Let us be thankful, then, that our language has other elements than the Saxon, admirable as that is. The circumstances under which this element had its origin were such as to impart strength rather than beauty or elegance. The language of our continental forefathers was the language of fierce barbarians, hemmed in by other barbarous tribes, and having no intercourse with foreign nations, except when roving as sea wolves to plunder and destroy. It was the speech of a taciturn people living only in gloomy forests and on stormy seas, and was naturally, therefore, harsh and monosyllabic. It was full, nevertheless, of pithy, bold, and vigorous expressions, and needed only that its hardy stock should receive the grafts of sunnier and softer climes, to bear abundant and beautiful fruit. Let us be thankful that this union took place. Let us be grateful for that inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by engrafting our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dialect of Normandy, caused ultimately the whole opulence of Roman, and even of Grecian thought, to play freely through the veins of our native tongue. No doubt the immediate result was anything but pleasant. For a long time after the language was thrown again into the crucible, Britons, Saxons and Normans talked a jargon fit neither for gods nor men. It was a chaos of language, hissing, sputtering, bubbling like a witch’s caldron. But luckily the Saxon element was yet plastic and unfrozen, so that the new elements could fuse with its own, thus forming that wondrous instrument of expression which we now enjoy, fitted fully to reflect the thoughts of the myriad-minded Shakespeare, yet, at the same time, with enough remaining of its old forest stamina for imparting a masculine depth to the sublimities of Milton or the Hebrew prophets, and to the Historic Scriptures that patriarchal simplicity which is one of their greatest charms.
We are aware that, in reply to all this, it may be asked, “Are not ninety-three words out of every hundred in the Bible Anglo-Saxon; and where are the life, beauty and freshness of our language to be found in so heaped a measure as in that ‘pure well of English,’ the Bible?” Nothing can be plainer or simpler than its vocabulary, yet how rich is it in all that concerns the moral, the spiritual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity! Is it logic that we ask? What a range of abstract thought, what an armory of dialectic weapons, what an enginery of vocal implements for moving the soul, do we find in the epistles of St. Paul! Is it rhetoric that we require? “Where,” in the language of South, “do we find such a natural prevailing pathos as in the lamentations of Jeremiah? One would think that every letter was written with a tear, every word was the noise of a breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted of sorrow, disciplined to grief from his infancy, one who never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan.” Yet, while our translation owes much of its beauty to the Saxon, there are passages the grandeur of which would be greatly diminished by the substitution of Saxon words for the Latin ones. In the following the Latin words italicized are absolutely necessary to preserve one of the sublimest rhythms of the Bible: “And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, ‘Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’”
The truth is, the translators of the Bible, while they have employed a large percentage of Saxon words, have hit the golden mean in their version, never hesitating to use a Latin word when the sense or the rhythm demanded it; and hence we have the entire volume of revelation in the happiest form in which human wit and learning have ever made it accessible to man. This an English Catholic writer, a convert from the Anglican church, has mournfully acknowledged, in the following touching passage:—“Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness.... The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle, and pure and penitent and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled.... In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”[21]
It is a very striking and suggestive fact that those very writers who award the palm for expressiveness to the Saxon part of our language, cannot extol the Saxon without the help of Latin words. Dr. Gregory tells us that when, in the company of Robert Hall, he chanced to use the term “felicity” three or four times in rather quick succession, the latter asked him: “Why do you say ‘felicity’? ‘Happiness’ is a better word, more musical, and genuine English, coming from the Saxon.” “Not more musical,” said Dr. Gregory. “Yes, more musical,—and so are all words derived from the Saxon, generally. Listen, sir: ‘My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.’ There is plaintive music. Listen again, sir: ‘Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.’ There is cheerful music.” “Yes, but ‘rejoice’ is French.” “True, but all the rest is Saxon; and ‘rejoice’ is almost out of time with the other words. Listen again: ‘Thou hast delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.’ All Saxon, sir, except ‘delivered.’ I could think of the word ‘tear’ till I wept.” But whence did Robert Hall get the words “musical” and “plaintive music”? Are they not from the Greek and the French? Is not this stabbing a man with his own weapons? It is a curious fact, that, in spite of this eulogy on Saxon words, a more than ordinary percentage of the words used in Mr. Hall’s writings are of Romanic origin. Again, even Macaulay, one of the most brilliant and powerful of all English writers, finds it impossible to laud the Saxon part of the language without borrowing nearly half the words of his famous panegyric from the Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article on Bunyan, in a passage written in studied commendation of the “pure old Saxon” English, we find, omitting the particles and wheelwork, one hundred and twenty-one words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent, are classical or alien. In other words, this great English writer, than whom few have a more imperial command over all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon insufficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is obliged to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the most emphatic ones, from the imported stock!
It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles,—the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure,—must be Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson’s conversational language with that of his writings, has vividly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a highly Latinized diction. “The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. ‘When we were taken up stairs,’ says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides, ‘a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.’ This incident is recorded in his published Journey as follows: ‘Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as black as a Cyclops from the forge.’ Sometimes,” Macaulay adds, “Johnson translated aloud. ‘The Rehearsal,’ he said, ‘has not wit enough to keep it sweet;’ then, after a pause, ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’” Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by straining it through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues, and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity rather springs from such words as are our own, and peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing to the language; for by pushing the artificial or classic system to an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, and led men to cultivate again the native idiom.
In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we would say to every young writer: Give no fantastic preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an affluence of synonyms and a nicety of discrimination which no homogeneous tongue can boast. To know how to use each in due degree, and on proper occasions,—when to aim at vigor and when at refinement of expression,—to be energetic without coarseness, and polished without affectation,—is the highest proof of a cultivated taste. Never use a Romanic word when a Teutonic one will do as well; for the former carries a comparatively cold and conventional signification to an English ear. Between the sounding Latin and the homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is often as much difference in respect to a power of awakening associations, as between a gong and a peal of village bells. Pleasant though it be to read the pages of one who writes in a foreign tongue, as it is pleasant to visit distant lands, yet there is always the charm of home, with all its witchery, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of our fathers. Of the words that we heard in our childhood, there are some which have stored up in them an ineffable sweetness and flavor, which make them precious ever after; there are others which are words of might, of power,—old, brawny, large-meaning words, heavily laden with associations,—which, when they strike the imagination, awaken tender and tremulous memories, obscure, subtle, and yet most powerful. The orator and the poet can never employ these terms without great advantage; their very sound is often a spell “to conjure withal.” Our language is essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it is thoroughly so; all its grammatical forms, all its most common and necessary words, are still identical with that old mother tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips of Arminius and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and of Harold of England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles the Great. On the other hand, never scruple to use a Romanic word when the Saxon will not do as well; that is, do not over-Teutonize from any archaic pedantry, but use the strongest, the most picturesque, or the most beautiful word, from whatever source it may come. The Latin words, though less home-like, must nevertheless be deemed as truly denizen in the language as the Saxon,—as being no alien interlopers, but possessing the full right of citizenship. Some of them came so early into the language, and are, therefore, so thoroughly naturalized, that we hardly recognize them as foreign words, unless our attention is particularly called to their origin. When a person speaks of “paying money” or “paying a debt,” we are no more sensible of an exotic effect than if he had spoken of “eating bread,” “drinking water,” or “riding a horse.” That “pay” is derived from pacare, “debt” from debitum, or “money” from (Juno) Moneta, scarcely suggests itself even to the scholar. Perhaps of all our writers Shakespeare may be deemed, in this matter of the choice of words, the student’s best friend. No one better knows how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weakness; and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar themes he uses simple words, and shows, by his total abstinence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it is on the broad pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and we shall find, if we regard him closely, that every feather is plucked from its wing.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] W. W. Story.
[21] F. W. Faber, in “Dublin Review,” June, 1853.