224 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



These are elementary questions. But no scholar in the world has 

 yet answered them to anything like general assent. Heaven knows 

 there are answers enough before the public ! About once a year some- 

 body puts forth a brand-new system of English meter, with novel 

 symbols and a fresh nomenclature; and it is impossible even to con- 

 jecture the number of eager young spirits in our universities who are 

 at this moment beginning to glow with the hope that they have at 

 last put their fingers on the strings in the long-sought way. For my 

 own part, I am not sanguine. We know the rough facts, and we can 

 feel the finer ones as we read or chant the verses of the great poets. 

 But whether we shall ever do much more is a question. The phonet- 

 icians are active, and if help comes from any quarter it must come 

 from them. But if one dare say it some of the most advanced 

 phoneticians have become so subtle and hair-splitting, and seem to 

 have so little notion of what is worth doing and what is not, that 

 they appear to an outsider (as well as to not a few of their more 

 conservative brethren) to be doing little more than piling up rubbish. 

 Some day there may be born a great psychologist with an innate 

 feeling for verse as verse. When he has exhausted the subject of 

 psychology, he may apply himself to literature, and when he is 

 sufficiently at home in that field, he may perhaps find time to become 

 an expert phonetician. He may then solace his declining years by 

 explaining for good and all the intricacies of English meter. I hardly 

 expect to live to see the man. Let me add, by the way, two more 

 qualifications: he should be modest, and a person of unusual 

 common sense. 



There are problems in plenty with regard to the history of English 

 as a literary language, this side of the Anglo-Saxon period, and 

 many of them are of great moment to students of literature as well 

 as to the special devotees of linguistic science. To some of the ques- 

 tions there is a generally accepted answer, generally accepted, but 

 not quite amply demonstrated. As to others, scholars take sides 

 (and hold them) with commendable stiffness. Nearly all of the 

 questions are pretty generally misconceived, in this or that way, 

 by the educated public, including most writers of literary histories. 



First among the problems that I have now in mind is the general 

 question of French influence upon English. In its main outlines 

 this matter is pretty well settled. We know (though it seems impos- 

 sible for historians of literature to find out the facts) that the Norman 

 dialect was familiar at the English court before the Conquest, so 

 that it is conceivable that, even without the Battle of Hastings, it 

 might have come to occupy a position similar to that of French at the 

 Prussian court in the reign of Frederick the Great, or German at the 

 Danish court in the eighteenth century. We know also that the 

 prevalence of Norman French as a court dialect after the Conquest 



