Amenities of Literature Part 12

[19] Le Comte de Neufchateau, "Essay on French Literature," prefixed to the late edition of Pascal's works.

[20] "Edinburgh Review," Oct., 1839.

[21] See "Quarterly Rev.," lix. 34.--The critic is deeply imbued with his delight of Saxon-English. "The first bursts in our literature (probably the n.o.blest are meant) are in almost pure Saxon." The critic particularly appeals to Milton for two instances; yet surely the Greekised, the Latinised, and even the Italianised Milton will not serve to a.s.sert the pre-eminence of our venerable dialect. "A country congregation" is its more certain test; where the language of the people is the only language required. Cobbett's writings throughout are Saxon-English. Coleridge considered Asgill and De Foe the most idiomatic writers.

VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

The vicissitudes of the English language are more evident than its origin. In the history of a language we are perpetually reminded, by the remonstrances of the critics, of the corruptions of its purity, the perils of innovation, and the obtrusion of neologisms, while we find these same critics fastidiously rejecting what they deem the antiquated and the obsolete; many causes are constantly operating these changes of language. The style of one age ceases to be that of another; new modifications of thought create new modes of expression; and as knowledge enlarges its sphere, and society changes its manners, novel objects imperiously demand adequate terms.

Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by foreign neologisms.

For more than five centuries was the Saxon language the language of England; the awful revolution of 1066 produced novelties of all kinds, but none greater than the entire change in our Saxon language, which, however, our Norman masters could never eradicate from among the people.

During three centuries most of our English writers composed in French.

When Greek was first studied in the reign of Henry the Seventh, it planted many a h.e.l.lenism in our English; the translation of the Scriptures in that of Edward the Sixth, while it transmitted many latinisms, at the same time revived the simplicity of the Saxon-English, which seemed to bear a sort of evidence that a primitive language was most suitable for primitive Christianity in contrast with the pompous corruptions of Rome.

Under Elizabeth favourite phrases were insinuated into the dialect by over-refined travellers, who spoke "minionlike," while the revolution of the Netherlands incorporated among us many a rough but vigorous inmate. In the days of James and Charles, the long residence of the Spanish Gondomar at our court, and the romantic pilgrimage of love to Madrid, and the political ties which bound the two nations, framed the style of courtesy, as well as set the fas.h.i.+ons.

The puritanic commonwealth under Cromwell sunk down the language to its basest uses. Stripped to nakedness, the jargon of the market and the shop hid itself under the gibberish of its cant. Writers then abounded equally illiterate and fanatical. Perhaps we owe to these mean scribblers the scorn and pride with which Milton constructed on the Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman.

Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, dest.i.tute of every sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished Duke of Weimar at St. James's, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national events.

The history of the vernacular language of other European nations discovers the same mutability, though not always produced by those great public incidents which may have been peculiar to ourselves. In Spain, however, we find that the possession of that land by the Moors has left in the Castilian language a whole dictionary of Arabic words which now mingle with the vernacular idiom, and for ever shall bear witness of the triumphs of their ancient masters. But in the history of a vernacular language it may also happen that the first writers, combining in a singleness of taste, may construct a particular style. The earliest writers of France had modelled their taste by the Greek; Jodelle, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and others, imbued with Attic literature, Greekised the French idiom, by their compounds, their novel terms, and their sonorous periphrases. The Court and the ladies were adopting this new style, and, as usual, the unskilful were diverging into the most ridiculous affectations. But it was possible that the French language might have acquired a concision and vigour of which it is now dest.i.tute, for those early writers threw out a more original force than their tame successors. The artificial delicacy of the French critics has condemned these attempts as barbarisms; but to have transplanted these atticisms into the native soil, partook more of boldness than of barbarism. The attempt failed, if it could ever have succeeded, by the civil wars which soon drew off the minds of men from the placable innovators of language.

The French, though not an insular people, have been subject to rapid revolutions in their language. The ancient Gaulish-French has long been as unintelligible to a modern Frenchman as our Saxon is to us; even those numerous poets of France who at a later period composed in their _langue Romane_, are strewed in the fields of their poesy only as carca.s.ses, which no miracle of antiquarian lore shall ever resuscitate.

Compare the style of one writer with another only two centuries later, or Rabelais with Voltaire! The age of Louis XIV. effected the most rapid change in the vernacular style, insomuch that the diction of the writers of the preceding reign of Louis XIII. had fallen obsolete in the short s.p.a.ce of half a century. And yet the chastened style of the age of Louis XIV., with its cold imitation of cla.s.sical antiquity, was to receive a higher polish from the hand of a Pascal, a novel brilliancy from the touch of a Montesquieu, and a more numerous prose from the impa.s.sioned Rousseau. The age of erudition and taste was to be succeeded by the more energetic age of genius and philosophy. An anecdote recorded of Vaugelas may possibly be true, and is a remarkable evidence of this perpetual mobility of style. This writer lived between 1585 and 1650, and during thirty years had been occupied, _more suo_, on a translation of Quintus Curtius. It was during this protracted period that the French style was pa.s.sing through its rapid transitions. So many phrases had fallen superannuated, that this martyr to the purity of his diction was compelled to re-write the former part of his version to modernise it with his later improved composition. The learned Menage lived to be old enough to have caught alarm at this vicissitude of taste, and did not scruple to avow that no work could last which was not composed in Latin.

The languages of highly cultivated nations are more subject to this innovation and variableness than the language of a people whose native penury receives but rare accessions. Hence the ancient and continued complaints through all the generations of critics, from the days of Julius Caesar and Quintilian to those in which we are now writing.[1] The same hostility against novelty in words or in style is invariably proclaimed. The captiousness of criticism has usually referred to the style of the preceding authors as a standard from which the prevalent style of its contemporaries has erringly diverged. The preceptors of genius at all times seem to have been insensible to the natural progress of language, resisting new qualities of style and new forms of expression; in reality, this was inferring, that a perfect language exists, and that a creative genius must be trammelled by their limited and arbitrary systems. This prejudice of the venerable brotherhood may, I think, be traced to its source. Every age advantageously compares itself with its predecessor, for it has made some advances, and rarely suspects that the same triumph is reserved for its successor; but besides this illusion in regard to the style, which, like the manners of the time, is pa.s.sing away, the veteran critic has long been a practised master, and in the daring and dubious novelties which time has not consecrated, he must descend to a new pupilage; but his rigid habits are no longer flexible; and for the matured arbiter of literature who tastes "the bitterness of novelty," what remains but an invective against the minting of new words, and the versatility of new tastes?

The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from the principle that a modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are emphatically called "the dead languages," in which every deviation unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. But the truth is, that every modern language has always existed in fluctuation and change. The people themselves, indeed, are no innovators; their very phrases are traditional. Popular language can only convey the single uncompounded notions of the people; it is the style of facts; and they are intelligible to one another by the shortest means. Their Saxon-English is nearly monosyllabic, and their phraseology curt. Hence we find that the language of the mob in the year 1382 is precisely the natural style of the mob of this day.[2] But this popular style can never be set up as the standard of genius, which is mutable with its age, creating faculties and embodying thoughts which do not enter into the experience of the people, and therefore cannot exercise their understandings.

A series of facts will ill.u.s.trate our principle, that the language of every literary people exists in a fluctuating condition, and that its vaunted purity and its continued stability are chimerical notions.

In this history of the vicissitudes of the English language, we may commence with our remote ancestors the Anglo-Saxons. When their studies and their language received a literary character, they coveted great pomposity in their style. They interlarded their staves with Latin words; and, even in the reign of the Confessor, the French language was fas.h.i.+onable. "The affectation of the Anglo-Saxon literati was evidently tending to adulterate their language; and even if the Conquest had not taken place, the purity of the English language would have been speedily destroyed by the admixture of a foreign vocabulary."[3] Thus early were we perilling our purity!

In 1387, John de Trevisa, translating the Latin Polychronicon of Higden, tells us he avoids what he calls "the old and ancient English." A century afterwards, Caxton, printing this translation of Trevisa, had to re-write it, to change the "rude and old English, that is, to wit, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood." It might have startled Master Caxton to have suspected that he might be to us what Trevisa was to him, as it had equally amazed Trevisa, when he discovered archaisms which had contracted the rust of time, to have imagined that his fresher English were to be archaisms to his printer in the succeeding century.

At the period at which our present vernacular literature opened on us, Eliot, More, and Ascham maintained great simplicity of thought and idiom; yet even at this period, about 1550, the language seemed in imminent danger; it raised the tone of our primitive critics, and the terrors of neologism took all frightful shapes to their eyes!

A refined critic of our language then was the learned Sir JOHN CHEKE, who at this early period considered that the English language was capable of preserving the utmost purity of style, and he was jealously awake to its slightest violations. A friend of his, Sir THOMAS HOBY, a courtly translator of the "Courtier of Castiglione," had solicited his critical opinion. The learned Cheke, equally friendly and critical, insinuated his abhorrence of "an unknown word," and apologises for his corrections, lest he should be accounted "overstraight a deemer of things, by marring his handywork." Hoby had evidently alarmed, by some sprinklings of Italianisms--some capriccios of "new-fangled" words--the chaste ear of our Anglican purist. I preserve this remarkable letter to serve as a singular specimen of our English, unpolluted even by a Latinism.[4]

"Our own tongue should be written _clean_ and _pure_, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed, by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitness of other tongues to attire herself withal; but used plainly her own, with such s.h.i.+ft as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent, doth lead her unto; and if she want at any time (as, being imperfect, she must), yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fas.h.i.+on a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease this need, we would not boldly venture on unknown words. This I say, not for reproof of you, who have scarcely and necessarily used, where occasion seemeth, a strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out of the matter, and not to be sought for; but for my own defence, who might be counted overstraight a deemer of things, if I give not this account to you, my friend, of my marring this your handy work."

Such was the tone even of our primitive critics! the terrors of neologism were always before their eyes. All those accessions of the future opulence of the vernacular language were either not foreseen or utterly proscribed, while, at the same time, the wants and imperfections of the language, amid all its purity or its poverty, were felt and acknowledged. We perceive that even this stern champion of his vernacular idiom confesses that "he may want at time, being imperfect, and must borrow with bashfulness." The cries of the critics suddenly break on us. Another contemporary critic of not inferior authority laments that "there seemed to be no mother-tongue." "The far-journeyed gentlemen" returned home not only in love with foreign fas.h.i.+ons, but equally fond "to powder their talk with over-sea language." There was French-English, and English Italianated. Professional men disfigured the language by conventional pedantries; the finical courtier would prate "nothing but Chaucer." "The mystical wis.e.m.e.n and the poetical clerks delivered themselves in quaint proverbs and blind allegories."[5] The pedantic race, in their furious Latinisms, bristling with polysyllabic pomposity, deemed themselves fortunate when they could fall upon "dark words," which our critic aptly describes "catching an ink-horn term by the tail." The eloquence of the more volatile fluttered in the splendid patches of modern languages. It seemed as if there were to be no longer a native idiom, and the good grain was choked up by the intruding c.o.c.kle which flourished by its side. Another contemporary critic announces that "our English tongue was a gallimaufry or hodge-podge of all other speeches." ARTHUR GOLDING grieves over the disjected members of the language:--

"Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature), Dismember'd, hack'd, maim'd, rent, and torn, Defaced, patch'd, marr'd, and made in scorn."

A critic who has left us "An Arte of English Poetry," written perhaps about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which, however, he never could in his own verses, "natural, pure, and the most usual of all his country," seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but there he acknowledges that "the preachers, the secretaries, and travellers," were great corrupters, and not less "our Universities, where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the primitive languages." The coa.r.s.e bran of our own native English was, however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against "the daily talk of northern men." The _good southern_ was that "we of Middles.e.x or Surrey use." Middles.e.x and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied from "the usual speech of the Court, and that of London within sixty miles, and not much above." But was our English more stable within this a.s.signed circ.u.mference of the metropolis than any other line of demarcation? About 1580, CAREW informs us that "Within these sixty years we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of our language consisteth in them."

Some there were among us who, alarmed that such ceaseless infusions were polluting the native springs of English, would look back with veneration and fondness on our ancient masters. Our great poet SPENSER,[6] then youthful, declared that the language of CHAUCER was the purest English; and our bard hailed, in a verse often quoted by the critics--

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.

But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for introducing "a waggon-load of words," and have proclaimed that Chaucer "wrote the language of no age;" a reproach which has been transferred to our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy axe of verbal pedantry.

Descending a complete century, in 1656 we are surprised at discovering HEYLIN, at a period relatively modern, reiterating the language of his ancient predecessors. This latter critic published his animadversions on the pedantic writings of HAMON L'ESTRANGE, who had opened on us a floodgate of Latinisms. Heylin observes: "More French and Latin words have gained ground upon us since _the middle of Queen Elizabeth's reign_ than were admitted by our ancestors, not only since the Norman, but the Roman conquest." This was written before the Restoration of Charles the Second, when we were to be overrun by Gallicisms. This complaint did not cease with Heylin, for it has often been renewed.

Heylin drew up in alphabetical order the uncouth and unusual words which are to be found in Hamon L'Estrange's "History," and yet many of these foreigners since the days of Heylin have become denizens. So unsettled were the notions of our philology with regard to style, that L'Estrange could venture in his rejoinder, which contains sufficient vinaicre, as he writes it, a defence of these hard words, which is entertaining. "As to those lofty words, I declare to all the world this not uningenuous acknowledgment, that having conversed with authors of the n.o.blest and chief remark in several languages, not only their notions but their very words especially being of the most elegant import, became at length so familiar with me, as when I applied myself to this present work I found it very difficult to renounce my former acquaintance with them; but as they freely offered themselves, so I entertained them upon these considerations. First, I was confident that among learned men they needed no other pa.s.se than their own extraction; and for those who were mere English readers I saw no reason they should wonder at them, considering that for their satisfaction I had sent along with every foreigner his interpreter, to serve instead of a dictionary." Hamon L'Estrange's "Life of Charles I." was certainly a piece of infelicitous pedantry, as we may judge by this specimen.[7]

Even great authors glanced with a suspicious eye on these vicissitudes of language, not without a conviction that they themselves were personally interested in these uncertain novelties. It would seem as if Milton, from the new invasion of Gallic words and Gallic airiness which broke in at the Restoration, had formed some uneasy antic.i.p.ations that his own learned diction and sublime form of poetry might suffer by the transition, and that Milton himself might become as obsolete as some of his great predecessors appeared to his age. The nephew of Milton, in the preface to his "Theatrum Poetarum," where the critical touch of the great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets, who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. Writing in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: "From Queen Elizabeth's reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to examine it well. If no poetry should please but what is calculated to every refinement of a language, of how ill consequence this would be for the future let him consider, and make it his own case, who, being now in fair repute, shall, two or three ages hence, when the language comes to be double-refined, understand that his works are come obsolete and thrown aside. I cannot--" he, perhaps Milton, continues--"I cannot but look upon it as a very pleasant humour that we should be so compliant with the French custom as to follow set fas.h.i.+ons, not only in garments, but in music and poetry. For clothes, I leave them to the discretion of the modish; breeches and doublet will not fall under a metaphysical consideration. But in arts and sciences, as well as in moral notions, I shall not scruple to maintain, that what was '_verum et bonum_' once, continues to be so always. Now whether the trunk-hose fancy of Queen Elizabeth's days, or the pantaloon genius of ours be best, I shall not be hasty to determine."

Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply to the CRITICS, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents; but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the LEXICOGRAPHERS, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings of their great "exchequer of words." Turn over the prefaces of our elder lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak, and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure. BARET, one of our earliest lexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses himself:--"I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete words which now a daies no good writer will use."[8] Words spurned at by the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into confusion. HENRY c.o.c.kRAM, whose volume has been at least twelve times reprinted, boldly avows that "what any before me in this kind have begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;" and, presuming on the privilege of "an interpreter of hard English words,"

the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms, which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some writers and speakers, as Hamon L'Estrange, were attempting.[9] What a picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the fleeting stages of their decadency from TREVISA to CAXTON, from CAXTON to BARET, from BARET to c.o.c.kRAM, and from c.o.c.kRAM to his numerous successors!

Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that "purity of style," whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom, fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She has even submitted to Fas.h.i.+on, that most encroaching usurper of words, who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banis.h.i.+ng the old and establis.h.i.+ng the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fas.h.i.+on under the consecrated name of CUSTOM.

But let us not quit this topic of "purity of style" without offering our sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the enc.u.mbering Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a set oration at the University of Glasgow by a n.o.ble personage. This taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life, was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.

It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical.

These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural progress of a long-protracted birth.

A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect existence, enc.u.mbered by the heavy ma.s.s in which it lies involved, resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when

--------Half appear'd The tawny Lion, PAWING TO GET FREE HIS HINDER PARTS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Curiosities of Literature," Art. "HISTORY OF NEW WORDS."

[2] These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner's "History of England." I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:--

"Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King's son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght."

Now we have plain, intelligible prose--

"Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the truth, and truth shall help you."

[3] Sir Francis Palgrave's "Rise and Progress of the English Common wealth;" Proofs and Ill.u.s.trations, ccxiii.

[4] This letter to the translator Hoby has been pa.s.sed over by those who collected the few letters of the learned CHEKE; and, what seems strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby's translation, having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.

[5] Sir Thomas Wilson's "Arte of Rhetoric," 1553.

[6] Spenser's protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen in his "Three Letters," which are preserved unmutilated in Todd's "Spenser;" they are deficient in Hughes' edition.

[7] Heylin's "Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles." L'Estrange's rejoinder may be found in the second edition of his History.