It's All Latin to Me

Latin is a very difficult language to learn.  I know; I worked on teaching myself for many years and can still make it through a few lines of the Aeneid only very slowly and with a dictionary.  And yet just a couple hundred years ago, university classes in Europe were still held in Latin.  In order to make this possible, all young people destined to go to university studied Latin in preparation for the experience.  By the time the teen-ager matriculated, supposing everything proceeded according to plan, he could read Virgil's epic and had parts of it memorized.  Scholarly authors such as Joseph Addison, who appears in Thackeray's Henry Esmond, wrote poems in Latin, poems read, enjoyed, and critiqued by Pope and Johnson and indeed anyone with a university education and interested in literature.  It's no wonder that casual conversation among such people was peppered with Latin phrases -- some from the works they had all studied and some made up on the spot for the occasion at hand.

Henry Esmond has a Cambridge education, goes to war along with Richard Steele, dines with Joseph Addison, and meets but dislikes Jonathan Swift, so of course his conversation and even his narrative includes many phrases from the classic tongue.  Today I offer a look at several of the ones I've come across so far.  I had to look up almost all the references; some of the translations I borrowed, and some are my own.

maxima debetur pueris reverentia: We owe the greatest respect to children.  (Juvenal)  The phrase refers to the care we ought to show in raising and teaching them, not to any obligation we have to listen to them or cater to their wishes.
O Dea certe: O, surely a goddess!  (Virgil, Aeneid)
vacuae sedes et inania arcana: empty seats and hollow mysteries.  According to Henry, this is what a shallow person sees when she looks into her heart.
indocilis pauperiem pati: One who cannot learn to endure poverty.  (Horace)
pudet haec opprobria dicere nobis: It is shameful that they speak these reproaches of us.  (Ovid)
abi in pace: Depart in peace.
saevo laeta negotio: happy with her savage work  (Horace, said of the goddess Fortune)
quondam: An adverb in Latin meaning formerly, the English language has adopted it as an adjective meaning former, as in "A quondam student of mine wrote to me recently."
Beati pacifici: Blessed are the peacemakers.  (Jesus, via Jerome)
Benedicti benedicentes: Blessed are those who bless.
virtute sua: by his own strength
Reficimus rates quassas: We refit our battered ships, i.e., we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again.  (Horace)
matre pulchra filia pulchrior: The mother is beautiful, the daughter even more so.
imo pectore: from the bottom of my heart
mori pro patria: to die for one's country; from Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.  (Horace)
reddas incolumem precor: Deliver him unharmed, I pray.  (Horace)
Gades aditure mecum? Will you visit Gades with me?  (Horace)  I don't know where Gades is or why I should want to ask someone to go there with me.  But the quotation provides a classical way of asking, "Would you go even to the ends of the earth with me?"
non omnis moriar: I shall not wholly die.  (Horace)
bar sinister: Only the second half of this phrase from heraldry is Latin.  The first word is the familiar English word; the second word means left.  (Sorry, lefties, you've had an unjustly bad reputation ever since ancient times.)  On a coat of arms, a solid bar running from lower left to upper right indicates a bastard son.  I had no idea; I'll be paying closer attention to coats of arms now.
vana somnia: false dreams
desipere in loco: part of Dulce est desipere in loco (Horace): Sweet it is to play the fool in the right place.
remedium amoris: remedy for love (Ovid)
aliquo mero: with some wine.  Henry and Addison are in an inn dining, and when Addison asks him to describe a battle he was in, Henry dips his finger in the wine and starts tracing a map on the table.  When another guest arrives, Addison explains that Henry is drawing aliquo mero.  The o's at the ends of the words in this instance indicate the ablative case, expressing what English does often by means of the words with or by.  So if you find someone drawing on the table with his drink, you can say he is drawing aliquo mero, but if you want to put a classical twist on the offer of a drink, you can ask a friend if he would like aliquid merum.
si parva licet: part of Si parva licet componere magnis (Virgil): if we may compare small things with great
hac ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus: Here flowed the Simois, Here is the Sigeian field.  (Ovid)  In looking over and explaining the map drawn with wine, Addison (or Henry, I forget which) tosses in these phrases from Ovid.  Shakespeare quotes the same Latin passage in The Taming of the Shrew in a scene apparently depicting a Latin lesson, suggesting that the passage formed a standard part of the Latin curriculum in Christian Europe.
aliquo proelia mixta mero: embroiled battles with some wine; a further development of the phrase spoken earlier
alma mater: Literally, nurturing mother; the phrase is used, of course, to refer to one's college.
magnum opus: great work, masterpiece
afflavit Deus, et dissipati sunt: God blew and they were scattered.  The English coined this phrase and used it to refer to the destruction of the Spanish Armada in a great storm.  A modern country making headlines for current events in Latin!  Imagine if Kennedy had told us to ask what we could do pro patria or if Neil Armstrong, when landing on the moon, had said, "Aquila consedit."
meminisse juvat: it is pleasing to have remembered
requiescat: may he rest.  The book uses only this one word, but it recalls the entire phrase requiescat in pace.  Curiously, both the original phrase and the common English translation, "Rest in peace," can be abbreviated on a small tombstone with the same three letters.
quidnunc: Literally "What now?" in Latin, the word is used in English for a busybody, one who goes around picking up gossip.
rus in urbe: countryside in the city, said of a park
Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur: The name changed, this tale is told of thee.  (Horace)  Like Joe Friday, Horace changed the name when he told his story, but unlike Friday, he identified his subject as soon as he was finished.

There's your Latin lesson for the day.  Say "O certa Dea" to a beautiful woman.  Tell someone, "I love you imo pectore."  Say "Abi in pace" when someone leaves, and toss in a quidnunc and a quondam.  Before you know it, respect for Latin will rise again, and our country will be full of eloquent youth.  Ah, such vana somnia.  Yet dulce est desipere.

Could Thackeray Keep a Secret?

Henry Esmond is full of secrets.  For a time, Henry's tutor, a Catholic priest, convinces Henry to believe in the Church of Rome but tells him to keep his loyalty a secret.  This same tutor, a supporter of James II both before and after his dethronement, has a secret means of escape from Castlewood should the Whig revolutionaries come looking for him.  Years after using this escape, the old tutor meets Henry again on the continent, where he dresses like a German officer and keeps his identity once more a secret.  Henry's guardian, Lord Castlewood, runs secret plots to take down King William and restore the crown to James -- for a while, that is, until he decides he prefers stability and must now keep his new-found respect for William a secret from the rest of the family.  Neither Henry nor his readers know the identity of his parents for quite a while, and then his father is revealed long before his mother.  Once Henry finds out his true lineage, he determines to keep the knowledge to himself for the good of the rest of the family.  Henry even goes so far as to say that he believes nature keeps a man's character secret even from the man himself, until adversity tests him and brings out his character.  Secrets, in short, seem to form the central theme of the book.

Since secrets play such a pivotal role in Henry's life, and since Henry tells his own story, I can't help wondering if he keeps even more secrets from his reader.  Other narrators do, I believe.  I'm convinced, for instance, that Dr. Watson holds information back in his tales of Sherlock Holmes.  In his narrative style, Watson often implies responses to Holmes without providing the transcript; Watson might report Holmes as saying something like this: "Of course, we'll have to tell the police about this business.  Oh, you wouldn't want that, would you?  Well then, . . . ."  Clearly his nervous interlocutor has evinced or even spoken his dismay, even if we don't hear it verbatim.  Now in speaking to Watson, Holmes's speeches almost never include any lines such as "Oh, you think that remark unfair to you, do you, Doctor?"  But surely Watson occasionally winces at the detective's clever barbs.  Watson simply keeps his responses unreported, as he does so many others, but in these cases removes Holmes's rejoinders, as well, leaving no evidence of his own hurt feelings -- except to a sharp-witted sleuth like myself who makes something out of the dog not barking in the night.

So further reading may reveal more secrets in Henry Esmond or not, but I think there's room for speculation either way.  With a mediocre character, the reader can often imagine what he would do even in a situation not narrated in the book.  With a good character, on the other hand, the reader can guess what he would do but still has doubts, because good characters, like the humans they imitate, are full of surprises and secrets.

Thackeray the Historian

Thackeray's Henry Esmond really puzzled me at first.  It begins with a family history inexplicably told twice, but something else mystified me even more than that.  When Henry finally appears, his story is attractive enough: we first see him left alone in Castlewood Estate until the new Lord and Lady Castlewood arrive, who instantly prove to be welcoming and accepting.  But that happy tableau doesn't seize the attention the way Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp does when she throws a dictionary out the carriage window in her first scene.  Although I had only read one novel by Thackeray before, I thought I knew what to expect, and found myself surprised.

My surprise lasted a couple of days until I read a little about the book.  Set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Thackeray set out to write a novel not just about that period, but as if it had been written then.  It is written in the first person (sort of; Henry himself serves as narrator, but he usually refers to himself in a Dolesque third-person), so it makes sense that Henry should tell his story in a fashion like that of stories he has read.  But Thackeray put an unusual amount of effort into the project, doing copious research on the politics, literary style, celebrities, and news of the times, and even had the publisher print the book in an eighteenth-century font in order to make it look more like an authentic autobiography.

So then the pieces fell into place: the book's style surprised me because Thackeray set out deliberately to write a novel not in his usual style.  Like Tom Jones and Roderick Random, for instance, Henry has sexual dalliances (although Thackeray doesn't describe them in his Victorian times with the detail that Fielding used in his) that do not keep him from being the protagonist.  By contrast, such characters in nineteenth-century novels must be either secondary comic characters or pitiable brothers of more central characters or downright villains.  Also, Thackeray's descriptions of events and even of characters' passions have the objective tone of the Age of Enlightenment.  Of his caretakers, Henry says at one point,

My lord was exceeding gentle and kind.  Whenever he quitted the room, his wife's eyes followed him.  He behaved to her with a kind of mournful courtesy and kindness remarkable in one of his blunt ways and ordinary rough manner.  He called her by her Christian name often and fondly, was very soft and gentle with the children, especially with the boy, whom he did not love.

True to the analytical ways of the period, Thackeray's Henry simply sets about cataloguing Castlewood's characteristics, the way a Jane Austen girl might coolly list the features of a suitor.

Of course the story includes a beautiful face that drives Henry mad (another reading coincidence: see the posts from last month on Plato's Phaedrus): the face of Castlewood's lovely daughter, Beatrix.  Henry says, "A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget," never referring to himself directly, but always confining this illness to the generic "a man."  When he finally describes Beatrix physically, he makes her stunning effect clear, but not by showing the reader how stunned he is.  Instead, he says that "she was a brown beauty; that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes were dark.," and tells us clinically that her "shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity."  Many a twentieth-century author would no doubt locate the symmetry and the activity more precisely for us.

Along the way, Thackeray gives his reader a lot of English history.  Henry's story takes place in counterpoint with the Protectorate, the Restoration, tensions between Catholics and Anglicans and Dissenters, the Glorious Revolution, tensions between Tories and the first Whigs, Queen Anne's suitability to both parties, and Marlborough and the battle of Blenheim.  I've read about this history, and I've been to Blenheim Palace, where the Dukes of Marlborough (and their cousin Winston Churchill) have lived for several centuries, but I don't remember ever reading a novel set in this period.  So now that I know that the book is what it's supposed to be, and not what I expected it to be, it's been -- I'll not say "fun," as I might with a nineteenth-century novel -- but, appropriate to the time, enlightening.

Without Repetition

British radio game shows are amazing.  No money or dumb contestants.  Just clever people from a country known for extemporaneous wit, playing a game with such panache that listeners stay enraptured by the entertaining volley of ingenuity.  If the phrase "game show" brings recollections of Let's Make a Deal to mind, think instead of Whose Line is it Anyway? (which started across the pond), and you'll be on the right track.

My favorite programme is Just a Minute, a panel show on BBC Radio 4 whose run has lasted now for forty-three years.  In this contest, four participants try speaking on a given subject for sixty seconds without hesitation, repetition, or deviation.  The first and third infractions would eliminate almost any American from the challenge: those in this country who can talk without pause almost never stick to a topic named for them.  But the second offense is what fascinates me, as players attempt astonishing feats of verbal gymnastics in order to avoid saying a word twice.  Someone having mentioned pants may try "trousers" on the second pass and "breeches" on the third, but what is he to use on the fourth?  "Coverings for the lower extremities"?  Often the solution involves something like "the aforementioned article of clothing."  Of course the other two rules don't always allow for careful thought and eloquent phraseology; Paul Merton once followed up "gravy" with "meat liquid."

The English language offers and has a preference for fresh and varied vocabulary.  It's not that every author has to be a master of slightly rare words, like Dickens, or the inventor of entire new lexicons, like Shakespeare.  It is enough to be able to get through a paragraph without reiterating what has once been written.  I'm enjoying Thackeray's Henry Esmond for, among other virtues, its creator's command of this very skill.  Consider this sentence:

These happy days were to end soon, however; and it was by Lady Castlewood's own decree that they were brought to a conclusion.

The switch from active voice to passive makes way for the substitution of "end" with "conclusion," and the result delights with the classically conceived beauty of unity in variety.  Soon afterward we read:

Tom Tusher's talk was of nothing but Cambridge now; and the boys, who were good friends, examined each other eagerly about their progress in books.  Tom had learned some Greek and Hebrew, besides Latin, in which he was pretty well skilled, and also had given himself to mathematical studies under his father's guidance, who was a proficient in those sciences, of which Esmond knew nothing.

How many ways of expressing the ideas of knowledge and learning do we find?  "Cambridge," "progress," "books," "skilled," "studies," "guidance," "proficient," "sciences," and "knew" skip through the passage like a well-practiced team shuffling a ball effortlessly back and forth without a misstep.  In the presence of a master, my humble hazard at the challenge sounds lumpy and awkward.

Some historical episodes of Just a Minute are available on CD, and selected recent offerings can be heard on BBC Radio 4's website.