Richard Trench, poet
This week I am faced with the challenge of posting a blog at
virtually the same moment that I am delivering a lecture in Richmond, Virginia. From the technological point out view
it should be managed easily enough, but under the circumstances my subject cannot
be a topical one that comes to mind on Tuesday night. So let me instead introduce you to a great book: Richard
Chevenix Trench’s On the Study of Words
(1851).
Friends
who view my library sometimes comment on the high proportion of old books to new,
or note that even most of the “new” books I have, such as my growing collection
of the Library of America, are the works of “old” authors. Guilty as charged, but the library is
not a monument to a medievalist’s scorn for modernity. Some of my best friends were born in
the twentieth century! Four of my
best grandchildren were born in the twenty-first! But shelf-space is limited, and one’s lifetime short.
One has to prioritize.
Inertia
is the default tendency to stay put physically. Parochialism is the default tendency to stay put
culturally. We all need a home
base, and I am as inert and parochial as most people, and more so than
many. Yet I am bemused that so
many friends who would not be content to limit their geographical, musical or
culinary horizons to their native county so seldom read “old” books.
I
am not referring here to “the classics”, broadly understood. Homer, Boethius, Dante, Shakespeare, Fielding,
Tolstoy, James—such writers as these, along with their natural peers and the
happy few who will join them in every generation, will I hope remain
indispensable reading forever. But
for that very reason their books will continue to be available and easy of
access in a profusion of editions, often cheap, not to mention free on-line and
in general libraries. In fact
developments in printing technology and the growth of the electronic library
have already rendered the truly unavailable out-of-print book a rarity; in the
future it will be virtually non-existent.
The
“old” books I have in mind are of a different sort. If you are looking for a good pizza, you may find one
three blocks away. But you must
know that the chances are good that there is a better one somewhere else in the
state, and probably one better than that somewhere
in the fifty states. With today’s
gas prices you cannot drive to Seattle for a pizza, but you can apply the principle to books. On almost any subject you want to read
about—or at least that I want to read
about—the best books are more likely to have been written in the last two
centuries than in the last two weeks.
In fact there are few categories to which the nice phrase golden oldie is more relevant than that
of books.
Richard Chevenix Trench, prelate; he took on a little weight and an extra name
Trench was an Anglican clergyman of the mid-nineteenth century. He eventually became the Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland. That was his day job, and his wonderful book On the Study of Words had its origins in lectures given to seminarians. Trench believed that words were “the guardians of thoughts,” and that the English lexicon, properly understood from an historical perspective, was in itself a nearly complete syllabus of truths human and divine. Some of his individual lectures were entitled “On the Poetry in Words,” “On the Morality in Words,” and “On the History in Words.” No reader can stick a thumb into this philological pie without coming up with a succulent plumb. Words that one has used all one's life—such as cheat, guinea, pagan, sham, tawdry, along with a thousand more—gain a new vivacity in Trench’s offhand remarks. Who knew that ringleader was once a term of respect and a genuine compliment?
Trench
was a pretty good poet. He is
sometimes called “a second-rate imitator of Wordsworth”, which is unfair, since
he was a first-rate imitator. (Indeed the words first-rate and second-rate
deserve an essay by Trench. Are
silver medals admired only in Olympic competition?) He wrote other fine books, and compiled a delightful Select glossary of English words used
formerly in senses different from their present. He was also a linguistic activist,
and it is in this role that he should gain the everlasting admiration of every
native speaker of the English language.
For
Trench was one of the movers and shakers behind the greatest lexicographical
enterprise of the nineteenth century, the fabulous New English Dictionary (usually called the Oxford English Dictionary or simply the OED). One of the
historians of this enterprise is my friend and colleague Hans Aarsleff, whose
great Study of Language in England,
1780-1860, having been published before most of my readers were born, is
now approaching golden oldie status itself.
Trench
was too busy with his important ecclesiastical duties to serve as a principal
editor of the dictionary he helped inspire. That work was undertaken in successive generations
principally by James Murray, Henry Bradley, and William Craigie, and continues
today with electronic bells and whistles.
But when they start doing baseball cards for philologists, an early
cardboard portrait of Archbishop Trench should be worth a pretty penny. If you can’t account for the use of the
word pretty there, look it up!
