LECTURE XXI.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING.

III.

ON a former occasion, I spoke of the diffusion of classical literature in modern Europe-the first great result of the invention of printing-as having much enlarged the English and other European vocabularies, by the introduction of new words derived from Greek and Latin roots. But the revival of learning was not unaccompanied with effects prejudicial to the cultivation of the modern languages, and to their employment for the higher purposes of literature. At that period, most of them were poor in vocabulary, rude and equivocal in syntax, unsettled in orthography, distracted with variety of dialect, and unmelodious in articulation. Under such circumstances, nothing could be more natural than that scholars imbued with the elegance, the power, the majesty of the ancient tongues and of the immortal works which adorned them, should have preferred to employ, as a vehicle for their own thoughts, a language which the church had everywhere diffused, and which was already fitted to express the highest conceptions of the human intellect, the most splendid images of the human fancy. He who wrote in Latin had the civilized world for his public; he who used a modern tongue could only count as readers the people of his province, or at most of a comparatively narrow sovereignty. Until, therefore, by a slow and gradual process, the necessity of sympathy and intellectual communication. between the learned and the ignorant, had enriched the vernacular tongues with numerous words from the dialects of theology, and ethics, and law, and literature, but few scholars ventured to employ so humble a medium. To write in the vulgar speech was a humiliation, a degradation of the thought and its author, and literary works in the modern tongues were generally prefaced with an apology for appearing in so mean a dress.

The close analogy between Latin and its Romance descendants much facilitated the enrichment of the dialects of Southern Europe, but in England and the Continental Gothic nations, the stimulus of the Reformation was necessary to furnish an adequate motive and a sufficient impulse for a corresponding improvement in the respective languages of those peoples.

Even so late as 1544, after so many great names had ennobled the speech of England, Ascham, writing on the familiar and popular subject of Archery, says, that it "would have been both more profitable for his study, and also more honest for his name, to have written in another tongue."

"As for the Latine or Greeke tongue," continues he, "everye thinge is so excellentlye done in them, that none can do better. In the Englishe tongue, contrary, everye thinge in a manner so meanlye both for the matter and handelinge, that no man can do worse. For therein the least learned, for the most part, have bene alwayes most readye to write. And they which had least hope in Latine, have been most bould in Englishe; when surelye everye man that is most readye to talke, is not most able to write."

One of the most obvious modes in which the art of printing has affected language, is, that by the cheapness and consequent multiplication of books, and by the greater uniformity and legibility of its characters, it has made reading much easier of acquisition, and thus allowed to a larger proportion of those who use a given language access to its highest standards of propriety and elegance. Of course, the effects of thus bringing books within the reach of a larger class will be measured, as between different countries, by the comparative extent to which literature is really diffused in them, and where the press is most active and least restricted, there the greatest number of the people will learn to comprehend and use the language of books, and there the average standard of correctness of speech will be relatively highest.

The same circumstances, independently of the superior inducements to authorship of which I have already spoken, will tend to increase the number of aspirants for literary fame, for where all read, many will feel and obey the impulse to write. The abun

* Preface to Toxophilus.

dant rivalries thus created in every field of intellectual effort are doubtless a great incentive to the attainment of superior excellence in composition, but, on the other hand, the fear of anticipation, and the haste to reap the solid rewards of successful authorship, concur to promote a rapidity of production which is inevitably associated with some negligence in point of form. I cannot but think that a perhaps unconscious sense (if that phrase does not involve a contradiction) of the necessity of rapid production, had some influence in prompting the advice given to young writers by authors so unlike as Cobbett and Niebuhr. "Never think of mending what you write; let it go; no patching," says Cobbett, in his strong English. "Endeavor," says Niebuhr, "never to strike out any thing of what you have once written down. Punish yourself by allowing once or twice some thing to pass, though you see you might give it better." And even Gibbon habitually conformed to the same rule, however little trace of it his highly artificial style betrays.* That this method has its advantages as a means of enforcing caution in the use of words is doubtless true, and perhaps he, who, like most modern writers, aims only to influence the opinion of the hour, may advantageously use the popular dialect, which will usually most readily suggest itself to him who writes for popular effect. But whatever may be the influence of the practice on the writer himself, however it may affect his position with his contemporaries, it cannot but have a prejudicial result as respects the idiom of the language, and the permanence of the works which are composed in it. Upon these points, the experience and judgment of all literature are to the contrary of the rule. The revamping of our own writings, indeed, after an interval so long that the mental status in which we composed them is forgotten, and cannot be conjured up and revivified, is a dangerous experiment, but literary biography fur

* It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.-Gibbon, Memoirs, Chap. ix. And in chapter x., speaking of his history, he says, "My first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press."

It appears from Ticknor's Life of Prescott, that the latter carried this practice so far as to be able to compose mentally sixty pages of his historical works, which he would dictate to an amanuensis at a single sitting.

nishes the most abundant proofs, that, in all ages, the works which stand as types of language and composition, have been of slow and laborious production, and have undergone the most careful and repeated revision and emendation.* Especially is this true with regard to the oratorical dialect. Great practice, strong passion, and a fervid imagination may confer the gift of unstudied eloquence, but the orations which after-ages read with applause are almost never the result of unpremeditated effort. Celebrated speakers prepare their impromptus beforehand to an extent incredible to those who are not familiar with their habits, or, at the least, they make them, by subsequent revision, very different in diction from the volley of winged words which the excitement of debate may have shot forth. Demosthenes, the greatest master of eloquence whose works remain in a written form, never ventured to address an audience without laborious preparation, and we know from the younger Pliny, that the Roman advocates of his time carefully studied their speeches before delivery, and scrupulously corrected and amplified them in writing them out afterwards.

In recent times, the press has become what the Senate and the Forum were in the old republics, but the rapid movement of modern society is unfavorable to the leisurely execution, the finish and completeness of literary works, and, of course, to polish and accuracy of language. He who writes for a fickle, a restless, or a progressive public, must take the tide at its flow, and if he follows the Horatian precept, and spends nine years in the elaboration and recension of his book, or in pausing to allow

* Not to speak of the endless lima labor of ancient classic literature, perfection of manner has been attained by modern writers only by similar methods. The stylistic ability of an author must always be estimated with reference to the innate power of expression possessed by the language he uses. Thus tried, Pascal and Paul Louis Courier are by far the greatest stylists of modern times, and we have no English writer who can compare with either, in perfect adaptation of the expression to the thought, or in flowing ease and gracefulness of diction. This excellence in both cases was the fruit of the most ceaseless and persevering labor in revision and correction. Marvellous as is the perfection of Goethe's style, he does not always impress you with the conviction that he has exhausted the utmost resources of his native tongue, and it is remarkable that one of his most felicitously expressed productions is a translation from the French-the Rameau's Nephew of Diderot-in which the fluent beauty of the original is admirably rendered, with little sacrifice of the German idiom.

himself time for cool criticism, he will find that he comes too late. The world in its swift advancement has already passed far beyond him.

The universality of literature, brought about through its general popularization by the press, has not only given birth to a more numerous class of producers, but has made it much more truly an expression or exponent of the mind and tendencies of the time and people, than in the ages which preceded the invention of printing. In every country of the civilized world, there is a manifest drift in some particular direction, and literary effort of all sorts feels the impulse of the current. The perpetual, allembracing inter-communication between mind and mind, through the press, stamps upon all the same tendencies, the same course of thought, the same proximate conclusions. Society is more intensely social. Men are become more deeply imbued with the spirit of a common humanity, and know and participate in each other's intellectual condition. There is a remarkable proof of this in the perpetually repeated instances of concurrent mental action between unconnected individuals. Not only does almost every new mechanical contrivance originate with half a dozen different inventors at the same moment, but the same thing is true of literary creation. If you conceive a striking thought, a beautiful image, an apposite illustration, which you know to be original with yourself, and delay for a twelvemonth to vindicate your priority of claim by putting it on record, you will find a dozen scattered authors simultaneously uttering the same thing. There are in the human mind unfathomable depths, out of which gush, unbidden, the well-springs of poesy and of thought; there are mines, unilluminated even by the lamp of consciousness, where the intellect toils in silent, sleepless seclusion, and sends up, by invisible machinery, the ore of hidden veins, to be smelted and refined in the light of open day. The press, which has done so much to reveal man to man and thereby to promote the reciprocal action of each upon his fellow, has established new sympathies between even these mysterious abysses of our wonderful and fearful being, and thus contributed to bring about a oneness of character which unmistakably manifests itself in oneness of thought and oneness of speech.

The law of copyright, though we have evidence in Martial and