The vicissitudes of the English language are more evident than its
origin. In the history of a language we are perpetually reminded, by the
remonstrances of the critics, of the corruptions of its purity, the
perils of innovation, and the obtrusion of neologisms, while we find
these same critics fastidiously rejecting what they deem the antiquated
and the obsolete; many causes are constantly operating these changes of
language. The style of one age ceases to be that of another; new
modifications of thought create new modes of expression; and as
knowledge enlarges its sphere, and society changes its manners, novel
objects imperiously demand adequate terms.
Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history
of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our
destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse
with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by
foreign neologisms.
For more than five centuries was the Saxon language the language of
England; the awful revolution of 1066 produced novelties of all kinds,
but none greater than the entire change in our Saxon language, which,
however, our Norman masters could never eradicate from among the people.
During three centuries most of our English writers composed in French.
When Greek was first studied in the reign of Henry the Seventh, it
planted many a hellenism in our English; the translation of the
Scriptures in that of Edward the Sixth, while it transmitted many
latinisms, at the same time revived the simplicity of the Saxon-English,
which seemed to bear a sort of evidence that a primitive language was
most suitable for primitive Christianity in contrast with the pompous
corruptions of Rome.
Under Elizabeth favourite phrases were insinuated into the dialect by
over-refined travellers, who spoke "minionlike," while the revolution
of the Netherlands incorporated among us many a rough but vigorous
inmate. In the days of James and Charles, the long residence of the
Spanish Gondomar at our court, and the romantic pilgrimage of love to
Madrid, and the political ties which bound the two nations, framed the
style of courtesy, as well as set the fashions.
The puritanic commonwealth under Cromwell sunk down the language to its
basest uses. Stripped to nakedness, the jargon of the market and the
shop hid itself under the gibberish of its cant. Writers then abounded
equally illiterate and fanatical. Perhaps we owe to these mean
scribblers the scorn and pride with which Milton constructed on the
Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial
and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was
never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for
its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman.
Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally
gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment
that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the
Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have
been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, destitute of every
sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished
Duke of Weimar at St. James's, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe
at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in
our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English
language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national
events.
The history of the vernacular language of other European nations
discovers the same mutability, though not always produced by those great
public incidents which may have been peculiar to ourselves. In Spain,
however, we find that the possession of that land by the Moors has left
in the Castilian language a whole dictionary of Arabic words which now
mingle with the vernacular idiom, and for ever shall bear witness of the
triumphs of their ancient masters. But in the history of a vernacular
language it may also happen that the first writers, combining in a
singleness of taste, may construct a particular style. The earliest
writers of France had modelled their taste by the Greek; Jodelle,
Ronsard, Du Bartas, and others, imbued with Attic literature, Greekised
the French idiom, by their compounds, their novel terms, and their
sonorous periphrases. The Court and the ladies were adopting this new
style, and, as usual, the unskilful were diverging into the most
ridiculous affectations. But it was possible that the French language
might have acquired a concision and vigour of which it is now destitute,
for those early writers threw out a more original force than their tame
successors. The artificial delicacy of the French critics has condemned
these attempts as barbarisms; but to have transplanted these atticisms
into the native soil, partook more of boldness than of barbarism. The
attempt failed, if it could ever have succeeded, by the civil wars which
soon drew off the minds of men from the placable innovators of language.
The French, though not an insular people, have been subject to rapid
revolutions in their language. The ancient Gaulish-French has long been
as unintelligible to a modern Frenchman as our Saxon is to us; even
those numerous poets of France who at a later period composed in their
_langue Romane_, are strewed in the fields of their poesy only as
carcasses, which no miracle of antiquarian lore shall ever resuscitate.
Compare the style of one writer with another only two centuries later,
or Rabelais with Voltaire! The age of Louis XIV. effected the most rapid
change in the vernacular style, insomuch that the diction of the writers
of the preceding reign of Louis XIII. had fallen obsolete in the short
space of half a century. And yet the chastened style of the age of Louis
XIV., with its cold imitation of classical antiquity, was to receive a
higher polish from the hand of a Pascal, a novel brilliancy from the
touch of a Montesquieu, and a more numerous prose from the impassioned
Rousseau. The age of erudition and taste was to be succeeded by the more
energetic age of genius and philosophy. An anecdote recorded of Vaugelas
may possibly be true, and is a remarkable evidence of this perpetual
mobility of style. This writer lived between 1585 and 1650, and during
thirty years had been occupied, _more suo_, on a translation of Quintus
Curtius. It was during this protracted period that the French style was
passing through its rapid transitions. So many phrases had fallen
superannuated, that this martyr to the purity of his diction was
compelled to re-write the former part of his version to modernise it
with his later improved composition. The learned Menage lived to be old
enough to have caught alarm at this vicissitude of taste, and did not
scruple to avow that no work could last which was not composed in Latin.
The languages of highly cultivated nations are more subject to this
innovation and variableness than the language of a people whose native
penury receives but rare accessions. Hence the ancient and continued
complaints through all the generations of critics, from the days of
Julius Caesar and Quintilian to those in which we are now writing.[1] The
same hostility against novelty in words or in style is invariably
proclaimed. The captiousness of criticism has usually referred to the
style of the preceding authors as a standard from which the prevalent
style of its contemporaries has erringly diverged. The preceptors of
genius at all times seem to have been insensible to the natural progress
of language, resisting new qualities of style and new forms of
expression; in reality, this was inferring, that a perfect language
exists, and that a creative genius must be trammelled by their limited
and arbitrary systems. This prejudice of the venerable brotherhood may,
I think, be traced to its source. Every age advantageously compares
itself with its predecessor, for it has made some advances, and rarely
suspects that the same triumph is reserved for its successor; but
besides this illusion in regard to the style, which, like the manners of
the time, is passing away, the veteran critic has long been a practised
master, and in the daring and dubious novelties which time has not
consecrated, he must descend to a new pupilage; but his rigid habits are
no longer flexible; and for the matured arbiter of literature who tastes
"the bitterness of novelty," what remains but an invective against the
minting of new words, and the versatility of new tastes?
The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from the principle that a
modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are
emphatically called "the dead languages," in which every deviation
unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. But the
truth is, that every modern language has always existed in fluctuation
and change. The people themselves, indeed, are no innovators; their very
phrases are traditional. Popular language can only convey the single
uncompounded notions of the people; it is the style of facts; and they
are intelligible to one another by the shortest means. Their
Saxon-English is nearly monosyllabic, and their phraseology curt. Hence
we find that the language of the mob in the year 1382 is precisely the
natural style of the mob of this day.[2] But this popular style can
never be set up as the standard of genius, which is mutable with its
age, creating faculties and embodying thoughts which do not enter into
the experience of the people, and therefore cannot exercise their
understandings.
A series of facts will illustrate our principle, that the language of
every literary people exists in a fluctuating condition, and that its
vaunted purity and its continued stability are chimerical notions.
In this history of the vicissitudes of the English language, we may
commence with our remote ancestors the Anglo-Saxons. When their studies
and their language received a literary character, they coveted great
pomposity in their style. They interlarded their staves with Latin
words; and, even in the reign of the Confessor, the French language was
fashionable. "The affectation of the Anglo-Saxon literati was evidently
tending to adulterate their language; and even if the Conquest had not
taken place, the purity of the English language would have been speedily
destroyed by the admixture of a foreign vocabulary."[3] Thus early were
we perilling our purity!
In 1387, John de Trevisa, translating the Latin Polychronicon of Higden,
tells us he avoids what he calls "the old and ancient English." A
century afterwards, Caxton, printing this translation of Trevisa, had to
re-write it, to change the "rude and old English, that is, to wit,
certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood." It
might have startled Master Caxton to have suspected that he might be to
us what Trevisa was to him, as it had equally amazed Trevisa, when he
discovered archaisms which had contracted the rust of time, to have
imagined that his fresher English were to be archaisms to his printer in
the succeeding century.
At the period at which our present vernacular literature opened on us,
Eliot, More, and Ascham maintained great simplicity of thought and
idiom; yet even at this period, about 1550, the language seemed in
imminent danger; it raised the tone of our primitive critics, and the
terrors of neologism took all frightful shapes to their eyes!
A refined critic of our language then was the learned Sir JOHN CHEKE,
who at this early period considered that the English language was
capable of preserving the utmost purity of style, and he was jealously
awake to its slightest violations. A friend of his, Sir THOMAS HOBY, a
courtly translator of the "Courtier of Castiglione," had solicited his
critical opinion. The learned Cheke, equally friendly and critical,
insinuated his abhorrence of "an unknown word," and apologises for his
corrections, lest he should be accounted "overstraight a deemer of
things, by marring his handywork." Hoby had evidently alarmed, by some
sprinklings of Italianisms--some capriccios of "new-fangled" words--the
chaste ear of our Anglican purist. I preserve this remarkable letter to
serve as a singular specimen of our English, unpolluted even by a
Latinism.[4]
"Our own tongue should be written _clean_ and _pure_, unmixt and
unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed,
by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her
house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably
utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitness of other
tongues to attire herself withal; but used plainly her own, with such
shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent,
doth lead her unto; and if she want at any time (as, being imperfect,
she must), yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear,
that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a
word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease
this need, we would not boldly venture on unknown words. This I say, not
for reproof of you, who have scarcely and necessarily used, where
occasion seemeth, a strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out of the
matter, and not to be sought for; but for my own defence, who might be
counted overstraight a deemer of things, if I give not this account to
you, my friend, of my marring this your handy work."
Such was the tone even of our primitive critics! the terrors of
neologism were always before their eyes. All those accessions of the
future opulence of the vernacular language were either not foreseen or
utterly proscribed, while, at the same time, the wants and imperfections
of the language, amid all its purity or its poverty, were felt and
acknowledged. We perceive that even this stern champion of his
vernacular idiom confesses that "he may want at time, being imperfect,
and must borrow with bashfulness." The cries of the critics suddenly
break on us. Another contemporary critic of not inferior authority
laments that "there seemed to be no mother-tongue." "The far-journeyed
gentlemen" returned home not only in love with foreign fashions, but
equally fond "to powder their talk with over-sea language." There was
French-English, and English Italianated. Professional men disfigured the
language by conventional pedantries; the finical courtier would prate
"nothing but Chaucer." "The mystical wisemen and the poetical clerks
delivered themselves in quaint proverbs and blind allegories."[5] The
pedantic race, in their furious Latinisms, bristling with polysyllabic
pomposity, deemed themselves fortunate when they could fall upon "dark
words," which our critic aptly describes "catching an ink-horn term by
the tail." The eloquence of the more volatile fluttered in the splendid
patches of modern languages. It seemed as if there were to be no longer
a native idiom, and the good grain was choked up by the intruding cockle
which flourished by its side. Another contemporary critic announces that
"our English tongue was a gallimaufry or hodge-podge of all other
speeches." ARTHUR GOLDING grieves over the disjected members of the
language:--
"Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature),
Dismember'd, hack'd, maim'd, rent, and torn,
Defaced, patch'd, marr'd, and made in scorn."
A critic who has left us "An Arte of English Poetry," written perhaps
about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which,
however, he never could in his own verses, "natural, pure, and the most
usual of all his country," seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard
of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but
there he acknowledges that "the preachers, the secretaries, and
travellers," were great corrupters, and not less "our Universities,
where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the
primitive languages." The coarse bran of our own native English was,
however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be
gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against "the daily talk of
northern men." The _good southern_ was that "we of Middlesex or Surrey
use." Middlesex and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all
British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied
from "the usual speech of the Court, and that of London within sixty
miles, and not much above." But was our English more stable within this
assigned circumference of the metropolis than any other line of
demarcation? About 1580, CAREW informs us that "Within these sixty years
we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of
our language consisteth in them."
Some there were among us who, alarmed that such ceaseless infusions were
polluting the native springs of English, would look back with veneration
and fondness on our ancient masters. Our great poet SPENSER,[6] then
youthful, declared that the language of CHAUCER was the purest English;
and our bard hailed, in a verse often quoted by the critics--
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.
But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of
having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old
Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which
he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological
antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for
introducing "a waggon-load of words," and have proclaimed that Chaucer
"wrote the language of no age;" a reproach which has been transferred to
our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the
English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery
of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for
recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy
axe of verbal pedantry.
Descending a complete century, in 1656 we are surprised at discovering
HEYLIN, at a period relatively modern, reiterating the language of his
ancient predecessors. This latter critic published his animadversions on
the pedantic writings of HAMON L'ESTRANGE, who had opened on us a
floodgate of Latinisms. Heylin observes: "More French and Latin words
have gained ground upon us since _the middle of Queen Elizabeth's
reign_ than were admitted by our ancestors, not only since the Norman,
but the Roman conquest." This was written before the Restoration of
Charles the Second, when we were to be overrun by Gallicisms. This
complaint did not cease with Heylin, for it has often been renewed.
Heylin drew up in alphabetical order the uncouth and unusual words which
are to be found in Hamon L'Estrange's "History," and yet many of these
foreigners since the days of Heylin have become denizens. So unsettled
were the notions of our philology with regard to style, that L'Estrange
could venture in his rejoinder, which contains sufficient vinaicre, as
he writes it, a defence of these hard words, which is entertaining. "As
to those lofty words, I declare to all the world this not uningenuous
acknowledgment, that having conversed with authors of the noblest and
chief remark in several languages, not only their notions but their very
words especially being of the most elegant import, became at length so
familiar with me, as when I applied myself to this present work I found
it very difficult to renounce my former acquaintance with them; but as
they freely offered themselves, so I entertained them upon these
considerations. First, I was confident that among learned men they
needed no other passe than their own extraction; and for those who were
mere English readers I saw no reason they should wonder at them,
considering that for their satisfaction I had sent along with every
foreigner his interpreter, to serve instead of a dictionary." Hamon
L'Estrange's "Life of Charles I." was certainly a piece of infelicitous
pedantry, as we may judge by this specimen.[7]
Even great authors glanced with a suspicious eye on these vicissitudes
of language, not without a conviction that they themselves were
personally interested in these uncertain novelties. It would seem as if
Milton, from the new invasion of Gallic words and Gallic airiness which
broke in at the Restoration, had formed some uneasy anticipations that
his own learned diction and sublime form of poetry might suffer by the
transition, and that Milton himself might become as obsolete as some of
his great predecessors appeared to his age. The nephew of Milton, in the
preface to his "Theatrum Poetarum," where the critical touch of the
great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets,
who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. Writing
in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: "From Queen Elizabeth's
reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry
of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to
examine it well. If no poetry should please but what is calculated to
every refinement of a language, of how ill consequence this would be for
the future let him consider, and make it his own case, who, being now in
fair repute, shall, two or three ages hence, when the language comes to
be double-refined, understand that his works are come obsolete and
thrown aside. I cannot--" he, perhaps Milton, continues--"I cannot but
look upon it as a very pleasant humour that we should be so compliant
with the French custom as to follow set fashions, not only in garments,
but in music and poetry. For clothes, I leave them to the discretion of
the modish; breeches and doublet will not fall under a metaphysical
consideration. But in arts and sciences, as well as in moral notions, I
shall not scruple to maintain, that what was '_verum et bonum_' once,
continues to be so always. Now whether the trunk-hose fancy of Queen
Elizabeth's days, or the pantaloon genius of ours be best, I shall not
be hasty to determine."
Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply
to the CRITICS, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents;
but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the
LEXICOGRAPHERS, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings
of their great "exchequer of words." Turn over the prefaces of our elder
lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary
of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those
which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his
record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak,
and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure. BARET, one of our
earliest lexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses
himself:--"I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete
words which now a daies no good writer will use."[8] Words spurned at by
the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers
of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet
another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into
confusion. HENRY COCKRAM, whose volume has been at least twelve times
reprinted, boldly avows that "what any before me in this kind have
begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;" and,
presuming on the privilege of "an interpreter of hard English words,"
the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms,
which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some
writers and speakers, as Hamon L'Estrange, were attempting.[9] What a
picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the
fleeting stages of their decadency from TREVISA to CAXTON, from CAXTON
to BARET, from BARET to COCKRAM, and from COCKRAM to his numerous
successors!
Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that "purity
of style," whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated
querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom,
fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to
attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She
has even submitted to Fashion, that most encroaching usurper of words,
who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banishing the old
and establishing the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy
unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fashion under the
consecrated name of CUSTOM.
But let us not quit this topic of "purity of style" without offering our
sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical
devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a
word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for
pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the encumbering
Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a
return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a
set oration at the University of Glasgow by a noble personage. This
taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine
genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life,
was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity
unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest
he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were
not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to
be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep
along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of
Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity
which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend
enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy
feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good
fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.
It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men
in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly
feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by
innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical.
These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular
idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All
those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were
but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural
progress of a long-protracted birth.
A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect
existence, encumbered by the heavy mass in which it lies involved,
resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when
--------Half appear'd
The tawny Lion, PAWING TO GET FREE
HIS HINDER PARTS.