BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
In the course of our two foregoing articles we followed the advance of the great Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we belong, from its original seat in Central Asia, which it began to leave more than four thousand years ago, until we found it in possession of India, Persia, and all of Europe. We considered briefly and incidentally the fact that within the last two hundred and fifty years this Asiatic race has taken absolute possession of the greater part of the continent of North America. We saw that speech was the bond and the token of the now vast and vague, but once narrow and compact, unity of this powerful race, which was brought into existence to conquer, to rule, and to humanize the world. Of the numerous languages which have sprung from the Aryan stem, English is the youngest. Compared in age with any other language of that stock, we may almost say with any existing language of any stock, it is like a new born babe in the presence of hoary eld. Only eight hundred years ago it was unknown. True, its rudiments and much of its substance then existed; but so it might be said that they existed in a certain degree four thousand years ago, as we saw in our last article. Yet again, more than four hundred years passed away before modern English was born. It was not until about the beginning of the sixteenth century that the language of Spenser, of Shakspere, of the Bible, of Bunyan, of Milton, of Goldsmith, Burke, Irving, Hawthorne, and Thackeray, came fully into existence as the recognized established speech of the English race.
Since that time the changes it has undergone have been trivial and unimportant. Like the languages of all other highly civilized peoples, it has received many additions, but its essential character has not changed; its structure has been modified so slightly that the change is perceptible only on the closest examination; its syntactical construction has remained unshaken. The prose of Spenser and Shakspere and the correspondence of the educated men of their day is as easily understood by an unlettered English speaking man of our day as the prose of Sir Arthur Helps or the more intelligible passages in the daily newspapers. During that time, indeed, there have been changes of style in writing English, which are more or less distinctive of periods. A reader of moderate experience and discrimination can soon tell whether a page that is put before him was written in the Elizabethan period, in that of the Restoration (Charles II.), in that of Queen Anne, or that of Victoria. But the differences by which his judgment would be guided are differences of tone, of manner, of “the way of putting things,” of certain tricks of expression, and are without any relations whatever to the “grammar,” or to the essential character of language. The presence of words not in use at one period, but which came into use at another, is an important means of such a discrimination. But, in the first place, the introduction of new words does not modify the essential character of a language; and in the next we are not now considering a criticism which goes so far as to examine the history of the English vocabulary.
This modern English, which is the youngest, is also the greatest language ever spoken. A man may be supposed, not unreasonably, to be prejudiced in favor of his mother tongue; but the judgment that declares in favor of English against all other languages, even Greek, needs neither motive nor support from prejudice. The two facts, that the English language is the vehicle and the medium of a literature unequaled by that produced in any other known tongue, and that it is becoming the common intermediary and most widely diffused speech of the world, show that it possesses in the highest degree the two essential elements of a great and complete language—adaptation to man’s highest and to his homeliest needs in expression. There is no other known language in which “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” the Falstaff scenes in “King Henry the Fourth,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Paradise Lost,” the Roger de Coverley papers of the “Spectator,” “The Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” “The Vicar of Wakefield” and “She Stoops to Conquer,” “The School for Scandal,” “Waverley,” “The Antiquary” and “The Fortunes of Nigel,” “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan,” “The Pickwick Papers,” “Henry Esmond,” “Adam Bede” and “Romola,” “In Memoriam” and “Sir Galahad,” “The Earthly Paradise,” “Child Roland” and “The Scarlet Letter” could all have been written. No other language is at once grand enough and simple enough, strong enough and flexible enough, lofty enough and homely enough to be the natural, fitting and complete utterance of the literature of which these are the typical productions, and to be, moreover, at the same time perfectly adapted to the needs of the jurist, the politician, the man of business, and the mariner. I remember that once on the St. Lawrence, on the way to Quebec, as the steamer came to a landing, the French officer on the “bridge” screamed an order to the engineer, “Arretez donc, Alphonse! arretez donc!”[1] and that then I recollected that the day before on the British steamer in which I left Montreal, the English officer in just the same situation had quietly said, in his strong, firm voice, “Hold hard!” and that I then thought not only how much more effective those two syllables were as a phrase of nautical command, but that they might be used by an English poet in a passage of grand and strong emotion. English has no words which are too great or too little, too fine or too homely to be used when need requires. English words change their character and their expression according to their connection and the manner in which they are uttered.
English owes its supremacy first, to the vigorous vitality of its germ and the clean robustness of its stem; next, to the rich and infinitely varied word-growth, which this trunk supports and nourishes. All languages are more or less composite, but of all languages English is most composite. It has been largely and richly grafted. It is, of all languages, the most complex in substance, and the simplest in structure. This simplicity of structure enables the uneducated man—Bunyan, for example—to use it with correctness and force, while the vast variety of its substance adapts it to all the needs of poet and philosopher. Let us see how such a language came into existence, and what it is.
The people which spoke the English language when it assumed its modern form, had made it. This may seem to be the sort of truth which is triteness; but it is not so. The people which speaks a language generally does make it; but not always, as we shall see. The people who made the English language, and who made England, were of that part of the great Aryan family which had taken possession of the northwestern part of Europe—that which lies around the southern and western part of the Baltic Sea. It is commonly said that the English are a very composite and heterogeneous people. In a narrow sense this is true, but in a large and really significant sense it is quite untrue. In his welcome to the Danish princess Alexandra, when she arrived in England to become Princess of Wales, the poet laureate prettily availed himself of the minor truth, to sing
“Saxon and Dane and Norman are we,
But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra!”
The English race is, and for more than five hundred years has been compounded of Saxons (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), Danes and Normans. But these three peoples were of such close kindred that, in Launcelot Gobbo’s phrase, they were “cater cousins.”[A] They were all Goths; the Danes and the Normans were both Scandinavians; and the Saxons, the Angles, and particularly the Jutes, although they were Low German tribes (the term Low German meaning merely inhabitants of the lower parts of Germany near the sea) were, because of their origin, and also of their neighborhood to the others, so like them in blood and in speech that the difference was rather superficial than essential.