THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.* IT is
not often that we are able to speak of the work of an American author in terms of such high commendation, as we are glad to employ in the case of Mr. Marsh's lectures on the " Origin and History of the English Language." The book appears to us to be a really valuable contribution to the literature of the subject of which it treats. Its excellence is in great measure owing to the extended view of the nature and object of philological studies which is taken by its author. According to him, philology is " the study of language in connection with, and as a means to the knowledge of, the literature, the history, and the whole mooed and intellectual actions of different peoples." He remarks that many modern scholars, and especially those of his own nation, confine themselves to "making a professedly profound, but really most superficial research into linguistic analogies and ethnological relations;" that they study only grammar and lexicons, to the exclusion of the general literature of the languages which they undertake to examine. Such a course of philological study as this can produce, at best, but imperfect and unsatisfactory results. "Roots, inflections, and word-book definitions," says Mr. Marsh, " are products of the decomposi-
The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the early Literature it embodies. By George P. Marsh, Author of "Lectures on the English language," Ac." Sampson Low, Son, and Co.
tion of speech, not speech itself. Grammar has but a value,. not a worth ; it is a means, not an end ; it teaches but half-truths, and, except as an introduction to literature and that which literature embodies, it is a melancholy heap of bleached ashes, marrowless bones, and empty oyster-shells." This contraction of the scope of philological study has led to the introduction of a false system of etymology, by fostering the habit of neglecting the historical method of deduction, and of adopting the less laborious and more ambitious course of referring Gothic and Romance words directly to any Sanscrit, Celtic, or Sclavonic root which happens to resemble them, instead of tracing, in literature and in speech, the true route by which, and the source from which, they have migrated into our mother-tongue. Finally, Mr. Marsh sums up the duties of the philologist in the following words :—" The study of forms and of the primary or abstract meanings of words must go band in hand with wide observation of those forms, and of the plastic modification and development of the signification of words, as exemplified in the living move- ment of actual speech or literature, and no amount of gramma- tical and lexical knowledge is a substitute for the fruits of such observation." It is the intimate acquaintance displayed by Mr. Marsh, not only with the language, but also with the literature of the period of which he treats, which renders his book at once valuable to the philological, and interesting to the general, reader.
Mr. Marsh does not carry his survey of English literature beyond the close of the sixteenth century. His reason for this limitation is that after this period the history of the language and literature of England ceases to be concurrent; so that these later times do not fall within the scope of his work, which is designed to discuss the two branches of the subject—language and litera- ture—with constant reference to their reciprocal influence on each other. According to Mr. Marsh, the earliest period at which the English language attained to a recognizable existence as a distinct individuality was about the middle of the thirteenth century ; and he fixes the birthday of English literature, properly so called, about a hundred years later. He finds it necessary, however, to devote some time to the Anglo-Saxon language, and to the period of transition between it and the English tongue ; and the chapters which treat of these sections of his subject are by no means the least interesting in the book. He observes that our knowledge of time capacities of the Anglo-Saxon language is very limited, owing to the fact that the extant literature of that tongue is not sufficiently extensive and varied in subject and treatment, to furnish us with the true and only means we can ever possess of learning the actual force of words, namely, observation of their use at different periods, in different combina- tions, and by different writers. Still, we know enough to be able to say with confidence that, in the highest quality of speech—the power of varied expression upon moral and intellectual topics,—it certainly was not inferior to any other language of time Gothic stock. It was poor in synonyms, and in the mere number of its words was inferior to more than one of its kindred tongues ; but it was singularly rich in words expressive of different emotions, passions, and states of the mind. But, although the Anglo-Saxon is, to some extent, at least, the mother of the English language, we must not conclude that time literature of ancient Anglia stands in any such relation to that of modern England. The whole body of Anglo-Saxon literature had, Mr. Marsh tells us, been buried out of sight and forgotten long before any work now recognized as distinctively English in spirit bad been conceived in the imagination of its author ; and the earliest truly English writers borrowed neither imagery, nor thought, nor plan, seldom even form, from older native models. The transition from the Anglo-Saxon to the English tongue was so gradual that many philologists maintain that the two languages are, in fact, identical one with time other. This, however, does not appear to be Mr. Marsh's opinion. According to him, there is a true and radical difference between the two languages ; and lie finds in "the principle that the grammatical categories of the words in a period are determined by their relative positions," the true characteristic of the English as dis- tinguished from the Saxon tongue. It is, however, impossible to assign a date for the introduction of this principle. During this time of transition there was, properly speaking, no literature at all. There are, indeed, a few remains of this period still in existence ; but they are far from coming up to Mr. Marsh's defini- tion of a national literature, which, to quote his own words, "com- mences only when time genius of the people expresses itself, through native authors, upon topics of permanent interest, in the grammatical and rhetorical forms best suited to the essential cha-
racter of the vernacular, and of those who speak it." The earliest and most remarkable monuments of this dark age of English philo- logical history are four in number, and they belong to a period probably not later than the early part of the thirteenth century. They are "Layamou's Chronicle of King Brutus ;" the "Ancren Riwle," a code of monastic precepts drawn up by an unknown author for a religious society of ladies; the " Ormulum," aparapbrase of Scripture by an English Augustine monk, named Orm or Ormin ; and "Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle." The dialect of the first three of these works is generallycalled Semi-Saxon, that of the last, Early English. With the exception of the "Ancren Riwle," they are all in verse—unfortunately, says Mr. Marsh, because, for several reasons, prose writings are generally much more to be depended on than poetry in tracing the history of the fluctuations of language. The other remains of this period, which are mostly scattered verses, are of minor importance, though the extracts which Mr. Marsh has made from them are not without interest, nor, in some cases, without a certain degree of literary merit.
We now come to the period from which Mr. Marsh dates the commencement of a truly national English literature. The birth or revival of a truly national literature is, he tells us, gene- rally contemporaneous with an enlargement of the vocabulary, by foreign importation, or by the resuscitation of obsolete words of native growth. Accordingly we find that at this period a greater number of French words was introduced into the English language, in the course of one generation, than in the nearly three centuries which had elapsed since the Norman Conquest. This power of assimilation is to be regarded as a proof of the growing strength of the English language. "Thenceforward," says Mr. Marsh, "to use the com- parison of St. Jerome, it seized and appropriated foreign words as a conqueror—no longer unwillingly received, and bore them as a badge of servitude to an alien yoke." It is a common error to suppose that this influx of French words was owing mainly, if not entirely, to poetry. It is to the technical phraseology of science, arts, and commerce that we must look for its real cause ; and, as a matter of fact, the poets were singularly reserved in the employment of foreign words, and, when not constrained by the necessities of rhyme, preferred, if not a strictly Anglo-Saxon diction, at least a dialect composed of words which use had already familiarized to the English people. Sir John Mandeville, the earliest prose writer of this period, whose travels were written in 1356, employed a larger proportion of foreign words than is to be found in the works of Langlande, Chaucer, Gower, or any other English poet of that century. It is in the "Vision of Piers Plough- man," which appeared between 1360 and 1370, that Mr. Marsh recognizes the earliest unmistakeably English literary production. Its authorship is commonly ascribed to one Langlande, an English monk. We have not space to follow Mr. Marsh through all his observations on this remarkable poem. We may, however, notice that it was an eminently popular work, and that it is cha- racterized to a remarkable degree by the element of humour, of which no trace is to be found in any extant remains of Anglo- Saxon poetry or prose. The proportion of foreign words which it contains is as great as that found in the works of Chaucer ; but the structure of its dialect is more archaic, and there are many words which are now obsolete, as well as not a few the meaning of which is entirely unknown. The moods and tenses of the verbs had acquired very nearly their present force, and the curious and intricate distinction which we now make between the two auxiliaries shall and will appears to have been observed almost as rigorously as it is at the present day. The next great literary work is the translation of the Bible, commonly known as Wycliffe's, which was completed somewhere about 1380. There is considerable difference in the dialect and grammatical con- struction of the earlier and later portions of this version ; and, in fact, the first part, from Genesis to Baruch iii. 20, is generally ascribed to Hereford, an English ecclesiastic, while the rest of the Apocrypha and the whole of the New Testa- ment is known to be the work of Wycliffe. In connection with this work Mr. Marsh observes that "it is a noteworthy circumstance in the history of the literature of Protestant countries, that in every one of them the creation or revival of a national literature has commenced with, or at least been announced by, a translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular, which has been remarkable both as an accurate representation of the original text, and as an exhibition of the heat power of expression possessed by the language at that stage of its de- velopment. Hence, in all these countries, these versions have had a very great influence, not only upon religious opinion, but upon literary effort in other fields, and, indeed, upon the whole
philological history of the nation." As examples of this general truth, he cites, besides Wycliffe's translation, the Danish version of 1550, and the German of Luther. If the literary influence exercised by the first of these works was less important than that exerted by the two latter, the reason of the difference is to be sought, not in any inferiority of Wycliffe's version, but in the immensely greater difficulties which beset its circulation at that early period. On the whole, Mr. Marsh concludes that, "though Langlande and the school of Wycliffe are not to be looked upon as great immediate agencies in the general improve- ment of written English, or as standards of the literary dialect in their own age, there can be little doubt that they did exercise a direct influence upon the diction of Chaucer, and, through him, on the whole literature of the nation."
It is scarcely necessary to observe that Mr. Marsh does full justice to the services rendered by Chaucer to his native tongue. He regards him, in fact, as in a peculiar sense the father of the English language. The period at which he appeared was, as Mr. Marsh points out, a very important one in English philo- logical history. Before his time, the language was entirely without a standard of literary authority, and, consequently, had no fixedness nor uniformity, and scarcely deserved to be called a written speech. There had, indeed, been some writers—the author of the " Omeulum," for example—whose syntax and ortho- graphy were so uniform that a consistent accidence might be constructed from them ; but there was no common grammatical or orthographical system to which all authors were compelled to conform. Moreover, the English and French languages, which had hitherto been running side by side, had, in the early part of the fourteenth century, begun to coalesce ; and this process was going on with a rapidity which threatened a predominance of the French, if not a total extinction of the Saxon, element. This tendency had been in some measure arrested by the political events of the latter part of the reign of Edward HI. ; but an arbiter was needed at the critical moment of the severance of the two peoples and dialects, to preside over the division of the common property, and to determine what share of the contributions of France should be permanently annexed to the English tongue. Such an arbi- ter was found in Geoffry Chaucer, who, as far as regards com- pass, flexibility, expressiveness, grace, and all the higher qualities of poetical diction, gave at once to the English language the ut- most perfection which it was capable of receiving, and clothed it with a form which, in all essential points, is identical with that which it wears at the present day. Of the intrinsic merit of Chaucer's works, regarded, not from a philological, but from a poetical point of view, Mr. Marsh entertains the highest possible opinion. Gower he rates much less highly, observing that his re- putation was for a long time above his merits, and conjecturing that his literary inferiority is, perhaps, to be ascribed to the fact that he did not possess the manly independence and moral cou- rage of Wycliffe and Chaucer, and was unable to shake off the feeling of deference to traditional authority, which in all ages has proved so generally fatal to originality in productive intellec- tual effort.
Mr. Marsh's survey of the period between Chaucer and Shakes- peare is comparatively brief, and presents fewer points of general interest than the earlier portion of his work. It contains, how- ever, a fair share of valuable observations, to which we cannot, for want of space, more particularly direct the reader's attention. We are quite aware that the imperfect outline which we have been able to give can convey but a very inadequate notion of the value of Mr. Marsh's volume. It may however, we hope, be found sufficient to induce the reader to turn to the book itself. We can confidently assure him that he will not be disappointed.
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