CHAPTER I
PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS

Electric. Quality. Garden. Mead. Timber.

If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished letter of Dr. Johnson’s, and on reading it through we came across the word “telephone”, we should be fairly justified in sending him about his business. The fact that there was no such thing as a telephone until many years after Johnson’s death would leave no doubt whatever in our minds that the letter was not written by him. If we cared to go farther, we could say with equal certainty that the letter was written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the telephone was invented.

Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer had said that “the atmosphere was electric”, we could still be fairly positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be because the thing of which the letter spoke had no existence in Johnson’s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as they are to-day; but if we look up the word electric in the Oxford Dictionary, we find that in Johnson’s time it simply was not used in that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as:

The world was only just beginning to connect this mysterious property of amber with the thunder and lightning, and however still and heavy the air might have been, it would have been impossible for the lexicographer to describe it by that word. Or again, supposing the letter had said nothing about a storm, but that it had described a conversation between Garrick and Goldsmith which was carried on “at high tension”, we should still have little hesitation in pronouncing it to be a forgery. The phrase “high tension”, used of the relation between human beings, is a metaphor taken from the condition of the space between two electrically charged bodies. At present many people who use such a phrase are still half-aware of its full meaning, but many years hence everybody may be using it to describe their quarrels and their nerves without dreaming that it conceals an electrical metaphor——just as we ourselves speak of a man’s “disposition” without at all knowing that the reference is to astrology.[1] Nevertheless by consulting an historical dictionary it will still be possible to “date” any passage of literature in which the phrase occurs. We shall still know for certain that the passage could not have been written in a time before certain phenomena of static electricity had become common knowledge.

Thus, the scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another. They made it possible for them to speak of the “high tension” between them. So that the discovery of electricity, besides introducing several new words (e.g. electricity itself) into our everyday vocabulary, has altered or added to the meaning of many older words, such as battery, broadcast, button, conductor, current, force, magnet, potential, tension, terminal, wire, and many others.

But apart from the way in which it is used, there is a little mine of history buried in the word electric itself. If we look it up in a dictionary we find that it is derived from a Greek word ‘ēlektron’, which meant ‘amber’. And in this etymology alone anyone who was completely ignorant of our civilization could perceive three facts—that at one time English scholars were acquainted with the language spoken by the ancient Greeks, that the Greeks did not know of electricity (for if they had there would have been nothing to prevent our borrowing their word for it), and that the idea of electricity has been connected in men’s minds with amber. Lastly, if we were completely ignorant of the quality of amber itself, the fact that ‘ēlektron’ is connected with ‘ēlektōr’, which means ‘gleaming’ or ‘the beaming sun’, might give us a faint hint of its nature. These are some of the many ways in which words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.

Now the deduction of information from the presence or absence of certain words is a common practice which has been known to critics and historians of literature, under some such name as “internal evidence”, for many years. It is from such evidence, for instance, that we deduce Shakespeare’s ignorance of the details of Roman civilization. But until a few years ago—within the memory of men still living—very little use had been made of language itself, that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds. It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.

In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort which went to its making. Thus, the word quality is used by most educated people every day of their lives, yet in order that we should have this simple word Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it is perhaps the greatest effort known to man) of turning a vague feeling into a clear thought. He invented the new word ‘poiotēs’, ‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’ and Cicero translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves realize, can even make ourselves feel how every time the word quality is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition of such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life about us. It is the kiss which brings the sleeping courtiers to life.

But in order to excavate the information which is buried in a word we must have the means to ascertain its history. Until quite recently (about a hundred years ago) philology, as an exact science, was still in its infancy, and words were derived by ingenious guesswork from all kinds of impossible sources. All languages were referred to a Hebrew origin, since Hebrew was the language of the Bible. This was taken for granted. Since then, however, two new developments have revolutionized the whole study, made it accurate, and enormously extended its scope. During the eighteenth century Sanskrit, the ancient speech of the Hindoos, began for the first time to attract the attention of European scholars. In 1767 a French Jesuit named Coeurdoux pointed out certain resemblances between the European and Sanskrit languages. In 1786 Sir William Jones described that language as being

At the time it was no more than a brilliant conjecture, but with it the comparative philology of the Aryan languages may be said to have begun.

Secondly, with the advent of phonology certain immutable laws were discovered governing the sounds made by the human throat, and the way in which these sounds change with the passing of time and react upon each other when they are knit together in a spoken word. Henceforward it was possible to say for certain that, for example, the English word wit (from the old verb ‘witan’, to know) was not derived from the Latin ‘videre’, but cognate, or related, with it. Many words derived from ‘videre’, such as advice, envy, review, seem at first sight infinitely farther off from the stem ‘vid-’ than wit, but it was now possible for scholars to say for certain that a Latin stem ‘vid’ adopted into English could not possibly have changed into wit. They could be equally certain that, if the Romans had borrowed the Greek word ‘idein’ (to see) into their language, it could never have changed its form to ‘videre’, so that, innumerable as are the words which Rome borrowed from Greece, ‘videre’ is not one of them. Thus, it was clear that such groups of three words as idein, videre, and wit, or astēr, stella, and star, were not father, son, and grandson (as is the case, for instance, with poenē, poena, and penal), but three brothers or cousins all descended from a common ancestor with a stem something like ‘weid’ belonging to some other language. This, put very briefly and with many omissions, was the contribution made by phonology to the science of comparative philology.

Perhaps it is not altogether insignificant that the study of that seemingly dull subject—phonology—should be associated in our minds with one of the most charming collection of fairy-tales in Europe. It is thanks to the labours of Jacob Grimm during the first half of the last century that we are now able to reconstruct the remote pasts of words, not, it is true, with absolute certainty, but with a degree of it which makes a chapter such as the present one worth writing. And while Grimm was burrowing into the rich, loamy soil of German speech and German folk-lore, another German scholar, Franz Bopp, was laying the foundations, with the help of this knowledge and of the results of the study of Sanskrit, of a genuinely scientific comparative philology. Nor was it long before less scholarly but more imaginative minds, such as Max Müller’s, were interpreting the meaning of their researches to a wider public.

We can imagine the suppressed excitement of the philologists of that time as they began to discover in that remote Eastern language, the sacred language of the Vedic hymns, words such as ‘vid’ (to see), ‘tara’ (a star), ‘sad’ (to sit), ‘bhratar’ (a brother). For it was not only the evident relation of Sanskrit to the languages of Europe that was exciting. Sanskrit, which had preserved the forms of its words more unchanged than any other Aryan tongue, threw a brilliant light on the close relations existing between those other languages themselves. For instance, although the sisterhood of words such as the Greek ‘onoma’, Latin ‘nomen’, and name, had long been suspected, yet there had been no way of distinguishing such a sisterhood from purely accidental resemblances like Hebrew ‘gol’, Greek ‘kaleo’, and call, and the connection between ‘brother’ and ‘frater’ was by no means obvious. But when the older Sanskrit form ‘bhratar’ was brought to light, the gap between these words was at once bridged. It could be seen at a glance how the three of them, brother, bhratar, and frater, had started from the same original form and diverged through the years. Gradually all doubt was blown away, and Sanskrit, the language of a race with whom Europeans had thought, and for the most part still think, that they had nothing whatever in common, stood revealed as an obvious relative of Latin, Greek, Modern English, and practically all the other languages of Europe. It seemed, therefore, to follow that our ancestors and those of the Hindoos were at one time living together, that our ancestors and theirs were, in fact, the same.

At first it was thought that Sanskrit itself was the parent-language from which all the others had derived, and that the nations of Europe were descended from a body of Hindoos, some of whom had migrated westwards. We called ourselves “Aryans” because the people who had once spoken Sanskrit were known as “Aryas”, or worshippers of the God of the Brahmins. But soon the accurate methods of analysis which philology had now acquired made it plain that this could not be so. Therefore a still older language was postulated and called indifferently the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, or the Indo-European parent-language. If there was a language, there must have been a people who spoke it, and attention was soon focused on the character, civilization, and whereabouts in space and time of the people who spoke the lost Indo-European, or “Aryan” parent-language.

The fascination of this particular branch of philological research is apparent when we recollect that in this case, in the case of these remote Eastern ancestors of ours, philology is almost the only window through which we can look out on them. In most subsequent periods of history we have many other ways, besides the study of language, of discovering the outward circumstances of men’s lives. Historical records, archaeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature, all come to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization; but it is not so with the Aryans. Here ethnology and archaeology tell us practically nothing, anthropology a little, and the rest nothing at all. If we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from this period we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it. And in such romantic circumstances it is hardly surprising that we should find a veritable army of scholars and philosophers, both professional and amateur, jostling each other upon that plank with such vigour that the bridge and its burden have often seemed in danger of vanishing quietly together into the abyss.

The central principle upon which philologists have worked is this, that if a word occurs to-day in a fair sprinkling of the Aryan languages, then that word existed in the Aryan parent-language, and therefore the thing of which it is the label existed in some form or other in the primitive Aryan civilization. Conversely, if an object or an idea is found to have a different name in most of the Aryan languages, it was sometimes assumed that that object was not known to the Aryans before their dispersion. But this negative deduction soon came to be regarded as unsafe, and there are indeed many reasons why the whole method is limited and uncertain. For instance, even in one language it is constantly happening that when a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it. This is inevitable. We have to proceed from the known to the unknown in language as in life; but language lags behind life and words change more slowly than things or ideas. When railways first came in, their rolling-stock consisted of a string of vehicles resembling the old horse coach so exactly that it was said later that “the ghost of a horse stalked in front of the engine”. Although this is no longer the case, we still call these vehicles carriages or coaches, and look like continuing to do so. To take an even more patent example, when a modern Englishman or American uses the very old Celtic word car, we all know what he means: yet it would be an error to deduce from this that the principle of internal combustion was known in pre-Christian times in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and probably Rome (Latin ‘carrus’, a cognate word). Moreover, we can see at once that the fraction of error is infinitely greater when we are dealing, not with the development of a word in one language, but with its history as it descended from one language to another; for example, from the hypothetical parent-tongue into the languages with which we are familiar to-day. Indeed, this kind of reasoning, if no other evidence were available, would lead us to conclude that the Greeks were acquainted with electricity.

Fortunately, however, it is not the object of this little book to put forward theories and discuss the extent to which they can be proved or disproved by words. And though it has been interesting to observe that in some cases—and notably when we are endeavouring to reconstruct the life and thought of our Aryan ancestors—our knowledge, such as it is, is derived very largely from the evidence of words, yet in these pages, even when that particular period is being dealt with, the words chosen for description will by no means necessarily be those which provide the most conclusive evidence for what is said. A great deal has been done in quite recent years by way of collating the results of comparative philology with those of anthropology, ethnology, comparative mythology, etc., and reconstructing from the combined data something of the past history of our own and other races or cultures. We are concerned here, not with the way in which those results were arrived at, but with the results themselves. The reconstruction itself has been and is being done by scholars; here the endeavour is rather to make use of their labours; not to think about the past, as it were, but to look at it. Consequently the words chosen are not the most useful ones, but those which are the best telescopes; for while the nineteenth century spent itself prodigally in multitudinous endeavours to know what the past was, it is now possible for us, by penetrating language with the knowledge thus accumulated, to feel how the past is.

Who are the Aryans? Where did they come from? Looking back down the corridors of time from the particular perspective to which we have attained in the twentieth century, far away in the past—it may be in the Stone Age—we seem to be able to perceive a remarkable phenomenon. At some particular spot in the vast plains stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia it was as though a fresh spring bubbled up into the pool of humanity. Whether it represented the advent of a new “race-type”, what a race-type exactly is, and how it begins are questions which we must leave to others to settle. That spring was the Aryan culture.

Throughout much of Europe and Asia there were already in existence different civilizations in different stages of development; such were the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and farther west the great Minoan civilization, which in its Bronze Age was to ray out an influence from Crete all over the Aegean world. It may be that there was something static[2] in the very nature of these pre-Aryan cultures, or it may be that they were ageing and passing in the natural course of events; what is certain is that there was something dynamic, some organic, out-pushing quality in the waters of this Aryan spring. For these waters spread. They have been spreading over the world ever since that time, now quickly, now slowly, down into India and Persia, north to the Baltic, west over all Europe and the New World, until in the persons of the three Aryan explorers, Peary, Amundsen, and Scott, their waves have licked the poles. It appears to have been the tendency of the Aryan settler, whether he came as a conquering invader or as a peaceful immigrant, to obliterate more than he absorbed of the aboriginal culture on which he imposed himself. In this the Celts and Teutons who ages ago overran most of Europe appear to have resembled the English-speaking settlers who long afterwards almost annihilated the North American Indian with his gods and traditions. It is true that we English owe to this latter pre-Aryan race the ability to express just that shade of contempt which is conveyed by the word skunk, also the charming blend of whimsicality and reprobation crystallized in mugwump. But such survivals really only emphasize the extent to which, as the Aryan waters spread, the pre-Aryan past has been covered over. The past does indeed live in the language we speak and in those with which we are familiar, but it is the past of the Aryans. If we dig down far enough into the English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation.

There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. We may patronize our less fortunate neighbours, but we do not “matronize” them. Yet faint memories of such strange ways seem to have lingered on among the Aryans in the widespread legend of a race of Amazons who once dwelt in the lost continent of Atlantis, the western land, and in the rumour of mighty female warriors in pre-Celtic[3] Gaul, while the name of the River Marne (Matrona) is thought to be another relic of the existence in pre-Aryan Europe of a race of men who deified their trees and streams, and hoped, when they died, to be gathered to their mothers.

With this brief glance at our forgotten predecessors, we may turn our gaze upon that region near the banks of the Dnieper whence our own ancestors first began to expand into the world. And we get a glimpse of the kind of settlements in which these pastoral people must have lived in the fact that the English word garden has grown from the same stem as the termination -grad in Petrograd, where it means ‘town’, while on the other hand the Dutch for garden is ‘tuin.’ We see their villages, family settlements springing up in an enclosure round the home of a patriarch. Households are large and cumbersome, the sons, as they grow up, bring home wives from different villages, and all live together under the roof and absolute dominion of the mother and father-in-law. Both sexes wear zones or loin-cloths, and probably in addition one simple garment of fur or of some woven material, which does not altogether hide their tattooed bodies, adorned with armlets and necklaces of animals’ teeth, or it may be of shells or amber beads. It is the business of the women in these communities, not only to remain faithful to their husbands on pain of the most appalling penalties, not only to bring up the children, to keep house, and to weave and spin, but also to till the fields and look after the bees, geese, oxen, sows, and such other animals as may have been domesticated. A hard enough life, but they have their consolations as they grow older and become respected as dames. Moreover, they have a religious cult of their own. In some cases their imaginations are rich in myth, and they are looked up to as knowing the secrets of Nature and possibly of the future itself. It is the men’s business to make war, hold councils, and hunt—possibly with horses[4] and hounds, both of which animals are at any rate known to them. The family lives on a kind of unleavened bread, milk, cheese,[5] cooked meats, vegetables, and some fruits.

There is much brutality. Widows may be expected to join their husbands in the grave, and old men are sometimes killed off to make room; nevertheless, life is not without its friendlier aspect. There is little doubt, for instance, that our Aryan ancestors knew how to get drunk. The liquor, made principally of honey, with which they sent themselves to bed, appears to have been fraught with such sweet associations that no branch of the Aryan family, however far they went upon their travels, could forget it. The Angles and Saxons brought this mead into our country, and the word occurs in Dutch, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek (‘methu’), Sanskrit, Zend, and modern Persian. As it threads its way through this babel of tongues, ringing the changes on the meanings of ‘honey’, ‘drunkenness’, and ‘enjoyment’, the little monosyllable seems to give us a peculiarly intimate peep into the interior of an Aryan home. Yet the connection of the word bed with the Latin stem ‘fod-’ (fodio), ‘to dig’, should prevent us from forming an unduly voluptuous image of the final stages of this prehistoric pastime. If we call up before us a roof and walls of wood or wattles, bounding a dark interior crowded with human beings and possibly some cattle, lit only by a draughty hole in the roof—an arrangement which the Teutons were evidently trying to express when they afterwards dubbed it a ‘wind’s eye’ or window—we have a picture which will serve. It is a picture of our ancestors just before they began to spread out over the world, and the time is before 2000 B.C.

But the question of the houses in which they lived takes us farther back still. At some time, probably before they became acquainted with agricultural modes of livelihood, the Aryans were living a nomadic existence. Axle, nave, wheel, yoke, and a common word for ‘waggon’ have convinced people that they once moved from place to place in a kind of primitive caravan, running probably on solid wheels (for there is no common word for ‘spoke’). Now the English word cove, which in its Icelandic form means ‘hut’ and in its Greek form (‘gupē’) a subterranean dwelling such as that which was inhabited by the Cyclops, takes us back to a still older form of residence. Again, wand in English means a ‘slender rod’, but in German and Dutch it means a ‘wall’, while the weightier and more solid word timber is connected with the Greek root ‘dem-’ (demein), ‘to build’, Latin ‘domus’, ‘a house’. In these words we can perhaps see the most ancient house rising as time goes on out of a natural cave in the ground to the dignity of a sort of dug-out with wattled sides and roof—eventually to the estate of a firm, wooden hut. And so, behind the picture of our ancestors as they lived together on the spot from which they finally began to spread, we can discern another less certain picture of the very beginnings; of a race, a family perhaps, or some voluntary collection of men not tied by blood, who were together in the Stone Age somewhere in Central Asia. They increase in numbers and power, and, trekking westwards, live—for how many years or centuries we cannot tell—as a race of pastoral nomads, until somewhere in the region of the Dnieper they pass from the wandering nomad existence to some more settled life such as that which has been described.

In addition to the somewhat prosaic words from which we have attempted to derive information, it is pleasant to us to think of these ancestors of ours already uttering to one another in that remote past great and simple words like fire, night, star, thunder, and wind, which our children still learn to use as they grow up. And we must think also how during all this time the new thing, the force, the spirit which the Aryans were to bring into the world, must have been simmering within them. Strengthening their physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony, working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the Aryans became. And then they began to move. And the result was the Bhagavad Gita, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, the vast modern industrial civilizations of Europe and America, and the British Empire touching the Antipodes.