PARTS OF SPEECH
ESSAYS ON ENGLISH
_Books by Brander Matthews_:
ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS
French Dramatists of the 19th Century
Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance
Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays
The Historical Novel, and other Essays
Parts of Speech, Essays on English
The Development of the Drama (_in preparation_)
PARTS OF SPEECH
ESSAYS ON ENGLISH
BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
PROFESSOR IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
Copyright, 1901, by
BRANDER MATTHEWS
_Published September, 1901_
THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.
TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE
GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
PREFATORY NOTE
Altho the various essays which are now brought together in this book
have been written from time to time during the past ten years, nearly
all of them have had their origin in a desire to make plain and to
emphasize one fact: that the English language belongs to the peoples
who speak it--that it is their own precious possession, to deal with at
their pleasure and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be obvious
enough to all of us; and yet there would be no difficulty in showing
that it is not everywhere accepted. Perhaps the best way to present it
so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to draw attention to some of
its implications; and this is what has been attempted in one or another
of these separate papers.
The point of view from which the English language has been approached
is that of the man of letters rather than that of the professed expert
in linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that the professed
expert, even tho he discovers little that is new in these pages, will
find also little that demands his disapproval. The final essay is
frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is an attempt to define
not so much a word as a thing.
So wise a critic of literature and of language as Sainte-Beuve has
declared that “orthography is like society: it will never be entirely
reformed; but we can at least make it less vicious.” In this sensible
saying is the warrant for the simplified spellings adopted in the
following pages. As will be seen by readers of the two papers on our
orthography, the writer is by no means a radical “spelling-reformer,”
so called. But he believes that all of us who wish to keep the English
language up to its topmost efficiency are bound always to do all in our
power to aid the tendency toward simplification--whether of orthography
or of syntax--which has been at work unceasingly ever since the
language came into existence.
B. M.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
July 4, 1901.
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
I _The Stock that Speaks the Language_ 3
II _The Future of the Language_ 29
III _The English Language in the United States_ 47
IV _The Language in Great Britain_ 81
V _Americanisms Once More_ 97
VI _New Words and Old_ 127
VII _The Naturalization of Foreign Words_ 165
VIII _The Function of Slang_ 187
IX _Questions of Usage_ 217
X _An Inquiry as to Rime_ 241
XI _On the Poetry of Place-Names_ 271
XII _As to “American Spelling”_ 295
XIII _The Simplification of English Spelling_ 319
XIV _Americanism--An Attempt at a Definition_ 343
I
THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS
THE LANGUAGE
It is a thousand years since the death of the great Englishman, King
Alfred, in whose humble translations we may see the beginnings of
English literature. Until it has a literature, however unpretending
and however artless, a language is not conscious of itself; and it is
therefore in no condition to maintain its supremacy over the dialects
that are its jealous rivals. And it is by its literature chiefly that
a language forever binds together the peoples who speak it--by a
literature in which the characteristics of these peoples are revealed
and preserved, and in which their ideals are declared and passed down
from generation to generation as the most precious heritage of the race.
The historian of the English people asserts that what made Alfred
great, small as was his sphere of action, was “the moral grandeur of
his life. He lived solely for the good of his people.” He laid the
foundations for a uniform system of law, and he started schools,
wishing that every free-born youth who had the means should “abide at
his book till he can understand English writing.” He invited scholars
from other lands to settle in England; but what most told on English
culture was done not by them but by the king himself. He “resolved
to throw open to his people in their own tongue the knowledge which
till then had been limited to the clergy,” and he “took his books as
he found them,” the popular manuals of the day, Bede and Boethius and
Orosius. These he translated with his own hand, editing freely, and
expanding and contracting as he saw fit. “Do not blame me if any know
Latin better than I,” he explained with modest dignity; “for every
man must say what he says and must do what he does according to his
ability.” And Green, from whom this quotation is borrowed, insists
that, “simple as was his aim, Alfred created English literature”--the
English literature which is still alive and sturdy after a thousand
years, and which is to-day flourishing not only in Great Britain, where
Alfred founded it, but here in the United States, in a larger land, the
existence of which the good king had no reason ever to surmise.
This English literature is like the language in which it is written,
and also like the stock that speaks the language, wherever the race
may have planted or transplanted itself, whether by the banks of the
little Thames or on the shores of the broad Hudson and the mighty
Mississippi. Literature and language and people are practical, no
doubt; but they are not what they are often called: they are not
prosaic. On the contrary, they are poetic, essentially and indisputably
poetic. The peoples that speak English are, and always have been,
self-willed and adventurous. This they were long before King Alfred’s
time, in the early days when they were Teutons merely, and had not yet
won their way into Britain; and this they are to-day, when the most
of them no longer dwell in old England, but in the newer England here
in America. They have ever lacked the restraint and reserve which are
the conditions of the best prose; and they have always exulted in the
untiring energy and the daring imagination which are the vital elements
of poetry. “In his busiest days Alfred found time to learn the old
songs of his race by heart,” so the historian tells us; “and he bade
them be taught in the palace-school.”
Lyric is what English literature has always been at its best, lyric and
dramatic; and the men who speak English have always been individual and
independent, every man ready to fight for his own hand; and the English
language has gone on its own way, keeping its strength in spite of
the efforts of pedants and pedagogs to bind it and to stifle it, and
ever insisting on renewing its freshness as best it could. Development
there has been in language and in literature and in the stock itself,
development and growth of many kinds; but no radical change can be
detected in all these ten centuries. “No national art is good which
is not plainly the nation’s own,” said Mr. Stopford Brooke in his
consideration of the earliest English lyrics. “The poetry of England
has owed much to the different races which mingled with the original
English race; it has owed much to the different types of poetry it
absorbed--Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian, Spanish: but below all
these admixtures the English nature wrought its steady will. It seized,
it transmuted, it modified, it mastered these admixtures both of races
and of song.”
The English nature wrought its steady will; but what is this English
nature, thus set up as an entity and endowed with conscious purpose? Is
there such a thing, of a certainty? Can there be such a thing, indeed?
These questions are easier to ask than to answer. It is true that we
have been accustomed to credit certain races not merely with certain
characteristics, but even with certain qualities, esteeming certain
peoples to be specially gifted in one way or another. For example, we
have held it as an article of faith that the Greeks, by their display
of a surpassing sense of form, proved their possession of an artistic
capacity finer and richer than that revealed by any other people since
the dawn of civilization. And again, we have seen in the Roman skill
in constructive administration, in the Latin success in law-making
and in road-building--we have seen in this the evidence of a native
faculty denied to their remote predecessors, the Egyptians. Now come
the advocates of a later theory, who tell us that the characteristics
of the Greeks and of the Romans are not the result of any inherent
superiority of theirs, or of any native predisposition toward art
or toward administration, but are caused rather by circumstances of
climate, of geographical situation, and of historical position. We are
assured now that the Romans, had they been in the place of the Greeks
and under like circumstances, might have revealed themselves as great
masters of form; while the Greeks, had their history been that of the
Romans, would certainly have shown the same power of ruling themselves
and others, and of compacting the most diverse nations into a single
empire.
No doubt the theory of race-characteristics, of stocks variously gifted
with specific faculties, has been too vigorously asserted and unduly
insisted upon. It was so convenient and so useful that it could not
help being overworked. But altho it is not so impregnable as it was
supposed to be, it need not be surrendered at the first attack; and
altho we are compelled to abandon the theory as a whole, we can save
what it contained of truth. And therefore it is well to bear in mind
that even if the Greeks in the beginning had no sharper bent toward art
than had the Phenicians,--from whom they borrowed so much of value to
be made by them more valuable,--even if their esthetic superiority was
the result of a happy chapter of chances, it was a fact nevertheless;
and a time came at last when the Greeks were seen to be possessed of
a fertility of invention and of a sense of form surpassing all their
predecessors had ever exhibited. When this time came the Greeks were
conscious of their unexampled achievements and properly proud of them;
and they proved that they were able to transmit from sire to son this
artistic aptitude--however the aptitude itself had been developed
originally. So whether the Roman power to govern and to evolve the
proper instruments of government was a native gift of the Latins,
or whether it was developed in them by a fortuitous combination of
geographical and historical circumstances, this question is somewhat
academic, since we know that the Romans did display extraordinary
administrative ability century after century. Whenever it was evolved,
the artistic type in Greece and the administrative type in Italy was
persistent; and it reappeared again and again in successive generations.
This indeed needs always to be remembered, that race-characteristics,
whatever their origin, are strangely enduring when once they are
established. The English nature whereof Mr. Stopford Brooke speaks,
when once it was conscious of itself, worked its steady will, despite
the changes of circumstance; and only very slowly is it modified by the
accidents of later history and geography. M. Fouillée has set side by
side the description of the Germans by Tacitus and the account of the
Gauls by Cæsar, drawing attention to the fact that the modern French
are now very like the ancient Gauls, and that the descendants of the
Germans of old, the various branches of the Teutonic race, have the
characteristics of their remote ancestors whom the Roman historian
chose to praise by way of warning for his fellow-citizens.
The Romans conquered Gaul and held it for centuries; the Franks took
it in turn and gave it their name; but the Gallic type was so securely
fixed that the Roman first and then the Frank succumbed to it and were
absorbed into it. The Gallic type is not now absolutely unchanged, for,
after all, the world does move; but it is readily recognizable to this
day. Certain of Cæsar’s criticisms read as tho they were written by
a contemporary of Napoleon. As Cæsar saw them the Gauls were fickle
in counsel and fond of revolutions. Believing in false rumors, they
were led into deeds they regretted afterward. Deciding questions of
importance without reflection, they were ready to war without reason;
and they were weak and lacking in energy in time of disaster. They were
cast down by a first defeat, as they were inflamed by a first victory.
They were affable, light, inconstant, and vain; they were quick-witted
and ready-tongued; they had a liking for tales and an insatiable
curiosity for news. They cultivated eloquence, having an astonishing
facility of speech, and of letting themselves be taken in by words. And
having thus summed up Cæsar’s analysis of the Gaul, M. Fouillée asks
how after this we can deny the persistence of national types.
What Tacitus has to say of the Germans comes home more closely to
us who speak English, since the Teutonic tribes the Latin historian
was considering are not more the ancestors of the modern Prussians
than they are of the wide-spread Anglo-Saxon peoples. As those who
speak English went from the mainland across the North Sea to an
island and dwelt there for centuries, and were joined by earlier kin
from elsewhere, the race-characteristics were obviously modified a
little--just as they have been as obviously modified a little more
when some of those who spoke English went out again from the island
to a boundless continent across the Atlantic, and were joined here by
many others, most of whom were also derived from one or another of the
varied Teutonic stocks.
It is nearly two thousand years since Tacitus studied the Teutonic
race-characteristics, and yet most of the peculiarities he noted
then are evident now. Tacitus tells us that the Teutons were tall,
fair-haired, and flegmatic. They were great eaters, not to say gross
feeders; and they were given to strong drink. They were fond of games,
and were ready to pay their losses with their persons, if need be. They
were individual and independent. Their manners were rude, not to call
them violent. They were possessed of the domestic virtues, the women
being chaste and the husbands faithful. They loved war as they loved
liberty. They had a passionate fidelity to their leaders. They decided
important questions of policy in public assembly.
The several peoples of our own time who are descended from the Teutons
thus described by Tacitus with so sympathetic an insight have been
developing for twenty centuries, more or less, each in its own way,
under influences wholly unlike, influences both geographical and
historical; and it is small wonder that they have diverged as they
have, and that no one of them nowadays completely represents the
original stock. Some of the points Tacitus made are true to-day in
Prussia and are not true in Great Britain; and some hit home here
in the United States, altho they miss the mark in Germany. The
modern Germans still retain a few of these Tacitean characteristics
which the peoples that speak English have lost in their adventurous
career overseas. And on the other hand, certain of the remarks of
Tacitus might be made to-day in the United States; for example, the
willingness to run risks for the fun of the game--is not this a present
characteristic of the American as we know him? And here we have always
been governed by town-meeting, as the old Teutons were, whereas the
modern German is only now getting this back by borrowing it from the
English precedent. In our private litigations we continue to abide by
the customs of our remote Teutonic ancestors, while the German has
accepted as a legal guide the Roman law, wrought out by the countrymen
of Tacitus.
Second only to a community of language, no unifying force is more
potent than a community of law. In the depths of their dark forests the
Teutons had already evolved their own rudimentary code by which they
did justice between man and man; and these customary sanctions were
taken over to Britain by the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes; and
they served as the foundation of the common law by means of which the
peoples that speak English still administer justice in their courts.
And here again we find the handiwork of the great King Alfred, from
whom we may date the codification of an English law as we may also
reckon the establishing of an English literature. With the opportunism
of our race, he had no thought of a new legislation, but merely merged
the best of the tribal customs into a law for the whole kingdom. The
king sought to bring to light and to leave on record the righteous
rulings of the wise men who had gone before. “Those things which I met
with,” so the historian transmits his words, “either of the days of
Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht,
who first among the English race received baptism, those which seemed
to me rightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the rest.”
Law and language--these are the unrelaxing bands that hold a race
firmly together. There are now two main divisions of the Teutonic
stock, separated to-day by language and by law--the people who speak
German and are ruled by Roman law, and the peoples who speak English
and are governed by the common law; and the separation is as wide and
as deep legally as it is linguistically. “By the forms of its language
a nation expresses its very self,” said one of the acutest of British
critics; and we have the proof of this at hand in the characteristic
differences between the English language and the German. By the forms
of its law a people expresses its political beliefs; and we have the
evidence of this in the fact that we Americans regard our rulers merely
as agents of the town-meeting of the old Teutons, while the modern
Germans are submitting to a series of trials for lese-majesty.
Laws have most weight when they are seen to be the expression of the
common conscience; and they are most respected when they best reflect
the ideals that are “the souls of the nations which cherish them,” as
a historian of American literature has finely phrased it--“the living
spirits which waken nationality into being, and which often preserve
its memory long after its life has ebbed away.” The marked difference
now obvious between the two great divisions of the Teutonic stock--that
which speaks English and that which speaks German--is due in part to
their not having each conserved exactly the same portion of the ideals
inherited from their common ancestors, and in part to their having each
acquired other ideals in the course of the many centuries of their
separate existence. And the minor differences to be detected between
the two great divisions of the stock that speaks English, that dwelling
in Great Britain and that dwelling in the United States, are due to
similar causes.
While the ancestors of the people who speak German were abiding at
home, where Tacitus had seen them, the ancestors of the peoples who
speak English went forth across the North Sea and possessed themselves
of the better part of Great Britain and gave it a new name. They
were not content to defeat the earlier inhabitants in fair fight,
and then to leave them in peace, as the Romans did, ruling them and
intermarrying with them; the English thrust the natives out violently
and harried them away. As Green puts it tersely, “The English conquest
for a hundred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession and driving back
of the people whom the English conquered.” No doubt this dispossession
was ruthless; but was it complete? The newcomers took the land for
their own, and they meant to kill out all the original owners; but
was this possible? The country was rough and thickly wooded, and
it abounded in nooks and corners where a family might hide itself.
Moreover, what is more likely than that the invader should often spare
a woman and take her to wife? For centuries the English kept spreading
themselves and pushing back the Britons; but in the long war there
were truces now and again, and what is more likely than an incessant
intermingling of the blood all along the border as it was slowly driven
forward?
Certain it is that one of the influences which have modified the modern
English stock is a Celtic strain. If the peoples that speak English
are now not quite like the people that speak German, plainly this is
one reason: they have had a Celtic admixture, which has lightened them
and contributed elements lacking in the original Teuton. To declare
just what these elements are is not easy; but to deny their presence is
impossible. The Celt has an impetuosity and a swiftness of perception
which we do not find in the original Teuton, and which the man who
speaks English is now more likely to possess than the man who speaks
German. The Celt has a certain shy delicacy; he has a happy sensibility
and a turn for charming sentiment; he has a delightful lyric note;
and he has at times a sincere and puissant melancholy. These are all
qualities which we find in our English literature, and especially in
its greatest figure. “The Celts do not form an utterly distinct part
of our mixed population,” said Henry Morley in a striking passage.
“But for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in
its half-barbarous days invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick,
and that quickened afterward the Northmen’s blood in France, Germanic
England would not have produced a Shakspere.”
Here we see Morley declaring that the Celt had “quickened the
Northmen’s blood in France”; and perhaps by his choice of a word he
meant to remind us that whereas the Northmen who sailed down the
mouth of the Seine were Teutons, the Normans who were to sail up to
Hastings had been materially modified during their sojourn in France,
which had once been Celtic Gaul. Two series of occasions there were
when the English received an accession of Celtic blood: first, when
they conquered England; and second, when they in turn were conquered
by the Normans, who ruled them for centuries, and were finally merged
in them, just as earlier the Romans had been merged in the Gauls. And
this recalls to us the fact that there was more in the Norman than the
intermingling of the Teuton and the Celt; there was in the Norman also
not a little of the Roman who had so long ruled Gaul, and who had so
deeply marked it with certain of his own characteristics. Thus it was
that the Norman brought into England a Latin tradition; he had acquired
something of the Roman administrative skill, something of the Roman’s
genius for affairs. After the Renascence, Latin influences were to
affect the English language and English literature; but it was after
the conquest that the English people itself came first in contact with
certain of the Roman ideals.
Matthew Arnold thought that we owed “to the Latin element in our
language the most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which
it is contradistinguished from the modern German”; and he found in the
Latinized Normans in England “the sense for fact, which the Celts had
not, and the love of strenuousness, clearness, and rapidity, the high
Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not.” Perhaps the English feeling
for style, our command of the larger rhetoric, may be due to this blend
of the Norman; and it cannot be denied that this gift has not been
granted to the modern German. The fantastic brilliancy of De Quincey
and the sonorous picturesqueness of Ruskin are alike inconceivable in
the language of Klopstock; and altho there is a pregnant concision in
the speeches of Bismarck at his best, there is no German orator who
ever attained the unfailing dignity and the lofty affluence of Webster
at his best.
Less than two centuries after the good King Alfred had declared English
law and established English literature, the Normans came and saw and
conquered. Less than three centuries after King William took the land
there was born the first great English poet. If the language is to-day
what it is, it is because of Chaucer, who chose the court dialect of
London to write in, and who made it supple for his own use and the use
of the poets that were to come after. The Norman conquest had brought a
new and needed contribution to the English character; it had resulted
in an immense enrichment of the English language; and it had related
English literature again to the broad current of European life. To the
original Teutonic basis had been added Celtic and Norman and Latin
strains; and still the English nature wrought its steady will, still it
expressed itself most freely and most fully in poetry. And in no other
poet are certain aspects of this English nature more boldly displayed
than in Chaucer, in whom we find a fresh feeling for the visible world,
a true tenderness of sentiment, a joyous breadth of humor, and a
resolute yet delicate handling of human character.
Two centuries after Chaucer came Shakspere, in whom the English nature
finds its fullest expression. The making of England was then complete;
all the varied elements had been fused in the fire of a struggle
for existence and welded by war with the most powerful of foes. The
race-characteristics were then finally determined; and in Elizabethan
literature they are splendidly exhibited. Something was contributed
by the literature of the Spain that the Elizabethans had stoutly
withstood, and something more by the literature of the Italy so many of
them knew by travel; but all was absorbed, combined, and assimilated by
the English nature, like the contributions that came from the classics
of Rome and Greece. Bacon and Cecil, Drake and Ralegh, are not more
typical of that sudden and glorious outpouring of English individuality
than are Marlowe, Shakspere, and Jonson, Spenser, Chapman, and
Massinger. In that greatest period of the race we do not know which
is the greater, the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity, the
ability to govern, that the English then displayed, or the mighty sweep
and range of the imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry. The
works of the Elizabethan writers are with us, like the memory of the
deeds of the Elizabethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was needful,
that the peoples that speak English are of a truth poetic, that they
are not prosaic.
In the days of Elizabeth the English began to go abroad and to settle
here and there. To those who came to America there were added in due
season many vigorous folk from other Teutonic sources; and here in the
centuries that have followed was to be seen a fusion of races and a
welding into one nation such as had been seen in England itself several
centuries earlier. To those who remained in England there came few
accretions from the outside, altho when the edict of Nantes was revoked
the English gained much that the French lost. The Huguenots were stanch
men and sturdy, of great ability often, and of a high seriousness.
Some crossed the Channel and some crossed the ocean; and no one of the
strands which have been twisted to make the modern American is more
worthy than this.
More important than this French contribution, perhaps, was another
infusion of the Celtic influence. When the King of Scotland became
King of England, his former subjects swarmed to London--preceding by a
century the Irishmen who made themselves more welcome in the English
capital, with their airy wit and their touch of Celtic sentiment. Far
heavier than the Scotch raid into England, and the Irish invasion,
was the influx of Scotch, of Irish, and of Scotch-Irish into America.
At the very time when Lord Lyndhurst was expressing the opinion that
the English held the Irish to be “aliens in blood, aliens in speech,
aliens in religion,” the Irish were withdrawing in their thousands
from the rule of a people that felt thus toward them; and they were
making homes for themselves where prejudice against them was not
potent. Yet in England itself the Irish left their mark on literature,
especially upon comedy, for which they have ever revealed a delightful
aptitude; and in the eighteenth century alone the stage is lightened
and brightened by the plays of Steele, of Sheridan, and of Goldsmith.
About the end of the same century also the Scotch began to make their
significant and stimulating contribution to English literature, which
was refreshed again by Burns with his breath of sympathy, by Scott with
his many-sided charm, and by Byron with his resonant note of revolt.
Just as the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes had mingled in Great
Britain to make the Englishman, and had been modified by Celtic and
Norman and Latin influences, so here in the United States the Puritan
and the Cavalier, the Dutchman and the Huguenot and the German, the
Irish and the Scotch and the Scotch-Irish, have all blended to make
the American. Not a few of the original Teutonic race-characteristics
recorded by Tacitus are here now, as active as ever; and not a few
of the English race-characteristics as revealed by the Elizabethan
dramatists survive in America, keeping company with many a locution
which has dropped out of use in England itself. There is to-day in the
spoken speech of the United States a larger freedom than in the spoken
speech of Great Britain, a figurative vigor that the Elizabethans
would have relished and understood. It is not without significance
that the game of cards best liked by the adventurers who worried the
Armada should have been born again to delight the Argonauts of ’49.
The characteristic energy of the English stock, never more exuberantly
displayed than under Elizabeth, suffered no diminution in crossing the
Atlantic; rather has it been strengthened on this side, since every
native American must be the descendant of some man more venturesome
than his kin who thought best to stay at home. Nor is the energy less
imaginative, altho it has not taken mainly a literary expression.
“There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans,” so Lowell reminded
us, “and yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of those very Puritans.” And he added tersely:
“They had enough of it, or they could never have conceived the great
epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this
continent from Maine to California.”
More than half those who speak English now dwell in the United States,
and less than a third dwell within the British Isles. To some it may
seem merely fanciful, no doubt, but still the question may be put,
whether the British or the American is to-day really closer to the
Elizabethan? It has recently been remarked that the typical John Bull
was invisible in England while Shakspere was alive, and that he has
become possible in Great Britain only since the day when these United
States declared their independence. Walter Bagehot, the shrewdest of
critics of his fellow-countrymen, maintained that the saving virtue
of the British people of the middle of the nineteenth century was
a stolidity closely akin to stupidity. But surely the Elizabethans
were not stolid; and the Americans (who have been accused of many
things) have never been accused of stupidity. Mr. Bernard Bosanquet
has just been insisting that the two dominant notes of the British
character at the beginning of the twentieth century are insularity and
inarticulateness. The Elizabethan was braggart and self-pleased and
arrogant, but he was not fairly open to the reproach of insularity,
nor was he in the least inarticulate. Perhaps insularity and
inarticulateness are inseparable; and it may be that it is the immense
variety of the United States that has preserved the American from the
one, as the practice of the town-meeting has preserved him from the
other.
No longer do we believe that there is any special virtue in the purity
of race, even if we could discover nowadays any people who had a just
right to pride themselves on this. The French are descended from the
Gauls, but to the Gauls have been added Romans and Franks; the English
are descended from the Teutons, but they have received many accretions
from other sources; and the Americans are descended from the British,
but it is undeniable that they have differentiated themselves somehow.
The admixture of varied stocks is held to be a source of freshness
and of renewed vitality; and it may be that this is the cause of the
American alertness and venturesomeness. And as yet these foreign
elements have but little modified the essential type; for just as
the English nature wrought its steady will through the centuries, so
the American characteristics have been imposed on all the welter of
nationalities that swirl together in the United States.
Throughout the land there is one language, a development of the
language of King Alfred, and one law, a development of the law of King
Alfred; and throughout the land there are schools such as the good
king wished for. American ideals are not quite the same as British
ideals, but they differ only a little, and they have both flowered
from the English root, as the earlier English ideals had flowered
from a Teutonic root. The English stock has displayed in the United
States the same marvelous assimilating faculty that it displayed
centuries ago in Great Britain, the same extraordinary power of getting
the sojourners within its borders to accept its ideals. The law of
imitation is irresistible, as M. Tarde has shown; and as M. Fouillée
asserts, a nation is really united and unified only when its whole
population thrills at the same appeal and vibrates when the same chord
is struck. Then there is a consciousness of nationality and of true
national solidarity. Throughout the United States there is a unanimous
acceptance of the old English ideals--a liking for energy, a respect
for character, a belief in equality before the law, and an acceptance
of individual responsibility. These are the ideals which will echo
again and again in English literature on both shores of the Atlantic,
as they have echoed so often since King Alfred died. “A thousand years
are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”
(1901)
II
THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE
Two apparently contradictory tendencies are to-day visible. One of
them is revealed by our increasing interest in the less important
languages and in the more important dialects. The other is to be seen
in the immense expansion of the several peoples using the three or four
most widely spoken European tongues, an expansion rapidly giving them
a supremacy which renders hopeless any attempt of the less important
European languages ever to equal them. (It may be noted now once for
all that in this paper only the Indo-European languages are taken into
account, altho Arabic did succeed for a while in making itself the
chief tongue of the Mediterranean basin, overrunning Sicily and even
thrusting itself up into Spain, and altho Chinese may have a fateful
expansion in the dark future.)
As an instance of the first of the two conflicting tendencies, we have
in France the movement of the _félibres_ to revive Provençal, and to
make it again a fit vehicle for poetry. We have in Norway an effort
to differentiate written Norwegian from the Danish, which has hitherto
been accepted as the standard speech of all Scandinavian authors.
We have in Belgium an increasing resistance to French, which is the
official tongue, and an attempt arbitrarily to resuscitate the Flemish
dialect. We have in Switzerland a desire to keep alive the primitive
and moribund Romansh. We have in North Britain a demand for at least a
professorship of broad Scots. We see also that, among the languages of
the smaller nations, neither Dutch nor Portuguese shows any symptoms of
diminishing vitality, while Rumanian has been suddenly encouraged by
the political independence of the people speaking it.
All this is curious and interesting; and yet at the very period when
these developments are in progress, other influences are at work on
behalf of the languages of the greater races. The developments noted
above are largely the work of scholars and of students; they are the
artificial products of provincial pride; and they are destined to
defeat by forces as invincible as those of nature itself. In their
different degrees Provençal and Flemish are struggling for existence
against French; but French itself is not gaining in its old rivalry
with English and with German.
At the end of the seventeenth century French was the language of
diplomacy; it was the speech of the courts of Europe; it was the one
modern tongue an educated man in England or in Germany, in Spain or in
Italy, needed to acquire. As Latin had been the world-language in the
days of the Empire, so French bade fair to be the world-language in the
days when all the parts of the earth should be bound together by the
bands of commerce and finance. In the eighteenth century the supremacy
of French was still indisputable; but in the nineteenth century it
disappeared. And, unless all calculations of probability fail us,
somewhere in the twentieth century French will have fallen from the
first place to the fifth, just below Spanish, just above Italian, and
far, far beneath English and Russian and German.
It was the social instinct of the French which made their language so
neat, so apt for epigram and compliment, so admirable and so adequate
for criticism; and it was the energy of the English-speaking peoples,
their individuality, their independence, which made our language so
sturdy, so vigorous, so powerful.
An excess of the social instinct it is which has kept the French at
home, close to the borders of France, and which has thus restricted the
expansion of their language, while it is also an excess of the energy
of our stock that has scattered English all over the world, on every
shore of all the seven seas. And now that the nineteenth century has
drawn to an end, if we can guess at the future from our acquaintance
with the past, we are justified in believing that the world-language
at the end of the twentieth century--should any one tongue succeed in
winning universal acceptance--will be English. If it is not English,
then it will not be German or Spanish or French; it will be Russian.
This attempt to foretell the future is not a random venture or a
reckless brag; it is based on a comparison of the number of people
speaking the different European languages at different periods. At my
request Mr. N. I. Stone, of the School of Political Science of Columbia
University, made an examination of the statistics, in so far as they
are obtainable. The figures are rarely absolutely trustworthy before
the nineteenth century--indeed, they are sometimes little better than
guesswork. Yet they are approximately accurate, and they will serve
fairly well for purposes of comparison. They make plain the way in
which one language has gained on another in the past; and they afford
material for us to hazard a prediction as to the languages likely to
gain most in the immediate future.
In the fourteenth century the population of France was about ten
millions, and that of the British Isles probably less than four
millions. In both territories there were certainly many who did not
speak the chief language; yet the proportion of those who spoke French
to those who spoke English was at least ten to four.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century the British Isles still had
less than four millions, while France had more than twelve millions. At
this same period Italy had a few more than nine millions, and Spain a
few less, while the Germans (including always the Austrians who spoke
German) were about ten millions.
Coming toward the end of the sixteenth century, we find six millions
in the British Isles, more than fourteen millions in France and in the
French-speaking portions of the adjacent countries, and more than ten
millions in Italy. The Russians then numbered nearly four millions and
a half--only a million and a half less than the British.
At the very end of the seventeenth century the number of those speaking
English was nearly eight millions and a half--most of them still in the
British Isles, but some of them already departed into the colonies in
America and elsewhere. The number of those speaking French was twenty
millions, of those speaking Italian a few less than twelve millions,
and of those speaking Russian about fifteen millions. Those speaking
Spanish were chiefly at home in the Iberian peninsula, but not a few
were in the colonies in America: they amounted to about eight millions
in all, the mother-country having wasted her people in ruinous wars.
At the very end of the eighteenth century we find the English-speaking
peoples on both shores of the Atlantic swollen to twenty-two millions,
having nearly trebled in a hundred years, while the French had added
only a third to their population, amounting in all to a few more than
twenty-seven millions. The Germans were about thirty-three millions,
having passed the French; and the Italians were a few more than
thirteen millions, having increased very slowly. Neither Germans nor
Italians had as yet been able either to achieve unity for themselves or
to found colonies elsewhere. The Spanish, including their pure-blooded
colonists, numbered perhaps ten millions. The Russians had increased to
twenty-five millions, the boundaries of their empire having been widely
extended.
The nineteenth century was a period of unexampled expansion for the
English-speaking race, who have spread to India, to Australia, and to
Africa, besides filling up the western parts of the United States; they
now number probably between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred
and thirty millions. The Russians have also pushed their borders across
Asia, and they also show an immense increase, now numbering about a
hundred and thirty millions, altho probably a very large proportion
of their conglomerate population does not yet speak Russian. The
Germans have supplied millions of immigrants to the United States,
and thousands of expatriated traders to all the great cities of the
world; and in spite of this loss they now number about seventy millions
(including, as before, the German portions of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy). The Spanish-speaking peoples in the old world and the new
are about forty-two millions, not half of them being in Spain itself.
The French lag far behind in this multiplication; they number now a
few more than forty millions, including those Belgians and Swiss who
have French for their mother-tongue. The relative loss of the French
can best be shown by a comparison with the English after an interval of
five hundred years. In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, those
who spoke French were to those who spoke English as ten to four; in
the nineteenth century those who speak English are to those who speak
French as one hundred and thirty to forty. In other words, the French
during five centuries have increased fourfold, while the English have
multiplied more than thirtyfold.
French is still the language most frequently employed by diplomatists;
it is still the tongue in which educated men of differing nationalities
are most likely to be able to converse with each other. But its
supremacy has departed forever. It has long been fighting a losing
battle. Its hope of becoming the world-language of the future vanished,
never to reappear, when Clive grasped India and when Wolfe defeated
Montcalm. At a brief interval the French let slip their final chances
of holding either the east or the west.
The English-speaking peoples and the Russians have entered into the
inheritance which the French have renounced. The future is theirs, for
they are ready to go forth and subdue the waste places of the earth.
They are the great civilizing forces of the twentieth century, each in
its own way and each in its own degree. The Russians have revealed a
remarkable faculty of assimilation, and have taken over the wild tribes
of the east, which they are slowly starting along the path of progress.
The English--by which I mean always the peoples who speak the English
language--have possessed themselves of North America and of South
Africa and of Australia; and there is no sign yet visible of any lack
of energy or of any decrease of vigor in the branches of this hardy and
prolific stock.
At the rate of increase of the nineteenth century, the end of the
twentieth century will find eight hundred and forty millions speaking
English and five hundred millions speaking Russian, while those who
speak German will be one hundred and thirty millions and those who
speak French perhaps sixty millions. But it is very unlikely that the
rate of increase in the twentieth century will be what it was in the
nineteenth. The extraordinary expansion of the United States is the
salient phenomenon of the nineteenth century; and it is doubtfully
possible and certainly improbable that any such expansion can take
place in the twentieth century, even in South Africa. On the other
hand, the building of the Siberian railroad may open to the Russians
an outlet for the overflow of their population not unlike that offered
to the English by the opening of the middle west of the United States.
The outpouring of Germans, hitherto directed chiefly to the United
States (where they have been taught to speak English), may perhaps
hereafter be diverted to German colonies, where the native tongue will
be cherished.
Thus it seems likely that, while the estimate for the year 2000 of
one hundred and thirty million Germans is none too large, that of
five hundred million Russians is perhaps too small, and that of eight
hundred and fifty millions for the English-speaking peoples is
probably highly inflated. What, however, we have no reasonable right
to doubt is that German will be a bad third, as French will be a bad
fourth; and that the English language and the Russian will stand far
at the head of the list, one all-powerful in the west and the other
all-powerful in the east. Which of them will prevail against the other
in the twenty-first century no man can now foretell, nor can he get any
help from statistics.
The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by any inspection of
figures, for it will turn not so much on mere numbers--altho the
possession of these will be an immense advantage: it will be decided
rather by the race-characteristics of the two stocks when thrust into
irresistible opposition. The manners and customs of the people who
speak Russian and of the peoples who speak English, their physical
strength and their vitality, their ideals, social and political--all
these things will be the decisive factors in the final combat. Whether
Russian or English shall be the world-language of the future depends
not on the language itself and its merits and demerits, but on the
sturdiness of those who shall then speak it, on their strength of
will, on their power of organization, on their readiness to sacrifice
themselves for the common cause, and on their fidelity to their ideals.
Russian is a beautiful language, so those say who know it best: it is
fresh and vigorous, as might be expected in a speech the literature of
which is not yet old; it is also as clear and as direct as French. But
it has one insuperable disadvantage: its grammar is as primitive and
as complex as the grammar of German or the grammar of Greek. The verb
has an elaborate conjugation, the noun an elaborate declension, the
adjective an elaborate method of agreement in gender, number, and case.