Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

It is nearly two thousand years since Tacitus studied the Teutonic race-characteristics, and yet most of the peculiarities he noted then are evident now. Tacitus tells us that the Teutons were tall, fair-haired, and flegmatic. They were great eaters, not to say gross feeders; and they were given to strong drink. They were fond of games, and were ready to pay their losses with their persons, if need be. They were individual and independent. Their manners were rude, not to call them violent. They were possessed of the domestic virtues, the women being chaste and the husbands faithful. They loved war as they loved liberty. They had a passionate fidelity to their leaders. They decided important questions of policy in public assembly.

The several peoples of our own time who are descended from the Teutons thus described by Tacitus with so sympathetic an insight have been developing for twenty centuries, more or less, each in its own way, under influences wholly unlike, influences both geographical and historical; and it is small wonder that they have diverged as they have, and that no one of them nowadays completely represents the original stock. Some of the points Tacitus made are true to-day in Prussia and are not true in Great Britain; and some hit home here in the United States, altho they miss the mark in Germany. The modern Germans still retain a few of these Tacitean characteristics which the peoples that speak English have lost in their adventurous career overseas. And on the other hand, certain of the remarks of Tacitus might be made to-day in the United States; for example, the willingness to run risks for the fun of the game—is not this a present characteristic of the American as we know him? And here we have always been governed by town-meeting, as the old Teutons were, whereas the modern German is only now getting this back by borrowing it from the English precedent. In our private litigations we continue to abide by the customs of our remote Teutonic ancestors, while the German has accepted as a legal guide the Roman law, wrought out by the countrymen of Tacitus.

Second only to a community of language, no unifying force is more potent than a community of law. In the depths of their dark forests the Teutons had already evolved their own rudimentary code by which they did justice between man and man; and these customary sanctions were taken over to Britain by the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes; and they served as the foundation of the common law by means of which the peoples that speak English still administer justice in their courts. And here again we find the handiwork of the great King Alfred, from whom we may date the codification of an English law as we may also reckon the establishing of an English literature. With the opportunism of our race, he had no thought of a new legislation, but merely merged the best of the tribal customs into a law for the whole kingdom. The king sought to bring to light and to leave on record the righteous rulings of the wise men who had gone before. “Those things which I met with,” so the historian transmits his words, “either of the days of Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht, who first among the English race received baptism, those which seemed to me rightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the rest.”

Law and language—these are the unrelaxing bands that hold a race firmly together. There are now two main divisions of the Teutonic stock, separated to-day by language and by law—the people who speak German and are ruled by Roman law, and the peoples who speak English and are governed by the common law; and the separation is as wide and as deep legally as it is linguistically. “By the forms of its language a nation expresses its very self,” said one of the acutest of British critics; and we have the proof of this at hand in the characteristic differences between the English language and the German. By the forms of its law a people expresses its political beliefs; and we have the evidence of this in the fact that we Americans regard our rulers merely as agents of the town-meeting of the old Teutons, while the modern Germans are submitting to a series of trials for lese-majesty.

Laws have most weight when they are seen to be the expression of the common conscience; and they are most respected when they best reflect the ideals that are “the souls of the nations which cherish them,” as a historian of American literature has finely phrased it—“the living spirits which waken nationality into being, and which often preserve its memory long after its life has ebbed away.” The marked difference now obvious between the two great divisions of the Teutonic stock—that which speaks English and that which speaks German—is due in part to their not having each conserved exactly the same portion of the ideals inherited from their common ancestors, and in part to their having each acquired other ideals in the course of the many centuries of their separate existence. And the minor differences to be detected between the two great divisions of the stock that speaks English, that dwelling in Great Britain and that dwelling in the United States, are due to similar causes.

While the ancestors of the people who speak German were abiding at home, where Tacitus had seen them, the ancestors of the peoples who speak English went forth across the North Sea and possessed themselves of the better part of Great Britain and gave it a new name. They were not content to defeat the earlier inhabitants in fair fight, and then to leave them in peace, as the Romans did, ruling them and intermarrying with them; the English thrust the natives out violently and harried them away. As Green puts it tersely, “The English conquest for a hundred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession and driving back of the people whom the English conquered.” No doubt this dispossession was ruthless; but was it complete? The newcomers took the land for their own, and they meant to kill out all the original owners; but was this possible? The country was rough and thickly wooded, and it abounded in nooks and corners where a family might hide itself. Moreover, what is more likely than that the invader should often spare a woman and take her to wife? For centuries the English kept spreading themselves and pushing back the Britons; but in the long war there were truces now and again, and what is more likely than an incessant intermingling of the blood all along the border as it was slowly driven forward?

Certain it is that one of the influences which have modified the modern English stock is a Celtic strain. If the peoples that speak English are now not quite like the people that speak German, plainly this is one reason: they have had a Celtic admixture, which has lightened them and contributed elements lacking in the original Teuton. To declare just what these elements are is not easy; but to deny their presence is impossible. The Celt has an impetuosity and a swiftness of perception which we do not find in the original Teuton, and which the man who speaks English is now more likely to possess than the man who speaks German. The Celt has a certain shy delicacy; he has a happy sensibility and a turn for charming sentiment; he has a delightful lyric note; and he has at times a sincere and puissant melancholy. These are all qualities which we find in our English literature, and especially in its greatest figure. “The Celts do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population,” said Henry Morley in a striking passage. “But for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in its half-barbarous days invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick, and that quickened afterward the Northmen’s blood in France, Germanic England would not have produced a Shakspere.”

Here we see Morley declaring that the Celt had “quickened the Northmen’s blood in France”; and perhaps by his choice of a word he meant to remind us that whereas the Northmen who sailed down the mouth of the Seine were Teutons, the Normans who were to sail up to Hastings had been materially modified during their sojourn in France, which had once been Celtic Gaul. Two series of occasions there were when the English received an accession of Celtic blood: first, when they conquered England; and second, when they in turn were conquered by the Normans, who ruled them for centuries, and were finally merged in them, just as earlier the Romans had been merged in the Gauls. And this recalls to us the fact that there was more in the Norman than the intermingling of the Teuton and the Celt; there was in the Norman also not a little of the Roman who had so long ruled Gaul, and who had so deeply marked it with certain of his own characteristics. Thus it was that the Norman brought into England a Latin tradition; he had acquired something of the Roman administrative skill, something of the Roman’s genius for affairs. After the Renascence, Latin influences were to affect the English language and English literature; but it was after the conquest that the English people itself came first in contact with certain of the Roman ideals.

Matthew Arnold thought that we owed “to the Latin element in our language the most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the modern German”; and he found in the Latinized Normans in England “the sense for fact, which the Celts had not, and the love of strenuousness, clearness, and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not.” Perhaps the English feeling for style, our command of the larger rhetoric, may be due to this blend of the Norman; and it cannot be denied that this gift has not been granted to the modern German. The fantastic brilliancy of De Quincey and the sonorous picturesqueness of Ruskin are alike inconceivable in the language of Klopstock; and altho there is a pregnant concision in the speeches of Bismarck at his best, there is no German orator who ever attained the unfailing dignity and the lofty affluence of Webster at his best.

Less than two centuries after the good King Alfred had declared English law and established English literature, the Normans came and saw and conquered. Less than three centuries after King William took the land there was born the first great English poet. If the language is to-day what it is, it is because of Chaucer, who chose the court dialect of London to write in, and who made it supple for his own use and the use of the poets that were to come after. The Norman conquest had brought a new and needed contribution to the English character; it had resulted in an immense enrichment of the English language; and it had related English literature again to the broad current of European life. To the original Teutonic basis had been added Celtic and Norman and Latin strains; and still the English nature wrought its steady will, still it expressed itself most freely and most fully in poetry. And in no other poet are certain aspects of this English nature more boldly displayed than in Chaucer, in whom we find a fresh feeling for the visible world, a true tenderness of sentiment, a joyous breadth of humor, and a resolute yet delicate handling of human character.