The Weekly Machen
The following is the second article Arthur Machen published in The Daily Express. For more information, please see Little Sights of London.
Clotted Nonsense
Boast That Germans Is The Only True Language
by
Arthur Machen
September 25, 1918
Leslie Stephen once wrote an interesting article about Coleridge. He made inquisition, as it were, into the tragedy of Coleridge; how did it happen, he asked, that so wonderful a promise was so imperfectly fulfilled? Here was the amazing dreamer uttering golden enchantments, spells, marvels, miracles of speech on the Quantock Hills, and then many barren years, or years almost barren, and an old man dies at Highgate, having added little or nothing to that which was so nobly begun. What happened to Coleridge?
Leslie Stephen thought that opium had happened, that the drug bewildered the vision and stifled the utterance of the seer. I doubt it. De Quincey ate opium as if it were cream-cheese, and drank Laudanum out of a decanter; and yet he remained eloquent. I believe that Coleridge was destroyed by his visit to Germany and by his immersion in German literature.
I have been confirmed in this belief by reading Rhyme and Revolution in Germany by J. G. Leggs. This is a curious study of German politics and literature between 1813 and 1850; it is an excursion into clotted nonsense. Here is Fichte proving that German is the only true language; those using the Romance languages, says Fichte, “are not in possession of any living language at all by which they examine the dead one, and if one looks at the matter closely, are entirely without a mother tongue.” It must be distressing to those who speak the languages of Dante, Rabelais, or Cervantes to reflect that they are without a mother tongue.
Here again is an example of the pompous futility of which the Germans are masters. There was a revolution, men were shot, and there was a funeral. And then the solemn official pronouncement:—
His Majesty the King has, in reference to the funeral ceremony which took place yesterday, made known and expressed his most complete admiration; the sublime demeanour of the inhabitants of Berlin has, etc.
The sublime demeanour! The populace made their Sovereign ride through the streets wearing the revolutionary colours; they made him eat dirt.
It might be interesting to inquire whether the solemn, big-browed, blundering stupidity illustrated in the passages quoted and illustrated in most of the Teutonic works cited by Mr. Leggs is not really at the root of German barbarism.
If the German be such a fool as to think his language the criterion of all other languages, and, in a sense, the only language, he may well conceive German morality to be the only morality. And thus he may easily arrive at the conclusion that it is pious to bomb Margate, but infamous to bomb Mannheim.
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Many thanks – this is fascinating! Good to know that such a book was available in 1918, and, this would suggest, may have been – or become – widely known!
I find scans of two copies of the original 1918 Constable edition and one of the 1919 US edition in the Internet Archive – as well as scans of a later book by James Granville Legge, Chanticleer: A Study of the French Muse (Dent, 1935): one Archive author-line gives his dates as 1861-1940.
He seems to lack a Wikipedia article, but searching for it made me aware of his famous and accomplished family, thanks to articles on his father, James Legge (buried at Wolvercote cemetery, as are the Tolkiens) who was first Professor of Chinese at Oxford (1876) and member of the committee (1879) which led to the founding of Somerville Hall – later College, where Dorothy L. Sayers (among many another famous woman) went. His younger brother was Thomas Morison Legge, made first Medical Inspector of Factories and Workshops in 1898. His daughter, Mary Dominica Legge, also went to Somerville, attended the first International Arthurian Congress in Truro, Cornwall in 1930, and later became Professor of French (Anglo-Norman Studies) at Edinburgh.
Sadly, I cannot find evidence of an audiobook of Rhymes and Revolution in Germany, but I see there are LibriVox recordings of Professor Legge’s translations of the Confucian Analects and of The Tao Teh King, or the Tao and its Characteristics – I wonder if C.S. Lewis knew them, among translations of works he refers to in The Abolition of Man?
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I forgot to mention that I see elsewhere that James Granville Legge also wrote a satirical futuristic novel, The Millennium, published by Basil Blackwell in 1927!
Looking this up again, I also find an illustrated biography of him at a website sadly listed as ‘unsafe’ (since http and not https) – that of the Sefton Rugby Football Club!
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