Beech. Bard. Attic. Tragedy. Authority. Delirious. Wine. Church.
It would be a great mistake to picture the Aryans setting out in some vast, organized expedition such as that of the Israelites under Moses. The study of comparative grammar suggests rather that they spread outwards from their centre in a series of little rills, each one, as it flowed, either pushing the rill in front of it a stage farther on, or flowing through it and passing beyond. During the first thousand years of this process we have very little idea of the extent to which the individual groups of these ever-widening circles—the different “races” as they were now beginning to be—were in communication with one another. After a time, however, we can discern them pretty sharply divided into two streams, a north-western and a south-eastern stream. It was the main stream which flowed north-west, and it carried along with it the ancestors of the powerful races which were afterwards to be called Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Teutons, and Celts. The settlement of the Celts in Britain and the subsequent arrival first of the Teutonic Angles and Saxons and then of the Normans, the movement of the Celts westward to Wales and Ireland, and the final streaming of their Teutonic successors right through them and across the Atlantic—all these are excellent examples of the way in which the separate rills of the north-western stream have continued ever since the first central commotion to crawl and mingle and overlap like the waves of an incoming tide.
Meanwhile the south-eastern stream flowed past the Himalayas down into India and Persia, where their descendants became the Brahmanic Hindoos and the Zoroastrian Persians of a later date.
That all connection was lost at a very early date between these two main streams is plain from another interesting little group of words. These are common to all the members of the north-western group, but quite unknown to the south-eastern, and perhaps the most interesting is mere, the Old English for ‘sea’, which is still used poetically of inland waters, and in the word mermaid, while its Latin form ‘mare’ is equally familiar to most educated Englishmen. From the distribution of this word among the Aryan nations, together with similar equations such as fish and piscis, we can deduce that these two groups of travellers had already separated before either of them reached the sea-board.
There is evidence, too, that this north-western group, comprising as it did the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, as well as of the Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, had reached before it dispersed a new country of forests, such as must have covered most of Northern and Western Europe at that time. At any rate we find words for trees—such as beech, elm, and hazel—and for birds—finch, starling, swallow, throstle—common to most of the languages spoken by their descendants, yet absent from Persian and Sanskrit. It was at this time, and amid these surroundings, that agriculture seems to have appeared among the north-western Aryans. The old Aryan word from which we have acre lost its former meaning of ‘any enclosed piece of land’ and acquired the new and special significance of tilled land, as in the Latin ‘ager,’ etc. Corn, furrow, bean, meal, ear of corn, and the verb to mow also date back to this period of our history.
And then the north-western stream again subdivided; and we will follow first of all that branch of it which dropped away southward into the Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. This time it is not a word, but a poet’s imagination which has fixed for us in a passage of considerable beauty the historic moment when this wave first lapped the farther shore, the prophetic shock of contact between Aryan settler and aborigine:
These young, light-hearted masters were called Greeks, or Hellenes; they migrated southwards in a series of waves, the first of which contained two tribes known as the Achaians and Danaans. These were followed and overtaken at a later date by the Dorians, and subsequently again by the Attic Greeks. We still make use of some of the experiences undergone by these tribes, and of the characteristics which they developed, in order to express more exactly our own inner experiences. Through the channel of words and myths which have come down to us from that time, the great poet who sang to the Achaians and Danaans of the exploits of their ancestors has given us many metaphors and images—special little reservoirs of feeling which we could not have created for ourselves. Most people, for instance, like to be called Trojans; stentorian and pander are from the names of characters in his poems, and nectar and ambrosial from the food and drink consumed by his gods. Speech was a more miraculous and rhythmical thing to the Achaians than it is to us to-day, and whether or no the Gaelic bard is cognate with the Greek ‘phrazein’, to ‘speak’, there is no doubt that ‘epos’, the ‘word’, had its other meaning of ‘poem’. Long afterwards the adjective ‘epikos’ came to be applied especially to lofty compositions such as those of the great poet himself. Accordingly, in the European war the special correspondent could often find no more vivid expression for his sense of the vastness and grandeur of the catastrophe he was recording than to call up by the word epic vague memories of Homer’s gods and heroes.
A single timid reference to ‘awful signs’,[6] together with the absence of any ordinary word for ‘writing’, suggests that Homer’s Achaians did not know how to write, and that his two long poems of twenty-four books each had to be memorized from beginning to end by that class of professional reciters from which our word rhapsody is derived. The actual text of the Iliad and Odyssey gives us a vivid and majestic picture of early, but not the earliest, Aryan culture. Of their author, in so far as there was one particular author, we know very little except that he was probably blind. It was the common thing for the bards who were to be found among all the Aryan races, and survived as ‘Minstrels’ into the Middle Ages, to be blind; and Homer’s own blindness, apart from a reference to it, has been deduced by some from a preponderance in his poems of “audile” epithets, such as the clanging arrow and the loud-sounding sea. It may be mentioned that the Slavs once called their bards ‘sliepac’, a word which also meant ‘blind’.
The Dorians who followed soon divided into two main groups with their centres in Laconia and Attica respectively. The notorious taciturnity of the inhabitants of Laconia has given us laconic, and we are referring to their rigid ideas on infant welfare when we speak of a ‘spartan mother’, for Sparta was the capital of Laconia.
But it was in Attica, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. that the Hellenic culture reached its finest flower. We use the word Attic[7] to describe a peculiarly finished work of art or an exquisite literary style. No wonder. In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. Consequently, the names of many things which we regard as the very hall-marks of a cultured society can be traced back to the Attic dialect of this period, and no farther. Academy, school, history, philosophy, logic, grammar, poetry, rhythm, harmony, melody, music, are all from Greek words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words, chorus, comedy, drama, theatre, and tragedy, and the lesser catastrophe, episode, prologue, and protagonist, all of which draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great Athenian dramatists.
Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into contact with other races. It is just such a spark which, in the famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, lights up for us one of the early shocks of encounter between these Italiot Aryans and the older inhabitants of Italy.
Most people know a little about the subsequent history of these Italiots. The republic which they founded at Rome transformed itself into an empire that extended its bounds until they were coterminous with the civilized world—an empire of Europe and part of Asia which retained its real authority over men’s persons until the fifth century A.D., and its authority, as an idea, over their minds and actions down to that day at the beginning of the last century when Bonaparte first styled himself “Emperor of the French”. There is, in fact, scarcely a word in our language expressing even remotely the notion of “authority”, which does not come to us from the Latin: authority, chief, command, control, dictator, dominion, empire, government, master, officer, rule, subordinate, are some of them; and it is significant that the two Greek words which we use to express the same idea are despot and tyrant. Both these terms have a definite stigma attaching to them, and are employed very much more often by the foes of authority than by her friends. The Greeks were not the nation to establish a world-empire. They would have combined to bury Caesar, not to praise him; and from another point of view the odious sybarite is good proof that they were not the stuff of which colonists are made. The English lord and king, on the other hand, retain about them a hint of the possibility of affection. It is a mark of affection when sailors drop the Latin captain and adopt the Dutch skipper, just as it is when landsmen substitute for Latin manager the Old High German boss. And lastly, when we wish to suggest a peculiar blend of dignity and chill self-consciousness, we use the name of the most remarkable of all the Roman emperors.
Rome not only extended her jurisdiction over all Europe; she was responsible for the birth of a new idea in men’s minds—the idea that “authority”, as such, based on an abstraction called “law” and irrespective of real ties of blood or affection, of sympathy or antipathy, of religion or ownership, can exist as a relation between human beings.
But we have hurried on to the Empire and left out the Republic. What were the beginnings and early occupations of this astonishing race, of whose national hero we are reminded when we use the word brute? In the previous chapter reference was made to certain words and phrases which are now used for the purposes of everyday life, but which were originally technical metaphors drawn from the phenomena of electricity. If we examine such words as calamity, delirious, emolument, pecuniary, prevaricate, tribulation, we shall find that they possess a similar history. Although the Romans of classical times used the Latin words from which they are derived in much the same way as the English words are used now, yet if we trace them a little farther back, we learn that ‘delirare’ had at one time no other meaning than to ‘go out of the furrow,’ when ploughing; ‘praevaricari’ was to ‘plough in crooked lines’; ‘tribulare’ to thrash with a ‘tribulum’, and so forth. In interval, on the other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades), excel, premium, salary, and many other words we have examples of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding word, spoil, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome. Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life, and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was constantly melting both implements into ideas.
Wherever we turn in our language, we have only to scratch the surface in order to come upon fresh traces of Rome and of her solid, concrete achievements in the world. With Greece, however, it is different. It was not the outer fabric of a future European civilization which the Greeks were building up while their own civilization flourished, but the shadowy, inner world of human consciousness. They were creating our outlook. We shall see a little later how the language which is used by the theologians, philosophers, and scientists of Europe was the gradual and painful creation of the thinkers of ancient Greece; and we shall see that, without that language, the thoughts and feelings and impulses which it expresses could have no being. Rome’s task was to erect across Europe a rigid and durable framework on which the complicated texture of thought, feeling, and will, woven in the looms of Athens and Alexandria, could be permanently outspread. Yet the performance of this task, concrete as it was, was inseparably connected with an event of tremendous import for that growing, inner world to which we have already referred—the most significant event, as many believe, in the whole history of mankind.
The first casual contact between Greek coaster and Semitic trader, imaginatively portrayed in the stanza quoted above from Matthew Arnold, was indeed prophetic. It proved afterwards to have been not merely a memorable event, but a sort of fertilization of the whole history of humanity. For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense. The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart, were destined to meet and intermingle. In 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great sacked Sidon and Tyre, Aryans and Semites began for the first time to live side by side. They did not intermarry, but subtle influences must have passed from one to the other, for in Alexandria, shortly afterwards, contact between the two grew so intimate that by the second century B.C. Greek had become the official language of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the same century a Roman Protectorate was established over Syria, which in due course of time became a province of the Roman Empire. In that province was born the individual who is known to history as Jesus of Nazareth.
His teaching, as far as it has come down to us, was Semitic both in its form and in its outlook on the past. Nevertheless, it was His teaching, and the feelings and impulses (though in a somewhat unrecognizable form) which He implanted in the hearts and wills of men, which were spread by the organization of the Roman Empire all over Europe; and it was, above all, that part of the Greek world of thought which had crystallized round His teaching that was carried over into the thought and feeling of modern Europe.
But all this could only happen very slowly; for while Greece and Rome had been rising successively to pinnacles of civilization, the rest of the north-western group of Aryans had remained plunged in darkness. They had passed Italy by, and already, more than a thousand years B.C., begun to spread themselves over the rest of Europe and to develop in the different areas wherein they found a final resting-place the distinctive characteristics of Teuton, Slav, and Celt. The Slavs, although they occupied—and still occupy—the whole vast east of Europe, and although they number something like two hundred million souls have as yet had extraordinarily little influence upon our national life. There are only two Slavonic words which may be described as common in all our language, trumpet and slave, and both have come to us by devious routes, the first through German and French, the second through Greek and Latin. One of the lesser Slavonic races, the Croatians, developed a kind of neckwear which appealed to the fashionable French, who adopted it and described it as ‘croate’, ‘crovate’, or ‘cravate’, from which we get our cravat. Otherwise the words are mostly exotic both in sound and meaning. Thus, those that come to us direct from Russia are copek, drosky, knout, rouble, samovar, steppe, verst—all of which, with the possible exception of steppe, are still only used when we are speaking of life in Russia itself.
How different it is when we come to consider the Teutons! When we have abstracted all the Latin words, the French words, the Celtic words, etc., from our vocabulary, the “English” words which remain are all Teutonic; for we, ourselves, are a branch of the Teutonic race.[8] Accordingly some of our older and most English words contain buried vestiges of the lives which our ancestors once lived in the continental forests. Fear, which is thought to be derived from the same word as fare, has been taken to suggest the dangers, and weary, which is traced to an old verb meaning ‘to tramp over wet ground’, the fatigues of early travel, while learn goes back to a root which meant ‘to follow a track’. As the Italiot Aryans, the Romans, created and extended their great empire, they came into contact with these barbaric Teutonic tribes, whom they regarded, naturally enough, not as kinsmen, but as strangers. We find some of the results of this contact in such words as inch, kitchen, mile, mill, pound, street, toll, wall, and table—all of which are Latin words borrowed by our ancestors while they were still living on the Continent together with the ancestors of the Scandinavian, Dutch, German, Austrian, and Swiss nations. By their nature these words suggest civilizing influences, and we find in their company the names of more portable articles, such as chest, dish, kettle, pillow, and wine, which traders might have brought with them on their beasts of burden. This hypothesis becomes almost a certainty when it is seen that mule and ass were borrowed from Latin at this time; that -monger (in costermonger, fishmonger, ...) is a corruption of ‘mango’, the Latin name for a trader; and that the old English ceapian, ‘to buy’, which we still keep in chap, chapman, cheap, ... goes back to ‘caupones’, the Roman name for wine-dealers. A few words like pepper even seem to have come in at this time from the remote East, by way of Rome, and altogether these old Teutonic words may indeed give us, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has said, “a dim picture of Roman traders, travelling with their mules and asses along the paved roads of the German provinces, their chests and boxes and wine-sacks, and their profitable bargains with our primitive ancestors”. Finally, the military words camp and pile recall the heyday of the Empire, when Rome would recruit vast armies from her provincial subjects; and even church (another word common to all the Teutonic languages) may have been brought home by German mercenaries on service in the East. The Greek ‘Kuriakon’, from which it is said to be derived, was in use in the Eastern provinces, as opposed to the ‘ecclesia’ (French ‘église’, Italian ‘chiesa’ and ecclesiastical) of Latin Christianity, and our pagan forefathers probably picked it up accidentally while they were pillaging the sacred buildings in which their posterity was to kneel.
The modern nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland cover most of the area over which the Teutonic immigrants originally spread. In a good many cases they found Celtic predecessors already in possession. These Celts had been the first Aryans to arrive in Northern Europe, and they seem, at one time, to have spread over most of the Continent. Later on, in historical times, they were to be found chiefly throughout that wide district—including most of modern France and a great part of Spain and Portugal—which the Romans called “Gaul”, as well as all over Great Britain and Ireland. In Spain and France they mingled their blood extensively with that of the Italiots, the two together becoming the ancestors of the present “Latin” races or speakers of the “Romance”[9] languages. But already, long before the decline of the Roman Empire, the Teutons were beginning to drive the Celts westward and away, a process which is clearly marked in these islands by the prevalence of Celtic place-names in the west country. Thus, the percentage of Celtic place-names in Cornwall has been calculated to be about 80; in Devon it is only 32, and in Suffolk 2. The conflict between Celt and Teuton dragged on in Ireland until 1921, and it is doubtful if it is quite finished yet. One contingent of the old Celtic inhabitants of this island, or Britons, driven to the tip of Cornwall, decided to leave these shores altogether. They sailed back to the Continent, and there established themselves in the sea-board district which still bears the name of Brittany. It is said that a Welsh peasant and a Breton can still, to this day, understand one another’s speech well enough for most practical purposes.
The number of proved Celtic words which have found their way into English is extraordinarily small—scarce above a dozen. Bard, bog, and glen are among those which have come to us direct, and car had to travel through Latin and French before it reached us, the original having been borrowed by Julius Caesar from the Gauls, who had thus named their war chariots. But for the most part, Celtic words like banshee, eisteddfod, galore, mavourneen, ... have a remote and foreign look, even though we may have used them for many years. When we reflect that the Welsh tongue is still spoken within two hundred miles of London, and that another Celtic language, the Cornish, has only just died out, this seems very difficult to understand.
Such, then, in barest outline, was the distribution of the Aryan races which formed the major part of that vague and loose-knit organization, the later Roman Empire. But it must not be imagined that this picture of Rome’s European subjects is anything like complete. Evoking history from words is like looking back at our own past through memory; we see it, as it were, from within. Something has stimulated the memory—a smell, a taste, or a fragment of melody—and an inner light is kindled, but we cannot tell how far that light will throw its beams. Language, like the memory, is not an automatic diary; and it selects incidents for preservation, not so much according to their intrinsic significance as according to the impression they happen to have made upon the national consciousness.
Thus, English words have little to tell us about the great migrations and massacres in Europe during the first ten centuries of the Christian era, for terms of abuse like vandal and hun draw their emotional force from the imaginations of historians rather than from actual contact with the tribes in question.[10] From a mathematically impartial point of view, therefore, the small amount of space that can be assigned here to events which absorbed such an enormous share of time and energy and swallowed millions of human lives is indeed misleading. There is, however, an interesting little group of words still bearing the imprint of the mighty upheaval which took place around the Mediterranean during the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., when Mohammedan Arabs overran Persia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and the south of France. As might be expected, these words come to us mostly from Arabic, via Spanish and French, for it was in Spain that Islam took her firmest hold on Europe. They include cotton, gazelle, giraffe, lacquey, masquerade, syrup, tabby (originally a kind of silk), tabor, talc, tambourine, and some very interesting technical terms to which we shall presently return. Naturally the receding tide of invasion has left Arabic place-names dotted about in all the countries mentioned, while Spain herself is literally crammed with them; but to give examples would be beyond the scope of this little volume, which now finds itself drawn by the laws of its subject-matter to hover more closely about the shores of these islands.