It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light upon this subject, that the greatest masters of style in all the ages were the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any language but their own. In the most flourishing period of their literature, they had no grammatical system, nor did they ever make any but the most trivial researches in etymology. “The wise and learned nations among the ancients,” says Locke, “made it a part of education to cultivate their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks counted all other nations barbarous, and had a contempt for their languages. And though the Greek learning grew in credit among the Romans, ... yet it was the Roman tongue that was made the study of their youth; their own language they were to make use of, and therefore it was their own language they were instructed and exercised in.” Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language, and one of the mightiest masters of expression the world has seen, knew no other tongue than his own. He modelled his style after that of Thucydides, whose wonderful compactness, terseness, and strength of diction were derived from no study of old Pelasgic, Phœnician, Persian, or other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech,—of which he knew nothing,—but were the product of his own marvellous genius wreaking itself upon expression.
No riches are without inconvenience. The men of many tongues almost inevitably lose their peculiar raciness of home-bred utterance, and their style, like their words, has a certain polyglot character. It has been observed by an acute Oxford professor that the Romans, in exact proportion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign languages, because it was his business to write German, and he thought that, by reading other languages, he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley’s defects to his continental associations, and said that his losses at home overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore, who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language was justly attributed to their entire abstinence from every other. It is a saying as old as Cicero that women, being accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing those of men. “A man who thinks the knowledge of Latin essential to the purity of English diction,” says Macaulay, “either has never conversed with an accomplished woman, or does not deserve to have conversed with her. We are sure that all persons who are in the habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that the orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no means the most scrupulous about marring their native tongue. We could mention several members of Parliament, who never fail to usher in their scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords.”
Mr. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” does not hesitate to express the opinion that “our great English scholars have corrupted the English language by jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled dialect strives to hide.” He then adds that the principal reason why well educated women write and converse in a purer style than well educated men, is “because they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted for them.” To nearly the same effect is the declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble language in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the women’s letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on “Paradise Lost”? What prose style, always excepting that of the “Areopagitica,” is worse for imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved, half-rhythmical periods, “dragging, like a wounded snake, their slow length along”? Yet Bentley and Milton, whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek literature through and through, were probably the profoundest classical scholars that England can boast. Let the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and beware lest while he is wandering in fancy along the banks of the Meander, the Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drinking at the fountains of Helicon, he heedlessly and profanely trample under foot the beautiful, fragrant, and varied productions of his own land.
FOOTNOTE:
[26] “Lectures on the English Language.”
[CHAPTER X.]
ONOMATOPES.
’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.—Pope.