Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

speech keeps them a sequestered place which is Italian, Italian beyond
the ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration.  And--what
is pretty to observe--the speakers are well conscious of the characters
of this intimate language.  An Italian countryman who has known no other
climate will vaunt, in fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like
manner he is conscious of the local character of his language, and tucks
himself within it at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad.  A
properly spelt letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs
Dingley and Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language,
ill-written, was "snug."
Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler
language insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller?
discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despair
thus prattle and gibber and stammer?  Rather perhaps this departure from
English is but an excursion after gaiety.  The ideal lovers, no doubt,
would be so simple as to be 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