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Title: Pomona; or, the future of English
Author: Basil de Sélincourt
Release date: February 22, 2024 [eBook #73017]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1928
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POMONA; OR, THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH ***
POMONA
OR
THE FUTURE
OF
ENGLISH
POMONA
OR
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
BY
BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT
[Illustration]
E. P. DUTTON & CO. :: NEW YORK
POMONA, OR THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
COPYRIGHT 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.
POMONA
POMONA
OR
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
Before discussing the future of English, one is forced, in the bustle
of these scientific days, to inquire whether language itself has a
future. “We are working”, wrote Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, in his brilliant
little essay _Daedalus_, “towards a condition when any two persons on
earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more
than a twenty-fourth of a second.” Is speech quick-moving enough to
keep a place in such a picture? When everything else has learned the
speed of lightning, will the transference of our thought be likely to
lag behind and is it not a waste of time to ask if future generations
will speak German, or Japanese, or Esperanto, when they may not need to
speak at all?
Scientific knowledge is a delightful plaything. Working with measurable
quantities, it can treat the future like a ball of string to be
unwound. Though life is all wonder and surprise, though the world
always turns out stranger and richer than we expected, we know that the
future will be linked mechanically with the present as the present is
with the past. The machinery of human existence fifty years hence will
be the practical application of possibilities known to-day. There is
basis, then, for a certain kind of scientific prediction. The future of
language is in a different case, because the mechanical element in it
is subsidiary. It is conjecturable, of course, that it may one day be
superseded, that men may learn to transfuse their meanings by a kind of
controlled telepathy, mind meeting mind. But to do this they would need
to be able to think without words, and language, as we now know it, is
not for communication only: it is the very framework of our thought. It
is part of our lives; and what our lives are to be we can tell only by
living them.
A good deal has been learned of late about the evolution of
language――enough to modify very much our views as to the influences
that really count, the habits which conduce to accuracy or to vitality.
But there is a long way between understanding after the event and
understanding before it. It is with the different languages of the
world as with the different species of animals: once they have come
into being, one easily sees which way they came, one cannot see in the
least which way they are going. Of all whom change awaits, man seems
likely to change most and most quickly. Whole nations are stirred to
hope and restlessness. Never did the future beckon more enticingly
than it does now. Science lays a finger upon the springs of life and
dreams of a race to be made perfect, not by the murderous processes
of haphazard struggle, but by the swift and decisive elaboration of
a conscious design. The man of the future, we hear, may differ as
much from ourselves as we do from monkeys. Inventive eugenics, new as
motor-cars, is to inaugurate a still more drastic revolution and make
of us, in the near future, whatever we may wish to be.
What then do we wish to be? A fundamental question that――to which the
answer, surely, is that we cannot deeply wish to be other than we are,
seeing that we have become what we are because it was what we wished to
be. We wished it for a hundred thousand years, while slowly the wish
took form and substance. That form, that substance have been determined
by the movements of the mind: they are its tutored response to the
totality of the conditions of life on the earth; and therefore it is
one of our justest instincts to be jealous of any tampering with the
results, any light pretension of the flickering intellect to replace
these gradually matured perfections. How fruitless for man to lift his
head nearer heaven if his feet cease to touch the ground! One thing we
may be sure of, that the processes of our amelioration, physical or
spiritual, will never be spectacular. Let the mind, rushing ahead, call
the body a lumberer if it will; the body never was and never will be
idealist. Its province is not to set a feather on the mountaintop, but
to arrive with bag and baggage.
It is because language is a branch of the tree of life that we can do
so little by way either of influencing or predicting its future. The
expert in eugenics vividly suggests to us that in time to come he will
give us twelve fingers if we want them, and we can understand why he
is so confident. He is saying “Only have courage, and we will do with
men to-morrow what we are doing with guinea-pigs to-day.” But we must
not let his love of the picturesque delude us. These things could be
done only on condition of our surrendering our lives to beings as
high above us as we are above pigs; and surrender to superiors is not
a means of progress. The jesuitry of religion is bad enough, but at
least it secures us against succumbing to any jesuitry of science. The
development of the machinery of the individual life is bound up with
the development of the individual mind; it requires independence, not
submission. In this our language is like our members. The scientists
of speech are tempted from time to time to descend upon us and prove
what a much better instrument we might have than the one which we
have painfully elaborated for ourselves; and indeed the wastefulness,
the inconsistencies of every language that exists are plain to the
merest tyro. Nevertheless it is of the essence of our language, as of
our members, that it should have grown upon us, that it should have
grown out of us. “Improvement makes straight roads,” wrote Blake,
“but crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius”, and
by genius he meant simply life working upon life. It is a curious
fact, that when experts advise on language, their advice is generally
bad. Language, if it is to live, must follow the ways of life; and
advice, even good advice, can never allow enough for one factor at once
decisive and unknowable, the new experiences of newly situated minds.
What is the future of the English language? The problem is evolutionary.
It is of little interest to conjecture how many mouths will be speaking
it in a hundred years and with what sort of twang or accent;
speculations of that sort range too widely. Our aim must be to inquire
whether English is or is not a growing member; whether those who use and
are to use it have an instrument capable of enlarging and purifying
their knowledge, whether it can help them to mould themselves more
closely to the pattern of truth. Languages, like other organisms, have
their appointed length of days. The tree cannot go on putting out fresh
leaves for ever. The more leaves there are, whispering and breathing in
the wind, the thicker the trunk must be and the denser the roots and
branches, for flow of sap from tip to tip; and the whole must keep sweet
if that flow is to continue. It is the same with language. The leaves
are our conversations, the roots are our experiences, the trunks and
boughs our literature. And that great woody framework, which is the
strength of the fabric, is also a seat of trouble and decay. It has
taken shape, it determines us. Only through it can our ideas pass to
their being; it has decided what we must be. What if its form is
biassed, if it is preternaturally confined? Our condition then is that
of animals who have missed the highway of development, turned into some
cul-de-sac, and come to a full stop. Every animal except man has done
it, and most races of men have done it too. The continuance of progress
is extraordinarily difficult; there are always a million chances
against it at any particular time and place.
Can English, then, maintain its life-current? Our literature,
indubitably, shows symptoms of fatigue. Everyone feels in Chaucer the
joyous expansiveness of youth, in Hardy the sombre introspection of old
age. Chaucer, were he living now, would not be Hardy; but Hardy’s view
of life is widely accepted as representative, and few are surprised
by it, while the sweet serenity of Bridges surprises many. How far is
the change merely literary, how far is it racial, and what are the
modes in which racial and literary progress interact? Literature, to
begin with, is an art and art is in this unlike nature that it does
not tolerate simple repetition. Events like Shakespeare’s plays or
_Paradise Lost_ cannot happen twice; and by happening once they prevent
many other things from happening at all. To write in English without
knowing them is almost impossible; to know them and not be influenced
by them quite impossible. The English literary artist has therefore
the choice of working on the same lines as his precursors and going
further, or of finding different lines to work on. So Tennyson becomes
daintier, Browning more boisterous, Swinburne more exuberant, Meredith
more congratulatory, Hardy more afflicted, than any one was before;
and in the achievement of each one overhears the sigh for a serener
element, all are recognizably oppressed and restless in their thickly
peopled pool. They are aware that the main outlines of an Englishman’s
experiences have been laid down, that new territory exists only in
nooks and corners, while, as to the methods of exploration, they have
been so greatly taken, the virtues so generously submerging the faults,
that ability to take them has become almost synonymous with greatness
and a change unthinkable. Thus the poet of to-day must allow that his
instinct to outvie all predecessors can hardly be gratified, that where
he deserts them it is at his peril, and that the best he can hope for
is to hit on some secluded bypath where his mind, wandering in freedom,
may dispossess itself of fruitless rivalries.
So much for the merely literary, but what of the racial position? In
so far as the experience of the English race is fed and sustained by
its literature, it must necessarily be affected by any toxin of age
with which that literature is charged. But, in the first place, no
race possessed of a great literature has ever had a less literary
experience than we have, and, in the second place, the circumstances
of English lives now-a-days (and, indeed, of human lives everywhere)
are subjected perpetually to so many and such startling changes, that
our accumulation of racial experience takes a different bearing, may
help instead of hindering us. The English of England, or of the British
Isles, appear, it is true, to be living too close and to have lived
too long to be able to continue living freely; and yet there are signs
that the natural developments of racial life are still proceeding.
To King, Lords, and Commons is being added among us one might say, a
fourth estate: we are endeavouring to found an ordered commonwealth
on the conscious collaboration of a prosperous working-class. The
bulk of the people, therefore, still looks forward; and, this being
their attitude, there is fair hope of their learning how to possess
themselves of the new world that is opening up around them.
So English, though already an old language, is even in England still
spoken by a young people; and its future everywhere (the future of
a language cannot be separated from the future of those who speak
it) depends on its power to reconcile these as it has reconciled so
many other opposites. The English or Anglo-Saxon temperament has from
the first been equally remarkable for its absorptiveness and its
idiosyncrasy. The characters we find in _Piers Plowman_ or the earliest
lyrics acknowledge, in idioms like our own, our own ideals:
No love to love of man and wife;
No hope to hope of constant heart;
No joy to joy of wedded life,
No faith to faith in either part;
Flesh is of flesh and bone of bone
When deeds and words and thoughts are one.
The thought expressed here by an anonymous Elizabethan might have
been expressed yesterday or in Chaucer’s time. It was with us from
the first, is not outgrown, and never will be. And part and parcel
of the thought is a certain bluntness in its expression. It is felt
to be worth more than any possible expression, to have the right
to be guarded against facile exposure. The trait is typical, and
justifies us in calling English the expression of an inexpressive
people. Communication flows slowly among them; their ideas, before
they brim over into speech, have felt the north and the south wind and
turned their faces east and west. There is modesty in this as well as
deliberation, and mingled with it are tolerance, humour, and common
sense. Aware of the world, they have been aware that it is made up of
many sorts of men, aware too, finally, that the world is not something
that we make but something to which we lend ourselves that it may
make us: a point at which the practical and the mystical join hands.
All these qualities have passed into the language, which has great
diversity in its contacts, an admirable economy in its mechanism. It
is a comprehensive, a hospitable, a pliable language; it is full of
inconsistencies, yet it works; and if its grasp, wide always, needs now
to be wider than ever before, will anyone assert that it has found its
limits?
The English have certainly shown themselves in the past to be a people
who could live and let live; as the possessors of this rare virtue,
they now find themselves living everywhere; but how shall words, which
have been formed on the lips of the inhabitants of a small island in
a soft misty climate, express the lives of men whose homes are the
continents of the world and to whom nature is revealed in all her
grandiose extremes of heat and cold, drought and flood, bounty and
bareness? The birds of the moor and the woodland do not speak alike;
they say the same things, it may be, but their tone they borrow from
their habitat; and the languages of men have a similar reflectiveness.
In Celtic, with its tenderness and wild glamour, we feel the mountain
and the valley, the rocks and the rain; in the mellow vowels of
Italian the blue of the Mediterranean and its cloudless skies. English,
it would appear, resembles rather the chirping of the sparrow――a
noise capable of following men wherever they go and echoing under any
roof with which they protect themselves from the elements. It has a
faculty of almost brutish accommodation, attracts indolence, ignores
discomfort, and thrives in the absence of the graces.
Every one who loves birds, though he cannot deny the sparrow many
virtues, shrinks at the thought of his capacity for mere multiplication
and is haunted by a nightmare vision of a world from which the more
fastidious species have been banished, leaving all one sparrowdom. A
similar horror fills the mind of the humanist when it occurs to him
that English may be destined to be the language of the human race.
_What_ English, he wonders, and reflects that there are men now working
to that end who do, after all, represent one aspect of the English
genius, making it not impossible that half-baked bricks and gim-crack
motors may one day overrun the earth. The nettle-like loose rankness of
our language not only helps to spread it, but makes it liable to tower
domineeringly as it spreads. In plain truth, it is already spoken too
generally for its good, and, in spite of all the machinery we possess
for unifying it, its expansion may yet prove its undoing.
The issue is so important as to justify us in reflecting a little on
the nature of language in itself. Invented to be of service to truth,
it is committed to a compromise with falsehood. Our experience is
indivisible, but, in order to explain it to ourselves and others, we
are obliged to split it up into segments; to which segments and the
relations between them we give names. What we name is therefore an
interpretation imposed on nature, not nature itself; and even when
our names seem to belong to objects which Nature classified before we
did, as when we talk of a man or a woman, we are not protected against
error. Into the word ‘man’ come creeping all the associations born of
our experience of the men we know, and we suppose every two-legged
talking animal to have their failings and their virtues. Such words
as ‘liberty’ or ‘peace’ are more misleading still; they are names
of variable types of feelings and relations; we can judge of their
application to reality only after the experience of half a lifetime.
Thus, though our language grows from us like a limb, it yet has its
mechanical side, and the reconciliation of the vital and the mechanical
is always difficult. A machine like a mowing machine interferes with
the activity of Nature at set stages; that is simple enough: it is
different with a machinery which must avail itself of the movements
of life and adapt itself to them; and such is the machinery of
language. Its cogs are letters, syllables, the sounds they prescribe;
it is still mechanical when it assigns to these sounds their limited
meaning; and, although it does not cut up Nature’s map into a jig-saw
puzzle, yet its divisions, however careful, can never be conclusive,
because it is cutting up an organic whole into inorganic parts. How
different is music,――how much truer! No note of music has meaning in
itself; it means what it means from its position in a phrase, and, as
phrase follows phrase in a movement, the music develops and completes
this meaning in an organic whole, no part of which can be detached
from it alive. Thus music is, as it were, all life and universally
intelligible, language only part life, the rest mechanical attachment.
Nor have these attachments even the security of being hitched to
stable objects. They are an intermediary between one kind of life and
change and another. The makers of the names change while they make
them, and the objects have changed before their names are known.
What do we mean, for example, by ‘love’? something, surely, as definite
as it is familiar. But no! the meaning of ‘love’ is a historical
study――it belongs even to the future almost as much as to the past. We
have not found its meaning yet, we have not given it its meaning. We
have for long devoted ourselves to the pursuit of a meaning for it, and
after centuries of failure have endowed it with a halo of converging
aspirations. Love is the name of an ideal, constantly sought, partially
realized. In its fullest sense, it suggests an enduring tie between a
man and a woman which is also a pattern of the true relationship of the
soul to the world.
But what is that true relationship?――something that we have still to
find out. The French call love ‘amour’; ‘amour’ too has its halo. About
the word ‘amour’ has gathered the memories of a race that has learned
to consider its physical and spiritual impulses irreconcilable. It has
in it the wild contrasts of some natural upheaval and a prevailing
tenderness, like that of calm after storm. It is a great word,
providing a name for one deep chord of experience, which in English, by
the different focus of our attention, we have left nameless. But the
differences between the two words not only proceed from differences of
racial temperament, they also produce and perpetuate such differences.
The average Englishman who hungers after ‘amour’ never obtains it,
because the thought of ‘love’, of which he cannot divest himself,
intervenes. The average Frenchman is equally debarred from ‘love’, for
the very sound of ‘amour’ assures him that it is a romantic dream. So
the indivisible experience of reality is split up in one way by one
people, in another by another, and each perforce sees it along its own
dividing lines. Both cannot be right, and truth is hidden from men by
the apparatus with which they hoped to unveil her.
Of course the words that count for most in a language are those in
which men exchange their common thought about the purposes on which
they are chiefly bent, the goal to which they are steering; and words
of this kind are apt to be merely national. The German ‘Kultur’ is an
example. ‘Kultur’ was the focus of a peculiar complex of associations,
which involved, among other things, a novel conception of the relation
of the muscles to the mind. The Germans thought they had found in it an
ideal of conquering force, and many people in England spoke shyly of
‘culture’ for a time, as if the love of letters and the arts must lead
every one where it had led the Germans. Temperamental concentrations
of the kind that gave ‘Kultur’ its intensive meaning are constantly at
work; we see the result in the different characters of the Greek, the
Spaniard, the Italian. The Italians and the French, the French and the
English, have different notions of what life ought to be. ‘Libertà’ is
a word still found in Italian dictionaries, but Signor Mussolini has
revised its meaning very drastically. Breathing the same air, walking
the same earth, the different peoples blend the elements in different
mixtures and draw from the soil a sap that permeates their being and
gives individual colour to every feeling and thought. These variations
of tincture are valuable in themselves; life would be poorer if there
were only one kind of flower or fruit; the idiosyncrasies of nations
give brightness and colour to the human comedy. But they are also of
capital importance to progress, because they remind us that our own
blend of ideas is a makeshift like the rest, and that, if we are not to
be left stranded, we must learn how to leave it open to possibility of
change. With the establishment of a universal language these fruitful
comparisons would cease; the human race would be committed to one
set of conventional ideas and caught for ever in a prison of its own
making; and even if such a universal language were only ancillary,
though the worst evil would be avoided, the adopted language would tend
to be debased, since men of different schemes of experience would use
the same words in different senses, so step by step obliterating their
true sense and leaving them flavourless.
Great therefore as is the glory for a language of being as wide as the
world, that glory has its drawbacks and its dangers; and the crisis in
the condition of English is aggravated by its exceptional capacity for
assimilating foreign influences. It is useless harking back, as some
idealists do, to the pure well of Anglo-Saxon simplicity. Anglo-Saxon
was not simple; it was cumbrous and complicated, more like German
than English. The first English that is easily intelligible to us
is already half French; and all through their history, wherever they
have gone in their travels, the English have brought words back with
them. In India, Africa, America, Australia, amalgamation still goes
on, and the result is that our vocabulary, in its mere bulk and before
one begins to think of the anomalies it contains bears heavily on the
frail intelligence of mortal man. With half-a-dozen different peoples
continually tossing fresh petals into the vast pot-pourri, what will
happen to the unifying aroma which is the all-in-all? What influences,
habits, ideals shared by all these people can have strength to overcome
their growing divergencies? Their eyes open on different scenes, they
are surrounded by different plants, birds, and animals, eat different
food, endure or enjoy different climates. Nor do these differences
remain external: they evoke different temperaments, different
constitutions. Will not these different constitutions soon dictate a
different rhythm, a different articulation, a different music for their
expression? The problem is the more engrossing, because the determining
conditions have no parallel in history, and our developed machinery,
of communication and reduplication, from printing to telephony,
introduces influences the effect of which no one can foresee. If it is
enough for us to hear the same speeches and read the same books, there
is now nothing to prevent our doing so. The one language is obviously a
great convenience. But does not the machinery which sustains it favour
conventional forms rather than living speech?
The salient feature of our age is the increasing participation of the
masses in the guidance of life and in its interests. Machinery has made
this possible, and more and ever more machinery will be required, if we
are to attain the broader humanity we desire. Yet machinery symbolizes
the ossifying routine, the obstructive red tape, which chokes progress;
and machinery always has undue importance for undeveloped minds.
The unlettered villager of old was a walking poem; he grew like the
hawthorn in the hedgerow, still pruned, still sprouting; his thoughts
were the lichen on its trunk, the idiom of his speech had the twists
and freaks of its knotty boughs. Forms of life surrounded and emanated
from him; he knew nothing else. But when the choice came between life
and machinery he chose machinery, not thinking of it as a choice.
Because you buy a bicycle, you do not cease to have a garden; only, in
course of riding, you pass your garden by; you have removed it a little
from your life. The printed book works in the same way. It multiplies
a man’s commerce with words; and though it increases also his power
to see through words to thoughts and things, it does not increase
this power in the same proportion; and so with all the rest of our
literary machinery. Here again the world-wide language suffers, its
diffusion weighting the balance against its life. If print is really
at times to get its meaning over, there must still be lips from which
words fall like flowers, there must still be minds in which language
is growth and beauty; and there must be a _Gradus ad Parnassum_, a
means of working-up through the machine-made stages, a consciousness
piercing somehow down into the copy-book world, something to remind
the half-lettered of the primitive life they have emerged from and the
completer life to which they would attain. Our English must keep its
natural warmth and concreteness, its gift of free response to the fresh
fact. These things cannot be preserved. Preserves, it is true, keep
indefinitely, but at the sacrifice of freshness; and it is freshness
that we want. What we love most in English is just that quality of
unsugared sweetness, which is the difference between fruit and jam.
Here we bring new water from the well so clear,
For to worship God with this happy New Year.
The best English always has a bloom upon it. The danger is that, as
vulgarisms increase on one side, proprieties will increase on the
other, and that conversation may begin to burden itself with a sense
of duty. To be correct is already to be mechanical. The defiance of
correctness, even by the vulgar, has in it something of the virtue and
virility, which, in the work of masters, we recognize as the genius
of the language. It is easy enough to avoid saying “like I do”; but
it is difficult to realize that living language overrides grammatical
distinctions and that the test of a phrase is not whether it has been
tabled at Oxford, but whether it has its share of soil and sun and dew.
Here the indolences of our language, its cautiousness, and even its
propensity to wallow in the mire, may have their saving influence. They
are all symptoms of the instinct to get appearances on the honourable
side, the instinct to appear less, not more, than you are; they are the
tacit acknowledgment of a standard of reality, and count for ballast
and steadiness.
Are there then no means of vitalizing our English speech? One cannot
put the question without seeing that it is unreal. “The answer is in
the negative”, as our officials say. Even education itself, consciously
applied, may defeat its object; for if people are to talk English, they
must talk as they wish to talk; they know that the majority of their
would-be masters talk the worse for talking as they have been taught.
As to the meanings of words, the temptation to suppose that they can
be decided from on high must specially be resisted. We all have our
contribution to make to the meaning of the words we use, and the
greatest words――faith, freedom, sport, spirit――cannot mean more than
we do. These cannot be standardized; standardization, the name without
the thought, is their death, simply. The Trade Unionists of England
are disposed to banish ‘competition’ from our dictionary; will nature
vanish it from hers? ‘Religion’, somewhere in America, is the belief
that the world was created in six days; if truth is a fundamentalist,
well and good. Obviously there must be standardization up to a point if
people are to stick together, and we must be prepared to swallow it in
considerable doses now that English is the language of two hemispheres.
But the essential is that the point should be a point of agreement.
The kind of feeling, the kind of habit, that can be imposed on a man
are not worth imposing: the Germans showed that. We, too, have our
outbreaks of the dragooning impulse: the word ‘Empire’ is a notorious
rally, with hyænas always hot upon its trail. But, on the whole, the
tendency to reduce experience to rule and its expression to a formula,
the tendency to regularize men’s minds and drill them into uniformity,
flatly opposed as it is to all our traditions, wins little success
amongst us. True, we have a certain uniformity of drabness (the livery
of the sparrow) which suggests an army inured to all the degradations
of drill and rebellious only against its smartness. But then, it is the
smartness that kills. Drill is machine-made uniformity, a necessary
evil of which the English hate to make a panache. Their uniformities
are morose, because they are uniformities of submission; their pride
goes out to the things they touch directly and can make their own.
This is the attitude to be cherished at all costs, because the future
is open to it, because it opens to the future. By Heaven’s grace, the
English have it deep ingrained. Thus the future of English presents
itself to the mind as depending, above all, on the survival, in its
pre-eminence, of the spirit of freedom, the more so because the scope
of freedom is determined by the capacity for discipline. The question
of the day is how much machinery a man can stand; and the hope for
English is that the average Englishman can stand so much. Regulations
are necessary everywhere. Language itself must have its dictionary,
grammar its rules. The English rob them of their sting by toleration.
Their order even when they speak is spontaneous and has a taste of
liberty.
That an Englishman should regard England as the life-centre of the
English language is, perhaps, inevitable; yet he is foolish if he
assumes her to be so. The life-centre of English is to be found where
the spirit of those who speak it is in closest accord with developing
realities, and these cannot reveal themselves to minds fixed in any
past, however vital that past may have been when it was present. Are
not, then, the Americans living a more contemporary life than we
are?――has not the focus of development passed over to them? This is a
question so searching that I can touch upon it only with the greatest
diffidence. At the conclusion of his first preface to _Leaves of
Grass_, Whitman, distinguished among great writers for the forward
view, congratulated himself and the Americans on the qualities of the
language they had inherited. “English”, he wrote, “is the chosen tongue
to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality,
friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage.” It is a
noble list of virtues which no one would wish to disavow; and yet
the Englishman, of whatever station, would still prefer the briefer
catalogue of Chaucer’s knight, who, five hundred years ago,
loved chivalrye
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.
In such words as courtesy, chivalry, and honour, though doubtless
he does not understand them quite as Chaucer did, he would trace
a fullness of experience, for which self-esteem, friendliness, and
their like, however generously mixed with faith and courage, seem poor
equivalents. Now, Chaucer’s virtues obviously assume inequalities
between men and a sense of the responsibilities of privilege.
Whitman’s assertion is that the English ideal survives when privilege
is discarded. Can it? Is not the bloom, is not the ripeness of our
most comprehensive, most human words, is not the peculiar aroma which
surrounds the English conception of the virtues, traceable to our
candid admission that inequalities, even when traditional, may be
bedded in truth? Honour itself, though not the property of a class,
belongs we feel, to those who, by favour of circumstance in part,
have come to see that circumstance counts for nothing by the side of
truth and loyalty, and who therefore identify these with their very
being. Arising out of advantage, the sense of honour carries with it a
compensating obligation to all from whom such advantage is withheld.
No such associations can attach to the word in America, because
they imply limits which are not recognized, nor is honour allowed
its externalization, its badge. The King is, with us, the fountain
of honour, as he is also its personification at the height; and to
them our toleration of royalty is a mysterious medievalism. Yet the
Englishman who easily sees the absurdity of kings in general finds his
own miraculously contemporaneous. Differences like this affect in a
thousand ways the flavour and idiom of the two languages (for, for the
moment, we must call them two), and even the tone with which they are
spoken. American talk is full of equality; and to the English ear this
equality sounds less like a harmonious prevision of Nature’s purpose
than a grim determination to wrest it into line with human wishes.
Right and wrong in such a matter can be decided only by the event.
However it be, the United States, obviously, is now the scene of the
severest ordeals, the vividest excitements of our language. Only when
we hear English on the lips of Americans do we fear for its integrity;
others might drag it down; they alone could lift it into change; they
alone speak an actively competitive English. They have the right. The
English of the United States is not merely different from ours, it
has a restless inventiveness which may well be founded in a sense
of racial discomfort, a lack of full accord between the temperament
of the people and the constitution of their speech. The English are
uncommunicative, the Americans are not. In its coolness and quiet
withdrawal, in its prevailing sobriety, our language reflects the
cautious economies and leisurely assurance of the average speaker.
We say so little that we do not need to enliven our vocabulary and
underline our sentences, or cry ‘Wolf!’ when we wish to be heard.
The more stimulating climate of the United States has produced a
more eager, a more expansive, a more decisive people. The Americans
apprehend their world in sharper outlines and aspire after a more
salient rendering of it. No doubt the search for emphasis in the speech
of Americans and of American women particularly arises, in part, out
of the sheer volume of their communication; but it is also because of
their keener interest in things that they have a greater desire to talk
about them.
With this greater vividness goes, inevitably perhaps, a disposition
to anticipate, to define, to ‘fix’. The American nation was born of
the desire for a more perfect freedom than was obtainable in England;
and one of its first actions was to get freedom fixed, to define and
express it in a constitution. It might seem impossible that freedom
should ever be a chain, but stranger things have happened; and a chain
that passes under the name of freedom is peculiarly galling. The
American is threatened by a danger of knowing his freedom before he
gets it; the Englishman at best surmises, out of a mind stored with
immemorial checks and inhibitions. Idealism with the English is an
unacknowledged leaven, permeating action and language and passing from
one to the other in a haze of tolerance that helps them to surmount the
difficult transition from thought to things. Sleepy blundering protects
them against the cruder certitudes. The American attitude has more of
the unmediated clash of steel on steel, unsurpassable when the fit is
perfect and the speeds accurately timed, but, in the world we know,
liable to produce friction, heat, and jarring. The bright slap-dash of
the American vernacular shows the defect of this quality, and with its
insistence on scoring leaves reality behind. In the ‘he-man’ hero of
‘sob-stuff’ efficiency and sentimentalism meet and marry.
Oppressed by the weight of their traditions, anxious to find a
machinery for maintaining them, the English in England show symptoms
of decline. Societies to study and protect a language however
admirably inspired, have an ominous, classicizing trend. We are
becoming conscious of our language as of our Empire, and our virtue
was our unconsciousness. The fresh outlook, the frank unconcern, the
overflowing youthfulness of the Americans drive us back upon ourselves,
it may be, but they are a reviving challenge, nevertheless; and though
much that is most deeply characteristic of the language is threatened
by Americanism, the conditions under which English is spoken in the
United States (where it is only one language among many) have a great
deal in common with those out of which it originally grew, and are
certain to produce, as indeed they have produced already, a flow of
novel words and novel devices, some of which will remain to enrich and
renovate our speech. The fact, too, that America and England stand
for different impulses, not easily reconcilable, may enable them to
discover and release a further impulse, deeper than that with which
either seeks to be identified. Above all, the more magnetic, more
mercurial, the tauter, stormier American temperament has, with these
gifts of the modern life of speed and contrast, a quicker sympathy,
a warmer and more inclusive comradeship. Love and freedom are the
greatest words of our speech; and if, in America, ‘freedom’ is losing
some of its bloom, ‘love’ has found there a new substance and sweetness.
The contrasting and competitive use of their one language by the
English and the Americans gives it a new occasion for the exercise of
its old and noble faculty of compromise. In a period of promise and
renewal, it was beginning to grow old, the Americans are young; in
a period of urgency, it was lagging, the Americans have made speed
their element. Nothing, we may be sure, will ever make the English
language brisk; but its strong constitution will assimilate tonics as
fast as friends can supply them, and take no serious harm. Changes
are certainly in store for it; but the best and most English instinct
is still that of resistance to change, and above all to any plan or
method of change, any committee or academy or association to school
and enlighten us. Let the future of our language repose in our own
keeping; let us be jealous of our property in it. Take the most obvious
of its faults, its vagaries of spelling and pronunciation. Of course it
would be an advantage if there were less chaos here. But it is doubtful
whether, if a revision was made by the best people that could be found,
our gains would outweigh the loss we should suffer in having asked for
it; and, just because rulings are un-English, they generally come from
the worst people. On pronunciation the B.B.C. already undertakes to
instruct us, and its chief adviser is said to be an Irishman. _O passi
graviora_...! The Lord will make an end of these things too. Milton
spelt a number of words variably to express degrees of emphasis; it is
pleasant to think that nothing need prevent a successor of his doing
the same to-morrow, if he ever finds a successor. But, naturally, the
position is different now that usage is settled. Usage is our best
law. The Americans have dropped a _u_ out of humour and other words;
possibly we should have done so, if they had not. An inconspicuous
adjustment like this which saves time and trouble is obviously
harmless, and one may even hope that it will be followed by others.
From time to time experiments can be aired in the press or by some
enterprising publisher; if they find favour, they will be adopted. But
conscious spelling leads to conscious pronunciation; and, again, this
kind of consciousness, when English people get it, always goes wrong.
You change ‘humour’ into ‘humor’ and you get people talking as if the
last syllable rhymed with ‘or’. You change the spelling of a word to
bring it into line with the pronunciation and, before you can look
round, people have changed the pronunciation to bring it into line
with the spelling. Where are you then? The truth is, that sensitive
pronunciation of English involves gradations and blends of vowel sound
that the alphabet has no means of recording; and our frank anomalies
are really useful if they help to remind us of this. How am I to
pronounce ‘prophecy’ or ‘library’ or ‘worship’? I only know when I hear
them on the lips of some one who can speak English. A further value
of our spelling, as we have it, is its bond with the past. It is a
pity that many usages, when first established, were established amiss;
but the errors are of such ancient date that they have grown into the
language. Most of our spellings, too, have something to tell us of the
history and origin of the words concerned, and, in a mixed language
like ours, this is much more important than that they should attempt
to imitate and perpetuate our way of pronouncing them. It is absurd
to spell ‘rough’ and ‘dough’ as we do; but if we substituted ‘ruff’
and ‘doe’, we should lose interesting information and also fall into a
confusion which we now avoid.
What applies to spelling applies equally to grammar and to the
formation of words. We appreciate it, of course, when people who have
studied language and have leisure to think about such things tell us
how we ought to speak and what kind of improvements we might introduce
into our language if we chose. This is the sort of topic which serves
admirably for the correspondence columns of the daily press during
the month of August, and gives its readers something to refresh their
minds with in intervals of fishing and shooting. But when enthusiasts
run campaigns against ‘cinema’ or ‘aeroplane’, telling us that we must
say ‘kineema’ and ‘air-plane’, and suggesting that English will go to
the dogs unless we are more serious and can consent to be guided by
competent authority, the reply is that seriousness and authority _are_
the dogs, where English is concerned. So far, it has always kept them
running and we hope it always will.
All the same, it would be the greatest mistake to suppose, because
English refuses to be dictated to and dislikes above all things the
dictation of the specialist, that the destinies of the language are
really in the hands of an unlettered herd. Authority is always at
work; but it emanates from sources wider, fresher, and saner than any
from which it would be possible to obtain it in the form of rules and
laws. If no authority is recognized, it is because we all aspire to
be authorities in our measure, and perceive by instinct which of our
neighbours sees further or knows more than we do. Instead of a regal
fiat, which it would be ignominy to ignore or disobey, what guides us
is an infection of reverence for a mysterious rightness, the tutelage
of which belongs to ourselves just so far as we are able to penetrate
the secret of its being. The final exponents of this rightness are,
of course, the great writers of English when they are writing as they
would like to do――few if any of them have often done it; and the way
of penetration is the knowledge of their works: not the knowledge
which regards them as things done once and for ever (though, in one
aspect, they are inevitably that), but such as finds in them, rather,
the revelation of a spirit capable of revealing itself anew and of
taking forms which, in proportion to their life and worth, must always
be unpredictable.
For, of course, if English is to continue to be the speech of vital,
developing, progressive peoples, nothing is more certain than that
this vitality and progress will be accompanied and sustained by a
literature. We stand together now because of the treasury of wisdom
which our common language enables us to share; but wisdom itself fades
to a dream, unless new expressions of it are continually found, to
illuminate and summarize the swift accumulations of human experience.
Not that books are to be regarded as the greatest thing in life; or,
rather, let us be bold and say that they must be so regarded; but they
are in life, and there are a thousand other things in it which divide
the interest of those who would appreciate books at their true worth,
and which constitute, let us confess it, a very tolerable education
for those (in England they have always been many) who never open a
book at all. The best books are concentration of the experience of
the best livers, of men who, over and above their faculty, for direct
living, have the impulse to live a second life in which they share with
others the discoveries and delights of the first one. And, just as,
among ordinary English people, action is more than speech and speech
shines by its contented subservience, so, among those who read and
write English, the direct life has always counted for more than the
translation. English literature has been the work of men who lived
before they wrote: that is its greatness. And though this quality is
certainly menaced now that writing tends to become a trade; though the
modern audience of two hundred millions tempts even an Englishman to
raise his voice; yet modern life, we may reflect, has room for many
things, and the worry and self-importance of our literary professionals
of all kinds will somehow get worked into the larger equilibrium
required of us, along with much else that is worrying and imposing.
Life is richer now in its opportunities, more exhilarating in its
occupations, more tantalizing in its questions, more urgent in the
close pressure of its reality than it ever was for our forefathers;
and the men who enter into all these things in flesh and blood will not
fail to lift their meaning one day into the ideal world of books.
Meantime the life itself has to be lived, and the very fact that it
will be inevitably a harassing, distracting life gives the impassive
Englishman his chance. Some one has to take the lead and steer the
steady course――why not he? It is ‘up to him’; for he is not only solid
but sociable; the institutions he devises are the attraction and
the torment of the world. No one else can work them; every one that
sees them has to have a try. Roughly stated, the problem of Western
Civilization is still to abjure slavery, to be rid of the legacies
of a social organization which involved the unconsenting sacrifice
of a class. Every man’s mind is now to be its own master; everything
of value must be open to every one capable of possessing it; the
individual must know his limitations to be his own. And this is no
idealist’s ideal; it is a necessity arising from the diffusion, by
mechanical means in the main, of a knowledge which may easily wreck
us, but of which we cannot get rid. How then is this knowledge to
be formed into an instrument of progress? The condition of success,
clearly, is the presence of a soul-stirring warmth among all classes,
the participation of all in one atmosphere――for every man, however
unawakened, his place in the sun, so that, even if he does not care
to lift his eyes to the light, light may at least reach him through
the pores of his skin. This percolation of light, this preparatory
gestation of embryonic soul, is assured to the English by the natural
mysticism of their intelligence, by the tincture of poetry that
irradiates and solidifies their common sense. The influence which
chiefly sustains them in this firmest and fruitfullest of all their
compromises, is, no doubt, their age-old familiarity with the Bible.
All classes have possessed it, and possessed it so thoroughly as to
insist on a hundred private and personal interpretations of the one
sacred text. Nothing is more English than non-conformity, except the
acceptance of it, and nothing more necessary to the vitality of the
practical English mind. For to conform is to take your truth from
another or to acknowledge that the truth is beyond you. But religion
is practised by the English because its truth is known; personal
discovery has made truth real to them; and the vehicle of the discovery
has been a collection of mysterious poems and rhapsodies, the words of
which there is no holding, for they mean at the same time everything
and nothing. From childhood up poetry has ruled us all, and our
language has been a kind of rainbow-bridge on which we passed from
earth to heaven. The speech which was on our lips from day to day
belonged not only to the day’s events, but also to a region of heavenly
mystery which brooded over them. Our very faculty of experience has
been cradled in the love of incomprehensible beauties; the ruling
virtues of our lives draw radiance from the words in which they were
made known to us.
Out of the merging of the practical and the poetical, the intuitive
acknowledgment of unknown margins as a working factor in everyday
affairs, springs the evolutionary virtue of the English mind, the hope
of its future; and, of course, however broadened by the Bible, the
English instinct for poetry does not stop and did not begin there.
It has expressed itself at large in English literature, the most
companionable literature the world has seen, and it has permeated
the language, a language formed for common uses and stubbornly
matter-of-fact, yet one in which matter-of-factness itself is not hard,
but deep. The English practical man is poetically practical; for, in
his view, the practical lines, in thought and action, are the lines of
life; things that are to succeed, he feels, must hold their place in an
equilibrium, must learn their forms and limits and the economy of their
power as wild things do in the world of natural competition; his genius
is at its best, in work or play, when his occupation is richest in
vital analogies. What is the greatness of cricket――cricket, one of the
great words of the language as it is one of the great facts of English
life――if not that its excellencies can be developed only in a large
frame of human feeling, that it is life in little, as much a poem as a
game? Now the practical life is the life all have to lead; and if the
spirit in which men lead it on the humble level of quiet plodding is
the same as that which in his more radiant element inspires the poet,
it would seem that the condition, essential to progress in this age, of
one light shining for all in varying degrees of brightness, is actually
fulfilled.
What we have abutted on is not, really, a paradox. The nettle, the
sparrow of the world, is its rose, its nightingale. Again, why not?――he
has been, and may be again. The point is that, in life as the English
practise it, one passes into the other imperceptibly. For other
peoples, poetry has been a thing removed from truth and fact, treating
of shadowy or unearthly beauties in an atmosphere no human being ever
breathed. That has never been the prevailing English view. For them
the poet’s task has been the practical one of making language live,
casting on one side the intellectual figments and abstractions in which
speech entangles us and bringing back to words their primal power and
motion. Poetry is often called simple, but the word needs a gloss.
Simple people have poetry because they are so near nature and speak so
little that their speech is like an animal’s cry, half its own, half an
echo of its surroundings. As the complexities of civilization pass over
them, they become complex, they ‘grow up’, and because they are grown
up, we think them more mature. They are not really more mature: they
are more mechanical. So far as by growth we become complex, we are
growing towards a condition in which growth is stultified. The mature
is that of which the elements are indistinguishably fused together,
it is simplicity at a higher power. This is the simplicity of poetry,
which outreaches the finest minds in their subtlest discriminations and
abashes science with the flames of its enveloping beauty. This, too, is
the simplicity of the English nature, and the English language; neither
of them, obviously, simple things at all, but possessed, it seems, of
Nature’s secret of growth and therefore destined, we may believe, to go
on growing.
It was right that an essay on the future of English should contain
very little about English itself. To test the mirror, watch what it
reflects. The less we think about our language, the likelier we are to
retain the qualities which have made it what it is; the more we study
it, the greater the risk of breaking that continuous impulse with which
the English mind, in high and low alike, feels its way through the
world, watching without defining, absorbing rather than classifying,
identified with the meanings of things, not distinguished from them.
For its loyal use and a true maintenance of the virtue of its tradition
we have only to assume that it was made for our purposes by others
whose purposes were the same as ours, and to see that it lives to-day
on our lips as it lived once on theirs. “Ripeness is all.”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
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