Basil De Selincourt

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life is richer now in its opportunities, more exhilarating in its occupations, more tantalizing in its questions, more urgent in the close [46] 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [33] 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [32] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Working with measurable quantities, [8] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”