A stranger named Micah Hussaini wrote to me from Nigeria with this question about grammar:
Kindly help me out with this sentence that I came across while reading the essay “Some Necessary Iconoclasm” by Walter Lippmann in his collection of essays A Preface to Politics:
“For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral” What is the function of “but” here, and is the whole sentence even grammatical? It does not feel right to me.
What a wonderful question. And what a difficult answer it leads to. The construction Lippmann chose here is archaic, and surprisingly tricky to describe. I replied to Micah giving as much help as I could, and (as always) found it interesting.
To begin with, I noted that linguistically Lippmann was a child of the 19th century. Born in 1889, he would have been literate in English well before the 20th century began. In 1910 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, where he was taught by George Santayana (born 1863), Graham Wallas (born 1858), and William James (born 1842). Although he lived until 1974, it is not too surprising that he would use a construction that Victorians knew but we no longer readily understand.
The meaning of There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral is “There is nothing so bad that it cannot masquerade as moral.” So in effect but is synonymous with the discontinuous sequence that ... not, or something semantically equivalent. It negates the clause that it introduces, and in this construction is preceded by a clause expressing what a logician would call a negative existential quantification. That is, the first clause asserts that something doesn’t exist or never occurs. So we get sentences saying things like “There is never a case where X holds but Y holds” with the meaning “There is never a case where X holds that is not also a case where Y holds.”
One literary work exemplifying this curious use of but (a work that I had occasion to quote for a different reason back in 2013) is The Fire Worshippers, part of an epic called Lalla Rookh by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). I boldface the sentences that are relevant here:
Playful she turned, that he might see
The passing smile her cheek put on;
But when she marked how mournfully
His eyes met hers, that smile was gone;
And, bursting into heartfelt tears,
‘Yes, yes,’ she cried, ‘my hourly fears,
My dreams, have boded all too right—
We part—for ever part—to-night!—
I knew, I knew it could not last—
’Twas bright, ’twas heavenly, but ’tis past!
Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,
I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never loved a tree or flower,
But ’twas the first to fade away.
I never nursed a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die!’
So the penultimate sentence says there was never a case of her loving a tree or flower that was not also a case where it rapidly faded away; and the last says she never had a pet gazelle (now you finally see the point of the picture above) without it inevitably dying once it had grown to know her and love her.
Lippmann — essayist, critic, journalist, commentator — would probably have known that poem. It was very popular in the 19th century; there are at least four entertaining parodies of the last four lines quoted above. And he published A Preface to Politics quite early in his career, more than a hundred years ago, in 1913.
The use of but under discussion has completely disappeared from the contemporary language. Using it in the same way now would be a studied archaism, potentially unintelligible to modern readers. So this is a rare case of a noticeable syntactic change, actually capable of affecting meaning and comprehensibility, taking place over as little as a century. English syntax does change, but over such a short time span as 100 years the changes are trivial. Failing to understand this is one of the mistakes made by the doom-mongers who believe English is under threat from changes that will destroy its fabric. Soon we will not even be able to understand each other, they cry, but it doesn’t happen: The doom never arrives. That’s because a human lifetime is barely long enough for any significant change in grammar to become established.
