Chapter 1 of 3 · 3882 words · ~19 min read

Part 1

POMONA OR THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH

BY BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT

[Illustration]

E. P. DUTTON & CO. :: NEW YORK

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 It is conjecturable, of course, that it may one day be superseded, that men may learn to transfuse their meanings by a kind of controlled telepathy, mind meeting mind.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.