The notion of genius does not exclude convention, unless the former is understood as a kind of mystical insufflation that comes from outside the linguistic formative process. Maistre decides to isolate the “genius” specific to Greek and to Latin in some morphological characteristics of the two languages, an admissible method, without making any decision as to the precision of the analysis. Thus he observes that in Greek compound words can be formed in which the two parts generate a second meaning, without therewith becoming unrecognizable, whereas Latin tends to shatter the words in such a way that from their fragments, chosen and joined through some unknown and quite singular agglutinations, are born new words of surprising beauty, whose elements are no longer recognizable except to a trained eye (49). But here is the proof:
From these three words, for example, CAro DAta VERmibus they made CADAVER, flesh abandoned to the worms. From the words MAgis and voLO, NOn and voLO, they made MALO and NOLO, two excellent verbs that every language, even Greek, might envy Latin.… The French are not absolutely unacquainted this system. Those who were our ancestors, for example, knew very well how to name theirs by a partial union of the word ANCIien with ÊTRE, just as they made beffroi from Bel EFFROI. See how they worked with the two Latin words DUo and IRE, from which they made DUIRE, going two together, and by a very natural extension, mener, conduire. From the personal pronoun SE, from the relative adverb of place HORS, and the verbal ending TIR, they made S-OR-TIR, that is to say SEHORSTIR, or to put one’s person outside the place where it was, which appears marvelous to me. (49–50)
This passage displays two contradictions. In the first part, the fact that two languages evolved through different morphological rules is, if anything (as we have said), an argument against monogenetism. In the second part, with a specific quotation from Isidore, Maistre tries to play the etymological card. But at least the etymology of the seventeenth-century monogeneticists consisted of showing how the words of each language had developed from a single Hebrew root (the only one, for that matter, to have a presumed “iconic” or motivated relationship with the thing signified). Here, on the contrary, the game consists of demonstrating that within each language, and with quite different mechanisms, compound words can be created whose meanings are born from the sum of the meanings of their simple components, which is what happens in the natural languages when they compose terms like screwdriver, corkscrew, parasol, or when spontaneous agglutinations are born, as in the transformation of Mediolanum into Milan—though, alas, this never happened with the Latin word cadaver. Even if Isidore’s etymology of cadaver were plausible, and even if had the etymology attributed to it by Maistre, this would in no way prove any iconic and motivated relation between simple words and signified reality but rather, if anything, that new coinages are often born from the wordplay typical of the rhetors of decadence and not from an instinctive folk wisdom.
The fact that this aspect could escape Maistre is explained only by the religious—and not linguistic—exigency that he convince his readers (almost pedagogically) that language says originally the Truth. And we sense this from some expressions of outright joy with which he glimpses the action, within every human language, of this impulse to tell always the truth, no matter what: “It is a pleasure to be present, so to speak, at the work of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes you see it struggling against some difficulty that impedes its development: it searches a form that it lacks; its materials resist it; then it will extricate itself from its embarrassment with a happy solecism, and it will say very effectively, ‘Rue passante,’ ‘couleur voyante’ ‘place marchande’ ‘métal cassant,’ etc.” (51).
No objection would be made as to the efficacy of these compounds, were it not for the fact that Maistre is not always fond of compounds (or of the hidden action a language forms in order to mint them), as if a language, in some of its vicissitudes, remained faithful to its own obligation to truth and in other instances degenerated. As examples of degeneration, he cites the fact that already in his own day (and in the St. Petersburg familiar to him) on visiting cards one could find titles such as Minister, Général, Kammerherr, Fräulein, Général-Anchef, Général-Dejourneí, Joustizii-Minister, and that on commercial posters words like magazei, fabrica, meubel, or that in the course of military drills commands were heard such as directii na prava, na leva, deployade en échiquier, en echelon, contre-marche, or that in the army functions should be named haupt-wacht, exercise hause, ordonnance-hause, commisariat, cazarma, canzellari.
Immediately afterward, he mentions terms considered “beautiful, elegant, and expressive” that presumably existed in “your primitive language”: souproug (bridegroom), which precisely means “he who is attached with another to a single yoke,” and he comments that “nothing more correct or more inspired” could have been found, just as “we must admit that the savages or the barbarians who once deliberated to form such nouns surely did not lack refinement” (52).
It is obvious that there is no reason (except the imponderable one of taste) to decide that place marchande is legitimate and contremarche is not. It is unclear why to describe the bridegroom as someone attached to the same yoke (which could be simply a carnival taunt) seems beautiful, whereas it is horrible to give an order for an army to deploy itself like a chessboard (an effective spatial metaphor). Perhaps here Maistre laments only the introduction of barbarisms and therefore the pollution of one language with terms borrowed from another. In any case, he seems to react according to his personal stylistic preferences, “by ear.”
The point is that, if language must be considered the only way to enter into a rapport with the Sacred, every etymology must be “good”; in every metaphor, even the most banal, there should shine a truth, even in screwdriver. Since rue passante is not ancient to belong to the golden age, in recognizing it as an undegenerate expression Maistre is simply privileging the freshness of popular language over that of bureaucratic language. If he were to trace these and other discriminants, he would shift from mystical linguistics to sociolinguistics, an intention that is very far from his mind.
In fact, he returns constantly to the idea that the perfect language is that of the origins:
The formation of the most perfect, the most meaningful, the most philosophic words, in the full force of the term, invariably belongs to the time of ignorance and simplicity. One must add, to complete this great theory, that similarly the name-making talent invariably disappears in the measure that one descends to the epochs of civilization and science. In all the writings of our time on this interesting question, there has been a continuously expressed wish for a philosophic language, but without anyone knowing or even suspecting that the most philosophic language is that in which philosophy is least involved. Two little things are lacking to philosophy to create words: the intelligence to invent them and the power to get them adopted. If it sees a new object, it pages through its dictionaries to find an antique or foreign word, and almost always it turns out badly. The word montgolfière, for example, which is national, is correct, at least in one sense, and I prefer it to aréostat, which is the scientific term and which says nothing.
One might as well call a ship a hydrostat. See this crowd of new words borrowed from the Greek this past twenty years, as crime or folly has found the need: almost all have been taken or formed in a way that is contrary to their literal meaning. The word théophilanthrope, for example, is more foolish than the thing, which is to say a lot: an English or German schoolboy would have known how to say, on the contrary, théanthrophile. You tell me that this word was invented by wretches in a wretched period; but chemical nomenclature, which was certainly the work of very enlightened men, begins with a solecism of the worst sort, oxygène instead of oxygone. Moreover, although I am not a chemist, I have excellent reasons to think that this whole dictionary will be effaced; but merely looking at the matter from the philological and grammatical point of view, it would be perhaps the most unfortunate thing imaginable if the recently disputed metric nomenclature did not win the all-time award for barbarism. (56–57)
Why should oxygen be more unhappy than the very unhappy oxygon? This is what Maistre does not explain. If language is seen as what the world was for the Middle Ages, as a natural revelation of Truth, nothing in language should be wrong. As medieval thinkers said, even monsters should show the power of God. Furthermore, as Maistre is the first to assert, in language there is a glottogonic force that overcomes all human resistance (and hence language is always right).
It must, however, be said that, at least in one case, Maistre’s reasoning finds a logically plausible formulation. He seeks, in effect, to distinguish three concepts: (1) the historical paternity through which every language derives from another, all tracing their ancestry back to the same, primigenial source; (2) the autonomous force whereby every language develops its
