The group of tribes speaking this dialect are of the Lenni-Lenapes family, and they originally ranked higher than the two yellow peoples who were caught in the sweep of Hindu civilization. If, in spite of their primitive superiority, they are now inferior to the Asiatics, it is because these live under the influence of the social institutions of a noble race and have profited by them, though in themselves they are of slight account. Contact with the Hindus has been enough to raise them some way in the scale, while the Lenapes, who have never been touched by any such influence, have not been able to rise above their present civilization. In a similar way (to take an obvious example) the young mulattoes who have been educated in London or Paris may show a certain veneer of culture superior to that of some Southern Italian peoples, who are in point of merit infinitely higher; for once a mulatto, always a mulatto. When therefore we come upon a savage tribe with a language better than that of a more civilized nation, we must examine carefully whether the civilization of the latter really belongs to it, or is merely the result of a slight admixture of foreign blood. If so, a low type of native language helped out by a hybrid mixture of foreign idioms may well exist side by side with a certain degree of social culture.[[124]]
I have already said that, as each civilization has a special character, we must not be surprised if the poetic and philosophic sense was more developed among the Hindus and the Greeks than among ourselves; whereas our modern societies are marked rather by their practical, scientific, and critical spirit. Taken as a whole, we have more energy and a greater genius for action than the conquerors of Southern Asia and Hellas. On the other hand, we must yield them the first place in the kingdom of beauty, and here our languages naturally mirror our humble position. The style of the Indian and Ionian writers takes a more powerful flight towards the sphere of the ideal. Language, in fact, while being an excellent index of the general elevation of races, is in a special degree the measure of their æsthetic capacities. This is the character it assumes when we use it as a means of comparing different civilizations.
To bring out this point further, I will venture to question a view put forward by William von Humboldt, that in spite of the obvious superiority of the Mexican to the Peruvian language, the civilization of the Incas was yet far above that of the people of Anahuac.[[125]]
The Peruvian customs were certainly more gentle than the Mexican; and their religious ideas were as inoffensive as those of Montezuma’s subjects were ferocious. In spite of this, their social condition was marked by far less energy and variety. Their crude despotism never developed into more than a dull kind of communism; whereas the Aztec civilization had made various political experiments of great complexity. Its military system was far more vigorous; and though the use of writing was equally unknown in both empires, it seems that poetry, history, and ethics, which were extensively studied at the time of Cortes, would have advanced further in Mexico than in Peru, the institutions of which were coloured by an Epicurean indifferentism that was highly unfavourable to intellectual progress. Clearly we must regard the more active people as superior.
Von Humboldt’s view is simply a consequence of the way in which he defines civilization.[[126]] Without going over the same ground again, I was yet bound to clear up this point; for if two civilizations had really been able to develop in inverse ratio to the merits of their respective languages, I should have had to give up the idea of any necessary connexion between the intelligence of a people and the value of the language spoken by it. But I cannot do this, in view of what I have already said about Greek and Sanscrit, as compared with English, French, and German.
It would be, however, a very difficult task to assign a reason, along these lines, for the exact course taken by the language of a hybrid people. We have seldom sufficient knowledge either of the quantity or quality of the intermixture of blood to be able properly to trace its effects. Yet these racial influences persist, and if they are not unravelled, we may easily come to false conclusions. It is just because the connexion between race and language is so close, that it lasts much longer than the political unity of the different peoples, and may be recognized even when the peoples are grouped under new names. The language changes with their blood, but does not die out until the last fragment of the national life has disappeared. This is the case with modern Greek. Sadly mutilated, robbed of its wealth of grammar, impoverished in the number of its sounds, with the pure stream of its vocabulary troubled and muddy, it has none the less retained the impress of its original form.[[127]] In the intellectual world it corresponds to the sullied and deflowered Parthenon, which first became a church for the Greek popes, and then a powder-magazine; which had its pediments and columns shattered in a thousand places by the Venetian bullets of Morosini; but which still stands, for the wonder and adoration of the ages, as a model of pure grace and unadorned majesty.
Not every race has the power of being faithful to the tongue of its ancestors. This makes our task still more difficult, when we try to determine the origin or relative value of different human types by the help of philology. Not only do languages change without any obvious reason, at any rate from the racial point of view; but there are also certain nations which give up their own language altogether, when they are brought for some time into contact with a foreign race. This happened, after the conquests of Alexander, in the case of the more enlightened nations of Western Asia, such as the Carians, Cappadocians, and Armenians. The Gauls are another instance, as I have already said. Yet all these peoples brought a foreign element into the conquering tongue, which was transformed in its turn. Thus they could all be regarded as using their own intellectual tools, though to a very imperfect extent; while others, more tenacious of theirs, such as the Basques, the Berbers of Mount Atlas, and the Ekkhilis of Southern Arabia, speak even at the present day the same tongue as was spoken by their most primitive ancestors. But there are certain peoples, the Jews for example, who seem never to have held to their ancestral speech at all; and we can discover this indifference from the time of their earliest migrations. When Terah left the land of his fathers, Ur of the Chaldees, he certainly had not learnt the Canaanitish tongue that henceforth became the national speech of the children of Israel. It was probably influenced to some extent by their earlier recollections, and in their mouth became a special dialect of the very ancient language which was the mother of the earliest Arabic we know, and the lawful inheritance of tribes closely allied to the black Hamites.[[128]] Yet not even to this language were the Jews to remain faithful. The tribes who were brought back from captivity by Zerubbabel had forgotten it during their short stay of sixty-two years by the rivers of Babylon. Their patriotism was proof against exile, and still burned with its original fire; but the rest had been given up, with remarkable facility, by a people which is at the same time jealous of its own traditions and extremely cosmopolitan. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its inhabitants reappeared, speaking an Aramaic or Chaldean jargon, which may have had some slight resemblance to the speech of the fathers of Abraham.
At the time of Christ, this dialect offered only a feeble resistance to the invasion of Hellenistic Greek, which assailed the Jewish mind on all sides. Henceforth all the works produced by Jewish writers appeared in the new dress, which fitted them more or less elegantly, and copied to some extent the old Attic fashions. The last canonical books of the Old Testament, as well as the works of Philo and Josephus, are Hellenistic in spirit.
When the Holy City was destroyed, and the Jewish nation scattered, the favour of God departed from them, and the East came again into its own. Hebrew culture broke with Athens as it had broken with Alexandria, and the language and ideas of the Talmud, the teaching of the school of Tiberias, were again Semitic, sometimes in the form of Arabic, sometimes in that of the “language of Canaan,” to use Isaiah’s phrase. I am speaking of what was henceforth to be the sacred language of religion and the Rabbis, and was regarded as the true national speech. In their everyday life, however, the Jews used the tongue of the country where they settled; and, further, these exiles were known everywhere by their special accent. They never succeeded in fitting their vocal organs to their adopted language, even when they had learnt it from childhood. This goes to confirm what William von Humboldt says as to the connexion between race and language being so close that later generations never get quite accustomed to pronounce correctly words that were unknown to their ancestors.[[129]]
Whether this be true or not, we have in the Jews a remarkable proof of the fact that one must not always assume, at first sight, a close connexion between a race and its language, for the language may not have belonged to it originally.[[130]]