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                            THE CHAUTAUQUAN.

      _A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE.
        ORGAN OF THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE._

                VOL. V.      DECEMBER, 1884.      No. 3.




Officers of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.


_President_, Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio. _Superintendent of Instruction_,
Rev. J. H. Vincent, D.D., New Haven, Conn. _Counselors_, Rev. Lyman
Abbott, D.D.; Rev. J. M. Gibson, D.D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D.D.;
Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, D.D. _Office Secretary_, Miss Kate F. Kimball,
Plainfield, N. J. _General Secretary_, Albert M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa.




Contents

Transcriber’s Note: This table of contents of this periodical was created
for the HTML version to aid the reader.

    REQUIRED READING FOR DECEMBER
    What English Is                                                 123
    Sunday Readings
        [_December 7_]                                              127
        [_December 14_]                                             127
        [_December 21_]                                             128
        [_December 28_]                                             128
    Glimpses of Ancient Greek Life
        III.—Greek Private Life                                     129
    Greek Mythology
        Chapter III.                                                131
    Temperance Teachings of Science; or, the Poison Problem
        Chapter III.—Physiological Effects of the Poison Habit      134
    Studies in Kitchen Science and Art
        III.—Barley, Oats, Rice and Buckwheat                       137
        The Cereals                                                 139
    Home Studies in Chemistry and Physics
        III.—Chemistry of Air                                       141
    The Laureate Poets                                              144
    The Spell of the Halcyon                                        146
    Christmas Dangers and Christmas Hints                           147
    Do Animals Feign Death?                                         150
    The War Department                                              151
    Milton as the Poets’ Poet                                       154
    Geography of the Heavens for December                           155
    The Liberal Upheaval in Norway                                  157
    How to Help the C. L. S. C.                                     158
    Outline of Required Readings                                    160
    Programs for Local Circle Work                                  160
    How to Organize a Local Circle                                  161
    The Local Circle                                                162
    Local Circles                                                   163
    The C. L. S. C. Classes                                         167
    Questions and Answers                                           168
    The Chautauqua University                                       170
    Editor’s Outlook                                                171
    Editor’s Note-Book                                              174
    C. L. S. C. Notes on Required Readings for December             176
    Notes on Required Readings in “The Chautauquan”                 178
    People’s Christmas Vesper and Praise Service                    180
    Talk About Books                                                181
    Special Notes                                                   182




REQUIRED READING FOR DECEMBER.




WHAT ENGLISH IS.

BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.


In the course of our two foregoing articles we followed the advance of
the great Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we belong, from its
original seat in Central Asia, which it began to leave more than four
thousand years ago, until we found it in possession of India, Persia,
and all of Europe. We considered briefly and incidentally the fact
that within the last two hundred and fifty years this Asiatic race has
taken absolute possession of the greater part of the continent of North
America. We saw that speech was the bond and the token of the now vast
and vague, but once narrow and compact, unity of this powerful race,
which was brought into existence to conquer, to rule, and to humanize the
world. Of the numerous languages which have sprung from the Aryan stem,
English is the youngest. Compared in age with any other language of that
stock, we may almost say with any existing language of any stock, it is
like a new born babe in the presence of hoary eld. Only eight hundred
years ago it was unknown. True, its rudiments and much of its substance
then existed; but so it might be said that they existed in a certain
degree four thousand years ago, as we saw in our last article. Yet again,
more than four hundred years passed away before modern English was born.
It was not until about the beginning of the sixteenth century that the
language of Spenser, of Shakspere, of the Bible, of Bunyan, of Milton,
of Goldsmith, Burke, Irving, Hawthorne, and Thackeray, came fully into
existence as the recognized established speech of the English race.

Since that time the changes it has undergone have been trivial and
unimportant. Like the languages of all other highly civilized peoples,
it has received many additions, but its essential character has not
changed; its structure has been modified so slightly that the change is
perceptible only on the closest examination; its syntactical construction
has remained unshaken. The prose of Spenser and Shakspere and the
correspondence of the educated men of their day is as easily understood
by an unlettered English speaking man of our day as the prose of Sir
Arthur Helps or the more intelligible passages in the daily newspapers.
During that time, indeed, there have been changes of style in writing
English, which are more or less distinctive of periods. A reader of
moderate experience and discrimination can soon tell whether a page that
is put before him was written in the Elizabethan period, in that of the
Restoration (Charles II.), in that of Queen Anne, or that of Victoria.
But the differences by which his judgment would be guided are differences
of tone, of manner, of “the way of putting things,” of certain tricks of
expression, and are without any relations whatever to the “grammar,” or
to the essential character of language. The presence of words not in use
at one period, but which came into use at another, is an important means
of such a discrimination. But, in the first place, the introduction of
new words does not modify the essential character of a language; and in
the next we are not now considering a criticism which goes so far as to
examine the history of the English vocabulary.

This modern English, which is the youngest, is also the greatest language
ever spoken. A man may be supposed, not unreasonably, to be prejudiced
in favor of his mother tongue; but the judgment that declares in favor
of English against all other languages, even Greek, needs neither motive
nor support from prejudice. The two facts, that the English language is
the vehicle and the medium of a literature unequaled by that produced in
any other known tongue, and that it is becoming the common intermediary
and most widely diffused speech of the world, show that it possesses in
the highest degree the two essential elements of a great and complete
language—adaptation to man’s highest and to his homeliest needs in
expression. There is no other known language in which “King Lear,”
“Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” the Falstaff scenes in “King Henry
the Fourth,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Paradise Lost,” the Roger de
Coverley papers of the “Spectator,” “The Elegy in a Country Churchyard,”
“The Vicar of Wakefield” and “She Stoops to Conquer,” “The School for
Scandal,” “Waverley,” “The Antiquary” and “The Fortunes of Nigel,”
“Childe Harold” and “Don Juan,” “The Pickwick Papers,” “Henry Esmond,”
“Adam Bede” and “Romola,” “In Memoriam” and “Sir Galahad,” “The Earthly
Paradise,” “Child Roland” and “The Scarlet Letter” could _all_ have been
written. No other language is at once grand enough and simple enough,
strong enough and flexible enough, lofty enough and homely enough to be
the natural, fitting and complete utterance of the literature of which
these are the typical productions, and to be, moreover, at the same time
perfectly adapted to the needs of the jurist, the politician, the man
of business, and the mariner. I remember that once on the St. Lawrence,
on the way to Quebec, as the steamer came to a landing, the French
officer on the “bridge” screamed an order to the engineer, “_Arretez
donc, Alphonse! arretez donc!_”[1] and that then I recollected that the
day before on the British steamer in which I left Montreal, the English
officer in just the same situation had quietly said, in his strong,
firm voice, “Hold hard!” and that I then thought not only how much more
effective those two syllables were as a phrase of nautical command, but
that they might be used by an English poet in a passage of grand and
strong emotion. English has no words which are too great or too little,
too fine or too homely to be used when need requires. English words
change their character and their expression according to their connection
and the manner in which they are uttered.

English owes its supremacy first, to the vigorous vitality of its germ
and the clean robustness of its stem; next, to the rich and infinitely
varied word-growth, which this trunk supports and nourishes. All
languages are more or less composite, but of all languages English is
most composite. It has been largely and richly grafted. It is, of all
languages, the most complex in substance, and the simplest in structure.
This simplicity of structure enables the uneducated man—Bunyan, for
example—to use it with correctness and force, while the vast variety of
its substance adapts it to all the needs of poet and philosopher. Let us
see how such a language came into existence, and what it is.

The people which spoke the English language when it assumed its modern
form, had made it. This may seem to be the sort of truth which is
triteness; but it is not so. The people which speaks a language generally
does make it; but not always, as we shall see. The people who made
the English language, and who made England, were of that part of the
great Aryan family which had taken possession of the northwestern part
of Europe—that which lies around the southern and western part of the
Baltic Sea. It is commonly said that the English are a very composite and
heterogeneous people. In a narrow sense this is true, but in a large and
really significant sense it is quite untrue. In his welcome to the Danish
princess Alexandra, when she arrived in England to become Princess of
Wales, the poet laureate prettily availed himself of the minor truth, to
sing

    “Saxon and Dane and Norman are we,
     But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra!”

The English race is, and for more than five hundred years has been
compounded of Saxons (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), Danes and Normans. But
these three peoples were of such close kindred that, in Launcelot Gobbo’s
phrase, they were “cater cousins.”[A] They were all Goths; the Danes and
the Normans were both Scandinavians; and the Saxons, the Angles, and
particularly the Jutes, although they were Low German tribes (the term
Low German meaning merely inhabitants of the lower parts of Germany near
the sea) were, because of their origin, and also of their neighborhood to
the others, so like them in blood and in speech that the difference was
rather superficial than essential.

These Jutes, Angles and Saxons, continuing the armed Aryan progress
westward, went to Britain in companies of hundreds and thousands,
and fighting their way from the shore inland at various points, and
continually reinforced from their hive on the continent, in the course of
about one hundred and fifty years they obtained complete possession of
the island, from the Tweed to the Channel, excepting only the mountainous
part at the west, now called Wales. They seem not to have mingled with
the conquered Britains, who it will be remembered were Celts, but to have
wholly displaced them, to have swept the land clean of them, except
in Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, and a small remnant in Cornwall,
the extreme southwestern point of the island. They carried with them
their Scandinavian-tinged Low German speech (called for convenience
Anglo-Saxon), which became the language of the country whose name their
presence and possession changed from Britain to Angle-land, Engel-land,
England. But when they had established themselves they were not left
undisturbed. The Danes poured in upon them at the north, and soon getting
foot-hold, they in their turn attempted the conquest of the whole island.
They succeeded so nearly that they not only obtained possession of the
northern part of the England of that day, but of the government; and
three Danish kings[B] ruled the land at London. They did not, however,
like the Anglo-Saxons, destroy their predecessors; partly from lack of
strength to accomplish such a destruction, and partly, it would seem,
from affinities of race and habits of life. Danes and Anglo-Saxons
mingled; although the former were chiefly confined to the northern part
of the country. One result of this conquest and intermingling was a
modification of the speech of the country, particularly at the north.
It received a strong Scandinavian infusion, the alterative influence of
which has been recognized more and more by philologists as they have
studied the structure and history of the English language. It should be
said here, and