5 Free (with Eleutherios, Liberal, Frank etc.)
The materials of this chapter will illustrate two principles mentioned in the Introduction. They are all moralised status-words. And they all show parallelism of semantic movement in different languages.
I. ‘ELEUTHEROS’
Eleutheros means ‘free’, not a slave. One can also be eleutheros apo, free from, pain, fear or the like. A community is eleutheros when it is autonomous; Xenophon can speak of two communities being eleutherous apo, free from, one another; mutually independent. All this would be unimportant if the word had not taken on a secondary, a social-ethical, sense. To call a man eleutheros in the first sense merely identified his legal status; to call his behaviour eleutheros in the second was to say that it displayed the qualities which, on the Greek view, a freeman ought to have. There is also another adjective, eleutherios, which is used with this second meaning only. Eleutheros is used with both.
The character of the eleutheros (or eleutherios) is, of course, contrasted with that of the slave. It would be dangerous in modern English to say ‘with the servile character’, for that would probably conjure up a false image. By a ‘servile’ man we mean, I take it, an abject, submissive man who cringes and flatters. That this was not the ancient idea of the typical slave is plain from the slaves in Greek and Roman comedy and also from the contrasts implied in the words we are now studying. It was a slave-girl who taunted Monica with her tippling, while quarrelling with her young mistress ut fit, ‘the way they do’. The true servile character is cheeky, shrewd, cunning, up to every trick, always with an eye to the main chance, determined ‘to look after number one’. Figaro or Mrs Slipslop fill the requirements pretty well. Sam Weller has the right knowingness, the diamond-cut-diamond realism, but he is disinterested. Absence of disinterestedness, lack of generosity, is the hall-mark of the servile. The typical slave always has an axe to grind. Hence the miserably betrayed Philoctetes in Sophocles’ play (l. 1006) says to the cunning Odysseus ‘Oh you—you who never had a sound or eleutheron thought in your mind!’ Odysseus has done nothing without ‘an ulterior motive’.
It was of course recognised, as by Aristotle so by others, that servile status and servile character did not always coincide. Hence a fragment of Menander runs ‘Live in slavery with the spirit of a freeman (eleutherôs) and you will be no slave’.
Generosity being part of the freeman’s character, the abstract noun eleutheriotes can mean generosity about money, bountifulness, readiness to give; the word generosity itself, as we noticed before, shows a very similar development. Aneleutheria, the opposite of eleutheriotes, of course means stinginess.
II. ‘LIBER’
Latin liber and liberalis are related almost exactly as eleutheros and eleutherios. Liber is ‘free’, not a slave; or free, used of an inanimate object, in the sense of unconfined, unopposed. The sea, in Ovid, as opposed to the rivers, is the plain of freer (liberioris) water. One’s mind or judgement can be liber when one is not ‘committed’ or bound by previous engagement or prejudice. Honest jurymen who come to the case with an ‘open’ mind are liberi solutique in Cicero’s Verrines, ‘free and without ties’. Conduct is liberalis when it is such as becomes a freeman. Justice, according to Cicero, is the most magnificent virtue and most suitable-to-a-freeman (liberalis). This ethical sense is often specialised and narrowed to denote the quality which we still call liberality. ‘Liberales are the sort of people who ransom prisoners of war’.
Since the word liberalis is metrically two trochees it can never occur in dactylic verse. In poetry, therefore, ingenuus (free-born) is used instead, with, I think, precisely the same range of meaning. That is, it may refer merely to status, but much more often has the ethical-social meaning; as when Juvenal says ‘a boy of ingenuus countenance, with an ingenuus modesty (pudor)’, in XI, 154. The passage is interesting in two ways: first, because this boy was in fact a slave, and secondly because the pudor brings out by contrast the ancient idea of the typical slave. The slick waiters, alternately fawning and insolent, in the worst type of ‘posh’ hotel would have seemed to the ancients typically ‘servile’; the kind, unpretentious old servants whom men of my age can still remember (especially in the country) would not. The later history of the derivative ingenuous is also instructive; like a freeman, thence open, unsuspicious, ready to trust because trustworthy, thence (in the good sense) simple, thence too simple, credulous, finally fatuous, a dupe, a gull. Greek euethes, originally ‘good-natured’ but finally ‘silly’, shows the same development. So does silly itself, and innocent. These developments in fact embody the comment of the typical slave on the ingenuus, whose lack of suspicion he regards as folly. If Sam Weller had been a typical servus he would merely have despised (instead of both honouring and smiling at) the innocence of Mr Pickwick.
III. ‘FREE’
Like the Greek and Latin words this originally refers to legal status. The opposite is slave—theow in classical Anglo-Saxon, or, later, Old Norse thrael. All sons of free men, freora manna, are to be taught to read, says King Alfred in the preface to his version of the Cura Pastoralis. It also means ‘free’ in the physical sense, free to move. After her miraculous healing the blind woman in the old version of Bede, who had been led to the shrine by her maids, went home ‘freo on her own feet’ (IV, 10). These, the oldest senses of the word, are now, oddly enough, its dangerous senses; for the others, those that correspond roughly to eleutherios and liberalis, are mainly obsolete.
I say ‘correspond roughly’ because there is a perceptible difference between the ancient and the English developments. Both may be described as ‘social-ethical’, but in the Greek and Roman words the ethical predominates and the social almost vanishes in the end. This is not so of English free. Its background is feudal, not republican; it belongs to a world in which manners were more elaborate than in antiquity and far more valued.
In Piers Plowman we read that Mede is married more for her money than for any virtue or beauty or any high kinde—any noble blood. The B text at the corresponding point reads free kinde. The adjectives are probably almost synonymous in this context. There need be no ethical implication in either; and the social pretension is higher than that of eleutheros or liberalis. Often the word refers neither to blood nor to morality but to manners, as when the thirteenth-century Floris and Blancheflor (l. 498) describes a burgher as ‘fre and curteys’, polite and courteous. Like the adjective kinde it tails off into the vaguest, most unspecified, laudation, so that Christ in the York Harrowing of Hell (l. 5) can say ‘mi Fader free’. It shows its fullest charge of meaning in Chaucer’s line ‘Trouthe and honour, fredom and courtesye’; knightly behaviour, in which morality up to the highest self-sacrifice and manners down to the smallest gracefulness in etiquette were inextricably blended by the medieval ideal.
Inevitably, since ‘largesse’ is a most important aspect of fredom, this sense throws out the branch ‘munificent, open-handed’; ‘fre of hir goodes’, generous with their property, or ‘to fre of dede’, over-liberal in its action. This could also, however, be reached without going through the sense ‘noble, courteous’, simply from the sense ‘unrestrained’ (as in the translation of Bede); uninhibited, unchecked, in one’s dealings with one’s own property.
The larger sense is perhaps well brought out in Chaucer’s line ‘Free was daun John and namely of dispence’: he had in general the manners of a gentleman, and especially in the way he spent his money. The Franklin’s Tale gives us a sort of competition in fredom (magnanimity, generosity) and hands over to the reader the problem ‘which was the moste free’. Boccaccio in the corresponding passage asks who had shown the greatest liberalità.
From the sense ‘unrestrained’ another branch goes off. Behaviour which is informal, familiar, facile, the reverse of ‘stand-offish’, can be free. Thus Quarles says ‘The world’s a crafty strumpet . . . if thou be free she’s strange; if strange, she’s free’. Hence a pejorative usage. One may be more familiar, less formal, than the social situation justifies, and may receive, as in Sheridan, the rebuff ‘Not so free, fellow’. Finally free can almost mean ‘abusive’. ‘The mistress and the maid shall quarrel and give each other very free language.’ ‘A freedom’ can likewise be an unwarranted breach of social restraint, a ‘liberty’ unduly ‘taken’, and even an indecency: ‘I do not know a more disagreeable character than a valetudinarian, who thinks he may do anything that is for his ease and indulges himself in the grossest freedoms’.
It is probably by an influence from this sense that we should explain Shakespeare’s use of liberal to mean, in various senses, (too) ‘free-spoken’; as where the young wag in The Merchant is warned that his chatter among strangers may ‘show something too liberal’ (II, ii, 187).
Very distinct from all these, though doubtless springing from the idea of ‘unrestrained, not tied, not confined’, is free in the sense ‘costing nothing’ (Latin gratis and Greek dorean). Thus dorean is rendered as freely in the Authorised Version; ‘freely ye have received’, and, earlier, in the Wycliffite translation, freli.
IV. ‘FRANK’ AND ‘VILLAIN’
There is a sharp contrast between the histories of frank and free. The social-ethical meanings of free have vanished; but, for frank, only the ethical meaning, and that in a very narrowed sense, survives.
Originally frank is of course a national name—‘a Frank’. Its legal, social, and ethical meanings are ultimately derived from the state of affairs in Gaul after the Frankish conquest. Any man you met would probably be either a Frank, hence a conqueror, a warrior, and a landowner, or else a mere ‘native’, one of a subject race. If the latter, he was (typically) a serf, an un-free peasant attached to an estate which had once been a Roman villa; he was in fact a villanus or vilains. Frank and villain (or frans and vilains) is the essential contrast.
English villain could still be used in its literal sense by Lancelot Andrewes: ‘they be men, and not beasts; free-men, and not villains’. But long before his time it had dwindled into a term of abuse, and finally into a term of mere (i.e. unspecified) abuse: villain (d.s.), a synonym for ‘bad man’, useless except as a technical term in dramatic criticism (for ‘Shakespeare’s villains’ is a convenient enough expression). The process was of course gradual, and it is not easy to be sure what stage of it is represented by each occurrence of the word in the old texts.
At first its pejorative meaning was closely connected with its literal; the image of the actual vilains or peasant was still operative. Peasants, since we abolished them, have in this country been so idealised that we may go as far astray about the old overtones of ‘peasant’ as about the ancient idea of the servile character. We get an inkling of them when Love, in the Romance of the Rose, says ‘no villain or butcher’ has ever been allowed to kiss his lips (l. 1938). He goes on to say that the villain is brutal (fel), pitiless, disobliging, and unfriendly (ll. 2086–7). If you would avoid vilanie, the peasant character, you must imitate courteous Gawain, not surly Kay (ll. 2093 f.). Danger is later described as a vilains; he leaps suddenly from his hiding place, huge, dark, bristly, with blazing eyes, loud and violent (ll. 2920 f.). But notice that while vilains is still thus closely connected with the image of the actual peasant, it quite clearly refers to a psychological type, not to an actual rank. Love takes care to tell us that ‘vilanie makes the vilains’ (l. 2083). Theoretically, one who was a vilains by status might not have the vice of vilanie; certainly many a man who is not a vilains by status will be guilty of it. Churl, itself originally a status word, would be the nearest English equivalent to Old French vilains in this sense, if it had not come to lay more emphasis on niggardliness in particular than on the generally sullen and uncooperative character of the peasant. Boor is perhaps now our best translation.
The noun vilein is of doubtful occurrence in Chaucer, but vileinye is common. The central area of its meaning is rudeness, bad manners. The Knight never ‘said vileinye’, spoke rudely, to anyone (A. 70). Chaucer hopes that his setting down the bawdy tales will not be counted against him as vileinye (l. 726). The young roisterers in the Pardoner’s Tale are reproved for speaking vileinye to an old man (C. 740). By an easy transition, to dispraise or vilify anything is to speak vileinye of it; the Wife of Bath asks why one should speak vileinye ‘of bigamye or of octogamye’ (D. 34) or of Lameth (D. 53). Hence a shame or indignity done to anything, like Creon’s refusal to permit the burial of the enemy dead (A. 941), can be a vileinye.
We get nearer to a purely ethical sense when the Wife of Bath argues that if nobility were really transmissible by heredity, then those of a good stock would never cease to practise gentillesse nor begin practising ‘villeinye or vyce’ (D. 1133–8). But the context still attaches the word very closely not to moral defects in general but to those moral defects which were felt to be especially inappropriate in the highest ranks—the opposites of gentillesse. Twice we find rape described as villeinye. The wife of Hasdrubal committed suicide to make sure that no Roman ‘dide hir vileinye’ (F. 1404), and Tarquin is asked in an apostrophe how he could have done Lucretia ‘this vilanye’. But note the preceding lines. He ought to have acted as a lord and a ‘verray knight’, instead of which he has ‘doon dispyt to chivalrye’. Rape will naturally be the first of all moral offences to be called vileinye because, besides being a sin against the Christian law, it is the direct antithesis of gentillesse, of courtesy and of deference to ladies. Tarquin’s sin is a vilein’s act because it is, as our fathers, if not we, would say, ‘the act of a cad’. Indeed the word cad, with its contemporary semantic wobble between social and moral condemnation, is a good enough parallel to vileinye in this sense. And once vileinye means something like ‘caddishness’ it is already on the downward path which will finally lead it to become a word of mere, unspecified opprobrium. Once or twice in Chaucer it has almost reached this stage. When the act of those enemies who had beaten the wife of Melibeus and mortally wounded his daughter is described as a vileinye (B. 2547), or John warns Aleyn that the miller is a dangerous man who might do them a vileinye (A. 4191), the content of the word is perhaps hardly more precise than ‘a rotten trick’ or ‘a bad turn’. In the Second Nun’s Tale, when we hear that no one can see the rose and lily garlands brought by the angel unless he ‘be chaast and hate vileinye’ (G. 231), perhaps we have reached a purely ethical meaning.
In the Elizabethan drama villain, and the associated words, are, so to speak, treacherous. At first the modern reader in most contexts will give them the dangerous sense without hesitation. Because they are opprobrious, that sense will always seem to fit the context; that is why it is so dangerous. ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!’; ‘I never loved my brother in my life’—‘More villain thou’; ‘Some villain hath done me wrong’—what should all these be but villain (d.s.)? Perhaps they all are. But it is not absolutely certain.
Antipholus of Syracuse describes his man Dromio as ‘a trusty villain’ whose ‘merry jests’ often cheer him up. We have here of course the affectionate use of an opprobrious term in reverse—like ‘a trusty rogue’. But it is hard to believe that the opprobrium stored in the term before it is reversed can be as strong as that of villain (d.s.). Something more like ‘rogue’ or (in older usage) ‘wretch’, or ‘rascal’. And ‘rascal’—certainly not villain (d.s.)—is surely the sense required when Petruchio repeatedly calls his man Grunio a villain, and once a knave. Again, in Measure for Measure (V, i, 264) the luckless Lucio says that Friar Lodowick ‘spoke most villanous speeches of the Duke’. The point of the joke is that it was Lucio himself who had spoken those speeches, as no one knows better than the Duke. And they were not those of a villain (d.s.). He was not plotting the Duke’s murder or deposition, only telling ‘pretty tales’, talking bawdy about his betters. His speeches were, in fact, vileinye in Chaucer’s rather than in the modern sense; rude, scandalous.
Since words mean many things in the same period, these usages do not of course disprove the interpretation villain (d.s.) in the previous passages from Hamlet, As You Like It and Lear. But they provide the background against which its probability can be judged. I am inclined, myself, to think that villain (d.s.) need not be fully present in any of them. It may be present in all as the speaker’s meaning. The speaker certainly regards the other party as what we would call a villain; but I am not certain that he selects this particular term of abuse because it already (lexically) has the meaning ‘very wicked man’. The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt—even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called. Hence extreme hatred may select the word villain precisely because it is not yet merely moral but still carries some implication of ignoble birth, coarse manners, and ignorance. For all except the best men would rather be called wicked than vulgar. Compare the scene where Somerset calls Suffolk away from the de jure Duke of York with the words ‘Away! . . . We grace the yeoman by conversing with him’.
All this I admit to be uncertain. But there is one place where I very greatly hope that villain has hardly any of the dangerous sense in it. The opening soliloquy of Richard III does not, on any view, show Shakespeare at his subtlest. But the crudity of ‘I am determined to prove a villain’ (I, i, 30) is, even on that level, almost comic if Richard means villain (d.s.). But if we dare suppose that the word has predominantly—or, better still, exclusively—its older sense, the line is immeasurably improved. For then, Richard, having produced as good, and contemptuous, a parody as his distorted body can of those who ‘court an amorous looking glass’, suddenly relapses into himself, looks as clumsy, as coarse, as uncouth as he knows how—becomes the very image of the vilains, fixes the audience with a glance of ogre-ish glee, and says in effect ‘Well; since I can’t be a lounge-lizard, I’ll be—gad, I’ll be—a Tough’.
Some other usages, which obviously come by hyperbole, are consistent with almost any meaning of the word. Such are ‘a villainous house for fleas’, ‘villainous smell’, ‘villainous melancholy’, or ‘villainously cross-gartered’. These will surprise no one who remembers how, at various periods, every inconvenience or discomfort, has been called scurvy, abominable, shocking, incredible or shattering.
In Old French, frans, the form which frank assumed, can mean free, unencumbered. There is a line quoted by Chalcidius ‘When you have laid aside your body and soar free (liber) to the sky’; the Romance of the Rose (l. 5030) translates ‘You will go frans into the holy air’. This usage is found also in English; Lord Berners in his version of Huon writes ‘he and all his companye shal depart frank and free at their pleasure’ (XLIII).
Its social-ethical sense once had pretty much the same range as that of free. The god of love, in the Romance of the Rose, says that the servant when he accepts must be courteous and frans (l. 1939). The quality which the frans has is of course franchise (courtesy, gentle manners, the gentle heart) both in French and English; among Gawain’s virtues are ‘franchise and fellowshipe’. But later usage restricted the word to a sense which may owe something both to the idea of ‘unrestrained’ and to that of the noble or chivalrous. This double implication, or double semantic root, may have helped the sense in question to triumph. The frank person is unencumbered by fears, calculations, and an eye to the main chance; he also shows the straightforwardness and boldness of a noble nature. Hence ‘with frank and with uncurbed plainness’ or ‘bearing with frank appearance their purposes towards Cyprus’.
Like free, it too can mean gratis, not to be paid for; in Mother Hubbards Tale, we find ‘Thou hast it wonne for it is of frank gift’ (l. 531). This sense long survived in ‘the frank’ which members of Parliament were once entitled to put on their letters.
V. AN OBSOLETE BRANCH-LINE
Like eleutheria and libertas, freedom and franchise can of course mean the legal freedom of a community. But the ancient words are used chiefly, if not entirely, in reference to the freedom of a state. The contrast implied is sometimes between autonomy and subjection to a foreign power; sometimes between the freedom of a republic and the rule of a despot. The medieval words nearly always refer to something different; to the guaranteed freedoms or immunities (from royal or baronial interference) of a corporate entity which cuts across states, like the Church, or which exists within the state, like a city or guild. Thus Gower says a knight should defend ‘The common right and the franchise of Holy Churche’; or Shakespeare, ‘If you deny it let the danger light upon your city’s freedom’.
This led to a development unparalleled, I believe, in the ancient languages. By becoming a member of any corporation which enjoys such freedom or franchise you of course come to share that freedom or franchise. You become a freeman of, or receive the freedom of, that city; or you become ‘free of the Grocers’. These are familiar. But a further development along this line is more startling. Freedom can mean simply ‘citizenship’, and when the centurion tells Saint Paul that he had paid a lot of money to acquire Roman citizenship (politeia), the Authorised Version says ‘At a great price obtained I this freedom’. Philemon Holland translating Suetonius writes ‘Unlesse they might be donati civitate . . . enioye the fraunchises and freedom of Rome’. This meaning is fossilised in the surviving English use of franchise to mean the power of voting, conceived as the essential mark of full citizenship.
VI. ‘LIBERAL’ AS A CULTURAL TERM
We had brought the ancient words to a social and ethical sense; it remains to consider the all-important cultural meaning which grew from it.
The freeman, and still more the eleutherios or liberalis who not only is but ought to be a freeman, has not only his characteristic virtues but his characteristic occupations. Some of these are necessary; statesmanship, says Pseudo-Plato, is the most liberal (eleutheriotaten) of studies. But the idea that leisure occupations, things done for their own sake and not for utility, are especially eleuthera, soon comes into play. It is perhaps present when Xenophon says ‘They have a square (agora) called the Free (eleuthera) Square from which tradespeople and their noises and vulgarities (apeirokaliai) are excluded’. The tradespeople need not be, and probably are not, slaves. But they are engaged in activities which have no value except in so far as they contribute to some end outside themselves. The contrast becomes explicit when Aristotle says in the Rhetoric ‘of one’s possessions those which yield some profit are the most useful, but those which exist only to be enjoyed are eleutheria’. This is the first step. Only he who is neither legally enslaved to a master nor economically enslaved by the struggle for subsistence, is likely to have, or to have the leisure for using, a piano or a library. That is how one’s piano or library is more liberal, more characteristic of one’s position as a freeman, than one’s coal-shovel or one’s tools.
But there is a further development, which we owe (I believe) entirely to Aristotle; a brilliant conceit. (There is no reason why we should not attribute a conceit to him; he was a wit, and a dressy man, as well as a philosopher.) It comes in the Metaphysics. ‘We call a man free whose life is lived for his own sake not for that of others. In the same way philosphy is of all studies the only free one; for it alone exists for its own sake.’
Here is an astonishing change. Up till now a study could be free because it was the characteristic occupation of a freeman. Aristotle now makes it ‘free’ in a quite new sense; namely, by analogy. It is a free study because it holds among other studies the same privileged position which the freeman holds among other men. The conceit is all the better for taking up into itself the much simpler idea that disinterestedness is an essential part of the ‘free’ character. The free study seeks nothing beyond itself and desires the activity of knowing for that activity’s own sake. That is what the man of radically servile character—give him what leisure and what fortune you please—will never understand. He will ask, ‘But what use is it?’ And finding that it cannot be eaten or drunk, nor used as an aphrodisiac, nor made an instrument for increasing his income or his power, he will pronounce it—he has pronounced it—to be ‘bunk’.
How far Aristotle’s ideal is from a mere dilettantism can best be seen by giving it the background which two other passages supply. In Metaphysics we learn that the organisation of the universe resembles that of a household, in which ‘no one has so little chance to act at random as the free members. For them everything or almost everything proceeds according to a fixed plan (tetaktai), whereas the slaves and domestic animals contribute little to the common end and act mostly at random.’ The attitude of any slave-owning society is and ought to be repellent to us, but it is worth while suppressing that repulsion in order to get the picture as Aristotle saw it. Looking from his study window he sees the hens scratching in the dust, the pigs asleep, the dogs hunting for fleas; the slaves, any of them who are not at that very moment on some appointed task, flirting, quarrelling, cracking nuts, playing dice, or dozing. He, the master, may use them all for the common end, the well-being of the family. They themselves have no such end, nor any consistent end, in mind. Whatever in their lives is not compelled from above is random—dependent on the mood of the moment. His own life is quite different; a systematised round of religious, political, scientific, literary and social activities; its very hours of recreation (there’s an anecdote about them) deliberate, approved and allowed for; consistent with itself. But what is it in the structure of the universe that corresponds to this distinction between Aristotle, self-bound with the discipline of a freeman, and Aristotle’s slaves, negatively free with a servile freedom between each job and the next? I think there is no doubt of the answer. It is the things in the higher world of aether which are regular, immutable, consistent; those down here in the air that are subject to change, and chance and contingence. In the world, as in the household, the higher acts to a fixed plan; the lower admits the ‘random’ element. The free life is to the servile as the life of the gods (the living stars) is to that of terrestrial creatures. This is so not because the truly free man ‘does what he likes’, but because he imitates, so far as a mortal can, the flawless and patterned regularity of the heavenly beings, like them not doing what he likes but being what he is, being fully human as they are divine, and fully human by his likeness to them. For the crown of life—here we break right out of the cautious modesty of most Greek sentiment—is not ‘being mortal, to think mortal thoughts’ but rather ‘to immortalise as much as possible’ and by all means to live according to the highest element in oneself.
Of course humanity is not often on the Aristotelian height. The eleutheria mathemata of the Greeks, the liberalia studia or liberales artes of the Latins are soon taken over by the curricula and every teacher or student knows which they are; one no longer needs to think why they are called liberal. You need merely enumerate: ‘Arts’, says Cicero, ‘which include liberales et ingenuae knowledges, such as Geometry, Music, the knowledge of letters and poets and whatever is said about natural objects, human manners and politics’. One even meets the idea (strange to those who have studied the lives of the Humanists) that the pursuit of such studies tends to improve one’s behaviour: ‘to have learned well the liberal arts’ (ingenuas, because it comes in a hexameter) ‘softens the manners and banishes ferocity’. Finally, in the Middle Ages, the Liberal Arts settle down into the well known list of seven—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Arithmetic might hardly have won its place if Aristotle’s idea of the liberal had been kept steadily in view.
That idea is, however, still operative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the conception of an inquisitiveness which is ‘generous’ or ‘noble’ or ‘liberal’ because it seeks knowledge for its own sake. Johnson speaks of ‘such knowledge as may justly be admired in those who have no motive to study but generous curiosity’, and praises Boswell, back from Corsica, as one ‘whom a wise and noble curiosity has led where perhaps no native of his country ever was before’. Macaulay says that the Jesuits, as missionaries, ‘wandered to countries which neither mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had impelled any stranger to explore’.
The liberal motive is here contrasted equally with the religious and the mercantile. This suggests a problem for those who wish to embrace both the Christian and the Aristotelian scheme. What excellence can either ideal concede to the other? The only nineteenth-century author, so far as I know, who fully faced the question was Newman, in a very firm piece of thinking which makes clear how, in his view, that which is necessarily subordinate has nevertheless its own relative autonomy and its own proper excellence—
That alone is liberal knowledge which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel . . . refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end. The most ordinary pursuits have this specific character if they are self-sufficient and complete; the highest lose it when they minister to something beyond them. . . . If, for instance, Theology, instead of being cultivated as a contemplation, be limited to the purposes of the pulpit or be represented by the catechism, it loses—not its usefulness, not its divine character, not its meritoriousness (rather it increases those qualities by such charitable condescension) but it does lose the particular attribute which I am illustrating; just as a face worn by tears and fasting loses its beauty. . . . And thus it appears that even what is supernatural need not be liberal, nor need a hero be a gentleman, for the plain reason that one idea is not another idea.
Unless followed by the word ‘education’, liberal has now lost this meaning. For that loss, so damaging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then of a theological, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its ‘selling-power’, has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word conservative would have said if it had not been ‘cornered’ by politicians. Evangelical, intellectual, rationalist, and temperance have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word friends. And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. Humanist is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as gentleman.
We cannot stop the verbicides. The most we can do is not to imitate them.