grave.  That is a tenable opinion.  Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved.  Why so?  They might have chosen broken English of other sorts—that, for example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman—a complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage’s English devised by Mrs Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian.  But none of these found favour.  The choice has always been of the language of children.  Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the inspirers of those prattlings.  “See then thy selfe likewise art lyttle made,” says Spenser’s Venus to her child.

Swift was the best prattler.  He had caught the language, surprised it in Stella when she was veritably a child.  He did not push her clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged in her a childhood he had loved.  He is “seepy.”  “Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue.”  It is a real good-night.  It breathes tenderness from that moody and uneasy bed of projects.

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger’s fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a phrase that is its own essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of other tongues.  Easily—shall I say cheaply?—spiritual, for example, was the nation that devised the name anima pellegrina, wherewith to crown a creature admired.  “Pilgrim soul” is a phrase for any language, but “pilgrim soul!” addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-praised, “pilgrim-soul!” is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of a lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly surpassed them—this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an Italian heaven.

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of life passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor had thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note.  It was, he said, poetical.

Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than Pergolese’s airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the more modern love-song suited the day of Bellini.  But it is only Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other European nation, but only of this.

To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of those buoyant words:-

Felice chi vi mira,
Ma più felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be but a property of the turn of speech.  It is rather the profounder advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very language keeps in store.  In another tongue you may sing, “happy who looks, happier who sighs”; but in what other tongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram?  Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase is intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm may still be unknown to Englishmen—“piuttosto bruttini.”  See what an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but tolerant and familiar.  You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they be condemned.  Brutto—ugly—is the word of justice, the word for any language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the European concert.  But bruttino is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the rear—“rather than not.”  “Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way that we need say few words about—the fewer the better;” nay, this paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no further.  After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be composed of brass instruments.

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into which a traveller hither has to enter!  Do we possess anything here more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than our particle “un”?  Poor are those living languages that have not our use of so rich a negative.  The French equivalent in adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itself—or hardly; it does not attain the participle; so that no French or Italian poet has the words “unloved”, “unforgiven.”  None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravest and the most majestic of all ironies.  In our English, the words that are denied are still there—“loved,” “forgiven”: excluded angels, who stand erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not be done.

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain of loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in sight.  All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-foretelling is the word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferable speech.  And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languages for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to their own garden enclosed, without recognition.  Never may they be disregarded or confounded with the universal stock.  If I would not so neglect piuttosto bruttini, how much less a word dominating literature!  And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no great English author but has abundant possession.  No need to recall them.  But even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full consciousness of their birthright.  Thus does a man who was hardly an author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights.  He has incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and the head he studied was, he says, full of “power and grief.”

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectual place—Felice chi vi mira—or the art-critic’s phrase—piuttosto bruttini—of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words—and it has many—who would not treasure the language that has given us—no, not that has given us, but that has kept for its own—ensoleillè?  Nowhere else is the sun served with such a word.  It is not to be said or written without a convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light and radiation.  The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; therefore neither England nor Italy