Thomas Laurence Kington-Oliphant

“ In the last twelve years of Elizabeth's life, London had privileges far beyond any favours ever bestowed on Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, or Weimar; the great Queen might have gathered together in one room Spenser, Shakespere, Bacon, and Hooker; to say nothing of her other guests, the statesmen who outwitted Rome, the seamen who singed the proud Spaniard's beard, the knights who fought so manfully for the good cause in Munster, in Normandy, and in Flanders. Nowhere does the spirit of that high-reaching age breathe stronger than in Spenser's verse ”

“ But the old and pithy style of address, such as Charles I. and Speaker Lenthall employed, is now thought out of place; the Sovereign harangues the lieges in a speech that has become a byword for bad English. We have taken into our heads the odd notion, that long sentences stuffed with Latinized words are more majestic than our forefathers' simplicity of speech; the bad grammar, often put into the Sovereign's mouth, smacks of high treason. The evil example spreads downwards; it is no wonder that official reports are not seldom a cumbrous mass of idle wordiness. ”

“ That web is of a woof too precious to be pieced with stuff of no more worth than a penny a line.’ But sound English criticism too often calls forth a growl of annoyance from vulgar vanity. If any one in our day sets himself to breast the muddy tide of fine writing, an outcry is at once raised that he is panting to drive away from England all words that are not thoroughly Teutonic. ”

“ Poetry always clings fast to old words, long after they have been dropped by prose; and this was the case in England before the Conquest. If we take a piece of Old English prose, say the tales translated by Alfred, or Ælfric's Homilies, or a chapter of the Bible, we shall find that we keep to this day three out of four of all the nouns, adverbs, and verbs em­ployed by the old writer; but of the nouns, adverbs, and verbs used in any English poem, from the Beowulf to the song on Edward the Confessor's death, about half have dropped for ever. ”

“ As years went on, and as men more and more aped their betters, the French words would drive out the Old En­glish words; and the latter class would linger only in the mouths of upland folk, where a keen antiquary may find some of them still. So mighty was the spell at work, that in the Fourteenth Century French words found their way into even the Lord's Prayer and the Belief; the last strongholds, it might be thought, of pure En­glish. ”

“ Mistrust has been almost wholly driven out by distrust. We have happily two or three Teutonic endings still in use, when we coin new adjectives and nouns; one of these is ness. It had English rivals in full vigour at the end of the Fourteenth Century, but they have now dropped out of use; what our penny-a-liners now call inebriety might in 1380 be Englished not only by Chaucer's dronkenesse, but by Wickliffe's drunkenhede, by Mire's dronkelec, and by Gower's drunkeshepe. [44] Our lately-coined pigheadedness and longwindedness show that there is life in the good old ness yet. ”

“ The answer is: no man that knows the history of the English tongue, can ever be guilty of such unwisdom. Our heedless forefathers in the Thirteenth Century allowed thousands of our good old words to slip; out language must be copious, at any cost; we therefore by slow degrees made good the loss with thousands of French terms. Like the Lycian, whom Zeus bereft of wit, we took brass for gold. Thanks to this process, Chaucer had most likely as great a wealth of words at his beck as Orrmin had, two hun­dred years earlier. ”

“ We are scraping the stucco off the old stone and brick, as the Germans and Danes have done. Ere long, it is to be hoped, the most polysyllabic of British scribblers will find out that for him Defoe and Fielding are better models than Johnson or Gibbon. The great truth will dawn upon him, that few men can write forty words unbroken by a semicolon, without making slips in gram­mar. He will think twice before he uses Latin words, such as ovation, in a sense that makes scholars writhe. He will never discard a Teutonic word without good reason ”

“ Of all cities, none has better earned the homage of the English patriot, the English scholar, and the English architect, than Peterborough. Her Abbot was brought home, sick unto death, from the field of Hastings; her monks were among the first English­men who came under the Conqueror's frown. Her Minster suffered more from Hereward and his Norse friends than from her new French Abbot, Turold. At Peterborough our history was compiled, not in Latin but in English; the English that had grown up from the union of many generations of Danes and Angles, dwelling not far from Rutland. ”

“ CHAPTER I.
english in its earliest shape. [1]
There are many places, scattered over the world, that are hallowed ground in the eyes of Englishmen; but the most sacred of all would be the spot (could we only know it) where our forefathers dwelt in common with the ancestors of the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Slavonians, and Celts — a spot not far from the Oxus. By the unmistakable witness of language we can frame for ourselves a pedigree more truthful than any heraldic tree boasted by Veres or Montmorencies, by Guzmans or Colonnas. ”

“ I think it was President Pierce who, in his opening address at the Capitol, twenty years ago, spoke of slavery as ‘involuntary servitude.’ New habits stand in need of new words; one verb, that has come to us within the last four years from the American mint, is ‘to interview.’ Nothing can better express the spirit of our age, ever craving to hear something new; the verb calls up before us a queer pair: on the one side stands the great man, not at all sorry at the bottom of his heart that the rest of mankind are to learn what a fine fellow he is ”

“ But among the many good qualities of ourselves and our kinsmen, tender care for conquered foes has seldom been reckoned; Western Celt and Eastern Slavonian know this full well. Hard times were at hand; the old worn-out Empire of Rome was to receive fresh life-blood from the healthy Teutons. In the Fifth Century, our brethren overran Spain, Gaul, and Italy; becoming lords of the soil, and overlaying with their own words the old Latin dialects spoken in those provinces. To this time belongs the Beowulf, which is to us English (may I not say, to all Teutons?) ”

“ The penny-a-liner's help is often sought by an Editor, who knows what good English is, yet employs these worthless tools. Surely the Editors of our first-class journals should look upon themselves as the high-priests of a right worshipful Goddess, and should let nothing foul or unclean draw nigh her altars. Cannot these lower journeymen of the Press be put through a purification, such as an ex­amination in Defoe, Swift, or some sound English writer, that a good style may be formed before the novice is allowed to write for the journal? ”

“ It is a loss to mankind that Garnett has left so little behind him. He seems to have been the nearest approach England ever made to bringing forth a Mezzofanti, and he combined in himself qualities not often found in the same man. When his toilsome industry is amassing facts, he plods like a German; when his playful wit is unmasking quackery, he flashes like a Frenchman. He it was who first called attention to the varying dialects of England and who first en­deavoured to classify them. ”

“ Civil war is commonly thought to forebode evil to literature; England for forty years after Duke Hum­phrey's death was harassed by risings of the Commons, or was divided between the Red and the White Roses, as many a bloody field bore witness. Yet this is the precise time when English prose was handled with wonderful skill. Theology, chivalry, law, and homely life found the best of representatives in Pecock, Mallory, Fortescue, and Caxton. This was the time when our inflections were almost all driven out ”

“ She is sometimes to be met with abroad, dight in comely apparel; plain in her neatness, she seems fondest of the attire she brought with her from over the sea, though she shrinks not from wearing a fair proportion of the French gear which she cannot now do without, thanks to her unwisdom when she lived in the scullery. Arrayed on this wise, she can hold her own, so skilful judges say, against all comers; she need not fear the rivalry of the proudest ladies ever bred in Greece or Italy. ”

“ Compare Ockley, the lion's pro­vider, with Gibbon. Poetry was thriving; and in his Rape of the Lock, Pope beat the French on their own ground; the English Muse, forty-four years after bring­ing forth the Paradise Lost, showed that she could carve a face out of a cherry stone as well as hew a Colossus out of the rock. Dryden and Pope surpassed all mankind in the majestic art of reasoning in rime, and in the skill with which they wielded the keenest of weapons. ”

“ We see what wild anarchy of speech was raging throughout the length and breadth of England in the first half of the Fourteenth Century; and this anarchy had lasted more than two hundred years. But at the same time we plainly see that the dialect of the shires nearest to Rutland was the dialect to which our own classic speech of 1873 is most akin, and that Robert of Brunne in 1303 was leading the way to something new. ”

“ The Sanscrit lan­guage, having been set down in writing two thousand years before the earliest English, shows us far more of the great Mother Speech than our own tongue does. I now print a hundred and thirty words or so, the oldest used by us, which vary but slightly in their Eastern and Western shapes. How the one-syllable roots first arose, no man can say.
Unhappily, we English have been busy, for the last four thousand years, clipping and paring down our inflec­tions, until very few of them are left to us. Of all Europeans, we have been the greatest sinners in this way. ”

“ Indeed, the new style of building, brought from France more than a hun­dred years before the time of these worthies, must have unfolded many a new term of art to King Edward's masons at Westminster. In our own day, the great revival of Architecture has led to a wonderful enlarge­ment of diction among the common folk; every work­ing mason now has in his mouth scores of words for the meaning of which learned men forty years ago would have searched in dictionaries.
The Preacher in his religious or secular character was not the only importer of French words. ”

“ Tyndale's great work, beloved by all forms alike of English Protestantism, will for ever be a bond of fellow­ship between the seventy millions of the Angel cyn, whether they live on the Thames, the Potomac, the Kuruman, or the Murrumbidgee. Our tongue is like the Turk, who will bear no brothers near his throne; Irish and Welsh are dying out, as Cornish did long ago.
The great prose writers of the Sixteenth Century did much for the cause of sound English. ”

“ Fearful was the havock done in the Thirteenth Century; sore is our loss: but those of us who love a Teutonic diction should blame, not Chaucer or Wickliffe, but the Franciscans of an earlier age; they, if I guess aright, were the men who wrought the great change in our store of words. The time of King Henry the Third's death is the moment when our written speech was barrenest; a crowd of English words had already been dropped, and few French words had as yet been used by any writer of prose or poetry, except by the author of the Ancren Riwle ”

“ What our ladies, priests, soldiers, lawyers, doctors, huntsmen, architects, and cooks owe to France, has been fairly acknowledged. Italy has given us the words ever in the mouths of our painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Portuguese traders, three hundred years ago, helped us to many terms well known to our merchants. Germany, the parent of long-winded sentences, has sent us very few words; and these remind us of the Thirty Years' War, when English and Scotch soldiers were fighting on the right side. ”

“ But, though we long ago repaired with brick the gaps made in our ruined old stone hall, it does not follow that we should daub stucco over the brick and the stone alike. What a scholar mourns, is that our daws prank themselves in peacocks' feathers: that our lower press and our clergy revel in Romance words, brought in most needlessly after Swift and Addi­son were in their graves. What, for instance, do we want with the word exacerbate instead of the old embitter? The former is one of the penny-a-liner's choicest jewels. ”

“ Alfred had been King of the South; Alfred's son had won the Midland; Alfred's grandsons were now to bring the North under their yoke. The Danes drove the many quarrelsome English kingdoms into unity in sheer self-defence; much as in our own time the Austrians helped Italy to become one nation. The Saxon Chronicle in 941 names the Five Danish Burghs which overawed Mercia, and which have had so great an influence on the tongue now spoken by us. ”

“ Rome's most renowned poets were to be outdone by Teuton Makers, men who would soar aloft upon bolder wing into the Unseen and the Unknown, and who would paint the passions of mankind in more lifelike hues than any Latin writer ever essayed. ”