Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

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--ensoleille?  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