PROBLEMS IN STUDY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 221 



elusively, fleeing to the woods, but desirous first to be seen. For 

 myself, I must confess that I give much thought to certain idioms 

 containing (as I think) for and an adjective, but reducible, in the 

 opinion of many, to compounds with the "intensive prefix," and 

 that I should die happier if I felt sure of ever knowing the whole 

 truth about the kankedort in which Troilus found himself when he 

 heard Pandarus and Cressida whispering at the door. 



These, then, and thousands like them, are all present problems with 

 regard to the English language, and I might easily fill my allotted five 

 and forty minutes by cataloguing them, and still leave the most im- 

 mediate interests of some of you untouched. Because these are little 

 things, the scoffer talks of pedantry, and the mousing philologist is 

 ridiculed as an operose trifler a cavalier of empty thoughts. But we 

 may leave the scoffer out of account. Our revenge on him is lordly 

 and complete. As a learned friend of mine once said to some of his 

 fellow students who were inclined to think that literary criticism 

 was the whole of life, it is exhilarating to observe the hungry 

 eagerness with which the supercilious outsider picks up the crumbs 

 that fall from the philologist's table. A correct analysis of if you 

 please, or you are welcome, or willy nitty, or a demonstration of the com- 

 mon trick of substituting a glottal catch for a guttural, will hold an 

 audience of literary enthusiasts as surely as the finest analysis of the 

 sesthetician or the boldest flight of the critical aeronaut. 



The minuter questions of English philology, such as those to which 

 I have already adverted, are of course being settled one by one, and 

 their solutions are gradually, though very slowly, finding their place 

 in collective treatises. One of the larger problems that confronts us 

 is the difficulty of getting collective treatises written in a competent 

 way. To be sure, there is no reason for discouragement. As we com- 

 pare the array of trustworthy manuals that the tyro now has at his 

 disposal with the scanty and incorrect apparatus of the greatest 

 scholars fifty years ago, we have much to be thankful for; but no 

 one can deny that there is still an enormous amount of sifting and 

 codification to be done, even in those departments of our subject 

 which have received the most earnest and fruitful attention from 

 philologists. 



The earliest period of our language (call it Anglo-Saxon or Old 

 English as you please; for this petty question of mere nomenclature 

 I refuse to regard as a problem, though much ink has been shed in 

 debating it) has been more minutely and successfully studied than 

 any other. The reasons are obvious, and need not be recapitulated. 

 One of the most potent has been, of course, the fact that Anglo-Saxon 

 is of vital importance to every Germanic philologist, to a degree that 

 is not true of any later period of English. Hence we have enjoyed, 

 in this field, the active cooperation of scholars of different nationalities 



