If a degraded people, at the lowest rung of the racial ladder, with as little significance for the “male” as for the “female” progress of mankind, could possibly have invented a language of philosophic depth, of æsthetic beauty and flexibility, rich in characteristic forms and precise idioms, fitted alike to express the sublimities of religion, the graces of poetry, the accuracy of physical and political science,—such a people would certainly possess an utterly useless talent, that of inventing and perfecting an instrument which their mental capacity would be too weak to turn to any account.
We should have, in such a case, to believe that our observation has been suddenly brought to a stop, not by something unknown or unintelligible (as often happens) but by a mere absurdity.
At first sight, this tantalizing answer seems the correct one. If we take the races as they are to-day, we must admit that the perfection of idiom is very far from corresponding, in all cases, to the degree of civilization reached. The tongues of modern Europe, to speak of no others, are unequal in merit, and the richest and most beautiful do not necessarily belong to the most advanced people. Further, they are one and all vastly inferior to many languages which have been at different times spoken in the world.
A still more curious fact is that the languages of whole groups of peoples which have stopped at a low level of culture may be of considerable merit. Thus the net of language, with its varied meshes, might seem to have been cast over mankind at random, the silk and the gold sometimes covering rude, ferocious, and miserable tribes, while wise and learned peoples are still caught in the hemp, the wool, and the horsehair. Happily, this is so only in appearance. If, with the aid of history, we apply our doctrine of the difference of races, we shall soon find that our proofs of their intellectual inequality are even strengthened.
The early philologists were doubly in error, when they thought, first that all languages are formed on the same principle, secondly that language was invented merely under the stress of material needs. In the former point they were influenced by the unitarian doctrine that all human groups have a common origin.
With regard to language, doubt is not even possible. The modes of formation are completely different; and whether the classifications of philology require revision or not, we cannot believe for a moment that the Altaic, Aryan, and Semitic families were not from the first absolutely foreign to each other. Nothing is the same. The vocabulary has its own peculiar character in each of these groups. There is a different modulation of the voice in each. In one, the lips are used to produce the sounds; in another, the contraction of the throat; in another the nasal passage and the upper part of the head. The composition of the parts of speech, according as they confuse or distinguish the various shades of thought, points equally to a difference of origin. The most striking proof of the divergence in thought and feeling between one group and another are seen in the inflexions of the substantive and the conjugations of the verb. When, therefore, the philosopher tries to give an account of the origin of language by a process of purely abstract conjecture, and begins by conceiving an “original man,” without any specific racial or linguistic character, he starts from an absurdity, and continues on the same lines. There is no such being as “man” in the abstract; and I am especially sure that he will not be discovered by the investigation of language. I cannot argue on the basis that mankind started from some one point in its creation of idiom. There were many points of departure, because there were many forms of thought and feeling.[113]
The second view, I think, is just as false. According to this theory, there would have been no development save as dictated by necessity. The result would be that the “male” races would have a richer and more accurate language than the “female”; further, as material needs are concerned with objects apprehended by the senses, and especially with actions, the main factor of human speech would be vocabulary.
There would be no necessity for the syntax and grammatical structure to advance beyond the simplest and most elementary combinations. A series of sounds more or less linked together is always enough to express a need; and a gesture, as the Chinese know well, is an obvious form of commentary, when the phrase is obscure without it.[114] Not only would the synthetic power of language remain undeveloped; it would also be the poorer for dispensing with harmony, quantity, and rhythm. For what is the use of melody when the sole object is to obtain some positive result? A language, in fact, would be a mere chance collection of arbitrary sounds.
Certain questions are apparently cleared up by such a theory. Chinese, the tongue of a masculine race, seems to have been at first developed with a purely utilitarian aim. The word has never risen above a mere sound, and has remained monosyllabic. There is no evolution of vocabulary, no root giving birth to a family of derivatives. All the words are roots; they are not modified by suffixes, but by each other, according to a very crude method of juxtaposition. The grammar is extremely simple; which makes the phraseology very monotonous. The very idea of æsthetic value is excluded, at any rate for ears that are accustomed to the rich, varied, and abundant forms, the inexhaustible combinations of happier tongues. We must however add that this may not be the impression produced on the Chinese themselves; and their spoken language certainly aims at some kind of beauty, since there are definite rules governing the melodic sequence of sounds. If it does not succeed in being so euphonious as other languages, we must still recognize that it aims at euphony no less than they. Further, the primary elements of Chinese are something more than a mere heaping together of useful sounds.[115]
I admit that the masculine races may be markedly inferior in æsthetic power to the others,[116] and their inferiority may be reproduced in their idioms. This is shown, not merely by the relative poverty of Chinese, but also by the careful way in which certain Western races have robbed Latin of its finest rhythmic qualities, and Gothic of its sonority. The inferiority of our modern languages, even the best of them, to Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, is self-evident, and corresponds exactly to the mediocrity of the Chinese civilization and our own, so far as art and literature are concerned. I admit that this difference, alone with others, may serve to mark off the languages of the masculine races. They still, however, have a feeling for rhythm (less than that of the ancient tongues, but still powerful), and make a real attempt to create and obey laws of correspondence between sounds and the forms by which thought is modified in speech. I conclude that even in the languages of masculine races there still flickers the intellectual spark, the feeling for beauty and logic; this feeling, as well as that of material need, must preside at the birth of every language.
I said above that if material need had reigned alone, a set of any chance sounds would have been enough for human necessities, in the first ages of man’s existence. Such a theory cannot be maintained.
Sounds are not assigned to ideas by pure chance. The choice is governed by the instinctive recognition of a certain logical relation between noises heard outwardly by man’s ear and ideas that his throat or tongue wishes to express. In the eighteenth century men were greatly struck by this truth. Unfortunately, it was caught in the net of etymological exaggeration so characteristic of the time; and its results were so absurd that they justly fell into disrepute. For a long time the best minds were warned off the land that had been so stupidly exploited by the early pioneers. They are now beginning to return to it again, and if they have learnt prudence and restraint in the bitter school of experience, they may arrive at valuable conclusions. Without pushing a theory, true in itself, into the realm of chimeras, we may allow that primitive speech knew how to use as far as possible the different impressions received by the ear, in order to form certain classes of words; in creating others it was guided by the feeling of a mysterious relation between certain abstract ideas and some particular noises. Thus, for example, the sound of ē seems to suggest death and dissolution, that of v or w, vagueness in the moral or physical realm, vows, wind, and the like; s suggests starkness and standing fast, m maternity, and so on.[117] Such a theory is sufficiently well founded for us to take it seriously, if kept within due limits. But it must be used with great circumspection, if we are not to find ourselves in the dark paths where even common sense is soon led astray.
The last paragraph may show, however imperfectly, that material need is not the only element that produces a language, but that the best of man’s powers have helped in the task. Sounds were not applied arbitrarily to ideas and objects, and in this respect men followed a pre-established order, one side of which was manifested in themselves. Thus the primitive tongues, however crude and poor they may have been, contained all the elements from which their branches might at a later time be developed in a logical and necessary sequence.
W. von Humboldt has observed, with his usual acuteness, that every language is independent of the will of those who speak it. It is closely bound up with their intellectual condition, and is beyond the reach of arbitrary caprice. It cannot be altered at will, as is curiously shown by the efforts that have been made to do so.
The Bushmen have invented a system of changing their language, in order to prevent its being understood by the uninitiated. We find the same custom among certain tribes of the Caucasus. But all their efforts come to no more than the mere insertion of a subsidiary syllable at the beginning, middle, or end of words. Take away this parasitic element, and the language remains the same, changed neither in forms nor syntax.
De Sacy has discovered a more ambitious attempt, in the language called “Balaïbalan.” This curious idiom was invented by the Sufis, to be used in their mystical books, with the object of wrapping the speculations of their theologians in still greater mystery. They made up, on no special plan, the words that seemed to them to sound most strangely to their ears. If however this so-called language did not belong to any family and if the meaning given to its sounds was entirely arbitrary, yet the principles of euphony, the grammar and the syntax, everything in fact which gives a language its special character, bore the unmistakable stamp of Arabic and Persian. The Sufis produced a jargon at once Aryan and Semitic, and of no importance whatever. The pious colleagues of Djelat-Eddin-Rumi were not able to invent a language; and clearly this power has not been given to any single man.[118]
Hence the language of a race is closely bound up with its intelligence, and has the power of reflecting its various mental stages, as they are reached. This power may be at first only implicit.[119]
Where the mental development of a race is faulty or imperfect, the language suffers to the same extent. This is shown by Sanscrit, Greek, and the Semitic group, as well as by Chinese, in which I have already pointed out a utilitarian tendency corresponding to the intellectual bent of the people. The superabundance of philosophical and ethnological terms in Sanscrit corresponds to the genius of those who spoke it, as well as its richness and rhythmic beauty. The same is the case with Greek; while the lack of precision in the Semitic tongues is exactly paralleled by the character of the Semitic peoples.
If we leave the cloudy heights of the remoter ages, and come down to the more familiar regions of modern history, we shall be, as it were, presiding at the birth of many new tongues; and this will make us see with even greater clearness how faithfully language mirrors the genius of a race.
As soon as two nations are fused together, a revolution takes place in their respective languages; this is sometimes slow, sometimes sudden, but always inevitable. The languages are changed and, after a certain time, die out as separate entities. The new tongue is a compromise between them, the dominant element being furnished by the speech of the race that has contributed most members to the new people.[120] Thus, from the thirteenth century, the Germanic dialects of France have had to yield ground, not to Latin, but to the lingua romana, with the revival of the Gallo-Roman power.[121] Celtic, too, had to retreat before the Italian colonists. It did not yield to Italian civilization; in fact, one might say, that, thanks to the number of those who spoke it, Celtic finally gained a kind of victory. For after the complete fusion of the Gauls, the Romans, and the northern tribes, it was Celtic that laid the foundations of modern French syntax, abolished the strong accentuation of Germanic as well as the sonority of Latin, and introduced its own equable rhythm. The gradual development of French is merely the effect of this patient labour, that went on, without ceasing, under the surface. Again, the reason why modern German has lost the striking forms to be seen in the Gothic of Bishop Ulfilas lies in the presence of a strong Cymric element in the midst of the small Germanic population that was still left to the east of the Rhine,[122] after the great migrations of the sixth and following centuries of our era.
The linguistic results of the fusion of two peoples are as individual as the new racial character itself. One may say generally that no language remains pure after it has come into close contact with a different language. Even when their structures are totally unlike each other, the vocabulary at any rate suffers some changes. If the parasitic language has any strength at all, it will certainly attack the other in its rhythmic quality, and even in the unstable parts of its syntax. Thus language is one of the most fragile and delicate forms of property; and we may often see a noble and refined speech being affected by barbarous idioms and passing itself into a kind of relative barbarism. By degrees it will lose its beauty; its vocabulary will be impoverished, and many of its forms obsolete, while it will show an irresistible tendency to become assimilated to its inferior neighbour. This has happened in the case of Wallachian and Rhætian, Kawi and Birman. The two latter have been leavened with Sanscrit elements; but in spite of this noble alliance, they have been declared by competent judges to be inferior to Delaware.[123]
The group of tribes speaking this dialect are of the Lenni-Lenapes family, and they originally ranked higher than the two yellow peoples who were caught in the sweep of Hindu civilization. If, in spite of their primitive superiority, they are now inferior to the Asiatics, it is because these live under the influence of the social institutions of a noble race and have profited by them, though in themselves they are of slight account. Contact with the Hindus has been enough to raise them some way in the scale, while the Lenapes, who have never been touched by any such influence, have not been able to rise above their present civilization. In a similar way (to take an obvious example) the young mulattoes who have been educated in London or Paris may show a certain veneer of culture superior to that of some Southern Italian peoples, who are in point of merit infinitely higher; for once a mulatto, always a mulatto. When therefore we come upon a savage tribe with a language better than that of a more civilized nation, we must examine carefully whether the civilization of the latter really belongs to it, or is merely the result of a slight admixture of foreign blood. If so, a low type of native language helped out by a hybrid mixture of foreign idioms may well exist side by side with a certain degree of social culture.[124]
I have already said that, as each civilization has a special character, we must not be surprised if the poetic and philosophic sense was more developed among the Hindus and the Greeks than among ourselves; whereas our modern societies are marked rather by their practical, scientific, and critical spirit. Taken as a whole, we have more energy and a greater genius for action than the conquerors of Southern Asia and Hellas. On the other hand, we must yield them the first place in the kingdom of beauty, and here our languages naturally mirror our humble position. The style of the Indian and Ionian writers takes a more powerful flight towards the sphere of the ideal. Language, in fact, while being an excellent index of the general elevation of races, is in a special degree the measure of their æsthetic capacities. This is the character it assumes when we use it as a means of comparing different civilizations.
To bring out this point further, I will venture to question a view put forward by William von Humboldt, that in spite of the obvious superiority of the Mexican to the Peruvian language, the civilization of the Incas was yet far above that of the people of Anahuac.[125]
The Peruvian customs were certainly more gentle than the Mexican; and their religious ideas were as inoffensive as those of Montezuma’s subjects were ferocious. In spite of this, their social condition was marked by far less energy and variety. Their crude despotism never developed into more than a dull kind of communism; whereas the Aztec civilization had made various political experiments of great complexity. Its military system was far more vigorous; and though the use of writing was equally unknown in both empires, it seems that poetry, history, and ethics, which were extensively studied at the time of Cortes, would have advanced further in Mexico than in Peru, the institutions of which were coloured by an Epicurean indifferentism that was highly unfavourable to intellectual progress. Clearly we must regard the more active people as superior.
Von Humboldt’s view is simply a consequence of the way in which he defines civilization.[126] Without going over the same ground again, I was yet bound to clear up this point; for if two civilizations had really been able to develop in inverse ratio to the merits of their respective languages, I should have had to give up the idea of any necessary connexion between the intelligence of a people and the value of the language spoken by it. But I cannot do this, in view of what I have already said about Greek and Sanscrit, as compared with English, French, and German.
It would be, however, a very difficult task to assign a reason, along these lines, for the exact course taken by the language of a hybrid people. We have seldom sufficient knowledge either of the quantity or quality of the intermixture of blood to be able properly to trace its effects. Yet these racial influences persist, and if they are not unravelled, we may easily come to false conclusions. It is just because the connexion between race and language is so close, that it lasts much longer than the political unity of the different peoples, and may be recognized even when the peoples are grouped under new names. The language changes with their blood, but does not die out until the last fragment of the national life has disappeared. This is the case with modern Greek. Sadly mutilated, robbed of its wealth of grammar, impoverished in the number of its sounds, with the pure stream of its vocabulary troubled and muddy, it has none the less retained the impress of its original form.[127] In the intellectual world it corresponds to the sullied and deflowered Parthenon, which first became a church for the Greek popes, and then a powder-magazine; which had its pediments and columns shattered in a thousand places by the Venetian bullets of Morosini; but which still stands, for the wonder and adoration of the ages, as a model of pure grace and unadorned majesty.
Not every race has the power of being faithful to the tongue of its ancestors. This makes our task still more difficult, when we try to determine the origin or relative value of different human types by the help of philology. Not only do languages change without any obvious reason, at any rate from the racial point of view; but there are also certain nations which give up their own language altogether, when they are brought for some time into contact with a foreign race. This happened, after the conquests of Alexander, in the case of the more enlightened nations of Western Asia, such as the Carians, Cappadocians, and Armenians. The Gauls are another instance, as I have already said. Yet all these peoples brought a foreign element into the conquering tongue, which was transformed in its turn. Thus they could all be regarded as using their own intellectual tools, though to a very imperfect extent; while others, more tenacious of theirs, such as the Basques, the Berbers of Mount Atlas, and the Ekkhilis of Southern Arabia, speak even at the present day the same tongue as was spoken by their most primitive ancestors. But there are certain peoples, the Jews for example, who seem never to have held to their ancestral speech at all; and we can discover this indifference from the time of their earliest migrations. When Terah left the land of his fathers, Ur of the Chaldees, he certainly had not learnt the Canaanitish tongue that henceforth became the national speech of the children of Israel. It was probably influenced to some extent by their earlier recollections, and in their mouth became a special dialect of the very ancient language which was the mother of the earliest Arabic we know, and the lawful inheritance of tribes closely allied to the black Hamites.[128] Yet not even to this language were the Jews to remain faithful. The tribes who were brought back from captivity by Zerubbabel had forgotten it during their short stay of sixty-two years by the rivers of Babylon. Their patriotism was proof against exile, and still burned with its original fire; but the rest had been given up, with remarkable facility, by a people which is at the same time jealous of its own traditions and extremely cosmopolitan. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its inhabitants reappeared, speaking an Aramaic or Chaldean jargon, which may have had some slight resemblance to the speech of the fathers of Abraham.
At the time of Christ, this dialect offered only a feeble resistance to the invasion of Hellenistic Greek, which assailed the Jewish mind on all sides. Henceforth all the works produced by Jewish writers appeared in the new dress, which fitted them more or less elegantly, and copied to some extent the old Attic fashions. The last canonical books of the Old Testament, as well as the works of Philo and Josephus, are Hellenistic in spirit.
When the Holy City was destroyed, and the Jewish nation scattered, the favour of God departed from them, and the East came again into its own. Hebrew culture broke with Athens as it had broken with Alexandria, and the language and ideas of the Talmud, the teaching of the school of Tiberias, were again Semitic, sometimes in the form of Arabic, sometimes in that of the “language of Canaan,” to use Isaiah’s phrase. I am speaking of what was henceforth to be the sacred language of religion and the Rabbis, and was regarded as the true national speech. In their everyday life, however, the Jews used the tongue of the country where they settled; and, further, these exiles were known everywhere by their special accent. They never succeeded in fitting their vocal organs to their adopted language, even when they had learnt it from childhood. This goes to confirm what William von Humboldt says as to the connexion between race and language being so close that later generations never get quite accustomed to pronounce correctly words that were unknown to their ancestors.[129]
Whether this be true or not, we have in the Jews a remarkable proof of the fact that one must not always assume, at first sight, a close connexion between a race and its language, for the language may not have belonged to it originally.[130]
We see how cautiously we must tread if we attempt to infer an identity of race from the affinity, or even the resemblance, of languages. Not only have most of the nations of Western Asia and nearly all those of Southern Europe merely adapted the speech of others to their own use, while leaving its main elements untouched; but there are also some who have taken over languages absolutely foreign to them, to which they have made no contribution whatever. The latter case is certainly rarer, and may even be regarded as an anomaly. But its mere existence is enough to make us very careful in admitting a form of proof in which such exceptions are possible. On the other hand, since they are exceptions, and are not met with so often as the opposite case, of a national tongue being preserved for centuries by even a weak nation; since we also see how a language is assimilated to the particular character of the people that has created it, and how its changes are in exact proportion to the successive modifications in the people’s blood; since the part played by a language in forming its derivatives varies with the numerical strength, in the new groups, of the race that speaks it, we may justly conclude that no nation can have a language of greater value than itself, except under special circumstances. As this point is of considerable importance, I will try to bring it out by a new line of proof.
We have already seen that the civilization of a composite people does not include all its social classes.[131] The racial influences that were at work in the lower strata from the first still go on; and they prevent the directing forces of the national culture from reaching the depths at all,—if they do, their action is weak and transitory. In France, about five-eighths of the total population play merely an unwilling and passive part in the development of modern European culture, and that only by fits and starts. With the exception of Great Britain, of which the insular position produces a greater unity of type, the proportion is even higher in the rest of the Continent. I will speak of France at greater length, as an instance of the exact correspondence between language and racial type; for in France we have a particular instance that strikingly confirms our main thesis.
We know little, or rather we have no real evidence at all, of the phases which Celtic and rustic Latin[132] passed through before they met and coalesced. Nevertheless, St. Jerome and his contemporary Sulpicius Severus tell us (the former in his “Commentaries” on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, the second in his “Dialogue on the virtues of the Eastern Monks”) that in their time at least two languages were generally spoken in Gaul. There was, first, Celtic, which was preserved on the banks of the Rhine in so pure a form, that it remained identical with the language spoken by the Galatians of Asia Minor, who had been separated from their mother country for more than six centuries.[133] Secondly, there was the language called “Gallic,” which according to a commentator, can only have been a form, already broken down, of Popular Latin. This fourth century dialect, while different from the Gallic of Treves, was spoken neither in the West nor in Aquitaine. It was found only in the centre and south of what is now France, and was itself probably split up into two great divisions. It is the common source of the currents, more or less Latinized, which were mingled with other elements in different proportions, and formed later the langue d’oil and the lingua romana, in the narrower sense. I will speak first of the latter.
In order to bring it into being, all that was necessary was a slight alteration in the vocabulary of Latin, and the introduction of a few syntactical notions borrowed from Celtic and other languages till then unknown in the West of Europe. The Imperial colonies had brought in a fair number of Italian, African, and Asiatic elements. The Burgundian, and especially the Gothic, invasions added another, which was marked by considerable harmony, liveliness, and sonority. Its vocabulary was further increased after the inroads of the Saracens. Thus the lingua romana became, in its rhythmic quality, quite distinct from Gallic, and soon assumed a character of its own. It is true that we do not find this in its perfection, in the “Oath of the Sons of Ludwig the Pious,” as we do later in the poems of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras or Bertran de Born.[134] Yet even in the “Oath” we can recognize the language for what it is; it has already acquired its main features, and its future path is clearly mapped out. It formed henceforth (in its different dialects of Limousin, Provençal, and Auvergnat) the speech of a people of as mixed an origin as any in the world. It was a refined and supple language, witty, brilliant, and satirical, but without depth or philosophy. It was of tinsel rather than gold, and had never been able to do more than pick up a few ingots on the surface of the rich mines that lay open to it. Without any serious principles, it was destined to remain an instrument of indifference, of universal scepticism and mockery. It did not fail to be used as such. The people cared for nothing but pleasure and parade. Brave to a fault, beyond measure gay, spending their passion on a dream, and their vitality on idle toys, they had an instrument that was exactly suited to their character, and which, though admired by Dante, was put to no better use in poetry than to tag satires, love-songs, and challenges, and in religion to support heresies such as that of the Albigenses, a pestilent Manicheism, without value even for literature, from which an English author, in no way Catholic in his sympathies, congratulates the Papacy on having delivered the Middle Ages.[135] Such was the lingua romana of old, and such do we find it even to-day. It is pretty rather than beautiful, and shows on the surface how little it is fitted to serve a great civilization.
Was the langue d’oil formed in a similar way? Obviously not. However the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements were fused (for we cannot be certain on this point, in the absence of records going back to the earliest period of the language[136]), it is at any rate clear that it rose from a strongly marked antagonism between the three tongues, and that it would thus have a character and energy quite incompatible with such compromises and adaptations as those which gave birth to the lingua romana. In one moment of its life, the langue d’oil was partly a Germanic tongue. In the written remains that have survived, we find one of the best qualities of the Aryan languages, the power of forming compounds. This power, it is true, is limited; and though still considerable, is less than in Sanscrit, Greek, and German. In the nouns, we find a system of inflexion by suffix, and, in consequence, an ease in inverting the order which modern French has lost, and which the language of the sixteenth century retained only to a slight extent, its inversions being gained at the expense of clearness. Again, the vocabulary of the langue d’oil included many words brought in by the Franks.[137] Thus it began by being almost as much Germanic as Gallic; Celtic elements appeared in its second stage, and perhaps fixed the melodic principles of the language. The best possible tribute to its merits is to be found in the successful experiment of Littré,[138] who translated the first book of the “Iliad” literally, line for line, into French of the thirteenth century. Such a tour de force would be impossible in modern French.
Such a language belonged to a people that was evidently very different from the inhabitants of Southern Gaul. It was more deeply attached to Catholicism; its politics were permeated by a lively idea of freedom, dignity, and independence, its institutions had no aim but utility. Thus the mission set before the popular literature was not to express the fancies of the mind or heart, the freakishness of a universal scepticism, but to put together the annals of the nation, and to set down what was at that time regarded as the truth. It is to this temper of the people and their language that we owe the great rhymed chronicles, especially “Garin le Loherain,” which bear witness, though it has since been denied, to the predominance of the North. Unfortunately, since the compilers of these traditions, and even their original authors, mainly aimed at preserving historical facts or satisfying their desire for positive and solid results, poetry in the true sense, the love of form and the search for beauty, does not always bulk as large as it should in their long narratives. The literature of the langue d’oil was, above all, utilitarian; and so the race, the language, and the literature were in perfect harmony.
The Germanic element in the race, however, being far less than the Gallic basis or the Roman accretions, naturally began to lose ground. The same thing took place in the language; Celtic and Latin advanced, Germanic retreated. That noble speech, which we know only at its highest stage, and which might have risen even higher, began to decline and become corrupted towards the end of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth, it was no more than a patois, from which the Germanic elements had completely disappeared. The treasury was exhausted; and what remained was an illogical and barbarous anomaly in the midst of the progress of Celtic and Latin. Thus in the sixteenth century the revival of classical studies found the language in ruins, and tried to remodel it on the lines of Greek and Latin. This was the professed aim of the writers of this great age. They did not succeed, and the seventeenth century, wisely seeing that the irresistible march of events could in no wise be curbed by the hand of man, set itself merely to improve the language from within; for every day it was assuming more and more the forms best suited to the dominant race, the forms, in other words, into which the grammatical life of Celtic had formerly been cast.
Although both the langue d’oil and French proper are marked by a greater unity than the lingua romana (since the mixture of races and languages that gave birth to them was less complex) yet they have produced separate dialects which survive to this day. It is not doing these too much honour to call them dialects, not patois. They arose, not from the corruption of the dominant type, with which they were at least contemporary, but from the different proportions in which the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements, that still make up the French nationality, were mingled. To the north of the Seine, we find the dialect of Picardy; this is, in vocabulary and rhythmic quality, very near Flemish, of which the Germanic character is too obvious to be dwelt upon. Flemish, in this respect, shows the same power of choice as the langue d’oil, which could in a certain poem, without ceasing to be itself, admit forms and expressions taken bodily from the language spoken at Arras.[139]
As we go south of the Seine towards the Loire, the Celtic elements in the provincial dialects grow more numerous. In Burgundian, and the dialects of Vaud and Savoy, even the vocabulary has many traces of Celtic; these are not found in French, where the predominant factor is rustic Latin.[140]
I have shown above[141] how from the sixteenth century the influence of the north had given ground before the growing preponderance of the peoples beyond the Loire. The reader has merely to compare the present sections on language with my former remarks on blood to see how close is the relation between the speech of a people and its physical constitution.[142]
I have dealt in detail with the special case of France, but the principle could easily be illustrated from the rest of Europe; and it would be seen, as a universal rule, that the successive changes and modifications of a language are not, as one usually hears, the work of centuries. If they were, Ekkhili, Berber, Euskara, and Bas-Breton would long have disappeared; and yet they still survive. The changes in language are caused by corresponding changes in the blood of successive generations, and the parallelism is exact.
I must here explain a phenomenon to which I have already referred, namely the renunciation by certain racial groups (under pressure of special necessity, or their own nature) of their native tongue in favour of one which is more or less foreign to them. I took the Jews and the Parsees as examples. There are others more remarkable still; for we find, in America, savage tribes speaking languages superior to themselves.
In America, by a curious stroke of fate, the most energetic nations have developed, so to speak, in secret. The art of writing was unknown to them, and their history proper begins very late and is nearly always very obscure. The New World contains a great number of peoples which, though they are neighbours and derive in different directions from a common origin, have very little resemblance to each other.
According to d’Orbigny, the so-called “Chiquitean group” in Central America is composed of tribes, of which the largest contain about 1500 souls, and the least numerous 50 and 300. All these, even the smallest, have distinct languages. Such a state of things can only be the result of a complete racial anarchy.
On this hypothesis, I am not at all surprised to see many of these tribes, like the Chiquitos, in possession of a complicated and apparently scientific language. The words used by the men are sometimes different from those of the women; and in every case when a man borrows one of the women’s phrases, he changes the terminations. Where such luxury in vocabulary is possible, the language has surely reached a very refined stage. Unfortunately, side by side with this we find that the table of numerals does not go much further than ten. Such poverty, in the midst of so much careful elaboration, is probably due to the ravaging hand of time, aided by the barbarous condition of the natives to-day. When we see anomalies like these, we cannot help recalling the sumptuous palaces, once marvels of the Renaissance, which have come, by some revolution, into the hands of rude peasants. The eye may rove with admiration over delicate columns, elegant trellis-work, sculptured porches, noble staircases, and striking gables—luxuries which are useless to the wretchedness that lives under them; for the ruined roofs let in the rain, the floors crack, and the worm eats into the mouldering walls.
I can now say with certainty that, with regard to the special character of races, philology confirms all the facts of physiology and history. Its conclusions however must be handled with extreme care, and when they are all we have to go upon, it is very dangerous to rest content with them. Without the slightest doubt, a people’s language corresponds to its mentality, but not always to its real value for civilization. In order to ascertain this, we must fix our eyes solely on the race by which, and for which, the language was at first designed. Now with the exception of the negroes, and a few yellow groups, we meet only quaternary races in recorded history. All the languages we know are thus derivative, and we cannot gain the least idea of the laws governing their formation except in the comparatively later stages. Our results, even when confirmed by history, cannot be regarded as infallibly proved. The further we go back, the dimmer becomes the light, and the more hypothetical the nature of any arguments drawn from philology. It is exasperating to be thrown back on these when we try to trace the progress of any human family or to discover the racial elements that make it up. We know that Sanscrit and Zend are akin. That is something; but their common roots are sealed to us. The other ancient tongues are in the same case. We know nothing of Euskara except itself. As no analogue to it has been discovered up to now, we are ignorant of its history, and whether it is to be regarded as itself primitive or derived. It yields us no positive knowledge as to whether the people who speak it are racially simple or composite.
Ethnology may well be grateful for the help given by philology. But the help must not be accepted unconditionally, or any theories based on it alone.[143]
This rule is dictated by a necessary prudence. All the facts, however, mentioned in this chapter go to prove that, originally, there is a perfect correspondence between the intellectual virtues of a race and those of its native speech; that languages are, in consequence, unequal in value and significance, unlike in their forms and basic elements, as races are also; that their modifications, like those of races, come merely from intermixture with other idioms; that their qualities and merits, like a people’s blood, disappear or become absorbed, when they are swamped by too many heterogeneous elements; finally, that when a language of a higher order is used by some human group which is unworthy of it, it will certainly become mutilated and die out. Hence, though it is often difficult to infer at once, in a particular case, the merits of a people from those of its language, it is quite certain that in theory this can always be done.
I may thus lay it down, as a universal axiom, that the hierarchy of languages is in strict correspondence with the hierarchy of races.