Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Sweet, Henry
SWEET, HENRY (1845–1912), phonetician, comparative philologist, and anglicist, the eldest son of George Sweet, barrister-at-law, of the Inner Temple, by his wife, Agnes Nicholson, was born in London 15 September 1845. His father was of Frisian and West of England origin, his mother of Scottish birth. In his early life Sweet suffered under great physical disadvantages; as a boy he was subject to fits, and also to extreme short-sightedness, which made reading inconceivably difficult, until the defect was relieved in later years. In the subjects of which he became a master Sweet was largely self-taught. He began with an interest in alphabets; but the first advance in the direction of his life's work was due to his study of Rask's grammar of Anglo-Saxon.
Sweet's formal education began in his tenth year at a private school, Bruce Castle, Tottenham. At the age of sixteen he went to King's College School, London. In 1864 he gained experience of German philological method at the university of Heidelberg. After a short time in a merchant's office, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1869. He was ill fitted by nature and to some extent by the turn which his studies had taken, to adapt himself to the classical curriculum of the university. He won a Taylorian scholarship in German and gained thereby the favourable notice of Friedrich Max Müller, but his fourth class in literae humaniores (1873) did not commend him in the eyes of university or college authorities, and no position in Oxford was offered to him.
Sweet had, however, already contributed to the Proceedings of the London Philological Society, and had published in 1871 an edition of King Alfred's translation of the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great, in which he had laid the foundations of the dialectology of Old English. He had been familiar since 1868 with the system of A. Melville Bell's Visible Speech (1863), and this bore fruit in his Handbook of Phonetics: including a Popular Exposition of the Principles of Spelling Reform, published in 1877. His History of English Sounds from the earliest period had appeared in 1874; this is a work of great originality, and in its enlarged form (1888) became a standard text-book.
In 1876 Sweet published the first edition of his famous Anglo-Saxon Reader, a selection of Old English literature that has not been surpassed in any similar compass. In the twenty years following he produced most of that pioneer work which, by its range and originality, distinguishes him as the greatest philologist that this country has produced. In The Oldest English Texts (1885), the result of some seven years of the closest work, he put the early history of English once for all on a sound basis. Through the medium of his Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885) and the English edition of it (1890) he taught phonetics to Europe; he must, indeed, be considered to be the chief founder of modern phonetics, and his descriptions of the sounds of the languages examined by him—for instance, Danish, Welsh, Russian, and Portuguese—will always retain their value.
Sweet applied the data of human speech with vital results to the exposition of the history of the English language and to the elucidation of wider linguistic problems. Supreme examples of his method are seen in A New English Grammar (1892, 1898) and The History of Language (1900). His last word on the subject of phonetics is contained in The Sounds of English: an Introduction to Phonetics (1908), where he refers to the value and possibilities of instrumental phonetics. Few scholars, native or foreign, have left their mark so plainly and permanently upon the study of the grammar and lexicography of Old English, of the relation of grammar to the laws of thought, and of the history of English in all its forms and periods.
In the accomplishment of this great and lasting work Sweet enjoyed neither an official position nor a settled endowment until 1901, when a readership in phonetics was created for him at Oxford. In 1876 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of comparative philology (to which no salary was attached) at University College, London; in 1885 he failed to obtain the newly founded Merton professorship of English language and literature at Oxford. In 1898 he accepted a lectureship in English language at University College, Liverpool, but he was obliged to resign, for private reasons, before he had taken up the duties. In 1901 the chair of comparative philology at Oxford became vacant by the death of Max Müller, and once again Sweet was an unsuccessful candidate, although supported by the testimony of several of the greatest philologists in Europe: this failure was perhaps the severest blow of all. Thus, to the astonishment of foreign scholars, he remained all his life deprived of those large opportunities which an important chair might have afforded him of working out liberal schemes for a school of linguistic study which he had adumbrated as far back as the early 'eighties.
In 1887 Sweet married Mary Aletheia, youngest daughter of Samuel Birch, the Egyptologist [q.v.], and sister of Walter de Gray Birch, for many years senior assistant in the MSS. department of the British Museum. After several changes of residence, he and his wife settled permanently in Oxford in 1895. Here he was brought into contact with a considerable group of eminent philologists. It was not long, however, before trouble arose from some obscure cause. Living somewhat remote from society, Sweet was prone to magnify chance sayings and doings out of all proportion to their significance. Misunderstandings became frequent; feud succeeded feud, and finally Sweet became estranged from nearly all his philological contemporaries in Oxford. With a few, however, he remained in touch, among them being Max Müller; with two others at least, Frederick York Powell and F. C. Conybeare, he remained on intimate terms. The fault was not all on his side. A more general spirit of magnanimity towards a great worker and thinker would have made his position easier. But Sweet did not understand the ways of the world, and he resented violently anything that he conceived to savour of jealousy or intrigue. More than once his irritation provoked him to outbursts which his most fervent admirers could not but deplore.
The keynote of Sweet's work and character was independence. As a philologist, he belonged to no school of thought; as a man, he took his own way. He was widely interested in many things; he had the gifts of humour and an open mind. He was always learning. He was close on fifty years of age when he began the study of Arabic, Chinese, and Finnish. Late in life, also, he took to music, and was at one time busy with a new system of musical notation. His teaching was an inspiration to many young scholars.
Sweet's power of literary appreciation and expression is less well known, but is clearly evident in, for instance, his lecture on Shelley's Nature Poetry (delivered in 1888 and privately printed in 1901), and in his sketches of persons and places in A Primer of Spoken English (1890). He was interested in spiritualism and Swedenborgianism, and looked forward to flying, ‘real flying, not with bags and stoves.’
Sweet was of middle height and thickset, with a head remarkable at once for its length and breadth, with deep square shoulders, hair that was golden-yellow in his youth, and blue eyes, to which his excessive shortsightedness lent a glaring aspect. He died of pernicious anaemia at Oxford 30 April 1912, and was buried at Wolvercote. He had no children.
[H. C. K. Wyld in Modern Language Quarterly, July 1901; H. C. K. Wyld and Alois Brandl in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, April 1913; J. A. S. in Oxford Magazine, 9 May 1912; Transactions and Proceedings of the Philological Society (London) 1868–1885; the several prefaces to Sweet's works, and letters in Academy, 23 January, &c., 1886; Collected Papers of Henry Sweet, arranged by H. C. K. Wyld, 1913; private information; personal knowledge.]