THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR

The cause of the modern monotony of ‘you’ might be sought in the mere slovenliness of our civilization in the practice of the inflexions of grammar. All things tend to become specialized, except only words. Though in the house of life itself the organs, as life grows more perfect, begin to draw apart to their own separate functions; though the labourer, in the later association of mankind, finds his task by degrees to dwindle in range and to be enforced within closer and closer repetitions; and though only a small division of any of the sciences that have come towards adult and responsible age falls to the share of a single specialist, the word alone grows not expert and special, but general and inexpert.

It is obliged to do more various things, and to do them with less directness and, as it were, a less sequestered intention. It is engaged upon enterprises of unskilled labour. The industrial word has less and less craft, less dignity, less leisure, less rest, and more mere utility.

Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its own varieties, amid the varieties of the casual task. It changes not its vesture, and the inflexion is lost.

Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized peoples, in the inevitable evolution of things, 134should tend to become poor, careless, and inexact grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact is, needless to say, well enough known. Some of the French missionaries, students of American-Indian languages, have astonished us with reports of the enormous vocabularies and the scientific order of those tongues. The people are in the nomadic stage of society, their languages in the finished, the special, the sub-divided condition; intricate in system, organic, arranged, logical, full of expressive differences, cases that precisely assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time, turning the future to look upon the past, and anticipating that turn, and making a shifting perspective of the past; distinguishing persons not merely by pointing the rude forefinger of a pronoun, but by the allusion of all the inflexions of a verb. All that the antique grammars did, and more, is done, we hear, by those doomed languages of an unaltering people, a people with neither literature nor history, a people whose antiquities have no interest nor value, nor date, because their centuries resembled each other.

Not only the tactics of grammar, but an innumerable variety of words is theirs, so that a speaker might hardly name a common thing without a conscious play of choice, according as the syllables of a sentence were to fold and close. Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has the charge of thought, without some degree of 135a like liberty of choice, and modern prose in all languages has, obviously, for the lack of this liberty—for lack of rich alternatives—somewhat forgone the practice of rhythm; forgone it altogether in the explanations of science, for instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red-Indian speech, translated even into sentimental English, as used formerly to be done, must have undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier change when it was done into sentimental French.

It is, however, among English races chiefly that an unwillingness to be troubled with the distinctions of grammar has had this effect of making a word run errands and serve the first purpose at hand; and it is among English races that inflexions (never very numerous or subtle) have been neglected and let fall. That most orderly of grammars, the Spanish, is still in full use; the Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in Rome, retain as few as possible in Liguria—making shift with auxiliary verbs rather than conjugate properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts. The French go about to avoid certain of their own subjunctives, even in literature, and in speech the perfect tenses are passed askance, for fear of pedantry. None but ourselves have been so impatient as to put out of common use the second person singular. ‘You’ was manifestly a trick of politeness in all languages, until it became 136depreciated by general use, when Germans, Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more distant pronoun of courtesy.

The literary Genius was kind to its wayward chosen people, and kept for us a plot of the language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry. As things are, we need not envy the French their second person singular. For them it has but two keen significances—the first use in love and the disuse in the reproof of children. The second is, perhaps, the more important; it is renewed, and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence. To say ‘vous’ to a naughty child is to enforce insatiate retribution; few children deserve so much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches the personality, and alters the relations of life.

As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is by no means certain that the second person singular, with its single delight—the first—never to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar regrets of the world for the flights of its joys. ‘Toi’, the first ‘toi’, is an arbitrary, a conventional happiness, a happiness because it is single—it has no quality but that. The ‘many thousand’ of ‘toi’ are insignificant, and therefore it has no ‘poor last’; it sets a paltry example, therefore.

And then, while the second person singular plays this ambiguous part in love, see how primly it is eschewed in prayer. ‘May your name be sanctified’ is a second phrase of the oraison 137dominicale (oraison dominicale! the name says everything) which we should be loth to have in place of our own. With us there is not only the poetic ‘thy’, but the obsolete valuing of the last syllable of the past participle—‘hallowed’—and the unworn, the still fresh word itself to make the sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such words into familiar use we should gain much, but we should lose a most distinctive characteristic, bestowed upon us by the literary Genius, as though in reward of our very sins—our unique plot of disregarded language that the traffic of the world passes by. For though the Italians have a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their daily prose are rather in the form of the words than in the words themselves. Now the French have the Psalms of David in the language of the trade circular charged with a little rhetoric.

As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and its effectual influence in effacing them, it could not be more distinctly proved than by the Quaker speech. Restoring the second person singular to the language (by way of denying the primitive hyperbole of courtesy from which the general second person plural took its use), the followers of Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for a generation or so these were in practice, yet the increase of carelessness and the generalizing habit of speech in a world more and more intent upon special tasks in all things else, quickly made an 138end of them. So that Quakerism began to talk a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If Mrs. Beecher Stowe makes Quakers speak according to their use, they suppressed ‘thou’ more or less, and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing but the slovenly indifference that has made all our verbs so dull could be the cause of this perversion of a reform.

Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of our own poets, who seem to find a difficulty in carrying the second person singular safely through a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one there is another, a little more out of sight, that does not. As Shelley wrote—

Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety,

so write others of the moderns.

Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not done in the other centuries. Must we needs, as we go on, grow so lax, and do these unhandsome things? If we do by some obscure process grow so lax, why should there not be, in a time of revisions, a revision of these customs? A little of the subjunctive was restored many years ago by Mr. Henley in the National Observer; that this little soon fell aside again is not encouraging; nevertheless, ‘it were’ worth while for some author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the second person singular, and with it certain tenses long out of use.

139There might be such a literary restoration—a literary and a familiar restoration—as would make our language again more various and more charming, and yet would not turn the speech poetic to vulgar use, nor decrease the dignity of what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ‘the essential and ornamental measures of address’.

Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary grammar, we have the treasure of the sequestered poetic and religious language in good order and perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two derivations may well be dwelt upon afresh, now when so many of our writers are obsequious to the French language. (How is it, by the way, that Ireland is so little joyful for the gift of English?) French cannot be the great poetic language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc, delivered from a grandfatherly hearth-rug: ‘L’anglais et le français; ce sont les deux langues qui resteront; l’anglais pour le commerce, le français pour la littérature.’ The blood of a silent listener was only ten years old, but it boiled. And here is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French judgement upon Browning: ‘What a singular man! his middle is not in the centre.’ That Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle of an English poet is not in the centre; it is one focus of an ellipse, like the sun. Our national imagination takes wide adventures and unequal velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler) 140that the earth’s orbit must be circular, because a circle is ‘perfect’. And this is the kind of perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the French mind has long cherished.

Not only in this matter of middles and centres is English poetry out of bounds. She does not know when she is beaten, as was said of English armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow her way in? Into great drama she intrudes, bidding the stage to wait; by lyre and song she commands epic narrative to halt the marching columns of its processions; waves rhetoric from its right throne in the grand style and in heroic verse, and usurps its place by an imperial supersession; scatters literary boundaries, and makes all the kingdoms hers—Poetry’s. And no imaginable academies could have prevailed against her.

French lacks much besides those alien powers, our Latin and Teutonic inheritances, forbidden as it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with the Danube between, or the Alps between.

It lacks also negatives worth having; making shift with half-hearted particles or the grotesquely insufficient peu. Peu is the only negative for some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile we have our profound and powerful particle, in our ‘undone’, ‘unloved’ ‘unforgiven’, the ‘un’ that summons in order that it may banish, and keeps the living word present to hear sentence and denial, showing the word ‘unloved’ to be not less than archangel ruined.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Renumbered footnotes.