Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/203



N the preceding article was given an account of the melancholy views which have been expressed at times by various writers of eminence in regard to the condition of the language. The historical survey made, brief as it was compared with what it could have been, renders it clear that there is nothing peculiar to any period about these utterances. Illustrations of the same nature could be multiplied endlessly, never more so than now; though it is fair to add, rarely in any age from men of the intellectual grade of Swift and Landor. The Beatties and Miss Bowdlers will never die out. Furthermore, it is to be said that from views of this sort there has never been much dissent. Dryden indeed, writing in 1670, maintained that the language had been improving since the era of the great dramatists, instead of degenerating. But in this instance, as in so many others, he was arguing as an advocate; he was not speaking as a judge. It is plain from his further words that the opinion he expressed was not the opinion generally entertained. He admitted that many in his time insisted that from Ben Jonson's death to their own day English, speech "had been in a continual declination like that of the Romans from the age of Virgil to Statins, and so downwards to Claudian."

In truth, if we take for authority the contemporary opinion of successive periods, there is no escape from the conclusion that, for the past two hundred years at least, our tongue has been steadily deteriorating. There is in it an innate depravity which tends to make it go wrong. As if this were not enough, there are always certain mischievous and irresponsible persons who are engaged in the work of destroying its purity. In Swift's time it was the frequenters of the court, the theatrical writers, the translators from the French, and the poets. In Beattie's time it was the political pamphleteers and essayists. But during the last hundred years the agency which has been the favorite one to accuse of corrupting the language is the newspaper. Exactly why this particular form of literary production should be deemed responsible for the ever-impending ruin is not very clear. The writers for the press, at least for the leading journals, are generally a picked body of men. They suffer indeed from the necessity of producing work under the pressure of instant demand. To counterbalance this disadvantage, they are, as a rule, in earnest. They are partisans, and sometimes bitter partisans. In consequence they are usually in a state of wrath against something or somebody. No one needs to be told that few things conduce more than wrath to impart clearness, directness, and energy to expression; and these are qualities that contribute to purity of speech and not to its corruption. Accordingly the dangers to be anticipated from the newspaper are really little more than creations of the imagination.

At this point attention must be called to the falsity of the belief, once widely and perhaps generally entertained, that the inrush of new words and phrases into a language is evidence of the influences at work in it tending to produce corruption. Men, it was held, should be content with what sufficed their fathers. On the contrary, the number of new locutions which at any given time are presenting themselves for admission into a tongue is a pretty accurate indication of the degree of intellectual activity prevailing among those who speak it. The largeness of the number of words struggling for entrance is a sign of the health of a language, not of its decay. To these as-