Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 16

See this faire shooing.

Put on those pompes...."

After all, possibly, such publications as that before me are chiefly valuable for a purpose for which they were not designed--for the bounteous light which they shed on our old English customs and notions; and I do not think that they have been hitherto fully brought into employment. It is obviously impossible for me, however, in the present case to remedy this shortcoming, more particularly as the quotations suffer by curtailment or paraphrase.

The _Arnalte and Lucenda_ takes up the major part of the volume, and must be said to be freer from grammatical inaccuracies than that division of the book devoted to grammar. Nor could a man live in London without catching some of the colloquialisms current among its residents. In his _Italian Phrases_ we meet on the English side of the page with: "Hee looketh rather like a cutter or fencer then," and "He goeth accompanied with Roisters and cutters."

The French Dictionary of Desainliens was entirely superseded by that of Randle Cotgrave in 1611. The latter spared no pains to make his book a really valuable performance; he invited help from others, and modelled his labours on a fairly intelligible plan, and it remains to this day in the enlarged edition by Howell a standard and indispensable work of reference.

It was the only one available for the school-boy and student for a considerable length of time.

III. Delamothe and Erondelle were contemporary with Desainliens, and may have been equally eminent and successful as teachers; but they did not display the same degree of literary activity. The former indeed produced nothing but a _French Alphabet_ (1595). Pierre Erondelle was a native of Normandy; and besides new and improved editions of his predecessor Desainliens, he brought out in 1605 a quaint book of lessons for the acquisition of French, which he called _The French Garden for English Ladies and Gentlemen to walk in; Or A Summer day's Labour_. The volume mainly consists of thirteen dialogues in French and English, embracing the various occupations of the day, from the first rising in the morning till bedtime. Some of the conversations are remarkable for their archaic _naivete_ so far as English ideas of decorum in speech are concerned; but they are nothing more than the plainness of phrase which was once recognised both here and on the Continent, and the banishment of which has, at all events, not of itself added to our morality. Sterne, in his _Sentimental Journey_, signalises as a French trait the incident of the lady of quality with whom he drove in her carriage; but he must have been aware that the tone in the same circles at home was equally p.r.o.nounced; and editors of the earlier Georgian literature have to exercise a pruning hand in dealing with MSS. to be presented now-a-days to public view.

Another of these foreign professors was Jacques Bellot, who published several educational works for the instruction of the English in the French grammar and language. Among these _Le Jardin de Vertu et Bonnes Moeurs_, 1581, where the English and French are given, as usual, in parallel columns, is the most remarkable. There is a Table of _Errata_ for both languages; but that for the English might, from a native point of view, be indefinitely extended, as Bellot proves himself as incapable of comprehending our idiom as the rest of his countrymen. He renders "La memoire du prodigue est nulle" by "Of the prodigall ther is no memory,"

and "La seulle vertu est la vraye n.o.blesse" by "The only vertue, is the true n.o.bilitie."

The writer trips, as may be conjectured, just in those nice points in which even an Englishman is not always at home.

New and improved systems were continually submitted to the public, or rather, in the language of those days, to the n.o.bility and Gentry. In 1634, the Grammar of Charles Maupas of Blois, an esteemed and experienced teacher, who during a career of thirty years numbered among his pupils many of the young men of family in Holland as well as in England, was adapted by William Aufield for the use of his countrymen. The original is still regarded as a standard work, though discarded by the schools. Both the French and English are of the antique cast, of course, and many of the examples and much of the phraseology are obsolete; but the book was written for Frenchmen and translated for Englishmen, to both of whom the speech of these days would have seemed at least equally strange, and proved not less embarra.s.sing.

The pages of Maupas, as he is presented to us in his English dress, acquire an oddity and an almost humorous side, which are absent from the French text itself; as, for instance:--

"Of making Stop.

"Hola, ho there, prou well, well, so so; a.s.sez enough, enough; demeure, arreste, stay, stay, budge not."

"Of feeling Pain.

"Aou, haou, aouf, ah, of, alas. The same words will serve in English."

"Of Joy.

"Gay, deliait, alaigrement, heighday, as a man woud wish, merrily then."

Claudius Mauger and Paul Festeau were two other professors at a somewhat later date, who endeavoured to secure patronage for their methods and books by throwing special temptations in the way of customers. The former, who seems to have been resident in London, introduced into his pages as an attractive novelty a series of Dialogues ill.u.s.trative of English exploits by land and sea, as well as of contemporary French history, while Festeau baited his hook with the two scarcely reconcilable a.s.surances that his plan was the exactest possible for attaining the purity and eloquence of the French tongue, as it was spoken about 1660 in the Court of France, and that Blois, his native place, was the city "where the true tone of the French tongue was found by the unanimous consent of all Frenchmen."

XIX.

Foreigners' English.

I. A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treatment of our language either colloquially or with a literary object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Grammar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 _The English Schoolmaster, for teaching strangers to p.r.o.nounce English_. That such a book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the _Familiar Letters_, who brought out in 1662 _A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English_. This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howell was both a linguist and a scholar.

Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not much appreciated; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices. Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic community; and it was princ.i.p.ally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account, probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabularies and primers elsewhere noticed.

In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making, consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and grammar; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear's _Dr. Caius_, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchman's broken English. The _Duke de Jarmany_ of the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gibberish put into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of _dramatis persona_ was among the comic effects.

The Mrs. Plawnish of a modern novelist thought that bad English might be good French; but the jargon of Caius is _sui generis_; he "hacks our English." as mine host puts it, but not naturally, although Shakespear must have had the opportunity of studying such a character from the original. But he even confers on the French doctor in the _Merry Wives_ the very name of an actual English one, who was living in his boyhood, and who was not merely a contributor to literature, but a writer on philological subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real Caius were apt to feel some mystification at his dramatic presentment, claiming a nationality which did not belong to him, and murdering a language which was his own.

As regards the familiarity of the French and Germans with our idiom, the position is changed; for while that of the former remains nearly stationary, that of Germany has grown more accurate and more general.

II. But the conversance with our language in former times, even among those who devoted their attention to philology and instruction, was excessively scanty and inexact. If no more than a bare quotation, example, or equivalent in English is given, the solecisms are sometimes ludicrous in the extreme; and this branch of the subject is sufficiently interesting and novel to induce me, before I conclude my inquiry, to shew somewhat farther than I have done in the account of the foreign professors of languages settled in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ignorance of English exhibited by two distinct cla.s.ses of writers, namely, by foreigners occupying among us of old the position of tutors or teachers, and by the authors of publications designed for employment by ourselves visiting the Continent, or by our neighbours coming hither.

The notions entertained by educated professional Frenchmen, and even by Hollanders and Germans, about our grammar and idiom were from the outset down nearly to the present century of the vaguest and most puerile character. Perhaps one of the most edifying monuments of this inveterate repugnance to the acquisition of so much as the alphabet of our poor tongue is to be found in a volume printed at Nurnberg so late as 1744 under the t.i.tle _Representation of the High-landers who arrived at the Camp of the Confederated Army_, 1743, where beneath the first of a series of plates occurs this elucidation: "The Highlanders in their accostumes clothes and downwards hanging cloak." The explanatory description of the next engraving is "A High-lander who puts on his cloak about his schoulders, when weather is sed to rain." These solecisms of course arose from the incompetence of the foreign artist or publisher, or both; but even where an ignorant typographer in a Continental town was employed to set up an English book by the author himself, the liability to blunders was very great, and we are not to be surprised at slips of the press in such a work as Bishop Hooper's _Declaration of the Commandments_, printed at Zurich in 1549, when at the end the writer apprises us that "the setters of the print understand not one word of our speech!"

The most diverting ill.u.s.trations of the jargon which was intended to pa.s.s for good conversational English abound in the pocket-guides and dictionaries, of which some went through several editions, and were evidently in great request by the sections of society to which they appealed. One of them is an octoglot vocabulary, 1548, and a second a series of Colloquies in six languages, accompanied by a dictionary, 1576.

The English examples in the latter are highly curious, as affording an insight into our language as it was spoken at that date by foreign students and visitors; and, in point of fact, it is hard to choose between the two, which is the more remarkable. Let us take the Preface to the earlier publication from an impression of 1631 before me:--

"TO THE READER.

"Beloved Reader this boocke is so need full and profitable / and the vsance of the same so necessarie / that his goodnes euen of learned men / is not fullie to be praised for ther is noman in France / nor in thes Nederland / nor in Spayne / or in Italie handling in these Netherlandes which hat not neede of the eight speaches that here in are writen and declared: Fer whether thad any man doo marchandise / or that hee do handle in the Court / or that hee fo lowe the warres or that hee be a trauailling man / hy should neede to haue an interpretour / for som of theese eight speaches. The which wee considering have at our great cost and to your great profite / brought the same speaches here in suchwise to gether / and set them in order / so that you fromyence fouath shall not neede eny interpretour / but shalbe able to speake them your self / ...."

An extract from one of the interlocutions must suffice:--

"_D._ Peeter / is that your sone?

_P._ Yea it is my sonne.

_D._ it is a goodlie childe. G.o.d let hun al wayes prosper in virtue.

_P._ I thancke you coosen.

_D._ Doth he not go to the scole?

_P._ Yes / hee learneth to speake French.

_D._ Doth hee? it is very well done. John / can you well speake French?

_J._ Not very well coosen, but I learne.

_D._ Wher go you too schoole?

_J._ In the Lumbeardes streat.

_D._ Have you gon long too schoole?

_J._ About half a yeare."

So the dialogue goes on, and there is a series of them.

III. A second exemplification of the superlative obstacles which persons born out of England have at all periods encountered in the endeavour to comprehend on their own part, and render intelligible to others, our insular speech, is taken from the Italian Grammar of Henry Pleunus, printed at Leghorn at the end of the seventeenth century.

Now, here, in lieu of the alleged width of acceptability, which meets the eye in the traveller's pocket-dictionary just described, we get a positive a.s.surance that the author was a master of the English tongue; and it may be predicated of him that, compared with the majority of foreigners, he exhibits a proficiency very considerably above the average, though we honestly believe it to be grossly improbable that "every one speaks English at Legorne," as he says in one of the Anglo-Italian dialogues.