The Future Of Philology [pp. 698-714]

THE FUTURE OF PHILOLOGY.
Speech, as it grows, follows other laws than reason, and comes
out like other things that grow, like uncodified commnon law, or
fashionable habits, or wild trees, full of all sorts of knots and
gnarls, twists in the branches, broken boughs, and when it gets
to be great and old, with rotten places in the bole as big as a
house. It is one of the strangest facts about these growths
which grow with men-the products of natural associations
that their defects and strangenesses turn to be centres of interest. "There is no excellent beauty," says Bacon, "that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion." The wounds of the
oyster are nuclei for pearls. In idioms, for example, a combination of words means something different from what the
meanings of the words, when used singly, would naturally give.
The strangeness fixes the attention, fastens the phrase in the
memory, makes it spring up with special promptness and vividness. Energy is concentrated upon it; it accumulates mIoving
associations; its force develops like that of a Darwinian organism. The great singer was not so far wrong who made it her
rule to render any passage which she did not understand with
special effusion. The poets love these nuclei of imysterious
throngs of associations-these ganglions of nervous energy
and expression-and historical critics like them, too, as curious
growths of the old time, just as antiquaries admire old china
which it requires some special dexterity to use. And they
sneer at the schoolmaster or grammar-maker who applies
common-sense to the expression and condemns it. They say,
Vox poplti, voc Dei "'-God makes speech, schoolmasters mar
it. But this is stupid sneering. God makes schoolmasters,
and even the m:ikers of school grammars, as well as invertebrate animals. Their work is his work. The last and best
work of the Divine energy is wrought out through the reason
of man. No genuine action of reason is wholly blind or void.
And ignorant as many of the grammar men have been, and
are, there never was one who wrote a book thlat did not in
some degree improve the speech. We extend a cordial greeting to the thousandth or ten thousandth new English grammar
that is made by a real enthusiastic parser and analyzer who
has something of his own to tell. Locke's famous man, who put
out his eyes to use a telescope, has just as much sense as
those who close the eyes of reason on the logic of speech and
try to talk by intuition.
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