There was the German Lolling too, who later became the head of the Archaeological Institute in Berlin, if I am not mistaken, and who wrote the famous Baedeker guide-book to Greece.
Then there was an Italian, a sort of assistant curator of the Pitti Gallery, in Florence, and an astonishing Frenchman, a man of perhaps forty or forty-five, with a fine presence and magnificent head, who spoke almost every European language excellently and with a perfect accent-the only Frenchman I ever saw, indeed, the only foreigner who spoke English so that you could not tell he was not an Englishman. I have forgotten his name, but we called him the Baron.
I remember one evening Raikes brought in Mr. Bryce, afterwards Lord Bryce, who was then about to make his first tour through Greece. A couple of Greek professors from the university used to come pretty regularly; one of them I christened Plato and the nickname stuck. I have forgotten his real name; he had charming manners and was extraordinarily intelligent and well-read in all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects. For instance, he knew South Africa and especially Cape Colony almost as well as I did, though he had never set foot in the country. I came into the room rather late one evening and was told by the chairman, Lolling, that they had had an interesting discussion on various European languages and had settled some points to their entire satisfaction.
Everyone agreed, he said, that Italian was the most musical language, Spanish having been ruled out because of its harsh gutturals. German, it was decided, was the best instrument for abstract thought, and indeed the largest vehicle in a general way. French was considered to be the best language for diplomacy, being very precise and simple and having an extensive popularity from one end of Christendom to the other. Such were some of the general conclusions.
"All very interesting," I said, "but where on earth do you put English?"
"English," the German replied, "is very simple and logical, of course, but almost without grammatical construction or any rules of pronunciation.
Therefore its claims have not been put forward very strongly, but we shall be glad to hear you on this subject, if you wish to say anything."
Of course I took the bull by the horns at once and began by saying it would be easy to prove that English was the most musical of all the languages mentioned, at which there was a shout of amused laughter. Signor Manzoni, the Italian, wanted to know whether I was serious; he thought it would be easy to demonstrate that English was the most cacophonous of European tongues.
"Let me first make my point," I interjected. "Why do you say Italian is the most musical of all languages?"
"Because of our beautiful open vowel sounds," he replied, "and we have no harsh gutturals or sibilants."
"But English has got your five pure vowel sounds," I replied, "and many more;
English has six or seven different sounds for o and four or five different sounds for a; in fact, we have about twenty vowel sounds to your five. Is it really your contention that the fewer the instruments in an orchestra, the more divine is the music?"
"I see your point," said Manzoni. "I didn't think of it before. It is a good point, but you must admit that your English s's are even a greater disqualification than the German gutturals."
"We avoid the sibilants," I replied, "as much as we can, though I do admit that the s is a danger in English, just as the guttural is in German; but the point is, you must admit, that we have a larger orchestra of vowel sounds than any other European language, and you must also admit that we have had the greatest poets in the world to use them. You can hardly then question the result as to the best music, for I know you would admit at once that the most complex music is pretty sure to be the finest."
"I seize your argument," he replied thoughtfully. "It would have been truer to say that you English have the finest orchestra and we Italians the finest string quintet in the world."
"Let us leave it at that," I exclaimed, laughing. "But if you care for my opinion, I can assure you that there are cadences in English verse so subtle and so musical that I put it above all other verse in the world, above even the best of Goethe. Think of the over-praised Greek, of Euripides, for example, who puts the caesura invariably in the second foot: his music is as mechanical as a treadmill. And no one tells you of that; all praise him, scholars and poets alike:
And Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears
And his touches of things common
Till they rise to touch the spheres.
"Besides, this matter is being decided in another way. A century ago only about fifteen millions of people spoke English; now nearly two hundred millions of the most rapidly increasing population in the world speak English; in another century there will be four or five hundred millions speaking it; the only competitor we have really is Russian, and Russian will be in a secondary place as soon as Australia and the great plateau of Central Africa are filled with English-speaking people. The verdict of humanity will be in favour of English as the language of the most progressive and most numerous people in the world. And I am inclined to believe that this judgment by results is pretty good judgment." (A year or so later I remember Turgenev saying once that he infinitely preferred Russian to German or to French, though he spoke both languages excellently. He insisted that Russian was far richer, a far finer instrument than German, and, "it is already much more widely spread," was his final argument.) "The survival," said the Baron, "may be of the fittest, but the fittest is not always the best or highest. In spite of your arguments, and they are excellent, I regard the conclusions come to before you renewed the discussion as nearer the truth in many essentials. I still think Italian more musical than English: you cannot believe that your English "critcher" is as musical as creatura (he pronounced it in four syllables); and French is a better language for diplomacy than English, with finer shades of courtesy, more exact shades, I mean, of amiable converse. We French have fifty different ways of ending our letters; contrast them with 'Yours sincerely,' 'Yours truly,' 'Yours faithfully.' It seems to me that in all matters of politeness we have the full orchestra and you have nothing but the banjo, the cymbals and the drum!"
"The question," I replied, "is surely susceptible of proof. Give me any of the expressions with which you close your letters and I will undertake to render them into English without difficulty, giving the very shade of meaning you wish to have conveyed."
"Pardon," he retorted, "but you would not even be able to translate amities!
The shade between love and friendship would slip through the large English mesh and be lost."
"We can say, 'your loving friend,'" I said, "or, 'your friend and lover,' or 'your affectionate friend,' the matter is perfectly simple."
The discussion became general for a few minutes. They all gave me phrases they thought would be difficult to translate into English, but they were all easily convertible, and I resumed the discussion by saying: "Let me give one English instance and see how you would translate it. I shall not excogitate a phrase out of my inner consciousness; I will simply give a well-known passage of Ruskin's in which he praises Venetian painters and ask you to translate it.
'Venice taught these men,' he said, 'to love another style of beauty; broadchested and level-browed like her horizons; thighed and shouldered like her billows; footed like her stealing foam; bathed in clouds of golden hair like her sunset.' "Now, Baron, don't be in a hurry to translate into French 'thighed and shouldered like her billows' or 'footed like her stealing foam.' "I think you will find it hard to translate that sentence into even a page of any modern language, and in translating it I am sure you will lose the poetry of it, the beauty of it, or at least some part of the poetry and beauty; whereas you admit that I have been able to translate your French and German examples into their equivalent English pretty easily."