Pomona; or, the future of English

by Basil De Selincourt

When deeds and words and thoughts are one.

The thought expressed here by an anonymous Elizabethan might have been expressed yesterday or in Chaucer’s time. It was with us from the first, is not outgrown, and never will be. And part and parcel of the thought is a certain bluntness in its expression. It is felt to be worth more than any possible expression, to have the right to be guarded against facile exposure. The trait is typical, and justifies us in calling English the expression of an inexpressive people. Communication flows slowly among them; their ideas, before they brim over into speech, have felt the north and the south wind and turned their faces east and west. There is modesty in this as well as deliberation, and mingled with it are tolerance, humour, and common sense. Aware of the world, they have been aware that it is made up of many sorts of men, aware too, finally, that the world is not something that we make but something to which we lend ourselves that it may make us: a point at which the practical and the mystical join hands. All these qualities have passed into the language, which has great diversity in its contacts, an admirable economy in its mechanism. It is a comprehensive, a hospitable, a pliable language; it is full of inconsistencies, yet it works; and if its grasp, wide always, needs now to be wider than ever before, will anyone assert that it has found its limits?

The English have certainly shown themselves in the past to be a people who could live and let live; as the possessors of this rare virtue, they now find themselves living everywhere; but how shall words, which have been formed on the lips of the inhabitants of a small island in a soft misty climate, express the lives of men whose homes are the continents of the world and to whom nature is revealed in all her grandiose extremes of heat and cold, drought and flood, bounty and bareness? The birds of the moor and the woodland do not speak alike; they say the same things, it may be, but their tone they borrow from their habitat; and the languages of men have a similar reflectiveness. In Celtic, with its tenderness and wild glamour, we feel the mountain and the valley, the rocks and the rain; in the mellow vowels of Italian the blue of the Mediterranean and its cloudless skies. English, it would appear, resembles rather the chirping of the sparrow—a noise capable of following men wherever they go and echoing under any roof with which they protect themselves from the elements. It has a faculty of almost brutish accommodation, attracts indolence, ignores discomfort, and thrives in the absence of the graces.

Every one who loves birds, though he cannot deny the sparrow many virtues, shrinks at the thought of his capacity for mere multiplication and is haunted by a nightmare vision of a world from which the more fastidious species have been banished, leaving all one sparrowdom. A similar horror fills the mind of the humanist when it occurs to him that English may be destined to be the language of the human race. What English, he wonders, and reflects that there are men now working to that end who do, after all, represent one aspect of the English genius, making it not impossible that half-baked bricks and gim-crack motors may one day overrun the earth. The nettle-like loose rankness of our language not only helps to spread it, but makes it liable to tower domineeringly as it spreads. In plain truth, it is already spoken too generally for its good, and, in spite of all the machinery we possess for unifying it, its expansion may yet prove its undoing.

The issue is so important as to justify us in reflecting a little on the nature of language in itself. Invented to be of service to truth, it is committed to a compromise with falsehood. Our experience is indivisible, but, in order to explain it to ourselves and others, we are obliged to split it up into segments; to which segments and the relations between them we give names. What we name is therefore an interpretation imposed on nature, not nature itself; and even when our names seem to belong to objects which Nature classified before we did, as when we talk of a man or a woman, we are not protected against error. Into the word ‘man’ come creeping all the associations born of our experience of the men we know, and we suppose every two-legged talking animal to have their failings and their virtues. Such words as ‘liberty’ or ‘peace’ are more misleading still; they are names of variable types of feelings and relations; we can judge of their application to reality only after the experience of half a lifetime.

Thus, though our language grows from us like a limb, it yet has its mechanical side, and the reconciliation of the vital and the mechanical is always difficult. A machine like a mowing machine interferes with the activity of Nature at set stages; that is simple enough: it is different with a machinery which must avail itself of the movements of life and adapt itself to them; and such is the machinery of language. Its cogs are letters, syllables, the sounds they prescribe; it is still mechanical when it assigns to these sounds their limited meaning; and, although it does not cut up Nature’s map into a jig-saw puzzle, yet its divisions, however careful, can never be conclusive, because it is cutting up an organic whole into inorganic parts. How different is music,—how much truer! No note of music has meaning in itself; it means what it means from its position in a phrase, and, as phrase follows phrase in a movement, the music develops and completes this meaning in an organic whole, no part of which can be detached from it alive. Thus music is, as it were, all life and universally intelligible, language only part life, the rest mechanical attachment. Nor have these attachments even the security of being hitched to stable objects. They are an intermediary between one kind of life and change and another. The makers of the names change while they make them, and the objects have changed before their names are known.

What do we mean, for example, by ‘love’? something, surely, as definite as it is familiar. But no! the meaning of ‘love’ is a historical study—it belongs even to the future almost as much as to the past. We have not found its meaning yet, we have not given it its meaning. We have for long devoted ourselves to the pursuit of a meaning for it, and after centuries of failure have endowed it with a halo of converging aspirations. Love is the name of an ideal, constantly sought, partially realized. In its fullest sense, it suggests an enduring tie between a man and a woman which is also a pattern of the true relationship of the soul to the world.

But what is that true relationship?—something that we have still to find out. The French call love ‘amour’; ‘amour’ too has its halo. About the word ‘amour’ has gathered the memories of a race that has learned to consider its physical and spiritual impulses irreconcilable. It has in it the wild contrasts of some natural upheaval and a prevailing tenderness, like that of calm after storm. It is a great word, providing a name for one deep chord of experience, which in English, by the different focus of our attention, we have left nameless. But the differences between the two words not only proceed from differences of racial temperament, they also produce and perpetuate such differences. The average Englishman who hungers after ‘amour’ never obtains it, because the thought of ‘love’, of which he cannot divest himself, intervenes. The average Frenchman is equally debarred from ‘love’, for the very sound of ‘amour’ assures him that it is a romantic dream. So the indivisible experience of reality is split up in one way by one people, in another by another, and each perforce sees it along its own dividing lines. Both cannot be right, and truth is hidden from men by the apparatus with which they hoped to unveil her.

Of course the words that count for most in a language are those in which men exchange their common thought about the purposes on which they are chiefly bent, the goal to which they are steering; and words of this kind are apt to be merely national. The German ‘Kultur’ is an example. ‘Kultur’ was the focus of a peculiar complex of associations, which involved, among other things, a novel conception of the relation of the muscles to the mind. The Germans thought they had found in it an ideal of conquering force, and many people in England spoke shyly of ‘culture’ for a time, as if the love of letters and the arts must lead every one where it had led the Germans. Temperamental concentrations of the kind that gave ‘Kultur’ its intensive meaning are constantly at work; we see the result in the different characters of the Greek, the Spaniard, the Italian. The Italians and the French, the French and the English, have different notions of what life ought to be. ‘Libertà’ is a word still found in Italian dictionaries, but Signor Mussolini has revised its meaning very drastically. Breathing the same air, walking the same earth, the different peoples blend the elements in different mixtures and draw from the soil a sap that permeates their being and gives individual colour to every feeling and thought. These variations of tincture are valuable in themselves; life would be poorer if there were only one kind of flower or fruit; the idiosyncrasies of nations give brightness and colour to the human comedy. But they are also of capital importance to progress, because they remind us that our own blend of ideas is a makeshift like the rest, and that, if we are not to be left stranded, we must learn how to leave it open to possibility of change. With the establishment of a universal language these fruitful comparisons would cease; the human race would be committed to one set of conventional ideas and caught for ever in a prison of its own making; and even if such a universal language were only ancillary, though the worst evil would be avoided, the adopted language would tend to be debased, since men of different schemes of experience would use the same words in different senses, so step by step obliterating their true sense and leaving them flavourless.