The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle ages, appear to be glebæ adscriptitiæ, and to extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as had Charlemagne before him.
England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,—German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,—the common language in which we express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,—this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?
As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.
A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, the man who makes them potent. As it was not the famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of the Prussian soldier,—the man behind the gun, educated in the best common schools in the world,—so it is the latent heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives them momentum and projectile force. The same words, coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their destination, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than upon the degree in which they have been organized into the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored away in their formation, which is liberated in their publication.
There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “Mesopotamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact.
Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that “every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and constitution, the trip-hammer momentum with which he makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense current of his physical energy.” When the great champion of New England said, in the United States Senate, “There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of character, and of all the associations connected with it, which changed that which, uttered by another, would have been the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened the pulse even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It was this which gave such prodigious power to the words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and, above all, the evidence which these furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.
In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the creative individuality projected into the words that makes the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by the simple words, “Who said that?” An acute American writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke glaring through it.[6] What can be more effective than the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers not merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he says it.
“Let but a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens, how the style refines!”
says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that