Here we are simply demonstrating that every epoch had its poets, capable of naming things in an unusual and perspicacious fashion. Or, at most, we are repeating, in a simplified form, a thesis inspired by Vico on the metaphoric origin of language that is, if anything, a reflection of the perceptive freshness of ancient peoples, not of their presumed occult knowledge. It hardly seems that any profound learning was necessary for agrarian peoples to call the earth “life-giving” as they lived, in fact, on the earth’s fruits.
Maistre was a vigorous thinker, capable of historically based critical judgments (it suffices to look at his contestations of the Templar myth of the Scottish masonry). And he was not ignorant of the attempts made to construct an a priori philosophical language, from Bacon to Wilkins and beyond. He perceives the contrivances of the artificial languages proposed in the course of the previous two centuries, to which common sense would reply that natural languages seem more flexible in handling our experience. But then this position (which, thus enunciated, would prove disastrously “enlightened”) in Maistre’s discourse is radically transformed. To demonstrate the agility of natural languages Maistre cannot avoid recurring to another notion, born in the eighteenth century: that of the “genius” of languages. But the notion of genius recalls that of polygenesis, or at least of autonomous development, unreconcilable with any monogenetic hypothesis. Maistre thus finds himself entangled in a line of reasoning that leads to wild paralogisms:
I would like, however, to underline a fact, whose obviousness is undeniable, namely, the prodigious talent demonstrated by young peoples in forming words and, on the other hand, the absolute inability of philosophers to do the same, in the most refined centuries. I recall that Plato already points out this talent of peoples in their infancy. What is amazing is that they give the impression of having followed deliberate criteria, thanks to a precise system of agreement, despite the fact that this was from any viewpoint strictly impossible. Every language has its genius, a genius that is unique, therefore we must exclude any idea of composition, of arbitrary formation, and of antecedent convention. (120–121)
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 (121). But here is the proof:
from these three words, CAro DAta VERmibus they have formed the word CA-DA-VER, “meat abandoned to the worms.” From two other words, MAgis and voLO, they have made MALO and NOLO, two splendid verbs that every language, Greek included, can envy Latin. … The French have not totally ignored this system. For example, to give a name to those who were our ancestors, they formed the word ANCETRE, joining part of the word ANCien [old, ancient] with the verb ETRE [to be], just as they formed the term BEFFROI [alarm bell], joining Bel [beautiful] and EFFROI [fright]. You see then how they utilized the two terms DUo and IRE to form the verb DUIRE, [to go in a pair] and, through natural extension of the verb condurre [conduct, lead], diriger [direct]. With the personal pronoun SE, with the relative adverb of place HORS [outside] and with the verbal ending TIR, they formed S-OR-TIR [to go out], that is, SEHORS-TIR “to put one’s own person outside the place where it was.” All this to me seems wondrous. (121–123)
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 monogenesists 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 Medio-lanum into Milan—though, alas, this never happened with the Latin word cadaver. Even if Isidore’s etymology of cadaver were plausible, and even if beffroi 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 witness, so to speak, the action of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes we see it struggling against a difficulty that arrests it on its path: it seeks a form that is lacking, the materials at its disposal resist; then it will solve the problem with a happy solecism and will say, very effectively, ‘rue passante,’ ‘couleur voyante,’ ‘place marchande,’ ‘métal cassant,’ etc.” (125).
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, Fraülein, Général-Anchef, Général-Dejournei, 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 échelon, contre-marche, or that in the army functions should be named haupt-wacht, exercise hause, ordonnance-hause, commisariat, cazarma, canzellarii.
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” (127).
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
