What is the future of the English language? The problem is evolutionary. It is of little interest to conjecture how many mouths will be speaking it in a hundred years and with what sort of twang or accent; speculations of that sort range too widely. Our aim must be to inquire whether English is or is not a growing member; whether those who use and are to use it have an instrument capable of enlarging and purifying their knowledge, whether it can help them to mould themselves more closely to the pattern of truth. Languages, like other organisms, have their appointed length of days. The tree cannot go on putting out fresh leaves for ever. The more leaves there are, whispering and breathing in the wind, the thicker the trunk must be and the denser the roots and branches, for flow of sap from tip to tip; and the whole must keep sweet if that flow is to continue. It is the same with language. The leaves are our conversations, the roots are our experiences, the trunks and boughs our literature. And that great woody framework, which is the strength of the fabric, is also a seat of trouble and decay. It has taken shape, it determines us. Only through it can our ideas pass to their being; it has decided what we must be. What if its form is biassed, if it is preternaturally confined? Our condition then is that of animals who have missed the highway of development, turned into some cul-de-sac, and come to a full stop. Every animal except man has done it, and most races of men have done it too. The continuance of progress is extraordinarily difficult; there are always a million chances against it at any particular time and place.
Can English, then, maintain its life-current? Our literature, indubitably, shows symptoms of fatigue. Everyone feels in Chaucer the joyous expansiveness of youth, in Hardy the sombre introspection of old age. Chaucer, were he living now, would not be Hardy; but Hardy’s view of life is widely accepted as representative, and few are surprised by it, while the sweet serenity of Bridges surprises many. How far is the change merely literary, how far is it racial, and what are the modes in which racial and literary progress interact? Literature, to begin with, is an art and art is in this unlike nature that it does not tolerate simple repetition. Events like Shakespeare’s plays or Paradise Lost cannot happen twice; and by happening once they prevent many other things from happening at all. To write in English without knowing them is almost impossible; to know them and not be influenced by them quite impossible. The English literary artist has therefore the choice of working on the same lines as his precursors and going further, or of finding different lines to work on. So Tennyson becomes daintier, Browning more boisterous, Swinburne more exuberant, Meredith more congratulatory, Hardy more afflicted, than any one was before; and in the achievement of each one overhears the sigh for a serener element, all are recognizably oppressed and restless in their thickly peopled pool. They are aware that the main outlines of an Englishman’s experiences have been laid down, that new territory exists only in nooks and corners, while, as to the methods of exploration, they have been so greatly taken, the virtues so generously submerging the faults, that ability to take them has become almost synonymous with greatness and a change unthinkable. Thus the poet of to-day must allow that his instinct to outvie all predecessors can hardly be gratified, that where he deserts them it is at his peril, and that the best he can hope for is to hit on some secluded bypath where his mind, wandering in freedom, may dispossess itself of fruitless rivalries.
So much for the merely literary, but what of the racial position? In so far as the experience of the English race is fed and sustained by its literature, it must necessarily be affected by any toxin of age with which that literature is charged. But, in the first place, no race possessed of a great literature has ever had a less literary experience than we have, and, in the second place, the circumstances of English lives now-a-days (and, indeed, of human lives everywhere) are subjected perpetually to so many and such startling changes, that our accumulation of racial experience takes a different bearing, may help instead of hindering us. The English of England, or of the British Isles, appear, it is true, to be living too close and to have lived too long to be able to continue living freely; and yet there are signs that the natural developments of racial life are still proceeding. To King, Lords, and Commons is being added among us one might say, a fourth estate: we are endeavouring to found an ordered commonwealth on the conscious collaboration of a prosperous working-class. The bulk of the people, therefore, still looks forward; and, this being their attitude, there is fair hope of their learning how to possess themselves of the new world that is opening up around them.
So English, though already an old language, is even in England still spoken by a young people; and its future everywhere (the future of a language cannot be separated from the future of those who speak it) depends on its power to reconcile these as it has reconciled so many other opposites. The English or Anglo-Saxon temperament has from the first been equally remarkable for its absorptiveness and its idiosyncrasy. The characters we find in Piers Plowman or the earliest lyrics acknowledge, in idioms like our own, our own ideals:
No love to love of man and wife;
No hope to hope of constant heart;
No joy to joy of wedded life,
No faith to faith in either part;
Flesh is of flesh and bone of bone