ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE 3 43 



I do not mean to say that French is, or will be, in any but the 

 vaguest sense of the term, the international language of literature. If 

 a few writers may be led by the prospect of more rapid success, or merely 

 for personal reasons, to serve under foreign colors, the majority will 

 remain faithful to their mother tongue, great or small, for in it alone 

 their best work can be done. A language spoken by five million men 

 may be as good a literary medium as one used by a hundred and twenty 

 million. Indeed, a Pole, for instance, might actually be better off than 

 a Frenchman in many respects, for he would combine an intenser 

 national feeling with a more cosmopolitan culture. It is possible not 

 only to do good work in the so-called minor languages — most of which 

 have a larger public than English in Shakespeare's time — but also to 

 conquer universal fame. Eussian is little known beyond its frontiers, 

 yet Tolstoy is everywhere admired. New York alone has a much larger 

 population than Norway, but Clyde Fitch's glory has not eclipsed 

 Ibsen's. Sienkiewicz's country is dismembered, his language perse- 

 cuted in Prussia and in Eussia — and who has not read " Quo Vadis " ? 

 Mistral writes in a dialect, a patois, an artificial one at that, the com- 

 bined work of the peasant and of the philologist; no one was surprised 

 when the Nobel prize was awarded him. "We do not see any tendency 

 to a concentration of languages analogous to the Marxian concentration 

 of wealth. But if there were any signs of such a concentration, they 

 would seem to be in favor of French rather than English. 



It seems therefore improbable that this tangled problem of inter- 

 national speech will be solved automatically, by a natural process of 

 selection. One alternative remains to be considered : a universal agree- 

 ment. There is a growing spirit of cooperation among nations, and so 

 the adoption of a world-language is becoming at the same time easier 

 and more desirable as time goes on. Latin was universal when there 

 was a Soman world, Imperial or Catholic; classical French was uni- 

 versal when there was a " classical Europe " ; after a century of divi- 

 sion, the world is recovering the consciousness of its unity. Let us 

 hope that a conference will be called together, and a universal agreement 

 arrived at; what, in an open competition of that sort, would be the 

 chances of English? 



I waive the argument from the present erratic spelling of English. 

 Professor Brander Matthews is doing his best to reform it. Let us 

 hope he will fully succeed, that is to say, that English will be altered 

 beyond recognition. Perhaps the difficult sounds of the language, its 

 weird consonants, its tripthongized vowels, might also be eliminated. 

 The present chaotic state of English accentuation calls for urgent 

 reform. A " Simplified Pronunciation Board " would help us out, by 

 making it a misdemeanor to pronounce English otherwise than in the 

 scientific, or German, way. After such thorough overhauling, English 



