On the Approaches to the English Language [pp. 434-456]

1874.] ON THE APPROACHES TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
yet set in grooves, the author works best propria sponte. In
this stage, science might do art more harm than good. The author has to trust to his own reading, observation and experience. But after both speech and literature have matured, have
accumulated national wealth, and with it national debt, after it
becomes needful to discriminate, compare, contrast, accept, and
reject, after dictionaries, grammars, manuals, compends, concord.
ances have become the author's indispensable outfit-in other
words, after the author himself ceases to be nomadic and begins
to till and manure the soil in the sweat of his brow, then the
need of independent, abstract, and thoroughly scientific research
into forms of expression becomes apparent. We have passed
from the age of Shakespeare to the age of Samuel Johnson and
Tennyson; Johnson betraying the weakness of literature without philology, Tennyson its strength through philology. That
exquisite adjustment of speech to thought, that perfectly artistic
recoining of antique gold to modern usages, which characterize
every line of "The Princess," "In Memoriam," and" The Idylls of
the King " prove that the poet is the product of a generation that
.has profited by the labors of Grimm and Bopp, Kemble, Bosworth,
Thorpe, and Halliwell. We say profited by; Tennyson does not
claim to be a philologist, he has never explored for himself the
intricacies of Sanscrit or pointed cut tile phonietic changes in
Gothic, Norse and Anglo Saxon. But other men have labored,
and he has entered into their labors. Keeping strictly within
the bounds of English proper, yet intensely alive to all the great
movements of thought acround him, he has caught the spirit of
his age and has submitted to it as only a great poet can submit
partly receiving, partly giving; his inspirations have been corrected, his inspirations guided, consciously or unconsciously, by
science. Where Johnson, taken as the exponent of his age, is
hasty, overbearing, meddlesome, through zeal without knowledge, Tennyson is cautious, yet courageous, subtle but clear,
genial, and above all, imbued with the deepest sense of piety, in
the strict sense of the Latin pietas, toward the past. We feel
that Tennyson has breathed an atmosphere the tendency of
which is to choke the hateful weeds of snap judgment, glittering
analogy, and haphazard etymology.
But the most practical way of illustrating the distinction between philology and literary study will be to sketch the outline
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