THE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE UNEQUAL, AND CORRESPOND PERFECTLY IN
RELATIVE MERIT TO THE RACES THAT USE THEM
If a degraded people, at the lowest rung of the racial ladder, with as
little significance for the “male” as for the “female” progress of
mankind, could possibly have invented a language of philosophic depth,
of æsthetic beauty and flexibility, rich in characteristic forms and
precise idioms, fitted alike to express the sublimities of religion, the
graces of poetry, the accuracy of physical and political science,—such a
people would certainly possess an utterly useless talent, that of
inventing and perfecting an instrument which their mental capacity would
be too weak to turn to any account.
We should have, in such a case, to believe that our observation has been
suddenly brought to a stop, not by something unknown or unintelligible
(as often happens) but by a mere absurdity.
At first sight, this tantalizing answer seems the correct one. If we
take the races as they are to-day, we must admit that the perfection of
idiom is very far from corresponding, in all cases, to the degree of
civilization reached. The tongues of modern Europe, to speak of no
others, are unequal in merit, and the richest and most beautiful do not
necessarily belong to the most advanced people. Further, they are one
and all vastly inferior to many languages which have been at different
times spoken in the world.
A still more curious fact is that the languages of whole groups of
peoples which have stopped at a low level of culture may be of
considerable merit. Thus the net of language, with its varied meshes,
might seem to have been cast over mankind at random, the silk and the
gold sometimes covering rude, ferocious, and miserable tribes, while
wise and learned peoples are still caught in the hemp, the wool, and the
horsehair. Happily, this is so only in appearance. If, with the aid of
history, we apply our doctrine of the difference of races, we shall soon
find that our proofs of their intellectual inequality are even
strengthened.
The early philologists were doubly in error, when they thought, first
that all languages are formed on the same principle, secondly that
language was invented merely under the stress of material needs. In the
former point they were influenced by the unitarian doctrine that all
human groups have a common origin.
With regard to language, doubt is not even possible. The modes of
formation are completely different; and whether the classifications of
philology require revision or not, we cannot believe for a moment that
the Altaic, Aryan, and Semitic families were not from the first
absolutely foreign to each other. Nothing is the same. The vocabulary
has its own peculiar character in each of these groups. There is a
different modulation of the voice in each. In one, the lips are used to
produce the sounds; in another, the contraction of the throat; in
another the nasal passage and the upper part of the head. The
composition of the parts of speech, according as they confuse or
distinguish the various shades of thought, points equally to a
difference of origin. The most striking proof of the divergence in
thought and feeling between one group and another are seen in the
inflexions of the substantive and the conjugations of the verb. When,
therefore, the philosopher tries to give an account of the origin of
language by a process of purely abstract conjecture, and begins by
conceiving an “original man,” without any specific racial or linguistic
character, he starts from an absurdity, and continues on the same lines.
There is no such being as “man” in the abstract; and I am especially
sure that he will not be discovered by the investigation of language. I
cannot argue on the basis that mankind started from some one point in
its creation of idiom. There were many points of departure, because
there were many forms of thought and feeling.[113]
The second view, I think, is just as false. According to this theory,
there would have been no development save as dictated by necessity. The
result would be that the “male” races would have a richer and more
accurate language than the “female”; further, as material needs are
concerned with objects apprehended by the senses, and especially with
actions, the main factor of human speech would be vocabulary.
There would be no necessity for the syntax and grammatical structure to
advance beyond the simplest and most elementary combinations. A series
of sounds more or less linked together is always enough to express a
need; and a gesture, as the Chinese know well, is an obvious form of
commentary, when the phrase is obscure without it.[114] Not only would
the synthetic power of language remain undeveloped; it would also be the
poorer for dispensing with harmony, quantity, and rhythm. For what is
the use of melody when the sole object is to obtain some positive
result? A language, in fact, would be a mere chance collection of
arbitrary sounds.
Certain questions are apparently cleared up by such a theory. Chinese,
the tongue of a masculine race, seems to have been at first developed
with a purely utilitarian aim. The word has never risen above a mere
sound, and has remained monosyllabic. There is no evolution of
vocabulary, no root giving birth to a family of derivatives. All the
words are roots; they are not modified by suffixes, but by each other,
according to a very crude method of juxtaposition. The grammar is
extremely simple; which makes the phraseology very monotonous. The very
idea of æsthetic value is excluded, at any rate for ears that are
accustomed to the rich, varied, and abundant forms, the inexhaustible
combinations of happier tongues. We must however add that this may not
be the impression produced on the Chinese themselves; and their spoken
language certainly aims at some kind of beauty, since there are definite
rules governing the melodic sequence of sounds. If it does not succeed
in being so euphonious as other languages, we must still recognize that
it aims at euphony no less than they. Further, the primary elements of
Chinese are something more than a mere heaping together of useful
sounds.[115]
I admit that the masculine races may be markedly inferior in æsthetic
power to the others,[116] and their inferiority may be reproduced in
their idioms. This is shown, not merely by the relative poverty of
Chinese, but also by the careful way in which certain Western races have
robbed Latin of its finest rhythmic qualities, and Gothic of its
sonority. The inferiority of our modern languages, even the best of
them, to Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, is self-evident, and corresponds
exactly to the mediocrity of the Chinese civilization and our own, so
far as art and literature are concerned. I admit that this difference,
alone with others, may serve to mark off the languages of the masculine
races. They still, however, have a feeling for rhythm (less than that of
the ancient tongues, but still powerful), and make a real attempt to
create and obey laws of correspondence between sounds and the forms by
which thought is modified in speech. I conclude that even in the
languages of masculine races there still flickers the intellectual
spark, the feeling for beauty and logic; this feeling, as well as that
of material need, must preside at the birth of every language.
I said above that if material need had reigned alone, a set of any
chance sounds would have been enough for human necessities, in the first
ages of man’s existence. Such a theory cannot be maintained.
Sounds are not assigned to ideas by pure chance. The choice is governed
by the instinctive recognition of a certain logical relation between
noises heard outwardly by man’s ear and ideas that his throat or tongue
wishes to express. In the eighteenth century men were greatly struck by
this truth. Unfortunately, it was caught in the net of etymological
exaggeration so characteristic of the time; and its results were so
absurd that they justly fell into disrepute. For a long time the best
minds were warned off the land that had been so stupidly exploited by
the early pioneers. They are now beginning to return to it again, and if
they have learnt prudence and restraint in the bitter school of
experience, they may arrive at valuable conclusions. Without pushing a
theory, true in itself, into the realm of chimeras, we may allow that
primitive speech knew how to use as far as possible the different
impressions received by the ear, in order to form certain classes of
words; in creating others it was guided by the feeling of a mysterious
relation between certain abstract ideas and some particular noises.
Thus, for example, the sound of _ē_ seems to suggest death and
dissolution, that of _v_ or _w_, vagueness in the moral or physical
realm, vows, wind, and the like; _s_ suggests starkness and standing
fast, _m_ maternity, and so on.[117] Such a theory is sufficiently well
founded for us to take it seriously, if kept within due limits. But it
must be used with great circumspection, if we are not to find ourselves
in the dark paths where even common sense is soon led astray.
The last paragraph may show, however imperfectly, that material need is
not the only element that produces a language, but that the best of
man’s powers have helped in the task. Sounds were not applied
arbitrarily to ideas and objects, and in this respect men followed a
pre-established order, one side of which was manifested in themselves.
Thus the primitive tongues, however crude and poor they may have been,
contained all the elements from which their branches might at a later
time be developed in a logical and necessary sequence.
W. von Humboldt has observed, with his usual acuteness, that every
language is independent of the will of those who speak it. It is closely
bound up with their intellectual condition, and is beyond the reach of
arbitrary caprice. It cannot be altered at will, as is curiously shown
by the efforts that have been made to do so.
The Bushmen have invented a system of changing their language, in order
to prevent its being understood by the uninitiated. We find the same
custom among certain tribes of the Caucasus. But all their efforts come
to no more than the mere insertion of a subsidiary syllable at the
beginning, middle, or end of words. Take away this parasitic element,
and the language remains the same, changed neither in forms nor syntax.
De Sacy has discovered a more ambitious attempt, in the language called
“Balaïbalan.” This curious idiom was invented by the Sufis, to be used
in their mystical books, with the object of wrapping the speculations of
their theologians in still greater mystery. They made up, on no special
plan, the words that seemed to them to sound most strangely to their
ears. If however this so-called language did not belong to any family
and if the meaning given to its sounds was entirely arbitrary, yet the
principles of euphony, the grammar and the syntax, everything in fact
which gives a language its special character, bore the unmistakable
stamp of Arabic and Persian. The Sufis produced a jargon at once Aryan
and Semitic, and of no importance whatever. The pious colleagues of
Djelat-Eddin-Rumi were not able to invent a language; and clearly this
power has not been given to any single man.[118]
Hence the language of a race is closely bound up with its intelligence,
and has the power of reflecting its various mental stages, as they are
reached. This power may be at first only implicit.[119]
Where the mental development of a race is faulty or imperfect, the
language suffers to the same extent. This is shown by Sanscrit, Greek,
and the Semitic group, as well as by Chinese, in which I have already
pointed out a utilitarian tendency corresponding to the intellectual
bent of the people. The superabundance of philosophical and ethnological
terms in Sanscrit corresponds to the genius of those who spoke it, as
well as its richness and rhythmic beauty. The same is the case with
Greek; while the lack of precision in the Semitic tongues is exactly
paralleled by the character of the Semitic peoples.
If we leave the cloudy heights of the remoter ages, and come down to the
more familiar regions of modern history, we shall be, as it were,
presiding at the birth of many new tongues; and this will make us see
with even greater clearness how faithfully language mirrors the genius
of a race.
As soon as two nations are fused together, a revolution takes place in
their respective languages; this is sometimes slow, sometimes sudden,
but always inevitable. The languages are changed and, after a certain
time, die out as separate entities. The new tongue is a compromise
between them, the dominant element being furnished by the speech of the
race that has contributed most members to the new people.[120] Thus,
from the thirteenth century, the Germanic dialects of France have had to
yield ground, not to Latin, but to the _lingua romana_, with the revival
of the Gallo-Roman power.[121] Celtic, too, had to retreat before the
Italian colonists. It did not yield to Italian civilization; in fact,
one might say, that, thanks to the number of those who spoke it, Celtic
finally gained a kind of victory. For after the complete fusion of the
Gauls, the Romans, and the northern tribes, it was Celtic that laid the
foundations of modern French syntax, abolished the strong accentuation
of Germanic as well as the sonority of Latin, and introduced its own
equable rhythm. The gradual development of French is merely the effect
of this patient labour, that went on, without ceasing, under the
surface. Again, the reason why modern German has lost the striking forms
to be seen in the Gothic of Bishop Ulfilas lies in the presence of a
strong Cymric element in the midst of the small Germanic population that
was still left to the east of the Rhine,[122] after the great migrations
of the sixth and following centuries of our era.
The linguistic results of the fusion of two peoples are as individual as
the new racial character itself. One may say generally that no language
remains pure after it has come into close contact with a different
language. Even when their structures are totally unlike each other, the
vocabulary at any rate suffers some changes. If the parasitic language
has any strength at all, it will certainly attack the other in its
rhythmic quality, and even in the unstable parts of its syntax. Thus
language is one of the most fragile and delicate forms of property; and
we may often see a noble and refined speech being affected by barbarous
idioms and passing itself into a kind of relative barbarism. By degrees
it will lose its beauty; its vocabulary will be impoverished, and many
of its forms obsolete, while it will show an irresistible tendency to
become assimilated to its inferior neighbour. This has happened in the
case of Wallachian and Rhætian, Kawi and Birman. The two latter have
been leavened with Sanscrit elements; but in spite of this noble
alliance, they have been declared by competent judges to be inferior to
Delaware.[123]
The group of tribes speaking this dialect are of the Lenni-Lenapes
family, and they originally ranked higher than the two yellow peoples
who were caught in the sweep of Hindu civilization. If, in spite of
their primitive superiority, they are now inferior to the Asiatics, it
is because these live under the influence of the social institutions of
a noble race and have profited by them, though in themselves they are of
slight account. Contact with the Hindus has been enough to raise them
some way in the scale, while the Lenapes, who have never been touched by
any such influence, have not been able to rise above their present
civilization. In a similar way (to take an obvious example) the young
mulattoes who have been educated in London or Paris may show a certain
veneer of culture superior to that of some Southern Italian peoples, who
are in point of merit infinitely higher; for once a mulatto, always a
mulatto. When therefore we come upon a savage tribe with a language
better than that of a more civilized nation, we must examine carefully
whether the civilization of the latter really belongs to it, or is
merely the result of a slight admixture of foreign blood. If so, a low
type of native language helped out by a hybrid mixture of foreign idioms
may well exist side by side with a certain degree of social
culture.[124]
I have already said that, as each civilization has a special character,
we must not be surprised if the poetic and philosophic sense was more
developed among the Hindus and the Greeks than among ourselves; whereas
our modern societies are marked rather by their practical, scientific,
and critical spirit. Taken as a whole, we have more energy and a greater
genius for action than the conquerors of Southern Asia and Hellas. On
the other hand, we must yield them the first place in the kingdom of
beauty, and here our languages naturally mirror our humble position. The
style of the Indian and Ionian writers takes a more powerful flight
towards the sphere of the ideal. Language, in fact, while being an
excellent index of the general elevation of races, is in a special
degree the measure of their æsthetic capacities. This is the character
it assumes when we use it as a means of comparing different
civilizations.
To bring out this point further, I will venture to question a view put
forward by William von Humboldt, that in spite of the obvious
superiority of the Mexican to the Peruvian language, the civilization of
the Incas was yet far above that of the people of Anahuac.[125]
The Peruvian customs were certainly more gentle than the Mexican; and
their religious ideas were as inoffensive as those of Montezuma’s
subjects were ferocious. In spite of this, their social condition was
marked by far less energy and variety. Their crude despotism never
developed into more than a dull kind of communism; whereas the Aztec
civilization had made various political experiments of great complexity.
Its military system was far more vigorous; and though the use of writing
was equally unknown in both empires, it seems that poetry, history, and
ethics, which were extensively studied at the time of Cortes, would have
advanced further in Mexico than in Peru, the institutions of which were
coloured by an Epicurean indifferentism that was highly unfavourable to
intellectual progress. Clearly we must regard the more active people as
superior.
Von Humboldt’s view is simply a consequence of the way in which he
defines civilization.[126] Without going over the same ground again, I
was yet bound to clear up this point; for if two civilizations had
really been able to develop in inverse ratio to the merits of their
respective languages, I should have had to give up the idea of any
necessary connexion between the intelligence of a people and the value
of the language spoken by it. But I cannot do this, in view of what I
have already said about Greek and Sanscrit, as compared with English,
French, and German.
It would be, however, a very difficult task to assign a reason, along
these lines, for the exact course taken by the language of a hybrid
people. We have seldom sufficient knowledge either of the quantity or
quality of the intermixture of blood to be able properly to trace its
effects. Yet these racial influences persist, and if they are not
unravelled, we may easily come to false conclusions. It is just because
the connexion between race and language is so close, that it lasts much
longer than the political unity of the different peoples, and may be
recognized even when the peoples are grouped under new names. The
language changes with their blood, but does not die out until the last
fragment of the national life has disappeared. This is the case with
modern Greek. Sadly mutilated, robbed of its wealth of grammar,
impoverished in the number of its sounds, with the pure stream of its
vocabulary troubled and muddy, it has none the less retained the impress
of its original form.[127] In the intellectual world it corresponds to
the sullied and deflowered Parthenon, which first became a church for
the Greek popes, and then a powder-magazine; which had its pediments and
columns shattered in a thousand places by the Venetian bullets of
Morosini; but which still stands, for the wonder and adoration of the
ages, as a model of pure grace and unadorned majesty.
Not every race has the power of being faithful to the tongue of its
ancestors. This makes our task still more difficult, when we try to
determine the origin or relative value of different human types by the
help of philology. Not only do languages change without any obvious
reason, at any rate from the racial point of view; but there are also
certain nations which give up their own language altogether, when they
are brought for some time into contact with a foreign race. This
happened, after the conquests of Alexander, in the case of the more
enlightened nations of Western Asia, such as the Carians, Cappadocians,
and Armenians. The Gauls are another instance, as I have already said.
Yet all these peoples brought a foreign element into the conquering
tongue, which was transformed in its turn. Thus they could all be
regarded as using their own intellectual tools, though to a very
imperfect extent; while others, more tenacious of theirs, such as the
Basques, the Berbers of Mount Atlas, and the Ekkhilis of Southern
Arabia, speak even at the present day the same tongue as was spoken by
their most primitive ancestors. But there are certain peoples, the Jews
for example, who seem never to have held to their ancestral speech at
all; and we can discover this indifference from the time of their
earliest migrations. When Terah left the land of his fathers, Ur of the
Chaldees, he certainly had not learnt the Canaanitish tongue that
henceforth became the national speech of the children of Israel. It was
probably influenced to some extent by their earlier recollections, and
in their mouth became a special dialect of the very ancient language
which was the mother of the earliest Arabic we know, and the lawful
inheritance of tribes closely allied to the black Hamites.[128] Yet not
even to this language were the Jews to remain faithful. The tribes who
were brought back from captivity by Zerubbabel had forgotten it during
their short stay of sixty-two years by the rivers of Babylon. Their
patriotism was proof against exile, and still burned with its original
fire; but the rest had been given up, with remarkable facility, by a
people which is at the same time jealous of its own traditions and
extremely cosmopolitan. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its inhabitants
reappeared, speaking an Aramaic or Chaldean jargon, which may have had
some slight resemblance to the speech of the fathers of Abraham.
At the time of Christ, this dialect offered only a feeble resistance to
the invasion of Hellenistic Greek, which assailed the Jewish mind on all
sides. Henceforth all the works produced by Jewish writers appeared in
the new dress, which fitted them more or less elegantly, and copied to
some extent the old Attic fashions. The last canonical books of the Old
Testament, as well as the works of Philo and Josephus, are Hellenistic
in spirit.
When the Holy City was destroyed, and the Jewish nation scattered, the
favour of God departed from them, and the East came again into its own.
Hebrew culture broke with Athens as it had broken with Alexandria, and
the language and ideas of the Talmud, the teaching of the school of
Tiberias, were again Semitic, sometimes in the form of Arabic, sometimes
in that of the “language of Canaan,” to use Isaiah’s phrase. I am
speaking of what was henceforth to be the sacred language of religion
and the Rabbis, and was regarded as the true national speech. In their
everyday life, however, the Jews used the tongue of the country where
they settled; and, further, these exiles were known everywhere by their
special accent. They never succeeded in fitting their vocal organs to
their adopted language, even when they had learnt it from childhood.
This goes to confirm what William von Humboldt says as to the connexion
between race and language being so close that later generations never
get quite accustomed to pronounce correctly words that were unknown to
their ancestors.[129]
Whether this be true or not, we have in the Jews a remarkable proof of
the fact that one must not always assume, at first sight, a close
connexion between a race and its language, for the language may not have
belonged to it originally.[130]
We see how cautiously we must tread if we attempt to infer an identity
of race from the affinity, or even the resemblance, of languages. Not
only have most of the nations of Western Asia and nearly all those of
Southern Europe merely adapted the speech of others to their own use,
while leaving its main elements untouched; but there are also some who
have taken over languages absolutely foreign to them, to which they have
made no contribution whatever. The latter case is certainly rarer, and
may even be regarded as an anomaly. But its mere existence is enough to
make us very careful in admitting a form of proof in which such
exceptions are possible. On the other hand, since they _are_ exceptions,
and are not met with so often as the opposite case, of a national tongue
being preserved for centuries by even a weak nation; since we also see
how a language is assimilated to the particular character of the people
that has created it, and how its changes are in exact proportion to the
successive modifications in the people’s blood; since the part played by
a language in forming its derivatives varies with the numerical
strength, in the new groups, of the race that speaks it, we may justly
conclude that no nation can have a language of greater value than
itself, except under special circumstances. As this point is of
considerable importance, I will try to bring it out by a new line of
proof.
We have already seen that the civilization of a composite people does
not include all its social classes.[131] The racial influences that were
at work in the lower strata from the first still go on; and they prevent
the directing forces of the national culture from reaching the depths at
all,—if they do, their action is weak and transitory. In France, about
five-eighths of the total population play merely an unwilling and
passive part in the development of modern European culture, and that
only by fits and starts. With the exception of Great Britain, of which
the insular position produces a greater unity of type, the proportion is
even higher in the rest of the Continent. I will speak of France at
greater length, as an instance of the exact correspondence between
language and racial type; for in France we have a particular instance
that strikingly confirms our main thesis.
We know little, or rather we have no real evidence at all, of the phases
which Celtic and rustic Latin[132] passed through before they met and
coalesced. Nevertheless, St. Jerome and his contemporary Sulpicius
Severus tell us (the former in his “Commentaries” on St. Paul’s Epistle
to the Galatians, the second in his “Dialogue on the virtues of the
Eastern Monks”) that in their time at least two languages were generally
spoken in Gaul. There was, first, Celtic, which was preserved on the
banks of the Rhine in so pure a form, that it remained identical with
the language spoken by the Galatians of Asia Minor, who had been
separated from their mother country for more than six centuries.[133]
Secondly, there was the language called “Gallic,” which according to a
commentator, can only have been a form, already broken down, of Popular
Latin. This fourth century dialect, while different from the Gallic of
Treves, was spoken neither in the West nor in Aquitaine. It was found
only in the centre and south of what is now France, and was itself
probably split up into two great divisions. It is the common source of
the currents, more or less Latinized, which were mingled with other
elements in different proportions, and formed later the _langue d’oil_
and the _lingua romana_, in the narrower sense. I will speak first of
the latter.
In order to bring it into being, all that was necessary was a slight
alteration in the vocabulary of Latin, and the introduction of a few
syntactical notions borrowed from Celtic and other languages till then
unknown in the West of Europe. The Imperial colonies had brought in a
fair number of Italian, African, and Asiatic elements. The Burgundian,
and especially the Gothic, invasions added another, which was marked by
considerable harmony, liveliness, and sonority. Its vocabulary was
further increased after the inroads of the Saracens. Thus the _lingua
romana_ became, in its rhythmic quality, quite distinct from Gallic, and
soon assumed a character of its own. It is true that we do not find this
in its perfection, in the “Oath of the Sons of Ludwig the Pious,” as we
do later in the poems of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras or Bertran de Born.[134]
Yet even in the “Oath” we can recognize the language for what it is; it
has already acquired its main features, and its future path is clearly
mapped out. It formed henceforth (in its different dialects of Limousin,
Provençal, and Auvergnat) the speech of a people of as mixed an origin
as any in the world. It was a refined and supple language, witty,
brilliant, and satirical, but without depth or philosophy. It was of
tinsel rather than gold, and had never been able to do more than pick up
a few ingots on the surface of the rich mines that lay open to it.
Without any serious principles, it was destined to remain an instrument
of indifference, of universal scepticism and mockery. It did not fail to
be used as such. The people cared for nothing but pleasure and parade.
Brave to a fault, beyond measure gay, spending their passion on a dream,
and their vitality on idle toys, they had an instrument that was exactly
suited to their character, and which, though admired by Dante, was put
to no better use in poetry than to tag satires, love-songs, and
challenges, and in religion to support heresies such as that of the
Albigenses, a pestilent Manicheism, without value even for literature,
from which an English author, in no way Catholic in his sympathies,
congratulates the Papacy on having delivered the Middle Ages.[135] Such
was the _lingua romana_ of old, and such do we find it even to-day. It
is pretty rather than beautiful, and shows on the surface how little it
is fitted to serve a great civilization.
Was the _langue d’oil_ formed in a similar way? Obviously not. However
the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements were fused (for we cannot be
certain on this point, in the absence of records going back to the
earliest period of the language[136]), it is at any rate clear that it
rose from a strongly marked antagonism between the three tongues, and
that it would thus have a character and energy quite incompatible with
such compromises and adaptations as those which gave birth to the
_lingua romana_. In one moment of its life, the _langue d’oil_ was
partly a Germanic tongue. In the written remains that have survived, we
find one of the best qualities of the Aryan languages, the power of
forming compounds. This power, it is true, is limited; and though still
considerable, is less than in Sanscrit, Greek, and German. In the nouns,
we find a system of inflexion by suffix, and, in consequence, an ease in
inverting the order which modern French has lost, and which the language
of the sixteenth century retained only to a slight extent, its
inversions being gained at the expense of clearness. Again, the
vocabulary of the _langue d’oil_ included many words brought in by the
Franks.[137] Thus it began by being almost as much Germanic as Gallic;
Celtic elements appeared in its second stage, and perhaps fixed the
melodic principles of the language. The best possible tribute to its
merits is to be found in the successful experiment of Littré,[138] who
translated the first book of the “Iliad” literally, line for line, into
French of the thirteenth century. Such a _tour de force_ would be
impossible in modern French.
Such a language belonged to a people that was evidently very different
from the inhabitants of Southern Gaul. It was more deeply attached to
Catholicism; its politics were permeated by a lively idea of freedom,
dignity, and independence, its institutions had no aim but utility. Thus
the mission set before the popular literature was not to express the
fancies of the mind or heart, the freakishness of a universal
scepticism, but to put together the annals of the nation, and to set
down what was at that time regarded as the truth. It is to this temper
of the people and their language that we owe the great rhymed
chronicles, especially “Garin le Loherain,” which bear witness, though
it has since been denied, to the predominance of the North.
Unfortunately, since the compilers of these traditions, and even their
original authors, mainly aimed at preserving historical facts or
satisfying their desire for positive and solid results, poetry in the
true sense, the love of form and the search for beauty, does not always
bulk as large as it should in their long narratives. The literature of
the _langue d’oil_ was, above all, utilitarian; and so the race, the
language, and the literature were in perfect harmony.
The Germanic element in the race, however, being far less than the
Gallic basis or the Roman accretions, naturally began to lose ground.
The same thing took place in the language; Celtic and Latin advanced,
Germanic retreated. That noble speech, which we know only at its highest
stage, and which might have risen even higher, began to decline and
become corrupted towards the end of the thirteenth century. In the
fifteenth, it was no more than a patois, from which the Germanic
elements had completely disappeared. The treasury was exhausted; and
what remained was an illogical and barbarous anomaly in the midst of the
progress of Celtic and Latin. Thus in the sixteenth century the revival
of classical studies found the language in ruins, and tried to remodel
it on the lines of Greek and Latin. This was the professed aim of the
writers of this great age. They did not succeed, and the seventeenth
century, wisely seeing that the irresistible march of events could in no
wise be curbed by the hand of man, set itself merely to improve the
language from within; for every day it was assuming more and more the
forms best suited to the dominant race, the forms, in other words, into
which the grammatical life of Celtic had formerly been cast.
Although both the _langue d’oil_ and French proper are marked by a
greater unity than the _lingua romana_ (since the mixture of races and
languages that gave birth to them was less complex) yet they have
produced separate dialects which survive to this day. It is not doing
these too much honour to call them dialects, not patois. They arose, not
from the corruption of the dominant type, with which they were at least
contemporary, but from the different proportions in which the Celtic,
Latin, and Germanic elements, that still make up the French nationality,
were mingled. To the north of the Seine, we find the dialect of Picardy;
this is, in vocabulary and rhythmic quality, very near Flemish, of which
the Germanic character is too obvious to be dwelt upon. Flemish, in this
respect, shows the same power of choice as the _langue d’oil_, which
could in a certain poem, without ceasing to be itself, admit forms and
expressions taken bodily from the language spoken at Arras.[139]
As we go south of the Seine towards the Loire, the Celtic elements in
the provincial dialects grow more numerous. In Burgundian, and the
dialects of Vaud and Savoy, even the vocabulary has many traces of
Celtic; these are not found in French, where the predominant factor is
rustic Latin.[140]
I have shown above[141] how from the sixteenth century the influence of
the north had given ground before the growing preponderance of the
peoples beyond the Loire. The reader has merely to compare the present
sections on language with my former remarks on blood to see how close is
the relation between the speech of a people and its physical
constitution.[142]
I have dealt in detail with the special case of France, but the
principle could easily be illustrated from the rest of Europe; and it
would be seen, as a universal rule, that the successive changes and
modifications of a language are not, as one usually hears, the work of
centuries. If they were, Ekkhili, Berber, Euskara, and Bas-Breton would
long have disappeared; and yet they still survive. The changes in
language are caused by corresponding changes in the blood of successive
generations, and the parallelism is exact.
I must here explain a phenomenon to which I have already referred,
namely the renunciation by certain racial groups (under pressure of
special necessity, or their own nature) of their native tongue in favour
of one which is more or less foreign to them. I took the Jews and the
Parsees as examples. There are others more remarkable still; for we
find, in America, savage tribes speaking languages superior to
themselves.
In America, by a curious stroke of fate, the most energetic nations have
developed, so to speak, in secret. The art of writing was unknown to
them, and their history proper begins very late and is nearly always
very obscure. The New World contains a great number of peoples which,
though they are neighbours and derive in different directions from a
common origin, have very little resemblance to each other.
According to d’Orbigny, the so-called “Chiquitean group” in Central
America is composed of tribes, of which the largest contain about 1500
souls, and the least numerous 50 and 300. All these, even the smallest,
have distinct languages. Such a state of things can only be the result
of a complete racial anarchy.
On this hypothesis, I am not at all surprised to see many of these
tribes, like the Chiquitos, in possession of a complicated and
apparently scientific language. The words used by the men are sometimes
different from those of the women; and in every case when a man borrows
one of the women’s phrases, he changes the terminations. Where such
luxury in vocabulary is possible, the language has surely reached a very
refined stage. Unfortunately, side by side with this we find that the
table of numerals does not go much further than ten. Such poverty, in
the midst of so much careful elaboration, is probably due to the
ravaging hand of time, aided by the barbarous condition of the natives
to-day. When we see anomalies like these, we cannot help recalling the
sumptuous palaces, once marvels of the Renaissance, which have come, by
some revolution, into the hands of rude peasants. The eye may rove with
admiration over delicate columns, elegant trellis-work, sculptured
porches, noble staircases, and striking gables—luxuries which are
useless to the wretchedness that lives under them; for the ruined roofs
let in the rain, the floors crack, and the worm eats into the mouldering
walls.
I can now say with certainty that, with regard to the special character
of races, philology confirms all the facts of physiology and history.
Its conclusions however must be handled with extreme care, and when they
are all we have to go upon, it is very dangerous to rest content with
them. Without the slightest doubt, a people’s language corresponds to
its mentality, but not always to its real value for civilization. In
order to ascertain this, we must fix our eyes solely on the race by
which, and for which, the language was at first designed. Now with the
exception of the negroes, and a few yellow groups, we meet only
quaternary races in recorded history. All the languages we know are thus
derivative, and we cannot gain the least idea of the laws governing
their formation except in the comparatively later stages. Our results,
even when confirmed by history, cannot be regarded as infallibly proved.
The further we go back, the dimmer becomes the light, and the more
hypothetical the nature of any arguments drawn from philology. It is
exasperating to be thrown back on these when we try to trace the
progress of any human family or to discover the racial elements that
make it up. We know that Sanscrit and Zend are akin. That is something;
but their common roots are sealed to us. The other ancient tongues are
in the same case. We know nothing of Euskara except itself. As no
analogue to it has been discovered up to now, we are ignorant of its
history, and whether it is to be regarded as itself primitive or
derived. It yields us no positive knowledge as to whether the people who
speak it are racially simple or composite.
Ethnology may well be grateful for the help given by philology. But the
help must not be accepted unconditionally, or any theories based on it
alone.[143]
This rule is dictated by a necessary prudence. All the facts, however,
mentioned in this chapter go to prove that, originally, there is a
perfect correspondence between the intellectual virtues of a race and
those of its native speech; that languages are, in consequence, unequal
in value and significance, unlike in their forms and basic elements, as
races are also; that their modifications, like those of races, come
merely from intermixture with other idioms; that their qualities and
merits, like a people’s blood, disappear or become absorbed, when they
are swamped by too many heterogeneous elements; finally, that when a
language of a higher order is used by some human group which is unworthy
of it, it will certainly become mutilated and die out. Hence, though it
is often difficult to infer at once, in a particular case, the merits of
a people from those of its language, it is quite certain that in theory
this can always be done.
I may thus lay it down, as a universal axiom, that the hierarchy of
languages is in strict correspondence with the hierarchy of races.