Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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СКАЧАТЬ anecdote recorded of Vaugelas may possibly be true, and is a remarkable evidence of this perpetual mobility of style. This writer lived between 1585 and 1650, and during thirty years had been occupied, more suo, on a translation of Quintus Curtius. It was during this protracted period that the French style was passing through its rapid transitions. So many phrases had fallen superannuated, that this martyr to the purity of his diction was compelled to re-write the former part of his version to modernise it with his later improved composition. The learned Menage lived to be old enough to have caught alarm at this vicissitude of taste, and did not scruple to avow that no work could last which was not composed in Latin.

The languages of highly cultivated nations are more subject to this innovation and variableness than the language of a people whose native penury receives but rare accessions. Hence the ancient and continued complaints through all the generations of critics, from the days of Julius Cæsar and Quintilian to those in which we are now writing.1 The same hostility against novelty in words or in style is invariably proclaimed. The captiousness of criticism has usually referred to the style of the preceding authors as a standard from which the prevalent style of its contemporaries has erringly diverged. The preceptors of genius at all times seem to have been insensible to the natural progress of language, resisting new qualities of style and new forms of expression; in reality, this was inferring, that a perfect language exists, and that a creative genius must be trammelled by their limited and arbitrary systems. This prejudice of the venerable brotherhood may, I think, be traced to its source. Every age advantageously compares itself with its predecessor, for it has made some advances, and rarely suspects that the same triumph is reserved for its successor; but besides this illusion in regard to the style, which, like the manners of the time, is passing away, the veteran critic has long been a practised master, and in the daring and dubious novelties which time has not consecrated, he must descend to a new pupilage; but his rigid habits are no longer flexible; and for the matured arbiter of literature who tastes “the bitterness of novelty,” what remains but an invective against the minting of new words, and the versatility of new tastes?

The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from the principle that a modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are emphatically called “the dead languages,” in which every deviation unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. But the truth is, that every modern language has always existed in fluctuation and change. The people themselves, indeed, are no innovators; their very phrases are traditional. Popular language can only convey the single uncompounded notions of the people; it is the style of facts; and they are intelligible to one another by the shortest means. Their Saxon-English is nearly monosyllabic, and their phraseology curt. Hence we find that the language of the mob in the year 1382 is precisely the natural style of the mob of this day.2 But this popular style can never be set up as the standard of genius, which is mutable with its age, creating faculties and embodying thoughts which do not enter into the experience of the people, and therefore cannot exercise their understandings.

      A series of facts will illustrate our principle, that the language of every literary people exists in a fluctuating condition, and that its vaunted purity and its continued stability are chimerical notions.

In this history of the vicissitudes of the English language, we may commence with our remote ancestors the Anglo-Saxons. When their studies and their language received a literary character, they coveted great pomposity in their style. They interlarded their staves with Latin words; and, even in the reign of the Confessor, the French language was fashionable. “The affectation of the Anglo-Saxon literati was evidently tending to adulterate their language; and even if the Conquest had not taken place, the purity of the English language would have been speedily destroyed by the admixture of a foreign vocabulary.”3 Thus early were we perilling our purity!

      In 1387, John de Trevisa, translating the Latin Polychronicon of Higden, tells us he avoids what he calls “the old and ancient English.” A century afterwards, Caxton, printing this translation of Trevisa, had to re-write it, to change the “rude and old English, that is, to wit, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood.” It might have startled Master Caxton to have suspected that he might be to us what Trevisa was to him, as it had equally amazed Trevisa, when he discovered archaisms which had contracted the rust of time, to have imagined that his fresher English were to be archaisms to his printer in the succeeding century.

      At the period at which our present vernacular literature opened on us, Eliot, More, and Ascham maintained great simplicity of thought and idiom; yet even at this period, about 1550, the language seemed in imminent danger; it raised the tone of our primitive critics, and the terrors of neologism took all frightful shapes to their eyes!

A refined critic of our language then was the learned Sir John Cheke, who at this early period considered that the English language was capable of preserving the utmost purity of style, and he was jealously awake to its slightest violations. A friend of his, Sir Thomas Hoby, a courtly translator of the “Courtier of Castiglione,” had solicited his critical opinion. The learned Cheke, equally friendly and critical, insinuated his abhorrence of “an unknown word,” and apologises for his corrections, lest he should be accounted “overstraight a deemer of things, by marring his handywork.” Hoby had evidently alarmed, by some sprinklings of Italianisms—some capriccios of “new-fangled” words—the chaste ear of our Anglican purist. I preserve this remarkable letter to serve as a singular specimen of our English, unpolluted even by a Latinism.4

      “Our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed, by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitness of other tongues to attire herself withal; but used plainly her own, with such shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent, doth lead her unto; and if she want at any time (as, being imperfect, she must), yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease this need, we would not boldly venture on unknown words. This I say, not for reproof of you, who have scarcely and necessarily used, where occasion seemeth, a strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out of the matter, and not to be sought for; but for my own defence, who might be counted overstraight a deemer of things, if I give not this account to you, my friend, of my marring this your handy work.”

Such was the tone even of our primitive critics! the terrors of neologism were always before their eyes. All those accessions of the future opulence of the vernacular language were either not foreseen or utterly proscribed, while, at the same time, the wants and imperfections of the language, amid all its purity or its poverty, were felt and acknowledged. We perceive that even this stern champion of his vernacular idiom confesses that “he may want at time, being imperfect, and must borrow with bashfulness.” The cries of the critics suddenly break on us. Another contemporary critic of not inferior authority laments that “there seemed to be no mother-tongue.” “The far-journeyed gentlemen” returned home not only in love with foreign fashions, but equally fond “to powder their talk with over-sea language.” There was French-English, and English Italianated. Professional men disfigured the language by conventional pedantries; the finical courtier would prate “nothing but Chaucer.” “The mystical wisemen and the poetical clerks delivered themselves in quaint proverbs and blind allegories.”5 The pedantic race, in their furious Latinisms, bristling with polysyllabic pomposity, deemed themselves fortunate when they could fall upon “dark words,” which our critic aptly describes “catching an ink-horn term by the tail.” The eloquence of the more volatile fluttered in the splendid patches of modern languages. It seemed as if there were to be no longer a native idiom, and the good СКАЧАТЬ