Pomona; or, the future of English

by Basil De Selincourt

Right and wrong in such a matter can be decided only by the event. However it be, the United States, obviously, is now the scene of the severest ordeals, the vividest excitements of our language. Only when we hear English on the lips of Americans do we fear for its integrity; others might drag it down; they alone could lift it into change; they alone speak an actively competitive English. They have the right. The English of the United States is not merely different from ours, it has a restless inventiveness which may well be founded in a sense of racial discomfort, a lack of full accord between the temperament of the people and the constitution of their speech. The English are uncommunicative, the Americans are not. In its coolness and quiet withdrawal, in its prevailing sobriety, our language reflects the cautious economies and leisurely assurance of the average speaker. We say so little that we do not need to enliven our vocabulary and underline our sentences, or cry ‘Wolf!’ when we wish to be heard. The more stimulating climate of the United States has produced a more eager, a more expansive, a more decisive people. The Americans apprehend their world in sharper outlines and aspire after a more salient rendering of it. No doubt the search for emphasis in the speech of Americans and of American women particularly arises, in part, out of the sheer volume of their communication; but it is also because of their keener interest in things that they have a greater desire to talk about them.

With this greater vividness goes, inevitably perhaps, a disposition to anticipate, to define, to ‘fix’. The American nation was born of the desire for a more perfect freedom than was obtainable in England; and one of its first actions was to get freedom fixed, to define and express it in a constitution. It might seem impossible that freedom should ever be a chain, but stranger things have happened; and a chain that passes under the name of freedom is peculiarly galling. The American is threatened by a danger of knowing his freedom before he gets it; the Englishman at best surmises, out of a mind stored with immemorial checks and inhibitions. Idealism with the English is an unacknowledged leaven, permeating action and language and passing from one to the other in a haze of tolerance that helps them to surmount the difficult transition from thought to things. Sleepy blundering protects them against the cruder certitudes. The American attitude has more of the unmediated clash of steel on steel, unsurpassable when the fit is perfect and the speeds accurately timed, but, in the world we know, liable to produce friction, heat, and jarring. The bright slap-dash of the American vernacular shows the defect of this quality, and with its insistence on scoring leaves reality behind. In the ‘he-man’ hero of ‘sob-stuff’ efficiency and sentimentalism meet and marry.

Oppressed by the weight of their traditions, anxious to find a machinery for maintaining them, the English in England show symptoms of decline. Societies to study and protect a language however admirably inspired, have an ominous, classicizing trend. We are becoming conscious of our language as of our Empire, and our virtue was our unconsciousness. The fresh outlook, the frank unconcern, the overflowing youthfulness of the Americans drive us back upon ourselves, it may be, but they are a reviving challenge, nevertheless; and though much that is most deeply characteristic of the language is threatened by Americanism, the conditions under which English is spoken in the United States (where it is only one language among many) have a great deal in common with those out of which it originally grew, and are certain to produce, as indeed they have produced already, a flow of novel words and novel devices, some of which will remain to enrich and renovate our speech. The fact, too, that America and England stand for different impulses, not easily reconcilable, may enable them to discover and release a further impulse, deeper than that with which either seeks to be identified. Above all, the more magnetic, more mercurial, the tauter, stormier American temperament has, with these gifts of the modern life of speed and contrast, a quicker sympathy, a warmer and more inclusive comradeship. Love and freedom are the greatest words of our speech; and if, in America, ‘freedom’ is losing some of its bloom, ‘love’ has found there a new substance and sweetness.

The contrasting and competitive use of their one language by the English and the Americans gives it a new occasion for the exercise of its old and noble faculty of compromise. In a period of promise and renewal, it was beginning to grow old, the Americans are young; in a period of urgency, it was lagging, the Americans have made speed their element. Nothing, we may be sure, will ever make the English language brisk; but its strong constitution will assimilate tonics as fast as friends can supply them, and take no serious harm. Changes are certainly in store for it; but the best and most English instinct is still that of resistance to change, and above all to any plan or method of change, any committee or academy or association to school and enlighten us. Let the future of our language repose in our own keeping; let us be jealous of our property in it. Take the most obvious of its faults, its vagaries of spelling and pronunciation. Of course it would be an advantage if there were less chaos here. But it is doubtful whether, if a revision was made by the best people that could be found, our gains would outweigh the loss we should suffer in having asked for it; and, just because rulings are un-English, they generally come from the worst people. On pronunciation the B.B.C. already undertakes to instruct us, and its chief adviser is said to be an Irishman. O passi graviora...! The Lord will make an end of these things too. Milton spelt a number of words variably to express degrees of emphasis; it is pleasant to think that nothing need prevent a successor of his doing the same to-morrow, if he ever finds a successor. But, naturally, the position is different now that usage is settled. Usage is our best law. The Americans have dropped a u out of humour and other words; possibly we should have done so, if they had not. An inconspicuous adjustment like this which saves time and trouble is obviously harmless, and one may even hope that it will be followed by others. From time to time experiments can be aired in the press or by some enterprising publisher; if they find favour, they will be adopted. But conscious spelling leads to conscious pronunciation; and, again, this kind of consciousness, when English people get it, always goes wrong. You change ‘humour’ into ‘humor’ and you get people talking as if the last syllable rhymed with ‘or’. You change the spelling of a word to bring it into line with the pronunciation and, before you can look round, people have changed the pronunciation to bring it into line with the spelling. Where are you then? The truth is, that sensitive pronunciation of English involves gradations and blends of vowel sound that the alphabet has no means of recording; and our frank anomalies are really useful if they help to remind us of this. How am I to pronounce ‘prophecy’ or ‘library’ or ‘worship’? I only know when I hear them on the lips of some one who can speak English. A further value of our spelling, as we have it, is its bond with the past. It is a pity that many usages, when first established, were established amiss; but the errors are of such ancient date that they have grown into the language. Most of our spellings, too, have something to tell us of the history and origin of the words concerned, and, in a mixed language like ours, this is much more important than that they should attempt to imitate and perpetuate our way of pronouncing them. It is absurd to spell ‘rough’ and ‘dough’ as we do; but if we substituted ‘ruff’ and ‘doe’, we should lose interesting information and also fall into a confusion which we now avoid.

What applies to spelling applies equally to grammar and to the formation of words. We appreciate it, of course, when people who have studied language and have leisure to think about such things tell us how we ought to speak and what kind of improvements we might introduce into our language if we chose. This is the sort of topic which serves admirably for the correspondence columns of the daily press during the month of August, and gives its readers something to refresh their minds with in intervals of fishing and shooting. But when enthusiasts run campaigns against ‘cinema’ or ‘aeroplane’, telling us that we must say ‘kineema’ and ‘air-plane’, and suggesting that English will go to the dogs unless we are more serious and can consent to be guided by competent authority, the reply is that seriousness and authority are the dogs, where English is concerned. So far, it has always kept them running and we hope it always will.

All the same, it would be the greatest mistake to suppose, because English refuses to be dictated to and dislikes above all things the dictation of the specialist, that the destinies of the language are really in the hands of an unlettered herd. Authority is always at work; but it emanates from sources wider, fresher, and saner than any from which it would be possible to obtain it in the form of rules and laws. If no authority is recognized, it is because we all aspire to be authorities in our measure, and perceive by instinct which of our neighbours sees further or knows more than we do. Instead of a regal fiat, which it would be ignominy to ignore or disobey, what guides us is an infection of reverence for a mysterious rightness, the tutelage of which belongs to ourselves just so far as we are able to penetrate the secret of its being. The final exponents of this rightness are, of course, the great writers of English when they are writing as they would like to do—few if any of them have often done it; and the way of penetration is the knowledge of their works: not the knowledge which regards them as things done once and for ever (though, in one aspect, they are inevitably that), but such as finds in them, rather, the revelation of a spirit capable of revealing itself anew and of taking forms which, in proportion to their life and worth, must always be unpredictable.

For, of course, if English is to continue to be the speech of vital, developing, progressive peoples, nothing is more certain than that this vitality and progress will be accompanied and sustained by a literature. We stand together now because of the treasury of wisdom which our common language enables us to share; but wisdom itself fades to a dream, unless new expressions of it are continually found, to illuminate and summarize the swift accumulations of human experience. Not that books are to be regarded as the greatest thing in life; or, rather, let us be bold and say that they must be so regarded; but they are in life, and there are a thousand other things in it which divide the interest of those who would appreciate books at their true worth, and which constitute, let us confess it, a very tolerable education for those (in England they have always been many) who never open a book at all. The best books are concentration of the experience of the best livers, of men who, over and above their faculty, for direct living, have the impulse to live a second life in which they share with others the discoveries and delights of the first one. And, just as, among ordinary English people, action is more than speech and speech shines by its contented subservience, so, among those who read and write English, the direct life has always counted for more than the translation. English literature has been the work of men who lived before they wrote: that is its greatness. And though this quality is certainly menaced now that writing tends to become a trade; though the modern audience of two hundred millions tempts even an Englishman to raise his voice; yet modern life, we may reflect, has room for many things, and the worry and self-importance of our literary professionals of all kinds will somehow get worked into the larger equilibrium required of us, along with much else that is worrying and imposing. Life is richer now in its opportunities, more exhilarating in its occupations, more tantalizing in its questions, more urgent in the close pressure of its reality than it ever was for our forefathers; and the men who enter into all these things in flesh and blood will not fail to lift their meaning one day into the ideal world of books.

Meantime the life itself has to be lived, and the very fact that it will be inevitably a harassing, distracting life gives the impassive Englishman his chance. Some one has to take the lead and steer the steady course—why not he? It is ‘up to him’; for he is not only solid but sociable; the institutions he devises are the attraction and the torment of the world. No one else can work them; every one that sees them has to have a try. Roughly stated, the problem of Western Civilization is still to abjure slavery, to be rid of the legacies of a social organization which involved the unconsenting sacrifice of a class. Every man’s mind is now to be its own master; everything of value must be open to every one capable of possessing it; the individual must know his limitations to be his own. And this is no idealist’s ideal; it is a necessity arising from the diffusion, by mechanical means in the main, of a knowledge which may easily wreck us, but of which we cannot get rid. How then is this knowledge to be formed into an instrument of progress? The condition of success, clearly, is the presence of a soul-stirring warmth among all classes, the participation of all in one atmosphere—for every man, however unawakened, his place in the sun, so that, even if he does not care to lift his eyes to the light, light may at least reach him through the pores of his skin. This percolation of light, this preparatory gestation of embryonic soul, is assured to the English by the natural mysticism of their intelligence, by the tincture of poetry that irradiates and solidifies their common sense. The influence which chiefly sustains them in this firmest and fruitfullest of all their compromises, is, no doubt, their age-old familiarity with the Bible. All classes have possessed it, and possessed it so thoroughly as to insist on a hundred private and personal interpretations of the one sacred text. Nothing is more English than non-conformity, except the acceptance of it, and nothing more necessary to the vitality of the practical English mind. For to conform is to take your truth from another or to acknowledge that the truth is beyond you. But religion is practised by the English because its truth is known; personal discovery has made truth real to them; and the vehicle of the discovery has been a collection of mysterious poems and rhapsodies, the words of which there is no holding, for they mean at the same time everything and nothing. From childhood up poetry has ruled us all, and our language has been a kind of rainbow-bridge on which we passed from earth to heaven. The speech which was on our lips from day to day belonged not only to the day’s events, but also to a region of heavenly mystery which brooded over them. Our very faculty of experience has been cradled in the love of incomprehensible beauties; the ruling virtues of our lives draw radiance from the words in which they were made known to us.

Out of the merging of the practical and the poetical, the intuitive acknowledgment of unknown margins as a working factor in everyday affairs, springs the evolutionary virtue of the English mind, the hope of its future; and, of course, however broadened by the Bible, the English instinct for poetry does not stop and did not begin there. It has expressed itself at large in English literature, the most companionable literature the world has seen, and it has permeated the language, a language formed for common uses and stubbornly matter-of-fact, yet one in which matter-of-factness itself is not hard, but deep. The English practical man is poetically practical; for, in his view, the practical lines, in thought and action, are the lines of life; things that are to succeed, he feels, must hold their place in an equilibrium, must learn their forms and limits and the economy of their power as wild things do in the world of natural competition; his genius is at its best, in work or play, when his occupation is richest in vital analogies. What is the greatness of cricket—cricket, one of the great words of the language as it is one of the great facts of English life—if not that its excellencies can be developed only in a large frame of human feeling, that it is life in little, as much a poem as a game? Now the practical life is the life all have to lead; and if the spirit in which men lead it on the humble level of quiet plodding is the same as that which in his more radiant element inspires the poet, it would seem that the condition, essential to progress in this age, of one light shining for all in varying degrees of brightness, is actually fulfilled.