I
THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE
It is a thousand years since the death of the great Englishman, King Alfred, in whose humble translations we may see the beginnings of English literature. Until it has a literature, however unpretending and however artless, a language is not conscious of itself; and it is therefore in no condition to maintain its supremacy over the dialects that are its jealous rivals. And it is by its literature chiefly that a language forever binds together the peoples who speak it—by a literature in which the characteristics of these peoples are revealed and preserved, and in which their ideals are declared and passed down from generation to generation as the most precious heritage of the race.
The historian of the English people asserts that what made Alfred great, small as was his sphere of action, was “the moral grandeur of his life. He lived solely for the good of his people.” He laid the foundations for a uniform system of law, and he started schools, wishing that every free-born youth who had the means should “abide at his book till he can understand English writing.” He invited scholars from other lands to settle in England; but what most told on English culture was done not by them but by the king himself. He “resolved to throw open to his people in their own tongue the knowledge which till then had been limited to the clergy,” and he “took his books as he found them,” the popular manuals of the day, Bede and Boethius and Orosius. These he translated with his own hand, editing freely, and expanding and contracting as he saw fit. “Do not blame me if any know Latin better than I,” he explained with modest dignity; “for every man must say what he says and must do what he does according to his ability.” And Green, from whom this quotation is borrowed, insists that, “simple as was his aim, Alfred created English literature”—the English literature which is still alive and sturdy after a thousand years, and which is to-day flourishing not only in Great Britain, where Alfred founded it, but here in the United States, in a larger land, the existence of which the good king had no reason ever to surmise.
This English literature is like the language in which it is written, and also like the stock that speaks the language, wherever the race may have planted or transplanted itself, whether by the banks of the little Thames or on the shores of the broad Hudson and the mighty Mississippi. Literature and language and people are practical, no doubt; but they are not what they are often called: they are not prosaic. On the contrary, they are poetic, essentially and indisputably poetic. The peoples that speak English are, and always have been, self-willed and adventurous. This they were long before King Alfred’s time, in the early days when they were Teutons merely, and had not yet won their way into Britain; and this they are to-day, when the most of them no longer dwell in old England, but in the newer England here in America. They have ever lacked the restraint and reserve which are the conditions of the best prose; and they have always exulted in the untiring energy and the daring imagination which are the vital elements of poetry. “In his busiest days Alfred found time to learn the old songs of his race by heart,” so the historian tells us; “and he bade them be taught in the palace-school.”
Lyric is what English literature has always been at its best, lyric and dramatic; and the men who speak English have always been individual and independent, every man ready to fight for his own hand; and the English language has gone on its own way, keeping its strength in spite of the efforts of pedants and pedagogs to bind it and to stifle it, and ever insisting on renewing its freshness as best it could. Development there has been in language and in literature and in the stock itself, development and growth of many kinds; but no radical change can be detected in all these ten centuries. “No national art is good which is not plainly the nation’s own,” said Mr. Stopford Brooke in his consideration of the earliest English lyrics. “The poetry of England has owed much to the different races which mingled with the original English race; it has owed much to the different types of poetry it absorbed—Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian, Spanish: but below all these admixtures the English nature wrought its steady will. It seized, it transmuted, it modified, it mastered these admixtures both of races and of song.”
The English nature wrought its steady will; but what is this English nature, thus set up as an entity and endowed with conscious purpose? Is there such a thing, of a certainty? Can there be such a thing, indeed? These questions are easier to ask than to answer. It is true that we have been accustomed to credit certain races not merely with certain characteristics, but even with certain qualities, esteeming certain peoples to be specially gifted in one way or another. For example, we have held it as an article of faith that the Greeks, by their display of a surpassing sense of form, proved their possession of an artistic capacity finer and richer than that revealed by any other people since the dawn of civilization. And again, we have seen in the Roman skill in constructive administration, in the Latin success in law-making and in road-building—we have seen in this the evidence of a native faculty denied to their remote predecessors, the Egyptians. Now come the advocates of a later theory, who tell us that the characteristics of the Greeks and of the Romans are not the result of any inherent superiority of theirs, or of any native predisposition toward art or toward administration, but are caused rather by circumstances of climate, of geographical situation, and of historical position. We are assured now that the Romans, had they been in the place of the Greeks and under like circumstances, might have revealed themselves as great masters of form; while the Greeks, had their history been that of the Romans, would certainly have shown the same power of ruling themselves and others, and of compacting the most diverse nations into a single empire.
No doubt the theory of race-characteristics, of stocks variously gifted with specific faculties, has been too vigorously asserted and unduly insisted upon. It was so convenient and so useful that it could not help being overworked. But altho it is not so impregnable as it was supposed to be, it need not be surrendered at the first attack; and altho we are compelled to abandon the theory as a whole, we can save what it contained of truth. And therefore it is well to bear in mind that even if the Greeks in the beginning had no sharper bent toward art than had the Phenicians,—from whom they borrowed so much of value to be made by them more valuable,—even if their esthetic superiority was the result of a happy chapter of chances, it was a fact nevertheless; and a time came at last when the Greeks were seen to be possessed of a fertility of invention and of a sense of form surpassing all their predecessors had ever exhibited. When this time came the Greeks were conscious of their unexampled achievements and properly proud of them; and they proved that they were able to transmit from sire to son this artistic aptitude—however the aptitude itself had been developed originally. So whether the Roman power to govern and to evolve the proper instruments of government was a native gift of the Latins, or whether it was developed in them by a fortuitous combination of geographical and historical circumstances, this question is somewhat academic, since we know that the Romans did display extraordinary administrative ability century after century. Whenever it was evolved, the artistic type in Greece and the administrative type in Italy was persistent; and it reappeared again and again in successive generations.
This indeed needs always to be remembered, that race-characteristics, whatever their origin, are strangely enduring when once they are established. The English nature whereof Mr. Stopford Brooke speaks, when once it was conscious of itself, worked its steady will, despite the changes of circumstance; and only very slowly is it modified by the accidents of later history and geography. M. Fouillée has set side by side the description of the Germans by Tacitus and the account of the Gauls by Cæsar, drawing attention to the fact that the modern French are now very like the ancient Gauls, and that the descendants of the Germans of old, the various branches of the Teutonic race, have the characteristics of their remote ancestors whom the Roman historian chose to praise by way of warning for his fellow-citizens.
The Romans conquered Gaul and held it for centuries; the Franks took it in turn and gave it their name; but the Gallic type was so securely fixed that the Roman first and then the Frank succumbed to it and were absorbed into it. The Gallic type is not now absolutely unchanged, for, after all, the world does move; but it is readily recognizable to this day. Certain of Cæsar’s criticisms read as tho they were written by a contemporary of Napoleon. As Cæsar saw them the Gauls were fickle in counsel and fond of revolutions. Believing in false rumors, they were led into deeds they regretted afterward. Deciding questions of importance without reflection, they were ready to war without reason; and they were weak and lacking in energy in time of disaster. They were cast down by a first defeat, as they were inflamed by a first victory. They were affable, light, inconstant, and vain; they were quick-witted and ready-tongued; they had a liking for tales and an insatiable curiosity for news. They cultivated eloquence, having an astonishing facility of speech, and of letting themselves be taken in by words. And having thus summed up Cæsar’s analysis of the Gaul, M. Fouillée asks how after this we can deny the persistence of national types.
What Tacitus has to say of the Germans comes home more closely to us who speak English, since the Teutonic tribes the Latin historian was considering are not more the ancestors of the modern Prussians than they are of the wide-spread Anglo-Saxon peoples. As those who speak English went from the mainland across the North Sea to an island and dwelt there for centuries, and were joined by earlier kin from elsewhere, the race-characteristics were obviously modified a little—just as they have been as obviously modified a little more when some of those who spoke English went out again from the island to a boundless continent across the Atlantic, and were joined here by many others, most of whom were also derived from one or another of the varied Teutonic stocks.