These Essays appeared originally in The Westminster Gazette, and have only been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volume publication. They aim at being suggestive rather than exhaustive: I shall be satisfied if I have provoked thought without following out each train to a logical conclusion. Most of the Essays are just what they pretend to be—crystallisations into writing of ideas suggested in familiar conversation.
| G. A. |
Hind Head, March 1894.
A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound misconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech of the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of the barometer.
My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world; it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round; while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day.
And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European populations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by the thousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west of Canada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestral speech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia and New Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got a footing, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learn English, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism to their native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them better to know and speak the language of commerce—the language of Cape Town, of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenever two tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to be more useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishes to do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is the Creole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in New York. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languages fairly out of the field in a couple of generations.
Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. English has annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific; Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines, Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are less suited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by North Europeans; but they absorb a large number of Italians and other Mediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. As to the other dominant languages, the points in their favour are different. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian over the steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanism are importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman is carrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia, Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them.
The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian who leaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American.
There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapid increase of English. No other language will carry you through so many ports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, New Orleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore, Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana, Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French with Marseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The most commercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in so many great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in the struggle for existence among the tongues of the future.
The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke Greek, not because Plato and Æschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was the tongue of the great commercial centres—of Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not because Catullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was the administrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul, of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wanted to do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; so much so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out, and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. In our own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India have to use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchants must write their business correspondence with distant houses in English. To put an extreme contrast: in the last century French was spoken by far more people than English; at the present day French is only just keeping up its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, is not advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundred million people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; has annexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting, Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida, California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, who once learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gains ground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among the European languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubt be spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundred million people.
And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations; thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling—one of the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward unopposed to the conquest of humanity.
I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar vice of which I have never been guilty.
Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation and morals than the democracy they live among.
I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people at large (and especially of that particular European people which "dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners, than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound superiority by birth to the world around him—a superiority as of fine porcelain to common clay—that the world around him has at last actually begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.
To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noble families of modern and mediæval Europe sprang, as a whole, from the Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards and the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the well-known aristocratic names of mediæval Italy are without exception Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere roturier. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised Romanised serf against the barbaric seigneur. In Spain, the hidalgo is just the hi d'al Go, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive barbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated autochthonous people.
It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, for example. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where a handful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger and Helotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: the Persian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as an aristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time in Babylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors had similarly imposed themselves upon the first known historical civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy of the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it over the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the same thing over again—a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)—a pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct; then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has conquered and subjugated.
"That may be true, perhaps," you object, "as to the remote historical origin of aristocracies; but surely the aristocrat of later generations has acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the people he lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation." Don't you believe it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last the aristocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, a barbarian. I often wonder, indeed, whether Arnold himself really recognised the literal and actual truth of his own brilliant generalisation. For the aristocratic ideas and the aristocratic pursuits remain to the very end essentially barbaric. The "gentleman" never soils his high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himself severely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitute civilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain he ignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescend to read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges of serfdom. If you look close at the "occupations of a gentleman" in the present day, you will find they are all of purely barbaric character. They descend to us direct from the semi-savage invaders who overthrew the structure of the Roman empire, and replaced its civilised organisation by the military and barbaric system of feudalism. The "gentleman" is above all things a fighter, a hunter, a fisher—he preserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is not a practiser of any civilised or civilising art—a craftsman, a maker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery. These are the things that constitute civilisation; but the aristocrat does none of them; in the famous words of one who now loves to mix with English gentlemen, "he toils not, neither does he spin." The things he may do are, to fight by sea and land, like his ancestor the Goth and his ancestor the Viking; to slay pheasant and partridge, like his predatory forefathers; to fish for salmon in the Highlands; to hunt the fox, to sail the yacht, to scour the earth in search of great game—lions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to kill—either his kind or his quarry.
Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman's home—his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, his titles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-clad ancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for his delectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, the Highlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher after beauty of scenery loves them—for the sake of their wild life, their heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon—but for the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs and his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries; they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are barbaric and military—knight and earl and marquis and duke, early crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier. Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths as distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position and rights of women—especially the women of the "lower orders"—are frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.
Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His love of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, of decorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but one external symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All over Europe, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by the practice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of absurd mediæval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated commoner.
Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morally inferior. And yet—a Bill for giving at last some scant measure of self-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in our nineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditary barbarians!
I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science.
It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have so long been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and I hope they may get as much as they want of it. But compared to the importance of science in education, education in science is a matter of very small national moment.
The difference between the two is by no means a case of tweedledum and tweedledee. Education in science means the systematic teaching of science so as to train up boys to be scientific men. Now scientific men are exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, and bakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can't all be bakers, and we can't all be painters in water-colours. There is a dim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the Scilly Isles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's washing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source of income is worse than precarious—it's frankly impossible. "It takes all sorts to make a world." A community entirely composed of scientific men would fail to feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and keep itself supplied with amusing light literature. In one word, education in science produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful and valuable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of a civilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers.
What the world at large really needs, and will one day get, is not this, but due recognition of the true value of science in education. We don't all want to be made into first-class anatomists like Owen, still less into first-class practical surgeons, like Sir Henry Thompson. But what we do all want is a competent general knowledge (amongst other things) of anatomy at large, and especially of human anatomy; of physiology at large, and especially of human physiology. We don't all want to be analytical chemists: but what we do all want is to know as much about oxygen and carbon as will enable us to understand the commonest phenomena of combustion, of chemical combination, of animal or vegetable life. We don't all want to be zoologists, and botanists of the type who put their names after "critical species:" but what we do all want to know is as much about plants and animals as will enable us to walk through life intelligently, and to understand the meaning of the things that surround us. We want, in one word, a general acquaintance with the results rather than with the methods of science.
"In short," says the specialist, with his familiar sneer, "you want a smattering."