Good Old Saxon.
By An English Catholic.
During the last five years an admirable society, formed in London, and called the Early English Text Society, has been reproducing at a cheap rate a large number of curious and valuable works written in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Many of these existed in manuscript only, while others were out of print, and very difficult of attainment. They range over a variety of different subjects, and being beautifully printed, amply supplied with notes and glossaries, and each edited by an accomplished Anglo-Saxon scholar, they afford clergymen, antiquarians, and men of letters in general an excellent opportunity of becoming familiar with the earlier forms of the English language, and the best authors during a literary period hitherto regarded as obscure.
These publications synchronize with, and have partly grown out of, a movement which, though retrograde, has been really an improvement and an advance—a movement, namely, from Latinized to Saxon English. We may perhaps date its commencement from the time when Dr. Johnson was approaching his sixtieth year. He had, for a long time, been lending the weight of his great name to the practice of using very long words, and those chiefly of Latin origin. In doing this he had not merely followed a crowd of classical English writers, but had put himself at their head. The genius of the language was being lost, and when it seemed to be gaining strength, it was in reality growing weaker. Its original tendency had been toward words of one syllable, but under Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and a multitude of essayists and pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, it tended strongly toward the use of words of many syllables. Thus sound was frequently substituted for sense, and sentences, though they ran more smoothly, had in them far less fibre. An air of pedantry was thrown over expressions, when such a word as "tremulousness" was substituted for "quivering," and "exsiccation" for "drying." Mannerism was certainly the mildest epithet that could be applied to such changes, when they became frequent and systematic. An instance of the habit in question is often quoted from Johnson's Dictionary, where, in defining "net" and "network," he calls the first, "anything made with interstitial vacuities," and the second, "anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."
Yet Johnson himself had, in the grammar prefixed to his Dictionary, pointed out clearly how very monosyllabic English was originally, how "our ancestors were studious to form borrowed words, however long, into monosyllables;" how they cut off terminations, cropped the first syllable, rejected vowels in the middle, and weaker consonants, retaining the stronger, which seem "the bones of words." Thus, from "excrucio" they made "screw;" from "exscorio," "scour;" from "excortico," "scratch;" from "hospital," "spittle;" and the like. By such processes, performed not according to rule, but by the unconscious working of national instincts, our forefathers produced a wonderful agreement between the sound of their words and the thing signified. Squeak, crush, brawl, whirl, bustle, twine, are but a few among a multitude of instances which will occur to any one who gives attention to the subject. Wallis, indeed, a writer often quoted in the grammar referred to, establishes the fact of a great agreement subsisting between even the letters, in the native words of our language, and the thing signified; and his analysis of the meaning conveyed by sn, str, st, thr, wr, sw, cl, sp, and other combinations is highly ingenious and, on the whole, satisfactory. He comes to the conclusion that one of our monosyllable words "emphatically expresses what in other languages can scarce be explained but by compounds, or decompounds, or sometimes a tedious circumlocution."
But although Dr. Johnson, like Wallis, appreciated highly the Saxon origin and character of English, though he fully recognized the strength which it derives from its native sources as opposed to southern innovations, his own practice was eminently faulty, and sure, in the hands of his imitators, to degenerate into pedantry and stilts. It was well, therefore, that when his career was drawing to a close, an obscure but highly gifted boy in Bristol ransacked the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe's Church, and found, or pretended to have found, in its old chests, the poems of Rowley, who was said to have written in the time of Edward III. The poems were not without merit in themselves, but, when Chatterton had, amid the pangs of hunger, put an end to his short and weary existence, they attracted attention in consequence of the antiquated form in which they appeared. They were like the fossil remains of extinct animals, and spoke of a literary period little known at that time even to the best English scholars. They breathed the language and the spirit of Chaucer; and from the moment of their appearance may be traced the reaction in favor of Saxon phraseology which marks the literature of the present day. The boy-author saw by intuition what Dr. Wallis had reduced to rules. Perhaps he had never analyzed very closely his own reasons, nor traced attentively the process of nature in the formation of words, so as to produce in them an agreement between the sound and the thing signified; but his youthful ear was charmed with the native energy of what Byron called our "northern guttural," and he loved to imitate, in such lines as these, the rugged sweetness of the early English poets:
"The rodie welkin sheeneth to the eyne;
In dasied mantles is the mountain dight,
The neshe young cowslip bendeth with the dew."
In these lines, all the words are of the pure Saxon type; and the same may be said of almost every stanza in Chaucer's Tales.
"The flowrs of many divers hue
Upon their stalkis gonin for to spread,
And for to splay out their leavis ill brede,
Again the sun, gold-burned in his sphere,
That down to them y-cast his beamis clear.'
And again, as we read in "The Clerke's Tale:"
"And whanne sche com hom sche wolde brynge
Wortis and other herbis tymes ofte,
The which sche shred and seth for her lyvyng
And made her bed ful hard, and nothing softe."
This, as regards language, is the mould in which the Tales are cast. The same Saxon stamp imprinted on the verse of Spenser, though the Fairie Queen came two centuries after the Canterbury Tales. One stanza shall suffice as a specimen:
"Then came the jolly summer, being dight
In a thin silken cassock coloured greene,
That was unlyned all, to be more light;
And on his head a girland well beseene
He wore, from which as he had chauffed been
The sweat did drop; and in his hand he bore
A bow and shaftes; as he in forrest greene
Had hunted late the libbard or the bore
And now would bathe his limbs with labor heated sore."
The habits and tastes of Ben Jonson and of Milton were largely influenced by their classical studies. The best authors of ancient Greece and Rome filled their memories, and it was only natural that their writings should betray at every turn the sources from which they had been fed. Yet a multitude of passages might be cited from these poets in which the genuine ring of the early English rhymers only is heard. Thus Ben Jonson, in a favorite piece of advice to a reckless youth, says:
"Nor would I you should melt away yourself
In flashing bravery; lest, while you affect
To make a blaze of gentry to the world,
A little puff of scorn extinguish it,
And you be left like an unsavoury snuff
Whose property is only to offend."
The last line has more than one word of Latin origin; but in Milton's Mask of Comus we find long passages entirely free from the foreign element. Thus, Sabrina sings:
"By the rushy-fringed bank
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,
My sliding chariot stays,
Thick set with agat, and the azure sheen
Of turkis blue and em'rald green,
That in the channel strays;
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O'er the cowslip's velvet head
That bends not as I tread."
Now it must not be supposed that in calling attention to the Saxon character of English as opposed to, or distinct from, its Latin and Norman aspects, we are advocating any exclusive system. We rejoice in our language being a compound; and as some of the most exquisite perfumes are produced by distilling a variety of different flowers and leaves, so languages formed by the mixture of several races, and influenced by numerous changes and chances in the history of the people who speak them, are often, in their way, as vigorous and beautiful as any of more simple origin. This is especially the case with that tongue which, being our own, is dearer to us than all besides. But because it consists, and must ever consist, of various elements, there is no reason why we should be indifferent to the relative proportions in which these elements are mixed together; nor is it by any means superfluous to inquire whether the tendency of a compound language may not, at any particular period, be toward corruption and decay, and, at another time, toward health, consistency, majesty, melody, and strength.
We have assumed that Saxon is the basis of English, and that of late years there has been among English writers a tendency to reascend the stream to its source, to freshen and invigorate their diction by the use of native, as distinct from foreign words. We have mentioned Chatterton as being, perhaps unconsciously, a leader in this movement; and we would add that Burns also fostered the reviving taste for pure English; for, though he wrote in the Scottish dialect, that dialect had, and has still, a thousand points of contact with our language in the days of its youth. Though its peculiarities were of Gaelic rather than Saxon origin, yet they resembled old English in this, that they were marked by short words and many consonants. Hence Robert Burns's verse revolts instinctively from the many liquid syllables of the South, and is wild and ragged as the crags and glens which were his favorite haunts. So far as it influenced our literature, it recalled it from the smoother and less vigorous course of Latinized or Johnsonian English to the sharper, simpler, and clearer notes of less artificial times.
"Your critic-folk may cock their nose
And say, How can you e'er propose,
You who ken hardly verse frae prose,
To mak a sang?
But, by your leaves, my learned foes,
Ye're may be wrang."
The touch and racy dialect of the Border Minstrelsy, which Walter Scott edited, Mr. Evans's Collection of Old Ballads, and Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, guided public taste into a direction opposed to the tame mediocrity of the imitators of Dryden and Pope. The ear and the mind alike were charmed by the exceeding simplicity of the style of these old ballads, and their almost exclusive use of monosyllables.
Here are a few notes from one of those Jacobite songs which resounded so freely among the Highlands when Prince Charles Edward came to recover the crown of his fathers. Walter Scott compares such ballads to the "grotesque carving on a Gothic niche:"
"It's nae the battle's deadly stoure
Nor friends pruived fause that'll gar me cower,
But the reckless hand o' povertie,
Oh! that alane can daunton me!
"High was I born to kingly gear,
But a cuif came in my cap to wear,
But wi' my braid sword I'll let him see
He's nae the man will daunton me."
The Lake school of poetry, being founded in a deep love of nature and a close scrutiny of her works, had a concurrent influence in restoring the liberal use of the older forms of speech. Writers like Charles Lamb, whose minds were richly stored with the treasures of Elizabethan lore, were sometimes accused of affectation in employing archaisms, but "the old words of the poet," as the author of "Summer Time in the Country" observes, "like the foreign accent of a sweet voice, give a charm to the tone, without in any large degree obscuring the sense." Indeed, if the most popular passages in Wordsworth, and in his great master Shakespeare, be examined, they will be found to answer on the whole to that ideal of English phraseology which is here formed—one, namely, in which the Saxon element largely predominates. Thus, almost at random, we quote from The Midsummer Night's Dream:
"What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy queen?"
And from Wordsworth's "Idle Shepherd Boys:"
"Beneath a rock, upon the grass,
Two boys are sitting in the sun;
Boys that have had no work to do,
Or work that now is done.
On pipes of sycamore they play
The fragments of a Christmas hymn;
Or with that plant which in our dale
We call stag-horn or fox's tail,
Their rusty hats they trim:
And thus, as happy as the day,
Those shepherds wear the time away."
Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab, in Romeo and Juliet, may also be pointed out as a signal example of pure Saxon English throughout; but it is too long and too familiar to our readers to be quoted here.
There are not wanting men of talent and research, who have remarked the change which has come over the national literature in its rebound toward Saxon diction, and who have recommended it very distinctly. Dean Swift, though in point of time he preceded the movement, held as a principle that no Saxon word should be allowed to fall into disuse. Dean Hoare has, in our own time, expressed his decided conviction that those speakers and writers impart most pleasure whose style is most Saxon in its character; and this remark applies, as he believes, especially to poetry. It is in accordance with the spirit of the age that we recoil from that "fine writing" which is generally mere declamation. In proportion as we become practical, the racy style—pointed, suggestive, and curt—rises in value. By the exercise of thought and cultivation of science we become exact, and through plenty of business we become brief-spoken. Vague talking and writing is now at a discount, and persons express themselves with more substance and strength because they are trained in the love of truth, historic and scientific, and have contracted a hatred of shams of every kind. Directness of statement is what is now most valued in a writer, and such men as Dr. Newman among Catholics, and Carlyle and Emerson among non-Catholics, have contributed in an immense degree to promote reverence for this quality. Circumlocution and over-expansion are faults which no one will now tolerate, and this jealousy for the clear and ready conveyance of ideas has a great deal to do with recurrence to the pregnant monosyllables, the picture-words, the gnarled and knotted strength of Saxon English.
It is, however, to Tennyson, more than to any other modern writer, that the public owes the more frequent use of short and sinewy words already known to most readers, and the enrichment of the language by the revival of many words which had become obsolete. Enoch Arden, though a poem consisting of two thousand lines, contains scarcely a word that is not of Saxon origin. It is, as far as language is concerned, simplicity almost in excess. Thus, to take but one example, it is not till we reach the last word of the following passage that we are reminded of the partly Latin origin of our tongue:
"For in truth
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter-gales,
Not only to the market-cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
And peacock-yewtree of the lonely hall,
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering."
In this passage all the words are in common use, but in other parts of the same volume, and, indeed, in all which the laureate has published, we perceive a strong tendency to antique and grotesque forms of speech, derived from long and devoted attachment to the old writers. If they were introduced by design, simply because they are archaisms, the artifice would be apparent, and the pedantry complete. But when they form a genuine part of the author's inner life of thought and memory, the case is different, and what would have been formal and stiff becomes natural and easy. They comport well with the idea one forms of a great thinker, and indicate a thorough mastery over the mother tongue. They might, no doubt, easily degenerate into affectation, but when employed with judgment and skill, they are like fossils in a well-arranged cabinet, or old china in a well-furnished room. Resembling, as they do, the tough, tortuous olive-tree, they are valuable signs of a people's mental vigor; for as surely as the "soft bastard Latin" of the Apennines indicates a population less martial than the Romans of old—as surely as the soft and sibilant Romaic tells of a race fallen from the higher walks of Grecian philosophy, history, science, and song—so surely would Latinized English be a sign that the people writing and speaking it, were falling away from the marked character of their forefathers, and contrasting with them as strongly as the silken senators whom Chatham denounced contrasted with the iron barons of the days of King John.