University of Virginia Library

LETTER XLV.
Strictures on the English language of the
present day.

YOU request my opinion of the English
language, taken in comparison with
the various languages of Europe, and desire
me to recommend and convey to you
the works of those authors of the present
day who have written it in its greatest
purity. I am incapable of opinion—perhaps
no man can form an adequate estimation
of his mother tongue. It is extremely
difficult for a man to obtain such an intimate
acquaintance with foreign languages
as to enable him to compare them with
his own; for if he had the gift of tongues,

he could not form an impartial or correct
judgment. To the asperities and gutturals
of his own language his very organs of
speech are adapted by early habit; the
harshness of enunciation is concealed by
familiar use; and the awkwardness of its
idiom may appear even graceful. That
language in which he can most readily
convey his ideas, he will be prone to consider
the best.

I can compare the French and English
idioms, and prefer the latter; whilst the
Parisian, who understands just as much
English as I do French, compares as I do,
and gives the decided preference to the
French. With some little smattering of
Spanish, German, and Italian, and some
knowledge of the French language, I prefer
the English to them all: but I do not
conclude I am certainly correct; I can,
however, give you the reason of my opinion.

I consider the Latin tongue in the
Augustan age, and the Greek in all the

elder ages, to have been the noblest languages;
the best adapted to converse, to
reason, to record human actions, to illustrate
the arts and sciences, to aid the
orator and the poet, to instruct and delight
us in prose, and inspire the enthusiasm of
verse. Whenever I would test the excellence
of a modern language, I attempt to
render some portion of the precious remnants
of these divine tongues into it. If
I discover, by the experiment, that the
modern idiom essentially varies—if I find
no word in the modern which will clearly
express the full idea conveyed by the
ancient—or if I am forced to circumlocution,
and obliged to use three modern
words to translate one of the ancient—or
if, after all my paraphrase, I cannot render
it, I conclude the modern language inferior;
and in proportion as one modern
language bears this test better than another,
I give it the preference. To this test
I have repeatedly brought my native
tongue, and, so far as I was able, tried the
experiment with some other modern languages,
and I do maintain the English
language to have the pre-eminence, because
it approaches nearest to these my elevated
standards of perfection; to borrow a term
from the chymists, the English has a
nearer analogy with the precious metals
of the Greeks and Romans.

Let me prevail on you, who are far
better qualified than myself, to try this
little philological experiment: translate,
or, in London phrase, do, an ode of Anacreon
into English. You will find yourself,
it is true, necessitated to paraphrase,
but still you can preserve the careless ease,
the vivid fire, and glowing description of
this gay sage: and if you lament the necessity
of paraphrase, and are tempted to
undervalue your native tongue, attempt
to do an ode of Horace into French, and
then if you are not very merry you will
not be very wise.

I am yet more incapable of selecting
any English authors of the present day, as

standards of purity in the language. In
deed, the perfectibility of language is as
ridiculous as the perfectibility of man.
Language, as pertaining to man, partakes
of the laws of our nature: it is ever
changing; it has the incoherency and
simplicity of youth, the vigour of manhood,
and the decline and decrepitude of
old age. This has been its fate in all ages:
it has begun in barbarism; had its age
of elegance and refinement, and became
nerveless and weak. The English language
was in infancy in the thirteenth century;
it ripened into manhood under
Queen Elizabeth; added refinement to
manliness under Queen Anne; but is now
on its decline. It approaches its second
childhood; it already betrays the garrulity
and weakness of old age;—it delights
in gorgeous metaphors, in similes which
sparkle but do not illustrate, and all the
pretty prettinesses of verse-like prose.

To prevent this decay, to fix some
standard of language, has been the ignis

fatuus of the learned in Europe. Numerous
academies in the Italian states have
attempted it in vain. The French literati,
under the Bourbons, founded a national
academy, the ostensible object of which
was to rectify and give permanency to
their language—but even under Louis
the Great the attempt was vain. People
would write and talk in their own way,
and even the academicians themselves rebelled
individually, against those literary
canons which collectively they had promulgated.—Dean
Swift, in England, in
his celebrated letter to Lord Oxford, was
pursuing the same will-o'-the-wisp; and
even if this philological philosopher's
stone could have been discovered, and the
standard of language fixed by act of parliament,
like the Winchester bushel, would
it not have been left to chance to decide
whether they who had fixed it had hit
upon the highest grade of perfection of
which the language was capable, and
might they not, by their officious intermeddling,
have impeded its further progress?—But,
in spite of all the learned
can do to fix a tower standard for language,
it will be subject to perpetual variance.
New discoveries will call for new terms
to express novel ideas, and the public
taste, like the Centaur not Fabulous of
Dr. Young, with her bauble and her rattle,
would incessantly call upon language to
follow her capricious steps.

The English language appears to me
to be in the same early progress of decline
as the Roman under Nero; for if, by
metempsychosis, the soul of Petronius
Arbiter could animate an English author
of the present day, his works would be
hot-pressed, reviewed with approbation,
and demand numerous editions.

But, if I am mistaken in my reveries,
and now is the accepted time and day of
perfection of the English language, which,
by the by, the English, like the Romans
in the days of Silius, Statius, and Valerius
Flaccus, and, indeed, like every

other people, fix upon their own æra—
(for a nation can never judge of its own
decline in language, the corruption of its
taste ever keeping pace with the decadency
of genius)—if I am mistaken, and
there are works edited in the reign of
George the Third which may be read as
models of that perfection, I assure you it
would be impracticable, from any information
I receive here, to designate them.
For if I had power to summon a convocation
of English literati, and could raise
up Bentley as their president and Dr.
Johnson as their secretary, it is not probable
that this learned and critical body
could unite a majority in favour of any
one author. The English reviewers assume
to be associations of the learned, and
yet, it is obvious, they differ as widely in
their opinions of the style and subject-matter
of books as the various readers of
them.

Neither can I obtain information from
individuals. One will present me Hume's

History of England, another Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;
and, yet, these two celebrated authors
differ as much in style as a plain, substantial
English broadcloth does, in texture
and appearance, from a stiff brocaded
lustring, shot with gold tinsel. In a word,
I ask for elegant wit, and they hand me
Peter Pindar—I inquire for sublimity, and
they present me Della Crusca.

In lieu, therefore, of presuming to direct,
I send you a trunk of modern books,
with a bundle of reviews. By the same
vessel you will receive a variety of India
and English pickles: if, in eating the latter,
you should want a director to your
taste, I can send you an assortment of culinary
reviews, vulgarly called cook-books,
and assure you I would as readily rely
upon them, in the articles of their criticism,
as I would upon English reviewers
to cater for me in a mental repast.