Page:The Popular Educator Volume 1.djvu/18

 two identical. Grammar is only one branch of the tree. Important as grammar is, it is scarcely the most important of the branches which combine to form the knowledge of a language. Grammar is only a means to an end. It is a pathway to the temple. The temple itself is the treasure of great thoughts which constitutes the literature, and which we have termed the productions of a language. It is for this treasure that a language is worth the labour of study; and in regard to literary treasures, no language will repay attention more fully than the English.

From what has been said, it is also clear that the grammar of a language is to be learnt in its literature. Grammar is no arbitrary thing. Its rules are not inventions. Its forms are not optional. They are both merely general statements of facts—facts ascertained by the careful perusal of what we term classical authors; that is, authors of high and universal repute. The office of grammar is to make a systematic report of the usages observed in writing by the great minds of a nation. Hence grammar is a science of imitation. The grammarian, like the sculptor, takes a model, and having studied its parts and qualities, endeavours to reproduce the whole. Authority, in consequence, is the great principle recognised in grammar. The authority of such men as Macaulay, Mackintosh, Addison, Dryden, Shakespeare, is, in grammar, paramount and supreme. What they do we must follow, and we must follow it because it is their practice. Their words, their forms of speech, their constructions must be ours. They are our masters, we their scholars. They give laws, we obey the laws they give. Scarcely less than implicit and unqualified ought the obedience to be; for grammar merely declares what is customary, and what is customary in a language is known by what is customary among its best writers.

Let it be observed that it is the English language that we are about to study. Consequently it is the qualities and the laws of that language that it will be our business to ascertain. If we were studying Sanscrit or Hebrew, then the qualities and the laws of the Sanscrit and the Hebrew would be the object of our search. Disregarding them, we are equally to disregard the qualities and the laws of the Latin. The best of Latin grammars would be a very bad English grammar, and a usage in Latin is no authority for the introduction into English of a similar usage.

The principles now set forth determine the mode of our proceeding. We have no intention to copy forms and rules from the writings of former grammarians, or to arbitrarily devise forms and rules. We shall rather take the language as it is, and inquire into its qualities and laws. Beginning with the simplest enunciations of thought, we shall aid the student to analyse them, and from such analysis to deduce for himself the fundamental facts and principles of the English tongue. This process must be gone through three times: first, in regard to the forms of the language or its grammar; secondly, in regard to the productions of the language or its literature: and thirdly, as an appendage to the last, in regard to the origin and progress of the language or its history. If the reader attentively accompany us over this extended field, he will possess a full as well as accurate acquaintance with the English language.

Language is the expression of thought by means of articulate sounds, as painting is the expression of thought by means of form and colour. The relations which subsist between our thoughts, when carefully analysed and set forth systematically, give rise to logic. The laws and conditions under which the expression of our thoughts takes place form the basis of grammar. The logician has to do with states of the intellect, the grammarian is concerned with verbal utterances.

A cursory attention to the subject will suffice to prove that there are laws of speech. There is, indeed, no province of the universe of things but is subject to law. Each object has its own mode of existence, which, in conjunction with the sphere of circumstances which surround it, gives rise to the laws and conditions by which it is controlled. Accordingly, language takes its laws from the organs by which sound is made articulate, from the culture of the intelligent beings by whom these organs are employed, from the purposes for which speech is designed, and from even the medium and other outward influences in union with which these purposes are pursued.

Were there no such laws the science of grammar could not exist. The sciences are in each case a systematic statement of generalised facts—in other words, of definite laws; and grammar rests on phenomena clearly ascertained, invariable in themselves, capable of being distinctly stated, and equally capable of being wrought into a system of general truths.

If the conditions under which thought became speech had been in all cases the same, there would only have been one language on the face of the earth. Descending as mankind did from a common progenitor, the various tribes would have spoken a common tongue. But at Babel the builders were "scattered abroad," and became subjected to outward influences of the most diversified character, and engaged in the most varied kinds of life. Men's pursuits were different almost from the first. Climate and soil change with every change of locality. And both original endowments and the degree of culture super-induced by external influences, or what may be termed indirect education, would be as diverse as the tribes, not to say the individuals of which the species consisted. All these diversified influences would speedily beget varieties in speech which time would increase and harden into different languages.

From this diversity there arise two kinds of grammar the universal and the particular. Universal grammar is formed by studying language in general, by passing in review the several languages which exist (or most of them), and selecting and classifying those facts which are common to all. Particular grammar is the result of the study of any one given language. By a careful consideration of the usages of the best English writers we discover what constitutes English grammar. If, after we have ascertained the laws of a number of separate languages, we then compare our discoveries one with another, and mark and systematise what we find common to them all, we compose a treatise on general grammar. Particular grammar resembles the anatomy of the human frame, and limits its teachings to one set of objects. Universal grammar is like comparative anatomy, which treats of the general laws of animal life, as deduced from a minute study of the animal kingdom in general.

It is with particular grammar that we are here concerned;—of the grammar of our nation—namely, the English—we have to treat.

Grammar and logic, or the laws of expression and the laws of thought, are, we have seen, closely connected together in the nature of things. Not easily, then, can they be sundered in manuals of instruction. If separate, they are related sciences; as being related to each other, they may afford mutual light and aid. Requiring separate treatment, they each give and receive illustration. Grammar assists the logician to put his thoughts into a lucid form; and logic assists the grammarian to make his utterances correspond to the exact analogy of his thoughts. No one can be a perfect grammarian who is entirely without logic; and no logician who neglects grammar can successfully convey his ideas to others.

But in a manual which proposes to handle the subject of grammar, and of English grammar, reference to logic must be tacit and latent; it may be felt, it must not be displayed. Yet, in at least one or two terms will our obligation to logic be more positive and outward, for we shall borrow from that science such words as subject, attribute, predicate, and the like; and this because these terms, when once their import is understood, afford facilities for explanation far greater than the ordinary terms employed in English grammars. In these cases, however, and in other things in which we shall depart from what is usual, we shall also supply the customary views and the ordinary terms.

As the English language, like other languages, was spoken before its laws were formed into a systematic treatise called a grammar, so the real facts of the language, in their primary and their model form, exist and are to be looked for ID the every-day speech of well-educated persons. Hence the speech of educated persons is of authority in grammar no less than the language of the best authors. Nay, we seem likely to find a language in its greater purity when we take it from the lips of educated persons generally than when we derive it from the somewhat artificial shapes which it assumes in the learned or the popular volume. If so, "household words" are good for grammar as well as for practical wisdom. And so it is in the nursery we may look for the English tongue in a form the most simple and yet the most idiomatic. Of all teachers of English grammar the best is a well-educated English mother. Hence it is evident that a nursery, in a cultivated English home, is the best school of English grammar. As a matter of fact, it is in such schools