CHAPTER I THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH Excellence in English is often sought too far afield. The trouble with many English grammarians and rhetoricians has been that they have known too much. By the time a man has mastered the hundreds of parts of the Latin and the Greek verb and the Hiphil, Hophal, and Hithpael of the Hebrew; when he knows the five declensions of Latin and the three of Greek nouns, and the various declensions of adjectives to suit all those nouns; when he has labored through the Slough of Despond of German genders, and added a light fringe of French, Spanish, and Italian eccentricities, he is apt to become an incarnate inflection. He feels that language exists in order to be inflected. That is what it is for. It is beautiful and rich according as it can be tabulated in paradigms under the law of permutations. If he is a teacher, the possibilities of browbeating and sidetracking pupils, and of enticing them into labyrinths where he alone holds the thread, become so alluring and soul-satisfying that he looks upon all that is self-evident and straightforward with the scorn of an expert in mysteries and occult arts. When there are no more dead or otherwise foreign languages to conquer, he sweeps his glance over the unfortunate English speech and sees it destitute and denuded of all its beloved intricacy-only here and there some remnant of old declension or conjugation standing separate and lonely, like surviving stumps after a forest fire. His grammatical soul aches over the "lost inflections," and he puts on sackcloth and ashes for the "poverty" of his native tongue. English simplicity has become the "wailing place" of grammatical exiles. In this strange language, which simply adds one word to another and depends on having every word in its natural place, it is no longer possible to bury the subject in a mass of vocables and extricate it by the sure token that it is the only noun in the sentence which is not in the genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, or ablative case, and must, therefore, be the long-lost subject; or to put the adjective at one end of the sentence and the noun at the other, and have them respond to each other like the poles of an electric battery, however many miles of insulated wire the current may have to pass through between them. If compelled to express himself in this absurdly simple speech, he finds unexpected difficulties for want of the linguistic stays and trusses on which his foreign models have accustomed him to depend, and suffers the fate of the cab-horse in "Pickwick" that "would fall down as soon as he was took out of harness.” He writes sentences like the card which a Greek professor is said to have put on the door of a college chapel at Oxford, 'Chapel will commence tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, and continue until further notice." He discovers or, at least, his readers or hearers discoverthat the seeming ease of English expression is a fine art, which no one may hope to attain by laboriously learning "how not to do it." He longs to recast the language, and run it into traditional molds, from which it should come forth with cogs and cams and dovetails to be interlocked with mathematical precision. For some centuries the mechanics of language labored hard to import into English exotic complications, especially adaptations of Latin rules and idioms. But those importations did not thrive in the rigorous English climate, where the winds of common sense are so very free and strong; and there is now a prevalent disposition to make the best of a bad bargain, holding that as we are saddled with a language that knows no better than to say outright what it has to say, we must try to get some approximate order into this makeshift speech, giving attractive glimpses here and there of the beautiful inflected languages, ancient and modern, which the pupil may hope to learn in the happier days to come, and the learning of which is the chief use of the formless English speech. Hence, English grammar has been largely apologetic, its keynote being that we express ourselves in this or that way because we can do no better, and that such a method is the best means of handling these loose threads of language, which have never been properly wound upon the bobbin of inflection. Richard Grant White proposed to cut the Gordian knot by treating English as "The Grammarless Tongue." But his system did not prevail because it was not a system. The stubborn subconsciousness of the English-speaking world knows that there is a grammatical system in our language, if it can only be exhumed from under the explanations in which it has been buried. The key of this system is simplicity-always the most elusive thing in any line of research. Scholarship can discover everything except the obvious. The simplicity of English, which has been the torment of learned research, is the triumph and glory of the existing speech. The simplification of English speech was at first a dis |