We have brought together thus far in these Anticipations the material
for the picture of a human community somewhere towards the year 2000. We
have imagined its roads, the type and appearance of its homes, its
social developments, its internal struggle for organization; we have
speculated upon its moral and æsthetic condition, read its newspaper,
made an advanced criticism upon the lack of universality in its
literature, and attempted to imagine it at war. We have decided in
particular that unlike the civilized community of the immediate past
which lived either in sharply-defined towns or agriculturally over a
wide country, this population will be distributed in a quite different
way, a little more thickly over vast urban regions and a little less
thickly over less attractive or less convenient or less industrial parts
of the world. And implicit in all that has been written there has
appeared an unavoidable assumption that the coming community will be
vast, something geographically more extensive than most, and
geographically different from almost all existing communities, that the
outline its creative forces will draw not only does not coincide with
existing political centres and boundaries, but will be more often than
not in direct conflict with them, uniting areas that are separated and
separating areas that are united, grouping here half a dozen tongues and
peoples together and there tearing apart homogeneous bodies and
distributing the fragments among separate groups. And it will now be
well to inquire a little into the general causes of these existing
divisions, the political boundaries of to-day, and the still older
contours of language and race.
It is first to be remarked that each of these sets of boundaries is
superposed, as it were, on the older sets. The race areas, for example,
which are now not traceable in Europe at all must have represented old
regions of separation; the language areas, which have little or no
essential relation to racial distribution, have also given way long
since to the newer forces that have united and consolidated nations. And
the still newer forces that have united and separated the nineteenth
century states have been, and in many cases are still, in manifest
conflict with "national" ideas.
Now, in the original separation of human races, in the subsequent
differentiation and spread of languages, in the separation of men into
nationalities, and in the union and splitting of states and empires, we
have to deal essentially with the fluctuating manifestations of the
same fundamental shaping factor which will determine the distribution of
urban districts in the coming years. Every boundary of the
ethnographical, linguistic, political, and commercial map--as a little
consideration will show--has indeed been traced in the first place by
the means of transit, under the compulsion of geographical contours.
There are evident in Europe four or five or more very distinct racial
types, and since the methods and rewards of barbaric warfare and the
nature of the chief chattels of barbaric trade have always been
diametrically opposed to racial purity, their original separation could
only have gone on through such an entire lack of communication as
prevented either trade or warfare between the bulk of the
differentiating bodies. These original racial types are now inextricably
mingled. Unobservant, over-scholarly people talk or write in the
profoundest manner about a Teutonic race and a Keltic race, and
institute all sorts of curious contrasts between these phantoms, but
these are not races at all, if physical characteristics have anything to
do with race. The Dane, the Bavarian, the Prussian, the Frieslander, the
Wessex peasant, the Kentish man, the Virginian, the man from New Jersey,
the Norwegian, the Swede, and the Transvaal Boer, are generalized about,
for example, as Teutonic, while the short, dark, cunning sort of
Welshman, the tall and generous Highlander, the miscellaneous Irish,
the square-headed Breton, and any sort of Cornwall peasant are Kelts
within the meaning of this oil-lamp anthropology.[44] People who believe
in this sort of thing are not the sort of people that one attempts to
convert by a set argument. One need only say the thing is not so; there
is no Teutonic race, and there never has been; there is no Keltic race,
and there never has been. No one has ever proved or attempted to prove
the existence of such races, the thing has always been assumed; they are
dogmas with nothing but questionable authority behind them, and the onus
of proof rests on the believer. This nonsense about Keltic and Teutonic
is no more science than Lombroso's extraordinary assertions about
criminals, or palmistry, or the development of religion from a solar
myth. Indisputably there are several races intermingled in the European
populations--I am inclined to suspect the primitive European races may
be found to be so distinct as to resist confusion and pamnyxia through
hybridization--but there is no inkling of a satisfactory analysis yet
that will discriminate what these races were and define them in terms
of physical and moral character. The fact remains there is no such thing
as a racially pure and homogeneous community in Europe distinct from
other communities. Even among the Jews, according to Erckert and Chantre
and J. Jacobs, there are markedly divergent types, there may have been
two original elements and there have been extensive local intermixtures.
Long before the beginnings of history, while even language was in its
first beginnings--indeed as another aspect of the same process as the
beginning of language--the first complete isolations that established
race were breaking down again, the little pools of race were running
together into less homogeneous lagoons and marshes of humanity, the
first paths were being worn--war paths for the most part. Still
differentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse,
frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse,
the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, would
develop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences.
It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes.
There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization,
with iron weapons and war discipline, with established paths and a
social rule and presently with the coming of the horse, what one might
call the areas of assimilation would increase in size. A stage would be
reached when the only checks to transit of a sufficiently convenient
sort to keep language uniform would be the sea or mountains or a broad
river or--pure distance. And presently the rules of the game, so to
speak, would be further altered and the unifications and isolations that
were establishing themselves upset altogether and brought into novel
conflict by the beginnings of navigation, whereby an impassable barrier
became a highway.
The commencement of actual European history coincides with the closing
phases of what was probably a very long period of a foot and
(occasional) horseback state of communications; the adjustments so
arrived at being already in an early state of rearrangement through the
advent of the ship. The communities of Europe were still for the larger
part small isolated tribes and kingdoms, such kingdoms as a mainly
pedestrian militia, or at any rate a militia without transport, and
drawn from (and soon drawn home again by) agricultural work, might hold
together. The increase of transit facilities between such communities,
by the development of shipping and the invention of the wheel and the
made road, spelt increased trade perhaps for a time, but very speedily a
more extensive form of war, and in the end either the wearing away of
differences and union, or conquest. Man is the creature of a struggle
for existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of the
gospel of self-abnegation even, and he instantly becomes its zealous
missionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram it into the
minds of his fellow-creatures do not include physical force--and if that
is not self-abnegation, he asks, what is? So he has been, and so he is
likely to remain. Not to be so, is to die of abnegation and extinguish
the type. Improvement in transit between communities formerly for all
practical purposes isolated, means, therefore, and always has meant, and
I imagine, always will mean, that now they can get at one another. And
they do. They inter-breed and fight, physically, mentally, and
spiritually. Unless Providence is belied in His works that is what they
are meant to do.
A third invention which, though not a means of transit like the wheeled
vehicle and the ship, was yet a means of communication, rendered still
larger political reactions possible, and that was the development of
systems of writing. The first empires and some sort of written speech
arose together. Just as a kingdom, as distinguished from a mere tribal
group of villages, is almost impossible without horses, so is an empire
without writing and post-roads. The history of the whole world for three
thousand years is the history of a unity larger than the small kingdom
of the Heptarchy type, endeavouring to establish itself under the stress
of these discoveries of horse-traffic and shipping and the written word,
the history, that is, of the consequences of the partial shattering of
the barriers that had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion of
more than tribal communities through all the long ages before the dawn
of history.
East of the Gobi Pamir barrier there has slowly grown up under these new
conditions the Chinese system. West and north of the Sahara Gobi barrier
of deserts and mountains, the extraordinarily strong and spacious
conceptions of the Romans succeeded in dominating the world, and do,
indeed, in a sort of mutilated way, by the powers of great words and
wide ideas, in Cæsarism and Imperialism, in the titles of Czar, Kaiser,
and Imperator, in Papal pretension and countless political devices,
dominate it to this hour. For awhile these conceptions sustained a
united and to a large extent organized empire over very much of this
space. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a political
union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of a
thin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs and
refinements, over the scarcely touched national masses. It checked,
perhaps, but it nowhere succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitable
differentiation of province from province and nation from nation. The
forces of transit that permitted the Roman imperialism and its partial
successors to establish wide ascendancies, were not sufficient to carry
the resultant unity beyond the political stage. There was unity, but not
unification. Tongues and writing ceased to be pure without ceasing to
be distinct. Sympathies, religious and social practices, ran apart and
rounded themselves off like drops of oil on water. Travel was restricted
to the rulers and the troops and to a wealthy leisure class; commerce
was for most of the constituent provinces of the empire a commerce in
superficialities, and each province--except for Italy, which latterly
became dependent on an over-seas food supply--was in all essential
things autonomous, could have continued in existence, rulers and ruled,
arts, luxuries, and refinements just as they stood, if all other lands
and customs had been swept out of being. Local convulsions and
revolutions, conquests and developments, occurred indeed, but though the
stones were altered the mosaic remained, and the general size and
character of its constituent pieces remained. So it was under the
Romans, so it was in the eighteenth century, and so it would probably
have remained as long as the post-road and the sailing-ship were the
most rapid forms of transit within the reach of man. Wars and powers and
princes came and went, that was all. Nothing was changed, there was only
one state the more or less. Even in the eighteenth century the process
of real unification had effected so little, that not one of the larger
kingdoms of Europe escaped a civil war--not a class war, but a really
_internal_ war--between one part of itself and another, in that hundred
years. In spite of Rome's few centuries of unstable empire, internal
wars, a perpetual struggle against finally triumphant disruption seemed
to be the unavoidable destiny of every power that attempted to rule over
a larger radius than at most a hundred miles.
So evident was this that many educated English persons thought then, and
many who are not in the habit of analyzing operating causes, still think
to-day, that the wide diffusion of the English-speaking people is a mere
preliminary to their political, social, and linguistic disruption--the
eighteenth-century breach with the United States is made a precedent of,
and the unification that followed the war of Union and the growing
unification of Canada is overlooked--that linguistic differences,
differences of custom, costume, prejudice, and the like, will finally
make the Australian, the Canadian of English blood, the Virginian, and
the English Africander, as incomprehensible and unsympathetic one to
another as Spaniard and Englishman or Frenchman and German are now. On
such a supposition all our current Imperialism is the most foolish
defiance of the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure, and
emotion that man ever made. So, indeed, it might be--so, indeed, I
certainly think it would be--if it were not that the epoch of post-road
and sailing-ship is at an end. We are in the beginning of a new time,
with such forces of organization and unification at work in mechanical
traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland of
novel, space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitable
advance in practical education, as the world has never felt before.
The operation of these unifying forces is already to be very distinctly
traced in the check, the arrest indeed, of any further differentiation
in existing tongues, even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is more
than an arrest even, the forces of differentiation have been driven back
and an actual process of assimilation has set in. In England at the
commencement of the nineteenth century the common man of Somerset and
the common man of Yorkshire, the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottar
and the common Ulsterman, would have been almost incomprehensible to one
another. They differed in accent, in idiom, and in their very names for
things. They differed in their ideas about things. They were, in plain
English, foreigners one to another. Now they differ only in accent, and
even that is a dwindling difference. Their language has become ampler
because now they read. They read books--or, at any rate, they learn to
read out of books--and certainly they read newspapers and those scrappy
periodicals that people like bishops pretend to think so detrimental to
the human mind, periodicals that it is cheaper to make at centres and
uniformly, than locally in accordance with local needs. Since the
newspaper cannot fit the locality, the locality has to broaden its mind
to the newspaper, and to ideas acceptable in other localities. The word
and the idiom of the literary language and the pronunciation suggested
by its spelling tends to prevail over the local usage. And moreover
there is a persistent mixing of peoples going on, migration in search of
employment and so on, quite unprecedented before the railways came. Few
people are content to remain in that locality and state of life "into
which it has pleased God to call them." As a result, dialectic purity
has vanished, dialects are rapidly vanishing, and novel differentiations
are retarded or arrested altogether. Such novelties as do establish
themselves in a locality are widely disseminated almost at once in books
and periodicals.
A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France, in
Italy, in Germany, and in the States. It is not a process peculiar to
any one nation. It is simply an aspect of the general process that has
arisen out of mechanical locomotion. The organization of elementary
education has no doubt been an important factor, but the essential
influence working through this circumstance is the fact that paper is
relatively cheap to type-setting, and both cheap to authorship--even the
commonest sorts of authorship--and the wider the area a periodical or
book serves the bigger, more attractive, and better it can be made for
the same money. And clearly this process of assimilation will continue.
Even local differences of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerant
dramatic company, the itinerant preacher, the coming extension of
telephones and the phonograph, which at any time in some application to
correspondence or instruction may cease to be a toy, all these things
attack, or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before they
can take root....
And this process is not restricted to dialects merely. The native of a
small country who knows no other language than the tongue of his country
becomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user of
any of the three great languages of the Europeanized world. For his
literature he depends on the scanty writers who are in his own case and
write, or have written, in his own tongue. Necessarily they are few,
because necessarily with a small public there can be only subsistence
for a few. For his science he is in a worse case. His country can
produce neither teachers nor discoverers to compare with the numbers of
such workers in the larger areas, and it will neither pay them to write
original matter for his instruction nor to translate what has been
written in other tongues. The larger the number of people reading a
tongue, the larger--other things being equal--will be not only the
output of more or less original literature in that tongue, but also the
more profitable and numerous will be translations of whatever has value
in other tongues. Moreover, the larger the reading public in any
language the cheaper will it be to supply copies of the desired work.
In the matter of current intelligence the case of the speaker of the
small language is still worse. His newspaper will need to be cheaply
served, his home intelligence will be cut and restricted, his foreign
news belated and second hand. Moreover, to travel even a little distance
or to conduct anything but the smallest business enterprise will be
exceptionally inconvenient to him. The Englishman who knows no language
but his own may travel well-nigh all over the world and everywhere meet
some one who can speak his tongue. But what of the Welsh-speaking
Welshman? What of the Basque and the Lithuanian who can speak only his
mother tongue? Everywhere such a man is a foreigner and with all the
foreigner's disadvantages. In most places he is for all practical
purposes deaf and dumb.
The inducements to an Englishman, Frenchman or German to become
bi-lingual are great enough nowadays, but the inducements to a speaker
of the smaller languages are rapidly approaching compulsion. He must do
it in self-defence. To be an educated man in his own vernacular has
become an impossibility, he must either become a mental subject of one
of the greater languages or sink to the intellectual status of a
peasant. But if our analysis of social development was correct the
peasant of to-day will be represented to-morrow by the people of no
account whatever, the classes of extinction, the People of the Abyss.
If that analysis was correct, the essential nation will be all of
educated men, that is to say, the essential nation will speak some
dominant language or cease to exist, whatever its primordial tongue may
have been. It will pass out of being and become a mere local area of the
lower social stratum,--a Problem for the philanthropic amateur.
The action of the force of attraction of the great tongues is
cumulative. It goes on, as bodies fall, with a steady acceleration. The
more the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less will
be the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less the
inducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attack
upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born to
speak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going on
in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even in
the case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as the
Italian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes for a similar
suppression. All over Italy is the French newspaper and the French book.
French wins its way more and more there, as English, I understand, is
doing in Norway, and English and German in Holland. And in the coming
years when the reading public will, in the case of the Western nations,
be practically the whole functional population, when travel will be more
extensive and abundant, and the inter-change of printed matter still
cheaper and swifter--and above all with the spread of the telephone--the
process of subtle, bloodless, unpremeditated annexation will conceivably
progress much more rapidly even than it does at present. The Twentieth
Century will see the effectual crowding out of most of the weaker
languages--if not a positive crowding out, yet at least (as in Flanders)
a supplementing of them by the superposition of one or other of a
limited number of world-languages over the area in which each is spoken.
This will go on not only in Europe, but with varying rates of progress
and local eddies and interruptions over the whole world. Except in the
special case of China and Japan, where there may be a unique
development, the peoples of the world will escape from the wreckage of
their too small and swamped and foundering social systems, only up the
ladders of what one may call the aggregating tongues.
What will these aggregating world-languages be? If one has regard only
to its extension during the nineteenth century one may easily incline to
overrate the probabilities of English becoming the chief of these. But a
great part of the vast extension of English that has occurred has been
due to the rapid reproduction of originally English-speaking peoples,
the emigration of foreigners into English-speaking countries in
quantities too small to resist the contagion about them, and the
compulsion due to the political and commercial preponderance of a
people too illiterate to readily master strange tongues. None of these
causes have any essential permanence. When one comes to look more
closely into the question one is surprised to discover how slow the
extension of English has been in the face of apparently far less
convenient tongues. English still fails to replace the French language
in French Canada, and its ascendency is doubtful to-day in South Africa,
after nearly a century of British dominion. It has none of the
contagious quality of French, and the small class that monopolizes the
direction of British affairs, and probably will monopolize it yet for
several decades, has never displayed any great zeal to propagate its
use. Of the few ideas possessed by the British governing class, the
destruction and discouragement of schools and colleges is,
unfortunately, one of the chief, and there is an absolute incapacity to
understand the political significance of the language question. The
Hindoo who is at pains to learn and use English encounters something
uncommonly like hatred disguised in a facetious form. He will certainly
read little about himself in English that is not grossly contemptuous,
to reward him for his labour. The possibilities that have existed, and
that do still in a dwindling degree exist, for resolute statesmen to
make English the common language of communication for all Asia south and
east of the Himalayas, will have to develop of their own force or
dwindle and pass away. They may quite probably pass away. There is no
sign that either the English or the Americans have a sufficient sense of
the importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race to
interfere with natural processes in this matter for many years to come.
Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, and who
are neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learn
English, rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initial
assumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amount
of science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the man
who learns it. It becomes, therefore, a fact of very great significance
that the actual number of books published in English is less than that
in French or German, and that the proportion of serious books is very
greatly less. A large proportion of English books are novels adapted to
the minds of women, or of boys and superannuated business men, stories
designed rather to allay than stimulate thought--they are the only
books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. In
this connection they do not count, however; no foreigner is likely to
learn English for the pleasure of reading Miss Marie Corelli in the
original, or of drinking untranslatable elements from _The Helmet of
Navarre_. The present conditions of book production for the English
reading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect.
There is neither honour nor reward--there is not even food or
shelter--for the American or Englishman who devotes a year or so of his
life to the adequate treatment of any spacious question, and so small is
the English reading public with any special interest in science, that a
great number of important foreign scientific works are never translated
into English at all. Such interesting compilations as Bloch's work on
war, for example, must be read in French; in English only a brief
summary of his results is to be obtained, under a sensational
heading.[45] Schopenhauer again is only to be got quite stupidly
Bowdlerized, explained, and "selected" in English. Many translations
that are made into English are made only to sell, they are too often the
work of sweated women and girls--very often quite without any special
knowledge of the matter they translate--they are difficult to read and
untrustworthy to quote. The production of books in English, except the
author be a wealthy amateur, rests finally upon the publishers, and
publishers to-day stand a little lower than ordinary tradesmen in not
caring at all whether the goods they sell are good or bad. Unusual
books, they allege--and all good books are unusual--are "difficult to
handle," and the author must pay the fine--amounting, more often than
not, to the greater portion of his interest in the book. There is no
criticism to control the advertising enterprises of publishers and
authors, and no sufficiently intelligent reading public has
differentiated out of the confusion to encourage attempts at critical
discrimination. The organs of the great professions and technical trades
are as yet not alive to the part their readers must play in the public
life of the future, and ignore all but strictly technical publications.
A bastard criticism, written in many cases by publishers' employees, a
criticism having a very direct relation to the advertisement columns,
distributes praise and blame in the periodic press. There is no body of
great men either in England or America, no intelligence in the British
Court, that might by any form of recognition compensate the
philosophical or scientific writer for poverty and popular neglect. The
more powerful a man's intelligence the more distinctly he must see that
to devote himself to increase the scientific or philosophical wealth of
the English tongue will be to sacrifice comfort, the respect of the bulk
of his contemporaries, and all the most delightful things of life, for
the barren reward of a not very certain righteous self-applause. By
brewing and dealing in tied houses,[46] or by selling pork and tea, or
by stock-jobbing and by pandering with the profits so obtained to the
pleasures of the established great, a man of energy may hope to rise to
a pitch of public honour and popularity immeasurably in excess of
anything attainable through the most splendid intellectual performances.
Heaven forbid I should overrate public honours and the company of
princes! But it is not always delightful to be splashed by the wheels of
cabs. Always before there has been at least a convention that the Court
of this country, and its aristocracy, were radiant centres of moral and
intellectual influence, that they did to some extent check and correct
the judgments of the cab-rank and the beer-house. But the British Crown
of to-day, so far as it exists for science and literature at all, exists
mainly to repudiate the claims of intellectual performance to public
respect.
These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study, might
very well rest there. But they must be recognized here because the
intellectual decline of the published literature of the English
language--using the word to cover all sorts of books--involves finally
the decline of the language and of all the spacious political
possibilities that go with the wide extension of a language.
Conceivably, if in the coming years a deliberate attempt were made to
provide sound instruction in English to all who sought it, and to all
within the control of English-speaking Governments, if honour and
emolument were given to literary men instead of being left to them to
most indelicately take, and if the present sordid trade of publishing
were so lifted as to bring the whole literature, the whole science, and
all the contemporary thought of the world--not some selection of the
world's literature, not some obsolete Encyclopædia sold meanly and
basely to choke hungry minds, but a real publication of all that has
been and is being done--within the reach of each man's need and desire
who had the franchise of the tongue, then by the year 2000 I would
prophesy that the whole functional body of human society would read, and
perhaps even write and speak, our language. And not only that, but it
might be the prevalent and everyday language of Scandinavia and Denmark
and Holland, of all Africa, all North America, of the Pacific coasts of
Asia and of India, the universal international language, and in a fair
way to be the universal language of mankind. But such an enterprise
demands a resolve and intelligence beyond all the immediate signs of the
times; it implies a veritable renascence of intellectual life among the
English-speaking peoples. The probabilities of such a renascence will
be more conveniently discussed at a later stage, when we attempt to draw
the broad outline of the struggle for world-wide ascendency that the
coming years will see. But here it is clear that upon the probability of
such a renascence depends the extension of the language, and not only
that, but the preservation of that military and naval efficiency upon
which, in this world of resolute aggression, the existence of the
English-speaking communities finally depends.
French and German will certainly be aggregating languages during the
greater portion of the coming years. Of the two I am inclined to think
French will spread further than German. There is a disposition in the
world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of
all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that
the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not
breed with the _abandon_ of rabbits or negroes. These are considerations
that affect the dissemination of French very little. The French reading
public is something different and very much larger than the existing
French political system. The number of books published in French is
greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception
for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a
writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and
efficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and to
recall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing of
French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have
the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and
no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank
indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement
to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book,
the _Text-book of Psychology_ of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for
'The Text Book of Psychology,' _read_ 'The Principles of Psychology'.]
in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera--three copies of a book that I have
never seen anywhere in England outside my own house,--and I am an
attentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all so
pleasant in the page, and so cheap--they are for a people that buys to
read. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downs
of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still more
horribly "illustrated," the exasperating pointless variety in the size
and thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book is
that it is something sold by a dealer in _bric-à-brac_, honestly sorry
the thing is a book, but who has done _his_ best to remedy it, anyhow!
And all the English shopful is either brand new fiction or illustrated
travel (of '_Buns with the Grand Lama_' type), or gilded versions of the
classics of past times done up to give away. While the French bookshop
reeks of contemporary intellectual life!
These things count for French as against English now, and they will
count for infinitely more in the coming years. And over German also
French has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of
books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has
quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is
a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as
popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is
an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a
hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to
sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful parallel to what
one may call the "honest Saxon" movement among the English, that queer
mental twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished preface
a "Foreword," and find a pleasurable advantage over their
fellow-creatures in a familiarity with "eftsoons." This tendency in
German has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom, and checked
the development of new words of classical origin. In particular it has
stood in the way of the international use of scientific terms. The
Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community of
technical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it is
frequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of his
subject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French,
than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the same
tongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not so
immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with their
Latin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are so
many "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free to
qualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their original
intention. In the growing and changing body of science this counts for
much. The indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromised
by its everyday relations, to the end of time it drags a lengthening
chain of unsuitable associations. And the shade of meaning, the limited
qualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a mere
twist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriously
overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis.... Moreover,
against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostile
people who fear German preponderance, and who have set their hearts
against its use. In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, and
Hungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as clear
a prospect of predominance.
These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they will
perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, and
perhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about the
Rhine. Politically this region lies now in six independent States, but
economically it must become one in the next fifty years. It will almost
certainly be the greatest urban region in all the world except that
which will arise in the eastern States of North America, and that which
may arise somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it
will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling
an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of
the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a
spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole
continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place
to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great
city region will remain, I believe, in its present position at the
seaport end of the great plain of the Old World. Considerations of
transit will keep it where it has grown, and electricity will be brought
to it in mighty cables from the torrents of the central European
mountain mass. Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven, or
even some port in the south-west of Ireland--unless, which is very
unlikely, the velocity of secure sea-travel can be increased beyond that
of land locomotion. I do not see how this great region is to unify
itself without some linguistic compromise--the Germanization of the
French-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to
entertain. Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications,
with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or
informally a bi-lingual compromise will come into operation, and to my
mind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upper
hand. Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English-speaking
peoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force this
European city to be tri-lingual, and prepare the way by which the whole
world may at last speak together in one tongue.
These are the aggregating tongues. I do not think that any other tongues
than these are quite likely to hold their own in the coming time.
Italian may flourish in the city of the Po valley, but only with French
beside it. Spanish and Russian are mighty languages, but without a
reading public how can they prevail, and what prospect of a reading
public has either? They are, I believe, already judged. By A.D. 2000 all
these languages will be tending more and more to be the second tongues
of bi-lingual communities, with French, or English, or less probably
German winning the upper hand.
But when one turns to China there are the strangest possibilities. It is
in Eastern Asia alone that there seems to be any possibility of a
synthesis sufficiently great to maintain itself, arising outside of,
and independently of, the interlocked system of mechanically sustained
societies that is developing out of mediæval Christendom. Throughout
Eastern Asia there is still, no doubt, a vast wilderness of languages,
but over them all rides the Chinese writing. And very strong--strong
enough to be very gravely considered--is the possibility of that writing
taking up an orthodox association of sounds, and becoming a world
speech. The Japanese written language, the language of Japanese
literature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh Chinese
words and expressions are continually taking root in Japan. The Japanese
are a people quite abnormal and incalculable, with a touch of romance, a
conception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of
intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any
other existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, but
when I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House of
Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itself
as a club--when I turn from that to this race of brave and smiling
people, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the
Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of
synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the
victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and
bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them
be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the
educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In
front and rear of China the English language stands. It has the start of
all other languages--the mechanical advantage--the position. And if only
we, who think and write and translate and print and put forth, could
make it worth the world's having!