The Adventure of English (27 page)

In 1760, Macpherson published
Fragments of Ancient Poetry,
a translation, he claimed, of a great Celtic epic created in the third century by the blind bard Ossian. Ossian's admirers included Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Yeats, Beethoven, Ingres and Napoleon, who is said to have carried the epic into battle. But doubt set in when Dr. Johnson denounced the work as a forgery. Despite some recent evidence in its favour, Macpherson is still perceived as a great Scottish cultural con artist. Yet the fact that there was a public, and such a distinguished public, ready to rally to the Gaelic (even in translation, even in a forged translation) demonstrates something of its continuing capacity to command attention.

And Dr. Johnson was at most only half right when he predicted of the Lowland tongue that in half a century it would become “provincial and rustick, even to themselves.” Robert Burns was born in 1759, and his work refuted Dr. Johnson. His songs may go on to undermine Johnson's opinion further, given the successful reaching back to its roots to which Scots has recently directed itself in poetry, fiction, drama and song over the past two generations.

Robert Burns, eldest son of seven children of a poor tenant farmer, who somehow managed to find the means to educate the boy, became a Romantic poet whose life was the essence of Romance and Romantic poetry. He was a “child of Nature,” working as a ploughboy until he was fifteen or sixteen. He wrote poetry to find “some kind of counterpoise” to his circumstances. He loved women to excess and fathered several illegitimate children, including twins to Jean Armour, whom he married. He loved Scots. He loved Scotch. His first collection,
Poems — Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,
received much critical acclaim and in Edinburgh he was feted, patronised and ruined perhaps, as “The Ploughman Poet.” He died aged thirty-seven, but his legacy is vast: four hundred songs, some of which are recognised as masterpieces, “The Lea Rig,” “Tam o' Shanter” and “A Red, Red Rose.” Ten thousand came to pay their respects at his funeral and that was only the beginning of a reputation which is kept alive wherever Scots with even a smattering of literature meet to talk of Scotland, drink whisky and toast the ladies and the haggis:

Not only the Scots read him, so did the English; he had readers everywhere. He is not all that difficult to understand. He'll often throw in an English word to help us out, especially in his word clusters “kiaugh and care” (the same), “furms an' benches” (the same), “decent, honest, fawsont” (fawsont means decent). But at a time when Dr. Johnson and his heirs appeared to be tramping Scots underfoot, this man from the land itself restored Auld Scotland's grandeur, gave it an inextinguishable heart of genius which resurrected pride and assured it a posterity.

English is there in Burns' work but there is no denying that because it was shot through with Scots, the work did not receive, in the mainstream of English literature, the appreciation its quality deserved. Burns' fidelity to one of the suppressed languages of Britain to some degree cut him off. For generations, Scots suffered the disregard of non-standard English: only recently has it risen again to claim a place as it were at the high table. For years, Burns' language became such a powerful touchstone for national identity that it was subsumed in politics. In this it was enacting a part often played by language. It can be language alone that holds a nation together, as it did for the English when Norman French threatened to overwhelm it.

A few miles south-west of Burns' country was the Lake District, which had nursed and nourished another poet who sought out the common experience and ordinary language for his subject-matter, William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth's contribution to English poetry has been widely recognised. Ted Hughes said that “looking back he is the first eminence we see.” In ascending order, he said, we “see” Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare. One of Wordsworth's contributions to the adventure of English is that, in the preface to his
Lyrical Ballads
in 1798, he stressed that poetry could be written in “the language really used by men” and did not need a special poetic diction or an elaborate vocabulary or any other “fine clothes” to express deep feelings. He also chose to write about the rural life which had surrounded his childhood, a childhood passed, geographically, not very far from that of Burns. But it was in a different world. Unlike Burns, Wordsworth went to an excellent grammar school and boarded; from there he went to Cambridge, took a walking tour in France and Switzerland, enjoyed advantages available to very few. Perhaps even more remarkable, then, that reimmersing himself in the daily life in the Lake District, he should find his main subject-matter in “low and rustic life.” He explained why: “because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer, more explicit language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated.”

He went even further: “The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.” There is an entire philosophy there, fuelled by Wordsworth's passion for the first phase of the French Revolution in which he had been caught up.

Given that Dr. Johnson had criticised Shakespeare for using “knife” in
Macbeth
— “a tradesman's word,” he called it, “an instrument used by butchers and cooks” — Wordsworth's determination to use plain words to convey the weight of powerful feelings was a bold and crucial step. He not only set this out as a manifesto, he followed his own commandment in poems which are now rooted into English literature. He was aware how much he was taking on. “Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” he wrote, “if they persist in reading this book [the
Lyrical Ballads
of 1798] to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look around for poetry.” He was reviled at first, and for many years, for daring to bring poetry from the voice of the people. In a way he gave it back to its bedrock of Old English.

A few years before, in 1790, Thomas Paine had written
The Rights of Man
in a plain style to demonstrate that “such a style did not preclude precision of thought and expression.” That a political work of great influence on political thought and a young poet who was to exercise even greater influence on poetic practice should agree in this way opened up what has become a major thoroughfare for English. A case was now made for the effectiveness, the poetry, the depth of meaning and feeling which could be mined from “plain English.” It is possible to imagine a world without the influence of Paine, Wordsworth and their followers and one of its aspects would be that a language separate from ordinary English was the only language in which high thinking and profound feeling could be expressed. Wordsworth, I believe, kept English true to its original and tested self. He saved, celebrated and gave lasting literary energy to the ancient language of ordinary speech.

Meanwhile in polite society the way you spoke became one of the subjects of polite society itself. Polite society was organised around a way of talking. If you could not talk that talk you risked ridicule. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, son of Thomas the Elocutionist, led the charge with the invention of Mrs. Malaprop.

Her name comes from French “Mal à propos,” meaning inappropriate. Her grave fault was the tendency to substitute a similar-sounding word for the word that she intended to use. “Make no delusions to the past,” she said, in
The Rivals
(1775), and “I have interceded another letter from the fellow.” “She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” she said, and, “If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.” The noun “malapropism” was first recorded in 1830. Bottom, in
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
often used the wrong word — “Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet” — and he would be laughed at by the Globe audience, but he was a “rude mechanical” and the laughter came with the territory. Mrs. Malaprop was supposed to be a cultivated lady from the aspiring middle classes and even in a world where another character in
The Rivals,
Sir Anthony Absolute, could exclaim, “Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I'd as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet,” she ought to have known better. The accent, the use of correct words, correct grammar, everything to do with language was falling into the hands of Those Who Knew Best. Even when done for satire, as in
The Rivals,
or for polite enlightenment, as in Fielding's essay on conversation, in which he gives guidance such as not hogging the conversation or introducing topics not understood by everyone present, with Wordsworth equally with Dr. Johnson, the literary men of England were going to tell you how best to use and speak your language and laugh at you, snub you, doubt you or even cut you if you did not follow their own particular and supreme rules.

Out of all this came a literary woman and a novelist (novels were originally seen as way below the salt, even contemptible, suitable only for women) whose prose was to clarify the England of that Enlightenment /Romantic era to a crystalline standard never achieved before and rarely since. Jane Austen, without a single mission statement, came to rule English. Her gifts for description, for conversation, narrative, the sound of her words on the inner ear, to all these gifts English gave of its best and the Jane Austen style was and is a new highroad opened up in this journey.

Novel reading was taking off in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the private circulating library, which put expensive books into people's hands for a small hire charge. As the nineteenth century rolled on, literacy grew, education spread, books became cheaper, novels increasingly popular and the novel itself, as emphasised severely by Jane Austen herself, came to be seen as a form in which wit, brilliance, depth and variety could find expression every bit as impressive as could be found in the more established forms of poetry and drama. The novel became the benchmark for good English. Dr. Johnson would never have believed it. It was “only a novel!”

That disparaging phrase comes from
Northanger Abbey.
It is early in the book, when Catherine and Isabella have become close friends, doing everything together, meeting even

Just as poetry in the Elizabethan Age had been enlisted to fructify the language, novels now took on that purpose. As the written word grew increasingly important, it is not impossible, I think, that the most devoted novel readers, women, who would also be those most likely to teach English to the young, would find in works by Jane Austen, the ideal and the model. An unofficial academy of language was developed through the novel, I believe, which had an effect on styles and speech and writing as great if not greater than that of Swift or Johnson or Sheridan.

But even Jane Austen has her limitations. The language of the streets is kept firmly outside the Austen door; the language of bodily parts was not allowed in the Austen parks; in her own way, Jane Austen was every bit as masterful and controlling as the men whom time has seen her surpass. Her own proper and correct use of English has permeated the minds and sensibilities of hundreds of thousands of her readers, a number of whom carried into their own novels the unspoken but clear and rigid rules of what did and did not do in expression as in behaviour. Swear words would never do. No one is called a son of a bitch; no one is told to bugger off.