352 EMERITUS PROFESSOR J. S. BLACK1E ON 



and JIesiod could never have been followed in due season by the large range of 

 historical survey in Herodotus, and the condensed summation of political wisdom 

 in Thucydides. A printed alphabet, therefore, we may say, is the mother of 

 prose literature, and of the wide expansion of intellectual sympathy and linguis- 

 tic expression which a prose literature implies. A people that does not read and 

 write will never demand and never acquire any form of intelligent utterance 

 beyond the historical ballad, enlarged, it may be, into the popular epic, the 

 sacred hymn, the secular song, and the popular harangue. An example of this 

 we have at our own door in the Highlands. The only other remark that occurs 

 to me to make on the alphabet is, whether it ought to be a system of visible 

 symbols distinctly representing articulate sounds, as in all the languages with 

 which European civilisation is familiar, or indirectly by means of abbreviated 

 pictures of the things which the words represent, as in the ideographic writing of 

 the Chinese. This method, compared with the other, is evidently the product of 

 an earlier stage of civilisation, crude, clumsy, and cumbrous, having neither the 

 poetry of a picture, nor the flexibility of an alphabet of spoken signs to recom- 

 mend it. But whether the use of it entails on the people who have not 

 advanced beyond this first stage of visible speech, any other disadvantage than 

 the necessity of cumbering the mind with a more complex array of memorial 

 signs, I do not know, and shall be happy to learn.* 



XIV. Language, as noted above, is not a convention, but a growth ; and as 

 a growth, like the human individual, has its infancy, its youth, its manhood, its 

 age, its decrepitude, and its death ; and the same circumstances that favour or 

 stunt the growth of the individual affect in a similar way the growth of a lan- 

 guage. The best parentage for a language is a fine climate and a great story 

 teller, in its infancy and youth. The Greeks had both. Homer was at once 

 their secular and their sacred Bible ; and as such acted powerfully from the 

 first, and without any diminution of action even to the present hour, both as a 

 spur and a rein ; a spur to exertion so brilliantly begun, and a rein to unre- 

 gulated, unchastened, and unfraternising exertions in future fields of intellectual 

 glory. The next condition of the luxuriant growth of language — of course, 

 always supposing rich natural endowments — is that the national mind, the 

 outcome of the national life, should not be disturbed in the natural progress of 

 its evolution. This disturbance usually occurs from some extraneous influence, 

 acting either violently in the way of conquest, or peacefully in the voluntary sub- 

 mission which a weak nation is always apt to pay to a stronger. From both 

 these disturbing forces the Greek language remained free. Escaping trium- 

 phantly by the heroic struggles of Marathon and Salamis from the threatened 



Since this paper was read I have seen Professor Legge of Cambridge, who expressed himself 

 decidedly of opinion that the ideographic writing of the Chinese acts as a hindrance to the rich develop- 

 ment of the spoken language. 



