Pomona; or, the future of English

by Basil De Selincourt

Great therefore as is the glory for a language of being as wide as the world, that glory has its drawbacks and its dangers; and the crisis in the condition of English is aggravated by its exceptional capacity for assimilating foreign influences. It is useless harking back, as some idealists do, to the pure well of Anglo-Saxon simplicity. Anglo-Saxon was not simple; it was cumbrous and complicated, more like German than English. The first English that is easily intelligible to us is already half French; and all through their history, wherever they have gone in their travels, the English have brought words back with them. In India, Africa, America, Australia, amalgamation still goes on, and the result is that our vocabulary, in its mere bulk and before one begins to think of the anomalies it contains bears heavily on the frail intelligence of mortal man. With half-a-dozen different peoples continually tossing fresh petals into the vast pot-pourri, what will happen to the unifying aroma which is the all-in-all? What influences, habits, ideals shared by all these people can have strength to overcome their growing divergencies? Their eyes open on different scenes, they are surrounded by different plants, birds, and animals, eat different food, endure or enjoy different climates. Nor do these differences remain external: they evoke different temperaments, different constitutions. Will not these different constitutions soon dictate a different rhythm, a different articulation, a different music for their expression? The problem is the more engrossing, because the determining conditions have no parallel in history, and our developed machinery, of communication and reduplication, from printing to telephony, introduces influences the effect of which no one can foresee. If it is enough for us to hear the same speeches and read the same books, there is now nothing to prevent our doing so. The one language is obviously a great convenience. But does not the machinery which sustains it favour conventional forms rather than living speech?

The salient feature of our age is the increasing participation of the masses in the guidance of life and in its interests. Machinery has made this possible, and more and ever more machinery will be required, if we are to attain the broader humanity we desire. Yet machinery symbolizes the ossifying routine, the obstructive red tape, which chokes progress; and machinery always has undue importance for undeveloped minds. The unlettered villager of old was a walking poem; he grew like the hawthorn in the hedgerow, still pruned, still sprouting; his thoughts were the lichen on its trunk, the idiom of his speech had the twists and freaks of its knotty boughs. Forms of life surrounded and emanated from him; he knew nothing else. But when the choice came between life and machinery he chose machinery, not thinking of it as a choice. Because you buy a bicycle, you do not cease to have a garden; only, in course of riding, you pass your garden by; you have removed it a little from your life. The printed book works in the same way. It multiplies a man’s commerce with words; and though it increases also his power to see through words to thoughts and things, it does not increase this power in the same proportion; and so with all the rest of our literary machinery. Here again the world-wide language suffers, its diffusion weighting the balance against its life. If print is really at times to get its meaning over, there must still be lips from which words fall like flowers, there must still be minds in which language is growth and beauty; and there must be a Gradus ad Parnassum, a means of working-up through the machine-made stages, a consciousness piercing somehow down into the copy-book world, something to remind the half-lettered of the primitive life they have emerged from and the completer life to which they would attain. Our English must keep its natural warmth and concreteness, its gift of free response to the fresh fact. These things cannot be preserved. Preserves, it is true, keep indefinitely, but at the sacrifice of freshness; and it is freshness that we want. What we love most in English is just that quality of unsugared sweetness, which is the difference between fruit and jam.

Here we bring new water from the well so clear,

For to worship God with this happy New Year.

The best English always has a bloom upon it. The danger is that, as vulgarisms increase on one side, proprieties will increase on the other, and that conversation may begin to burden itself with a sense of duty. To be correct is already to be mechanical. The defiance of correctness, even by the vulgar, has in it something of the virtue and virility, which, in the work of masters, we recognize as the genius of the language. It is easy enough to avoid saying “like I do”; but it is difficult to realize that living language overrides grammatical distinctions and that the test of a phrase is not whether it has been tabled at Oxford, but whether it has its share of soil and sun and dew. Here the indolences of our language, its cautiousness, and even its propensity to wallow in the mire, may have their saving influence. They are all symptoms of the instinct to get appearances on the honourable side, the instinct to appear less, not more, than you are; they are the tacit acknowledgment of a standard of reality, and count for ballast and steadiness.

Are there then no means of vitalizing our English speech? One cannot put the question without seeing that it is unreal. “The answer is in the negative”, as our officials say. Even education itself, consciously applied, may defeat its object; for if people are to talk English, they must talk as they wish to talk; they know that the majority of their would-be masters talk the worse for talking as they have been taught. As to the meanings of words, the temptation to suppose that they can be decided from on high must specially be resisted. We all have our contribution to make to the meaning of the words we use, and the greatest words—faith, freedom, sport, spirit—cannot mean more than we do. These cannot be standardized; standardization, the name without the thought, is their death, simply. The Trade Unionists of England are disposed to banish ‘competition’ from our dictionary; will nature vanish it from hers? ‘Religion’, somewhere in America, is the belief that the world was created in six days; if truth is a fundamentalist, well and good. Obviously there must be standardization up to a point if people are to stick together, and we must be prepared to swallow it in considerable doses now that English is the language of two hemispheres. But the essential is that the point should be a point of agreement. The kind of feeling, the kind of habit, that can be imposed on a man are not worth imposing: the Germans showed that. We, too, have our outbreaks of the dragooning impulse: the word ‘Empire’ is a notorious rally, with hyænas always hot upon its trail. But, on the whole, the tendency to reduce experience to rule and its expression to a formula, the tendency to regularize men’s minds and drill them into uniformity, flatly opposed as it is to all our traditions, wins little success amongst us. True, we have a certain uniformity of drabness (the livery of the sparrow) which suggests an army inured to all the degradations of drill and rebellious only against its smartness. But then, it is the smartness that kills. Drill is machine-made uniformity, a necessary evil of which the English hate to make a panache. Their uniformities are morose, because they are uniformities of submission; their pride goes out to the things they touch directly and can make their own. This is the attitude to be cherished at all costs, because the future is open to it, because it opens to the future. By Heaven’s grace, the English have it deep ingrained. Thus the future of English presents itself to the mind as depending, above all, on the survival, in its pre-eminence, of the spirit of freedom, the more so because the scope of freedom is determined by the capacity for discipline. The question of the day is how much machinery a man can stand; and the hope for English is that the average Englishman can stand so much. Regulations are necessary everywhere. Language itself must have its dictionary, grammar its rules. The English rob them of their sting by toleration. Their order even when they speak is spontaneous and has a taste of liberty.

That an Englishman should regard England as the life-centre of the English language is, perhaps, inevitable; yet he is foolish if he assumes her to be so. The life-centre of English is to be found where the spirit of those who speak it is in closest accord with developing realities, and these cannot reveal themselves to minds fixed in any past, however vital that past may have been when it was present. Are not, then, the Americans living a more contemporary life than we are?—has not the focus of development passed over to them? This is a question so searching that I can touch upon it only with the greatest diffidence. At the conclusion of his first preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman, distinguished among great writers for the forward view, congratulated himself and the Americans on the qualities of the language they had inherited. “English”, he wrote, “is the chosen tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality, friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage.” It is a noble list of virtues which no one would wish to disavow; and yet the Englishman, of whatever station, would still prefer the briefer catalogue of Chaucer’s knight, who, five hundred years ago,

loved chivalrye

Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.

In such words as courtesy, chivalry, and honour, though doubtless he does not understand them quite as Chaucer did, he would trace a fullness of experience, for which self-esteem, friendliness, and their like, however generously mixed with faith and courage, seem poor equivalents. Now, Chaucer’s virtues obviously assume inequalities between men and a sense of the responsibilities of privilege. Whitman’s assertion is that the English ideal survives when privilege is discarded. Can it? Is not the bloom, is not the ripeness of our most comprehensive, most human words, is not the peculiar aroma which surrounds the English conception of the virtues, traceable to our candid admission that inequalities, even when traditional, may be bedded in truth? Honour itself, though not the property of a class, belongs we feel, to those who, by favour of circumstance in part, have come to see that circumstance counts for nothing by the side of truth and loyalty, and who therefore identify these with their very being. Arising out of advantage, the sense of honour carries with it a compensating obligation to all from whom such advantage is withheld. No such associations can attach to the word in America, because they imply limits which are not recognized, nor is honour allowed its externalization, its badge. The King is, with us, the fountain of honour, as he is also its personification at the height; and to them our toleration of royalty is a mysterious medievalism. Yet the Englishman who easily sees the absurdity of kings in general finds his own miraculously contemporaneous. Differences like this affect in a thousand ways the flavour and idiom of the two languages (for, for the moment, we must call them two), and even the tone with which they are spoken. American talk is full of equality; and to the English ear this equality sounds less like a harmonious prevision of Nature’s purpose than a grim determination to wrest it into line with human wishes.