of the most audacious were women, like Constance Gordon Cumming, who wandered through Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Fiji, China and Japan, or Isabella Bird, who clambered up Mauna Loa and rode into the Rocky Mountains wearing a pair of baggy Hawaiian trousers.37 Nineteenth-century Americans flocked to Europe, armed with Roswell Park’s A Hand-Book for American Travellers (1853) or, later, Grant Allen’s The European Tour: A Handbook for Americans and Colonists (1899), to soak up what Henry James would call its ‘denser, richer, warmer … spectacle’. Park is quick with words like portmanteau, embarcadère, loggia and vettura, and informs readers that ‘an American may travel on the … mainland of Europe, without knowing aught beforehand of any language save his own.’38 Allen commends Europe’s opportunities for ‘free use of lungs and limbs’ and, while dropping in a few foreign words, strikes a less serious tone, insisting for example that ‘to see Rome before you have seen Florence is a fatal blunder.’39
British travellers could be a pretty dismal bunch, fretting about the real possibility of fatality and the inevitability of blundering. Reeking waterways, pipe smoke, garlic and mosquitoes were common causes of complaint. The caustic Frances Trollope fusses about ‘the want of drains and sewers … [in] all the cities in France’ and the ‘seared and blunted conscience’ of Americans.40 John Henry Newman bemoans the horrors of the Sicilian flea. Matthew Arnold draws from Holland a ‘general impression … of mortal ennui’.41 Shelley agitates about the ‘stupid and shrivelled slaves’he sees walking the streets of Milan, and Algernon Swinburne, bordering on incoherence, characterizes Italy as a ‘leprous, blotched, mangy, grimy, parboiled, country without trees, water, grass, fields – with blank, beastly, senseless olives and orange-trees like a mad cabbage gone indigestible’.42 Diet is a frequent worry. ‘Not uncommonly in southern climes an egg with the shell on is the only procurable animal food without garlic in it,’ writes Thomas King Chambers in 1875.43 A ‘polyglot dialogue book’ aimed at English travellers in the Levant hints at the bilious experiences of those who journeyed there, offering Greek and Turkish equivalents for phrases such as ‘My head aches terribly,’ ‘Your tongue is foul’ and ‘Don’t let me forget to buy some handkerchiefs.’44 The experience of being put in quarantine to prevent the spread of cholera familiarized travellers with the Italian lazaretto, where they might even be fumigated. More agreeably, they grew accustomed to previously unknown conveyances – the britzska, the carriole, the vetturino, the trekschuit.
Books for travellers, explaining where to go and what to take, were in high demand. Long before E. M. Forster satirized Lucy Honeychurch’s craven reliance on Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy, British tourists were subjecting themselves to a compressed and compartmentalized version of the Grand Tour. Travel was regimented – work more than play. The Practical Guide series provided information to tourists about wintering places on the Mediterranean, the Italian lakes, Paris and the Rhine, Switzerland and so on. Travellers were advised ‘not to attempt sentences; but pronounce boldly and baldly the one or two words which mainly imply the meaning’.45 No change there, then. One was, however, allowed to drop into speech such resonantly Continental words as chalet, edelweiss, strudel and contessa, or indeed kursaal and permis de séjour. From more remote climes came troika, tundra and laager. Tundra, for instance, was first attested in 1841; it hails from the language spoken by the Sami people of the Kola Peninsula bordering the Barents Sea.
Writings on art provided a more majestic view of Continental culture. Artistic was a Victorian buzzword, and with it came talk of the artistic temperament as well as the distinction between an artist and that less exalted performer, the artiste.46 Most of the Victorian writing about art happened in periodicals such as Art-Journal and the Illustrated London News. The dominant figure in an age of frequently incompetent and insensitive reviewery (a good Victorian word, coined by Robert Louis Stevenson) was John Ruskin, an exceptional polemicist, who created nothing less than a new way of looking at paintings and buildings.
The aestheticism of Ruskin and Walter Pater had its own analytical language that translated everything the eye could see into a whirl of words. In his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which is barely a history at all, Pater writes a fluid prose that exists to stimulate with its richness. Yet his borrowings are few – ben trovato is the only one of note. By contrast, Ruskin’s writings, which are of a more educational bent, abound with new technical terms, and his tastes are unmistakably classical, as he adopts or confects a great many terms – aesthesis (‘mere sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies’), vaporescence, interfenestral (as in the ‘interfenestral piers’ of an apse in The Stones of Venice), chromolithotint, the Italian scuola and the pseudo-French blottesque. To be educated was to be ‘learned in the peerage of words’, grasping the ramifications of their ancestry and their distant relationships. Art history has embraced this principle. One of the difficulties of writing about art is that, while historians want to enlarge their critical lexicon by finding or making new words, such items are ‘cultural orphans’, dissociated from any proper semantic framework. A description of a painting by Rembrandt will violate our experience of actually looking at the painting.47 In the field of art criticism, sensitivity to the nuances and historical resonances of language has made borrowing at once seductive and troublesome.
New words connected with art included macramé, which was related to an Arabic word for a bedcover, vitrine, trompe l’œil and œuvre. The Encyclopædia Britannica could gamely adopt Sebastiano del Piombo’s notion of Michelangelo’s terribilità – ‘the tempest and hurricane of the spirit which accompanied his unequalled technical mastery and knowledge’. The arts were the field in which Italian was most valued; loans of this period include prima donna, magenta, studio, scenario. Another is graffiti, in 1851; oddly, it was first used in English not of a curse inscribed at Pompeii or the Coliseum, but of a Stone Age runic inscription found in Orkney. At the same time fiasco was adopted; it derived from a word for a bottle, perhaps because glassblowers who made a mess of a delicate piece of work would end up having to turn their creation not into art, but into a mere receptacle. Impressionist art is mentioned by Henry James in 1876, two years after Louis Leroy’s article in Le Charivari which coined the term to insinuate the triviality of Monet, Renoir and Degas. It’s worth adding that individual works of art (and cultural artefacts more generally) have made particular words and phrases well known, and that these can be detached from their original contexts: just as we may know what pietà is without necessarily thinking of Michelangelo, so we can use without recalling their origins such phrases as jeux sans frontières and j’accuse.
The word decadence, which once signified little more than decay, is now at once highly suggestive and vague, suggesting a woolly melodrama of transgression, and this too can be historically located. Until the late nineteenth century the word was not attached to people: things and conditions and the temper of public life might be convicted of decadence, but individuals could not be. The century’s final generation changed this. In 1886 a minor French poet by the name of Anatole Baju founded a magazine called Le Décadent, and in the first issue he trumpeted the emergence of a new type of person – ‘a man of progress’. Surprisingly to us, Baju’s image of decadence was essentially rational – his imagined ‘precursor’ of a brightly decadent future was ‘economical, hard-working and straight in all his habits’ – but others were promoting an image that we will much more easily recognize. While the Marquis de Sade a hundred years before had hinted at a cult of unreason as he commended the extremes of depravity, claiming that true happiness was the
fruit of widespread moral corruption, the 1880s and ‘90s witnessed a flowering of decadent aesthetics. The paintings of Gustave Moreau and the violently expressive prose of Joris-Karl Huysmans made a mixture of lasciviousness and artifice seem the height of glamour. The principal character of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), which has been dubbed the ‘bible of Decadence’, possesses a ‘nervous system altogether modern in its morbid sensitiviness’.48
In the ‘yellow’ 1890s, which seem to have been the first decade identified as having its own peculiar hue, the art of luxurious decay was practised by androgynous young men. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray does likewise: here is a pair of lemon-coloured gloves, here a cigarette laced with opium, here a lamp bedizened with turquoises. Fashionable words associated with this demi-monde (itself a fashionable word, coined by Alexandre Dumas fils) included mystique, ambiance and folie. The phrase fin de siècle became voguish in the century’s final decade. Applied as an adjective, it connoted from the start a welter of unreason and purple excess. Critics used it ominously: participants, excitedly. Entourage meanwhile became increasingly a term associated with artists and intellectuals, as was the less recently adopted coterie, and the dashingly expressive panache first made an appearance in the English translation of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1898.
A less radical arm of the arts was dance, yet this proved an area of sustained eastern-European influence. The minuet was French and graceful, the gavotte French and lively, the waltz German and smooth, the forlana Italian, stately and brisk. Polish forms included the gorlitza, the krakowiak and the redowa, all of which, in common with the forlana, began as folk dances. The country dance known as a mazurka was Polish in origin, and became widely known in western Europe thanks to either German or Russian influence. Another dance, the polka, which originated during the Polish uprising of 1830-31, gained popularity in Bohemia; its name is actually Czech. The csardas was a further style of dance new to Victorian audiences. Hungarian in origin, it provided themes for works by Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and was a courtship dance, though apparently related to the verbunkos, which was used during army recruitment ceremonies. As industrialization squeezed the communities where these folk dances had grown up, admirers began deliberately to conserve them, and conservation systematized the different styles’ gestures and rituals.
Hungarian, Czech and Polish were, to nineteenth-century English-speakers, objects of only mild curiosity, if even that. By contrast, German eminence in the sciences meant that the German language seemed a threat to English, in academic circles at least. As Coleridge’s borrowings have suggested, many important Englightenment ideas were first expressed in German. While ultimately the language of the Germans made a negligible impact beyond their country’s borders, it resonated with intellectuals, who relished its agglutinative nouns, which crisply expressed complex ideas. German compounds are said to be ‘self-explaining’, as Old English was and Modern English frequently isn’t.
The term Zeitgeist was adopted by Matthew Arnold, who first used it in a letter in 1848 and gave it a public airing in Literature and Dogma in 1873. The word was made well known among those of a philosophical bent by Georg Hegel early in the nineteenth century, yet it was still being used only tentatively by English writers in the 1930s. Today, though, it has been freed from its philosophical and poetic moorings: in an episode of Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw is asked to speak to university students taking a course in ‘Cultural Zeitgeist’, and the word is used by Google as an umbrella term for prevailing Internet search trends. It is, quite simply, one of those words that endows an everyday idea with both seriousness and glamour; comparable examples with German backgrounds include ersatz, wanderlust, doppelganger and Kaffeeklatsch. German nouns, as we have already seen, begin with a capital letter: here I have kept the initial capital only for those that still seem resolutely German.
In Britain, German loanwords are often connected with scholarship, outdoor recreation and politics. In the first of these domains a few choice examples are festschrift, the scientist’s ansatz (an assumption made to facilitate the solving of an equation) and the drama student’s Verfremdungseffekt (the Brechtian technique of alienation), the calque animal magnetism from Franz Anton Mesmer’s thierischer Magnetismus, Leibniz’s coinage infinitesimal and the literary-critical Bildungsroman, as well as the much less obvious calque academic freedom. A related example is the Greek ecology, which became known only through an awareness of the work of Ernst Haeckel. In the second category we might readily think of rucksack or to yodel, a number of words to do with climbing and winter sports (abseil, alpenstock, the calque outrun), and several familiar breeds of dog – the rottweiler, for instance, and the dachshund, which was originally favoured for hunting badgers (dachs being the German for ‘badger’). The third, in which I include the language of war, is represented by hinterland, diktat and Marx’s concept of the Lumpenproletariat. Other examples are zeppelin, blitz and flak, alongside the more surprising spanner, which was originally a device to wind up the spring in a firearm. This category also incorporates some lasting calques: power politics is modelled on the German Machtpolitik, while Gastarbeiter is rendered as the only superficially respectful guest worker.
Another area of conspicuous influence is psychology. Some of the terms in this field are quite plainly German: Christian von Ehrenfels’s concept of Gestalt, for instance. Others have classical roots, but were popularized by German-speakers. Thus imago and libido, and thus too the specialized psychological sense of complex, which was coined by Albert Neisser in 1906 and given publicity by Freud, and the Greek-sounding empathy, an English rendering of Theodor Lipps’s notion of Einfühlung. Psychoanalysis itself is a word clearly Greek in origin, but it was Freud who originated this method of treatment and used Psychoanalyse as a more succinct form of Psychische Analyse.49 He also used the word Todeswunsch, which has been rendered in English as deathwish. Yet another borrowing in this field that has found wide use is angst, while Hackliste, originally a term restricted to studies of animal behaviour, is the source of the expressive pecking order.
Not all areas of Germanic achievement made an impression. In the age of Bach (d. 1750), Mozart (d. 1791) and Beethoven (d. 1827), no musical term of note was borrowed from German.50 But then Italian had provided such a wealth of musical terminology that little more was needed. And plenty of other domains were represented. For example, kindergarten was quickly adopted after its coinage by Friedrich Froebel as a name for the activity centre he had set up in 1837. Then there were words to do with religion: papist, which was coined by Luther; selfhood, which is a calque of Jacob Boehme’s Selbheit; and some of the terms introduced in sixteenth-century translations of the Bible, such as mercy seat, which is William Tyndale’s rendering of Luther’s Gnadenstuhl. The negative associations of the noun culture – felt mainly by those who think the word smacks of elitism or chauvinism – stem from a growing sense in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the German notion of Kultur; the English word does not come from German, but Kultur was at once well known and tainted by associations with a nationalist view of German civilization with which few English-speakers felt at ease.
Food and drink also figure – we might think straight away of pretzel, muesli, lager, spritzer and schnapps. Another obvious loan in this area is hamburger, first attested in 1889, although this is really an Americanism on a German model. Frankfurter is an abbreviation of Frankfurter Wurst; along with delicatessen – now usually just deli – it makes an early appearance in Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877), a volume collecting the culinary wisdom of Auguste Kettner, whose Soho restaurant was a favourite haunt of Oscar Wilde. The evidence of delicatessen notwithstanding, we can infer something about the British perception of the German diet – and indeed about the true essence of the German diet – by comparing these rather indelicate borrowings with those words borrowed in this field from Italian or French.
For a perspective on Victorian eating habits, we could do a lot worse than turn to Isabella
Beeton’s famous Book of Household Management. Published in 1861, it drew on received wisdom from Britain, Ireland, France, Italy and Germany. Especially handy was its list explaining French terms – words at once necessary and somewhat unfamiliar – such as bouillon, purée, remoulade and café noir. Mrs Beeton was not the only successful English food writer of her day. Spaghetti, which she defines as ‘a smaller kind of macaroni’, is ‘Naples vermicelli’ in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845).51 At the start of Acton’s bulky volume there is a helpful ‘vocabulary’, explaining what is meant by casserole, meringue, purée and the like, and there is a brief section on ‘Foreign and Jewish Cookery’, which includes recipes for Indian lobster cutlets, kedgeree, various pilaffs (Syrian, Turkish, Arabian, Indian), Milanese risotto, a Swiss mayonnaise, Viennese soufflé, and a German drink made from white wine, orange and woodruff.52 As one history of the period’s language explains, ‘More than any other linguistic community then or earlier, Anglophones in the nineteenth century explored the remotest parts of the globe and encountered new things described in languages new to them’.53
We have touched already several times on food – on the appetites of English-speakers – and on language’s omnivorous capacity. The subject is worth a digression. As we have seen, food has played a significant part in shaping history: our appetites have drawn us into conflict and inspired grand projects of piracy and conquest. In English, the language of food signals both our imperial contacts and our cosmopolitan aspirations, while also testifying to deeper continuities. In recent years travel and culinary evangelism have enlarged our tastes and our knowledge. Even if they are not to your liking, you may well be familiar with harissa from North Africa, Mexican fajitas, pad thai, gyoza, Cypriot halloumi, Cajun jambalaya, raclette from Switzerland, Russian shashlik and zakuski, Japanese edamame, and tabbouleh from the Middle East. Our taste in drinks may be a little less wide-ranging, but we can recognize the different sources from which we get grappa, sake, Eiswein, cognac, tequila, slivovitz and port, and adventurous types may also manage raki, kumis and aguardiente.
The Secret Life of Words Page 35
