have also to admit the virtues of
easy intelligibility and of persuasiveness. Greek largely owed its
admirable fitness for speech to the natural richness and prolongation of
its euphonious words, which allowed the speaker to attain the legitimate
utterance of his thought without pauses or superfluous repetition.
French, again, while by no means inapt for concentration, as the
_pensee_ writers show, most easily lends itself to effects that are
meant for speech, as in Bossuet, or that recall speech, as in Mme de
Sevigne in one order of literature, or Renan in another. But at Rome, we
feel, the spoken tongue had a difficulty to overcome, and the
mellifluously prolonged rhetoric of Cicero, delightful as it may be,
scarcely seems to reveal to us the genius of the Latin tongue. The
inaptitude of English for the purposes of speech is even more
conspicuous, and is again well illustrated in our oratory. Gladstone was
an orator of acknowledged eloquence, but the extreme looseness and
redundancy into which his language was apt to fall in the effort to
attain the verbose richness required for the ends of spoken speech,
reveals too clearly the poverty of English from this point of view. The
same tendency is also illustrated by the vain re-iterations of ordinary
speakers. The English intellect, with all its fine qualities, is not
sufficiently nimble for either speaker or hearer to keep up with the
swift brevity of the English tongue. It is a curious fact that Great
Britain takes the lead in Europe in the prevalence of stuttering; the
language is probably a factor in this evil pre-eminence, for it appears
that the Chinese, whose language is powerfully rhythmic, never stutter.
One authority has declared that "no nation in the civilized world speaks
its language so abominably as the English." We can scarcely admit that
this English difficulty of speech is the result of some organic defect
in English nervous systems; the language itself must be a factor in the
matter. I have found, when discussing the point with scientific men and
others abroad, that the opinion prevails that it is usually difficult to
follow a speaker in English. This experience may, indeed, be considered
general. While an admirably strong and concise language, English is by
no means so adequate in actual speech; it is not one of the languages
which can be heard at a long distance, and, moreover, it lends itself in
speaking to so many contractions that are not used in wri