The cause of the modern monotony of ‘you’ might be sought in the mere
slovenliness of our civilization in the practice of the inflexions of
grammar. All things tend to become specialized, except only words.
Though in the house of life itself the organs, as life grows more
perfect, begin to draw apart to their own separate functions; though the
labourer, in the later association of mankind, finds his task by degrees
to dwindle in range and to be enforced within closer and closer
repetitions; and though only a small division of any of the sciences
that have come towards adult and responsible age falls to the share of a
single specialist, the word alone grows not expert and special, but
general and inexpert.
It is obliged to do more various things, and to do them with less
directness and, as it were, a less sequestered intention. It is engaged
upon enterprises of unskilled labour. The industrial word has less and
less craft, less dignity, less leisure, less rest, and more mere
utility.
Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its own varieties, amid the
varieties of the casual task. It changes not its vesture, and the
inflexion is lost.
Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized peoples, in the
inevitable evolution of things, should tend to become poor, careless,
and inexact grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact is, needless
to say, well enough known. Some of the French missionaries, students of
American-Indian languages, have astonished us with reports of the
enormous vocabularies and the scientific order of those tongues. The
people are in the nomadic stage of society, their languages in the
finished, the special, the sub-divided condition; intricate in system,
organic, arranged, logical, full of expressive differences, cases that
precisely assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time, turning
the future to look upon the past, and anticipating that turn, and making
a shifting perspective of the past; distinguishing persons not merely by
pointing the rude forefinger of a pronoun, but by the allusion of all
the inflexions of a verb. All that the antique grammars did, and more,
is done, we hear, by those doomed languages of an unaltering people, a
people with neither literature nor history, a people whose antiquities
have no interest nor value, nor date, because their centuries resembled
each other.
Not only the tactics of grammar, but an innumerable variety of words is
theirs, so that a speaker might hardly name a common thing without a
conscious play of choice, according as the syllables of a sentence were
to fold and close. Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has the
charge of thought, without some degree of a like liberty of choice, and
modern prose in all languages has, obviously, for the lack of this
liberty—for lack of rich alternatives—somewhat forgone the practice of
rhythm; forgone it altogether in the explanations of science, for
instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red-Indian speech, translated
even into sentimental English, as used formerly to be done, must have
undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier change when it was done
into sentimental French.
It is, however, among English races chiefly that an unwillingness to be
troubled with the distinctions of grammar has had this effect of making
a word run errands and serve the first purpose at hand; and it is among
English races that inflexions (never very numerous or subtle) have been
neglected and let fall. That most orderly of grammars, the Spanish, is
still in full use; the Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use
them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in Rome, retain as few as
possible in Liguria—making shift with auxiliary verbs rather than
conjugate properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts. The
French go about to avoid certain of their own subjunctives, even in
literature, and in speech the perfect tenses are passed askance, for
fear of pedantry. None but ourselves have been so impatient as to put
out of common use the second person singular. ‘You’ was manifestly a
trick of politeness in all languages, until it became depreciated by
general use, when Germans, Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more
distant pronoun of courtesy.
The literary Genius was kind to its wayward chosen people, and kept for
us a plot of the language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry. As
things are, we need not envy the French their second person singular.
For them it has but two keen significances—the first use in love and the
disuse in the reproof of children. The second is, perhaps, the more
important; it is renewed, and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence.
To say ‘vous’ to a naughty child is to enforce insatiate retribution;
few children deserve so much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches
the personality, and alters the relations of life.
As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is by no means certain
that the second person singular, with its single delight—the first—never
to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar regrets of the world for
the flights of its joys. ‘Toi’, the first ‘toi’, is an arbitrary, a
conventional happiness, a happiness because it is single—it has no
quality but that. The ‘many thousand’ of ‘toi’ are insignificant, and
therefore it has no ‘poor last’; it sets a paltry example, therefore.
And then, while the second person singular plays this ambiguous part
in love, see how primly it is eschewed in prayer. ‘May your name be
sanctified’ is a second phrase of the _oraison dominicale_ (_oraison
dominicale!_ the name says everything) which we should be loth to
have in place of our own. With us there is not only the poetic
‘thy’, but the obsolete valuing of the last syllable of the past
participle—‘hallowed’—and the unworn, the still fresh word itself to
make the sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such words into
familiar use we should gain much, but we should lose a most
distinctive characteristic, bestowed upon us by the literary Genius,
as though in reward of our very sins—our unique plot of disregarded
language that the traffic of the world passes by. For though the
Italians have a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their
daily prose are rather in the form of the words than in the words
themselves. Now the French have the Psalms of David in the language
of the trade circular charged with a little rhetoric.
As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and its effectual
influence in effacing them, it could not be more distinctly proved than
by the Quaker speech. Restoring the second person singular to the
language (by way of denying the primitive hyperbole of courtesy from
which the general second person plural took its use), the followers of
Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for a generation or so these
were in practice, yet the increase of carelessness and the generalizing
habit of speech in a world more and more intent upon special tasks in
all things else, quickly made an end of them. So that Quakerism began to
talk a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If Mrs. Beecher Stowe
makes Quakers speak according to their use, they suppressed ‘thou’ more
or less, and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing but the
slovenly indifference that has made all our verbs so dull could be the
cause of this perversion of a reform.
Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of our own poets, who seem to
find a difficulty in carrying the second person singular safely through
a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one there is another, a
little more out of sight, that does not. As Shelley wrote—
Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety,
so write others of the moderns.
Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not done in the other
centuries. Must we needs, as we go on, grow so lax, and do these
unhandsome things? If we do by some obscure process grow so lax, why
should there not be, in a time of revisions, a revision of these
customs? A little of the subjunctive was restored many years ago by Mr.
Henley in the _National Observer_; that this little soon fell aside
again is not encouraging; nevertheless, ‘it were’ worth while for some
author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the second person
singular, and with it certain tenses long out of use.
There might be such a literary restoration—a literary and a familiar
restoration—as would make our language again more various and more
charming, and yet would not turn the speech poetic to vulgar use, nor
decrease the dignity of what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ‘the
essential and ornamental measures of address’.
Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary grammar, we have the treasure
of the sequestered poetic and religious language in good order and
perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two derivations may well be
dwelt upon afresh, now when so many of our writers are obsequious to the
French language. (How is it, by the way, that Ireland is so little
joyful for the gift of English?) French cannot be the great poetic
language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc, delivered from a
grandfatherly hearth-rug: ‘L’anglais et le français; ce sont les deux
langues qui resteront; l’anglais pour le commerce, le français pour la
littérature.’ The blood of a silent listener was only ten years old, but
it boiled. And here is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French
judgement upon Browning: ‘What a singular man! his middle is not in the
centre.’ That Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle of an
English poet is not in the centre; it is one focus of an ellipse, like
the sun. Our national imagination takes wide adventures and unequal
velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler) that the earth’s orbit
must be circular, because a circle is ‘perfect’. And this is the kind of
perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the French mind has long
cherished.
Not only in this matter of middles and centres is English poetry out of
bounds. She does not know when she is beaten, as was said of English
armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow her way in? Into great
drama she intrudes, bidding the stage to wait; by lyre and song she
commands epic narrative to halt the marching columns of its processions;
waves rhetoric from its right throne in the grand style and in heroic
verse, and usurps its place by an imperial supersession; scatters
literary boundaries, and makes all the kingdoms hers—Poetry’s. And no
imaginable academies could have prevailed against her.
French lacks much besides those alien powers, our Latin and Teutonic
inheritances, forbidden as it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with
the Danube between, or the Alps between.
It lacks also negatives worth having; making shift with half-hearted
particles or the grotesquely insufficient _peu_. _Peu_ is the only
negative for some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile we have
our profound and powerful particle, in our ‘undone’, ‘unloved’
‘unforgiven’, the ‘un’ that summons in order that it may banish, and
keeps the living word present to hear sentence and denial, showing the
word ‘unloved’ to be not less than archangel ruined.
PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY FREDERICK HALL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
POEMS: By ALICE MEYNELL. With a portrait by J. S. Sargent, R.A. 7s. 6d.
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