Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac
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Название: Amenities of Literature
Автор: Disraeli Isaac
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4064066119720
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Such was the crisis, and such the difficulties and the obstructions of that native literature in whose prosperous state every European people now exults. Homogeneous with their habitual associations, moulded by their customs and manners, and everywhere stamped by the peculiar organization of each distinct race, we see the vernacular literature ever imbued with the qualities of the soil whence it springs, diversified, yet ever true to nature. Had the native genius of the great luminaries of literature not found a vein which could reach to the humblest of their compatriots, they who are now the creators of our vernacular literature had remained but pompous plagiarists or frigid babblers, and the moderns might still have been pacing in the trammels of a mimetic antiquity.
1 Sidonius Apollinaris.
2 An ingenious literary antiquary has given us a copious vocabulary, as complete evidence of Latin words merely abbreviated by omitting their terminations, whence originated those numerous monosyllables which impoverish the French language. In the following instances the Gauls only used the first syllable for the entire word, damnum—damn; aureum—or; malum—mal; nudum—nud; amicus—ami: vinum—vin; homo—hom, as anciently written; curtus—court; sonus—son; bonus—bon: and thus made many others.
The nasal sound of our neighbours still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks into Gracque; Titus Livius is but Tite Live; and the historian of Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintus Curtius, is the ludicrous Quinte Curce!—Auguis, “Du Génie de la Langue Françoise.”
3 Turner’s “History of England.”
4 See “Curiosities of Literature,” article Recovery of Manuscripts.
5 Erasmus composed a satirical dialogue between two vindictive Ciceronians; it is said that a duel has been occasioned by the intrepidity of maintaining the purity of a writer’s latinity. The pedantry of mixing Greek and Latin terms in the vernacular language is ridiculed by Rabelais in his encounter with the Limousin student, whom he terrified till the youngster ended in delivering himself in plain French, and left off “Pindarising” all the rest of his days.—“Pantagruel,” lib. ii. c. 6.
6 Collier’s “History of Dramatic Poetry,” ii. 463.
7 We now possess this valued literary history, which none, perhaps, but Anthony à Wood could have so fervently pursued: “The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford,” in five volumes, quarto. Edited by John Gutch. It is a distinct work from the far-known “Athenæ Oxonienses.” Why did this great work, as well as some others, come forth with a Latin title? This absurdity was a remaining taint of the ancient prejudice. But an English work was not the more classical for bearing a Latin title.
ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Johnson pronounced it impossible to ascertain when our speech ceased to be Saxon and began to be English; and although since his day English philology has extended its boundaries, the lines of demarcation are very moveable for the literary antiquary. At whatever point we set out, we may find that something which preceded has been omitted; a century may pass away and leave no precise epoch; and transitions of words and styles, like shades melting into each other, may elude perception. Too often wanting sufficient data, the toil of the antiquary becomes baffled, and the microscopic eye of the philologist pores on empty space. The learned have their theories; but in darkness we are doomed to grope, and in a circle we can fix on no beginning.
The elegant researches of Ellis, the antiquarian lore of Ritson, the simplicity of taste of Percy, the poetic fervour of Campbell, the elaborate diligence of Sharon Turner, and more recent names skilled in Saxon lore, have given opposite hypotheses, conjectures, and refutations. “A modification of language is not in reality a change,” observes a powerful researcher in literary history,1 who is at a loss “whether some compositions shall pass for the latest offspring of the mother, or the earliest fruit of the daughter’s fertility”—a shrewd suspicion which the genealogists of words may entertain concerning the legitimate and the illegitimate, or the pure and the corrupt.
The Saxon language had been tainted by some Latin terms from the ecclesiastics, and some fashionable Normanisms from the court of the Confessor; when the Norman-French, fatal as the arrow which pierced Harold, by a single blow struck down that venerable form—and never has it arisen! And now, with all its pomp, such as it was, it lies entombed and coffined in some scanty manuscripts.
We indeed triumph that the language of our forefathers never did depart from the land, since it survived among the people. What survived? It soon ceased to be a written tongue, for no one cared to cultivate an idiom no longer required, and utterly contemned. After the Conquest, the miserable Saxons lost their “book-craft.” We find nothing written but the continuation of a meagre chronicle. A few pietists still lingered in occasional homilies, and a solitary charter has been perpetuated; but the style was already changed, and as a literary language the Anglo-Saxon had for ever departed! It had sunk to the people, and they treated the ancient idiom after their fashion—the language of books served not simple men; laying aside its inflections, and its inversions, and its arbitrary construction, they chose a shorter and more direct conveyance of their thoughts, and only kept to a language fitted to the business of daily life. This getting free from the encumbrances of the Anglo-Saxon we may consider formed the obscure beginnings of the English Language. All the gradual changes or the sudden innovations through more than two centuries may not be perceivable by posterity; but philologists have marked out how first the inversion was simplified, and then the inflections dropped; how the final E became mute, and at length was ejected; how ancient words were changed, and Norman neologisms introduced. As this English cleared itself of the nebulosity, the anomalies, and all the complex machinery of the mother idiom, a natural style was formed, very homely, for this vaunted Saxon now came from the mouths of the people, and from those friends of the people, the monks, who only wrote for their humble brother-Saxons. The English writers who were composing in French, and the more learned who displayed their clerkship by their Latinity, had a standard of literature which would regulate or advance their literary workmanship; but there was no standard in the language of bondage: it had mixed, as Ritson oddly describes it, “with one knows not what,” a disorganization of words and idioms. Numerous DIALECTS pervaded the land; the east and the west agreed as ill together as both did with the north and the south; and they who wrote for the people each chose the dialect of their own shire.
The “Saxon Chronicle,” which СКАЧАТЬ