Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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Amenities of Literature - Disraeli Isaac


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and pride with which Milton constructed on the Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman. Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, destitute of every sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished Duke of Weimar at St. James’s, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national events.

      The history of the vernacular language of other European nations discovers the same mutability, though not always produced by those great public incidents which may have been peculiar to ourselves. In Spain, however, we find that the possession of that land by the Moors has left in the Castilian language a whole dictionary of Arabic words which now mingle with the vernacular idiom, and for ever shall bear witness of the triumphs of their ancient masters. But in the history of a vernacular language it may also happen that the first writers, combining in a singleness of taste, may construct a particular style. The earliest writers of France had modelled their taste by the Greek; Jodelle, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and others, imbued with Attic literature, Greekised the French idiom, by their compounds, their novel terms, and their sonorous periphrases. The Court and the ladies were adopting this new style, and, as usual, the unskilful were diverging into the most ridiculous affectations. But it was possible that the French language might have acquired a concision and vigour of which it is now destitute, for those early writers threw out a more original force than their tame successors. The artificial delicacy of the French critics has condemned these attempts as barbarisms; but to have transplanted these atticisms into the native soil, partook more of boldness than of barbarism. The attempt failed, if it could ever have succeeded, by the civil wars which soon drew off the minds of men from the placable innovators of language.

      The French, though not an insular people, have been subject to rapid revolutions in their language. The ancient Gaulish-French has long been as unintelligible to a modern Frenchman as our Saxon is to us; even those numerous poets of France who at a later period composed in their langue Romane, are strewed in the fields of their poesy only as carcasses, which no miracle of antiquarian lore shall ever resuscitate. Compare the style of one writer with another only two centuries later, or Rabelais with Voltaire! The age of Louis XIV. effected the most rapid change in the vernacular style, insomuch that the diction of the writers of the preceding reign of Louis XIII. had fallen obsolete in the short space of half a century. And yet the chastened style of the age of Louis XIV., with its cold imitation of classical antiquity, was to receive a higher polish from the hand of a Pascal, a novel brilliancy from the touch of a Montesquieu, and a more numerous prose from the impassioned Rousseau. The age of erudition and taste was to be succeeded by the more energetic age of genius and philosophy. An 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.

      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 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!


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