The Trick of Education
THE pages following are concerned with differences of speech, but not with great differences; not with the error of the many, but with divergence and distinctions amongst the few. It is a tenable opinion, advanced here, that of two educated ways of pronouncing a word or shaping a phrase, one is a little the more educated. The two manners are not equal; but they are nearly equal, hence all the interest and energy of the contention. A student of emotional drama has discovered that the true tragedy lies not in the opposition of good to evil, but in the fatal strife of good with good. And a light version of this truth may be detected in the comedy of our daily language. Yet how to judge between two slender consonants, two hasty vowels, two turns of phrase to be heard in the same room or from the same well-accredited platform? How to judge without gratuitous dogmatism? It seems hardly possible, and yet it is easy. The close law is the unwritten; and the certain thing is the barely perceptible, because upon it we fasten a finer attention.
Mr. Wells would have all English speakers to speak alike. The fulfilment of that wish is, of course, beyond reach. That which is within the scope of a reasonable wish is that all persons of good education should use that way of speaking which is a very little better than another way. While there is water to draw and wood to hew, there must needs be men and women who have not time for perfect education; and from them we have no despicable equivalent—the provincial phrase, the local accent, the vowel that baffles mimicry, a word lurking in a corner of England or America, rediscovered there and gladly re-adopted by Literature herself. This brief article, then, is not to be concerned with provincialisms, but with differences at the centre. It is enough to say that if provincialisms should be destroyed we should lose the er of Somersetshire, Hampshire, Cornwall, and California, the sound that is given to "earth," "infer," and "world" in those several provinces, a sound that does not exist in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, or, as far as I can ascertain, in any of the Slav languages—nay, the Oriental. To the ears of New York and London it may be unwelcome, but the tongue of mankind is not to be deprived of a sound for that reason. Nay, I have heard the syllable praised, on its own merits, as "rich." Not only rich, but rank, I thought; but I would not have it abolished. It would be ill-judged, too, to put an end to that French u which comes now and then to town out of Devonshire. While most English people can hardly master the French u, and Stratford-atte-Bowe is obliged to be content to hear its pupils, after years of "tuition," say Brooges for Bruges, here are perfectly uneducated country people from Devon who put the u of Paris itself into their English. If Mr. Wells had his wish, moreover, we should even lose the Scottish inflection, with its gentle endings as it were away from the key-note. And a sensible loss would befall amongst the non-provincial also, and those who speak in the "received" manner, if my own wish were granted. For we should thenceforth want one of the best topics of prattle. It was in a remote country house, in a foreign land, that chance made house-companions of two strangers with "nothing in common" except their language, but ready to take, and especially to show, an interest in each other for the sake of the courtesies of a young acquaintance. "And what did you talk about with your host?" was asked afterwards of the lady. "After a few days we began to quarrel about pronunciations. We made great friends; we had not half finished when the others came."
