PART II

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been

placed at the end of the book.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

HISTORY IN ENGLISH WORDS

HISTORY IN

ENGLISH WORDS

BY

OWEN BARFIELD

[Illustration: colophon]

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

_First Published in 1926_

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

PART I

THE ENGLISH NATION

CHAPTER PAGE

I. PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS 3

II. THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE 20

III. ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION 35

IV. MODERN ENGLAND 50

PART II

THE WESTERN OUTLOOK

V. MYTH 71

VI. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 85

VII. DEVOTION 107

VIII. EXPERIMENT 128

IX. PERSONALITY AND REASON 145

X. MECHANISM 167

XI. IMAGINATION 185

BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

INDEX 209

PART I

THE ENGLISH NATION

CHAPTER I

PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS

_Electric._ _Quality._ _Garden._ _Mead._ _Timber._

If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished

letter of Dr. Johnson’s, and on reading it through we came across the

word “telephone”, we should be fairly justified in sending him about

his business. The fact that there was no such thing as a telephone

until many years after Johnson’s death would leave no doubt whatever

in our minds that the letter was not written by him. If we cared

to go farther, we could say with equal certainty that the letter

was written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the

telephone was invented.

Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the

letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If

in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer

had said that “the atmosphere was electric”, we could still be fairly

positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be

because the _thing_ of which the letter spoke had no existence in

Johnson’s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and

fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as

they are to-day; but if we look up the word _electric_ in the _Oxford

Dictionary_, we find that in Johnson’s time it simply was not used in

that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as:

A property in some bodies, whereby when rubbed so as to grow warm,

they draw little bits of paper, or such-like substances, to them.

The world was only just beginning to connect this mysterious property

of amber with the thunder and lightning, and however still and heavy

the air might have been, it would have been impossible for the

lexicographer to describe it by that word. Or again, supposing the

letter had said nothing about a storm, but that it had described a

conversation between Garrick and Goldsmith which was carried on “at

high tension”, we should still have little hesitation in pronouncing

it to be a forgery. The phrase “high tension”, used of the relation

between human beings, is a metaphor taken from the condition of the

space between two electrically charged bodies. At present many people

who use such a phrase are still half-aware of its full meaning, but

many years hence everybody may be using it to describe their quarrels

and their nerves without dreaming that it conceals an electrical

metaphor——just as we ourselves speak of a man’s “disposition” without

at all knowing that the reference is to astrology.[1] Nevertheless

by consulting an historical dictionary it will still be possible to

“date” any passage of literature in which the phrase occurs. We shall

still know for certain that the passage could not have been written

in a time before certain phenomena of static electricity had become

common knowledge.

Thus, the scientists who discovered the forces of electricity

actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them

to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness

of their relationship with one another. They made it possible for

them to speak of the “high tension” between them. So that the

discovery of electricity, besides introducing several new words (e.g.

_electricity_ itself) into our everyday vocabulary, has altered

or added to the meaning of many older words, such as _battery_,

_broadcast_, _button_, _conductor_, _current_, _force_, _magnet_,

_potential_, _tension_, _terminal_, _wire_, and many others.

But apart from the way in which it is used, there is a little mine

of history buried in the word _electric_ itself. If we look it

up in a dictionary we find that it is derived from a Greek word

‘ēlektron’, which meant ‘amber’. And in this etymology alone anyone

who was completely ignorant of our civilization could perceive

three facts—that at one time English scholars were acquainted with

the language spoken by the ancient Greeks, that the Greeks did not

know of electricity (for if they had there would have been nothing

to prevent our borrowing their word for it), and that the idea of

electricity has been connected in men’s minds with amber. Lastly, if

we were completely ignorant of the quality of amber itself, the fact

that ‘ēlektron’ is connected with ‘ēlektōr’, which means ‘gleaming’

or ‘the beaming sun’, might give us a faint hint of its nature. These

are some of the many ways in which words may be made to disgorge the

past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle

or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.

Now the deduction of information from the presence or absence of

certain words is a common practice which has been known to critics

and historians of literature, under some such name as “internal

evidence”, for many years. It is from such evidence, for instance,

that we deduce Shakespeare’s ignorance of the details of Roman

civilization. But until a few years ago—within the memory of men

still living—very little use had been made of language itself,

that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as

interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds. It

has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone,

not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is

spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral

earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is

this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets

which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us

a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the

bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has

preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals

the evolution of consciousness.

In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the

thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead,

but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden

of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler

its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which

it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort

which went to its making. Thus, the word _quality_ is used by most

educated people every day of their lives, yet in order that we should

have this simple word Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it

is perhaps the greatest effort known to man) of turning a vague

feeling into a clear thought. He invented the new word ‘poiotēs’,

‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’ and Cicero

translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language

becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves

realize, can even make ourselves feel how every time the word

_quality_ is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative

effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition of

such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it

circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life

about us. It is the kiss which brings the sleeping courtiers to life.

But in order to excavate the information which is buried in a word we

must have the means to ascertain its history. Until quite recently

(about a hundred years ago) philology, as an exact science, was still

in its infancy, and words were derived by ingenious guesswork from

all kinds of impossible sources. All languages were referred to a

Hebrew origin, since Hebrew was the language of the Bible. This was

taken for granted. Since then, however, two new developments have

revolutionized the whole study, made it accurate, and enormously

extended its scope. During the eighteenth century Sanskrit, the

ancient speech of the Hindoos, began for the first time to attract

the attention of European scholars. In 1767 a French Jesuit named

Coeurdoux pointed out certain resemblances between the European and

Sanskrit languages. In 1786 Sir William Jones described that language

as being

of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious

than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet

bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of

verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced

by accident—so strong that no philologer could examine all three

without believing them to have sprung from some common source

which, perhaps, no longer exists.

At the time it was no more than a brilliant conjecture, but with it

the comparative philology of the Aryan languages may be said to have

begun.

Secondly, with the advent of phonology certain immutable laws were

discovered governing the sounds made by the human throat, and the way

in which these sounds change with the passing of time and react upon

each other when they are knit together in a spoken word. Henceforward

it was possible to say for certain that, for example, the English

word _wit_ (from the old verb ‘witan’, to know) was not _derived_

from the Latin ‘videre’, but cognate, or related, with it. Many words

derived from ‘videre’, such as _advice_, _envy_, _review_, seem at

first sight infinitely farther off from the stem ‘vid-’ than _wit_,

but it was now possible for scholars to say for certain that a Latin

stem ‘vid’ adopted into English could not possibly have changed

into _wit_. They could be equally certain that, if the Romans had

_borrowed_ the Greek word ‘idein’ (to see) into their language, it

could never have changed its form to ‘_vid_ere’, so that, innumerable

as are the words which Rome borrowed from Greece, ‘videre’ is not

one of them. Thus, it was clear that such groups of three words as

_idein_, _videre_, and _wit_, or _astēr_, _stella_, and _star_, were

not father, son, and grandson (as is the case, for instance, with

_poenē_, _poena_, and _penal_), but three brothers or cousins all

descended from a common ancestor with a stem something like ‘weid’

belonging to some other language. This, put very briefly and with

many omissions, was the contribution made by phonology to the science

of comparative philology.

Perhaps it is not altogether insignificant that the study of that

seemingly dull subject—phonology—should be associated in our minds

with one of the most charming collection of fairy-tales in Europe.

It is thanks to the labours of Jacob Grimm during the first half

of the last century that we are now able to reconstruct the remote

pasts of words, not, it is true, with absolute certainty, but with

a degree of it which makes a chapter such as the present one worth

writing. And while Grimm was burrowing into the rich, loamy soil of

German speech and German folk-lore, another German scholar, Franz

Bopp, was laying the foundations, with the help of this knowledge and

of the results of the study of Sanskrit, of a genuinely scientific

comparative philology. Nor was it long before less scholarly but

more imaginative minds, such as Max Müller’s, were interpreting the

meaning of their researches to a wider public.

We can imagine the suppressed excitement of the philologists of that

time as they began to discover in that remote Eastern language, the

sacred language of the Vedic hymns, words such as ‘vid’ (to see),

‘tara’ (a star), ‘sad’ (to sit), ‘bhratar’ (a brother). For it

was not only the evident relation of Sanskrit to the languages of

Europe that was exciting. Sanskrit, which had preserved the forms

of its words more unchanged than any other Aryan tongue, threw a

brilliant light on the close relations existing between those other

languages themselves. For instance, although the sisterhood of words

such as the Greek ‘onoma’, Latin ‘nomen’, and _name_, had long

been suspected, yet there had been no way of distinguishing such a

sisterhood from purely accidental resemblances like Hebrew ‘gol’,

Greek ‘kaleo’, and _call_, and the connection between ‘brother’

and ‘frater’ was by no means obvious. But when the older Sanskrit

form ‘bhratar’ was brought to light, the gap between these words

was at once bridged. It could be seen at a glance how the three of

them, _brother_, _bhratar_, and _frater_, had started from the same

original form and diverged through the years. Gradually all doubt was

blown away, and Sanskrit, the language of a race with whom Europeans

had thought, and for the most part still think, that they had nothing

whatever in common, stood revealed as an obvious relative of Latin,

Greek, Modern English, and practically all the other languages of

Europe. It seemed, therefore, to follow that our ancestors and those

of the Hindoos were at one time living together, that our ancestors

and theirs were, in fact, the same.

At first it was thought that Sanskrit itself was the parent-language

from which all the others had derived, and that the nations of Europe

were descended from a body of Hindoos, some of whom had migrated

westwards. We called ourselves “Aryans” because the people who had

once spoken Sanskrit were known as “Aryas”, or worshippers of the

God of the Brahmins. But soon the accurate methods of analysis

which philology had now acquired made it plain that this could not

be so. Therefore a still older language was postulated and called

indifferently the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, or the Indo-European

parent-language. If there was a language, there must have been a

people who spoke it, and attention was soon focused on the character,

civilization, and whereabouts in space and time of the people who

spoke the lost Indo-European, or “Aryan” parent-language.

The fascination of this particular branch of philological research is

apparent when we recollect that in this case, in the case of these

remote Eastern ancestors of ours, philology is almost the only window

through which we can look out on them. In most subsequent periods

of history we have many other ways, besides the study of language,

of discovering the outward circumstances of men’s lives. Historical

records, archaeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature, all come

to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization;

but it is not so with the Aryans. Here ethnology and archaeology tell

us practically nothing, anthropology a little, and the rest nothing

at all. If we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from this

period we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately

over it. And in such romantic circumstances it is hardly surprising

that we should find a veritable army of scholars and philosophers,

both professional and amateur, jostling each other upon that plank

with such vigour that the bridge and its burden have often seemed in

danger of vanishing quietly together into the abyss.

The central principle upon which philologists have worked is this,

that if a word occurs to-day in a fair sprinkling of the Aryan

languages, then that word existed in the Aryan parent-language, and

therefore the thing of which it is the label existed in some form or

other in the primitive Aryan civilization. Conversely, if an object

or an idea is found to have a different name in most of the Aryan

languages, it was sometimes assumed that that object was not known

to the Aryans before their dispersion. But this negative deduction

soon came to be regarded as unsafe, and there are indeed many reasons

why the whole method is limited and uncertain. For instance, even

in one language it is constantly happening that when a new thing

or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is

described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing

object which most closely resembles it. This is inevitable. We have

to proceed from the known to the unknown in language as in life; but

language lags behind life and words change more slowly than things

or ideas. When railways first came in, their rolling-stock consisted

of a string of vehicles resembling the old horse coach so exactly

that it was said later that “the ghost of a horse stalked in front

of the engine”. Although this is no longer the case, we still call

these vehicles _carriages_ or _coaches_, and look like continuing to

do so. To take an even more patent example, when a modern Englishman

or American uses the very old Celtic word _car_, we all know what

he means: yet it would be an error to deduce from this that the

principle of internal combustion was known in pre-Christian times

in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and probably Rome (Latin

‘carrus’, a cognate word). Moreover, we can see at once that the

fraction of error is infinitely greater when we are dealing, not

with the development of a word in one language, but with its history

as it descended from one language to another; for example, from the

hypothetical parent-tongue into the languages with which we are

familiar to-day. Indeed, this kind of reasoning, if no other evidence

were available, would lead us to conclude that the Greeks were

acquainted with electricity.

Fortunately, however, it is not the object of this little book to

put forward theories and discuss the extent to which they can be

proved or disproved by words. And though it has been interesting

to observe that in some cases—and notably when we are endeavouring

to reconstruct the life and thought of our Aryan ancestors—our

knowledge, such as it is, is derived very largely from the evidence

of words, yet in these pages, even when that particular period is

being dealt with, the words chosen for description will by no means

necessarily be those which provide the most conclusive evidence

for what is said. A great deal has been done in quite recent years

by way of collating the results of comparative philology with

those of anthropology, ethnology, comparative mythology, etc., and

reconstructing from the combined data something of the past history

of our own and other races or cultures. We are concerned here, not

with the way in which those results were arrived at, but with the

results themselves. The reconstruction itself has been and is being

done by scholars; here the endeavour is rather to make use of their

labours; not to think about the past, as it were, but to look at it.

Consequently the words chosen are not the most useful ones, but those

which are the best telescopes; for while the nineteenth century spent

itself prodigally in multitudinous endeavours to know what the past

was, it is now possible for us, by penetrating language with the

knowledge thus accumulated, to feel how the past is.

Who are the Aryans? Where did they come from? Looking back down the

corridors of time from the particular perspective to which we have

attained in the twentieth century, far away in the past—it may be in

the Stone Age—we seem to be able to perceive a remarkable phenomenon.

At some particular spot in the vast plains stretching from Eastern

Europe to Central Asia it was as though a fresh spring bubbled up

into the pool of humanity. Whether it represented the advent of a

new “race-type”, what a race-type exactly is, and how it begins are

questions which we must leave to others to settle. That spring was

the Aryan culture.

Throughout much of Europe and Asia there were already in existence

different civilizations in different stages of development; such

were the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and farther west the great Minoan

civilization, which in its Bronze Age was to ray out an influence

from Crete all over the Aegean world. It may be that there was

something static[2] in the very nature of these pre-Aryan cultures,

or it may be that they were ageing and passing in the natural course

of events; what is certain is that there was something dynamic, some

organic, out-pushing quality in the waters of this Aryan spring. For

these waters spread. They have been spreading over the world ever

since that time, now quickly, now slowly, down into India and Persia,

north to the Baltic, west over all Europe and the New World, until

in the persons of the three Aryan explorers, Peary, Amundsen, and

Scott, their waves have licked the poles. It appears to have been

the tendency of the Aryan settler, whether he came as a conquering

invader or as a peaceful immigrant, to obliterate more than he

absorbed of the aboriginal culture on which he imposed himself. In

this the Celts and Teutons who ages ago overran most of Europe appear

to have resembled the English-speaking settlers who long afterwards

almost annihilated the North American Indian with his gods and

traditions. It is true that we English owe to this latter pre-Aryan

race the ability to express just that shade of contempt which is

conveyed by the word _skunk_, also the charming blend of whimsicality

and reprobation crystallized in _mugwump_. But such survivals really

only emphasize the extent to which, as the Aryan waters spread, the

pre-Aryan past has been covered over. The past does indeed live in

the language we speak and in those with which we are familiar, but

it is the past of the Aryans. If we dig down far enough into the

English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere

round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands

at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation.

There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe

as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important

customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used

cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan

culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. We may patronize

our less fortunate neighbours, but we do not “matronize” them. Yet

faint memories of such strange ways seem to have lingered on among

the Aryans in the widespread legend of a race of Amazons who once

dwelt in the lost continent of Atlantis, the western land, and in the

rumour of mighty female warriors in pre-Celtic[3] Gaul, while the

name of the River Marne (Matrona) is thought to be another relic of

the existence in pre-Aryan Europe of a race of men who deified their

trees and streams, and hoped, when they died, to be gathered to their

mothers.

With this brief glance at our forgotten predecessors, we may turn our

gaze upon that region near the banks of the Dnieper whence our own

ancestors first began to expand into the world. And we get a glimpse

of the kind of settlements in which these pastoral people must have

lived in the fact that the English word _garden_ has grown from the

same stem as the termination _-grad_ in _Petrograd_, where it means

‘town’, while on the other hand the Dutch for _garden_ is ‘tuin.’ We

see their villages, family settlements springing up in an enclosure

round the home of a patriarch. Households are large and cumbersome,

the sons, as they grow up, bring home wives from different villages,

and all live together under the roof and absolute dominion of the

mother and father-in-law. Both sexes wear _zones_ or loin-cloths,

and probably in addition one simple garment of fur or of some woven

material, which does not altogether hide their tattooed bodies,

adorned with armlets and necklaces of animals’ teeth, or it may be

of shells or amber beads. It is the business of the women in these

communities, not only to remain faithful to their husbands on pain

of the most appalling penalties, not only to bring up the children,

to keep house, and to _weave_ and spin, but also to till the fields

and look after the _bees_, _geese_, _oxen_, _sows_, and such other

animals as may have been domesticated. A hard enough life, but they

have their consolations as they grow older and become respected as

dames. Moreover, they have a religious cult of their own. In some

cases their imaginations are rich in myth, and they are looked up

to as knowing the secrets of Nature and possibly of the future

itself. It is the men’s business to make war, hold councils, and

hunt—possibly with horses[4] and _hounds_, both of which animals are

at any rate known to them. The family lives on a kind of unleavened

bread, _milk_, cheese,[5] cooked meats, vegetables, and some fruits.

There is much brutality. Widows may be expected to join their

husbands in the grave, and old men are sometimes killed off to make

room; nevertheless, life is not without its friendlier aspect. There

is little doubt, for instance, that our Aryan ancestors knew how

to get drunk. The liquor, made principally of honey, with which

they sent themselves to bed, appears to have been fraught with such

sweet associations that no branch of the Aryan family, however far

they went upon their travels, could forget it. The Angles and Saxons

brought this _mead_ into our country, and the word occurs in Dutch,

Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek

(‘methu’), Sanskrit, Zend, and modern Persian. As it threads its way

through this babel of tongues, ringing the changes on the meanings

of ‘honey’, ‘drunkenness’, and ‘enjoyment’, the little monosyllable

seems to give us a peculiarly intimate peep into the interior of an

Aryan home. Yet the connection of the word _bed_ with the Latin stem

‘fod-’ (fodio), ‘to dig’, should prevent us from forming an unduly

voluptuous image of the final stages of this prehistoric pastime. If

we call up before us a roof and walls of wood or wattles, bounding a

dark interior crowded with human beings and possibly some cattle, lit

only by a draughty hole in the roof—an arrangement which the Teutons

were evidently trying to express when they afterwards dubbed it a

‘wind’s eye’ or _window_—we have a picture which will serve. It is a

picture of our ancestors just before they began to spread out over

the world, and the time is before 2000 B.C.

But the question of the houses in which they lived takes us farther

back still. At some time, probably before they became acquainted

with agricultural modes of livelihood, the Aryans were living a

nomadic existence. _Axle_, _nave_, _wheel_, _yoke_, and a common

word for ‘waggon’ have convinced people that they once moved from

place to place in a kind of primitive caravan, running probably on

solid wheels (for there is no common word for ‘spoke’). Now the

English word _cove_, which in its Icelandic form means ‘hut’ and in

its Greek form (‘gupē’) a subterranean dwelling such as that which

was inhabited by the Cyclops, takes us back to a still older form

of residence. Again, _wand_ in English means a ‘slender rod’, but

in German and Dutch it means a ‘wall’, while the weightier and more

solid word _timber_ is connected with the Greek root ‘dem-’ (demein),

‘to build’, Latin ‘domus’, ‘a house’. In these words we can perhaps

see the most ancient house rising as time goes on out of a natural

cave in the ground to the dignity of a sort of dug-out with wattled

sides and roof—eventually to the estate of a firm, wooden hut. And

so, behind the picture of our ancestors as they lived together on

the spot from which they finally began to spread, we can discern

another less certain picture of the very beginnings; of a race, a

family perhaps, or some voluntary collection of men not tied by

blood, who were together in the Stone Age somewhere in Central Asia.

They increase in numbers and power, and, trekking westwards, live—for

how many years or centuries we cannot tell—as a race of pastoral

nomads, until somewhere in the region of the Dnieper they pass from

the wandering nomad existence to some more settled life such as that

which has been described.

In addition to the somewhat prosaic words from which we have

attempted to derive information, it is pleasant to us to think of

these ancestors of ours already uttering to one another in that

remote past great and simple words like _fire_, _night_, _star_,

_thunder_, and _wind_, which our children still learn to use as they

grow up. And we must think also how during all this time the new

thing, the force, the spirit which the Aryans were to bring into

the world, must have been simmering within them. Strengthening their

physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony,

working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon

some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the

Aryans became. And then they began to move. And the result was the

_Bhagavad Gita_, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy

Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare,

Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, the vast modern industrial

civilizations of Europe and America, and the British Empire touching

the Antipodes.

CHAPTER II

THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE

_Beech._ _Bard._ _Attic._ _Tragedy._ _Authority._ _Delirious._

_Wine._ _Church._

It would be a great mistake to picture the Aryans setting out in

some vast, organized expedition such as that of the Israelites under

Moses. The study of comparative grammar suggests rather that they

spread outwards from their centre in a series of little rills, each

one, as it flowed, either pushing the rill in front of it a stage

farther on, or flowing through it and passing beyond. During the

first thousand years of this process we have very little idea of

the extent to which the individual groups of these ever-widening

circles—the different “races” as they were now beginning to be—were

in communication with one another. After a time, however, we can

discern them pretty sharply divided into two streams, a north-western

and a south-eastern stream. It was the main stream which flowed

north-west, and it carried along with it the ancestors of the

powerful races which were afterwards to be called Greeks, Italians,

Slavs, Teutons, and Celts. The settlement of the Celts in Britain

and the subsequent arrival first of the Teutonic Angles and Saxons

and then of the Normans, the movement of the Celts westward to Wales

and Ireland, and the final streaming of their Teutonic successors

right through them and across the Atlantic—all these are excellent

examples of the way in which the separate rills of the north-western

stream have continued ever since the first central commotion to crawl

and mingle and overlap like the waves of an incoming tide.

Meanwhile the south-eastern stream flowed past the Himalayas down

into India and Persia, where their descendants became the Brahmanic

Hindoos and the Zoroastrian Persians of a later date.

That all connection was lost at a very early date between these two

main streams is plain from another interesting little group of words.

These are common to all the members of the north-western group, but

quite unknown to the south-eastern, and perhaps the most interesting

is _mere_, the Old English for ‘sea’, which is still used poetically

of inland waters, and in the word _mer_maid, while its Latin form

‘mare’ is equally familiar to most educated Englishmen. From the

distribution of this word among the Aryan nations, together with

similar equations such as _fish_ and _piscis_, we can deduce that

these two groups of travellers had already separated before either of

them reached the sea-board.

There is evidence, too, that this north-western group, comprising

as it did the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, as well as of the

Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, had reached before it dispersed a new

country of forests, such as must have covered most of Northern and

Western Europe at that time. At any rate we find words for trees—such

as _beech_, _elm_, and _hazel_—and for birds—_finch_, _starling_,

_swallow_, _throstle_—common to most of the languages spoken by their

descendants, yet absent from Persian and Sanskrit. It was at this

time, and amid these surroundings, that agriculture seems to have

appeared among the north-western Aryans. The old Aryan word from

which we have _acre_ lost its former meaning of ‘any enclosed piece

of land’ and acquired the new and special significance of _tilled_

land, as in the Latin ‘ager,’ etc. _Corn_, _furrow_, _bean_, _meal_,

_ear_ of corn, and the verb to _mow_ also date back to this period of

our history.

And then the north-western stream again subdivided; and we will

follow first of all that branch of it which dropped away southward

into the Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. This time

it is not a word, but a poet’s imagination which has fixed for us

in a passage of considerable beauty the historic moment when this

wave first lapped the farther shore, the prophetic shock of contact

between Aryan settler and aborigine:

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!

As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,

Descried at sunrise an emerging prow

Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,

The fringes of a southward-facing brow

Among the Aegean isles;

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,

Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,

Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine;

And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted Masters of the waves....

These young, light-hearted masters were called Greeks, or Hellenes;

they migrated southwards in a series of waves, the first of which

contained two tribes known as the Achaians and Danaans. These

were followed and overtaken at a later date by the Dorians, and

subsequently again by the Attic Greeks. We still make use of some of

the experiences undergone by these tribes, and of the characteristics

which they developed, in order to express more exactly our own inner

experiences. Through the channel of words and myths which have come

down to us from that time, the great poet who sang to the Achaians

and Danaans of the exploits of their ancestors has given us many

metaphors and images—special little reservoirs of feeling which we

could not have created for ourselves. Most people, for instance, like

to be called _Trojans_; _stentorian_ and _pander_ are from the names

of characters in his poems, and _nectar_ and _ambrosial_ from the

food and drink consumed by his gods. Speech was a more miraculous

and rhythmical thing to the Achaians than it is to us to-day, and

whether or no the Gaelic _bard_ is cognate with the Greek ‘phrazein’,

to ‘speak’, there is no doubt that ‘epos’, the ‘word’, had its other

meaning of ‘poem’. Long afterwards the adjective ‘epikos’ came to

be applied especially to lofty compositions such as those of the

great poet himself. Accordingly, in the European war the special

correspondent could often find no more vivid expression for his sense

of the vastness and grandeur of the catastrophe he was recording than

to call up by the word _epic_ vague memories of Homer’s gods and

heroes.

A single timid reference to ‘awful signs’,[6] together with the

absence of any ordinary word for ‘writing’, suggests that Homer’s

Achaians did not know how to write, and that his two long poems of

twenty-four books each had to be memorized from beginning to end by

that class of professional reciters from which our word _rhapsody_

is derived. The actual text of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ gives us

a vivid and majestic picture of early, but not the earliest, Aryan

culture. Of their author, in so far as there was one particular

author, we know very little except that he was probably blind. It

was the common thing for the bards who were to be found among all the

Aryan races, and survived as ‘Minstrels’ into the Middle Ages, to be

blind; and Homer’s own blindness, apart from a reference to it, has

been deduced by some from a preponderance in his poems of “audile”

epithets, such as the _clanging_ arrow and the _loud-sounding_ sea.

It may be mentioned that the Slavs once called their bards ‘sliepac’,

a word which also meant ‘blind’.

The Dorians who followed soon divided into two main groups with their

centres in Laconia and Attica respectively. The notorious taciturnity

of the inhabitants of Laconia has given us _laconic_, and we are

referring to their rigid ideas on infant welfare when we speak of a

‘_spartan_ mother’, for Sparta was the capital of Laconia.

But it was in Attica, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. that

the Hellenic culture reached its finest flower. We use the word

_Attic_[7] to describe a peculiarly finished work of art or an

exquisite literary style. No wonder. In the city state of Athens, for

the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something

which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a

civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a

social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan

moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was

absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years

into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have

never been wholly surpassed. Consequently, the names of many things

which we regard as the very hall-marks of a cultured society can

be traced back to the Attic dialect of this period, and no farther.

_Academy_, _school_, _history_, _philosophy_, _logic_, _grammar_,

_poetry_, _rhythm_, _harmony_, _melody_, _music_, are all from Greek

words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence

of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words,

_chorus_, _comedy_, _drama_, _theatre_, and _tragedy_, and the lesser

_catastrophe_, _episode_, _prologue_, and _protagonist_, all of which

draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great

Athenian dramatists.

Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into

Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded

the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which

the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash

into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into

contact with other races. It is just such a spark which, in the

famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, lights up for us one of

the early shocks of encounter between these Italiot Aryans and the

older inhabitants of Italy.

Most people know a little about the subsequent history of these

Italiots. The republic which they founded at Rome transformed itself

into an empire that extended its bounds until they were coterminous

with the civilized world—an empire of Europe and part of Asia which

retained its real authority over men’s persons until the fifth

century A.D., and its authority, as an idea, over their minds and

actions down to that day at the beginning of the last century when

Bonaparte first styled himself “Emperor of the French”. There is, in

fact, scarcely a word in our language expressing even remotely the

notion of “authority”, which does not come to us from the Latin:

_authority_, _chief_, _command_, _control_, _dictator_, _dominion_,

_empire_, _government_, _master_, _officer_, _rule_, _subordinate_,

are some of them; and it is significant that the two Greek words

which we use to express the same idea are _despot_ and _tyrant_.

Both these terms have a definite stigma attaching to them, and are

employed very much more often by the foes of authority than by her

friends. The Greeks were not the nation to establish a world-empire.

They would have combined to bury Caesar, not to praise him; and from

another point of view the odious _sybarite_ is good proof that they

were not the stuff of which colonists are made. The English _lord_

and _king_, on the other hand, retain about them a hint of the

possibility of affection. It is a mark of affection when sailors drop

the Latin _captain_ and adopt the Dutch _skipper_, just as it is when

landsmen substitute for Latin _manager_ the Old High German _boss_.

And lastly, when we wish to suggest a peculiar blend of dignity and

chill self-consciousness, we use the name of the most remarkable of

all the Roman emperors.

Rome not only extended her jurisdiction over all Europe; she was

responsible for the birth of a new idea in men’s minds—the idea

that “authority”, as such, based on an abstraction called “law” and

irrespective of real ties of blood or affection, of sympathy or

antipathy, of religion or ownership, can exist as a relation between

human beings.

But we have hurried on to the Empire and left out the Republic. What

were the beginnings and early occupations of this astonishing race,

of whose national hero we are reminded when we use the word _brute_?

In the previous chapter reference was made to certain words and

phrases which are now used for the purposes of everyday life, but

which were originally technical metaphors drawn from the phenomena

of electricity. If we examine such words as _calamity_, _delirious_,

_emolument_, _pecuniary_, _prevaricate_, _tribulation_, we shall

find that they possess a similar history. Although the Romans of

classical times used the Latin words from which they are derived in

much the same way as the English words are used now, yet if we trace

them a little farther back, we learn that ‘delirare’ had at one time

no other meaning than to ‘go out of the furrow,’ when ploughing;

‘praevaricari’ was to ‘plough in crooked lines’; ‘tribulare’ to

thrash with a ‘tribulum’, and so forth. In _interval_, on the

other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades),

_excel_, _premium_, _salary_, and many other words we have examples

of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding

word, _spoil_, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other

meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering

with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it

lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome.

Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life,

and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it

was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of

realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the

warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was

constantly melting both implements into ideas.

Wherever we turn in our language, we have only to scratch the surface

in order to come upon fresh traces of Rome and of her solid, concrete

achievements in the world. With Greece, however, it is different. It

was not the outer fabric of a future European civilization which the

Greeks were building up while their own civilization flourished, but

the shadowy, inner world of human consciousness. They were creating

our outlook. We shall see a little later how the language which is

used by the theologians, philosophers, and scientists of Europe was

the gradual and painful creation of the thinkers of ancient Greece;

and we shall see that, without that language, the thoughts and

feelings and impulses which it expresses could have no being. Rome’s

task was to erect across Europe a rigid and durable framework on

which the complicated texture of thought, feeling, and will, woven in

the looms of Athens and Alexandria, could be permanently outspread.

Yet the performance of this task, concrete as it was, was inseparably

connected with an event of tremendous import for that growing, inner

world to which we have already referred—the most significant event,

as many believe, in the whole history of mankind.

The first casual contact between Greek coaster and Semitic trader,

imaginatively portrayed in the stanza quoted above from Matthew

Arnold, was indeed prophetic. It proved afterwards to have been not

merely a memorable event, but a sort of fertilization of the whole

history of humanity. For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner

world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real

than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old

Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had

been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom

and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an

extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense.

The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart,

were destined to meet and intermingle. In 332 B.C., when Alexander

the Great sacked Sidon and Tyre, Aryans and Semites began for the

first time to live side by side. They did not intermarry, but subtle

influences must have passed from one to the other, for in Alexandria,

shortly afterwards, contact between the two grew so intimate that by

the second century B.C. Greek had become the official language of

the Hebrew Scriptures. In the same century a Roman Protectorate was

established over Syria, which in due course of time became a province

of the Roman Empire. In that province was born the individual who is

known to history as Jesus of Nazareth.

His teaching, as far as it has come down to us, was Semitic both

in its form and in its outlook on the past. Nevertheless, it was

His teaching, and the feelings and impulses (though in a somewhat

unrecognizable form) which He implanted in the hearts and wills of

men, which were spread by the organization of the Roman Empire all

over Europe; and it was, above all, that part of the Greek world of

thought which had crystallized round His teaching that was carried

over into the thought and feeling of modern Europe.

But all this could only happen very slowly; for while Greece and

Rome had been rising successively to pinnacles of civilization,

the rest of the north-western group of Aryans had remained plunged

in darkness. They had passed Italy by, and already, more than a

thousand years B.C., begun to spread themselves over the rest of

Europe and to develop in the different areas wherein they found a

final resting-place the distinctive characteristics of Teuton, Slav,

and Celt. The Slavs, although they occupied—and still occupy—the

whole vast east of Europe, and although they number something like

two hundred million souls have as yet had extraordinarily little

influence upon our national life. There are only two Slavonic words

which may be described as common in all our language, _trumpet_

and _slave_, and both have come to us by devious routes, the first

through German and French, the second through Greek and Latin. One

of the lesser Slavonic races, the Croatians, developed a kind of

neckwear which appealed to the fashionable French, who adopted it and

described it as ‘croate’, ‘crovate’, or ‘cravate’, from which we get

our _cravat_. Otherwise the words are mostly exotic both in sound and

meaning. Thus, those that come to us direct from Russia are _copek_,

_drosky_, _knout_, _rouble_, _samovar_, _steppe_, _verst_—all of

which, with the possible exception of _steppe_, are still only used

when we are speaking of life in Russia itself.

How different it is when we come to consider the Teutons! When we

have abstracted all the Latin words, the French words, the Celtic

words, etc., from our vocabulary, the “English” words which remain

are all Teutonic; for we, ourselves, are a branch of the Teutonic

race.[8] Accordingly some of our older and most English words contain

buried vestiges of the lives which our ancestors once lived in the

continental forests. _Fear_, which is thought to be derived from

the same word as _fare_, has been taken to suggest the dangers, and

_weary_, which is traced to an old verb meaning ‘to tramp over wet

ground’, the fatigues of early travel, while _learn_ goes back to

a root which meant ‘to follow a track’. As the Italiot Aryans, the

Romans, created and extended their great empire, they came into

contact with these barbaric Teutonic tribes, whom they regarded,

naturally enough, not as kinsmen, but as strangers. We find some

of the results of this contact in such words as _inch_, _kitchen_,

_mile_, _mill_, _pound_, _street_, _toll_, _wall_, and _table_—all

of which are Latin words borrowed by our ancestors while they were

still living on the Continent together with the ancestors of the

Scandinavian, Dutch, German, Austrian, and Swiss nations. By their

nature these words suggest civilizing influences, and we find in

their company the names of more portable articles, such as _chest_,

_dish_, _kettle_, _pillow_, and _wine_, which traders might have

brought with them on their beasts of burden. This hypothesis becomes

almost a certainty when it is seen that _mule_ and _ass_ were

borrowed from Latin at this time; that _-monger_ (in _costermonger_,

_fishmonger_, ...) is a corruption of ‘mango’, the Latin name for a

trader; and that the old English _ceapian_, ‘to buy’, which we still

keep in _chap_, _chapman_, _cheap_, ... goes back to ‘caupones’,

the Roman name for wine-dealers. A few words like _pepper_ even

seem to have come in at this time from the remote East, by way of

Rome, and altogether these old Teutonic words may indeed give us,

as Mr. Pearsall Smith has said, “a dim picture of Roman traders,

travelling with their mules and asses along the paved roads of the

German provinces, their chests and boxes and wine-sacks, and their

profitable bargains with our primitive ancestors”. Finally, the

military words _camp_ and _pile_ recall the heyday of the Empire,

when Rome would recruit vast armies from her provincial subjects; and

even _church_ (another word common to all the Teutonic languages)

may have been brought home by German mercenaries on service in the

East. The Greek ‘Kuriakon’, from which it is said to be derived,

was in use in the Eastern provinces, as opposed to the ‘ecclesia’

(French ‘église’, Italian ‘chiesa’ and _ecclesiastical_) of Latin

Christianity, and our pagan forefathers probably picked it up

accidentally while they were pillaging the sacred buildings in which

their posterity was to kneel.

The modern nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland cover most of the area over which

the Teutonic immigrants originally spread. In a good many cases they

found Celtic predecessors already in possession. These Celts had

been the first Aryans to arrive in Northern Europe, and they seem,

at one time, to have spread over most of the Continent. Later on,

in historical times, they were to be found chiefly throughout that

wide district—including most of modern France and a great part of

Spain and Portugal—which the Romans called “Gaul”, as well as all

over Great Britain and Ireland. In Spain and France they mingled

their blood extensively with that of the Italiots, the two together

becoming the ancestors of the present “Latin” races or speakers of

the “Romance”[9] languages. But already, long before the decline

of the Roman Empire, the Teutons were beginning to drive the Celts

westward and away, a process which is clearly marked in these islands

by the prevalence of Celtic place-names in the west country. Thus,

the percentage of Celtic place-names in Cornwall has been calculated

to be about 80; in Devon it is only 32, and in Suffolk 2. The

conflict between Celt and Teuton dragged on in Ireland until 1921,

and it is doubtful if it is quite finished yet. One contingent of

the old Celtic inhabitants of this island, or _Britons_, driven to

the tip of Cornwall, decided to leave these shores altogether. They

sailed back to the Continent, and there established themselves in

the sea-board district which still bears the name of _Brittany_.

It is said that a Welsh peasant and a Breton can still, to this

day, understand one another’s speech well enough for most practical

purposes.

The number of proved Celtic words which have found their way into

English is extraordinarily small—scarce above a dozen. _Bard_, _bog_,

and _glen_ are among those which have come to us direct, and _car_

had to travel through Latin and French before it reached us, the

original having been borrowed by Julius Caesar from the Gauls, who

had thus named their war chariots. But for the most part, Celtic

words like _banshee_, _eisteddfod_, _galore_, _mavourneen_, ... have

a remote and foreign look, even though we may have used them for

many years. When we reflect that the Welsh tongue is still spoken

within two hundred miles of London, and that another Celtic language,

the Cornish, has only just died out, this seems very difficult to

understand.

Such, then, in barest outline, was the distribution of the Aryan

races which formed the major part of that vague and loose-knit

organization, the later Roman Empire. But it must not be imagined

that this picture of Rome’s European subjects is anything like

complete. Evoking history from words is like looking back at our

own past through memory; we see it, as it were, from within.

Something has stimulated the memory—a smell, a taste, or a fragment

of melody—and an inner light is kindled, but we cannot tell how far

that light will throw its beams. Language, like the memory, is not an

automatic diary; and it selects incidents for preservation, not so

much according to their intrinsic significance as according to the

impression they happen to have made upon the national consciousness.

Thus, English words have little to tell us about the great migrations

and massacres in Europe during the first ten centuries of the

Christian era, for terms of abuse like _vandal_ and _hun_ draw their

emotional force from the imaginations of historians rather than from

actual contact with the tribes in question.[10] From a mathematically

impartial point of view, therefore, the small amount of space that

can be assigned here to events which absorbed such an enormous share

of time and energy and swallowed millions of human lives is indeed

misleading. There is, however, an interesting little group of words

still bearing the imprint of the mighty upheaval which took place

around the Mediterranean during the seventh and eighth centuries

A.D., when Mohammedan Arabs overran Persia, Syria, Egypt, North

Africa, Spain, and the south of France. As might be expected, these

words come to us mostly from Arabic, via Spanish and French, for it

was in Spain that Islam took her firmest hold on Europe. They include

_cotton_, _gazelle_, _giraffe_, _lacquey_, _masquerade_, _syrup_,

_tabby_ (originally a kind of silk), _tabor_, _talc_, _tambourine_,

and some very interesting technical terms to which we shall presently

return. Naturally the receding tide of invasion has left Arabic

place-names dotted about in all the countries mentioned, while Spain

herself is literally crammed with them; but to give examples would be

beyond the scope of this little volume, which now finds itself drawn

by the laws of its subject-matter to hover more closely about the

shores of these islands.

CHAPTER III

ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION

_Durbeck._ _Chester._ _Candle._ _Cross._ _Law._ _Person._ _Chair._

_Obligation._ _Size._

There could hardly be a better example of the uneasy movement of

Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British

Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look,

inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and

tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been

matriarchally organized, and who, if the name _Pict_ may be taken

as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing

their bodies. At length, several centuries before our era, the first

Aryan wave reaches these shores in the persons of the Celts, who

spread over England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where they have

been pointed out and variously described by historians as _Britons_,

_Ancient Britons_, _Welsh_, _Gaels_, _Celts_,... They settle down

and live for some centuries the primitive life of savages, till

half-way through the first century B.C. they are disturbed by a

little Aryan tongue reaching out from the well-nigh spent Italian

wave. Pagan Rome establishes a brief dominion over a small portion

of Britain, drives roads, builds camps and cities, and after some

four hundred years is sucked back again to the Continent. Another

century, and the Angles and Saxons, borne forward on the crest of

the Teutonic wave, overrun the main island, driving the Celts into

its extremities, whence they regurgitate, before finally settling

down, upon various military and missionary enterprises which have

played an important part in our history. But already another ripple

of the Teutonic wave is upon us, rocking over the seas in the long

boats of the Scandinavian Vikings, and almost before they have left

their impress on the eastern quarter of the land, a third—the Normans

this time—is breaking on Britain once again at Pevensey. The liquid

metaphor is unavoidable, for no other image seems adequate to express

what actually happened. To watch through the glasses of history the

gradual arrival and settlement of the Aryans in this country is to be

reminded irresistibly of the rhythmic wash and backwash, the little

accidental interplays of splash and ripple, which accompany the tide

as it fills an irregularly shaped pool.

Every one of these motions has left its mark on our language, though

the traces of the earliest immigration of all—that of the Celts—are

rather scarce. The clearest vestiges of it are to be found in the

proper names of our rivers, for a surprising number of these contain

one or other of the various Celtic terms for ‘water’ or ‘river’,

e.g. _avon_, _dwr_ (_ter_ or _der_), _uisge_ (_wye_, _usk_, _is_,

_ax_), while the other parts of the name are often composed of words

for ‘water’ taken from another Aryan language, as in _Derwentwater_,

_Windermere_, _Easeburn_, _Ashbourne_,... An ingenious theory has

been evolved to account for this. In the case of the _Dur-beck_ in

Nottinghamshire, and the _Dur-bach_ in Germany, it has been supposed

that in the first place a body of Celtic immigrants squatted by the

side of a stream which, as they were not extensive travellers, they

knew simply as the _dwr_—‘The Water’. Their Teutonic successors

inquired the name of the stream, and on learning that it was _dwr_,

naturally assumed that this was a proper name. They accordingly

adopted it, and tacked on one of their own words for ‘water’—‘bach’

or ‘beck’, just as we may speak of the ‘Avon River’ or the ‘River

Ouse’. The phenomenon occurs so persistently both in this country

and all over Europe that this explanation can hardly be altogether

fanciful.

The four hundred years of Roman colonization, following Julius

Caesar’s landing in 55 B.C.—years which left such permanent and

conspicuous vestiges on the face of England—have made little enough

impression on her language. Fresh as the memory of that civilization

must have been when the Angles and Saxons arrived, they seem to have

learnt nothing from it. A few towns, such as _York_ (Eboracum),

retain in a more or less corrupted form the particular titles given

to them by their Roman founders, but outside these almost the only

Latin words which our ancestors can be proved to have taken from

the Britons are _port_ and ‘castra’ (a camp), surviving to-day

in _Chester_ and in the ending of many other town names such as

_Winchester_, _Lancaster_, _Gloucester_,...

Then, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles and

Saxons began to flow in from the Continent, bringing with them old

Aryan words like _dew_, _night_, _star_, and _wind_, which they had

never forgotten, new words which they had coined or developed in

their wanderings, and Latin words which they had learnt as provincial

subjects of the Roman Empire,[11] bringing, in fact, that peculiar

Teutonic variant of the Aryan tongue which forms the rich nucleus

of our English vocabulary. Their arrival here was followed almost

immediately by their conversion to Christianity; and this moment in

our history was a pregnant one for the future of Europe. For now the

two great streams of humanity—Teutonic blood from the one side, and

from the other the old classical civilization, bearing in its dark

womb the strange, new Christian impulse—met. The Latin and Greek

words which entered our language at this period are concerned for the

most part with the dogma and ritual of the Church; such are _altar_,

_candle_, _clerk_, _creed_, _deacon_, _hymn_, _martyr_, _mass_,

_nun_, _priest_, _psalm_, _shrine_, _stole_, _temple_, and many

others. Far more important was the alteration which now gradually

took place in the _meanings_ of many old Teutonic words—words like

_heaven_, which had hitherto denoted a ‘canopy’, or _bless_, which

had meant to ‘consecrate with blood’. But to this we must return

later, when we come to consider what is called the “semantic” history

of English words—that is to say, the history of their meanings.

Although Christianity did not come officially from Rome to England

until Augustine landed in A.D. 597, it had already found its way

here indirectly during the Roman occupation. Obliterated by the

pagan Anglo-Saxons, it had continued to flourish in Ireland, and the

actual conversion of most of the English is believed to have been the

work of Celtic Christians, who returned from Ireland and established

missionary bases in Scotland and Northumbria. Their influence was so

extensive that ‘Scotia’, the old name for Ireland, came to be applied

to the country which we still know as _Scotland_. _Pat_ and _Taffy_,

the popular nicknames for an Irishman and a Welshman, are descended

from the Celtic saints, Patrick and David, and it is interesting

to reflect that the Celtic missionaries were starting their work in

Northumbria at almost exactly the same moment as St. Augustine landed

in Kent. Thus Christianity enfiladed England, as it were, from both

ends; and while the southern Anglo-Saxons were learning the Greek and

Latin words to which we have referred, the Irish Christians in the

north had been making the language a present of a few Celtic words,

two of which—_druid_ and _lough_—have survived. Again, although the

name for the instrument of the Passion comes to us ultimately from

the Latin ‘crux’, yet the actual form which the word _cross_ has

taken in our language is very largely due to these Irish Christians.

But for them it would probably have been something like _cruke_,

or _cruce_, or _crose_. This word has an interesting history. It

was adopted from the old Irish ‘cros’ by the Northmen, and it is

due to them that the final “s” took on that hissing sound which is

represented in modern spelling by “ss”. We may suppose, therefore,

that but for the Irish Christians the word would have been something

like _cruce_, and but for the Northmen it might have been _croz_ or

_croy_.

In the ninth and tenth centuries these Northmen, the Scandinavian

Teutons, whom our ancestors called Danes, established an ascendancy

over a large part of England. They seem to have mingled easily with

the English, and we can trace back to their dialect some of the

very commonest features of our language. Thus, the Scandinavian

pronouns, _they_, _them_, _their_, _she_, gradually replaced less

convenient Anglo-Saxon forms, and it is to the Northmen that we owe

that extremely useful grammatical achievement which has enabled

us to form both the genitive and the plural of nearly _all_ nouns

by merely adding the letter “s”. Other Scandinavian words are

_call_, _get_, _hit_, _husband_, _knife_, _leg_, _odd_, _same_,

_skin_, _take_, _want_, _wrong_; and there are many more hardly less

common. The mighty word _law_, together with _outlaw_, _hustings_,

_wapentake_, _moot_, and _riding_ (division of Yorkshire) serve to

remind us that the Danish ascendancy was no hugger-mugger affair, but

a firm political organization. The old Anglo-Saxon words which these

Northern intruders replaced, such as _niman_, ‘to take’, and _Rood_

(the Cross) have mostly fallen out of use; but in some cases the two

words survive side by side. Thus, our useful distinction between

_law_ and _right_ was once geographical rather than semantic, the two

words covering roughly the eastern and the western halves of England.

And now there followed an event which has had more influence on the

character of the English language than any other before or since.

The conquest of England by the Norman[12] invaders brought about an

influx of French words which went on increasing in volume for more

than three centuries. At first it was little more than a trickle.

For a long time the Norman conquerors did not mix much with their

Saxon subjects. There are plenty of indications of this; for the

languages, too, moved side by side in parallel channels. The custom

of having one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another

for the same beast, when it is killed and cooked, is often supposed

to be due to our English squeamishness and hypocrisy. Whether or

no the survival of this custom through ten centuries is due to the

national characteristics in question it would be hard to say, but

they have certainly nothing to do with its origin. That is a much

more blameless affair. For the Saxon neatherd who had spent a hard

day tending his _oxen_, _sheep_, _calves_, and _swine_, probably

saw little enough of the _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, and

_bacon_, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters. There is

something a little pathetic, too, in the thought that the homely old

word, _stool_, could be used to express any kind of seat, however

magnificent, until it was, so to speak, hustled into the kitchen by

the smart French _chair_. Even the polite, however, continued to use

the old word in the idiom “to fall between two stools.” _Master_,

_servant_, _butler_, _buttery_, _parlour_, _dinner_, _supper_, and

_banquet_ all came over with William, besides the names of our

titular ranks, such as _duke_, _marquis_, _viscount_, _baron_, and

_countess_. The French word ‘comte’ was evidently considered to

be equivalent to the one existing Anglo-Saxon title, _earl_, with

the result that _count_ never became an English rank. But since it

had not been the Saxon custom to give ladies titles corresponding

to those of their lords, the word _countess_ was able to fill an

important gap. That the Feudal System had an educative value and

played its part in creating modern ideals of conduct is suggested by

such words as _honest_, _kind_, and _gentle_, which meant at first

simply ‘of good birth or position’ and only acquired during the

Middle Ages their later and lovelier meanings.

Not the least interesting of the words that must have come over from

France about this time are such courtly flower-names as _dandelion_

and _pansy_, from ‘dent-de-lion’ (describing the ragged leaves)

and the sentimental ‘pensée’—remembrance. Many of these early

Norman words seem to have a distinctive character of their own,

and even now, after nearly a thousand years, they will sometimes

stand out from the printed page with peculiar appeal. Perhaps this

is especially true of the military vocabulary. That sharp little

brightness, as of a window-pane flashing just after sunset, which

belongs to the ancient, technical language of heraldry, such as

_argent_, _azure_, _gules_, ... sometimes seems to have spread to

more common Norman words—_banner_, _hauberk_, _lance_, _pennon_, ...

and—in the right mood—we can even catch a gleam of it in everyday

terms like _arms_, _assault_, _battle_, _fortress_, _harness_,

_siege_, _standard_, _tower_, and _war_. The Norman-French etymology

of _curfew_ (couvre-feu) is too well known to require comment.

It will be noticed that nearly all these words are directly descended

from the Latin, _beef_ going back through ‘boeuf’ to ‘bov-em’,

_master_ to ‘magister’, _duke_ to ‘dux’,... Thus already, by the

thirteenth century, we can trace in our vocabulary four distinct

layers of Latin words. There are the Latin words learnt by our

ancestors while they were still on the Continent, such as _camp_,

_mile_, and _street_;[13] there are the Latin words brought over

by the Roman invaders, of which _port_ and _Chester_ were given

as surviving examples; and thirdly there are those words—_altar_,

_candle_, _nun_, ... brought over by the Christian missionaries as

described earlier in this chapter. These three classes are reckoned

to account for about four hundred Latin words altogether; and lastly

there is this great deposit of Norman-French words, of which the

number must have been running into thousands. For it was not only

terms of general utility which were transferred from one language to

another. A second and entirely different kind of borrowing now sprang

up—the literary kind. For two or three centuries Poetry and Romance

had been making rapid strides in Italy and France. The medieval habit

of writing only in Latin was dying out and Dante in Italy and Du

Bellay in France had both written treatises extolling the beauties

of their native tongues. French lyric poetry burst into its early

spring blossom among the troubadours, with their curious “Rose”

tradition, and for two hundred years the English poets imitated and

translated them as fast as ever they could. It was just at the end of

this long period of receptiveness that an event occurred which fixed

the ingredients of our language in a way they had never been fixed

before. The printing press was invented.

A modern poet, looking back on that time, can scarcely help envying

a writer like Chaucer with this enormous store of fresh, unspoilt

English words ready to his hand and an unlimited treasury across the

channel from which he could pick a brand-new one whenever he wanted

it.

Thou hast _deserved_ sorer for to smart,

But _pitee_ renneth soone in _gentil_ heart.

Here are three Norman-French borrowings, three fine English words

with the dew still on them, in two lines. It was the May morning of

English poesy.

For these were not “French” words. Right at the beginning of the

thirteenth century the English kings had abandoned Normandy, and

the English Normans, separated from their brethren, began to blend

more and more completely with their neighbours. In England French

remained at first the exclusive language of the Court and the law,

but, as the blood of the two peoples mingled, the Norman words which

were not dropped gradually altered their shapes, developing various

English characteristics, which not only differentiated from their

original French forms the words already in the language, but served

as permanent moulds into which new borrowings could be poured as

they were made. _Gentil_ changed to _gentle_, _pitee_ to _pitie_

or _pity_; and it was the same with innumerable others. Familiar

French-English terminations like _-tion_, _-ty_, _-ance_, _-age_,

_-able_, _-on_, were already nearly as common in Chaucer as they are

in the pages of an average modern writer. Begotten on Latin words

by generations of happy-go-lucky French and English lips, they were

fixed for ever by the printing press, and to-day, if we want to

borrow a word directly from Latin, we still give it a shape which

tacitly assumes that it came to us through the French language at

about that time. As Nature takes the human embryo through repetitions

of its discarded forms—fish, reptile, mammal, and vertebrate—before

bringing it to birth, so whoever introduced, let us say, the word

_heredity_ in the nineteenth century went through the instinctive

process of deriving from the Latin ‘hereditare’ an imaginary French

word, ‘heredité’, and converting the latter into _heredity_. It is

usually done when we wish to borrow a new word from Latin.

We have borrowed so many that it has lately been calculated that as

many as one-fourth of the words which we can find in a full-sized

Latin dictionary have found their way directly or indirectly into the

English vocabulary. A large number of these are Greek words which the

Romans had taken from them. Thus, taking into account those Greek

words which have come to us by other channels, Greek and Latin form

a very large and a very important part of the English language. All

through the history of our nation the two threads can be seen running

together. At first sight they appear to be so inextricably twisted

round one another as to form but one solid cord, but in reality it

is not so difficult to unravel them. The fact, for instance, that

_hospital_, _parliament_, and _prison_ are Latin, while _church_ and

_school_ have only come _through_ Latin from the Greek, is symbolical

of the two main divisions into which the classical part of our

language falls; for words which are genuinely of Latin origin—unless

they have been especially used at some time to translate the thoughts

of Greek writers—are very often concerned with the material outer

world, but words of Greek origin are more likely to be landmarks in

the world of thoughts and feelings.

Rome had spent herself in building up the external, visible framework

on which European civilization was to hang; and this fact, observable

in the word-relics of her military and political exploits, is

observable still more intimately in the character and history of that

great institution, our common law. Dignified vocables like _justice_,

_jurisdiction_, _jurisprudence_, speak for themselves the lasting

influence of the great Roman conception of ‘jus’—that abstract ideal

of the relation between one free human being and another in so far as

it is expressed in their actions. It is not that in any sense we took

over the Roman system; lawyers as well as poets are keen to insist

that we built up our own. But as freedom slowly broadened down from

precedent to precedent, there was always before the early English

kings and judges a sort of pattern—more than that, a vital principle

which had outlived one body and was waiting to be clothed with

another. It was the spirit of Roman law living on in her language.

A whole chapter might be written on the numerous English words whose

meanings can be traced back to the usages of Roman law. Take, for

instance, the word _person_. Derived, probably, from an Etruscan

word meaning an actor’s mask, _person_ was used by the Roman

legislators to describe a man’s personal rights and duties, which

were defined according to his position in life. Its present meaning

of an individual human being is largely due to the theologians who

hit upon it when they were looking for some term that would enable

them to assert the trinity of Godhead without admitting more than one

“substance”. When we remember for how long a time Latin continued

to be the universal written language of educated Europe,[14] the

language of history and philosophy as well as of theology, we can

imagine how the subtle flavour of this word’s former meaning clung

to its syllables through all their ecclesiastical soarings and was

ready, as soon as it came to English earth, to assist the brains

of our early lawyers in their task of imagining and thus creating

that fortunate legal abstraction, the British subject. ‘Obligatio’

in early Latin meant merely the physical binding of someone to

something; but in the Roman law of that date a defaulting debtor

was literally bound and delivered a prisoner into the hands of his

creditor. Thus, when a little later on this crude practice was

abandoned, ‘obligatio’ came to mean the duty to pay—a duty which the

creditor could now only enforce against his debtor’s property; and in

this way the general meaning of our word _obligation_ was developed.

Similarly, retaliation came to us from the Latin ‘Lex Talionis’,

the latter word being associated with ‘talis’ (such or same)

and implying a punishment that fits the crime; while _advocate_,

_capital_,[15] _chattel_,[15] _classical_, _contract_, _emancipate_,

_formula_, _heir_, _peculiar_, _prejudice_, _private_, _property_,

and _testament_ are a few more examples of the same process, chosen

from a great many.

Naturally many of these words came into the English language just

after the Conquest. The French, being so much nearer to Rome, both

in blood and in space, were a century or two ahead of the Teutons in

their civilization, and the Normans, after their long sojourn on the

Continent, brought with them to England quite a complicated system

of legislature and executive. Besides the Latin words to which we

have referred, there are a large number of legal terms which are not

so easily recognizable as Latin, having passed through Late Latin,

Low Latin, and Early French colloquial speech before they reached

our shores. In some cases they only developed a specifically legal

sense in Late Latin or even Early French. Yet because the whole

spirit of Roman civilization had been so impregnated with legalism,

the capacity for expressing exact legal ideas seems to have remained

latent, through all their curious vicissitudes, in such words as

_assize_ (literally ‘a sitting down’), _court_, _judge_, _jury_,

_county_, _district_, _manor_, _rent_,... Lawyers have gone on

employing a queer kind of Anglo-French, in some cases, right down to

the present day. The official use of “Law French” in legal documents

was only recently abandoned, and such technical terms as _champerty_,

_feme sole_, _tort_, ... survive to remind us of the days when an

English-speaking lawyer would naturally write such a sentence as:

Arsons de measons felonisement faits est felony per le comen ley.

(Arson of houses committed with felonious intent is felony by the

common law.)

_Convey_, _felon_, _forfeit_, _lease_, _mortgage_, _perjury_,

_plaintiff_, and _defendant_, on the other hand, have acquired a

somewhat more general use; and indeed this Frenchified jargon, partly

imported and partly built up by English lawyers as they went along,

has produced in later times several words which the language as a

whole would find it hard to do without. Among them are _assets_

(French ‘assez’), _burglar_, _cancel_, _conventional_, _disclaim_,

_flotsam_ and _jetsam_, _jettison_, _improve_, _matter-of-fact_,

_mere_, “the _premises_”, _realize_, _size_, and—in its modern

sense—_franchise_; while _culprit_, which was used in court down to

the eighteenth century, has an interesting history of its own. In

former days, when the prisoner had pleaded “Not Guilty”, the Clerk of

the Crown would open proceedings by saying “Culpable: prest”, meaning

that the prisoner _is_ “guilty”, and I am “ready” to prove it. In the

official records of the case this formula was abbreviated, first to

‘cul-prest’ and afterwards to ‘cul-prit’, until later clerks formed

the habit of running the two words together.

Looking at such words as _cancel_, _improve_, _realize_, and _size_,

we can feel the force of Professor Maitland’s remark that in the

Middle Ages “Law was the point where life and logic met”. It served

another purpose besides that of establishing a secure polity; for

through it some of the new Latin words which were gradually being

created by its own, or translated from Greek, thought by the abstruse

scholastic philosophy of the day found their way into the vocabulary

of the people. Even the old word _cause_ seems to have reached us

by way of the law courts. They were thus the pipe through which

a little of that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every

great civilization, could flow into the common consciousness of the

many, and in their terminology we can see most clearly an example of

that never-pausing process by which the speculative metaphysics of

yesterday are transformed into the “common sense” of to-day.

CHAPTER IV

MODERN ENGLAND

_Sport._ _Caddie._ _Cannibal._ _Tory._ _Finance._

The English language has been facetiously described as “French badly

pronounced”. At the death of Chaucer, and for nearly a hundred years

afterwards, this description would have been very nearly a true one.

Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have

been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may

assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’

War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for

cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which

have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel

something of the way in which the genius of the English language

was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right

to a separate personality. At the Reformation, when England finally

shook herself free from the dangerous embraces of the Holy Roman

Empire, the period of excessive French influence came to an end. The

general effect of Protestantism on our language, subtle and profound

as it has been, will be dealt with later, but the Reformation

cannot be passed over here without recording one instance in which

a word—perhaps a misunderstood word—has had extraordinarily lasting

results. It is the confusion of the English _Sunday_ with the Jewish

_Sabbath_[16] and the consequent fastening upon that day of rest of

many of the sombre inhibitions entailed by Sabbatic Law.

There is, however, another historical event which had a far more

universal and direct bearing on English words, and that is the

Revival of Learning. The new intercourse with the ancient literatures

of Greece and Rome naturally brought into English a positive stream

of “literary borrowings”. At first these were mostly Latin words. If

we try to imagine an English from which such words as _accommodate_,

_capable_, _capacious_, _compute_, _corroborate_, _distinguish_,

_efficacy_, _estimate_, _experiment_, _insinuate_, _investigate_,

and a host of others equally common are as yet absent, we may partly

realize what an important part was played by the Renaissance in

producing the language in which we speak and think. There is indeed

good evidence that the stream of new words flowed too fast at this

time for ordinary people to keep up with it. For instance, many of

the Latin words that were borrowed have since fallen out of use.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, who is

not a fantastic writer, was using such unfamiliar expressions as

_contentation_, _contristation_, _digladiation_, _morigeration_,

_redargution_, _ventosity_, ... and somewhat before this, when

the Classical influx was at its height, it was conspicuous enough

to call forth several amusing parodies. We remember Shakespeare’s

Holofernes in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and Sir Thomas Wilson includes

in his _Arte of Rhetorike_ a fictitious letter applying for a church

benefice, in which he satirizes as follows the Klondyke rush after

fashionable Latinity:

Pondering, expending, and revoluting with myself, your ingent

affability, and ingenious capacity for mundane affairs: I cannot

but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other.

For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and

domestical superiority, if the fecundity of your ingeny had not

been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?...

Now this outcrop of linguistic parody is significant for other

reasons too. It reminds us that the English language had at last

become “self-conscious”. In former times the struggle between

different ways of saying the same thing, between the old and the new,

the native and the foreign, had generally worked itself out under the

surface, amid the unconscious preferences of the mass of the people.

Thus, the old English translators who rendered the Latin ‘exodus’

as _outfaring_ and ‘discipulus’ (disciple) as _learning-boy_, were

not consciously trying to keep the Latin words out; nor did the

fourteenth-century author of a book, which he called the _Againbite

of Inwit_, have any academic horror, as far as we know, of the new

Latin borrowings _remorse_ and _conscience_, with one of which, at

least, he must have been familiar. The same may be said of Wyclif,

who translated ‘resurrectio’ _againrising_ and ‘immortalitas’

_undeadliness_. These old writers anglicized because it came natural

to them to anglicize, just as the next generation began to prefer the

Latin words. But it was not so in Italy, nor in France, in both of

which countries poets had long ago written careful treatises on the

beloved medium of their art, their native language. And now, after

the Revival of Learning, in England, too, scholars and literary men

began to notice such things. Counterbalancing the enthusiasm for

Latin and Greek, there arose a “Purist” movement of just the kind

which has had such a powerful effect on the development of modern

German. People tried to expel all “foreign” words from the language;

Sir John Cheke began a translation of the New Testament in which

none but native words were to be used; and we find in his _Matthew_

_moond_ for _lunatic_, _hundreder_ for _centurion_, _frosent_

(from-sent) for _apostle_, _crossed_ for _crucified_, _freshman_ for

_proselyte_, and many other equally odd-sounding concoctions. To look

back in this way on the uncertainty and chaos which reigned at the

beginning of the seventeenth century is to intensify our admiration

for the scholarship and poetic taste displayed by the devout

compilers of the Authorised Version.

If we were to look for another symptom of this sometimes pedantic

self-consciousness, we could find it in the modern way of spelling

_debt_ and _doubt_. The old orthography, _det_ and _dout_, is a

perfectly correct English rendering of the French words from which

they are taken, but the scholars of the Renaissance, anxious to

show the ultimate derivation from the Latin stems ‘deb’ and ‘dub’,

inserted an entirely unnecessary “b” into the words, and there it

has stayed ever since. Sometimes, too, these Elizabethan dons made

learned howlers, as in the now abandoned spelling _abhominable_,

which arose from a quite false idea that that adjective is derived

from the Latin ‘ab’ (from) and ‘homo’ (man).

One can also get a curiously vivid sense of the way in which new

Latin words had been streaming into the language during the sixteenth

century from Bacon’s literary style. He is so fond of placing a

Latin and an English word side by side, in order to express what

is virtually a single idea, that two consecutive pages of the

_Advancement of Learning_ supply no less than ten examples of this

habit. Among them are _immoderate and overweening_, _action and

business_, _charge and accusation_, _eloquence and speech_. To

understand the exact effect which this kind of writing must have had

on the ears of his contemporaries we must try and realize the faintly

novel and difficult sound with which many of these Latin syllables

would still be ringing. No such effort is required, however, to

comprehend the way in which this deliberate duplication must have

helped to familiarize English people with the sound and meaning of

the new words.

Very soon the Greek language too began to be drawn upon, though never

to quite the same extent as Latin. Thus, English of the fifteenth

century must also be thought of as a language in which hundreds of

familiar words like _apology_, _apostrophe_, _bucolic_, _climax_,

_drama_, _emphasis_, _encyclopedia_, _epidemic_, _epilogue_,

_episode_, _hypothesis_, _hysterical_, _paragraph_, _parallel_,

_paraphrase_, _physical_, do not yet exist, for these are all

examples of words which came in with the Renaissance.[17] The number

of technical terms of art and literature is particularly noticeable,

and it was now that the foundations were laid of that almost

automatic system whereby a new Greek-English word is coined to mark

each advance that is made in science, and especially in mechanical

science. _Automatic_ is itself an example, and it is hardly necessary

to add _chronometer_, _dynamo_, _magneto_, _metronome_, _telescope_,

_theodolite_, _thermometer_,...

But though the stern lovers of their native tongue were thus

hopelessly outclassed, yet the mere existence of the conservative

feeling which they tried to voice must have acted as a useful

brake on the too indiscriminate adoption of new words. The English

language was, in fact, settling down. It was in the future to receive

countless additions—never to change its very essence as it had done

in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And thus, as we look on

towards the modern period, we find only fewer and more scattered

historical vestiges. But if we can no longer expect etymology to tell

us anything approaching to a complete and coherent tale, it will

nevertheless still light up for us from different angles different

little portions of that dark, mysterious mass, the past.

By the sixteenth century, for example, that peculiarly English

characteristic, the love of sport, had already begun to make its mark

on the language. _Sport_ itself is an abbreviation of ‘disport’, a

French word meaning ‘to carry oneself in a different direction from

that of one’s ordinary business’. It is interesting to observe how

both the form and meaning of the English word have diverged from

their origin, and how they have since been reborrowed into French

and most of the other languages of Europe. Italian tailors will

even use the vocable to describe a roll of loud check cloth! Of the

older sports, hawking has given us _allure_, _haggard_, _rebate_,

and _reclaim_. The Latin ‘reclamare’ had meant ‘to cry out against’

or ‘to contradict’; it was only in hawking that it acquired its

present sense of ‘calling back’ from the cries that were uttered to

summon the hawk back to the wrist. _Allure_ is from the old _lure_,

an apparatus for recalling the birds, and _haggard_ is a word of

obscure etymology which was used of a wild hawk. _Forte_ and _foible_

are old fencing terms, describing the strong and weak (_feeble_)

points of a sword. _Couple_, _muse_, _relay_, _retrieve_ (French

‘retrouver’), _run riot_, _ruse_, _sagacious_, _tryst_, and _worry_

we owe to hunting, as also the development of the Latin ‘sentire’

into the English word _scent_. Of these the most interesting are

perhaps _muse_, which is supposed to be derived from the same word

as _muzzle_, and _ruse_, another form of _rush_. The hounds were

said to ‘muzzle’ when they sniffed the air in doubt about the scent,

and a _ruse_ was a doubling of the hunted animal on its own tracks.

_Rove_ (but not _rover_) is from archery, meaning in the first place

‘to shoot arrows at an arbitrarily selected target’. _Bias_, _bowl

over_, and _rub_ in the phrase ‘there’s the rub’ are from bowls,

_crestfallen_ and _white feather_ from cockfighting, and _chess_,

_check_, _checkmate_, _cheque_, and _chequer_ come to us through the

Arabian from Persian, the central word being a corruption of the

Persian ‘Shah mat’, meaning ‘The Shah (the King) is dead’. It is not

so generally known that all the varied meanings of these words are

metaphors taken either from the game or from the board on which it is

played.

The more modern sports do not yet seem to have provided us with many

new words, but there is a promising tendency to transmute some of

their technical terms into lively idiom. In this way we can use, for

example, to _sprint_, to _put on a spurt_, the _last lap_, _clean

bowled_, to _take his middle stump_, to _skate on thin ice_, to _kick

off_, to _tee off_, _one up_,...; and modern games have also been

instrumental in preserving from oblivion the odd old French word

_bisque_, of unknown origin, which came over to England with the

now nearly obsolete game of tennis, as well as the French-Scottish

_caddie_.

When we hear a golfer use this word, when we hear a Scotch person

ask for an _aschet_, instead of a dish, or see the queer expression

_petticoat-tales_ on a tin of Edinburgh shortbread, we are taken back

to the close connection between the French and Scottish Courts which

existed in the days of Mary Stuart. For _caddie_ is a corruption

of the French “cadet” (younger son), whence also modern English

_cad_ and _cadet_; _aschet_ is a form of the French ‘assiette’; and

_petticoat-tales_ a corruption of ‘petits gateaux’ (little cakes).

Another phenomenon of history which is very faithfully preserved in

the English language is our long-standing and not always creditable

nautical relations with the Dutch. From the fourteenth to the

seventeenth century Dutch sea words continued to trickle into the

language, the fourteenth seeing the arrival of _bowsprit_ and

_skipper_, the fifteenth of _freight_, _hoy_, _keel_, _lighter_,

_pink_, _pump_, _scout_, _marline_, and _buoy_, the sixteenth of

_aloof_, _belay_, _dock_, _mesh_, _reef_, _rover_, and _flyboat_,

while the seventeenth century, when Van Tromp nailed his broom

to the mast, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, and William

of Orange sat upon the English throne, gave us _avast_, _bow_,

_boom_, _cruise_, _cruiser_, _gybe_, and _keelhaul_. Besides these

maritime words English possesses certain military memories of the

Dutch. _Freebooter_ goes back to the war with Spain in the reign

of Elizabeth, and _cashier_, _domineer_, _drill_, _furlough_,

and _onslaught_ are also among the words brought back from the

Low Countries by English soldiers. A particularly freakish Dutch

borrowing is the apparently English _forlorn hope_, which is in

reality a popular corruption of the Flemish ‘verloren hoop’, a phrase

that has nothing to do with hope and means a ‘lost expedition’.

The Spanish words in the English language, like the Dutch, are few in

number, but often full of history. Those which came originally from

Arabic—the most interesting of all—will be dealt with in another

chapter. We received them for the most part through the French.

_Alligator_,[18] _chocolate_, _cocoa_, and _tomato_, which come

through Spanish from Mexican, commemorate the Spanish conquest of

Mexico, and the poetic _breeze_ is a sixteenth-century adaptation

of the Spanish ‘briza’, a name for the north-east trade wind in the

Spanish Main. Of the other words which come to us through Spanish

_cannibal_, _hammock_, _hurricane_, _maize_, and _savannah_ are

Caribbean, while _canoe_, _potato_, and _tobacco_ are South American.

_Cannibal_, like the names _West Indies_ and _Indian_ (meaning

‘aboriginal inhabitant of America’), hides a more detailed history.

It was brought back by Christopher Columbus, who believed, when

he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, that he had sailed

right round the world, back to the east coast of India. The name

‘Caniba’—a variant of ‘Carib’ or ‘Caribes’—he took as a proof that

the inhabitants were subjects of the Grand Khan of Tartary.

We can see, then, how the new impulse towards travel and exploration

which followed the Renaissance left behind, when it ebbed, many

exotic and exotic-sounding words whose etymologies can tell us not a

little of the nationality of those adventurous mariners who led the

way to the East and to the new world. The Spaniards were not the only

explorers. The Indian words _coolie_ and _curry_ come to us through

Portuguese; _banana_ and _negro_ reached us from Africa, possibly

by the same route; and _cocoanut_ is from the Portuguese ‘coco’, a

bugbear or bogy—alluding to the nut’s monkey-like face. _Drub_—once

used only of the bastinado—is thought to be an Arabic word brought

back by suffering Christians from the Barbary States. _Amuck_,

_bamboo_, and _cockatoo_, come from Malayan through Portuguese,

and _caddy_ (the receptacle) from Malayan direct. _Moccasin_,

_tomahawk_, and _hickory_ are among the words sent back to us by

the seventeenth-century English settlers in North America. _Taboo_,

_tattoo_, and _kangaroo_ came home with Captain Cook from the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the civil and political history of England has been

growing steadily. _Political_, _politics_, _politician_, and

_parliamentary_ first appear in the sixteenth century, and _Cabinet

Council_ seems to have been introduced at the accession of Charles

I. _Cabal_, one of the few Hebrew words in the English language,

probably owes its familiarity to two historical events. It was

applied in Charles II’s reign to a small committee of the Privy

Council, also known as the “Committee for Foreign Affairs”, which

afterwards became the Cabinet; moreover, a little later on it

happened that the names of the five Ministers who signed the Treaty

of Alliance with France against Holland were Clifford, Arlington,

Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Their initials thus arranged

spell the word _cabal_, which was humorously used to describe them.

Another far commoner expression which dates back to the Civil War is

the phrase ‘the _army_.’ It reminds us that we had no standing army

until after the foundation of the Parliamentary Forces. _Cavalier_

and _Roundhead_ are words which carry their history, so to speak,

on their sleeves. They were both coined as terms of abuse, and

among other uncivil relics of the Civil War which have found a more

extended application, _fanatic_ and _Puritan_ were invented by the

Royalists and _malignant_ by the Roundheads. _Independent_ and

_independence_ are also Puritan words, and the useful _demagogue_

first appeared in the _Eikon Basilike_, the famous pamphlet in

defence of the Crown, which Milton answered with his _Eikonoklastes_.

The expression _to send to Coventry_ is probably a gift from the

rebellious citizens of Birmingham, who, according to Clarendon,

frequently “rose upon small parties of the King’s” and either

killed them or sent them, as prisoners, to Coventry, which was a

Parliamentary stronghold.

Spite, which always loves a rich vocabulary, is also the father of

those venerable labels _tory_ and _whig_. The old Celtic word _tory_

was first applied in the seventeenth century to the unfortunate Irish

Catholics, dispossessed by Cromwell, who became savage outlaws living

chiefly upon plunder; after that it was used for some time of bandits

in general, and at the close of James II’s reign the “Exclusioners”

found it a conveniently offensive nickname for those who favoured

the succession of the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York. Thus,

when William of Orange finally succeeded in reaching the throne, it

became the approved name of one of the two great political parties

in Great Britain. _Whig_ is a shortened form of _whiggamore_, a

name given to certain Scotchmen from the word _whiggam_, which they

used in driving their horses. It was first used of the rebellious

Scottish Covenanters who marched to Edinburgh in 1648; then of

the Exclusioners, who were opposed to the accession of James; and

finally, from 1689 onwards, of the other great political party or one

of its adherents.

That the seventeenth century saw the true genesis of many of our

commercial and financial institutions is suggested by the fact

that their names first appear at this time. Such are _capital_,

which is a doublet of _cattle_—the very oldest Aryan form of

wealth[19]—_commercial_, _discount_, _dividend_, _insurance_,

_investment_, and lastly the modern meaning of _bank_, which, like

the names of so many protective and responsible institutions—the

_Assizes_, the _Bench_, the _Consulate_, the _Council_, the _Chair_

at a public meeting, a _Seat_ in Parliament, and the _Throne_—is

based etymologically on what we may call one of the oldest and safest

of human occupations. The old Teutonic word which subsequently

became modern English _bench_ was adopted into Italian, probably

from the Teutonic Lombards of northern Italy, in the form ‘banco’.

It soon acquired the special sense of a moneychanger’s ‘bench’ or

table and found its way, together with the object it represents,

into most of the countries of Europe. Thus, like the name _Lombard

Street_, the little word carries us back with it to the origin of

banking in northern Italy and to Edward I’s substitution of Italian

_bankers_ for Jewish moneylenders. _Bankruptcy_, _currency_, and

_remittance_ appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century,

and in the second _bonus_, _capitalist_, _consols_, and _finance_.

The history of _finance_ is again interesting. The word goes right

back to the Latin ‘finis’ (end). When it first appeared in English,

it had the sense of a ‘fine’ or forfeit, but its modern significance

was developed in eighteenth-century France among the tax-farmers

or ‘financiers’, as they were called, to whom the king delegated

the duty of collecting his taxes. As time went on, these shrewd

individuals amalgamated into a sort of limited company, which, by a

judicious application of the principles of usury, gradually gained

more and more control over the revenue, until “toutes les finances

du royaume”, as Voltaire says, “dépendirent d’une compagnie de

commerce”. In England the phrase _Bank of England_ first appears in

1694, describing a body of individuals associated for the purpose of

lending money to the Government; and about thirty years later this

still (1925) outstanding loan began to be known as the _National

Debt_.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century commercial and financial

considerations seem to have played a steadily increasing part in

determining the nation’s policy. Horace Walpole is the first person

known to have used _speculation_ in the sense of buying and selling

stocks and shares; and _budget_ (a little bag or pocket) may owe

its modern political meaning to a pamphlet sarcastically entitled

_The Budget Opened_, in which his brother Robert’s financial policy

received some severe handling. _Prime Minister_ also takes us back to

Sir Robert Walpole, to whom it was applied with derisive innuendo,

for it had in those days more the sense of ‘Grand Vizier’ or despot’s

tool. In the old-fashioned _nabob_, as a synonym for ‘plutocrat’, we

have a memory of the latter days of the East India Company when the

squandering of large sums of money in London often rounded off a life

of empire-building in Bombay or Calcutta. The dictionary suggests,

however, that later generations of Anglo-Indians preferred to bring

back with them less questionable impedimenta, such as _pyjamas_ and

_shampoo_.

The phrase, the _Rights of Man_, takes us back to the American

Declaration of Independence. The borrowing of _aristocrat_ and

_democrat_ from French, the French word _guillotine_, and the

appearance in English of _revolutionize_ and _terrorize_ are enduring

relics of the French Revolution, and the word _sectional_, which came

in in the nineteenth century, is closely bound up with the history

of France, for it is derived (together with the geographical use of

_section_) from the division of France into electoral sections under

the Directory. The military meaning of _conscription_ goes back to

the France of the same period. To the campaigns in the Soudan we owe

_zareeba_, and to the Boer War the Dutch words _kopje_ and _spoor_.

It is too early yet to say what verbal legacy the European War has

left us, but the anonymous _stunt_ and _gadget_ (small mechanical

contrivance), and the French _camouflage_ seem to have taken a fairly

firm hold, while the expressions _eyewash_, to _scrounge_ (meaning

to ‘steal’), to _get the wind up_, to _go west_, and possibly to

_swing the lead_ (to be idle at somebody else’s expense), are idioms

which show no signs of departing from us yet. President Wilson’s

_self-determination_ has probably been added to half the languages of

the world.

A list of new words like _anaesthetic_, _galvanometer_, _morse_,

_railroad_, _telephone_, _turbine_, ... which appeared in the

nineteenth century, would tell a full and fairly accurate story of

its extraordinarily sudden mechanical and scientific development, but

such a list has yet to be compiled. More interesting in many ways

are the appearance of new metaphors and idioms, such as to _peter

out_, to _pan out_ (from mining), to _blow off_ or _get up steam_,

and to _go off the rails_ from the steam engine, and many electrical

metaphors such as those mentioned in Chapter I. For new ways of doing

are bound up with new ways of knowing and thinking, and the true

story of the nineteenth century, as of every other century, is the

story of its mental and emotional outlook. To this long and intricate

story the rest of this book is devoted, but before passing on to it

a few aspects of our subject, with which there is not space to deal

fully, may perhaps be mentioned.

The light thrown by certain words on the social history of England,

as opposed to her political history, is a clear and often a new one.

To look up in the _Oxford Dictionary_ such words as _blackguard_,

_carol_, _club_, _morris_, _teetotal_, or a thousand others which

seem to have no particular historical significance, and to read

through the many illustrative quotations, is to take a wonderfully

easy and intimate peep into the past; while the dates at which

such words as _magazine_, _news-letter_, _newspaper_, _novelist_,

_press_, or again, _callers_, _small talk_, _tea-party_, _snob_,

_antimacassar_, ... appeared, together with quotations showing the

particular shades of meaning with which they have been used, are in

themselves a little history of the English people. What could be more

suggestive, for instance, than the fact that the adjective _improper_

was first applied to human beings in the early fifties?

Words which are derived from the names of real individuals,

as _bowdlerize_, _boycott_, _burke_, _derrick_, _dunce_,[20]

_galvanize_, _mesmerism_, _morse_, _sandwich_, _tawdry_, or

fictitious ones, as _gamp_, _knickerbocker_, _lilliputian_,

_quixotic_, _pamphlet_, _pickwickian_, are sometimes, but not always

historically interesting. Again, the place-names of England, whether

of country villages or London streets, are heavily loaded with the

past, but the subject is such a vast and disconnected one that it

would require a volume to itself.

The characteristics of nations, as of races, are fairly accurately

reflected linguistically in the metaphors and idioms they choose, in

their tricks of grammar, in their various ways of forming new words.

It is, for obvious reasons, easier to apply this principle to other

nations than to one’s own; nevertheless there are a few such points

which English people can observe even in the English language. The

number of words and expressions drawn from sport is a phenomenon

which has already been touched upon, and it is at any rate a question

whether humour has not played a larger part in the creation of

English and American words than in those of other languages. The

French ‘tête’[21] is humorous in origin, and there must be other

French and Latin-French words with a similar history, but English has

really quite a number of words in which humour has taken a hand. One

way in which this comes about is the process known as back-formation.

We realize the humorous intention when somebody invents from the noun

_swashbuckler_ a verb to _swashbuckle_, or to _buttle_ and _cuttle_

from _butler_ and _cutler_, but it is not so well known that the same

process (probably with the same humorous intent behind it) gave us

such sober words as _burgle_, _sidle_, _edit_, _grovel_, _beg_, and

_greed_. One of the most interesting back-formations is the verb to

_maffick_, formed from the supposed present participle _mafficking_,

which was coined to describe the festivities that greeted the arrival

in London of the news of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War.

The well-known humorous device of understatement is responsible for

the modern meaning of _hit_ and most of its synonyms. The notion

of striking was once conveyed by the verb to _slay_; by Tudor

times, however, _smite_, which in Old English meant to ‘smear’ or

‘rub over’, had become the commoner word. _Strike_ itself in Old

English meant ‘to stroke’ or ‘to rub gently’, and _hit_, which is

now universal in serious colloquial speech, meant to ‘meet with’ or

‘light upon’—‘not to miss’, in fact; just as to _win_ (‘not to lose’)

something means, or recently meant, in the British Army, to _steal_

it. _Blow_ and _thrash_ are both sly agricultural metaphors, and the

present popularity of such slang phrases as _wipe_, meaning a blow,

and to _wipe out_, suggests that this pleasing and rather simple form

of humour is still active in English word-formation.

But the number of these little etymological sidetracks is almost

infinite. We might, for instance, ask ourselves whether the

colloquial use of _chap_ for ‘individual’ (from the Old English

‘cheapen’ to ‘buy’, cognate with _chapman_, _cheap_, _Cheapside_,

...) is really the unconscious self-expression of a nation of

shopkeepers, or whether it is purely accidental; in which connection

we should have to notice the modern tendency to renew a faded

metaphor by substituting the word _merchant_, and so on. But the

truly scientific way of approaching this part of our subject is to

study the various English words which have been adopted by foreign

nations, and the meanings they have developed there.

These were few enough up to the end of the seventeenth century, but

from then on their number and importance increased; and we cannot

help being interested in them, whether on the one hand the foreigner

has merely employed them in despair of finding any word in his own

language adequate to describe the object or idiosyncrasy in question,

or whether his adoption of them implies that he has also borrowed the

things of which they are the names. In the first of these classes

we should probably put _cant_, _comfort_, _gentleman_, _humbug_,

_humour_, _respectability_, _romantic_, _sentimental_, _snobbism_,

_spleen_,...; in the second, _ale_, _beefsteak_, _gin_, _grog_,

_mackintosh_, _pudding_, _riding-coat_ (redingote), _roast-beef_,

_rum_, _sport_, _sportsman_, _waterproof_, _whisky_, and various

technical terms of sport such as _box_, _Derby_, _handicap_,

_jockey_,...

To the second group also would belong our most important

contributions to foreign languages—the political words. When we

find _bill_, _budget_, _committee_, _jury_, _lock-out_, _meeting_,

_pamphlet_, _speech_, _strike_, _trade-union_, ... on the Continent,

and realize that the modern meanings of European words such as

_constitution_, _represent_, _vote_, or of Old French words like

_address_, _majority_, _minority_, _motion_, _parliament_, ...

are derived from English, we feel ourselves in the presence, not

so much of something peculiarly English as of something universal

which England has been the means of bringing to earth. That vast

theoretical terms like _liberty_, _equality_, and _fraternity_

should be borrowed by England from France in return for _committee_,

_jury_, _meeting_, ... that the French _idéalogue_ and _doctrinaire_

should be bartered for _utilitarian_ and _experimental_—these

facts have been taken to indicate a certain division of function

in the economy of European social evolution, the Frenchman

producing the abstract moral ideals and the Englishman attempting

to clothe them with reality. And it may be that in such important

loan-words as _club_ and _freemason_ and _sport_, but, above all, in

_committee_—that sensitive instrument for maintaining the balance as

between individual and associative personality—we can perceive the

Englishman’s secret: his power of voluntary co-operation, and his

innate understanding of the give-and-take it requires.

While we can hardly expect to see an undistorted reflection of

ourselves in the first group of words mentioned above, yet the

grotesque meanings which many of them have acquired abroad are

interesting partly for that very reason. They enable us, if studied

carefully, to see ourselves not only as others see us, but as others

saw us. And from both groups together we can re-create, as Mr.

Pearsall Smith has pointed out, something of the curious England

which was ‘discovered’ about the middle of the eighteenth century

by the rest of Europe, can rejoice with Voltaire in her atmosphere

of religious toleration and personal liberty, and admire with

Montesquieu her haphazard constitution; we can take back to our

native France or Germany romantic and sentimental memories of _le

‘lovely moon’ des Anglois_, or, better still, delving farther into

the past, we can stride across the Italian stage in our top boots and

our _redingote_, a moody and spleenful English _milord_, liable to

commit suicide at any moment.

Important as they are, however, we must not be misled by this little

group of words into supposing that English is a language which has

given away much. On the contrary, surveying it as a whole, we are

struck, above all, by the ease with which it has itself appropriated

the linguistic products of others. Like Mr. Shaw’s Shakespeare,

its genius seems to have lain not so much in originality as in the

snapping up of unconsidered trifles; and where it has excelled all

the other languages of Europe, possibly of the world, is in the grace

with which it has hitherto digested these particles of foreign matter

and turned them into its own life’s blood. Historically, the English

language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and

highly sensitive creature.

PART II

THE WESTERN OUTLOOK