Simple Speech

Speech is the great organ by which the mind reveals itself, the first visible form it gives itself. As the thought, so the word. Whoever would reform their life in the direction of simplicity must keep watch over both tongue and pen. Let speech be as simple as thought; let it be sincere, and let it be reliable: think rightly, speak frankly!

Social relations rest on mutual trust, and that trust is nourished by each person's sincerity. As soon as sincerity diminishes, trust deteriorates, relationships suffer, and uncertainty arises. This is as true in the realm of material interests as in that of spiritual interests. With people you must constantly be on guard against, it is as hard to carry on commerce and industry as it is to seek scientific truth, pursue religious concord, or bring about justice. When you must first check everyone's words and intentions, and start from the assumption that everything said and written is meant to serve you up illusion in place of truth, life becomes strangely complicated. That is our case. There are too many sly operators, too many diplomats, who try to outsmart one another and take pains to deceive each other, and that is why everyone has such trouble finding out about the simplest things, the very things that matter most to them. What I have just said would probably be enough to show what I mean, and everyone's experience could supply an ample commentary here, with illustrations to support it. Still, I am no less determined to dwell on this point and to surround myself with examples.

In earlier times people had rather limited means of communicating with one another. It was reasonable to suppose that by perfecting and multiplying the means of information we would increase the light. Nations would learn to love one another by knowing one another better, and citizens of the same country would feel bound by a closer fraternity, being better informed about everything that touches their common life. When printing was invented, people exclaimed, "Fiat lux!" and with still more reason when the habit of reading and the taste for newspapers spread. Why should they not have reasoned like this: two lights give better light than one, and several better than two; the more newspapers and books there are, the better we shall know what is happening, and those who want to write history after us will be fortunate indeed, for they will have their hands full of documents? Nothing seemed more obvious. Alas! This reasoning was founded on the qualities and power of the tools, but it reckoned without the human element, which everywhere is the most important factor. Now it turned out that the sophists, the wily, the slanderers, all those glib talkers who know better than anyone how to handle tongue and pen, have profited abundantly from every means of multiplying and spreading thought. What has come of it? Our contemporaries have all the trouble in the world finding out the truth about their own time and their own affairs. For the few newspapers that cultivate good international relations, trying to inform their neighbors fairly and to study them without ulterior motives, how many sow distrust and slander? How many artificial and unhealthy currents have been created in public opinion by false rumors and by malicious interpretations of facts or words? On our domestic affairs we are not much better informed than on foreign ones. Whether it is the interests of commerce, industry, or agriculture, political parties or social tendencies, or the people involved in public affairs, disinterested information is hard to obtain: the more newspapers you read, the less clearly you see. There are days when, after reading them, and supposing he took them at their word, the reader would be obliged to draw this conclusion: decidedly, there is no one left anywhere but men of tainted character, and the only people of integrity left are a few columnists. But this last part of the conclusion would collapse in its turn. For the columnists devour one another. The reader would then have before his eyes a spectacle like the one shown in the caricature entitled The Battle of the Serpents. Having devoured everything around them, the two reptiles attack and devour each other, and in the end two tails are left on the battlefield.

And it is not only the ordinary man of the people who is at a loss; it is cultivated people too, almost everyone. In politics, in finance, in business, even in science, the arts, literature, and religion, everywhere there are hidden workings, tricks, strings pulled behind the scenes. There is one truth for export and another for the initiated. The result is that everyone is deceived, for however much you may be in on the cooking in one kitchen, you are never in on it in all of them; and even those who deceive others most skillfully are deceived in their turn when they need to rely on someone else's sincerity.

The result of such practices is the debasement of human speech. It is debased first of all in the eyes of those who handle it as a base instrument. For the arguers, the quibblers, the sophists, for all who are driven only by the rage to be right or by the claim that their own interests alone deserve respect, no word is held in respect any longer. Their punishment is to be forced to judge others by the rule they follow themselves: Say what profits, not what is true. They can no longer take anyone seriously. A sad state of mind for people who write, speak, and teach. How they must despise their listeners and readers to approach them in such a frame of mind! For anyone who has kept a basic store of honesty, nothing is more revolting than the detached irony of an acrobat of pen or tongue trying to hoodwink a few good, trusting people. On one side, openness, sincerity, and the desire to be enlightened; on the other, a cunning that mocks the public. But the liar little knows how badly he is deceiving himself. The capital he lives on is trust, and nothing equals the trust of the people, unless it is their distrust the moment they feel betrayed. They may well follow for a time those who exploit their simplicity. But after that their welcoming mood turns to aversion; the doors that stood wide open present their impassive wooden faces, and the ears that once listened so attentively have closed. Alas! They close then not only to evil but to good as well. And that is the crime of those who twist and debase speech. They shake the general trust. People regard it as a calamity when money is debased, when government bonds fall, when credit is ruined; there is a greater misfortune than that: the loss of trust, of that moral credit which honest people extend to one another and which allows speech to circulate like genuine coin. Down with the counterfeiters, the speculators, the crooked financiers, for they bring suspicion even on honest money! Down with the counterfeiters of pen and speech, for because of them no one trusts anything or anyone anymore, and the value of what is said or written becomes like the value of Sainte-Farce banknotes.

You can see how urgent it is for each of us to keep watch over ourselves, to guard our tongue, to discipline our pen, and to aspire to simplicity. No twisted meanings, not so many circumlocutions, not so many reservations and evasions! They only confuse everything. Be men; be men of your word. One hour of sincerity does more for the salvation of the world than years of cunning.

Now a word about a national failing, addressed to those who make a superstition of words and of stylistic display. No doubt we should not hold it against people who enjoy elegant speech or refined reading. I am of the opinion that one can never say too well what one has to say. But it does not follow that the best-spoken and best-written things are the ones most elaborately dressed up. Speech must serve the fact, not take its place and make us forget it by dint of ornament. The greatest things are also the ones that gain most from being said simply, because then they show themselves as they are: you do not throw over them the veil, however transparent, of a fine speech, nor that shadow so fatal to truth which is called the vanity of the writer or the orator. Nothing is as strong, nothing is as persuasive, as simplicity. There are sacred emotions, cruel sorrows, great acts of devotion, and passionate enthusiasms that a look, a gesture, or a cry expresses better than the most finely turned sentences. What humanity holds most precious in its heart shows itself most simply. To persuade, you must be true, and certain truths are better understood when they come from simple lips, even faltering ones, than when they fall from mouths too well trained or are proclaimed by sheer force of lungs. These rules are good for everyone in everyday life. No one can imagine how much they would gain for their moral life by constantly observing this principle: to be true, sober, and simple in expressing our feelings and convictions, in private as in public; never to go beyond the measure; to render faithfully what is within us; and above all to remember. That is the main thing.

For the danger of fine words is that they live a life of their own. They are distinguished servants who have kept their titles and no longer perform their functions, as royal courts show us. You have spoken well, you have written well: very good, that is enough.

How many people have been content to talk and believed that this excused them from acting? And those who listen to them are content to have heard the talking. So it comes about that a life may, in the long run, consist of nothing more than a few well-turned speeches, a few fine books, and a few fine plays. As for practicing what has been set forth so masterfully, hardly anyone gives it a thought. And if we pass from the domain of the talented to the lower regions where the mediocre ply their trade, there, in the dim jumble, we shall see bustling about all those who think we are on earth to talk and to hear talk: the immense and hopeless throng of chatterers, of all that bawls, babbles, or holds forth and afterward still finds that there is not enough talking. They all forget that those who make the least noise do the most work. A machine that spends all its steam whistling has none left to turn its wheels. Cultivate silence, then. Whatever you save in noise, you gain in strength.

These reflections lead us to a neighboring subject, one that also well deserves attention: I mean what might be called the exaggeration of language. When you study the populations of a single country, you notice differences of temperament among them, and their language bears the traces. Here the population is rather phlegmatic and calm: it uses diminutives and softened terms. Elsewhere temperaments are well balanced: you hear the right word, exactly suited to the thing. But further on, through the effect of the soil, the air, perhaps the wine, hot blood runs in the veins: tempers flare quickly and expression is overblown; superlatives stud the language, and to say the simplest things people reach for the strongest word.

If the manner of language varies with climate, it also differs with the times. Compare the written or spoken language of our day with that of certain other periods of our history. People spoke differently under the Old Regime than under the Revolution, and we do not speak the same language as the men of 1830, of 1848, or of the Second Empire. In general, language has a simpler manner now: we no longer wear wigs, and we no longer put on lace cuffs to write; but one sign sets us apart from almost all our ancestors: our nervousness, the source of our exaggerations.

On excited and somewhat sickly nervous systems - and God knows that having nerves is no longer an aristocratic privilege - words do not produce the same impression as on a normal person. And conversely, when the nervous person tries to express what he feels, the simple term is not enough for him. In ordinary life, in public life, in literature, and on the stage, calm and sober language has given way to excessive language. The devices that novelists and actors have used to galvanize the public mind and force its attention reappear in rudimentary form in our most ordinary conversations, in our letters, and above all in polemics. Our ways of speaking are to those of a steady, calm person what our handwriting is to that of our fathers. People blame steel pens; if only that were true!

Then the geese would save us. But the trouble lies deeper; it is in ourselves. Ours is the handwriting of agitated and unbalanced people; our forefathers' pens ran across the paper more surely and more restfully. Here we face one of the results of this modern life, so complicated and so terribly wasteful of energy. It leaves us impatient, breathless, forever on edge. Our handwriting, like our language, bears the mark of it and betrays us. Let us go back from the effect to the source and understand the warning given to us. What good can come of this habit of exaggerating our language? Unfaithful interpreters of our own impressions, we can only distort, by our exaggerations, the minds of our fellows and our own. People who exaggerate stop understanding one another. Irritable tempers, violent and sterile arguments, hasty judgments devoid of all measure, the gravest excesses in education and in social relations: such are the results of intemperate language.

And in this plea for simple speech, may I be allowed to express a wish whose fulfillment would have the happiest consequences. I ask for a simple literature, not only as one of the best remedies for our jaded, overworked souls, weary of eccentricities, but also as a pledge and a source of social unity. I also ask for a simple art. Our arts and our literature are reserved for those privileged by wealth and education. But let me be clearly understood: I am not inviting poets, novelists, and painters to come down from the heights to walk halfway up the slope and settle comfortably into mediocrity, but on the contrary to climb higher. What is popular is not what suits a certain class of society that it is customary to call the common people; what is popular is what is common to all and what unites them. The sources of inspiration from which a simple art might be born lie in the depths of the human heart, in the eternal realities of life before which all are equal. And the sources of popular language are to be sought in the small number of simple and strong forms that express the elementary feelings and the great lines of human destiny. There lie truth, strength, greatness, and immortality. Would there not be in such an ideal enough to fire young people who, feeling the sacred flame of beauty burning within them, know pity, and who prefer to the disdainful adage "Odi profanum vulgus" this far more human saying: "Misereor super turbam"? As for me, I have no artistic authority, but from the crowd among whom I live I have the right to raise my cry to those who have received talent and to say to them: Work for those who are forgotten. Make yourselves understood by the humble. In this way you will accomplish a work of liberation and peacemaking; in this way you will reopen the springs from which those masters once drew whose creations have defied the ages, because they knew how to clothe genius in simplicity.

Translator's notes

Fiat lux: "Let there be light" (Latin).

Sainte-Farce, literally "Holy Farce": "banknotes of the Sainte-Farce" was a joking French expression for sham, worthless banknotes.

Then the geese would save us: a play on the goose quills that steel pens replaced, and on the sacred geese of the Capitol, whose cackling, according to legend, saved Rome.

Odi profanum vulgus: "I hate the uninitiated crowd" (Latin), Horace, Odes III.1. Misereor super turbam: "I have compassion on the multitude" (Latin), words of Christ in Mark 8:2.