THAT the study of foreign languages is a necessary part of a liberal education is a proposition which few intelligent persons will at this day dispute. The records of thought and knowledge are many tongued; and, therefore, as a means of encyclopædic culture, — of that thorough intellectual equipment which is imperiously demanded of every scholar, and even thinker, at the present day, — knowledge of foreign literature, both ancient and modern, is absolutely indispensable.
Familiarity with foreign languages liberalizes the mind in the same way as foreign travel. The Emperor Charles V once said that to learn a new language was to acquire a new soul. The man who is familiar only with the writers of his native tongue is in danger of confounding what is accidental with what is essential, and of supposing that manners and customs, tastes and habits of thought, which belong only to his own age and country, are inseparable from the nature of man. Acquainting himself with foreign literatures, he finds that opinions which he had thought to be universal, and feelings which he had supposed instinctive, have been unknown to millions. He thus loses that Chinese cast of mind, that contempt for everything outside of his own narrow circle, which was a foe to all self-knowledge and to all self-improvement. He doubts where he formerly dogmatized; he tolerates where he formerly execrated. Qualifying the sentiments of the 264 writers of his own age and country with the thoughts and sentiments of writers in other ages and other countries, he ceases to bow slavishly to the authority of those who breathe the same atmosphere with himself, and with whose idiosyncrasies he is en rapport. He declines henceforth to accept their opinions, to make their tastes his tastes, and their prejudices his prejudices, and thus avoids that mental slavery which is baser than the slavery of the body.
While we thus appreciate the value of linguistic studies to the few who have the time and money for thorough culture, we yet doubt whether the study of foreign languages, to the extent that fashion now exacts, is wise or profitable. That an Englishman, Frenchman, or German, even though a business man, should deem a knowledge of them not only useful, but even vital to his worldly success, we can understand. There is hardly a commercial house of any note in England that does not sell goods to Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, or Russia; hence every such house must have employés to conduct its foreign correspondence, and a knowledge of foreign tongues is, therefore, one of the best recommendations with which a young man seeking a clerkship can be armed. The same is true of Germany and France; but who will pretend that such is the fact in this country? If, instead of all speaking a common tongue, the Eastern, Northern, Southern, Western, and Middle States of our country spoke was many languages, the lingual necessities of our merchants and manufacturers would be similar to those of the great business houses of Europe; but, as the facts are, no such necessities exist. It is true we have a few houses that do business with Europe; and it is true, also, that in a few of our largest cities, there are many foreigners who cannot speak English; but, 265 everywhere else, linguistic knowledge is of little practical use.
The question is not whether a knowledge of French and German is desirable per se, but whether it is not too dearly purchased. Is it worth the heavy tax which our youth pay for it? Cannot the weary days, weeks, months, and even years, which are spent in acquiring what, after all, is usually but the merest smattering of their tongues, be more profitably spent upon English literature and the sciences? There is hardly any subject upon which so much illusion prevails as upon the supposed ease with which a modern language can be mastered. We hear it daily remarked that French and Italian are very easy, and that German, though presenting some difficulties, is by no means hard to acquire. Now the truth, to which, sooner or later, every student is forced to open his eyes, is, that the acquisition of any language, as Mr. Lincoln said of the crushing of the Rebellion, is “a big job.” The mastering of a foreign language, even the easiest, is the work, not of a day, but of years, and years of stern, unremitting toil.
It is true that Mr. Macaulay undertook (we know not with what success) to possessive himself of the German language during a four months’ voyage from India to Europe; but have we not the authority of the same Mr. Macaulay for the statement that Frederick the Great, after reading, speaking, writing French, and nothing but French, during more than half a century, — after unlearning his mother tongue in order to learn French, — after living familiarly many years with French associates, — could not, to the last, compose in French, without imminent risk of committing some mistake which would have moved a smile in the literary circles of Paris? Mr. Hamerton, the author of 266 “The Intellectual Life,” — a most competent judge, — lays down the following two propositions, tested by a large experience as unassailable: 1. Whenever a foreign language is perfectly acquired, there are peculiar family conditions. The person has either married a person of the other nation, or is of mixed blood. 2. A language cannot be learned by an adult without five years’ residence in the country where it is spoken; and, without habits of close observation, a residence of twenty years is insufficient. Mr. Hamerton further adds that one of the most accomplished of English linguists remarked to him that, after much observation of the labors of others, he had come to the rather discouraging conclusion that it was not possible to learn a foreign language.
This is an extreme position; but, if by “learning a language” is meant a thorough acquisition of it, so that one can speak and write it like a native, we believe that the statement is impregnable. Of course, we except the few prodigies of linguistic genius, — the Magliabecchis and the Mezzofantes, of whom but one appears in a century, — men who, as De Quincey says, in the act of dying, commit a robbery, absconding with a valuable polyglot dictionary.
Will it be said in reply, that a knowledge of a foreign language may fall short of perfection, yet be of great practical and even educational value? We admit it; we admit that there are men who learn many languages sufficiently for certain practical purposes, and yet never thoroughly master the grammar of one. Such a man was Goethe. Easily excited to throw his energy in a new direction, as his biographer tells us, he had not the patience which begins at the beginning, and rises gradually, slowly, into assured mastery. Like an eagle, he swooped down upon 267 his prey; he could not watch for it with cat-like patience. But though Goethe had no critical knowledge of foreign languages, — was but an indifferent linguist, — he had what was better for his own purposes, the divining instinct of genius, which enabled him to seize upon and appropriate the spirit of composition, to a knowledge of which other men attain only by a critical study of the letter. But Goethe’s method is one that can be safely followed only by those who have Goethe’s genius. For the mass of students there is no royal road, no safe short-cut, to a language. The Duke of Wellington, when asked how he spoke French, replied, “With the greatest intrepidity;” and so he fought at Waterloo; but it was not till, after years of patient toil, he had mastered the art of war. Intrepidity is an indispensable thing; but it not reasonable, if possible, till after one has conquered all the difficulties of the idiom. A mastery far short of this may be very serviceable; but we do not believe that the smattering which the great majority of our young men and women get, — and which is all they can get in most cases, — can possibly enrich them intellectually.
As Mr. Hamerton justly urges, until you can really feel the refinements of a language, you can get little help or furtherance from it of any kind, — nothing but an interminable series of misunderstandings. “True culture ought to strengthen the faculty of thinking, and to provide the material upon which that noble faculty may operate. An accomplishment which does neither of these two things for us is useless for our culture, though it may be of considerable practical convenience in the affairs of ordinary life.” In the weighty words of Milton: “Though a man should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the 268 world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.”
He is a poor economist who looks only at the value of an acquisition without counting the cost. If a young man can begin his studies early and continue them till his twenty-first year, by all means let him study French and German. But in no case would we have him study those tongues at the expense of utter ignorance or the merest surface-knowledge of his own language and its literature, and of the physical sciences. That the two latter branches of knowledge are far more essential than the former to both his success and happiness, we cannot doubt. Unfortunately, the majority of our young men are compelled to plunge into business so early that they are forced to elect between the two acquisitions; they cannot have both. For such persons to choose the French and German, and neglect the sciences and their own noble tongue and its literature, is as absurd as it would be for a laborer to stint himself all the year in meat or bread that he may enjoy a few baskets of strawberries in April. We yield to no one in our admiration of Montaigne, Pascal, Molière, Cuvier, and Sainte-Beuve, or of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Richter, and Heine; but we do, nevertheless, echo most heartily the words of Thomas De Quincey, — himself a consummate linguist, — when he declares that it is a pitiable spectacle to see young persons neglecting the golden treasures of their own literature, and wasting their time on German, French and Italian authors, comparatively obscure, and immeasurably inferior in quality. (See p. 22.)
The same writer has admirably explained the secret of 269 this strange reference, — a preference with which fashion has doubtless as much to do as the cause he names: “It is the habit (well known to psychologists) of transferring to anything created by our own skill, or which reflects our own skill, as if it lay causatively and objectively in the thing itself, that pleasurable power which in very truth belongs subjectively to the mind of him who surveys it, from conscious success in the exercise of his own energies. Hence it is that we see daily without surprise young ladies hanging enamored over the pages of an Italian author, and calling attention to trivial commonplaces, such as, clothed in plain mother English, would have been more repulsive to them than the distinctions of a theologian or the counsels of a great-grandmother. They mistake for a pleasure yielded by the author what is in fact the pleasure attending their own success in mastering what was lately an insuperable difficulty.”
We are fully convinced that even the literary man, though he cannot dispense with a familiarity with the modern languages, pays a high price for his knowledge. Here, as everywhere else, the law of compensation holds. Familiarity with foreign idioms almost invariably injures an author’s style. We know that the Romans, in exact proportion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign tongues, because its was his business to write German, and he thought that, by reading other languages, he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. Thomas Moore, who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language was justly attributed to their entire 270 abstinence from any other. It is notorious that Burke, after he took to reading the pamphlets of the French terrorists, never wrote so pure English as he did before. Gibbon, who boasted that his Essai sur l‘Étude de la Litérature was taken by the Parisians for the production of one of their own countrymen paid for the idiomatic purity of his French by the Gallicisms that deform the “Decline and Fall.”
Our young men might be pardoned for making some sacrifices to acquire a knowledge of the modern languages, if such a knowledge were necessary as a key to their literatures; but it is not. Nearly all the masterpieces have been translated into English. We are aware of the objections to translations; they are, at best, as Cervantes said, but “the reverse side of the tapestry.” The scholar has yet to be born who can reproduce in their full splendor in another tongue the epithets of St. Paul, the silvery lights of Livy, the curiosa felicitas of Horace, or the picture-words of Æschylus. But how many of our young men and women, who cannot give themselves a liberal education, are likely to enjoy the originals better than the translations that are executed by accomplished linguists? Not one in fifty. If a man of so exquisite a taste as Mr. Emerson prefers, as he tells us, to read foreign works in translations, is it at all likely that “Young America,” with his almost utter ignorance of the niceties and delicacies of the modern languages, will lose much by imitating his example? We say, then, in conclusion, if you are a man of leisure, or have sufficient time and money for a liberal education, by all means study French and German, and if you can, Spanish and Italian; but if you are to begin life at eighteen or twenty, let Spiers and Adler alone.
271Your first duty is to acquaint yourself with the learning and literature of your own and the mother country. Our English granaries will, of themselves, feed a long life. When you have mastered the giants who wrote in your mother-tongue, — when the great works of Chaucer, Shakspeare, Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Byron, Mill, Tennyson, and all our other representative authors, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into your mental constitution, it will be time to go abroad after “fresh fields and pastures new.” But do not, we beg of you, indulge the foolish ambition of becoming a polyglot when you cannot write a grammatical letter in your mother-tongue, and have never read a page in half of its best writers.