1849.]

Progressive Principle of Language and Style.

87

ART. VI.-THE PROGRESSIVE PRINCIPLE OF LANGUAGE AND STYLE.

THAT there is a gradation of excellence in the matter of language, has probably never been denied in terms. On the contrary, not a nation, not a tribe of mankind, that has not asserted for its particular idiom a degree of superiority to some or every other. The Iroquois savage would account the dialect of Plato but a barbarous jargon in comparison with his own: and if the rude prejudice would not, even in this instance, receive the literate sanction of what passes still for philological science, it is from no considerations more enlightened than the traditional pre-eminence, confirmed by school-boy bias, which is accorded to the Latin and Greek.

A gradation, then, is tacitly admitted. Nor is it recognized merely as between idioms reputed different, which, in truth, would not necessarily evince a progression; it is implied also as between successive periods of the same idiom. Thus, the civilized Englishman and his American echo will not only contend, like the savage, for the absolute superiority of their own language; they are often heard besides to deplore (still more preposterously) the degeneracy of its present state from the "energy and purity of the good old Saxon." For the English constitution is not, it seems, the only master-piece of wisdom and ingenuity which our ancestors had the peculiar fortune to find growing wild in the woods of Germany.*

* "Ce beau système a été trouvé dans les bois," says Montesquieu. We are far from meaning to deride either prejudice in its origin. It is natural, it is necessary, it is salutary even, that men should be led to adhere to their old institutions, by the blind grasp of instinct, in awaiting a more enlightened, if no more energetic, principle of attachment. This is the germ of patriotism itself, that noble prejudice which is not only the bond whereby a people is rooted morally to the soil, but also the living source, the nourishing sap of its best greatness and glory. In Englishmen, moreover-be it said to their apology, or rather honour-the plant has acquired a peculiar vigour and vivaciousness; probably from the repeated conquests or invasions which have swept over and desolated what Bossuet has termed their "stormy island."

Their extravagant estimate of the native idiom is similarly creditable, and proeeeds, perhaps, from the same cause. It is the resilience of the vanquished Saxon against his Norman oppressors; who laboured, with systematic tyranny, to supplant, by their own jargon, at that time scarce less barbarous, this last and least destructible asylum of nationality, the veritable Palladium, perhaps, symbolized by the ancients so significantly as the image and gift of Minerva. This, we repeat, was honourable in the sentiment; and it has resulted, in fact, through the career of adversity alluded to, in giving one of their highest qualities to the English people. It is only when the reaction is suffered, after the lapse of centuries, to extend the prejudice to the language and literature of France at the present day; after it has ceased to be but an echo of the past, unsanctioned any longer by political prudence

In this capacity of retro-gression, then, there is admitted a law of pro-gression, as well as the simple fact of gradation, in language. But, with this assumption, strictly universal, of a twofold principle, how comes it that the criterion expressly established should not merely differ from both, but be such as to negative the supposition of any principle whatever? For if usage be indeed the arbiter, it is self-evident there can be no comparing of tongues, any more than of tastes.* Adequately to explain this curious contradiction would be to go far-very far, we believe-beyond any actual researches into the true Philosophy of Language.

For so far is it from having been as yet explained, that it has not, we think, been hitherto so much as observed. To the mere statement of this singular inadvertence, nothing need be added to show how deeply the subject lingers within the mist of a class of prejudices too fundamental to be embarrassed by absurdity, however broad: we mean the prepossession, as between different idioms, of each nation for its own; and, as between the present and the primitive, or other preceding, state of the same idiom, the prepossession, still more puerile, which attributes to language, too, the chronological illusion of a "Golden Age."

Such, then, has been, in fact, the original standard of quality in language: for standard of some sort there must have always been, however inexplicit and imaginary. In the earlier stages of social infancy, the superiority was grounded simply on the belief that language was the gift of the national gods; thus partaking, quite of course, of the exclusive truth and perfection of each of the divers and divine. donors. Nor was this so bad in logic, however incongruous in principle, or apocryphal in fact.

At a later period, when, with the profane progress of reason, either these divinities had declined in credit, or man had forfeited their bounty by abusing their favours, the criterion came characteristically to be the ipse dixit of Usage. Characteristically, we say; for no in England, unsupported by national sentiment as in this country, and when, as such it dares to oppose itself to the dictates of reason and the demonstrations of scienceit is this parrot prejudice of mere tradition that seems to us to deserve derision, and even demand denunciation.

*Such appears to be, in fact, the declared doctrine of an Italian writer of distinction, toward the end of the last century, the Abbé Galiani; who pronounces the notion of a progression or preference among languages to be no better than an" absurdity." That there had been an author so avowedly consistent with the real absurdity of the "Usage" principle, we were not aware at the moment of penning the opening paragraph of this article. We retain it, however, as sufficiently exact for the general argument. Only justice requires that Galiani be acquitted of the second, the logical absurdity, reprehended in the text-that of being inconsistent with himself, as well as with fact and philosophy.

other criterion could be so convenient and compendious, in that chaotic condition of the general mind which follows upon the dissolution of what may be called the theological systems of secular knowledge. Usage affords an answer, prompt and peremptory, to all objections, a solution of all difficulties, a conciliation of all contradictions. Hence, very possibly, its pertinacious vogue among lawyers as well as linguists. To the grammarians it is the veritable philosopher's stone; which even the alchymists were saved, by the nature of their subject, from discovering. What wonder, then, that it should have been adopted by poets, and after echoed by pedants; who may indeed be excused their ignorance in linguistic, if only they be duly expert at prosody and parsing. But the expedient seems longer unpardonable in persons pretending to the name of philosophers, or even in their retainers and retailers of the critical tribe; both the one and the other of whom continue, we see, still to satisfy themselves, and to silence the innovators, by the Horatian maxim of usus est lex.

The truth is, that, as we possess no general principle upon the subject, so we have no distinctly recognized criterion, properly so called. This the dictum cited itself admits. For what is Usage? A mere abstraction; an abstraction negative; nay, worse than simply negative, a negation of all law and of all principle. Who alleges Usage, does, in effect, but confess ignorance. Yet this ignorance it is that we see conjured, by means of a word, into the pompous positivity of a dictatorial axiom.

To aid the reader in apprehending, as well as to justify the writer in imputing, such accumulated absurdity, it may be requisite, or at least respectful, to explain, that the chimeras referred to have, in their origin, been successively indispensable to the advancement of the human mind. All progress in real knowledge proceeds by generalization. This is to be performed either by ideas, as some maintain; or, as others contend, by names: more exactly, perhaps, by both conjointly. The name, however, appears to be the principal instrument, in those acquirements at least which may be termed communicated; that is to say, the result of artificial instruction. Here undoubtedly the terms mostly precede the things; even when the ideas are of the positive kind. But with negative terms this antecedence is inevitable in the natural formation of human knowledge, as well as in its acquisition by instruction. Hence the peculiar liability of words of the latter class to be mistaken, while subserving this transitive purpose of pivot, for the principle, the position itself, toward which they are thus conveying instrumentally the all-unconscious mind. Farther, the misapprehension is perpetuated when the negative name has happened to bear a positive form; as, for example, the words fate, chance, FOURTH SERIES, VOL. I.-6

and especially usage. Fallacy, in this disguise, has frequently eluded the most penetrating of intellects, not excepting Aristotle himself. We should not marvel, then, that, in the present instance, it has escaped the learned multitude of even our own day; who, very naturally, find it easier, in the void of reality and vagary of opinion combined, to hold fast to the physical symbols of thought, than to soar to the logical principles of science, much less to the still more comprehensive laws of the intellectual evolution and political civilization of the race.

Yet upon these laws alone it is that the Philosophy of Language, the scale and scope of its perfection, are definitively to be constructed. So at least has it been with all other subjects, after running the like career of illusory explanation. Not an art, an institution, a faculty, that has not been ascribed at first to the special gift of some divinity, and afterward to the arbitrary authority of Usage, (mos majorum.) Even the mechanical crafts, after having had gods for their inventors,* once owned no other principle of perfection than this accidental standard. Now, however, their proficiency is determined, happily, by a very different test. Why not expect the analogy to hold in the art of language likewise, which is at length fast passing under the dominion of scientific laws? In fact, the inference would seem to follow à fortiori: for when once a being, organized systematically, and operating accordingly, has been recognized as progressive himself, and the cause of progression in even inert matter, how can he be supposed capable of retrograding, or of even remaining stationary in the single attribute of language, allowed, moreover, to be of all others the most characteristic of his peculiar nature? The inconsequence has been explained already. As to the inference, it is a matter of obvious experience, in (for example) the well-known transition of our modern dialects from the ancient and synthetical, to the analytic, form of construction. That this is an improvement for scientific ends, is no longer denied by the very bigots themselves, whether of tradition or of usage.

It is curious in itself, however, as well as confirmatory of the preceding, to mark the manner of the admission, and observe it trailing behind the shattered shell of the old prejudice. Nations at all to be deemed civilized, no longer pretend to either absolute or exclusive perfection of idiom. The pre-eminence is now partial; but of course peculiar to each. The Englishman will allow the Italian

* Even as recently, we think, as the fourth or fifth century, one of the most eminent Fathers of the Church seems to attribute the mechanical efficacy of the yard-arms of a ship to the circumstance of their resembling in form the instrument of the Crucifixion!

speech to excel indeed in melody, the Spanish in majesty, and others in other qualities. Only he will place these properties in a subordinate rank, reserving the principal for his own favoured idiom. And reciprocal predilections linger with the other nations thus far. But a reservation, exactly analogous, in favour of the primitive state of the same language, would seem to be now peculiar to the Englishman in reference to his own. There is indeed progression, will he growl: but it is merely relative; and, moreover, at the cost of deterioration in other respects. The language may have advanced in generalization become more analytical, more philosophical; but then it is getting proportionably less fit for poetry; it is losing its metaphors, its involutions, its idioms. Here is, we repeat, an admission of definite principle and perfective developement in language, made in direct contradiction to the axiom of lawless Usage, and wrung, by dint of evidence, from the strongest of mental prejudices, in a soil too where all prejudices are as pertinacious as thistles, to wit, the Englishman's mind.

To this partial and subaltern excellence conceded to other languages, he still persists in making a single exception. And of which, think you, reader? Why, of the French! In this idiom of his ancient conqueror and constant rival in the career of glory, if not of gold, the Saxon sees nothing but faults: for pride can easier afford to be generous to inferiors than just to superiors. The exception here, however, serves, as usual, to prove the rule. And it is a point to be marked particularly, as these are the two dialects, to the comparison of which we are more immediately to apply the result of the preceding observations.

That result seems to be, that there exists a necessary and regular progression in the arts of Speech and Composition, as in all others; but that the special laws whereby this developement proceeds remain utterly unexplored.*

Its main directions, however, we have ascertained to be from the synthetic to the analytic form of structure; from the concrete to the abstract. Of this procession the above lamentation over the decline

According all possible merit to the vast researches and often valuable discoveries that have been made, during the last half century especially, in the domain of philology, it must, we think, be observed, that their importance is mainly, if not merely, statistical. With relation to what would be properly called the science of language, we are aware of no publication, British, French, or even German, that mounts beyond what Bacon terms a mera palpatio-in plain English, a mere groping. This science, as evolved historically in the aggregate progression of human language, is the object of a treatise wherein (at no remote day, perhaps) the present writer hopes to be found less untrue to the title (which he too has ventured to take) of the Philosophy of Language.