FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 11 



tion. So far as it goes, it is regarded as revolution, and therefore to 

 be resisted. Accordingly no change can take place in the grammar 

 of a cultivated speech which is not compelled to fight its way to 

 acceptance. It never succeeds without going through a struggle which 

 lasts at least scores of years. If it triumphs, it triumphs because it 

 recommends itself to the users of speech as accomplishing something 

 for expression which had not previously been secured. If once they 

 become thoroughly imbued with that view, vain are the protests of 

 purists and grammarians; for the educated users of speech know 

 better what they want than any or all of their self-constituted 

 instructors. 



The reason for this contrast between the attitudes assumed by 

 lettered and unlettered speech is due to a factor which has at all times 

 played an important part in the development of language, but with 

 the wide diffusion of education in modern times is destined to play 

 one stiil more important. This is the creation of literature. Its 

 existence in any tongue tends immediately to weaken or overthrow 

 entirely other influences which have been operating upon the speech. 

 Few even among scholars have learned to appreciate fully the con- 

 servative influence which literature exerts over language. Men used 

 to take the ground that speech was always moving away from its 

 sources; that the longer a tongue continued to live, the more increas- 

 ingly difficult of comprehension became its earlier form to its later 

 speakers. There is, or at least there may be, a great deal of truth in this 

 view so long as we confine our attention to tongues which can boast 

 of no literary monuments of excellence. It becomes absolutely false, 

 however, after a great literature has been created and has become 

 widely diffused. If the speech then undergoes changes on any great 

 scale, that result will be owing to outside influences and not to any 

 which belong to its own natural development. 



Yet this belief about the steady recession of speech from its 

 sources has lasted long after any reason for it has disappeared. Even 

 to-day it can be heard occasionally expressed. It is therefore not 

 surprising to find it once widely prevalent. By the great authors of 

 the time of Queen Anne and the first Georges dismal forebodings were 

 universally entertained and frequently uttered as to the ruin which 

 was to overtake their own writings, in consequence of the changes 

 constantly going on in English speech. Their works, they com- 

 plained, could not hope to outlast a century, unless the language 

 became what they called fixed, and they were in perpetual distress 

 of mind because some person or some organization could not be 

 induced to undertake and accomplish that impossible feat. 



The fact which these men did not perceive at all, and which is 

 none too clearly comprehended now, is that the moment a great 

 literature has been established, the language revolves about it, and, 



