It is easier to feel this than to prove it, for it is a question precisely of those acts which pass unperceived along life's path—of all sorts of things which are never mentioned, because they are not observed or because their importance is not understood. Thus physiology was long unknown, while curiosity was occupied with monsters. The continuous phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city-dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly restored to sight, who first noted natural beauty. There is an external physiology which disappears in habit. Analyzed, it reveals the most important voluntary act of our lives—voluntary, in the sense that they are contingent compared with the primordial movements of the life of a species; voluntary, if the will be regarded as the consciousness of an unconscious effort.
Whether sense or faculty, speech cannot logically be separated from hearing, but the education of the ear is much less perceptible than that of the vocal apparatus. They can thus be considered separately, or at least without observing a precise order in acquisitions which are entangled like all the activities of life. Moving, hearing, seeing, speaking—all these are connected. Imitation imposes itself upon all the functions at the same time, though an appreciable order of birth can be established for each of them. This order is of little moment in a study where it is question, not of the intelligence which receives, but of the intelligence which gives—of the exterior and not of the interior psychological life.
Speech is feminine. Poets and orators are feminine types. To speak is to do woman's work. Because woman speaks as a bird sings, she alone is capable of teaching the language. When the child attempts to imitate the sounds it has heard, the woman is there to watch him, to smile at him, and to encourage him. There is established a mute working contract between these two beings, and what patience the one who knows displays in guiding the one who tries! The first words pronounced by a child correspond in its mind to no object, to no sensation. The child, at this moment of its life, is a parrot, and nothing more. It imitates. It speaks because it hears others speaking. If the world were silent around it, speech would remain congealed in its brain. Thence the importance of a woman's prattle—an importance far greater than that of the most beautiful poems and of the profoundest philosophies. The function which makes man a man is the special work of the woman. A child reared by a very feminine and very talkative woman is formed rather for speech and, consequently, for psychologic consciousness. Left to the care of a taciturn man, the same child would develop very slowly—so slowly, perhaps, that it would never attain the full limits of its practical intelligence.
Were it possible to assign an origin to language, one would say that woman had created it; but the secret of all origins will forever escape us. Birds sing, the dog barks, man speaks. It is not easier to imagine a dumb man than a dumb dog or a dumb finch; and if these species formerly existed without a voice, it is not easy to see why they should have acquired an organ which many other animals, including the birds of the South Polar regions, get along very well without. If language were learned or acquired—if, in order to recover its first traces, the celebrated roots, it were enough to find the common mother of Latin and Sanskrit, of Greek and of Anglo-Saxon—it is not easy to see why the dog does not converse with his master otherwise than with his tail, his eyes and his yelping. But the dog will never speak, because the genius of an animal species is as rigorously determined as the forms of the crystalline species.
The view that the oldest language was composed of five or six hundred monosyllables, is now without value, though it had a certain force. It gave weight to several hypotheses whose absurdity was not at first evident. Yet nothing had ever been observed in any real language resembling an even unconscious reservoir of roots. Words are born of each other by derivation, coming into the world sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than the original word. This derivation is always dominated by a real, living concrete sense. No man whose mind has not been spoiled by special studies, has the sense of roots. The ba, be, bi, bo, bu of the alphabets, are, according to the theory, so many roots; but a series of kindred meanings has not been attributed to each of these sounds. They are capable, even in the same language, of expressing them all, either by chance, or according to a logic whose laws are undeterminable.
The primitive element in speech is not the word but the phrase. Man's spoken phrase is instinctive, like the sung phrase of the bird, like the yelped phrase of the dog. The word is a product of analysis.
In order to give the word priority over the phrase, the older school started from this idea, namely, that the word is created after the thing has been perceived, man acting as a nomenclator, as a professor of botany who gives names to sprigs of moss. The reality is different. The child stammers words before knowing the objects of which these words are the signs. It is possible that man spoke—chattered—a long time before a fixed relation became established between things and the familiar sounds issuing from his mouth.
Thousands of languages can thus have been chattered successively on thousands of territories—languages lacking precision, essentially musical, a succession of phrases in which certain sounds only corresponded to realities; but these sounds, in spite of their importance, in spite of their utilitarian and representative value, may be supposed to have been at first almost as fugitive as the rest of the speech. An unwritten language never survives the generation which created it. Among savages each generation remakes its language so completely that the grandfather is a stranger among his own grandchildren.
If this primitive chattering be admitted, it will readily be admitted also that woman must have had a large share in it, while arousing the mind of the males by her laughter and her attention. Woman has little capacity for verbal innovation. Among so many excellent women writers, none has ever created a language in the sense of which this is said of Ronsard, of Montaigne, of Chateaubriand, or of Victor Hugo; but she repeats well—often better than a man—what was said before her. Born to conserve, she performs her rôle to perfection. Eternally, unwearyingly she rekindles from the failing torch a new torch identical with the old. It is in the hands of women—dancers in life's ballet, or melancholy vestals in deep caverns—that the lampada vitai shine. What woman has been historically, she will always be and she has always been, from before history even.