Which of the two systems is the easier to learn? Obviously, that in which the persons are made distinct and are conscious subjects, not hidden in senseless terminations only to be distinguished by dead memory. What shall we say of the invention of new roots (appearing in the above suffixes) for the ordinary pronouns, when so many and such ancient languages had already come into accord upon these perpetually recurring ideas?

In the face of these grotesque absurd ities, only saved from the charge of lunacy by the orderly and systematic arrangement of nonsense words and forms, the wonder is, not why such a system should have promptly died, but why it ever has shown active signs of life and progress. Its advocates tell us that there have been forty attempts at various times to invent a non-national language. No wonder they are all dead and buried, when this, the latest and probably the most ingenious, offends so egregiously against common sense, against the present conditions of the world, against that fundamental law of progress to make the best of what we have. In the cemetery of buried projects which this century has to show, it occupies the newest grave, and on the fresh tombstone we may write its epitaph: Fad of fads.

It remains for us to try the only other solution. As the savages of the world have modified English to suit their purposes, adopting this one foreign language for international communication in addition to their own, so we must endeavor to persuade civilized men to be content to adopt one common language for the same purpose, while they cherish their own for national and for

literary use. In the last century French held this place as the language of diplomacy in the courts of Europe, and even now, though French influence is manifestly decaying throughout the world, though French commerce is waning,1 we often hear claims of the old supremand at Athens acy, or even at Alexandria (to our shame be it spoken), French is a more frequent medium of communication than English. But in spite of the stupid indifference of our rulers, who will not see that language is one of the great sources of a nation's influence, English enterprise and English trade make it perfectly impossible for any other nation to impose its language on the world. From this aspect we may include under English the great Republic of the West, which not only speaks English all over North America, but which leavens the cargoes of foreigners that arrive daily at her ports, and insists that, whatever may be their nationality or speech, they shall accommodate themselves to the condition of understanding and speaking English. If we add to the influence of the United States that of the English colonies all over the world, the preponderance of English is so great that we only wonder why our language has not long since become not only the crading language (Handelsprache), but the language of common intercourse throughout the nations of the world. That it will become so in time is very probable, if English commerce and English wealth continue to expand at their present rate. If the number of persons who expect to receive money from the English, and to whom therefore knowledge of our language is profitable, keeps continually increasing, the growth of English influence and English speech is a matter of certainty.

a

The great obstacle at present lies in that international jealousy of which I have recently spoken in this review. That "jealous female" France is furious at the wane of her old supremacy in lan

1 This is freely admitted by French observers ; cf. the instructive article of the Vicomte G.

d'Avenel in the Revue des deux Mondes for the 18t of March, 1896.

or four mistakes in our absurd spelling will exclude from the army a young man who has every natural quality to be a good soldier. Even the few little timid changes made by American use, in the direction of omitting useless letters, are regarded with dislike, and accounted vulgarisms, by our purists. Truly, if they set before their minds, not the convenience of Civil Service examiners, not the stupid adherence to an irrational and artificial orthography, not the isolation of England, but the great future which her language might have in traversing the whole world, they could see that some concessions at allevents might be made to the wants of all the foreign world, some release from the enormous tax of time upon our own children in having to spell contrary to their utterance.

Am I then a disciple of Mr. Pitman, and do I actually advocate the horror: of phonetic spelling? As a new system, no. A page of the Fonetic Nuz is to me as disgusting as to any purist in spell ing. The advocates of that system have gone too fast and too far. They were, like the advocates of Volapük, too rash in offending popular prejudices, and they have met with their punishment. They did not realize that a language is not an invention but a growth, so spelling is a growth, and will not be reformed by a revolution, but by a quiet and rational pressure in a proper direction. If every literary man would do but a little in that way, even our generation would see a great change. But we must emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of printers as well as pedants. I found that it required some little persuasion to make the former print, rime, rythm, sovran, and a few other such reforms, and I should certainly have reverted to the eighteenthcentury tho', were it not that I could not face do' (dough). But these faint and insignificant beginnings should be followed up by many others, especially warning the reformers that they need not expect, or even aim at, uniformity in the earlier stages of the campaign. The real and only object for the present generation is to accustom the vulgar

English public to a certain indulgence or laxity in spelling, so that gradually we may approach-I will not say a phonetic, but-a reasonably consistent orthography. For then every foreigner will find his task lightened; he will have some chance of learning English from books; any violations of use he commits by over-phonetic spelling will not be counted to him as a deadly crime against our language. And then in a short time, in spite of the jealousies that will arise, the British tongue, like British gold, will probably pervade the world.

The reader will give me credit, I hope, for opposing all wild and sudden expedients. The examples of Volapük and of phonetic spelling are sufficient warnings that any such policy only retards the great object which every promoter of imperial British interests should have in view. But adopting as our motto Festina lente, I have yet one suggestion to offer which may probably, like all such suggestions, however moderate, be regarded at first with scorn, ultimately with interest and approval. It is based upon the historic parallel of what was done by the Greeks when they stood in face of a problem analogous to ours. There came a period about the time that Rome absorbed and unified the kingdoms about the eastern Mediterranean, when Greek became the language of commerce, and even of polite intercourse, from the Tigris to the Atlantic Ocean, from the Red Sea to the British Channel. It was the interest of both Greeks and barbarians that many should learn to use Greek. How did the Greeks, a clever people, meet this demand? for their language was one of exceeding richness and complexity of forms, of literary diaIn the first lects, of constructions. place the varieties of spelling produced by writing the dialects were abolished. All the Greek intended for common intercourse was written in a common dialect, though, of course, great varieties of pronunciation must have remained. So far modern English is agreed with them. Though we may speak, we do not write, dialects in the books intended

for business, for science, or for international use. The Greeks had this ad vantage over us, that their spelling of this common dialect was, if not phonetic, at least rational and consistent, except in one particular. But in this lay a great difficulty for foreigners. The Greek accent was not at all determined by the quantity of the vowels, and so a foreigner reading out a manuscript of the second century B.C. would make such mistakes as to render him unintelligible to Greek natives who heard him. That is not a matter of conjecture or probability; it may be tested by any one to-day in Greece. If an Oxford or Cambridge scholar carries his "quantities" with him to the Peloponnesus, he will find himself hopelessly unintelligible, and he will hardly understand one word of what the people say, even when the words are good classical Greek.1 English people do not, I believe, realize how completely useless it is to speak any language with wrong accent. Let us read out the following example quickly to ordinary hearers, and how many will understand it? "He was misled up to his démise by mendacious evidence and illusóry promíses. The interpréter intérposed so that the juror éscaped uninjured."

How, then, did the Greeks meet this difficulty, and help the Romans and Orientals who desired to learn their language? They put accents on their words, a perfect novelty, and very probably one which the purists of the day beheld with disgust.' But by this means, and without altering their spelling, they gave a practical guide to foreigners and greatly facilitated the spread of Greek throughout the world. Why not adopt the same device as re1 In the simplest words this curious difficulty occurs. For e Ἡ πάρθενος βίβλιον έχει, pro nounced as our classical people barbarously pro. nounce it, has no meaning whatever to a Greek.

To the correct H Tapbévos Bißdiov eixet, he might

answer Máλiora, but would not recognize our Molioza. For with him, as with us, quantity and accent are nearly identical.

2 There is, moreover, clear evidence that this novelty was gradually introduced, and took some time to prevail.

gards English? I have known many a British traveller puzzled in Ireland because he was ignorant of the accents on our proper names. Why not therefore write Drogheda, Athenry, Achónry, Athy, etc., and save trouble? And then why not gradually and tentatively distinguish by accents though and tough, plague and ágúe, according to any system which may be found most simple and convenient? A paragraph at the opening of the grammar would be sufficient to explain it. Whether we should ever require the elaborate distinctions of the Greeks, whether a rude unscientific attempt might not be more effective than the systems of grammarians, these are questions which need not be discussed till some trial has been made.

Here, then, is the sum of the whole matter. The civilized world is undergoing a terrible waste of time and labor in the now compulsory acquiring of many languages, and in the main even this labor is thrown away, because most people do not advance far enough to use any foreign language. Moreover the great porportion of such students want foreign languages not to study their literature a high and refined pursult-but for practical purposes, in order to communicate with various natives, and in order to learn what they have to say on scientific or practical subjects. It is obvious that the use of one common language in addition to the mother tongue of each people would produce an enormous saving of time, and tend to the nearer and better knowledge of the world's progress among them all. This position of the common language was once attained by Greek, then in a wider sense by Latin, both of which commanded not only the business transactions, but even the literature of the world for some centuries. Since the abandonment of Latin in favor of the tongue of each European nation within its own area, confusion has prevailed, until the political predominance of France for a time imposed French as the language of diplomacy upon Europe, and more recently until the mercantile predominance of England and America has imposed English as the language of

.commerce upon the trading routes of the world. Nevertheless the other civilized nations of Europe hold fast to their respective tongues as a matter of jealous patriotism, and have even broken down the primacy of French in the field of diplomacy. Moreover France is waning in population and in power, while the English-speaking races are waxing. The attempt to settle the problem by inventing an arbitrary tongue has been ineffectual, and will never succeed in the face of practical languages, which are the natural growth of the human mind, spoken and understood already by many millions of men. Nor will a common system of signs like the Chinese be of much avail in trade, where speaking is far more important even among the educated minority than writing, an art which the majority of the world has never yet acquired. In spite, therefore, of many serious obstacles, English will gain the victory and become the world-language. Some of tuese obstacles, such as the jealousy of neighboring nations, we cannot obviate; others, which consist in certain anomalies affecting our orthography and hindering the quick acquisition of English by foreigners, we should endeavor to diminish by practical common sense, by disregarding the pedant and the purist, and by encouraging such gradual and moderate licenses as may make English easier, without violating the traditions or the spirit of our great heritage.

J. P. MAHAFFY.

From The Scottish Review. THE POETRY OF THE SKALDS. The Old Northern poets were liberal in praise, and they have not lacked pens to commend them; they were sometimes bitter in satire, and they have not escaped the contempt of others. Two quotations will give in brief compass the attitudes of their admirers and detractors. The one is:

Such an inspired and improvised poetizing occurs nowhere else in history.

If we make a distinction between Eddaic and Skaldic poetry, "grand and sublime" are epithets quite inapplicable to the latter, by far the greater part of which is mere bombast, "tumid and obscure" enough to be utterly worthless."

There are reasons for both of these opinions, and it may be worth while to make some attempt to disentangle them. The Old North has so mucli poetry in its history, that one is loath to dismiss its poets as the Muse's charlatans. To judge them aright, some account must be taken of their own aims and poetic ideals; and if their work is to be presented in a tongue not their own, this must be done in forms which do not entirely omit all that they considered essential to it.

The common conception of a skald seems to be that of a poetic berserk, who hurled himself into the midst of battle, shouting rude snatches of alliterative verse to cheer the hearts of his fellow-warriors. The picture is not unnatural, but is nevertheless incorrect. It has, however, the merit of being a shade nearer reality than the belief that the skalds were e authors of the sagas. No doubt Snorri and Sturla were good skalds, but that is not what is meant by the belief.

The skald is primarily neither fighter nor historian, but a poet, and this is all that his name in itself implies. In respect of worldly position, he might be eitner king or cottar, earl or hench.. man, so long as he had in him the gift of verse. The shepherd who lay on the old poet's grave-mound, and wres

tled in vain with the making of verse, until the dead man came by night and helped him, became, we are told, “a great skald," and made his fortune at the courts of foreign princes. 1 Benedict Gröndal. 2 J. A. Blackwell.