POMONA
POMONA
OR
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
Before discussing the future of English, one is forced, in the bustle of these scientific days, to inquire whether language itself has a future. “We are working”, wrote Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, in his brilliant little essay Daedalus, “towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than a twenty-fourth of a second.” Is speech quick-moving enough to keep a place in such a picture? When everything else has learned the speed of lightning, will the transference of our thought be likely to lag behind and is it not a waste of time to ask if future generations will speak German, or Japanese, or Esperanto, when they may not need to speak at all?
Scientific knowledge is a delightful plaything. Working with measurable quantities, it can treat the future like a ball of string to be unwound. Though life is all wonder and surprise, though the world always turns out stranger and richer than we expected, we know that the future will be linked mechanically with the present as the present is with the past. The machinery of human existence fifty years hence will be the practical application of possibilities known to-day. There is basis, then, for a certain kind of scientific prediction. The future of language is in a different case, because the mechanical element in it is subsidiary. It is conjecturable, of course, that it may one day be superseded, that men may learn to transfuse their meanings by a kind of controlled telepathy, mind meeting mind. But to do this they would need to be able to think without words, and language, as we now know it, is not for communication only: it is the very framework of our thought. It is part of our lives; and what our lives are to be we can tell only by living them.
A good deal has been learned of late about the evolution of language—enough to modify very much our views as to the influences that really count, the habits which conduce to accuracy or to vitality. But there is a long way between understanding after the event and understanding before it. It is with the different languages of the world as with the different species of animals: once they have come into being, one easily sees which way they came, one cannot see in the least which way they are going. Of all whom change awaits, man seems likely to change most and most quickly. Whole nations are stirred to hope and restlessness. Never did the future beckon more enticingly than it does now. Science lays a finger upon the springs of life and dreams of a race to be made perfect, not by the murderous processes of haphazard struggle, but by the swift and decisive elaboration of a conscious design. The man of the future, we hear, may differ as much from ourselves as we do from monkeys. Inventive eugenics, new as motor-cars, is to inaugurate a still more drastic revolution and make of us, in the near future, whatever we may wish to be.
What then do we wish to be? A fundamental question that—to which the answer, surely, is that we cannot deeply wish to be other than we are, seeing that we have become what we are because it was what we wished to be. We wished it for a hundred thousand years, while slowly the wish took form and substance. That form, that substance have been determined by the movements of the mind: they are its tutored response to the totality of the conditions of life on the earth; and therefore it is one of our justest instincts to be jealous of any tampering with the results, any light pretension of the flickering intellect to replace these gradually matured perfections. How fruitless for man to lift his head nearer heaven if his feet cease to touch the ground! One thing we may be sure of, that the processes of our amelioration, physical or spiritual, will never be spectacular. Let the mind, rushing ahead, call the body a lumberer if it will; the body never was and never will be idealist. Its province is not to set a feather on the mountaintop, but to arrive with bag and baggage.
It is because language is a branch of the tree of life that we can do so little by way either of influencing or predicting its future. The expert in eugenics vividly suggests to us that in time to come he will give us twelve fingers if we want them, and we can understand why he is so confident. He is saying “Only have courage, and we will do with men to-morrow what we are doing with guinea-pigs to-day.” But we must not let his love of the picturesque delude us. These things could be done only on condition of our surrendering our lives to beings as high above us as we are above pigs; and surrender to superiors is not a means of progress. The jesuitry of religion is bad enough, but at least it secures us against succumbing to any jesuitry of science. The development of the machinery of the individual life is bound up with the development of the individual mind; it requires independence, not submission. In this our language is like our members. The scientists of speech are tempted from time to time to descend upon us and prove what a much better instrument we might have than the one which we have painfully elaborated for ourselves; and indeed the wastefulness, the inconsistencies of every language that exists are plain to the merest tyro. Nevertheless it is of the essence of our language, as of our members, that it should have grown upon us, that it should have grown out of us. “Improvement makes straight roads,” wrote Blake, “but crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius”, and by genius he meant simply life working upon life. It is a curious fact, that when experts advise on language, their advice is generally bad. Language, if it is to live, must follow the ways of life; and advice, even good advice, can never allow enough for one factor at once decisive and unknowable, the new experiences of newly situated minds.