The Study of Modern Languages.

[In connection with these lectures, the kindness of Mrs. Mabel Lowell Burnett has made it possible to re-publish some selections from an address, given by James Russell Lowell before the Modern Language Association of America, in which are many sentiments kindred to those expressed in the lectures].

I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that a man is as many men as he knows languages, and still less with Lord Burleigh that such polyglottism is but "to have one meat served in divers dishes." But I think that to know the literature of another language, whether dead or living matters not, gives us the prime benefits of foreign travel. It relieves us from what Richard Lassels aptly calls a "moral Excommunication;" it greatly widens the mind's range of view, and therefore of comparison, thus strengthening the judicial faculty; and it teaches us to consider the relations of things to each other and to some general scheme rather than to ourselves; above all, it enlarges aethetic charity. It has seemed to me also that a foreign language, quite as much as a dead one, has the advantage of putting whatever is written in it at just such a distance as is needed for a proper mental perspective. No doubt this strangeness, this novelty, adds much to the pleaure we feel in reading the literature of other languages than our own. It plays the part of poet for us by putting familiar things in an unaccustomed way so deftly that we feel as if we had gained another sense and had ourselves a share in the sorcery that is practiced on us. The words of our mother tongue have been worn smooth by so often rubbing against our lips or minds, while the alien word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In our critical estimates we should be on our guard against this charm.

In reading such books as chiefly deserve to be read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to such a nice discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way. Those who have tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. That is the bird in the hand. The real meaning, the soul of it, that which makes it literature and not jargon, that is the bird in the bush which tantalizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses we catch of it as it flits from one to another lurking-place,-

"Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri."

After all, I am driven back to my Vergil again, you see, for the happiest expression of what I was trying to say. It was these shy allurements and provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an original poet of him in the very act of translating. I cite this instance merely by way of hint that as a spur to the mind, as an open-sesame to the treasures of our native vocabulary, the study of a living language (for literary, not linguistic, ends) may serve as well as that of any which we rather inaptly call dead.

We are told that perfection of form can be learned only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true that many among them attained to, or developed out of some hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense of proportion and of the helpful relation of parts to the whole organism which other races mostly grope after in vain. Spenser, in the enthusiasm of his new Platonism, tells us that "Soul is form,and doth the body make," and no doubt this is true of the highest artistic genius. Form without soul, the most obsequious observance of the unities, the most perfect a priori adjustment of parts, is a lifeless

things, like those machines of perpetual motion, admirable in every way but one-that they will not go. I believe that I understand and value form as much as I should, but I also believe that some of those who have insisted most strongly on its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of art have imprisoned the word "soul" in a single one of its many meanings and the sould itself in a single one of its many functions. For the sould is not only that which gives form, but that which gives life, the mysterious and pervasive essence always in itself beautiful, not always so in the shapes which it informs, but even then full of infinite suggestion. In literature it is what we call genius, an insoluble ingredient which kindles, lights, inspires and transmits impulsion to other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent, and makes them startlingly aware that they too may be parts of the controlling purpose of the world. A book may be great in other ways than as a lesson in form, and it may be for other qualities that it is most precious to us.

Many-sidedness is the essence of culture and it matters less what a man learns than how he learns it. The day will come, nay, it is dawning already, when it will be understood that the masterpieces of whatever language are not to be classed by an arbitrary standard, but stand on the same level in virtue of being masterpieces; that thought, imagination and fancy may make even a patois acceptable to scholars; that the poets of all climes and of all ages "sing to one clear harp in divers tones;" and that the masters of prose and the masters of verse in all tongues teach the same lesson and exact the same fee.

I began by saying that I had no wish to renew the Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to look upon the literatures of the ancient and modern worlds as antagonists, but rather as friendly rivals in the effort to tear as many as may be from the barbarizing plutolatry which seems to be so rapidly supplanting the worship of what alone is lovely and enduring. No, they are not antagonists, but by their points of disparity, of likeness, or contrast, they can be best understood, perhaps understood only through each other. The scholar must have them both, but may not he who has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in the lesser of the two, if that only be at

tainable? Have I admitted that one is the lesser? O matre pulchra filia pulchrior is perhaps what I should say here.

If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better. And that something better is Literature. Let us rescue ourselves from what Milton calls "these grammatic flats and shallows." The blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots; for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of the mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful.

What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to take the course in modern languages as being quite as good in point of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar whcih made our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is only through this record of Man's joys and sorrows, of his aspirations and failures, of his thought, his speculation, and his dreams, that we can become complete men, and learn both what he is and what he may be, for it is the unconscious autobiography of mankind. And has no page been added to it since the last ancient classic author laid down his pen?