If in this unscientific way I have conveyed my idea of Manx carvals,
Manx ballads, or Manx proverbs, you will not be surprised to hear me say
that I do not think that any of these, can live long apart from the Manx
language. We may have stolen most of them; they may have been wrecked on
our coast, and we may have smuggled them; but as long as they wear our
native homespun clothes they are ours, and as soon as they put it off
they cease to belong to us. A Manx proverb is no longer a Manx proverb
when it is in English. The same is true of a Manx ballad translated, and
of a Manx carval turned into an English carol. What belongs to us,
our way of saying things, in a word, our style, is gone. The spirit is
departed, and that which remains is only an English ghost flitting about
in Manx grave-clothes.
Now this is a sad fact, for it implies that little as we have got of
Manx literature, whether written or oral, we shall soon have none at
all. Our Manx language is fast dying out. If we had any great work in
the Manx tongue, that work alone would serve to give our language a
literary life at least. But we have no such great work, no fine Manx
poem, no good novel in Manx, not even a Manx sermon of high mark. Thus
far our Manx language has kept alive our pigmies of Manx literature; but
both are going down together. The Manx is not much spoken now. In
the remoter villages, like Cregnesh, Ballaugh, Kirk Michael, and Kirk
Andreas, it may still be heard. Moreover, the Manxman may hear Manx a
hundred times for every time an Englishman hears it. But the younger
generation of Manx folk do not speak Manx, and very often do not
understand it. This is a rapid change on the condition of things in my
own boyhood. Manx is to me, for all practical uses, an unknown tongue.
I cannot speak it, I cannot follow it when spoken, I have only a sort
of nodding acquaintance with it out of door, and yet among my earliest
recollections is that of a household where nothing but Manx was ever
spoken except to me. A very old woman, almost bent double over a
spinning wheel, and calling me Hommy-Veg, and _baugh-millish_, and so
forth. This will suggest that the Manx people are themselves responsible
for the death of the Manx language. That is partly true. The Manx tongue
was felt to be an impediment to intercourse with the English people.
Then the great English immigration set in, and the Isle of Man became a
holiday resort. That was the doomster of the Manx language. In another
five-and-twenty years the Manx language will be as dead as a Manx
herring.
One cannot but regret this certain fate. I dare not say that the
language itself is so good that it ought to live. Those who know it
better say that "it's a fine old tongue, rich and musical, full of
meaning and expression." {*} I know that it is at least forcible, and
loud and deep in sound. I will engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx
to make more noise in a given time than any other two human brethren in
Christendom, not excepting two Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be
capable of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a certain higher
lilt in a Manx woman's voice, suggesting the effort to speak about the
sound of the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is lost in
the voices of the younger women who speak English only. But apart from
tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of
sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played as children, bought and
sold as men, prayed, preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It
was their language at Tynwald; they sang their grim carvals in it, and
their wailing, woful ballads.
* The Rev. T. E. Brown.
When it is dead more than half of all that makes us Manxmen will be
gone. Our individuality will be lost, the greater barrier that separates
us from other peoples will be broken down. Perhaps this may have its
advantages, but surely it is not altogether a base desire not to be
submerged into all the races of the earth. The tower of Babel is built,
the tongues of the builders are confounded, and we are not all anxious
to go back and join the happy family that lived in one ark.
But aside from all lighter thoughts there is something very moving and
pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not
as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an
imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. It is
unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a
breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation
may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its
past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands
of the desert, yet its relics revivify its life. But a language that is
dead, a tongue that has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind
that is gone. A little while and it went from lip to lip, from lip to
ear; it came we know not whence; it has passed we know not where. It was
an embodied spirit of all man's joys and sorrows, and like a spirit it
has vanished away.
Then if this old language has been that of our own people its death is a
loss to our affections. Indeed, language gets so close to our heart that
we can hardly separate it from our emotions. If you do not speak the
Italian language, ask yourself whether Dante comes as close to you as
Shakespeare, all questions of genius and temperament apart. And if Dante
seems a thousand miles away, and Shakespeare enters into your closest
chamber, is it not first of all because the language of Shakespeare is
your own language, alive with the life that is in your own tongue, vital
with your own ways of thought and even tricks and whims of speech? Let
English die, and Shakespeare goes out of your closet, and passes away
from you, and is then your brother-Englishman only in name. So close is
the bond of language, so sweet and so mysterious.
But there is yet a more sacred bond with the language of our fathers
when it can have no posthumous life in books. This is the bond of love.
Think what it is that you miss first and longest when death robs you of
a friend. Is it not the living voice? The living face you can bring back
in memory, and in your dark hours it will shine on you still; the good
deed can never die; the noble thought lives for ever. Death is not
conqueror over such as these, but the human voice, the strange and
beautiful part of us that is half spirit in life, is lost in death. For
a while it startles us as an echo in an empty chamber, and then it is
gone, and not all the world's wealth could bring one note of it back.
And such as the vanishing away of the voice of the friend we loved is
the death of the old tongue which our fathers spoke. _It is the death of
the dead_.