As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is
the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest
itself in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy has
ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has given
itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the
fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has asserted
itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by
the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its
national integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward
which the western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark
Ages into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy
Roman Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm. In the
long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a monarchy
with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of
Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in Madrid. Normandy and
Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated finally with the
France of which the chief city was Paris.
Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim benefit
of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted themselves out of
the warring dialects when race after race came to a consciousness of its
unity and when the speech of a capital was set up at last as the
standard to which all were expected to conform. In Latin Dante discust
the vulgar tongue, tho he wrote the 'Divine Comedy' in his provincial
Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came after, was afraid that his poems in
Italian were, by that fact, fated to be transitory. Chaucer made choice
of the dialect of London, performing for it the service Dante had
rendered to the speech of the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went
back to Latin as the language still common to men of science. Milton
practised his pen in Latin verse, but never hesitated to compose his
epic in English. Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science
again; and it was not until the nineteenth century that the invading
vernaculars finally ousted the language of the learned which had once
been in universal use. And even now Latin is retained by the church
which still styles itself Catholic.
It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the
learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the
people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and
the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in
their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the
northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern
languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies
the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its
own use. Indeed, these racial characteristics are so distinct and so
evident to us now that we fancy we can detect them even tho they are
disguised in the language of Rome; and we find significance in the fact
that Seneca, the grandiloquent rhetorician, was by birth a Spaniard, and
that Petronius, the robust realist, was probably born in what is now
France.
The segregation of nationality has been accompanied by an increasing
interest in the several states out of which the nation has made itself,
and sometimes even by an effort to raise the dialects of these provinces
up to the literary standard of the national language. In this there is
no disloyalty to the national ideal,--rather is it to be taken as a
tribute to the nation, since it seeks to call attention again to the
several strands twined in the single bond. In literature this tendency
is reflected in a wider liking for local color and in an intenser relish
for the flavor of the soil. We find Verga painting the violent passions
of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the
Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans,
while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the
Provençals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the
humorous Scots of Mr. Barrie. We extend an equal welcome to the patient
figures of New England spinsterhood as drawn by Miss Jewett and Miss
Wilkins, and to the virile Westerners set boldly on their feet by Mr.
Wister and Mr. Garland.
What we wish to have explored for us are not only the nooks and corners
of our own nation; those of other races appeal also to our sympathetic
curiosity. These inquiries help us to understand the larger peoples, of
whom the smaller communities are constituent elements. They serve to
sharpen our insight into the differences which divide one race from
another; and the contrast of Daudet and Maupassant on the one hand with
Mark Twain and Kipling on the other brings out the width of the gap that
yawns between the Latins (with their solidarity of the family and their
reliance on the social instinct) and the Teutons (with their energetic
independence and their aggressive individuality). With increase of
knowledge there is less likelihood of mutual misunderstandings; and here
literature performs a most useful service to the cause of civilization.
As Tennyson once said: "It is the authors, more than the diplomats, who
make nations love one another." Fortunately, no high tariff can keep out
the masterpieces of foreign literature which freely cross the frontier,
bearing messages of good-will and broadening our understanding of our
fellowmen.