VII. ANGLO SAXON: THE OLD AND THE NEW.* We find the older forms of the Anglo-Saxon element in history and language, and its chief home in England. We find the newer phases in actual and prospective life, and its later sphere especially American. We study both history and language more and in better ways than formerly. We have fresher text - books, and more quickening teachers. Grote and Gibbon, Macaulay and Motley, Buckle and Froude, Bunsen and Guizot, have made history quite another thing. We are not now treated to dry details, to prolix and tedious narrations, to stiff pictures of the court and cloister, the conspiracies and campaigns, the bullying and the battles. Now, to read a page of the historian is often like opening a gallery of splendid portraits, where we look into the very faces of the leading actors of bygone times and buried nations. The departed years seem to come back at our bidding, and the dead live anew, to turn a new leaf is like unrolling a vast panorama, where whole generations sweep by in an eager procession, impelled more by the hand of Providence than by the force of the will. The various nations clasp hands. The whole race is seen to be a unit. The products of life at *Purely historical matter and also extensive poetical illustrations,-in certain ways necessary to the popular lecture,—are omitted here. lands are The latest one period appear as the outcome of seed scattered centuries before. The most remote bound to each other by a thousand ties. civilization is seen thrusting its roots into the grave of the earliest. History, read in this way, becomes at once teacher, inspirer and prophet; man rises in dignity; society is a wondrous growth, and God's Providence takes on new majesty. Since Schlegel and Grimm, Turner and Latham, Max Müller, Craik, Marsh and Whitney have put us upon the study of Comparative Philology, we find a meaning in language such as the old dictionary and grammar never suggested. It is no longer a mere mechanical instrument, or a set of accepted symbols, but an organism, a growth, a living thing. The people that used it poured into it their lifeblood and gave it a soul. It registers the changes through which their life has passed. It still carries all their beautiful fancies as though they were fresh blossoms. It swells with their great hopes. It keeps the soldier's battle - cry and enshrines his valor. The mother's lullabies run through it like a thread of melody. It catches up the laughter of little children, who made music in the household, and sends it ringing down the centuries. Wherever a new tide of life has come into a land, the language marks the precise point which it reaches, as the Nilometer at Cairo marks the rise of the great river that holds the great desert at bay and makes Egypt a garden. Reading the literature and analyzing the speech of an extinct people, we pos sess more than half their secrets we know even their rarer experiences; and we read their character as the geologist reads off the condition of the earth in a remote period by looking over the fossils in a museum. Borne over from its Teutonic home in lower Germany, the Saxon element roots itself in the English soil, crowding out or taking up the Celtic elements which still tarry, and working them into its own organism. The sunshine of the Christian faith falls upon it, making it less rough and more flexible. It takes the deposit which the Danish invasion brings, and, although warped and hindered, it grows still. It bends and shivers when the Norman avalanche comes thundering down upon coast and midland, but it is not uprooted, and it will not die; -nay, it shows fresh vigor and bears ampler fruit. It starts out for a broader sphere in the new world, and finds it. Clasping its roots about Plymouth Rock, it pushes its branches on across the continent, and stops for no rest till, descending the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, it is checked by the waves of the Pacific. Certainly, in all this it shows its toughness, its tenacity, its power of assimilation, and so proves the strength of its life, and prophesies its victorious future. Turning now to the English Language, we shall find that the Anglo-Saxon element is not less powerful and important than it has been in English history. As the Anglo-Saxons were a branch of the Old Teutonic family, so their language, when they made themselves masters of England, was a branch. of the Old Teutonic tongue. Less than forty words can now be found in our tongue that were used by the early Britons. The Danish invasion added a small stock of words, but they were neither numerous nor important enough to produce any marked effect. The missionaries brought in the Latin tongue, for this was the language of scholars throughout Europe, and held nearly all the ecclesiastical learning of the time. But as few of the Saxons were scholars, it was not much used among the people, but remained in the cloister or circulated in the narrow circles of the learned few. But the Norman conquest brought a change in speech as well as in general life. The language used by these Normans at this time was what is known as Norman - French, differing from other French only by having more or less Scandinavian words mixed with it, which they had brought from their home in the North. This Norman, or Norman - French, came originally from the Latin. After the fall of the Roman Empire, some centuries before, the old Latin language, which had been spoken in Italy, became broken into fragments, and gave rise to the family of languages known as the Romance, of which the modern Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the French are the chief members. It was the French, coming from the shattered Latin, and lacking the finish of the French of to-day, which these conquering Normans brought into England. They meant to root out the Saxon tongue and put their own in its place. But these plucky and defiant Saxons utterly refused to give up their native speech and use that of their hated conquerors. And so the two languages. fought for life and supremacy. The Normans were the rulers, and they tried the virtue of law and coercion. Only the Norman tongue was used at court, in camp, in parliament, in the baron's hall or the lady's boudoir. In this language the laws were̱ written, and all judicial proceedings conducted. No civil contract was binding, no man could sue or be sued, no right could be enforced, no wrong redressed, no favor won, except in the language of the governing race. The first step for every Saxon serf who wished to rise to anything like equality with his Norman neighbor, was to forget his mother tongue and train his lips to the speech of his foreign masters. The Normans inhabited the towns, managed the markets, held most of the money, and kept the mastery of trade. The Saxons dwelt in the country, tilled the soil, furnished the supplies and talked in the old speech. So that, while this state of things lasted, there were three distinct languages in use. The Latin was used in the schools, and among the scholars in the church; the Norman at the court, the bar and the market; the Saxon over the wide domain of rural life. And yet these different classes mingled with some freedom. |