"Tell us," said Lolling, "what you really thing about the English language."
Flattered by the appeal, I did my best to sum up like a judge.
"It was Max Muller," I said, "or one of the German philologists-it may have been Karl Werner-who put me on the track by saying that English had more names of things, was richer in substantives than any other language, the observant habit of the people, the sense of the facts of life being very strong in Englishmen.
"English has shed almost all grammatical forms, it seems to me, in the struggle for existence. It is more simple, more logical than any other modern language.
It can be used more easily by uneducated people than any other tongue, more easily even than French, and that quality gives it its fitness for spreading over the world. Its real weakness in sound is, as the Baron knows, the habit of accenting the first syllable, which tends to shorten all words, and the sibilant, which should be avoided as far as possible. The worst weakness of English in structure was, strange to say, in a people so given to action, its paucity of verbs.
"But here the poets have come to the rescue and have turned the present participles into verbs, as in the passage I quoted from Ruskin; and they have also managed to turn nouns into verbs: 'She cupped her face with her hand'; 'he bottled up his wrath'; 'he legged it away.' These are just instances to show how the richness of English nouns is converted into the astonishing, unexpected richness of English in painting verbs. All modern European languages have painting adjectives and epithets at hand with all the colours of the palette; but we are alone in being able to use present participles that are half-adjectives and half-verbs, and to convert even nouns into verbs, and so lend both pictorial beauty and speed to the tongue almost at will.
"Though I have great liking for classic Greek, the Greek of Plato and Sophocles, I still think the language of Shakespeare and Keats the most beautiful in the world. That is why I resent the way it is prostituted and degraded by the users. The aristocracy of England has degraded the tongue into a few shibboleths of snobbery. It's 'awfully' this and 'awfully' that; she is a 'high-stepper', and 'high-stepper' becomes a portmanteau adjective of the next generation of snobs who would fence themselves away from the middle classes, not by excellence of speech, but by idiotic shibboleths. The English aristocrat degrades his language as much as the corner-boy whose one adjective is 'bloody.' "Oh! That English aristocracy: how it dwarfs the ideal! It knows a good deal about outward things, about the body and men's dress and social observances and trivial courtesies; but alas, it knows very little about the mind, and nothing about the soul-nothing. What aristocrat in England ever thought of training his faculties of thought, as lots of schoolboys train their muscles, to almost perfect vigour and beauty, knowing instinctively that no muscle must be overdeveloped, but all should be kept in perfect harmony. Yet even here the Hindu Yogi knows more about the muscles of the heart and stomach and intestines, the most important parts of the body.
"No Englishman thinks it disgraceful today to be completely ignorant of German, French, Italian, and Russian and the special achievements of these peoples in thought and art and literature-"
"True, true," exclaimed the Baron, interrupting me, "and it needs saying; but what do you mean by the 'soul' exactly, and how can one train that?
"I know very little about it myself, I must confess," I replied, "but I got just a whiff of it as I came through India, and I have always promised myself to go back and spend six months or a year in assimilating the wisdom of the East.
Gautama Buddha always impresses me as one of the noblest of men, and where a single tree grows to the sky, the soil and climate, too, must be worth studying. But we've gone far afield and gotten far away from our theme."
"Let me just say one word," the Baron broke in. "I think France in almost every way finer than England, nearer the ideal. Every Frenchman of any intelligence loves the things of the mind-art and literature-and tries to speak French as purely and as well as possible, whereas in England there is no class that seems to care for the finest heritage of the race in the same way.
And what airs the English aristocrat gives himself. He's hardly human. Have you noticed that the only people who don't come to our meetings are the English students? And yet they need cosmopolitan education more than any other race."
Athens holds many of the deathless memories of my life. I was looking at the figures on the parapet of the Temple to the Wingless Victory one day when I suddenly noticed that the dress was drawn tight about the breast just to outline the exquisite beauty of the curve-sheer sensuality in the artist.
Thirty years later I asked Rodin what he thought, and he declared that the Greek gods of the Parthenon are as undisguisedly sensual as any figures in plastic art.
I met yet another person in this life at the Hotel d'Athenes who deserves perhaps to be remembered. One day a tall good-looking Englishman was introduced to me by the manager of the hotel. "This is Major Geary, Mr.
Harris. I've told the Major," he went on, "that you know more about Athens, and indeed about all Greece, than any one of my acquaintances, and he wishes to ask you some questions."
"I'll be glad to answer so far as I can," I said, for Major Geary was goodlooking and evidently of good class, tall and of course well-set-up, tho' he told me he had left the Royal Artillery some years before and was now in Armstrong's.
"The fact is," he began, "I've been sent out to sell some of our guns, and I want to ask someone who knows how I should set to work. A man at our Embassy advised me to go the King first."
"That would do you no good," I replied. "Do you know Tricoupis, the Prime Minister? You can surely get a letter to him and that will be the best door to his confidence."
Geary thanked me and followed my advice; a little later we lunched together and I found him an admirable host with, strange to say, a rare knowledge of English poetry. Shakespeare he knew very little about, but a great part of English lyric poetry was at his finger's ends, and he showed astonishing taste and knowledge.
Geary's delight in poetry drew us together, and one morning he asked me to go with him to meet Tricoupis and some of the ministers and support the Armstrong proposition. Briefly, it was that the English firm would give a much larger and longer credit than either Krupp or Creusot would give. I went with him the more willingly, for I was eager to meet Tricoupis, who had written in a masterly way the History of the Revolution.
But at the meeting Tricoupis was all business and I could get no private or confidential speech with him. Towards the end of the sitting, Geary pulled out a magnificent gold watch which had been given to him by his comrades when he left the Royal Artillery; it was engraved, if I remember rightly, with the arms of the artillery in jewels. As Tricoupis would not force a decision on his colleagues, he was the more courteous to Geary and expressed his admiration of the watch. Geary at once took it off the chain and showed it to him; the next man leaned forward to look, and the watch passed down the table, while Tricoupis assured Major Geary that his proposal would be seriously considered and answered within a week or so. As he rose, Geary exclaimed, smiling, "And my watch!" But the watch was not forthcoming and no one seemed to know what had become of it. Tricoupis frowned, evidently disgusted. "Gentlemen," he said, at length, "if Major Geary's watch is not forthcoming, I'll get the police in and have us all searched."