Englishness

“ Curiosity, which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is perhaps its initial and moving source. The trait which has sent the English broadcast over the world and mingled their history with the annals of all nations is the same that has so blended their literature with the history of all tongues. The acquisitive power which has created the empire of the English, with dominion on dominion, is parallel with the faculty that assimilates past literatures with the body of their literary speech. ”

“ This integrity of English nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. ”

“ One may easily challenge such a definition, which, like most others, is far from faultless. It is difficult, for example, to draw the line sharply between instructive and pleasure-giving works; for many an instructive book of history gives us pleasure, and there may be more instruction on important matters in a pleasurable poem than in a treatise on ethics. Again, there are historians who allege that English literature must include not simply the works of Britain but everything written in the English language. ”

“ I know that I have an earnest love for my subject; feeling proud of the name of Englishman, and the freedom of thought, speech, and action therein involved; loving our fields and lanes, our hills and moorlands, and the shores of our sea, and delighting much to wander among them. ”

“ This academic tradition has created English culture, which is perhaps best described as an instinctive standard of judgment, and is the necessary complement to that openness of mind that has characterized English literature from the first. Nor is this last word a paradox, but the simple truth, as is plain from the assimilative power here dwelt upon. The English genius is always itself; no element of greatness could inhere in it otherwise; [pg xxvi] but, in literature, it has had the most open mind of any nation. ”

“ Fiction and poetry, in some supposititious instance, report for the Englishman the bashful truth about himself; and what English life thereby misses in vivacity, English literature gains in wealth, in tenderness, in a rambling veracity, and in preciousness to the people's heart. ”

“ A strong common sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years: a rude strength newly applied to thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read. ”

“ English is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern phrase. ”

“ Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? ”

“ And we know that only the winged words live on, the words that are intelligible to the whole of mankind, that appeal to the whole of humanity, to the common human mind, the common heart.
We know the vast power of the English word. We know what a marvellous contribution the English writers have made to the life not of England alone, but to that of the whole world, the whole humanity. ”

“ It isn’t English, for one thing, and—isn’t it odd?—the notion persists that it is. If we are ever to have a race of our own here—if the melting pot we are always talking about ever really melts up the mass—how English, how German, how Puritanic will it be? ”

“ Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. ”

“ An Englishman whom I met tells me that even the language corrupts itself from day to day; the Englishman ceases to understand. It encourages me to find I’m not the only one. There are things every day that one can’t describe. ”

“ We English—all the world indeed to-day—live in a strange atmosphere of neglected great issues, of insistent, triumphant petty things, we are given up to the fine littlenesses of intercourse; table manners and small correctitudes are the substance of our lives. ”

“ What are ‘we,’ the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs? ”

“ Do you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest, purest, noblest thing in the world—the purely English and excellent thing? ”

“ It may be doubted whether the evidence of material and moral achievement make, anywhere, a more forcible appeal to eye and imagination, and whether any other spot on the earth is thus more likely to excite, or more fully justifies, pride in the name of Englishman. ”

“ The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it. ”

“ The English is admirable; there is great freshness and vigour in the descriptions of scenery and character, and in the narrative there is abundance of invention, and many of the situations are extremely dramatic.... ”

“ He was the first to break loose from the prevailing custom, which confined all learning and philosophy and history, to the constrained medium of a dead language, and commenced those efforts in the living English, which have resulted in giving us a vernacular prose literature, unequalled by that of any other language in the world. ”

“ Let us even go further, and say that no one has rendered certain aspects of English scenery with such soft, clear perfection of touch as he has—that no one has produced anything approaching it for years. ”

“ It is not my fault if the English are not clever enough to make thermometers and dyes, and are cruel enough to read private letters and shoot the writer. Must I suddenly be convinced that the English are absolutely right and wise and perfect in all they do? ”

“ To speak English correctly in a clear, pleasant voice, to read it intelligently and agreeably, to write it plainly and without ambiguity—this in itself would be a liberal culture, which few of us attain to. ”

“ The spirit and essence of Englishism, if I may so call it--that which marks our distinctive character, that which renders all we do so progressive, and at the same time so permanent--is the system, or principle, or habit--call it what you will--of small communities acting together, in some things separate from, in some things dependent upon, the great mass of the nation. ”

“ A language is but the instrument of those who use it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of the masterful English stock. ”

“ But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny constitution, affectation, and old age! ”

“ An Englishman speaking French, or a Frenchman speaking English, has no sympathy with the customs, laws, manners, morals, legends, literature, or drama of the foreign country beyond the acquired one of scholarship. ”

“ The influences at work upon the English language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force, so that the changes are startling in their rapidity. English is not only the language of a nation or of a race, not even of an empire ”

“ Before leaving this point, which to my thinking is the cause of many frictions and misunderstandings between ourselves and the English, I mustn’t omit to give instances of divergence, where an Englishman will speak of matters upon which we are silent, and is silent upon subjects of which we will speak.
You may present a letter of introduction to an Englishman, and he wishes to be civil, to help you to have a good time. ”

“ The article enunciated the thesis that if the English language should not in the near future contain the finest body of poetry in the world, the time is now upon us when it ought to do so; for no other literature has had that variety of poetic material which is now at the command of English-speaking poets. ”

“ The attention which has lately been given to the culture of the English language, by some who, in the character of critics or lexicographers, have laboured purposely to improve it, and by many others who, in various branches of knowledge, have tastefully adorned it with the works of their genius, has in a great measure redeemed it from that contempt in which it was formerly held in the halls of learning. ”

“ For it is a fact that the Englishman is endowed with a very great idea of himself, of the absolute rightness of his philosophy of life, his instincts, prepossessions, and the peculiar shape and shade of his morality. ”

“ There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the ‘form and pressure’ of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ Let it be admitted that at times he wrenches his English rather fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy, strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side by side with the noblest of our prose writers. ”

“ In asking this question I am not thinking about the tragic possibility that English may be the only language left in which civilized men can think and talk freely, even though that fact by itself would make it terribly basic. ”

“ The English, from the Happiness of a free Constitution, and a Turn of Mind peculiarly speculative and inquisitive, are observ’d to produce more Humourists and a greater Variety of Original Characters, than any other People whatsoever: And These owing their immediate Birth to the peculiar Genius of each Age, an infinite Number of Things alluded to, glanced at, and expos’d, must needs become obscure, as the Characters themselves are antiquated, and disused. ”

“ And is it not a noble thing, that the English tongue is, as it were, the common focus and point of union to which opposite beauties converge? Is it a trifle that we temper energy with softness, strength with flexibility, capaciousness of sound with pliancy of idiom? ”

“ Each of these expressions is common at the present time, and its meaning is instantly clear to any one who speaks English. But these expressions, not being used by well-informed and careful speakers, produce in the mind of a well-informed bearer an impression of vulgarity like that which we get from seeing a person eat with his knife. In language, as in manners and fashions, the law is found in the custom of the best people; and persons who wish to be classed as cultivated people must speak and write like cultivated people. ”

“ It is English that is as transparent as a crystal, and yet it is English that is full of fine colors and cadences. There could be no better investiture for the questionings and conclusions of so original, so curious, so learned, and, above all, so sound and hearty a man. ”

“ The English do a good action solely from a wish to do good, and from no other earthly inducement. I am now speaking of Englishmen as individuals, for, when acting in numbers, I must confess I do not hold so high an opinion of them. ”

“ The study of history shows us that the future of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Americans. ”

“ By adhering to our own practice, we preserve a superiority over the English, in those instances, in which ours is guided by rules; and so far ought we to be from conforming to their practice, that they ought rather to conform to ours. ”

“ A second quality, which is general enough to be constantly attracting attention, is the thoroughly English character of his life. The stock from which he sprang was rich in old English qualities of vigor, sense, and originality ”