ON NICKNAMES

The Edinburgh Magazine.] [September 1818.

‘Hæ nugæ in seria ducunt.’

This is a more important subject than it seems at first sight. It is as serious in its results as it is contemptible in the means by which those results are brought about. Nicknames for the most part govern the world. The history of politics, of religion, of literature, of morals, and of private life, is too often little less than the historyof nicknames. What are half the convulsions of the civilised world, the frequent overthrow of states and kingdoms, the shock and hostile encounter of mighty continents, the battles by sea and land, the intestine commotions, the feuds of the Vitelli and Orsini, of the Guelphs and Gibellines, the civil wars in England, and the League in France, the jealousies and heart-burnings of cabinets and councils, the uncharitable proscriptions of creeds and sects, Turk, Jew, Pagan, Papist and Puritan, Quaker and Methodist,—the persecutions and massacres, the burnings, tortures, imprisonments, and lingering deaths inflicted for a different profession of faith,—but so many illustrations of the power of this principle? Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Neale’s History of the Puritans, are comments on the same text. The fires in Smithfield were fanned by nicknames, and a nickname set its seal on the unopened dungeons of the Holy Inquisition. Nicknames are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the combustible part of men’s passions and prejudices, which have hitherto played so much more successful a game, and done their work so much more effectually than reason, in all the grand concerns and petty details of human life, and do not yet seem tired of the task assigned them. Nicknames are the convenient portable tools by which they simplify the process of mischief, and get through their job with the least time and trouble. These worthless, unmeaning, irritating, envenomed words of reproach are the established signs by which the different compartments of society are ticketted, labelled, and marked out for each other’s hatred and contempt. They are to be had, ready cut and dry, of all sorts and sizes, wholesale and retail, for foreign exportation or home consumption, and for all occasions in life. ‘The priest calls the lawyer a cheat, the lawyer beknaves the divine.’ The Frenchman hates the Englishman because he is an Englishman, and the Englishman hates the Frenchman for as good a reason. The Whig hates the Tory, and the Tory the Whig. The Dissenter hates the Church-of-England-man, and the Church-of-England-man hates the Dissenter, as if they were of a different species, because they have a different designation. The Mussulman calls the worshipper of the Cross ‘Christian dog,’ spits in his face, and kicks him from the pavement, by virtue of a nickname; and the Papist retorts the indignity upon the Infidel and the Jew by the same infallible rule of right. In France, they damn Shakespear in the lump, by calling him abarbare; and we talk of Racine’sverbiagewith inexpressible contempt and self-complacency. Among ourselves, an anti-Jacobin critic denounces a Jacobin poet and his friends, at a venture, ‘as infidels and fugitives, who have left their wives destitute, and their children fatherless’—whether they have wives and children or not.The unenlightened savage makes a meal of his enemy’s flesh, after reproaching him with the name of his tribe, because he is differently tattooed; and the literary cannibal cuts up the character of his opponent by the help of a nickname. The jest of all this is, that a party nickname is always a relative term, and has its counter-sign, which has just the same force and meaning, so that both must be perfectly ridiculous and insignificant. A Whig implies a Tory; there must be ‘Malcontents’ as well as ‘Malignants’; Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins; French and English. These sort ofnoms des guerresderive all their force from their contraries. Take away the meaning of the one, and you take the sting out of the other. They could not exist but upon the strength of mutual and irreconcileable antipathies; there must be no love lost between them. What is there in the names themselves to give them a preference over each other? ‘Sound them, they do become the mouth as well; weigh them, they are as heavy; conjure with them, one will raise a spirit as soon as the other.’ If there were not fools and madmen who hated both, there could not be fools and madmen bigotted to either. I have heard an eminent character boast that he had done more to produce the late war by nicknaming Buonaparte ‘the Corsican,’ than all the state-papers and documents on the subject put together. And yet Mr. Southey asks triumphantly, ‘Is it to be supposed that it is England,ourEngland, to whom that war was owing?’ As if, in a dispute between two countries, the conclusive argument which lies in the pronounour, belonged only to one of them. I like Shakespear’s version of the matter better:

‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? day, night,Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volumeOurBritain seems as of it, but not in it;In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee thinkThere’s livers out of Britain.’

‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? day, night,

Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume

OurBritain seems as of it, but not in it;

In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee think

There’s livers out of Britain.’

In all national disputes, it is common to appeal to the numbers on your side as decisive on the point. If every body in England thought the late war right, every body in France thought it wrong. There were ten millions on one side of the question, (or rather of the water), and thirty millions on the other side. That’s all. I remember some one arguing, in justification of our ministers interfering on that occasion, ‘That governments would not go to war for nothing;’ to which I answered, Then they could not go to war at all, for, at that rate, neither of them could be in the wrong, and yet both of them must be in the right, which was absurd. The only meaning of these vulgar nicknames and party-distinctions, where they are urged most violentlyand confidently, is, that others differ from you in some particular or other, (whether it be opinion, dress, clime, complexion), which you highly disapprove of, forgetting, that, by the same rule, they have the very same right to be offended at you because you differ from them. Those who have reason on their side do not make the most obstinate and furious appeals to prejudice and abusive language. I know but of one exception to this general rule, and that is, where the things that excite disgust are of such a kind that they cannot well be gone into without offence to decency and good manners; but it is equally certain in this case, that those who are most shocked at the things are not those who are most forward to apply the names. A person will not be fond of repeating a charge, or adverting to a subject, that inflicts a wound on his own feelings, even for the sake of wounding the feelings of another. A man should be very sure that he himself is not what he has always in his mouth. The greatest prudes have been often accounted the greatest hypocrites, and a satirist is at best but a suspicious character. The loudest and most unblushing invectives against vice and debauchery will as often proceed from a desire to inflame and pamper the passions of the writer, by raking into a nauseous subject, as from a wish to excite virtuous indignation against it in the public mind, or to reform the individual. To familiarise the mind to gross ideas is not the way to increase your own or the general repugnance to them. But, to return to the subject of nicknames.

The use of this figure of speech is, that it excites a strong idea without requiring any proof. It is a shorthand compendious mode of getting at a conclusion, and never troubling yourself or any body else with the formalities of reasoning or the dictates of common sense. It is superior to all evidence, for it does not rest upon any, and operates with the greatest force and certainty in proportion to the utter want of probability. Belief is only a strong impression, and the malignity or extravagance of the accusation passes for a proof of the crime. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit;’ and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise, and of all arguments the most unanswerable. It givescarte blancheto the imagination, throws the reins on the neck of the passions, and suspends the use of the understanding altogether. It does not stand upon ceremony, on the nice distinctions of right and wrong. It does not wait the slow processes of reason, or stop to unravel the web of sophistry. It takes every thing for granted that serves for nourishment for the spleen. It is instantaneous in its operations. There is nothing to interpose between the effect and it. It is passion without proof, and action without thought,—‘the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations.’ It does not, as Mr. Burkeexpresses it, ‘leave the will puzzled, undecided, and sceptical in the moment of action.’ It is a word and a blow.

‘Bring but a Scotsman frae his hill,Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,Say such is royal George’s will,And there’s the foe,He has nae thought but how to killTwa at a blow.’

‘Bring but a Scotsman frae his hill,

Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,

Say such is royal George’s will,

And there’s the foe,

He has nae thought but how to kill

Twa at a blow.’

The ‘No Popery’ cry, raised a little while ago, let loose all the lurking spite and prejudice which had lain rankling in the proper receptacles for them for above a century, without any knowledge of the past history of the country which had given rise to them, or any reference to their connection with present circumstances; for the knowledge of the one would have prevented the possibility of their application to the other. Facts present a tangible and definite idea to the mind, a train of causes and consequences, accounting for each other, and leading to a positive conclusion—but no farther. But a nickname is tied down to no such limited service; it is a disposable force, that is almost always perverted to mischief. It clothes itself with all the terrors of uncertain abstraction, and there is no end of the abuse to which it is liable but the cunning of those who employ, or the credulity of those who are gulled by it. It is a reserve of the ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance of weak and vulgar minds, brought up where reason fails, and always ready, at a moment’s warning, to be applied to any, the most absurd purposes. If you bring specific charges against a man, you thereby enable him to meet and repel them, if he thinks it worth his while; but a nickname baffles reply, by the very vagueness of the inferences from it, and gives increased activity to the confused, dim, and imperfect notions of dislike connected with it, from their having no settled ground to rest upon. The mind naturally irritates itself against an unknown object of fear or jealousy, and makes up for the blindness of its zeal by an excess of it. We are eager to indulge our hasty feelings to the utmost, lest, by stopping to examine, we should find that there is no excuse for them. The very consciousness of the injustice we may be doing another makes us only the more loud and bitter in our invectives against him. We keep down the admonitions of returning reason, by calling up a double portion of gratuitous and vulgar spite. The will may be said to act with most forcein vacuo; the passions are the most ungovernable when they are blindfolded. That malignity is always the most implacable which is accompanied with a sense of weakness, because it is never satisfied of its own success or safety.A nickname carries the weight of the pride, the indolence, the cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its side. It acts, by mechanical sympathy, on the nerves of society. Any one who is without character himself may make himself master of the reputation of another by the application of a nickname, as, if you do not mind soiling your fingers, you may always throw dirt on another. No matter how undeserved the imputation, it will stick; for, though it is sport to the bye-standers to see you bespattered, they will not stop to see you wipe out the stains. You are not heard in your own defence; it has no effect, it does not tell, excites no sensation, or it is only felt as a disappointment of their triumph over you. Their passions and prejudices are inflamed by the charge, ‘as rage with rage doth sympathise;’ by vindicating yourself, you merely bring them back to common sense, which is a very sober, mawkish state.Give a dog a bad name, and hang him, is a proverb. ‘A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.’ It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe it, it still haunts our apprehensions. Let a nickname be industriously applied to our dearest friend, and let us know that it is ever so false and malicious, yet it will answer its end; it connects the person’s name and idea with an ugly association, you think of them with pain together, or it requires an effort of indignation or magnanimity on your part to disconnect them; it becomes an uneasy subject, a sore point, and you will sooner desert your friend, or join in the conspiracy against him, than be constantly forced to repel charges without truth or meaning, and have your penetration or character called in question by a rascal. Nay, such is the unaccountable construction of language and of the human mind, that the affixing the most innocent or praiseworthy appellation to any individual or set of individuals,as a nickname, has all the effect of the most opprobrious epithets. Thus the cant name ‘The Talents,’ was successfully applied as a stigma to the Whigs at one time; it held them up to ridicule, and made them obnoxious to public feeling, though it was notorious to every body that the Whig leaders were ‘the Talents,’ and that their adversaries nicknamed them so from real hatred and pretended derision. ‘The Party’ is now substituted for ‘the Talents,’ since success has given their own set the monstrous affectation of being men of talents; and the poor Morning Chronicle is persecuted daily as the Party as it formerly stood the brunt (innocently enough) of all the abuse and sarcasms that were showered on the Talents. Call a man short by his Christian name, as Tom or Dick such a one, or by his profession, (however respectable), as Canning pelted a noble lord with his left-off title of Doctor,—and you undo him for ever, if he has a reputationto lose. Such is the tenaciousness of spite and ill-nature, or the jealousy of public opinion, even this will be peg enough to hang doubtful inuendos, weighty dilemmas upon. ‘With so small a web as this will I catch so great a fly as Cassio.’ The public do not like to see their favourites treated with impertinent familiarity—it lowers the tone of admiration very speedily. It implies that some one stands in no great awe of their idol, and he perhaps may know as much about the matter as they do. It seems as if a man whose name, with some contemptuous abbreviation, is always dinned in the public ear, was distinguished by nothing else. By repeating a man’s name in this manner you may soon make him sick of it, and of his life too. Mr. Southey has by this time, I should suppose, a tolerable surfeit of his title of Laureate! Children do not like to becalled out of their names. It is questioning their personal identity. A writer, who has made his vocabulary rich in nicknames, (the late Editor of the Times,) thought he had made a great acquisition to his stock, when it was pretended at one time that Bonaparte’s real name was not Napoleon but Nicholas. He congratulated himself on this discovery, as a standing jest and a lasting triumph. Yet there was nothing in the name to signify. Nicholas Poussin was an instance of a great man in the last age, and in our own times, have we not Nicholas Vansittart? The same writer has the merit of having carried this figure of speech as far as it would go. He fairly worried his readers into conviction by abuse and nicknames. People surrendered their judgments to escape the persecution of his style, and the disgust and indignation which his incessant violence and vulgarity excited, at last made you hate those who were the objects of it.Causa causæ causa causati.He made people sick of a subject by making them sick of his arguments. Yet he attributed the effect he produced to the eloquence of his phraseology and the force of his reasonings!

A parrot may be taught to call names; and if the person who keeps the parrot has a spite to his neighbours, he may give them a great deal of annoyance without much wit, either in the employer or the puppet. The insignificance of the instrument has nothing to do with the efficacy of the means. Hotspur would have had ‘astarlingtaught to repeat nothing but Mortimer,’ in the ears of his enemy. Nature, it is said, has given arms to all creatures the most proper to defend themselves, and annoy others: to the lowest she has given the use of nicknames.

There are some droll instances of the effect of proper names combined with circumstances. A young student had come up to London from Cambridge, and went in the evening and planted himself in the pit of the play-house. He had not been seated long when, in one ofthe front boxes near him, he discovered one of his college tutors, with whom he felt an immediate and strong desire to claim acquaintance, and called out in a low and respectful voice, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The appeal was, however, ineffectual. He then repeated in a louder tone, but still in an under key, so as not to excite the attention of any one but his friend, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The Doctor took no notice. He then grew more impatient, and repeated ‘Dr. Topping, Dr. Topping!’ two or three times pretty loud, to see whether the Doctor did not or would not hear him. Still the Doctor remained immovable. The joke began at length to get round, and one or two persons, as he continued his invocations of the Doctor’s name, joined with him in them; these were reinforced by others calling out, ‘Dr. Topping! Dr. Topping!’ on all sides, so that he could no longer avoid perceiving it, and at length the whole pit rose and roared, ‘Dr. Topping!’ with loud and repeated cries, and the Doctor was forced to retire precipitately, frightened at the sound of his own name. There is sometimes an inconvenience in common as well as uncommon names. On the night that Garrick took his leave of the stage, an inveterate playgoer could not get a seat in any part of the house. At length he went up into the gallery, but found that equally full with the rest. In this extremity a thought struck him, and he called out as loud as he could, ‘Mr. Smith, you’re wanted. Your wife’s taken suddenly ill, and you must go home immediately.’ In an instant, half a dozen persons started up from different parts of the gallery to go out, and the gentleman took possession of the first place that offered. No doubt these persons would be disposed to quarrel with their names and their wives for some time after.

The calling people by their Christian or surnames is a proof of affection, as well as of hatred. They are generally the best good fellows with whom their friends take this sort of liberty.Diminutivesare titles of endearment. Dr. Johnson’s calling Goldsmith ‘Goldy’ did equal honour to both. It shewed the regard he had for him. This familiarity may perhaps imply a certain want of formal respect; but formal respect is not necessary to, if it is consistent with, cordial friendship. Titles of honour are the reverse of nicknames,—they convey the idea of respect as the others do of contempt, and equally mean little or nothing. Junius’s motto,Stat nominis umbra, is a very significant one, it might be extended farther. A striking instance of the force of names, standing by themselves, is in the respect felt towards Michael Angelo in this country. We know nothing of him but his name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness. Our admiration of him supports itself, and our idea of his superiority seems self-evident, because it is attached to his name only. Some of ourartists seem trying to puff their names into reputation from an instinctive knowledge of this principle,—by talking incessantly of themselves and doing nothing. It is not, indeed, easy to deny the merit of the works—which they donotproduce. Those which they have produced are very bad.

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