The Sources of Standard English/Chapter VI - Good and Bad English in 1873
CHAPTER VI.
good and bad english in 1873.
We read that in our renowned government of 1757, framed by the greatest of all English War ministers and by the greatest of all English Ducal jobbers, everything that was bright and stainless passed through the one channel, everything that was foul and noisome poured through the other; the Ministry was based upon all the high and all the low parts of our nature. Something of the like kind may be remarked in 1873, as to the men who keep the English printing press at work. Some of these are scholars, or men of strong mother wit, who in prose and poetry employ a sound Teutonic style. Others are men representing the middle class, writers who, for want of education, often use in a wrong sense the long Latinized words wherein the true penny-a-liner revels. The first class are day by day straining the foul matter from our language, and are leading us back to old springs too long unsought; perhaps they may yet keep alive our perishing Subjunctive mood. The other class are day by day pouring more sewage into the well of what can no longer be called ‘English undefiled.’ From the one quarter comes all that is lofty and noble in the literature of the day; from the other all that is mean and tawdry.
Our middle class (we beheld something of this kind in the Thirteenth Century) has an amazing love of cumbrous Latin words, which have not long been in vogue. This is seen in their early life. Winchester and Eton may call themselves colleges, Harrow and Rugby may call themselves schools; but the place, where the offspring of our shopkeepers are taught bad French and worse Latin, is an educational establishment or a polite seminary. The books used in our National schools show a lofty disdain for homespun English. As the pupils grow older, they do not care to read about a fair lady, but they are at once drawn to a female possessing considerable personal attractions. A brawl is a word good enough for a scuffle between peasants; but when one half-tipsy alderman mauls another, the brawl becomes a fracas. An émeute is a far genteeler word than a riot. A farmer, when he grows rich, prides himself on being an eminent agriculturist. The corruption is now spreading downward to the lower class; they are beginning to think that an operative is something nobler than a workman.[1] We may call King David a singer; but a triller of Italian trills must be known as a vocalist. Our fathers talked of healing waters; our new guide-books scorn even the term medicinal; therapeutic is the word beloved by all professors of the high polite style. Pope's well-known divine is being outdone; our ears are now become so polite, that sins must be called by new names, at which Wickliffe and Tyndale would have stared. I see that a hospital has lately been founded, not for drunkards, but for inebriates, a new-coined substantive of which Bunyan's Mr. Smooth-tongue might have been proud. Shade of Cobbett! we are now forbidden to call a spade a spade; our speech, like Bottom the weaver, is indeed translated.
Let us watch an Englishman of the average type setting to work upon a letter to the Times.[2] The worthy fellow, when at his own fireside, seldom in his talk goes beyond plain simple words and short sentences, such as Mr. Trollope puts into the mouths of his heroes. But our friend would feel himself for ever shamed in the eyes of his neighbours, were he to rush into print in this homely guise. He therefore picks out from his dictionary the most high-sounding words he can find, and he works them up into long-winded sentences, wholly forgetting that it is not every man who can bend the bow of Hooker or Clarendon. The upshot is commonly an odd jumble, with much haziness about who, which, and their antecedents. The writer should look askant at words that come from the Latin; they are too often traps for the unwary.[3] The Lady of the even trench and the bristling mound is indeed a high I and mighty Queen, when seated on her own throne; she has dictated the verse of Catullus and the prose of Tacitus; her laws, given to the world by the mouths of heathen Emperors and Christian Popes, have had wondrous weight with mankind. But no rash or vulgar hand should drag her into English common life; her help, in eking out our store of words, should be sought by none but ripe scholars, and even then most sparingly.[4]
I once heard a country doctor say, ‘Let me percute your chest.’[5] This too common love of Latinized tawdriness is fostered by the cheap press; the penny-a-liner is the outcome of the middle class. As I shall bestow some notice upon these individuals, to use the word dearest to their hearts, I think it as well first to say what I mean by the scornful term. The leading articles in our daily papers of the highest rank are the work of scholars and gentlemen, who write much in the style of our great authors of 1700, and do not use a greater proportion of Romance words than Chaucer employed in his tale of Melibœus, five hundred years ago. As to some of our weekly papers (I need not give names), a steady perusal of them is in truth a liberal education, most cheaply procured. Without help from such writers this work of mine would never have been undertaken. Their merit as English authors is beyond that of Chaucer, for they cast aside a huge pile of Romance words that he never knew, that they may employ as great a proportion of Teutonic words as he did in his prose. Good English is not confined to London; the names of certain admirable journals, published in Scotland, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, will occur to many of my readers.
But when we go a little lower down, we alight upon the penny-a-liner. His two best-beloved quotations are coign of vantage and the light fantastic toe. He it was who, having never heard of the works of Wheatley or Cardinal Bona, named a certain party in the English Church ritualists; this was about seven years ago. He may always be known by his love of words fresh from Gaul (thus he always calls his brethren his confrères), and by his fondness for Latin words that came in after Pope's death. He looks upon Sir A. Alison's text, well bestrewn with French phrases, as a far nobler pattern than the works of Mr. Hallam or Bishop Thirlwall. With him dangers do not grow, but they ‘assume proportions of considerable magnitude.’ He scorns to abuse or revile his foes, much more to rate or miscall them, so long as he can vituperate them.[6] Mr. Justice Keogh in 1872 was accused by many Irish pens of having vituperated the Galway clergy, but never of having sinned with the four other verbs in italics. The Irish are every whit as fond of fine language as the English middle class. When in 1871 all the Roman Catholic Prelates in Ireland put forth a lengthy demand for education on sound Ultramontane principles, they spoke of the thing that scholars call a ‘hearty welcome’ as an ‘ovation.’ The Irish clergy of the old pattern never learnt stuff such as this at Douai or Salamanca. Maynooth ought to be above borrowing from the Daily Telegraph.[7] If a writer of this kind were to pit himself boldly against Dr. Arnold and once more to set forth the homeward march of the Roman Consuls after the glorious day of the Metaurus, he would most likely say that they met with an ovation in every town on their road, and that they ended with a triumph at Rome. Livy would raise his eyebrows, could he read this version of his heart-stirring tale. I remember seeing in one of the penny papers an article in 1872 on the Alabama business; the Americans were there said to be uttering minatory expressions; threats being a coarse Teutonic word, far too commonplace for these gentry of the lower press. It is a wonder to me that they have not long ago enriched our tongue with the verbs existimate and autumate, making a dead set at the vulgar think and deem. The pressmen have already outrun the auctioneer mentioned at page 229 of this work; having now waxed bolder, they will not begin or even commence; they inaugurate and initiate, and they will soon incept. The state of France after 1871 has lately given them two glorious new words, rejuvenescence and recuperation. In a letter on prison discipline, printed in the Times of September 5, 1872, we find the wondrous word penology; the writer compounds Latin with Greek, and knows not how to spell the Latin he has compounded. What would become of our unhappy tongue, had we not the Bible and Prayer Book to keep us fairly steady in the good old paths? Our forefathers thought our mansion weather-tight, but these lovers of the new-fangled are ever panting to exchange stone and brick for stucco.[8] When the Irish Protestants were revising their Prayer Book, not many months ago, one luckless wight, a lover of what they call ‘ornate phraseology,’ was not ashamed to propose an alteration of our grand old Teutonic name for the Third Person of the Trinity. It is needless to say what a reception this piece of unwisdom met with from a scholar like Archbishop Trench. No vulgar hands should be laid on the Ark.
We all owe much to the Correspondents of the daily
journals. Many of them write sound English; but the
penny-a-liner may now and then be found in their ranks.
His Babylonish speech bewrayeth him; he mawkishly
enough calls an Emperor ‘a certain exalted Personage;’
a favourite at Court becomes in the scribbler's mouth ‘a
persona grata.’ After all, it is rather hard to grudge him his chance of showing off that he learnt Latin in
youth. One of this breed, in the last years of the
French Empire, was never tired of telling us in a queer
Anglo-Gallic jargon what he ate and drank at Paris, and
what Dukes and Marquesses he slapped on the back.
Such stuff could not have been served up, day after day,
if it had not hit the taste of the English middle class, a
taste thoroughly corrupt. A writer of this kind must
have readers like-minded with himself. Let me borrow
his beloved jargon for one moment, and wound his amour
propre by asking what is his raison d'être? The penny-a-liner's
help is often sought by an Editor, who knows
what good English is, yet employs these worthless tools.
Surely the Editors of our first-class journals should look
upon themselves as the high-priests of a right worshipful
Goddess, and should let nothing foul or unclean draw
nigh her altars. Cannot these lower journeymen of the
Press be put through a purification, such as an examination
in Defoe, Swift, or some sound English writer,
that a good style may be formed before the novice is
allowed to write for the journal? If the great authors
named were set up as models for young writers, we
should never hear of fire as ‘the devouring element,’
of the spot where something happens as ‘the locale,’ or
of a man in his cups as ‘involved in circumstances of
inebriation.’[9] It would be barbarous indeed to ask the
writers to learn a new tongue; but we only beg them to
go back to what they learned from their mothers and
their nurses.
A sharp-eyed gamekeeper nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn door. Even so our Editors ought once a month or so to head their columns with a list of new-fangled words, the use of which should be forbidden to every writer for their journals; to be sure, the vermin unhappily are not yet dead. In this list would come, I hope, many words already gibbeted in this chapter, together with postprandial, solidarity, egoism, collaborator, acerbity, dubiety, donate.[10] Some of these words, I believe, came to us from America. Our kinsmen there have made noble contributions to our common stock of literature; the works of Irving, Motley, Marsh, Bryant, Longfellow, are prized on both sides of the Atlantic alike. Dr. March by his Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon language, a work to which I owe so much, has shown us that in some things American scholarship aims at rivalling German thoroughness. But Englishmen cannot help being astonished at one thing in his book: he writes labor, honor, &c., instead of following the good old English spelling. Here is one of the few instances in which the pupil, strong in his right, may make bold to correct the master. Our English honour, the French honure or honneur, takes us back eight hundred years to the bloody day, big with our island's doom, when the French knights were charging up the slope at Senlac again and again, when striving to break the stubborn English shield-wall. The word honure, which had already thriven in Gaul for eleven hundred years, must have been often in the conquerors' months all through those long weary hours; it was one of the first French words that we afterwards admitted to English citizenship; and it should abide with us in the shape that it has always hitherto worn. If we change it into honor, we pare down its history, and we lower it to the level of the many Latin words that came in at the Reformation: from the Bastard of Falaise to the English Josiah is a great drop. Let us in this, as in everything else, hold to the good old way; and let our kinsmen, like ourselves, turn with dislike from changes, utterly needless, that spoil a word's pedigree. To maul an old term, whether English or French, is to imitate the clerical boors who wrought such havock at Durham and Canterbury within the last Century.
America and England alike are too much given to slang and to clipping old words. Nothing in the speech of the former country, so far as I know, can match our ‘awfully nice,’ or our ‘what say?’ but one comfort is, that slang takes hundreds of years before it can creep into Standard English. Mob and sham were slang in 1680, and smack strongly of that year's peculiarities; on the other hand, humbug, though as old as Bonnell Thornton, can as yet be employed by no grave author. Addison had before protested against curtailing words, as in the case of incog.; what would he have said to our exam.? Fine writing has set its dingy mark upon America as well as England; I think it was President Pierce who, in his opening address at the Capitol, twenty years ago, spoke of slavery as ‘involuntary servitude.’ New habits stand in need of new words; one verb, that has come to us within the last four years from the American mint, is ‘to interview.’ Nothing can better express the spirit of our age, ever craving to hear something new; the verb calls up before us a queer pair: on the one side stands the great man, not at all sorry at the bottom of his heart that the rest of mankind are to learn what a fine fellow he is; on the other side fussily hovers the pressman, a Boswell who sticks at nothing in the way of questioning, but who outdoes his Scotch model in being wholly unshackled by any weak feeling of veneration. This Nineteenth Century of ours is a grand age of inventions. Thus we know to our cost what a Sensation Novel means; yet Mr. Edgeworth, writing in 1808, lets us see that the word sensation in his day was wholly confined to France (Memoirs, p. 192). Now and then innovators make a lucky hit. ‘Why so much weep?’ (fletus) asked Artemus Ward; he little knew that he was reviving the Old English word wóp.[11] It is well known that phrases, called Americanisms, are often relics of a remote age. Thus, where an Englishman resolves to do a thing, an American concludes to do it. Yet, in an account of the battle of St. Albans (written in 1455), we read that the King and Lords ‘kept resydens, concludyng to holde the parlement.’[12] The fact that America speaks of the Fall and not of the Autumn, ought in a Philologer's eyes to atone for a multitude of her sins of the tongue.
As I have made a few strictures upon American vagaries, I ought, in common fairness, to acknowledge that no American fault comes up to the revolting habit, spread over too many English shires, of dropping or wrongly inserting the letter h. Those whom we call ‘self-made men’ are much given to this hideous barbarism; their hopes of Parliamentary renown are too often nipped in the bud by the speaker's unlucky tendency to ‘throw himself upon the ’Ouse.’ An untaught peasant will often speak better English than a man worth half a million. Many a needy scholar might turn an honest penny by offering himself as an instructor of the vulgar rich in the pronunciation of the fatal letter.[13] Our public schools are often railed against as teaching but little; still it is something that they enforce the right use of the h upon any lad who has a mind to lead a quiet life among his mates. Few things will the English youth find in after-life more profitable than the right use of the aforesaid letter.[14] The abuse of it jars upon the ear of any well-bred man far more than the broadest Scotch or Irish brogue can do. These dialects, as I have shown, often preserve good old English forms that have long been lost to London and Oxford.[15]
There are two things which are supposed to bring fresh ideas before the minds of the middle class — the newspaper on week days, and the sermon on Sundays. We have seen the part played by the former; I now turn to the latter. Many complaints have lately been made on the scarcity of good preachers; one cause of these complaints I take to be, the diction of the usual run of sermons. The lectern and the reading desk speak to the folk, Sunday after Sunday, in the best of English; that is, in old Teutonic words, with a dash of French terms mostly naturalized in the Thirteenth Century. The pulpit, on the other hand, too often deals in an odd jargon of Romance, worked up into long-winded sentences, which shoot high above the heads of the listeners.[16] Swift complained bitterly of this a hundred and fifty years ago; and the evil is rife as ever now. Is it any wonder then that the poor become lost to the Church, or that they go to the meeting-house, where they can hear the way to Heaven set forth in English, a little uncouth it may be, but still well understood of the common folk? A preacher has been known to translate, ‘we cannot always stand upright,’ into ‘we cannot always maintain an erect position.’[17] Who can make anything out of the rubbish that follows, ‘a system thus hypothetically elaborated is after all but an inexplicable concatenation of hyperbolical incongruity?’[18] This reads like Dr. Johnson run mad; no wonder that Dissent has become rife in the land. If we wish to know the cause of the bad style employed in preaching by too many of the Anglican clergy, we must ask how they have been taught at our Schools and Universities. Much heed is there bestowed on Latin and Greek, but none on English.[19] What a change might be wrought in our pulpits if lads at public schools were given some knowledge of our great writers from Chaucer and Wickliffe downwards, instead of wasting so much time on Latin verses, that do no good in after life to three-fourths of the students! A lad of average wit only needs sound English models to be set before him, and he will teach himself much. What good service might Oxford do if she were to establish yet another School, which would enforce a thorough knowledge of English, and would, moreover, teach her bantlings a new use of the Latin and Greek already learnt! The works of March, Morris, Max Müller, and others would soon become Oxford text-books in one of the most charming of all branches of learning. Surely every good son of the Church will be of my mind, that the knowledge of English is a point well worth commending to those who are to fill our pulpits. Our clergy, if well grounded in their own tongue, would preach in a style less like Blair's and more like Bunyan's. Others may call for sweetness and light; I am all for clearness and pith.[20] But we are getting into the right path at last. Articles have lately appeared in the Times, calling for more attention to the study of English at our Grammar Schools.
While we are on the subject of schools, it may be pointed out that Greek has done much in the last three centuries to keep before us the foot, that English will lend itself readily to high-sounding compounds. Old Chapman long ago set us on the right tack; Milton followed; and our boys at school talk glibly of wide-swaying Agamemnon and swift-footed Achilles; thus the power of compounding has never altogether left us. Would that we could also fasten any one of our prepositions to our verbs at will! I believe it is mainly owing to the study of Latin, that forsooth and wont have been kept alive, by schoolboys construing scilicet and soleo in the time-honoured way. It is pleasant to find one bough of the great Aryan tree lending healthy sap to another offshoot.[21]
Some of the best English verse of our time may be
read in the pages of Punch, whenever great Englishmen
die. Moreover, that shrewd wight is always ready
to nail up vermin on the barn door; as lately in the
case of the word elasticity, employed by three Bishops.
Upon this he remarked (June 7, 1873): ‘An upstart
expression foisted into the Text would be like a
patch of new cloth, and that shoddy, sewn into an old
garment of honest English make. That web is of a woof
too precious to be pieced with stuff of no more worth
than a penny a line.’ But sound English criticism too
often calls forth a growl of annoyance from vulgar vanity.
If any one in our day sets himself to breast the muddy
tide of fine writing, an outcry is at once raised that he is
panting to drive away from England all words that are
not thoroughly Teutonic. The answer is: no man that
knows the history of the English tongue, can ever be
guilty of such unwisdom. Our heedless forefathers in
the Thirteenth Century allowed thousands of our good
old words to slip; out language must be copious, at any
cost; we therefore by slow degrees made good the loss with thousands of French terms. Like the Lycian,
whom Zeus bereft of wit, we took brass for gold.
Thanks to this process, Chaucer had most likely as great
a wealth of words at his beck as Orrmin had, two hundred
years earlier. But, though we long ago repaired
with brick the gaps made in our ruined old stone hall, it
does not follow that we should daub stucco over the
brick and the stone alike. What a scholar mourns, is
that our daws prank themselves in peacocks' feathers:
that our lower press and our clergy revel in Romance
words, brought in most needlessly after Swift and Addison
were in their graves. What, for instance, do we
want with the word exacerbate instead of the old embitter?
The former is one of the penny-a-liner's choicest jewels.
Is not the sentence, workmen want more pay, at least
as expressive as the tawdry operatives desiderate additional remuneration?
At the same time, no man of
sense can object to foreign words coming into English
of late years, if they unmistakeably fill up a gap. Our
hard-working fathers had no need of the word ennui;
our wealth, ever waxing, has brought the state of mind;
so France has given us the name for it. The importer,
who first bestowed upon us the French prestige, is worthy
of all honour, for this word supplied a real want. Our
ships sail over all seas; English is the chosen language
of commerce; we borrow, and rightly so, from the uttermost
shores of the earth; from the Australians we took
kangaroo; and the great Burke uses taboo, which came
to him from Otaheite.[22] What our ladies, priests, soldiers, lawyers, doctors, huntsmen, architects, and cooks
owe to France, has been fairly acknowledged. Italy has
given us the words ever in the mouths of our painters,
sculptors, and musicians. The Portuguese traders, three
hundred years ago, helped us to many terms well known
to our merchants. Germany, the parent of long-winded
sentences, has sent us very few words; and these remind
us of the Thirty Years' War, when English and Scotch
soldiers were fighting on the right side.[23] To make
amends for all this borrowing, England supplies
foreigners (too long enslaved) with her own staple —
namely, the diction of free political life.[24] In this she
has had many hundred years' start of almost every nation
but the Hungarians; she has, it is true, no home-born
word for coup d'état; but she may well take pride in
being the mother of Parliaments, even as old Rome was
the source of civil law.[25]
But it is sad to see one of the most majestic of our political forms debased into a well-spring of bad English. Few sights are more suggestive than that of a British Sovereign enthroned and addressing the Lords Spiritual and Temporal with the Commons; while the men of 1215 look down from their niches aloft upon their good work. The pageant, one after Burke's own heart, takes us back six hundred years to the days when was laid the ground-plan of our Constitution, much as it still stands; the speech deals with facts upon which hangs the welfare of two hundred millions of men. But the old and pithy style of address, such as Charles I. and Speaker Lenthall employed, is now thought out of place; the Sovereign harangues the lieges in a speech that has become a byword for bad English. We have taken into our heads the odd notion, that long sentences stuffed with Latinized words are more majestic than our forefathers' simplicity of speech; the bad grammar, often put into the Sovereign's mouth, smacks of high treason. The evil example spreads downwards; it is no wonder that official reports are not seldom a cumbrous mass of idle wordiness.[26] A wholesome awe of long sentences would wonderfully improve the Official style, and would save the country many reams of good paper. As it is, too often from the Government scribbler's toil
‘Nonentity, with circumambient wings,
An everlasting Phœnix doth arise.’
bywords, and those parts of the Bible most on our
lips in every-day life, are almost purely Teutonic. I go
A step farther and would remark, that the same holds
good, as regards the great watchwords of English
history; such as ‘Short rede, good rede, slay ye the
Bishop;’ ‘when Adam dalf and Eve span, who was then
the gentleman?’ ‘bastard slips shall not thrive;’ ‘this
man hath got the sow by the right ear;’ ‘turn or burn;’
‘the word Calais will be found graven on my heart after
death;’ ‘stone dead hath no fellow;’ ‘put your trust
in God, but keep your powder dry;’ ‘change kings,
and we will fight you again;’ ‘we'll sink or swim together;’
‘the French run, then I die happy;’ ‘a Church
without a Gospel, a King above the Law;’ ‘the wooden
walls of Old England;’ ‘what will they say in England
if we get beaten?’ ‘the schoolmaster is abroad in the
land;’ ‘the Queen has done it all;’ ‘the Bill, the
whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill;’ ‘blood is thicker
than water;’ ‘rest and be thankful;’ ‘are they not
your own flesh and blood?’[27]
In this way, Pitt the younger is known to us as ‘the pilot that weathered the storm.’ I have heard, that when Canning wrote the inscription graven on Pitt's monument in the London Guildhall, an Alderman felt much disgust at the grand phrase ‘he died poor,’ and wished to substitute ‘he expired in indigent circumstances.’ Could the difference between the scholarlike and the vulgar be more happily marked? I have lately seen another kind of alteration earnestly recommended — it is short rede, good rede; and it sounds like a loud call to come and do likewise. Mr. Freeman says in 1873, on reprinting his Essays written long before: —
‘In almost every page I have found it easy to put some plain English word, about whose meaning there can be no doubt, instead of those needless French and Latin words which are thought to add dignity to style, but which in truth only add vagueness. I am in no way ashamed to find that I can write purer and clearer English now than I did fourteen or fifteen years back; and I think it well to mention the fact for the encouragement of younger writers. The common temptation of beginners is to write in what they think a more elevated fashion. It needs some years of practice before a man fully takes in the truth that, for real strength and above all for real clearness, there is nothing like the old English speech of our fathers.’[28]
We have before our eyes many tokens that the old ways of our forefathers have still charms for us, though our tongue has been for ages, as it were, steeped in French and Latin. Take the case of children brought to the font by their godfathers; Lamb long ago most wittily handled a long list of fine girlish names, and avowed at the end,
‘These all, than Saxon Edith, please me less.’
One of the signs of the times is, the marked fondness for the name Ethel; we cannot say whether the heroine of Mr. Thackeray or the heroine of Miss Yonge is the pattern most present to the parental mind. I know of a child christened Frideswide, though her parents have nothing to do with Christchurch, Oxford. This is one of the straws that shows which way the wind is blowing. With all our shortcomings, we may fairly make the Homeric boast that in some things we are far better than our fathers. A hundred years ago Hume and Wyatt were making a ruthless onslaught upon the England of the Thirteenth Century: the one mauled her greatest men; the other (irreparable is the loss) mauled her fairest churches. We live in better times; we see clearly enough the misdeeds of Hume and Wyatt: ought not our eyes to be equally open to the sins of Johnson and Gibbon? For these last writers, the store that had served their betters was not enough; disliking the words in vogue at the beginning of their Century, they gave us a most unbecoming proportion of tawdry Latinisms, which are to this day the joy of penny-a-liners. But already improvement is abroad in the land; Cobbett first taught us a better way; we have begun to see that the Eighteenth Century (at least in its latter half) was as wrong in its diction as in its History or its Architecture. We are scraping the stucco off the old stone and brick, as the Germans and Danes have done. Ere long, it is to be hoped, the most polysyllabic of British scribblers will find out that for him Defoe and Fielding are better models than Johnson or Gibbon. The great truth will dawn upon him, that few men can write forty words unbroken by a semicolon, without making slips in grammar. He will think twice before he uses Latin words, such as ovation, in a sense that makes scholars writhe. He will never discard a Teutonic word without good reason; and if he cannot find one of these fit for his purpose, he will prefer a French or Latin word, naturalized before 1740, to any later comer. Fox had some show of right on his side, when he refused to embody in his History any word not to be found in Dryden; though the great Whig might surely have borne with phrases used by Swift and Bolingbroke.
I now give three sentences, which will bring three different forms of what is called English into the most glaring contrast; each contains more than twenty nouns and verbs.
I. Stung by the foe's twitting, our forefathers (bold wights!) drew nigh their trusty friends, and were heartily welcomed; taught by a former mishap, they began the fight on that spot, and showed themselves unaffrighted by threatening forebodings of woe.
II. Provoked by the enemy's abuse, our ancestors (brave creatures!) approached their faithful allies, and were nobly received; instructed by a previous misfortune, they commenced the battle in that place, and proved themselves undismayed by menacing predictions of misery.
III. Exacerbated by the antagonist's vituperation, our progenitors (audacious individuals!) approximated to their reliable auxiliaries, and were ovated with empressement; indoctrinated by a preliminary contretemps, they inaugurated hostilities in that locality, and demonstrated themselves as unintimidated by minatory vaticinations of catastrophe.[29]
These three sentences at once carry the mind to Hengist, to William the Conqueror, and to the Victorian penny-a-liner. Of the three, the first is made up of good Teutonic words that are among our choicest heirlooms; some of them have been in our mouths for thousands of years, ever since we dwelt on the Oxus. The second sentence is made up of French words, many of which, so far back as the Thirteenth Century, had the right of citizenship in England; they are not indeed to be ranked with the Teutonic words already given, yet are often most helpful. The third sentence is made up of Latin words, mostly not brought in until after 1740;[30] wholly unneeded in England, they are at once the laughing-stock of scholars and the idols of penny-a-liners.[31] The first sentence is like a Highland burn; the second is like the Thames at Hampton Court; the third is like London sewage.[32] Or, to borrow another illustration, the first sentence is like Scott's Jeanie Deans; the second is like the average young lady of our day; the third is like Fielding's loathsome Bellaston woman. Something has been said earlier of the merits of stone, brick, and stucco.[33]
I will end with a parable: — A maiden of Eastern birth came over the sea, and by sheer force installed herself in a Welshman's house. Her roughness was much abated after her baptism: some say the priest who christened her was an Italian, others will have it that he was an Irishman. Her garments were afterwards somewhat rumpled and torn in a struggle with a Danish rover, her own kinsman, who long worried her sorely. A French knight proved a still shrewder foe; he became lord of her house, settled himself in her parlour, and thrust her down into the scullery. There she abode many days, taking little thought for her dress, though she had once given the greatest heed to it. A begging friar now came in, who was listened to by knight and maiden alike; he persuaded the latter to throw away certain articles of her homespun raiment, brought by her from the East, and to replace these (a work of time) by an imitation of part of the knight's fine French apparel. What was worse, she became too proud to spin new garments, as she wanted them, out of her home materials. All this was wrong; her weeds now became parti-coloured, unlike those of her kinsmen on the mainland. Not long after this great change in her attire, she found herself once more mistress in all her rooms, equally at home in parlour and in scullery. She again and again took the law of the Frenchman, thus handsomely requiting him for his burglary; and as to the government of her own household, she laid down rules that have since been copied far and wide. But she herself followed foreign fashions in dress still further as she grew older, especially about the time that she turned Protestant. Soon after changing her creed, she is thought to have looked her very best. We must take her as we find her; it is hopeless to expect her to wear those articles that she long ago flung away at the friar's behest; but all lovers of good taste will be sorry, if she hide the goodly old homespun weeds that still remain to her, under a heap of new-fangled Italian gewgaws. She is sometimes to be met with abroad, dight in comely apparel; plain in her neatness, she seems fondest of the attire she brought with her from over the sea, though she shrinks not from wearing a fair proportion of the French gear which she cannot now do without, thanks to her unwisdom when she lived in the scullery. Arrayed on this wise, she can hold her own, so skilful judges say, against all comers; she need not fear the rivalry of the proudest ladies ever bred in Greece or Italy. But sometimes the silly wench seems to be given over to the Foul Fiend of bad taste; she comes out in whimsical garments that she never knew until the other day; she decks herself in outlandish ware of all the colours of the rainbow, hues that she has not the wit to combine;[34] heartily ashamed of her own home, she takes it into her bead to ape foreign fashions, like the vulgarest of the pretenders upon whom Thackeray loved to bring down his whip. In these fits, she resembles nothing so much as some purse-proud upstart's wife, blest with more wealth than brains, who thinks that she can take rank among Duchesses and Countesses by putting on her back the gaudiest refuse of a milliner's shop. Let us hope that these odd fits may soon become things of the past; and that the fair lady, whom each true knight is bound to champion against besetting clowns, may hold up before English scholars, preachers, and pressmen alike that brightest of all her jewels, simplicity.
Your termes, your coloures, and your figures,
Kepe hem in store, til so be ye endite
Hie stile, as whan that men to kinges write.
Speketh so plain at this time, I you pray,
That we may understonden what ye say.[35]
- ↑ May I not ask with Theocritus, τίς δὲ πόθος τῶν ἔκτοθεν ἐργάτᾳ ἀνδρί;
- ↑ Here is a gem, which occurs in a letter to the Times of May 5, 1873. The writer sets up to be a critic of the English drama; the blind leads the blind. ‘Such representations are artistically as much beneath contempt as morally suggestive of compassion for the performers, not to speak of some indignation that educated and responsible people should sanction such exhibitions.’ He also talks, of ‘partaking an intellectual pleasure.’ Yet the writer of this is most likely no fool in private life.
- ↑ I have seen a begging letter containing the words, ‘I have become so deaf that I cannot articulate what people say to me.’ I once heard a showman say of a baboon: ‘The form of his claws enables him to climb trees with the greatest felicity.’ I know people who talk of diseases being insiduous, confusing the adjective with assiduous.
- ↑ In my younger days, the term reduplication used to be confined to the Greek grammar; but I see that one of the cheap papers has begun to employ this word for the action known hitherto to Englishmen as repetition. A little learning is indeed a dangerous thing.
- ↑ Mr. Charles Butler had called the Bull, by which Pius V. deposed Elizabeth, illaudable. He was twitted by a hot Protestant for applying so mild an epithet to so hateful an act. The Roman Catholic answered that he had had in his mind Virgil's Busiris; he quoted, in support of his phrase, Aulus Gellius, Heyne, and Milton. Had be but used in the first place some plain English adjective to express his meaning, much angry ink would have been left unshed. See his Vindication against Mr. Townsend's Accusations, pp. 112-114. Mr. Hazard, the American, published in 1873 a very good book on San Domingo; but he will not hear of settling in a country; locating, according to him, is the right word to use.
- ↑ George III. and Dr. Johnson, in their famous interview, spoke of the vituperative habit as ‘calling names.’ Prisca gens mortalium!
- ↑ Let them not touch the unclean thing, remembering that the anagram on the name of their deadly foe, Titus Oates, was Testis Ovat.
- ↑ O that they would learn ‘deductum ducere carmen!’
- ↑ This last gem I saw myself in a Penny Paper of October, 1872. Hæc ego non agitem?
- ↑ Every writer, who prints his travels, calls his book ‘Personal Adventures.’ Lord Plunkett, when asked the meaning of this, supposed that there was the same difference between what was Real and what was Personal in travels, as in the law of property.
- ↑ Philology crops up in strange places; I once heard a clown in a circus propound the question, ‘If you may say I freeze, I froze, why not also say I sneeze, I snoze?’ Yet he most likely never heard of Strong and Weak Verbs, or as the vile English Grammars of old used to call them, Irregular and Regular Verbs. We may remember that Wamba the son of Witless plays the philologer in the opening scene of Ivanhoe.
- ↑ Paston Letters (Gairdner's edition), i. 331.
- ↑ I make a present of this hint to those whom it may concern; I took it from Thackeray, who introduces a Frenchman, the instructor of Mr. Jeames in the art of garnishing his English talk with French phrases.
- ↑ The following story sets in a strong light the great difference between the speech of the well-bred and of the untaught in England. A servant, who had dropped into a large fortune, asked his master how he was to pass muster in future as a gentleman. The answer was, ‘Dress in black and hold your tongue.’
- ↑ A Scotch farmer's wife once said to me, finding me rather slow in following her talk when she spoke at all fast, ‘I beg your pardon. Sir, for my bad English.’ I answered, ‘It is I that speak the bad English; it is you that speak the true old English.’ It is delightful to hear the peasantry talk of sackless (innocens), and he coft (emit).
- ↑ How charming, in Memorials of a Quiet Life, is the account of the scholarlike Augustus Hare's style of preaching to his Wiltshire shepherds! He had a soul above the Romance hodgepodge.
- ↑ Barnes, Early England, p. 106. Such a preacher would miss the point of that wittiest of all proverbs, ‘An empty sack cannot stand upright.’
- ↑ Mr. Cox, who treats us to this stuff (Recollections of Oxford, p. 223), says, ‘such sentences, delivered in a regular cadence, formed too often our Sunday fare, in days happily gone by.’
- ↑ I for some years of my life always thought that our English long was derived from the Latin longus. Every grammar and dictionary, used in schools, should have a short sketch of Comparative Philology prefixed. I know that I was fourteen, before the great truths of that science were set before me by Bishop Abraham's little book, used in the Lower Fifth form at Eton. In those days what we now call Aryan was termed Indo-Germanic.
- ↑ There is an old Oxford story, that a preacher of the mawkish school, holding forth before the University, spoke of a well-known beast as ‘an animal which decency forbids me to name.’ The beast turned out to be the one nearest of kin to the preacher himself; Balaam's reprover, to wit.
- ↑ One of the good deeds of our boys is that they have kept alive the old substantive let (a hindrance) used in the game of fives. In a letter of Horace Walpole's, written about 1737 from the Christopher at Eton, we see some of the venerable slang of that College; the words are still fresh as ever. Mr. Kinglake, in his account of Colonel Yea at the Alma, has almost made rooge classical; none who have played football in the Eton way can forget this verb.
- ↑ Burke (the friend of Hare, not the friend of Fox) has given us a new word for suppress. Another famous Galway house has given us a name for irregular justice executed upon thieves and murderers.
- ↑ The word plunder is due to this war. The Indian Mutiny gave us loot, and the American Civil War created the bummer, called of old marauder.
- ↑ I take the following from D'Azeglio's Letters to his wife, page 244 (published in 1871): ‘Abbiamo avuto qui Cobden, il famoso dell' Anti-Corn-Laws-League. Ho dovuto far l'inglese puro sangue, più che si potesse, coi speeches e i toast, che sono stati i seguenti: “a S.M. Carlo Alberto — alla Queen Victoria — a Cobden.”’ The great patriot, as we see, makes rather a hash of his English. We also supply foreigners with sportsmanlike terms; le groom anglais est pour le cheval français.
- ↑ Coup d'état reminds me of one effect of Napoleonism. The greatest of French Reviews says in an article on Manzoni (July 15, 1873): ‘quantité de termes, qui n'étaient permis qu'aux halles, ont passé dans le langage de la cour.’ Paris is here meant.
- ↑ In the Daily Telegraph, July 18, 1873, will be found a letter from an Official representing the Lord Chamberlain; while rebuking a Manager for bringing the Shah on the stage, he so far forgets himself as to talk of ‘altering the make-up.’ But he at once pulls himself up, after this slip, and goes on to speak of ‘making modifications of the personality of the principal character.’
- ↑ Lord Thurlow in 1789 knew very well what he was about, when he couched in good Saxon his famous adjuration, which he meant to be a household word in the mouths of English squires and parsons. The pithy comments of Pitt, Burke, and Wilkes on Thurlow's blasphemy are well known. The Irish leaders in 1873 are wise in talking of ‘Home Rule,’ rather than of ‘Domestic Legislation;’ though the former bears an unlucky resemblance to ‘Rome Rule.’ Mr. Tadpole and Mr. Taper knew the value of a good cry.
- ↑ Mr. Freeman's Essays, Second Series, Preface. I lighted upon this passage long after I had written the rest of this chapter.
- ↑ Mr. Soule, of Boston, furnished me with many of the words of Number III., grand rolling words far above my poor brain. Number III. differs from Number I. as Horace's meretrix from matrona, scurra from amicus; his lines on the difference are well known. As to Mr. Soule and his synonyms — haud equidem invideo; miror magis.
- ↑ There are two Greek words and two French words among them; I have shown the Victorian penny-a-liner at his very best.
- ↑ Bishop Hall says in his Satires, I. 6: —
‘Fie on the forged mint that did create
New coin of words never articulate.’ - ↑ A London journal or two, that might well stand for the Cloaca Maxima, will readily occur to my readers.
- ↑ I have spoken of gold and brass; but I know of no combination of metals vile enough to be likened to Number III.
- ↑ The word penology, to wit.
- ↑ Chaucer, the Clerkes Prologue.