Amenities of Literature Part 33

Even the learned of our own times have indulged some of these philological reveries. One would hardly have suspected that Dr.

FRANKLIN, whose genius was so wholly practical, contemplated to revolutionise the English alphabet: words were to be spelt by the sounds of their letters, which were to be regulated by six new characters, and certain changes in the vowels. He seems to have revived old Bullokar.

PINKERTON has left us a ludicrous scheme of what he calls "an improved language." Our vowel terminations amount but to one-fourth of the language; all substantives closing in hard consonants were to have a final vowel, and the consonant was to be omitted after the vowel. We were to acquire the Italian euphony by this presumed melody for our harsh terminations. In this disfigurement of the language, a _quack_ would be a _quaco_, and _that_ would be _tha_. Plurals were to terminate in _a_: _pens_ would be _pena_; papers, _papera_. He has very innocently printed the entire "Vision of Mirza" from the "Spectator," on his own system; the ludicrous jargon at once annihilates itself. Not many years ago, JAMES ELPHINSTONE, a scholar, and a very injudicious one, performed an extraordinary experiment. He ventured to publish some volumes of a literary correspondence, on the plan of writing the words as they are p.r.o.nounced. But this editor, being a Scotchman, had two sorts of Scotticisms to encounter--in idiom and in sound.

Notwithstanding the agreeable subjects of a literary correspondence, it is not probable that any one ever conquered a single perusal of pages, which tortured the eye, if they did not the understanding.

We may smile at these repeated attempts of the learned English, in their inventions of alphabets, to establish the correspondence of p.r.o.nunciation with orthography, and at their vowelly conceits to melodise our orthoepy. All these, however, demonstrate that our language has never been written as it ought to have been. All our writers have experienced this inconvenience. Considerable changes in spelling were introduced at various periods, by way of experiment; this liberty was used by the Elizabethan writers, for an improvement on the orthography of Gower and Chaucer. Since the days of Anne we have further deviated, yet after all our efforts we are constrained to read words not as they are written, and to write different words with the same letters, which leaves them ambiguous. And now, no reform shall ever happen, short of one by "the omnipotence of parliament," which the great luminary of law is pleased to affirm, "can do anything except making a man a woman."

Customary errors are more tolerable than the perplexing innovations of the most perverse ingenuity.[8] The eye bewildered in such uncouth pages as are here recorded, found the most capricious orthography in popular use always less perplexing than the attempt to write words according to their p.r.o.nunciation, which every one regulated by the sounds familiar to his own ear, and usually to his own county. Even the dismemberment of words, omitting or changing letters, distracts attention;[9] and modern readers have often been deterred from the study of our early writers by their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have, therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have transcribed them.

Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye, or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false p.r.o.nunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, "a p.r.o.nouncing dictionary," which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker, and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the language of the Cherokees.[10]

We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending in _ugh_ must confound him: for instance, _though_, _through_, and _enough_, alike written, are each differently p.r.o.nounced; and should he give us _bough_ rightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder at _cough_; if he escape in safety from _though_, the same wind will blow him out of _thought_. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language p.r.o.nounce words differently? A mere English scholar who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is p.r.o.nounced of those that stand written.

That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tense _red_, as a distinction from the present _read_, and anciently I have found it printed _redde_.

Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily contused the times. _G_ before _I_ ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute _b_ in _doubt_ and _debt_, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the p.r.o.nunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circ.u.mstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrote _tems_, rejecting the _p_ in _temps_, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original, _tempus_. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the a.n.a.logy of languages.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See "The Paston Letters," edited by Sir JOHN FENN; and LODGE'S authentic and valuable Collection.

[2] George Chalmers' "Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers," 94.--See on this subject in "Curiosities of Literature,"

art. "Orthography of Proper Names." [Also a note on the orthography of Shakspeare's name, in an Essay on that Poet, in a future page of the present volume.]

[3] "An Orthographie, composed by J(ohn) H(art), Chester Herald,"

1569. A book of extreme rarity. A copy at Horne Tooke's sale was sold for 6_l._ 6_s._ It is in the British Museum.

[4] "Bullokar's Booke at large for the Amendment of Orthographie for English Speech," &c. &c., 1580, 4to; republished in 1586.

[5] "The first part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chieflie of the _right writing of our English Tong_," 1582, 12mo.

[6] In this copious extract from Mulcaster's little volume, we have a specimen of the unadulterated simplicity of the English language. I have only modernised the orthography for the convenience of the reader, but I have not altered a single word.

[7] The second work of our Phonographer is ent.i.tled "The New Art of Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read Words by the Sight thereof,--rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c.,"

by J. Jones, M.D., 1704.

I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are p.r.o.nounced--

VISIBLE LETTERS. CUSTOMARY AND FASHIONABLY.

Mayor Mair.

Worcester Wooster Dictionary Dixnary Bought Baut.

"All words", he observes, "were originally written as sounded, and all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and pleasure's sake from

the harder to the easier the harsher to the pleasanter > sound."

the longer to the shorter /

[8] The Grammar prefixed to Johnson's Dictionary, curiously ill.u.s.trated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts.

[9] When we began to drop the letter K in such words as _physic_, _music_, _public_, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790, observed on this new fashion, that "forty years ago no schoolboy had dared to have done this with impunity." These words in older English had even another superfluous letter, being _physicke_, _musicke_, _publicke_. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonants _ck_ have not been shorn of their final _k_. We do not write _attac_, _ransac_, _bedec_, nor _bulloc_, nor _duc_, nor good _luc_.

The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though identically the same in point of sound, produces a painful effect on the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of monosyllables in which the final and redundant _k_ is not written,--"_Dic_ gave _Jac_ a _kic_ when _Jac_ gave _Dic_ a _knoc_ on the _bac_ with a _thic stic_." If even such familiar words and simple monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded, disguised by the mutilation of several letters.

[10] A most serious attempt was made a few years ago to establish English spelling by sound. A journal called the _Fonetic Nuz_ (_sic_ to give the idea of the p.r.o.nunciation of the word _News_) was published, and Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" printed with a type expressly cast for the novel forms. The ruin of the projector closed the experiment.--ED.

THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE.

A strong predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?

These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and the Romans would not only afford a cla.s.sical ear, long exercised in the nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design--that of elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a privileged cla.s.s. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days, iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few cla.s.sical ears by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.[1]

Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among the people of modern Europe ever to be subst.i.tuted for their native melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance of rhyme.

With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither admired nor imitated.[2] The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his _Versi e Regole della_ POESIA NUOVA--the very term afterwards adopted by the English critics--and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of "new poetry" appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei ill.u.s.trates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.

In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars, Jodelle, Pa.s.serat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known, later, D'Urfe, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adopted _blank verse_, for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that "Les vers sans rime sont morts pour jamais." French poetry, which at that period could hardly sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The "new poetry" in France, however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned his prejudices leaned in its favour, but as a faithful historian the truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with great curiosity and honest navete. "Since only these two nations, the Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe which poetises, who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people for more than seven or eight centuries, even in Italy itself, I can readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry than with that of the Greeks and the Romans."[3]

The candour of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries.

It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these experiments on our prosody; and, on the pretence of "reformed verse," were for revolutionising the whole of our metrical system.

The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks called _rhythmus_, the Latins _numerus_, and we _melody_ or _measure_. But in our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on the poet's ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music, slow or quick, long or short, which form the quant.i.ties or the time of the measured feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble languages of Greece and Rome. The artificial movements in the hexameter were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and, denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the genius of the native idiom.

Several of our scholars, invested by cla.s.sical authority, and carrying their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by the melody of emotion, as to a mechanical and severe scansion. To this Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician--

Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span Words with just _note_ and _accent_, not to scan _With Midas' ears, committing short and long_.

The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from "dark forgetfulness" when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his "Fairy Queen"

took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. STANYHURST has left a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic GABRIEL HARVEY had espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical TOM NASH, who scourged with searching humour. "The Hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins."

A treatise on "the New Poetry," or "the Reformed Verse," for it a.s.sumed this distinction, was expressly composed by WILLIAM WEBBE, recommendatory of this "Reformation of our English verse."[4] Some years after Dr. THOMAS CAMPION, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his rhymes, seating himself in the critic's chair, renewed the exotic system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of English verse, he denounces "the vulgar and inartificial custom of RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise of English poetry."[5] He calls it "the childish t.i.tillation of rime."

We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however, he was known in his days as "SWEET MASTER CAMPION," and his t.i.tle would not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical "Observations," he has prefixed a poem in what he calls "Licentiate Iambicks," which is our blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book, consisting only of nearly five leaves:--

Alas, poor book, I rue Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings; Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.

The poet DANIEL replied by his "Defence of Rime," an elaborate and elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the anti-rhymers.

It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly subst.i.tuted for the cla.s.sical metres, since the invaders of the Roman empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the contest solely turned on their genius.

A natural circ.u.mstance will explain the occasion of this general rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own spontaneous emotions.

Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere "Gothic barbarisms." Had the practice of the cla.s.sical writers become a custom, we should now be "committing long and short," and we should have missed the discovery of the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins could never have imagined the existence.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and cla.s.sical superst.i.tion, see _Quarterly Review_, August, 1834.