Why we should read Part 20

People certainly liked him better as an "honest sinner."

"'Wotsumdever ull Bob do next? That's wot I'd lik' to hear,'" said Mary; "'fust it's a woman, and then it's drink, and then it's the devil, and then it's G.o.d: reckon he's tried every way to disgrace us as he knows.'"

"'I thought I'd married a man,'" is Mabel's thought, "'and now it seems I've married a Young Man--a Young Man's Christian a.s.sociation.'"

Robert's love for her became more diffident and beseeching, for its glamours and ardours she had no response, for its doubts and hesitations she had nothing but contempt. "'I believe you'd make me as big a fool as yourself, if you could,'" she said. The people in the district get to the point where they "'woan't taake any more preaching from a chap wot's bin a byword in the Parish fur loosness this five years.'" So Clem tries to make him "hoald his tongue," but he has come to look upon himself as an apostle sent to the Gentiles, so he becomes a tramping Methodist, like the hero of Sheila Kaye-Smith's first book.

"On a warm March Sunday, when the hedges were brushed with green bloom, and the willow catkin made creamy splashes in the brown of the woods, Robert went off to Goudhurst."

Getting tired with his long walk, "he suddenly felt that it would be good to turn out of the lane, and lie down on the earth-smelling gra.s.s of one of those big, quiet fields, just where the shadow of the hedge was lacy on the edge of the sunshine ... to smell the earth, and feel its sweet, living strength as he lay on it ... while round him the primrose leaves uncurled, and the spotted leaves of the field orchid broke the green film of their bract, and the warm daisies breathed out a scent that was the caught essence of spring heat and honey ..." but he pulled himself up short ... this was the devil tempting him. "He distrusted a yearning for the beauty of the fields ... of old times he used never to think twice about the country--but since his conversion he had had ... temptations to turn to mere beauty." The conflict in his mind affected his preaching powers adversely. In the evening he meets a tramp whom he turns from the drink and is seduced by him into sleeping out of doors. "A strange, sweet peace had dropped upon him at last--he had forgotten the rubs and humiliations of his Sabbath ... but he did not sleep till nearly dawn. The night seemed awake ... it was full of a living scent of earth and gra.s.s, which mixed strangely with the musty dry scent of the hay. There was a continual flutter and whisper in the hedge, queer m.u.f.fled sounds came from the next field ... he slept just when the rich blue of the darkness was turning grey."

Mabel was furious with him, but he continued his irregular ministry. "It belonged to the casual nights he spent under the stars--soft purple nights of June, when the horns of the yellow moon burned above the woods, and the air was warm, and thick with the smell of hay. He a.s.sociated it with the sweet, straggling sunlight of late afternoon or early morning, with village wells, and cool deserted lanes ... he made no wonderful stir among the people, either for good or evil." He was not stoned at the cross-roads, any more than he was thronged by repentant sinners.

These accounts of his wanderings through Kent and Suss.e.x give Sheila Kaye-Smith a chance to describe more wonderfully and in greater detail than elsewhere the beauties of the nature that she knows and loves so well. In the end he falls in again with the gipsies, and is enticed by them to wrestle with Hannah, his first love, for her soul. He is at first averse from undertaking it: in the end, of course, he does.

"'Oh, Nannie,'" he said, "'G.o.d loves you. He's never stopped loving you once, for all you've turned against Him, and the cruel things you've done----'"

Then he knew that he was merely declaring his own love for her, and calling it G.o.d's.... He fell on his knees before her, and taking her in his arms, covered her face with kisses. Her husband immediately appears and threatens to blackmail him: "'This is a fine Gospel, and a d.a.m.n-fine Gospeller.'" He suggests that five pounds might seal their mouths and then----

"'I call five quid nothing for what you've done,'" said Auntie Lovel.

"'The other gentleman had to pay ten, and he scarce got hold of Hannah properly....'"

Robert at last sees the trick and nearly kills Hannah's husband, as a result of which he goes to prison, and Mabel seizes the opportunity to go back to the seaside. When he is released from jail Robert goes to live with Clem, a broken man.

"'Sims to me,'" says Polly, "'as Bob's life's lik' a green apple tree--he's picked his fruit lik' other men, but it's bin hard and sour instead of sweet. Love and religion--they're both sweet things, folks say, but with Bob they've bin as the hard green apples.'"

Robert goes to see Mabel and discovers that she wants to cut him right out of her life, and he decides to kill himself. He goes out in the dead of night to do it ... and finds at last that the love of the soil is too much for him. "The mistrusted earth had been his comfort all through that wonderful year.... Memories came to him of footprints in the white dust of Kentish lanes, of big fields tilted to the sunset, of ponds like moons in the night, of dim shapes of villages in a twilight thickened and yellowed by the chaffy mist of harvest, of the spilt glory of big solemn stars, the mystery and the wonder of sounds at night, sounds of animals creeping, sounds of water, sounds of birds.... The fields and the farms and the sunrise were calling him ... 'I am your G.o.d--doan't you know me?... Didn't you know that I've bin with you all the time?

That every time you looked out on the fields ... you looked on Me? Why woan't you look and see how beautiful and homely and faithful and loving I am? I'm plighted to you wud the troth of a mother to her child. You lost Me in the mists of your own mind.' ..."

Once more he is converted. Full of his new Salvation he hastens to enlighten Clem.

"'But now I see as how He's love ... and He's beauty.... He's in the fields maaking the flowers grow and the birds sing and the ponds have that lovely liddle white flower growing on 'em....'" Again he decides to convert the world despite Clem's protests. "'You can't go every time you're convarted preaching the Gospel about the plaace.'" But he goes ... and Hannah's husband stirs up the roughs to duck him in a mill pond: they are more thorough than they mean to be and he dies of his injuries.

'"I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord G.o.d I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive ... if I'm wud Him I can't never lose the month of May.'"

And the last words are fittingly left to Clem and Polly. "'He wur a decent chap, Poll ... he wur a good chap, the best I've known.'

"'Surelye,' said Polly, 'if Bob had only had sense he might have come to be a saint and martyr--who knows? He had the makings of one; but he had no sense--if he'd had sense he'd be alive now.'

"'Reckon he did wot he thought right.'

"'That's why it's a pity it wurn't sense.'"

This study of a man strange, dignified, real and crystal-clear is not likely quickly to perish. Those who have any trace of the pa.s.sion for the soil that possesses nearly all the characters in Sheila Kaye-Smith's books, and most Englishmen have it in some degree, will not need to look for any further reason why they should read her novels. All lovers of pure art, all lovers of Nature, all lovers of humanity will find in them satisfaction hardly to be found elsewhere in fiction.

PART III

BOOKS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I

_A HISTORY OF MODERN COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH_--BY H. C. WYLD

I purposely refrained from saying "Philology" because it has a frightening sound. There is a feeling that the study of literature is directly hostile to a study of Philology, whereas the truth is that, as Professor Wyld says, "_Rightly interpreted, language is a mirror of the minds and manners of those who speak it_," a point of view which cannot be sufficiently emphasised.

In the old days the study of language meant the chasing of umlaut and the tracking down of ablaut; to-day we find ourselves enticed into the study of modern colloquial English in these words:

"Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore, Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise."

The study of language in H. C. Wyld's _History of Modern Colloquial English_ becomes "one line of approach to the Knowledge of Man," and is vastly intriguing.

We find ourselves, for instance, trying to account for the great shifting in p.r.o.nunciation between the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in words of the "er" and "ar" type. Why did "sarvice," "vartue," "sarmon" die out, and "Derby,"

"Berkshire," "clerk" remain? Of course the great factor which nowadays destroys the value of vocabulary as a specific characteristic of a given regional dialect is the migratory habits of the population, and the war will have done more to ruin it than any amount of Elementary Education.

But we are concerned for the moment with curiosities. Why is "napkin"

to be preferred to "serviette"? Why do not people who speak of "the influenza" say "the appendicitis"? Even so great an authority on social propriety as Lord Chesterfield talks of "the head-ach." Where do shop-walkers get their "half-hose," "vest" (for waistcoat), "neckwear,"

"footwear" and similar words? What has happened to the word "_genteel_"?

"O d.a.m.n anything that's low"--"The genteel thing is the genteel thing"; but the fun lies in finding out what each age and each individual means or has meant by "genteel" and "low."

It is with a certain sense of surprise that those who have never studied the English Language find that in mediaeval times our ancestors gave the alphabet Continental values; those who have a smattering of literary history are equally surprised to find that Chaucer, "the Father of English Literature," did not create the English of Literature; he found it ready to his hand and used it with a gaiety, a freshness, a tenderness and a humanity which has never been surpa.s.sed.

Those interested in Literature have ever looked upon the fifteenth century as an arid waste: in language, on the other hand, it is a period of intense importance. For one thing, there is a big increase in the number of people who can write, and therefore in the number of private doc.u.ments that have come down to us. Freed from the shackles of the professional scribe, writing becomes a listening to actual people speaking, and so we find a great variety of spelling ... we find that modern English is beginning ... and there is of course the introduction of printing. It is to these old printers and to these old printers alone that we owe our persistence in clinging to an outworn system of spelling.

For four hundred and fifty years they have dictated to us how we are to spell, and a defence of our existing system which is completely unphonetic is defensible chiefly on the ground of custom, not at all for any pretended historical merit. If only Caxton had been a trifle more enterprising our spelling would have been less widely divorced from the facts of p.r.o.nunciation.

In the sixteenth century we find that regional dialect disappears completely from the written language of the South and Midlands--almost every private letter contains a certain number of spellings which throw light upon p.r.o.nunciation: "the tongue which Shakespeare spake" was the tongue which he wrote: and there is a definite unity between the colloquial language and the language of literature which is after all natural when we think how closely approximated to the action done was every word written by the Elizabethans who one and all seem to have been writers as well as soldiers, statesmen, politicians, sailors, merchant venturers and amba.s.sadors.

"It is not for nothing," says Professor Wyld, "that matters stood thus between the men of letters and the courtiers and the explorers in the age when Literary English was being made, or rather, let us say, when English speech was being put to new uses, and made to express in all its fullness the amazing life of a wonderful age, with all its fresh experiences, thoughts and dreams.

"If anyone doubts whether the language of Elizabethan literature was actually identical with that of everyday life, or whether it was not rather an artful concoction, divorced from the real life of the age, let him, after reading something of the lives and opinions of a few of the great men we have briefly referred to, ask himself whether the picture of Ascham, Wilson, Sidney, or Raleigh posturing and mourning like the Della Cruscans of a later age, is a conceivable one ... if the speech of the great men we have been considering was unaffected and natural, it certainly was not vulgar. If it be vulgar to say _whot_ for _hot_, _stap_ for _stop_, _offen_ for _often_, _sarvice_ for _service_, _venter_ for _venture_: if it be slipshod to say _Wensday_ for _Wednesday_, _beseechin_ for _beseeching_, _stricly_ for _strictly_, _sounded_ for _swooned_, _attemps_ for _attempts_, and so on; then it is certain that the Queen herself, and the greater part of her Court, must plead guilty to these imputations."

The individualism in spelling which still to a certain extent prevailed in the sixteenth century enables us to collect from written works, to a far higher degree than at present, the individual habits of speech which the writer possessed. The result of an examination of the writings of this age, from this point of view, is that we see that there existed a greater degree of variety in speech--both in p.r.o.nunciation and in grammatical forms--than exists now.

One particularly valuable doc.u.ment which Professor Wyld makes use of is the diary of Henry Machyn, a sixteenth-century tradesman who gossips at random in the vernacular of the middle-cla.s.s Londoner with no particular education or refinement. Like the Wellers, he confuses his _v's_ and _w's_: _wacabondes_, _wergers_, _walues_, _welvet_, _woyce_, _voman_, _Vestmynster_ are examples. He misplaces his initial aspirates, _alff_, _Amton Courte_, _ard_, _Allallows_, _elmet_, _alpeny_, _hanswered_, _haskyd_, _harme_: his is the largest list of "dropped aspirates" in words of English, not Norman-French, origin which Professor Wyld has found in any doc.u.ment as early as this. _As_ as a relative p.r.o.noun, _good ons_ for _good ones_, _syngyne_ for _singing_, _wyche_ for _which_ and _watt_ for _what_ are valuable signs. Machyn lets us into more secrets of contemporary speech than does any other writer of his period: he is marvellously emanc.i.p.ated from traditional spelling, which makes him a wonderful guide to the lower type of London English of his time.

When he gets to the seventeenth century the ordinary reader of to-day feels that the writers of that period begin for the first time to speak like men and women of his own age; both in spirit and in substance we have reached our own English; by the time we reach Sir John Suckling and Cowley we scent a colloquial modernity which is altogether foreign to the soaring periods of Milton, the eccentricity of Sir Thomas Browne or the didactic aloofness of Bacon. Dryden was conscious of great differences between the speech of his own time as reflected in writing, especially in the drama, and that of the Elizabethans. He attributes the change and "improvement" to the polish and refinement of Charles II.'s Court. He congratulates himself that "the stiff forms of conversation"

had pa.s.sed away; his charges against the older age are merely charges against the archaic and unfamiliar. To be obsolete in his eyes was to be inferior. Hence his attempt to modernise Chaucer and improve on Shakespeare. These strictures of Dryden about English refer primarily to literature, but they are applicable to the colloquial language. If literary prose style changes it is because the colloquial language has changed first.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century we have Swift's instructive treatises on the English of his day and of the age before, which is diametrically opposed to Dryden's theories. But it is important to notice that among the hosts of solecisms to which he objects he does not quote what we should expect him to quote. Why does he not mention _Lunnon_, _Wensday_, _Chrismas_, _greatis_ (greatest), _respeck_, _hounes_ (hounds)? The reason is that they were so widespread among the best speakers that he himself didn't notice anything wrong with them.

His strictures are those of the academic pedant, Dryden's are those of the man of the world.