but the Saxon forms soon dropped away, because they did not suit the new roots; and the genius of the language, from having to deal with the newly imported words in a rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections of the native ones. This for instance led to the introduction of the s as the universal termination of all plural nouns, which agreed with the usage of the French language, and was not alien from that of the Saxon, but was merely an extension of the termination of the ancient masculine to other classes of nouns”[29].
The Anglo-Saxon Element
If you wish to convince yourselves by actual experience, of the fact which I just now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of the language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence, let it be only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject entirely of your choice, employing therein only words which are of a Latin derivation. I venture to say you will find it impossible, or next to impossible to do it; whichever way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. And while it is thus with the Latin, whole pages might be written, I do not say in philosophy or theology or upon any abstruser subject, but on familiar matters of common everyday life, in which every word should be of Saxon extraction, not one of Latin; and these, pages in which, with the exercise of a little patience and ingenuity, all appearance of awkwardness and constraint should be avoided, so that it should never occur to the reader, unless otherwise informed, that the writer had submitted himself to this restraint and limitation in the words which he employed, and was only drawing them from one section of the English language. Sir Thomas Browne has given several long paragraphs so constructed. Take for instance the following, which is only a little fragment of one of them: “The first and foremost step to all good works is the dread and fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts to tread the ways of wisdom, and lead our feet into the land of blessing”[30]. This is not stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I would suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments; you will find it, I think, exactly as I have here affirmed.
While thus I bring before you the fact that it would be quite possible to write English, forgoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of the language, I would not have you therefore to conclude that this portion of the language is of little value, or that we could draw from the resources of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all the words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed that we have not kept our language more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion made that we should even now endeavour to keep under the Latin element of it, and as little as possible avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord Brougham urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good English, that they should do their best to rid their diction of long-tailed words in ‘osity’ and ‘ation’[31]. He plainly intended to indicate by this phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from the Latin. This exhortation is by no means superfluous; for doubtless there were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in the last century, Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in our language; and very much of its charm, of its homely strength and beauty, of its most popular and truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they succeeded in persuading others to write as they had written.
Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal
But for all this we could almost as ill spare this side of the language as the other. It represents and supplies needs not less real than the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high civilization find their utterance in the Latin words of our language, or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for present purposes may be grouped with them. How they should have found utterance in the speech of rude tribes, which, never having cultivated the things, must needs have been without the words which should express those things. Granting too that, cœteris paribus, when a Latin and a Saxon word offer themselves to our choice, we shall generally do best to employ the Saxon, to speak of ‘happiness’ rather than ‘felicity’, ‘almighty’ rather than ‘omnipotent’, a ‘forerunner’ rather than a ‘precursor’, still these latter must be regarded as much denizens in the language as the former, no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully as the most Saxon word of them all. One part of the language is not to be favoured at the expense of the other; the Saxon at the cost of the Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of the Saxon. “Both are indispensable; and speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as to subject, both are equally indispensable. Pathos, in situations which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to merit the name of lyrical) must be in the state of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the basis and not the superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the elementary situations of life. And although the Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in which great philological academy no toleration is given to words in ‘osity’ or ‘ation’. There is therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecration to our feelings, settled by usage and custom upon the Saxon strands in the mixed yarn of our native tongue. And universally, this may be remarked—that wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, presumes, or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the ‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry—Young’s, for instance, or Cowper’s), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that, whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle, will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will be the Anglo-Saxon”.
These words which I have just quoted are De Quincey’s—whom I must needs esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: “Upon the languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence, but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture of the Langue d’Oil, the never interrupted employment of the French as the language of education, and the nomenclature created by the scientific and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn to rags, unravelled and destroyed”[32].
The English Bible
I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation of the golden mean in this matter than in our Authorized Version of the Bible. One of the chief among the minor and secondary blessings which that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual life from it—a blessing not small in itself, but only small by comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the vehicle to them—is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its homely character, and shut up large portions of it from the understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honourable acknowledgement of the immense superiority in this respect of our English Version over the Romish, made by one now, unhappily, familiar with the latter, as once he was with our own. Among those who have recently abandoned the communion of the English