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easy one. But beyond a certain point of ease a universal language cannot go (ease meaning the ease of all), and that limit has probably been about reached now. Between future schemes there will be such a mere fractional difference in respect of ease, that competition becomes altogether beside the point. The thing is to take an easy one and stick to it.
XI
objections to an international language on aesthetic grounds

One of the commonest arguments that advocates of a universal language have to face runs something like this:

"Yes, there really does seem to be something in what you say—your language may save time and money and grease the wheels of business; but, after all, we are not all business men, nor are we all out after dollars. Just think what a dull, drab uniformity your scheme would lay over the lands like a pall. By the artificial removal of natural barriers you are aiding and abetting the vulgarization of the world. You are doing what in you lies to eliminate the racy, the local, the picturesque. The tongues of men are as stately trees, set deep in the black, mouldering soil of the past, and rich with its secular decay. The leaves are the words of the people, old yet ever new, and the flowers are the nation's poems, drawing their life from the thousand tiny roots that twist and twine unseen about the lives and struggles of bygone men. You are calling to us to come forth from the cool seclusion of these trees' shade, to leave their delights and toil in the glare of the world at raising a mushroom growth on a dull, featureless plain that reaches everywhither. Modern Macbeths, sophisticated by your modernity and adding perverted instinct to crime, you are murdering not sleep, but dreams—dreams that haunt about the mouldering lodges of the past, and soften the contact with reality by lending their own colouring atmosphere. You are hammering the last nail into the coffin of the old leisurely past, the past that raised the cathedrals, to which taste and feeling were of supreme moment, and when man put something of himself into his every work."

The man must be indeed dull of soul who cannot join in a dirge for the beauty of the vanishing past. Turn where we may now, we find the same railways, the same trams, music-halls, coats and trousers. The mad rush of modernity with its levelling tendency really is killing off what is quaint, out of the way, and racy of the soil. But why visit the sins of modernity upon an international language? The last sentence of the indictment itself suggests the line of defence. "You are hammering the last nail into the coffin of the old, leisurely past...."

Quite so, you are.

The universal ability to use an auxiliary language on occasion rounds off and completes the levelling process. But the old leisurely past will not be any the less dead, or any the less effectually buried, if one nail is not driven home in the coffin. The slayer is modernity at large, made up of science, steam, democracy, universal education, and many other things—but especially universal education. And the verdict can be, at the most, justifiable, or at any rate inevitable, pasticide. You cannot eat your cake and have it; you cannot kill off all the bad things and keep all the good ones. With sterilization goes purification, pasticide may be accompanied by pasteurization. At any rate, "the old order changeth," and you've got to let it change.

The whole history of the "progress" of the world, meaning often material progress, is eloquent of the lesson that it is vain to set artificial limits to advancing invention. The substitution of cheap mechanical processes of manufacture for hand-work involved untold misery to many, and incidentally led to the partial disappearance of a type of character which the world could ill afford to lose, and which we would give much to be able to bring back. The old semi-artist-craftsman, with hand and eye really trained up to something like their highest level of capacity, with knowledge not wide, but deep, and all gained from experience, and not from books or technical education—this type of character is a loss. Many, with the gravest reason, are dissatisfied with the type which has already largely replaced it, and which will replace it for good or evil, but ever more swiftly and surely. But no well-judging person proposes on that account to forgo the material advantages conferred upon mankind by the invention of machinery. If the world rejects, on sentimental grounds, the labour-saving invention of international language, it will be flying in the face of economic history, and it will not appreciably retard the disappearance of the picturesque.

There is another type of argument which may also be classed as aesthetic, but which differs somewhat from the one just discussed. It emanates chiefly from literary men and scholars, and may be presented as follows:

"Language is precious, and worthy of study, inasmuch as it enshrines the imperishable monuments of the thought and genius of the race on whose lips it was born. The study of the words and forms in which a nation clothed its thoughts throws many a ray of light on phases of the evolution of the race itself, which would otherwise have remained dark. The history of a language and literature is in some measure an epitome of the history of a people. We miss all these points of interest in your artificial language, and we shall, therefore, refuse to study it, and hereby commit it to the devil."

This is a particularly humiliating type of answer to receive, because it implies that one is an ass. In truth the man who should invent an artificial language and invite the world to study it for itself would be a fool, and a very swell-headed fool at that. It seems in vain to point this out to persons who use the above argument; or to explain to them that they would be aided in their study of languages that do repay study by the introduction of an easy international language, because many commentaries, etc., would become accessible to them, which are not so now, or only at the expense of deciphering some difficult language in which the commentary is written, the commentary itself being in no sense literature, and its form a matter of complete indifference.

Back comes the old answer in one form or another, every variation tainted with the heresy that the language is to be studied as a language for itself.

Perhaps the least tedious way of giving an idea of this kind of opposition, and the way in which it may be met, is to give some extracts from a scholar's letter, and the writer's answer. The letter is fairly typical.

"My dear ——,

"Many thanks for your long letter on Esperanto.... According to the books, Esperanto can be learnt quickly by any one. This means that they will forget it quite as rapidly; for what is easily acquired is soon forgotten.... In my humble opinion, an Englishman who knows French and German would do much better to devote any extra time at his disposal to the study of his own language, which, I repeat, is one of the most delicate mediums of communication now in existence. It has taken centuries to construct, while Esperanto was apparently created in a few hours. One is God's handiwork, and the other a man's toy. Personally, any living language interests me more than Esperanto. I am sorry I am such a heretic, but I fear my love for the English language carries me away....

"Yours ever,
"——."

The points that rankle are artificiality and lack of a history.

Reply

"My dear ——,

"I really can't put it any more plainly, so I must just repeat it: we are not trying to introduce a language that has any interest for anybody in itself. An international language is a labour-saving device. The question is, Is it an efficient one? If so, it must surely be adopted. The world wants to be saved labour. It never pays permanently to do things a longer way, if the shorter one produces equally good results. No one has yet proved, or, in my opinion, advanced any decent argument tending to show, that the results produced by a universal language will not be just as good for many purposes1 as those produced by national languages. That the results are more economically produced surely does not admit of doubt.

1And those very important ones, relatively to man's whole field of activity.

'Personally, any living language interests me more than Esperanto.' Of course it does. So it does me, and most sensible people. But what the digamma does it matter to Esperanto whether we are interested in it or not? It is not there to interest us. The question is, Does it, or not, save us or others unprofitable labour on a large scale? Neither you nor most sane persons are probably particularly interested in shorthand or Morse codes or any signalling systems. Yet they bear up.

"Do try to see that we think there is a certain felt want, amongst countless numbers of persons, which is much more efficiently and economically met by a neutral, easy, international language, than by any national one. That is the position you have got to controvert, if you are seriously to weaken the argument in favour of an international language. If you say that it is not a want felt by many people, I can only say, at the risk of being dogmatic, that you are wrong. I happen to know that it is.1 The question then is, Is there an easy way of meeting that want? And the equally certain and well-grounded answer is, There is....

1I have before me a list of 119 societies, representing many different lines of work and play and many nations, who had already in 1903 given in their adhesion to a scheme for an international language. Technical terms alone (in all departments of study) want standardizing, and an international language affords the best means. The number of societies is now (1907) over 270.

"As to your argument that what is easy is more easily forgotten—it is true. But I think you must see that, neither in practice nor in principle, does it or should it make for choosing the harder way of arriving at a given result. Chance the forgetting, if necessary re-learning as required, and use the time and effort saved for some more remunerative purpose.

"'One is God's handiwork, the other a man's toy.' I should have said the first was man's lip-work, but I see what you mean. It is God working through his creature's natural development. The same is equally true of all man's 'toys.' Man moulded his language in pursuance of his ends under God. Under the same guidance he moulded the steam engine, the typewriter, shorthand, the semaphore, and all kinds of signals. What are the philosophical differentia that make Esperanto a toy, and natural language God's handiwork? Apparently the fact that Esperanto is 'artificial,' i.e. consciously produced by art. If this is the criterion, beware lest you damn man's works wholesale. If this is not the criterion, what is?

"'An Englishman who knows French and German would do much better to devote any extra time at his disposal to the study of his own language.' Yes—if his object is to qualify as an artist in language. No—if his object is to save time and trouble in communicating with foreigners. You must compare like with like. It is

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