3 Sad (with Gravis)
I. ‘GRAVIS’ AND ‘GRAVE’
Though sad has never, to my knowledge, been influenced by Latin gravis and its English derivative grave, the likeness between their semantic histories makes it natural to begin this chapter with a glance at the latter.
As everyone knows gravis means ‘heavy’. And because we do not like carrying or ‘bearing’ heavy objects, it also means ‘grievous’. O passi graviora, says Aeneas, oh you who have suffered worse things than this! English heavy more often than English grave corresponds to this sense; as in Spenser’s ‘O heavie herse!’ It is true that we speak of ‘grave danger’ or ‘a grave disaster’, but this, I believe, brings in something of the next sense.
What is heavy is, in all physical operations, important. We cannot put it where we want it without effort, perhaps not even without planning; and, in return, wind or water or enemies cannot easily remove it. It will ‘stay put’. It is, every way, something serious, something to be reckoned with. Gravis therefore also describes the sort of man who has to be reckoned with; the man whose action or opinion, as we significantly say, ‘carries weight’. (Memories of muscular exertion turn up at every moment in this semantic area.) Lucretius, depreciating Heraclitus, says he has a higher reputation among those Greeks who are inanes than among those Greeks who are gravis and really want to know the truth. The contrast is between ‘empty’ and ‘heavy’ Greeks (an empty jug is lighter than a full one); between dilettanti or frivolous ones who make philosophy a hobby and those who are in earnest, serious—solides as the French say. This merges into the sense ‘venerable, authoritative, or august’. Thus in Virgil: ‘if the crowd catches sight of a man who is gravis by reason of his pietas and his good record’.
This sense is pretty accurately reproduced by the English word when Othello says ‘Most potent, grave, and reverend Seniors’ (I, iii, 76) or Ariel salutes Prospero as ‘grave Sir’ (I, ii, 189). We are moving a little away from it when Milton says ‘the men, though grave, eyed them’. Grave here probably means something like ‘serious-minded’ with a more specifically religious and moral emphasis than the Lucretian, Virgilian, and Shakespearian uses would bear. And perhaps it already includes some reference to the externals of mien and deportment. It was certainly in this latter and more external sense that the word developed. Gulliver says the Brobdingnagian clothes ‘are a very grave and decent habit’ (ch. III). And everyone will remember the parish bull who was in reality ‘no way equal to the department’ but of whom Mr Shandy had a ‘high opinion’ because ‘he went through the business with a grave face’.
II. ‘SAD’: THE ‘FULL’-SENSES
Anglo-Saxon sæd (plural sade) is brother to Old Norse saddr and cousin to Latin satur, and all three words have originally the same meaning: gorged, full (of food), replete. Thus in Psalm lxxviii. 30, where the Latin has manducaverunt et saturati sunt nimis, and Coverdale ‘So they did eat and were well-filled’, an Anglo-Saxon translator has ‘They ate largely (swi
e) and became sade’. In Old Norse saddr lifdaga ‘full of life-days’ is equivalent to the biblical ‘full of years’.
The distinction between having had enough and having had too much is, as we all know, a fine one. Our modern ‘fed up’ bears witness to it; also, though here litotes comes into it, the common use of ‘I’ve had enough of your impudence’ to mean ‘I have had more than I want’. And to say of a man who wants to stop fighting ‘He’s had his bellyful’, though a trifle archaic, would still be an intelligible taunt. Saddr and sæd both underwent this development. In the Laxdale Saga the cowman, flying from Hrapp’s ghost (which he has met several times before) says ‘I am saddr of wrestling with him’ (ch. XXIV). ‘I’m fed up with’ or ‘I’ve had enough of’ would be equally accurate translations. A somewhat similar use occurs in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The Brunnanburh poem says of the battlefield ‘there lay many a man, weary and sæd of war’—many a man who ‘had his fill’ of it in the sense that he was dead or dying. There is no taunt here; only the wry and grim pity of the Old Germanic style. Wiglaf dashed water over Beowulf who was ‘sæd of battle’, i.e. mortally wounded (l. 2722).
The sense ‘over-full’ or ‘fed up’ descended into Middle English. In the Owl and Nightingale the latter says that she does not sing all the year round because she does not want her audience to become to sade, too satiated (l. 452). Chaucer observes that inveterate alchemists can never ‘wexen sadde’, never grow tired of their delusive art (G. 877).
It is tempting to derive the modern sense of ‘melancholy’ (sad (d.s.)) directly and exclusively from the sense ‘fed up’, but this would be rash.
Now a man—or a thing—that is full is heavier than one that is empty. ‘Heavy’ therefore becomes one of the meanings of sæd. Gower says that the Earth ‘is schape round, Substantial, strong, sad and sound’ (VII, 225). So in Cotgrave’s French Dictionary (1611) we find Fromage de taulpe defined as ‘heavy or sad cheese’; and in many parts of the country till this day we call ‘sad’ a cake or loaf which has not risen. Where the English version of the Romance of the Rose speaks of ‘sadde burdens’ that make men’s shoulders ache, one who did not know the history of the word would see a psychological epithet; in reality, sadde means just ‘heavy’.
Emptiness and hollowness, fulness and solidity, are closely related conceptions. We need therefore feel no surprise to find Wycliff saying ‘the altar was not sad but hollow’. But this opens the way to a much more important development. Sad becomes the equivalent of Latin solidus and, whether as the result of this equivalence or not, takes on many of the same meanings: firm (the opposite of flimsy), complete (not broken or interrupted), reliable, sound. Virgil describes the spear to which her father bound the infant Camilla as solidum; Gavin Douglas renders it ‘the schaft was sad and sound’—a collocation of adjectives we had in Gower a moment ago. In Malory sadly is used where we should use soundly: ‘and there he found a bed and laid him therein and fell on sleep sadly’—fell sound asleep. And when Chaucer says ‘The messenger drank sadly ale and wyn’ (B. 743) we could almost translate it ‘drank solidly’—settled down, as the sequel shows (for he was soon ‘sleeping like a pig’), to a solid, or uninterrupted, or sound, or heavy, or serious, evening’s toping.
III. THE ‘GRAVE’-SENSES
When sad has acquired the meaning ‘firm’ or ‘sound’ it will almost inevitably be applied to human character. Thus the person who ‘like seasoned timber never gives’ will be sad. We find the word applied to a good wife: ‘o dere wyf . . . that were to me so sad and eek so trewe’. Sadness is the proper virtue of mature or elderly people. Lydgate bids us ‘In youth be lusty, sad when thou art olde’. The virtue of sadness is hardly to be expected in youth, but sometimes we are pleasantly surprised to find an old head on young shoulders. Thus we are told of Griselda
though this mayde tendre wer of age,
Yet in the brest of hir virginitie
Ther was enclosed rype and sad corage.
In the same tale the fickle rabble run with enthusiasm to welcome Walter’s new wife because they are ‘unsad and ever untrewe’ (l. 995), unstable and faithless. The ‘sadde folk’ (l. 1002) who censure this new-fangleness are what a Roman would have called graviores; men of principle, not to be blown about by every gust of fashion.
It will be noticed—so deeply is thought in debt to the senses—that in all these instances sad has still so much attachment to the idea of weight, that the adjective ‘light’ could be its opposite. It returns also to the physical level by another route. Bodily acts, if firm and steady, can be sad: ‘in goon the speres ful sadly in arest’. They are firmly laid in the rest, in a manner which shows that the combatants mean business. And of course a face will be sad when its expression betokens sadness within. The narrator in Pearl had last seen his daughter as an infant; by a contrast of immense poetical power she comes before him in the trans-mortal country with ‘semblant sad for doc other erle’ (l. 211), with all the state and gravity of a great nobleman. So, later in the poem, the Elders before the Throne are ‘sad of chere’ (l. 887).
In both these passages any intrusion of sad (d.s.) (melancholy, dejected) would be ruinous. But in the Clerk’s Tale (E. 693) it would make sheer nonsense. We are told that if Walter had not known, on other grounds, how dearly Griselda loved her children, he would have thought her cruel for wearing such a ‘sad visage’ when she submitted to the murder of her son. Sad here is, of course, composed, unmoved, the opposite of distraught. It is indeed used as a translation of compositus in Chaucer’s Boethius. Her heart was breaking but her face did not show it. This is perhaps the strongest instance I know of the context’s insulating power. For that very sense of sad which would have made the passage idiotic already existed in Chaucer’s time. Obviously, he has not the slightest fear that anyone will thrust it in at this point.
IV. ‘SAD (D.S.)’
The evidence of its existence comes in Chaucer himself. In his version of the Romance of the Rose (l. 211) he says of Avarice, ‘full sad . . . was she’, where Guillaume de Lorris had maigre (199. Var. laide). We may not think sad (d.s.) a very good translation of either, but all the other senses of sad are impossible. He cannot be calling Avarice full-fed, or heavy, or reliable, or composed. He must mean ‘gloomy’, ‘miserable’. But it is not easy, in the fourteenth century, to find any other unambiguous example. The N.E.D. finds one in another Chaucerian passage, where Theseus ‘with a sad visage . . . syked stille’ (A. 2985). But the dangerous sense seems to me here to be at best only possible. In the whole passage Theseus is giving an exhibition of gravitas. He has sent for Palamon and Emelye. He waits till they are seated and till the presence chamber is silent. He then remains silent himself for a while and—admirable touch—‘his eyen sette he ther as was his lest’ (l. 2983), fixed his eyes on what he chose. He sighed stille, quietly, and proceeded to make a high philosophical speech beginning with the First Mover. I cannot feel sure that the sad visage was—and I feel quite sure it need not have been—anything more than a grave, a staid, a composed, and an authoritative countenance. He is being compositus, gravis. More promising is the Lyric 105 in Carleton Brown’s Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, where the second line reads ‘For sorowe sore I sykkit sadde’. Here the dangerous sense seems to me the most probable. But it is not certain. The mourner may have sighed sadly as Chaucer’s messenger drank sadly: continuously, steadily, ‘in a big way’.
By the later sixteenth century, sad (d.s.), though not in exclusive possession, is common—‘in sad cypress let me be laid’, ‘tell sad stories of the death of kings’, ‘sad Celeno’ singing a song ‘that hart of flint asonder could have rifte’.
As often, we have no difficulty in suggesting ways in which the word could have arrived at this sense. Rather, the possible ways are so numerous that we cannot hope to determine which counted for most.
From the very nature of metaphor a word that means ‘heavy’ will be very likely to acquire the meaning ‘grievous’. A word that means ‘fed up’ will be very likely to acquire the meaning ‘displeased, ill-content’. A word which means ‘grave’ or even ‘steady-going’ will necessarily mean the opposite of ‘light’ or ‘sportive’. Thus we find sad used to mean ‘serious’, i.e. not joking. ‘Speak you this with a sad brow?’, are you in earnest? And what is serious will always be thought gloomy by some, and gloom may by litotes be called seriousness. Pensive, from meaning ‘thoughtful’, came to mean ‘melancholy’ by some such process. Again, what is sad in the sense of firm or thoroughgoing or earnest will in some contexts refer to what is also grievous. When Malory wrote ‘They drew their swords and gave many sad strokes’ (VII, 8), did he mean earnest, all-out strokes (they did not ‘pull their punches’), or grim and grievous strokes? Perhaps he could not have told us.
Almost every sense the word ever bore might have had some share in producing sad (d.s.).
V. OUR POLLY IS A ‘SAD’ SLUT
So runs the song in The Beggars’ Opera. We may put beside it, from Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer (III, ii), ‘An ignorant, pretending, impudent coxcomb—Aye, aye, a sad dog’ and ‘He’s a Whig, Sir, a sad dog’, and finally Mary Crawford’s address to Fanny, ‘Sad, sad girl: I do not know when I shall have done scolding you’. I am in great doubt how these arose.
They might owe something to the same sort of transference which has given two meanings to the words sorry and wretch. In logic one who is sorry (Anglo-Saxon sarig) ought to be one who is sore, in pain, miserable. But it can also be one who is vile and unsatisfactory—‘a sorry knave’; whence also a sorry inn, a sorry nag, or ‘sorry cheer’ (a bad meal). A wretch (Anglo-Saxon wrecca) ought to be an exile, hence (significantly—there is much Volkwanderung in the background) in Anglo-Saxon poetry a hero, but soon a ‘down and out’, a miserable outcast. But a wretch can also be a vile person, a villain. ‘Princes have been sold by wretches to whose care they were entrusted’, says Johnson. Thus the sorry man may be not the one who is himself dissatisfied but the one who causes our dissatisfaction; the wretch far from feeling wretchedness, may inflict it on others. Possibly in the same way sad may be transferred to the person who makes us sad, in whichever sense; either makes us ‘fed up’ (we have soon had quite enough of him), or makes us serious, or makes us melancholy.
But I fancy there is another possibility. Chaucer’s messenger drank sadly; that is thoroughly, or seriously—‘meant business’. The spears went sadly in the rest because they also meant business. A sad instance of anything undesirable could be a serious instance of it. Do Polly’s parents, when they call her ‘a sad slut’ mean that she is a serious, weighty, important instance of sluttery—is among sluts what ‘a grave disaster’ is among disasters? Are the ‘sad dogs’ advanced or grave cases of doggery? If so, Mary Crawford’s ‘sad girl’ would be in a separate category. The previous examples have in view a species which is undesirable as a whole (sluts, dogs) and mark out one person as a prime specimen of it. But Mary Crawford of course did not think girls an undesirable species. Her usage would show sad in this sense going on after the original shade of meaning has been forgotten.
While both are conjectural I cannot help thinking the second process the more likely. The passages where sad is used in this way usually have, to my ear, some hint of the humorous about them; never the downright, wholehearted condemnation of the word wretch. This seems to me to fit better with the idea of the ‘prime specimen’.