CHAPTER IX.LANGUAGE.
A few years since, an eminent historian, in a public lecture, discussed the probabilities of a universal language as an instrument of universal history, and as means for the universal civilization of mankind! Another public lecturer discussing this subject, and on a professedly scientific basis, held that language had a miraculous origin, though the period when this supernatural gift was conferred on man was left wholly to the imagination of his audience. Others, and among them Buffon, Pritchard, and even several ethnologists, have scarcely risen above this nonsense, while their uses or application of this faculty have been vastly more injurious to science than even their original misconceptions on the general subject.
Language is naturally divided into two distinct and widely separated portions, having no necessary connection, though at certain points or stages uniting and combining together. First, is that universal capacity of expressing itself—its wants, its sufferings, and its enjoyments—which God has given to all His creatures, from the insect at our feet to the Caucasian man standing at the head of this vast and innumerable host of living beings. In the second place, in its structure and arrangement into parts or portions of speech; in short, its grammatical construction. With the former it is alone or mainly proposed to deal in this place, though it will be necessary occasionally to refer to the latter. As has been said, all living or rather all animal beings have the faculty of expressing theirwants, and they have a vocal organism in exact correspondence with these wants and the purposes for which they are designed by the common Creator of all. Except to a few laborious and enthusiastic students of natural history, the vast world of insect life is aterra incognita, but each one of these myriad of beings is adapted to some specific purpose and beneficently designed by the Almighty Master of Life for the same universal enjoyment which is so distinctly revealed as the end of their existence in the more elaborately organized and higher endowed classes of animal being. And millions of these minute and often unseen creatures are daily and hourly singing praises to the Almighty Creator for His infinite goodness, rendering the fields and forests vocal with the music of their gratitude and the exuberance of their enjoyment. As we ascend in the scale of animated existence, the vocal faculty or language becomes still more distinctly revealed, with a vocal apparatus or organism in exact correspondence with the function or faculty that God has given to the being in question. The pigeon, of course, cannot give us the notes of the canary bird, nor the owl sing the songs of the nightingale. The serpent cannot exchange his hiss for the growl of the tiger, nor the ass abandon its uncouth utterances for the mighty roar or the majestic voice of the lion. Each is permitted to express its wants, its sufferings, and its joys, and each is provided with a vocal organism specific and peculiar to itself and to its kind, and in accord with the universal law of adaptation which inseparably unites organism with function. This, then, in its elementary form, is language—a faculty common to the animal world, and a necessity of animal existence. It differs in no essential respect in regard to human beings, or it varies no more from that of the animal world than other functions or faculties of the human being. There is, it is true, a point of departure or divergence where the analogies of the animalworld are no longer applicable to human beings, or where animal beings cannot furnish parallels for those endowed with a moral nature and destined for immortality; but a vocal organism with its corresponding faculty or function is essentially the same thing in both, and differs only in form and degree among the innumerable beings that compose or are comprised within the vast world of animated existence. While language, therefore, the voice or faculty by which animals as well as human beings express their wants, is universal and only varied as the structure and nature are varied, and while the vocal organism is in exact harmony with the faculty or function in all cases and in every phase of animated existence, there is also, and of necessity, a specific modification of this faculty in the case of the several human races or species. The vocal organs of the negro differ widely from those of the white man, and of course there is a corresponding difference in the language. The specific or the most essential feature of the negro nature is his imitative instincts, or his capacity for imitating the qualities and for acquiring the habitudes of the white man. This, of course, is limited to his actual juxtaposition with the superior race, for aside from that organic necessity which utterly forbids its being otherwise, there is no historical fact better attested than that which shows him invariably relapsing into savageism whenever he is left without the restraining support of the former. But for wise and beneficent purposes, God has endowed him with a capacity of imitation, and he is enabled to apply it to such an extent that those ignorant of the negro nature actually offer it as a proof of his equal capacity! But with all his power to thus imitate the habits and to copy the language of the white man, it is not possible that a single example can be furnished of his success in regard to the latter. With us, and especially at the North, all are negroes who are tainted with negro blood, and thus many persons will imaginethat they have seen negroes who were as competent to speak our language as white men themselves. But no actual or typical negro will be able—no matter what pains have been taken to “educate” him—to speak the language of the white man with absolute correctness. European ethnologists have, notwithstanding, sought to make language the means for tracing the history and determining the character of races, the worthlessness and indeed the absurdity of which only needs a single illustration to expose it. The negroes of Hayti have imitated or copied the language of their former masters, the French, therefore they are of the same race, and the future ethnologists would pronounce them Frenchmen! As the negro cannot preserve anything that he copies from the Caucasian beyond a certain period, the negroes of that island are rapidly losing all that they obtained from their former masters, and though the educated portion on the coasts, and especially the mongrels, yet retain the French language, those in the interior are rapidly relapsing into their native African tongue. And a century or two hence, when the French is entirely extinct and the existing negro population speak an African dialect, or what is far more probable, speak our own, the ethnological enquirer would decide that those led by Touissant and Christophe in the war of “Independence” were Frenchmen instead of Negroes, because, forsooth, the public documents of the time showed they spoke the French language! Thus, while language is an important means for tracing nationalities or varieties of our own race, as, for example, the modern Spanish, French, Italian, etc., in connection with the great Latin family of southern Europe, it is simply absurd to apply it to distinct species like Caucasians and negroes. Each race or each species, as each and every other form of life, is in perfect harmony with itself, and therefore the voice of the negro, both in its tones and its structure, varies just as widely from that ofthe white man as any other feature or faculty of the negro being. Any one accustomed to negroes would distinguish the negro voice at night among any number of those of white men by its tones alone, and without regard to his peculiar utterances. Tones or mere sounds are of course indescribable, and therefore no comparison in this respect is possible, but all those familiar with the tones of the negro voice know that it is never musical or capable of those soft and sweet inflections or modulations common to our own race. Music is to the negro an impossible art, and therefore such a thing as a negro singer is unknown. It is true that, a few years since, certain amiable people, both at the North and in England, believed for a time that they had secured a prodigy of this kind in the person of the “Black Swan,” but after a careful and patient trial, it was found to be a mistake. She was not even a negress, though perhaps of predominating negro blood, and was aided and encouraged by every possible means, especially in England, where she was actually placed under the care of Queen Victoria’s music master, but without avail—Nature was superior to art—the laws of God more potent than those of human invention—and the “Black Swan” finally disappeared from public view. The negro is fond of music, as are all other beings, and indeed all animal beings of the more elevated classes, but music is to him merely a thing of the senses. With the white race music is perceived as well as felt—an intellectual as well as sensuous thing—and though it by no means follows that intellectual persons, with minds above the common average, should also have musical powers, that sensitive and exquisite organization which is necessary to a musical genius must be united with a brain of corresponding complexity. The brain and the nerves constitute a whole—a system—however widely portions of the latter may diverge in their especial functions, and it is as impossible that the musicaltemperament, or that the elaborate and exquisitely sensuous system of the Caucasian could be united with the brain of the negro, as it would be to unite the color of the former with the negro structure. The negro, therefore, neither perceives nor can he give expression to music—he has neither the brain nor the delicacy of nerve nor the vocal organism that is essential to this faculty—all that is possible to him is a certain approximation through his wonderful powers of imitation, but which is less available to him in this respect perhaps than any other. His brain is much smaller, but his nerves are much larger, and his senses are consequently much more acute, and here is the cause of that “musical power” with which ignorant and mistaken persons have endowed him. Music is felt by the nerves rather than perceived by the brain, in his feet as much as in his head, and with an intensity unknown and unfelt by whites. His imitative instinct enables him to rapidly acquire the language of his master, but he also loses it with similar rapidity. The negroes imported to the West India Islands, though living on large plantations, soon acquired the language of the few whites, so far as words were concerned, but an organic necessity compelled them to retain the structure of their original tongue. Thus, those in British islands spoke English, in French islands, French, etc., but the general structure remained the same in all, and now, when the external force applied by the several European governments has removed the control and guidance of the superior race, they are rapidly losing the words of their former masters, and in this as well as every other respect returning to their native Africanism. In Hayti, where the imitative capacity has little or nothing to stimulate it, this process is very rapid indeed, and could they be entirely isolated, the utter extinction of the French language would doubtless occur within the present century.