fart HE 



NATIONAL STYLE 



LANGUAGE in a nation is an index to the mental a] 

 emotional character of the nation, to its hereditary ani 

 cedents and historical experience. 



1 What made the Jew a Jew, the Greek a Greek, is 

 unexplained as what daily causes the germs of an oak and 

 an ash to produce different trees. All we know is that, ii 

 the vague and infinitely distant past, races were nourisl 

 into form and individuality by the varied operation of the 

 unreckoned sympathies which attach man to nature, his 

 primitive mother. But the laws of that rudimentary growth 

 are still unknown ; " the abysmal depths of personality " ii 

 nations, as in men, remain unsounded ; we cannot even experi- 

 mentalise upon the process of ethnical development. Those 

 mighty works of art which we call languages, in the con- 

 struction of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, 

 the forms of which were determined not by individual genius, 

 but by the instincts of successive generations, acting to one 

 end inherent in the nature of the race those poems of pure 

 thought and fancy, cadenced not in words, but in living 

 imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the mind of 

 nascent nations, which we call mythologies these surely are 

 more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more 

 mature production of the races which evolved them/ 



These sentences I wrote many years ago ; and I resume 

 them here, because they utter our abiding sense of the miracle 



