have been chasing all these centuries ever since the revival of letters, every now and then fancying they had seized. them, till they were roused from their sweet delusion by the laughter of their fellow-idlers. The exact distinction between. μn and où, the precise meaning of åv and åpa and dý must forsooth be defined and settled; and it is very possible that we have not yet seen the last of these dreamy lucubrations. These things will be settled when the truant schoolboy has bound the rainbow to a tree. 249. There are still scholars who seek to render a firm reason for the Greek article in every place in which it occurs. But can they do so for their own language? Can they say, for example, what is the value of the definite article which occurs three times in the following distich? And to watch as the little bird watches Where is the man who can handle language so skilfully as to describe and define the value of these articles? He may say they are equivalent to so and so in Greek or in French, but he cannot render an account of what that value is. And yet this word was once a demonstrative pronoun, and it is time and use that has filed it down to this airy tenuity and delicate fineness. The sense would be affected by the absence of these little words, and yet it cannot be said that they are necessary to the sense. They seem to be at once nothing and something. The gold is beaten out to an infinitesimal thinness. Indeed, it is with language as with glory in Shakspeare's description: Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge it selfe, Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught. 1 Henry VI, i. 2. 133. 250. It is painful to think how much good enthusiasm has been wasted upon learning definitions which were not only unreal, but absolutely misleading as to the nature of the thing studied. So far from its being possible to define by rule the value of the Greek particles, it is barely possible to characterize them by a vague general principle. They were the product of usage, and usage is a compound made up of many converging tendencies, and that which was multitudinous in its sources continues to be heterogeneous in its composition. As usage produced it, so use alone can teach it. This is why the skilled examiner will proceed to test a knowledge of Greek by selecting a passage not with many hard words in it, but with this symbolic element delicately exhibited. Hard and rare words are useful as a test whether the books have been got up, but an examination in these furnishes no check on cramming. Whereas, it is a part of the distinct character and peculiar iridescent beauty of the symbolic element that it cannot be acquired by sudden methods: it can only be learnt by a process of gradual habituation, which is study in the true sense of the word, and wholesome exercise for the mind. You cannot tack on mechanically a given English word to a given Greek word in the symbolic element, as you do in the presentive. Symbolic words require different terms of rendering in different connections. They have a relative diversifiability of states and powers and functions, like living things. This is in each language the pith, the marrow, the true mother tongue. This is the element which is nearest of kin to thought; and the efficiency of a writer or speaker depends largely on his power over it: because, the moment he passes beyond object-words and palpable conceptions, there is nothing but the symbolic element that can serve him just to hit off the bright idea in his mind. 251. The following passage shews it well in Greek, and it is a passage borrowed from an Examination Paper. The symbolics are printed in thick type. Ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ἔστε μὲν αἱ σπονδαὶ ἦσαν οὔποτε ἐπαυόμην ἡμᾶς μὲν οἰκτείρων, βασιλέα δὲ καὶ τοὺς σὺν αὐτῷ μακαρίζων, διαθεώμενος αὐτῶν ὅσην μὲν χώραν καὶ οἵαν ἔχοιεν, ὡς δὲ ἄφθονα τὰ ἐπιτήδεια, ὅσους δὲ θεράποντας, ὅσα δὲ κτήνη, χρυσὸν δὲ, ἐσθῆτα δέ. Τὰ δ ̓ αὖ τῶν στρατιωτῶν ὁπότε ἐνθυμοίμην ὅτι τῶν μὲν ἀγαθῶν πάντων οὐδενὸς ἡμῖν μετείη, εἰ μὴ πριαίμεθα, ὅτου δ ̓ ὠνησόμεθα ᾔδειν ὅτι ὀλίγους ἔχοντας, ἄλλως δέ πως πορίζεσθαι τὰ ἐπιτήδεια ἢ ὠνουμένους ὅρκους ἤδη κατέχοντας ἡμᾶς· ταῦτ ̓ οὖν λογιζόμενος ἐνίοτε τὰς σπονδὰς μᾶλλον ἐφοβούμην ἢ νῦν τὸν πόλεμον. Ἐπεὶ μέντοι ἐκεῖνοι ἔλυσαν τὰς σπονδὰς λελύσθαι μοὶ δοκεῖ καὶ ἡ ἐκείνων ὕβρις καὶ ἡ ἡμετέρα ὑποψία.Xenophon, Anabasis, iii. I, § 19. The symbolics in Latin are strikingly different from those in Greek. They differ as the flowers of the florist differ from those of nature. It is manifest to the eye that the symbolics in Greek have grown spontaneously, while their Latin analogues have a got-up and cultivated look. The modifying words especially, those which are sometimes roughly comprised under the term particles, look very much like scholastic products. A long period of Greek education preceded the Augustan age of the Latin language, and the symbolic part could not help getting an educated development, when the youth of successive generations had been daily translating their bits of Greek into the vernacular Latin. 252. Although the symbolics in Latin are very effective when understood, yet it must be allowed that they are very hard to understand. This is one reason why a real Latin scholar, one who can command this title among scholars, is such a very rare personage. The symbolical element, which is to the mode of thought the essential element in every phrase in which it is present, did not grow of itself unconsciously and in the open air as in Greece, but it was the product of artificial elaboration and studied adaptation. And it still sits on the Latin like a ceremonious garment. The old native Latin, whose vitality and functionality was all but purely flectional, springs out of its Greek disguise every now and then, and shews what it can do with its own natural armour. Look at the muscular collectedness of such a sentence as BEATI MUNDO CORDE, and compare it in respect of the total absence of symbolics, either with the Greek Μακάριοι οἱ καθαροὶ τῇ καρδίᾳ, or with the English Blessed are the pure in heart. There spoke out the native and pre-classic Latin, a truly ancient language, and one in comparison with which we must call the Greek truly modern. For that rich and free outflow of the symbolic which marks the Greek, is the badge and characteristic of modernism in language. On the other hand, that independence of symbolics, and that power of action by complete inflectional machinery, which marks the Latin, is the true characteristic and best perfection of the ancient or pre-symbolic era. Not that our monuments reach back absolutely to a period when the symbolic element had yet to begin. Already in the Sanskrit, the symbolic verb is, than which nothing can be more purely symbolic, is in as full maturity as it is in our modern languages. The latter have made more use of it, but the oldest languages of the Aryan race were already in possession of it. We learn from Professor Max Müller that the Sanskrit root is As, 'which, in all the Aryan languages, has supplied the material for the auxiliary verb. Now, even in Sanskrit, it is true, this root as is completely divested of its material character; it means to be, and nothing else. But there is in Sanskrit a derivative of the root as, namely asu, and in this asu, which means the vital breath, the original meaning of the root as has been preserved. As, in order to give rise to such a noun as asu, must have meant to breathe, then to live, then to exist, and it must have passed through all these stages before it could have been used as the abstract auxiliary verb which we find not only in Sanskrit but in all Aryan languages'.' 253. Although we cannot pursue our research so far up into antiquity as to arrive at a station where inflections exist without symbolic words, yet we have sufficient ground for treating flexion as an ancient, and symbolism as a modern phenomenon. One reason is, that in the foremost languages of the world, flexion is waning while symbolism is waxing. Another consideration is this, that after the growth of the symbolic element, the motive for flexion would no longer exist. We have every reason to anticipate in the future of the world's history, that symbolic will continue to develope, and that flexion will cease to grow. A widening divergence separates them at their hither end. But if we could take a look into that far distant antiquity in which they had their rise, we might perhaps find their fountains near each other if not absolutely identified in one well-head. A large part of the inflections are simply words which, having made some progress towards symbolism, and having lost accordingly in specific gravity, have been attracted by, and at length absorbed into, the denser substance of presentive words. This would account for the great start which flexion had over symbolic; and yet we should understand how a marked and prominent symbolic word like is, charged with a singular amount of vitality, should have found the opportunity to make and keep a place for itself even as early as our highest attainable antiquity. 1 Lectures, ii. p. 349. |