7 Simple
It has been the curious fate of this word to achieve enormous popularity (now, I think, on the decline) without acquiring a dangerous sense. In many people’s usage it has, indeed, rather an atmosphere than anything that can be called a meaning.
We must start of course with Latin simplex; its first element related to semel (once) and its second to plicare (to fold). Originally, we must suppose, a thing was simplex when it was like a sheet of paper. Fold the sheet in two and it becomes duplex. We had a word somewhat like it in Anglo-Saxon; anfeald, as you might say, ‘onefold’. ‘You’ve heard my anfeald thought’, says someone in Beowulf (l. 256); the single, uncomplicated, unqualified, unambiguous thing I have to say. He is poising a spear in his hand while he speaks (l. 235) and is explaining to some strangers that they’d better—and the sooner the better (l. 256)—explain who they are before they go a step further. You couldn’t have a more ‘one-fold’ thought. The word appears again (afaild) in Gavin Douglas, there applied to God. But we have lost it. And the (presumably) original idea of folding in the Latin word has no influence on the meanings we shall have to consider.
1. The simplex is the opposite of the compound or composite: ‘The nature of the animating principle’, says Cicero, ‘must either be simplex . . . or else compounded (concreta) of diverse natures’. Just so in English. ‘A foote of two sillables is either simple or mixt’, says William Webbe. Locke tells us ‘one thing is to be observed concerning ideas . . . that some are simple and some complex’.
2. Every compound, or so we hope, can in principle be resolved into simple ingredients, ingredients which are internally homogeneous. And as the compound is a compound, so these ultimate ingredients are simples. Thus in older medical language the ultimate herbal ingredients of a medicine are simples, and a medicine which consists of one single herb (or what not) is a simple. Thus Amarillis in The Faithful Shepherdess (II, iii, 72) speaks of ‘all simples good for medicine’. We had a verb from this once. To go looking for such ingredients was to simple. ‘I know most of the plants of my country,’ says Browne, ‘yet methinks I do not know so many as when I . . . had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheap-side.’
3. Anything that is not added to, anything operating by itself, is simple. In this sense the word is almost synonymous with ‘mere’. In All’s Well we read of a remedy ‘whose simple touch Is powerful to araise King Pepin’ (II, i, 78). Its mere touch; nothing more is needed. We get the same in French: ‘En la justice . . . tout ce qui est au delà de la mort simple, me semble pure cruauté’; mere death, not aggravated by tortures. Examples of this usage are no doubt plentiful in Latin and in all languages that owe it the word, but they are not easy to identify. So often other ideas may come in as well. The sort of difficulty I have in mind can be shown by a glance at Pope’s Essay on Man I, 103 f.—the Poor Indian passage. ‘Proud science’ has never taught his soul this or that but ‘simple nature’ has given him the hope of immortality. Does this mean ‘mere’ nature, nature unaided, or does it mean ‘Nature, who (as we all know) is unsophisticated, free from artificiality’?
So far all has been plain enough. But we must now divide. This semantic trunk throws out three branches of meaning, which may be distinguished as the logical, the ethical, and the popular.
I. THE LOGICAL BRANCH
Simply, and Latin simpliciter, take over the function of the Greek adverb haplôs. What that function was, a good formal logician would define for us accurately in a very few words, but readers who are not themselves formal logicians might not be greatly enlightened. We had better take the slower way of learning its meaning from live examples. They are all from Aristotle’s Ethics.
‘The best critic in each subject is the man educated in that subject; but the best critic haplôs is the [generally] educated man’ (1094 b).
‘If one pursues B for the sake of A, he pursues A in itself, but B incidentally. To pursue anything “in itself” means the same as to pursue it haplôs’ (1151 b).
‘Some define the virtues as absences of passion or states of tranquillity. But this is wrong. For they say this haplôs, without the necessary addenda such as “in the right way” or “on the right occasion” ’(1104 b).
‘Things which are always good haplôs but not always good for a particular person’ (1129 b).
‘That habit of the soul which, haplôs, is virtue, when exercised towards our neighbour is “justice’ ” (1130 a).
‘A similar problem arises about jettison, when men throw goods overboard in a storm to lighten ship. This act would not be voluntary haplôs, though any man in his senses would do it to save himself and his shipmates. Such acts are, then, mixed. They are voluntary [in the circumstances] but perhaps involuntary haplôs’ (1110 a).
The use of simpliciter to translate haplôs is conveniently illustrated by Aquinas when he is discussing the same problem, and arrives at a different conclusion. Such acts are ‘voluntary simpliciter, but involuntary secundum quid’.
For purely logical purposes it is best to use in English the Latin word. For our own purpose, the meaning of it, and of haplôs, is now, I hope tolerably clear. What is good or true (or anything else) haplôs is so ‘in itself’, intrinsically, unconditionally, not in relation to special circumstances; can be called good or true (or whatever) without qualification. The opposites of haplôs would be expressed by reservations: ‘in a way’, ‘in a sense’, ‘for some people’, ‘under certain conditions’, ‘up to a point’, ‘with the necessary qualifications’, ‘relatively’, ‘in the circumstances’.
Our older writers use simply in precisely this way. As in Hooker’s ‘under man no creature is capable of felicity and bliss . . . because their chiefest perfection consisteth in that which is best for them, but not in that which is simply best, as ours doth’ (I, xi, 3). For our good is God, who is best simpliciter. A bone is a good for a dog but a bone is not good simply. (While it was still in a live animal the bone was a good for that animal, and there might come a day when it was a good for a palaeontologist. But never good simply.)
‘Other retentions and evacuations there are, not simply necessary but at some times’, says Burton (I, ii, 2, 4).
The words which I have italicised in the following (from Taylor) perhaps show that in his time the logical use of simply was already becoming a little less familiar. He seems to feel it needs expansion: ‘Elias, that he might bring the people from idolatry, caused a sacrifice to Baal to be made . . . which of itself was simply and absolutely evil’. The word ‘considered’ in Johnson’s (Boswell, 12 June 1784) ‘If you admit any degree of punishment, there is an end of your argument from infinite goodness simply considered’, may have the same cause.
Now to say that a thing is simply good (like charity) and not merely good for someone (like insulin for diabetics), or that it is simply bad (like envy) and not merely bad under certain conditions (as eight is a bad hour for breakfast if you’re catching a train at 8.15) is to say more about the thing—to exalt it higher or damn it deeper—than we should do if we admitted qualifications. Hence, by a degradation of the logical use, simply and absolutely (which we have already seen Taylor using to explicate simply) become merely intensifying adverbs. By prefixing them to an adjective ordinary speakers will soon feel that they are merely underlining the adjective or asserting a strong claim to it. Hence, in our own day, ‘simply delicious’, ‘simply marvellous’, ‘absolutely frightful’. (One could even have, though I am not sure I have yet heard it, ‘it’s all absolutely relative’.) This is a kind of gush which many suppose to be specifically modern, but it was already beginning in the sixteenth century. ‘He hath simply the best wit of any handy craft man in Athens’, says someone in Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV, ii, 9); and Sir Andrew claims to ‘have the back-trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria’. Thus we may—in such studies as this we must—trace the noble dust of Alexander stopping a bung-hole and see how a homespun’s schwärmerei or a gull’s vanity makes its own momentary use of tools inherited from the great masters of all occidental thought.
II. THE ETHICAL BRANCH
Simplicity here is the opposite of duplicity. A man is simplex when there is ‘only one of him’ in the sense that the character he shows you and that which he bears within are one not two; especially, of course, when his words and his thought, his professed and his real motives, are identical. ‘You and I are speaking to-day simplicissime’, says someone in Tacitus—frankly, sincerely, as we really think and feel. With an immeasurable deepening the idea can then be internalised so that it refers to an inner singleness or simplicity which makes a man sincere with himself, seeing what he sees and playing no tricks with his own knowledge or purpose. ‘If your eye is haplous’, says the Greek—haplous being of course the adjective of the adverb haplôs; and the Vulgate, si oculus tuus fuerit simplex (A.V. ‘single’).
Sincere people are guileless, and those who have no guile themselves are not quick to suspect it in others. (It has been said that no one ever meets anyone but himself.) It is here that the degradation of simplex begins. To be guileless, unsuspicious—is it not next door to being credulous, gullible? Accordingly Apuleius, explaining why Psyche believed the cock-and-bull story of her jealous sisters, says ‘she was seized by the terror of such alarming words, for poor little (misella) Psyche was simplex and of a tender wit, animi tenella’. An Elizabethan would here have rendered simplex by ‘seelie’. Apuleius does not yet mean quite silly in the modern sense, but he certainly means she was no Solomon. Ingenuous Psyche? Naïve Psyche? At any rate, a Psyche quite incapable of looking after herself, anyone’s prey.
The simple, being guileless and credulous, are of course not dangerous. They are harmless or—notice how all these words have a flavour of patronage or disparagement—‘innocuous’. The apostles are told in St Matthew (X. 16) to be as akeraioi as doves. The word, so far as I can make out, meant ‘guileless’, and the Vulgate’s simplices would be a good translation. Tyndale, Cranmer, and Geneva render it ‘innocent’, and A.V., ‘harmless’; presumably, for them, synonymous with simple. And the idea of harmlessness is probably uppermost when Fraunchise in the Romance of the Rose is said (l. 1198) to be ‘simple come uns colons’ (English version, ‘simple as dowve on tree’, l. 1219).
But in the same poem we can find the word at a further stage of its decline. Frend is advising the lover to ignore infidelities in his mistress; even when they are flagrant he should pretend that he is blind or plus simples que n’est uns bugles (l. 9700)—pretend, in fact, that he has no more sense than a buffalo. Simples has got beyond the senses ‘credulous’ or ‘naïf’; it means downright stupid. It is not far from this when Claudius accuses Hamlet of ‘An understanding simple and unschooled’ (I, ii, 97) or when, centuries later Mrs Morland says ‘You are fretting over General Tilney and that is very simple of you’. Often the defect implied is one of learning, skill and subtlety—a defect felt to be rather charming and put forward as a claim for pity, as in Henry VIII, ‘I am a simple woman much too weak To oppose your cunning’ (II, iv, 106). So Desdemona asks the Duke ‘let me find a charter in your voice to assist my simpleness’.
The word takes a much sharper downward turn in the sense which has given us simpleton. Simple can still—in Ireland anyway—mean ‘mentally deficient’. In Grimstone’s Siege of Ostend (1604) we read of one who was ‘lame of his body and half simple’—half an imbecile. When the exasperated Friar in Romeo asks ‘what simpleness is this?’ (III, iii, 77) simpleness probably means idiocy, and I think ‘Simple Simon’ in the Rhyme was a fatuus. Significantly ‘innocent’—and simple, as we have seen, can mean that—is used in the same way, so that there is a section in Taylor’s Worthy Communicant headed ‘Whether Innocents, Fools, and Madmen, may be admitted’. For innocent, simple, silly, ingenuous, and Greek euethes, all illustrate the same thing—the remarkable tendency of adjectives which originally imputed great goodness, to become terms of disparagement. Give a good quality a name and that name will soon be the name of a defect. Pious and respectable are among the comparatively modern casualties, and sanctimonious was once a term of praise.
As far as simple is concerned, Taylor comments on the process: ‘Simplicity is grown into contempt . . . unwary fools and defenceless people were called simple.’ And Shakespeare exploits it to good effect in the line ‘And simple truth miscall’d simplicity’, where simple, I take it, is not ‘mere’ but ‘guileless, single-minded’.
III. THE POPULAR BRANCH
We have already had simple or simplex as ‘mere’, not added to. The meaning I now want to consider is perhaps just budding out of this when Horace, deprecating ‘Persian’—Thackeray took ‘Frenchified’ as our equivalent—luxury in the arrangements for a dinner, says ‘Don’t bother to add anything to the simplici myrto’, ‘the mere or plain myrtle’.
The word ‘plain’, which itself well deserves study, is the best translation for simplex in this sense; ‘elaborate’ or ‘ornate’ are the opposites. Thus Milton rightly turns Horace’s simplex munditiis as ‘plain in thy neatness’. (Why, in heaven’s name, did Monsignor Knox think his version of that ode was ‘modelled on the Authorised Version’?)
Examples of this sense could be had by the armful. Addison says the opening lines of Paradise Lost are ‘as plain, simple, and unadorned as any in the whole poem’. Gulliver’s ‘style is very plain and simple’.
This sense again divides into two.
1. What is simple or plain is the reverse of complicated. A complicated process is hard to learn and a complicated argument hard to follow. Therefore simple comes to mean ‘easy’. The idea that it is within the capacity of those who are simple (in the sense ‘unskilled’) may perhaps have helped this development.
‘God never does that by difficult ways which may be done by ways that are simple and easy’, says John Norris in his Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal World (1701). F. H. Bradley in the Preface to his Logic (1922) says ‘if I saw further I should be simpler’.
2. There is a general feeling that what is unelaborate is modest or unostentatious. Simple thus acquires a sense which I might find it hard enough to define if a useful piece of modern slang did not help me out; the simple is the opposite of the ‘posh’. Frugal and homely ways are simple ways; Lenten fare, simple fare. In Gawain and the Green Knight we read of ‘the crabbed Lenten That fraystes the flesch with the fysche and fode more simple’ (l. 502)—is a trial to our flesh ‘with fish and simpler diet’. Virgil speaks of one whose health was never impaired by a recherché table, non epulae nocuere repostae. Dryden renders it ‘simple his beverage, homely was his food’.
In this usage, which is still very current, we often have good examples of the insulating power of the context. When we are warned that we shall get only ‘a very simple meal’ we may expect a shepherd’s pie or a dish of hash. These are certainly not simpler than a pheasant or a haunch of venison in the sense of being less complicated, containing fewer heterogeneous elements. And to cook these well is not a simpler (in the sense ‘easier’) operation. Indeed it is everyone’s experience that when we are hard up and start economising, our lives become simpler in the sense that they become homelier and less ‘posh’ while at the same time they become less simple (more complicated). Rags tacked together, and braces supplemented with string, and sleeves where you can hardly find the fairway—torn linings leading to so many dead-ends—make a man’s toilet marvellously complicated.
But simple as the opposite of ‘posh’, elaborate, or ostentatious, bifurcates again. It can be either derogatory or laudatory.
In its derogatory use it means, in one sense of that word, ‘poor’; ‘not up to much’, second-rate, trumpery, slight. Thus, again from Gawain: ‘Now forsake ye this silke, sayde the burde thenne, For hit is simple in hitself?’ (l. 1846)—because it doesn’t look much of a thing? Of course this is mock modesty; quite apart from its magical properties it was far from simple. But the lady uses the language of real modesty. So in Malory we learn that knights who use paramours will be unlucky and ‘shal be overcome with a simpler knight than they be hemself’ (VI, x)—a knight whose form or skill is below their own. In the same text (II, V) ‘your quarrel is ful simple’ might mean that it is foolish; more probably, I think, that it is trivial. Finally, simple can mean low-born, not of the gentry; as when the old fisherman says in Waverley (ch. XXXII) ‘gentle or simple shall not darken my door’.
As a term of praise it covers several shades of meaning. When Shame in the Romance of the Rose (l. 3563) si fu umeliant e simple, the English version gives ‘Humble of hir porte and made it simple’ (l. 3863); simple is almost exactly a synonym for ‘humble’. In Zechariah ix. 9, where A.V. reads ‘lowly’, Coverdale had ‘lowly and simple’, a doublet of synonyms. So in the Romance where we are told that Beauty was simple comme une esposee (l. 1000), ‘simple as byrde in bour’, something like ‘modest’ or ‘bashful’ might do. And so also for Chaucer’s Prioress who ‘of her smiling was ful simple and coy’ (A. 119), demure, unobtrusive. Coy, ultimately from quietus, is not far removed from it in meaning. Both adjectives paint a character who was far from being ‘loud’.
IV. THE SEMANTIC SEDIMENT
The logical branch of this word’s meanings has little effect on the others. But nearly all those others are bound together and (as Donne might say) ‘interinanimate’ one another in an unusual way, so that it is often impossible to decide which is intended or, if there are many intended, which is uppermost.
Dante writes: ‘From the hand of Him who loves her before she is, like a young girl who prattles, with laughter and tears, forth comes l’anima semplicetta.’ We notice that Dante is using a diminutive. The feeling which prompted Apuleius to his misella and tenella for ‘simple Psyche’ is at work. The new-created anima or psyche is a touching or disarming thing, viewed with tenderness and not without pity. But if we try to go beyond the emotional content of the word, I do not know what definable sense we could fix upon it. Is the soul simple because she is uncomplicated? or innocent? or gullible? or unskilled? or humble? or foolish? or for all these reasons? Could Dante himself have told us?
Simple, as we have seen, can impute either defects (lack of intelligence, of rationality even, of skill, of nobility) or virtues (sincerity, humility). But none of these defects is such as to produce hatred. Good reason why; they leave our self-love secure. We feel superior when we impute them. Even if they irritate us, there is some pity, often some amusement and indulgence, mixed with our irritation. The idiot (one thing that simple can mean) may indeed raise uneasiness or disgust in a modern; but he does not seem to have done so in our ancestors. They loved ‘fools’ and kept them as pets. Again, the simple are the harmless; we feel safe in their presence as well as superior. But, oddly enough, the virtues which this word can impute have the same effect. Humility disarms us, and we seldom acknowledge a man’s moral superiority to us in guilelessness and truth without reimbursing our self-esteem by a feeling that we are at least equally superior to him in acuteness and knowledge of the world. (The humour of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories depends on the continual pricking of this bubble.) Hence, over a very wide range of its senses, simple either imputes virtues and defects which can equally be contemplated de haut en bas, or else, when the speaker uses it of himself (more often perhaps herself) is placatory—claims our indulgence, deprecates our severity, and flatters us a little. Yes, and even while it assumes the form of self-depreciation, it gently insinuates that the thing confessed is really almost a virtue; is at least very touching and endearing. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find we live very simply’ may in fact be an appeal that we should regard dirty plates and tepid food, not as the results of laziness, but as somehow homely, unostentatious, modest, simple with the laudable simplicité des anciens mœurs.
This is why I describe the final state of the word as a semantic sediment. What effectively remains is not this or that precise sense but a general appealingness or disarmingness.
‘They prefer the simplicity of faith before that knowledge which, curiously sifting and disputing too boldly . . . chilleth . . . all warmth of zeal’. Faith un-added to and ‘mere’? Unskilled? Easy? Humble?
‘Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.’ Sincerity? Unskilfulness? Simple as against gentle? Silliness?
‘His place of birth a solemn Angel tells to simple shepherds.’
‘A general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour.’ Sincerity (not affectation)? Plainness (not ‘poshness’)? The easy (not the hard)? The modest (not the ostentatious)?
Finally, in A. C. Benson’s From a College Window: ‘Simple, silent, deferential people such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners’ (pp. 2–3). ‘Quiet lives of study and meditation led here’ (i.e. in Cambridge colleges) ‘by wise and simple men’ (pp. 8–9). ‘The University is a place where a poor man, if he be virtuous, may live a life of dignity and simplicity’ (p. 9). ‘How seldom does a perfectly simple, human relationship exist between a boy and his father’ (p. 10). ‘To have leisure and a degree of simple stateliness assured’ (p. 12). ‘I have grown to feel that the ambitions which we preach and the successes for which we prepare are very often nothing but a missing of the simple road . . . I have grown to believe that the one thing worth aiming at is simplicity of heart and life’ (p. 14).
The simplicity often lacking between father and son might be sincerity, but I think Benson would have used sincerity if he meant exactly that. In what sense either butlers or fellows of colleges are usually simple is hard to say. In two of the instances the word has, I fancy, almost an exclusively placatory function. You might grudge us ‘dignity’ or ‘stateliness’; yet surely not ‘dignity and simplicity’ or ‘simple stateliness’. Yet the continual recurrence of the word is undoubtedly necessary to the tone of the whole essay.
Though I do not myself much care for this word when it is in this condition—it is a soft, frilly, pouting, question-begging, almost a sly and sneaking, word—I would not say it is now meaningless. It indicates an (emotionally) specific area; like supernatural. We cannot say it serves none of the purposes of language.