BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

In the course of our two foregoing articles we followed the advance of the great Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we belong, from its original seat in Central Asia, which it began to leave more than four thousand years ago, until we found it in possession of India, Persia, and all of Europe. We considered briefly and incidentally the fact that within the last two hundred and fifty years this Asiatic race has taken absolute possession of the greater part of the continent of North America. We saw that speech was the bond and the token of the now vast and vague, but once narrow and compact, unity of this powerful race, which was brought into existence to conquer, to rule, and to humanize the world. Of the numerous languages which have sprung from the Aryan stem, English is the youngest. Compared in age with any other language of that stock, we may almost say with any existing language of any stock, it is like a new born babe in the presence of hoary eld. Only eight hundred years ago it was unknown. True, its rudiments and much of its substance then existed; but so it might be said that they existed in a certain degree four thousand years ago, as we saw in our last article. Yet again, more than four hundred years passed away before modern English was born. It was not until about the beginning of the sixteenth century that the language of Spenser, of Shakspere, of the Bible, of Bunyan, of Milton, of Goldsmith, Burke, Irving, Hawthorne, and Thackeray, came fully into existence as the recognized established speech of the English race.

Since that time the changes it has undergone have been trivial and unimportant. Like the languages of all other highly civilized peoples, it has received many additions, but its essential character has not changed; its structure has been modified so slightly that the change is perceptible only on the closest examination; its syntactical construction has remained unshaken. The prose of Spenser and Shakspere and the correspondence of the educated men of their day is as easily understood by an unlettered English speaking man of our day as the prose of Sir Arthur Helps or the more intelligible passages in the daily newspapers. During that time, indeed, there have been changes of style in writing English, which are more or less distinctive of periods. A reader of moderate experience and discrimination can soon tell whether a page that is put before him was written in the Elizabethan period, in that of the Restoration (Charles II.), in that of Queen Anne, or that of Victoria. But the differences by which his judgment would be guided are differences of tone, of manner, of “the way of putting things,” of certain tricks of expression, and are without any relations whatever to the “grammar,” or to the essential character of language. The presence of words not in use at one period, but which came into use at another, is an important means of such a discrimination. But, in the first place, the introduction of new words does not modify the essential character of a language; and in the next we are not now considering a criticism which goes so far as to examine the history of the English vocabulary.

This modern English, which is the youngest, is also the greatest language ever spoken. A man may be supposed, not unreasonably, to be prejudiced in favor of his mother tongue; but the judgment that declares in favor of English against all other languages, even Greek, needs neither motive nor support from prejudice. The two facts, that the English language is the vehicle and the medium of a literature unequaled by that produced in any other known tongue, and that it is becoming the common intermediary and most widely diffused speech of the world, show that it possesses in the highest degree the two essential elements of a great and complete language—adaptation to man’s highest and to his homeliest needs in expression. There is no other known language in which “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” the Falstaff scenes in “King Henry the Fourth,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Paradise Lost,” the Roger de Coverley papers of the “Spectator,” “The Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” “The Vicar of Wakefield” and “She Stoops to Conquer,” “The School for Scandal,” “Waverley,” “The Antiquary” and “The Fortunes of Nigel,” “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan,” “The Pickwick Papers,” “Henry Esmond,” “Adam Bede” and “Romola,” “In Memoriam” and “Sir Galahad,” “The Earthly Paradise,” “Child Roland” and “The Scarlet Letter” could all have been written. No other language is at once grand enough and simple enough, strong enough and flexible enough, lofty enough and homely enough to be the natural, fitting and complete utterance of the literature of which these are the typical productions, and to be, moreover, at the same time perfectly adapted to the needs of the jurist, the politician, the man of business, and the mariner. I remember that once on the St. Lawrence, on the way to Quebec, as the steamer came to a landing, the French officer on the “bridge” screamed an order to the engineer, “Arretez donc, Alphonse! arretez donc!”[1] and that then I recollected that the day before on the British steamer in which I left Montreal, the English officer in just the same situation had quietly said, in his strong, firm voice, “Hold hard!” and that I then thought not only how much more effective those two syllables were as a phrase of nautical command, but that they might be used by an English poet in a passage of grand and strong emotion. English has no words which are too great or too little, too fine or too homely to be used when need requires. English words change their character and their expression according to their connection and the manner in which they are uttered.

English owes its supremacy first, to the vigorous vitality of its germ and the clean robustness of its stem; next, to the rich and infinitely varied word-growth, which this trunk supports and nourishes. All languages are more or less composite, but of all languages English is most composite. It has been largely and richly grafted. It is, of all languages, the most complex in substance, and the simplest in structure. This simplicity of structure enables the uneducated man—Bunyan, for example—to use it with correctness and force, while the vast variety of its substance adapts it to all the needs of poet and philosopher. Let us see how such a language came into existence, and what it is.

The people which spoke the English language when it assumed its modern form, had made it. This may seem to be the sort of truth which is triteness; but it is not so. The people which speaks a language generally does make it; but not always, as we shall see. The people who made the English language, and who made England, were of that part of the great Aryan family which had taken possession of the northwestern part of Europe—that which lies around the southern and western part of the Baltic Sea. It is commonly said that the English are a very composite and heterogeneous people. In a narrow sense this is true, but in a large and really significant sense it is quite untrue. In his welcome to the Danish princess Alexandra, when she arrived in England to become Princess of Wales, the poet laureate prettily availed himself of the minor truth, to sing

The English race is, and for more than five hundred years has been compounded of Saxons (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), Danes and Normans. But these three peoples were of such close kindred that, in Launcelot Gobbo’s phrase, they were “cater cousins.”[A] They were all Goths; the Danes and the Normans were both Scandinavians; and the Saxons, the Angles, and particularly the Jutes, although they were Low German tribes (the term Low German meaning merely inhabitants of the lower parts of Germany near the sea) were, because of their origin, and also of their neighborhood to the others, so like them in blood and in speech that the difference was rather superficial than essential.

These Jutes, Angles and Saxons, continuing the armed Aryan progress westward, went to Britain in companies of hundreds and thousands, and fighting their way from the shore inland at various points, and continually reinforced from their hive on the continent, in the course of about one hundred and fifty years they obtained complete possession of the island, from the Tweed to the Channel, excepting only the mountainous part at the west, now called Wales. They seem not to have mingled with the conquered Britains, who it will be remembered were Celts, but to have wholly displaced them, to have swept the land clean of them, except in Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, and a small remnant in Cornwall, the extreme southwestern point of the island. They carried with them their Scandinavian-tinged Low German speech (called for convenience Anglo-Saxon), which became the language of the country whose name their presence and possession changed from Britain to Angle-land, Engel-land, England. But when they had established themselves they were not left undisturbed. The Danes poured in upon them at the north, and soon getting foot-hold, they in their turn attempted the conquest of the whole island. They succeeded so nearly that they not only obtained possession of the northern part of the England of that day, but of the government; and three Danish kings[B] ruled the land at London. They did not, however, like the Anglo-Saxons, destroy their predecessors; partly from lack of strength to accomplish such a destruction, and partly, it would seem, from affinities of race and habits of life. Danes and Anglo-Saxons mingled; although the former were chiefly confined to the northern part of the country. One result of this conquest and intermingling was a modification of the speech of the country, particularly at the north. It received a strong Scandinavian infusion, the alterative influence of which has been recognized more and more by philologists as they have studied the structure and history of the English language. It should be said here, and perhaps should have been said before, that the name Dane had in these early times a large and loose signification. It was applied, without much discrimination, to any people that lived in the Scandinavian country—Norway and Sweden as well as Denmark.

Alfred, that first great Englishman, who, if not the only good English king, has been approached neither in ability nor worth by any of his successors to this day, is generally thought of as having conquered the Danes and extinguished their power in England; but erroneously. The Danes were worsted by him; but the Danish settlers in England were not ousted, nor could they be, for they had become a part of the people; the Danish influence upon English life was not much minished. It was within the quarter of a century following Alfred’s death that the Danish king Sweyne levied an annual tribute of £36,000 upon England, and that Danes were called Lord Danes. Forty-two years after Alfred, the Danish Canute, son of Sweyne, was crowned king of England; and the Danish pretensions to the rule of England were not wholly abandoned until the occurrence of an event which had little less influence upon the language of England than upon its fortunes. Edward the Confessor, the last of the royal line of ancient England, was little more than king in name and state. The country was really ruled by a council of six great earls, Danes and English, who partitioned the control of the country among themselves. The Anglo-Saxons had invaded Britain, and had conquered the Celtic Britons and removed them from the soil; the Scandinavian Danes had invaded England, and partly conquered the Anglo-Saxons (now called Englishmen), but had not destroyed their near kinsmen, and the two people had mingled. And now, in the eleventh century (1066), the Normans invaded England and conquered its Dano-Anglo-Saxon people in their turn. Harold, who claimed and obtained the throne, on the death of Edward the Confessor, as his heir, but not as his descendant or lineal successor, was himself half Dane, his father having been Earl of Kent, his mother Gytha, a Danish noblewoman. The influence of the Scandinavian element on the character and the language of modern England was very great, and until of late has been underrated.

The conquest of England by the Normans, and the division of it into sixty thousand knight’s fees, distributed mostly among the followers of the Norman duke, who were thus with their families and followers scattered widely over the country, was the cause of one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of language—the introduction of Norman-French as an element of English speech. Some French or Romance words had come into England before, because of neighborhood and of affectation of foreign refinement, and a few Latin words had crept in under favor of the clergy; but now Norman-French was distributed all through the island as the speech not only of the holders of the sixty thousand knight’s fees, but of all their followers, and a considerable number of their tenants, to say nothing of their adulatory imitators, or of the Norman clergy who accompanied them to bless and to share their conquest.

Now who were the Normans, and what was this Norman-French which they introduced into England? The Normans were simply North-men from the great Scandinavian peninsula now divided into Norway and Sweden. They were pirates and robbers. Bold and bloody on sea and land, they had been for two or three centuries the scourge and the terror of Southern Europe. The people on the continent called them simply “North-men,” the people of England “East-men,” (the name being determined, it will be seen, by the relative position of those who gave it), and sometimes, as has been said before, “Danes.” These sea rovers and raiders effected settlements in various parts of Europe, but their most important lodgement, the only one with which we have now any concern, was in France, which they invaded on the south of the Seine, between that river and the Loire. Here in the course of less than a hundred years they had established themselves so firmly that in the year 912, Charles, the Frankish king, recognized and enfeoffed[2] the Viking Rollo, as first Duke of Normandy; Rollo acknowledging Charles as his over-lord, and receiving baptism—for the Normans were now, as the Anglo-Saxons had been until about A. D. 600, pagans. These Gothic Norsemen did not make the language that they soon came to speak. Conquerors and rulers although they were, they adopted the language of the country and the people which they had conquered, and spoke it with slight Gothic modification. This was the Norman-French which, only one hundred and fifty years after they were well settled in the country which they had seized, and which was called from them “Terra North manorum,”[3] or Normandy, they took into England.

This French language (Norman or other) was like many other things wrongly named. It was not the speech of the Franks or French, a German tribe, who in the fifth century conquered the country, and from whom it came to have its name. What, then, was it? We must turn back a moment.

It will be remembered that the column of Aryan immigration after entering Europe at its southeastern corner, divided; one division, the Celto-GrÆco-Italic, following the northern shore of the Mediterranean, taking possession of the country there, then pushing up northward to the country once called Gaul, now France, and finally crossing the English Channel and taking possession of Britain and Ireland. This column of immigrants founded, among other states, one which is hitherto the grandest, most influential fact in the history of the world—Rome, the city, the republic, and finally the empire of Rome; the influence of which upon the world has now, after more than two thousand years, not passed away; for the Roman Catholic Church, ecclesiastically supreme because it was the Church of Rome, is still one of the great powers of the earth. The Celtic peoples in Gaul were conquered by the great CÆsar half a century before the Christian era. The Romans were wise conquerors; they made the people whom they conquered Romans. The Celts of Gaul, during centuries of Roman rule lost almost all their native habits and customs, among them their mother tongue. They had Roman customs and laws and they gradually adopted the Roman language—the Latin. As might be expected, however, they did not speak pure Latin. The very people of Rome did not speak pure Latin, if by that we mean the Latin of Cicero’s orations, and the poems of Horace and of Virgil. That was a literary language. The popular Latin was speech much less formal and artificial. But the Celts of Gaul (or France) spoke this popular Latin much debased, and somewhat intermixed with Celticisms. The degradation of this form of Latin went on until the country was successfully invaded by German tribes in the fifth century. These Franks and Burgundians, being fewer than the Celto-Roman people whom they conquered, and inferior in civilization, gradually adopted their language, which, however, they broke up and simplified, by ridding it of case endings and tense signs; doing this for mere convenience sake; they had not the time or the patience to learn all the Latinish inflections. When about four hundred years of Frankish rule and influence and intermarriage had elapsed, it was discovered that the language of the people had become so greatly unlike Latin that it was practically another tongue. Wherefore it was decreed in the year 813 by the Council of Tours that the bishops should address their clergy and people in the Romance tongue, which was the name given to this popular modification of the old Roman (Latin) speech. This the Frank kings and courtiers, who had continued to speak German, were soon obliged to adopt; and after the division of Charlemagne’s empire, in the year 843, German was restricted to the country beyond and just about the Rhine. The Romance tongue, spoken to the westward, was rapidly modified by degradation of forms, and by intermixture of Teutonic words, until it became about the eleventh century, what is known as Old French. It was a debased form of this Old French which the Scandinavian North-men, or Normans, adopted, and finally carried into England, not only as the court language, but to spread it all over the country. This, then, is the strange phenomenon in language which is consequent upon the Norman conquest of England; that a Gothic people conquering and uniting themselves with another Gothic people, took into the conquered country, not a Gothic, but a Romance tongue. When the Norman conquerors spread themselves over all England, accompanied by their followers of various ranks (for it is an absurdly erroneous notion that all the Normans that went to England were nobles, or even knights), they took there no race of foreign blood. To the Dano-Anglo-Saxon English stock, they merely added more of the Danish element. But most strangely, the language brought in by this victorious body of near kinsmen was the most foreign that could have been found west of the Caucasus.

At first, with the pride of conquerors, the Normans in England spoke their own, or rather their adopted tongue. Norman-French was the language of the court, of the law-courts, of “society.” English was “vulgar.” This went on for some generations. The condition of things in this respect could not, however, remain unchanged. Two tongues can not be spoken by people in constant intercourse with each other without both being more or less affected by the contact. This happened. The English (called Anglo-Saxon or Old English) and the Norman-French were each modified by the other; they interchanged words and idioms; each dovetailing itself into the other, until about the year 1350, when it was discovered that the distinction of Norman and Englishman had practically passed away, and that the conqueror, yielding to the steady, gradual influence of the people and the country he had conquered, had himself become an Englishman. English had become the speech of the whole people, and thereafter English was by decree the language of all public documents, proclamations, and the like, the language of the court, and of “society.”

Of the English, however, which thus came into vogue, it must be remembered, first, that it did not prevail in the same form among all the people, but only among the superior classes and the middle classes of the best condition; that even among them it was spoken and written with much variation; and that as to the rustic people, they spoke almost as many dialects of the Old English as there were shires in England. Second, that this English of 1350 was so unlike both the Old English of Alfred’s day, four hundred years before, that he would not have been able to read it without much study, and that it was equally unlike the English of Queen Anne, four hundred years later.

The introduction of the Norman-French element into the English language was a gain, the value of which, in the enrichment of our tongue, and in its increased adaptability to the wants of a highly civilized people can not be overestimated. The Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was a strong, manly speech, and not without a certain homely charm and simple sweetness. It was direct, too, and seemed (but perhaps merely seemed) to be the speech of an honest people. It was however, rude, inflexible, limited in its vocabulary, and incapable of expressing fine distinctions of thought. In all these respects it was so profited, so endowed, so broadened, so suppled and so refined by its union with the Romance vocabulary which was largely grafted upon it, that it blossomed almost into another language; quite another if its capacities are considered. An examination of the more particular nature of these changes, which have direct connection with the practical use of the language, must be postponed until our next article.

To this two-elemented language, a language composed of two stocks so different as the Gothic and the Latin, and yet strangely spoken by a people wholly Gothic and largely Scandinavian in blood, there came now, or began to come, an addition which was destined to affect its character greatly, and without which it would not be the matchless language that it is. This addition was not an addition of substance, but of spirit, not of matter but of manner. It came to the English language because of the bold and independent spirit of the English race in politics and in religion. It came through the translation of the Bible into the English tongue. This brought into the English language, alone among all the languages of the Indo-European race, not a foreign element indeed, but the informing spirit of a great literature written in a tongue so radically unlike all Aryan speech that the existence of the two would seem wholly incompatible with the theory of evolution, and to imply two independent creations of man; at least two independent creations of language. Yet these two languages or families of languages, the Aryan and the Semitic, seem to have come into existence in neighboring countries. As our Aryan forefathers, in their earlier movements, and before their first division, passed between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, they skirted the northern borders of the great peninsula of Arabia, into which none of them, not even those who turned southward, seem to have attempted to penetrate. This peninsula was at that time, we may be sure, although there is neither evidence of the fact nor testimony to it, occupied by the Semitic race; a race of great power and peculiar genius, which has had an influence upon the world hardly less than that of the Aryan peoples. Why the Aryans did not attempt the conquest and possession of Arabia, we do not know. But it is to be remembered that they were then comparatively small in numbers; and the Semitic race is one at once so warlike and so sagacious, that the conquest would have been one of the utmost difficulty, even if it were practicable; and moreover, that the country is not an inviting one to strangers.

The great function of the Semitic race in the world seems to have been the conception and the promulgation of the idea of the One Spiritual God. This idea, to which the race still holds, spread itself with an all-controlling influence over the civilized globe. It is the corner stone of the Christian and the Mohammedan religions. The Semitic race, of which the Hebrews are a family, has, or had, among its other gifts, the gift of sublime, intense, and imaginative utterance in prose and in poetry. In this respect it is without rival among all the peoples who have or who have had a literature. To these qualities it adds that of a direct simplicity, which in pathos (if with art, with an art so hidden as to leave not even the suggestion of consciousness), attains the power both of the ideal and the real, and never descends so low as sentiment. Of fancy, the Hebrew writers (for it is they whom we are now considering) exhibit none; less it would seem because of the nature of their themes, than because fancifulness was foreign to their intensity and loftiness of soul. The writings forming the most important part of the early Hebrew sacred literature form also, as we all know, that Old Testament which fills the largest part of the Bible—that is, the Book which has been for more than fifteen hundred years held sacred by all christendom.

This sacred Book—which, even if it did not contain the revelation of the idea of the One Eternal and Almighty God, and of his dealings with them who deemed themselves his chosen people, and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and of the great apostle to the Gentiles, would yet be the most remarkable collection of writings known in literature—it has been the policy of the church of Rome to keep from the people. Its translation into the vulgar tongue, and its distribution among the people at large, have always by that church been most earnestly discouraged, and even, until a comparatively late date, forbidden. It is remarkable that its earliest translations were into languages of Gothic peoples. Bishop Ulphilas’s translation of the Gospels and a small part of the Old Testament into the MÆso-Gothic language, in the fourth century, has already been mentioned. About three centuries later an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels was made; and there is evidence, as we are assured by Bosworth,[C] in the rubrics[4] that portions of them were constantly read in Anglo-Saxon churches. But these versions did little to bring the Bible before the eyes of the people at large; and besides, they were, as we have seen, confined to a very small part of that book. The Old Testament remained to all intents and purposes in an unknown tongue until the dawn of the Reformation in England. Wycliffe and his followers translated the whole of the Bible about 1380; and from that time, notwithstanding bulls, and anathemas, and persecutions, this book of books, The Book, became the possession of the whole English people.

We are concerned here only with the effect of this momentous work upon the English language. It was great and peculiar. Wycliffe’s English version was followed in 1535 by Coverdale’s, which was afterward republished with revision, by Taverner’s, and by others, including the famous Genevan Bible[5], of which fifty editions were published in England within thirty years. These versions were mostly revisions, each “translator” availing himself, of course, of the text of his predecessors. Finally, in 1611, there was made what is known as the “authorized,” or King James I. version, which has since that time been, next to their common blood and common speech, the strongest bond of unity for the English race. But between the making of Wycliffe’s translation in 1380 and the middle of the sixteenth century, the Bible had taken strong hold of the English people. It sank into their hearts; it lifted their souls; its modes of thought became their modes of thought; its phrases, their household words. When Puritanism appeared, and strangely relied upon the Old Testament as its armory of theological warfare, the thoughts and the words of the prophets, priests and kings of Israel were the daily intellectual food of no inconsiderable part of the common people, and the air of all England was vocal with the phraseology of Job, of David, of Isaiah, and of Ezekiel. The effect of this upon the English mode of thought and expression was great and lasting; enduring even to this day. Its value was inestimable. By reason of it English diction acquired a simplicity, a strength, a directness, a largeness of style, a capacity of grandeur and of pathos, a richness and variety which it otherwise would not have acquired, and which has not been attained by the language of any other people. The spirit of Hebrew literature was transfused into the English mind to such a degree as to modify its mode of thought and of utterance. This took place because the diffusion of the Bible happened just at the time when the language was in a state of transition, and modern English was in course of formation. Had it not occurred until afterward, as was the case with other European peoples, it would have been too late to produce this effect. The English of Shakspere, of Milton, of Bunyan, and their great successors would not have existed but for the translation and diffusion of the Bible among the English people.

This, then, English is: a sturdy Gothic stem, largely and deeply grafted with Romanic scions, and permeated with the spirit of Hebrew sublimity and passion. These are the source elements of the supremacy of the youngest language of the Aryan stock. It unites all the powers and possibilities of its congeners, and adds to them those of the speech of the only other race that has felt and uttered the highest aspirations of humanity, and largely swayed the course of man’s progress through his unknown future.