1Spelman’s “History of Sacrilege.”234 Henry VIII.3Hallam’s “Constitution of England,” i. 8, 4to.4The remains of this feudal pomp and power were visible even at a later period in the succeeding reign, when we find the Earl of Nottingham, in his embassy to Spain, accompanied by a retinue of five hundred persons, and the Earl of Hertford, at Brussels, carried three hundred gentlemen.5“The graziers have assured me of their credit, and some of them may be trusted for a hundred thousand pounds.”—Sir J. Harrington’s Prologue toThe Metamorphosis of Ajax.
1Spelman’s “History of Sacrilege.”
234 Henry VIII.
3Hallam’s “Constitution of England,” i. 8, 4to.
4The remains of this feudal pomp and power were visible even at a later period in the succeeding reign, when we find the Earl of Nottingham, in his embassy to Spain, accompanied by a retinue of five hundred persons, and the Earl of Hertford, at Brussels, carried three hundred gentlemen.
5“The graziers have assured me of their credit, and some of them may be trusted for a hundred thousand pounds.”—Sir J. Harrington’s Prologue toThe Metamorphosis of Ajax.
ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY.
Someof the first scholars of our country stepped out of the circle of their classical studies with the patriotic design of inculcating the possibility of creating a literary language. This was a generous effort in those who had already secured their supremacy by their skill and dexterity in the two languages consecrated by scholars. Many of the learned engaged in the ambitious reform of ourorthography, then regulated by no certain laws; but while each indulged in some scheme different from his predecessors, the language seemed only to be the more disguised amid such difficult improvements and fantastic inventions.
A curious instance of the monstrous anomalies of our orthography in the infancy of our literature, when a spelling-book was yet a precious thing which had no existence, appears in this letter of the Duchess of Norfolk to Cromwell, Earl of Essex.
“My ffary gode lord—her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld I pra you take hit (in) wort An hy wer habel het showlde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone.”
These lines were written by one of the most accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century, “the friend of scholars and the patron of literature.” Dr. Nott, who has supplied this literary curiosity, has modernized the passage word by word; and though the idiom of the times is preserved, it no longer wears any appearance of vulgarity or of illiteracy.
“My very good lord,—Here I send you, in token of the New Year, a glass of setyll set in silver gilt; I pray you take it (in) worth. An I were able, it should be better. I would it were worth a thousand crowns.”
The domestic correspondence, as appears in letters of the times, seems to indicate that the writers imagined that, by conferring larger dimensions on their words by theduplication of redundant consonants, they were augmenting the force, even of a monosyllable!1
In such disorder lay our orthography, that writers, however peculiar in their mode of spelling, did not even write the same words uniformly. Elizabeth herself wrote one word, which assuredly she had constantly in her mind, seven different ways, for thus has this queen written the wordsovereign. The royal mistress of eight languages seemed at a loss which to choose for her command. The orthography of others eminent for their learning was as remarkable, and sometimes more eruditely whimsical, either in the attempt to retrace the etymology, or to modify exotic words to a native origin; or, finally, to suit the popular pronunciation. What system or method could be hoped for at a time when there prevailed a strange discrepancy in the very names of persons, so variously written not only by their friends but by their owners? Lord Burleigh, when Secretary of State, daily signing despatches with the favouriteLeicester, yet spelt his nameLecester; and Leicester himself has subscribed his own name eight different ways.2
At that period down to a much later, every one seems to have been at a loss to write their own names. The name ofVillersis spelt fourteen different ways in the deeds of that family. The simple dissyllabic but illustrious name ofPercy, the bishop found in family documents, they had contrived to write in fifteen different ways.
This unsettled state of ourorthography, and what it often depended on, ourorthoepy, was an inconvenience detected even at a very early period. The learned SirJohn Cheke, the most accomplished Greek scholar of the age, descended from correcting the Greek pronunciation to invent a system of English orthography. Cheke was no formal pedant; with an enlarged notion of the vernacular language, he aimed to restore the English of his day towhat then he deemed to be its purity. He would allow of no words but such as were true English, or of Saxon original; admitting of no adoption of any foreign word into the English language, which at this early period our scholar deemed sufficiently copious. He objected to the English translation of the Bible, for its introduction of many foreign words; and to prove them unnecessary he retranslated the Gospel of St. Matthew, written on his own system of a new orthography. His ear was nice, and his Attic taste had the singular merit of giving concision to the perplexed periods of our early style. But his orthography deterred the eyes of his readers; however the learned Cheke was right in his abstract principle, it operated wrong when put in practice, for every newly-spelt word seemed to require a peculiar vocabulary.
When Secretaries of State were also men of literature, the learned SirThomas Smith, under Elizabeth, composed his treatise on “The English Commonwealth,” both in Latin and in English—the worthy companion of the great work of Fortescue. Not deterred by the fate of his friend, the learned Cheke, he projected even a bolder system, to correct the writing of English words. He designed to relieve the ear from the clash of supernumerary consonants, and to liquify by a vowelly confluence. But though the scholar exposed the absurdity of the general practice, where in certain words the redundant letters became mutes, or do not comprehend the sounds which are expressed, while in other words we have no letters which can express the sounds by which they are spoken, he had only ascertained the disease, for he was not equally fortunate in the prevention. An enlargement of the alphabet, ten vowels instead of five, and a fantastical mixture of the Roman, the Greek, and the Saxon characters, required an Englishman to be a very learned man to read and write his maternal language. This project was only substituting for one difficulty another more strange.
Were we to course the wide fields which these early “rackers of orthography” have run over, we should start, at every turn, some strange “winged words;” but they would be fantastic monsters, neither birds with wings nor hares with feet. Shakspeare sarcastically describes thisnumerous race: “Now he is turnedORTHOGRAPHERhis words are a very fantastical banquet; just so many strange dishes.” Some may amuse. One affords a quaint definition of the combination oforthoepywithorthography, for he would teach “how to write orpaint the image of man’s voicelike to the life or nature.”3The most popular amender of our defective orthography was probablyBullokar, for his work at least was republished. He proposed a bold confusion, to fix the fugitive sounds by recasting the whole alphabet, and enlarging its number from twenty-four to more letters, giving two sounds to one letter, to some three; at present no mark or difference shows how the sounded letters should be sounded, while our speech (or orthography) so widely differed; but the fault, says old Bullokar, is in thepicture, that is, the letters, not the speech. His scheme would have turned the language into a sort of music-book, where the notes would have taught the tones.4I extract from his address to his country a curious passage. “In true orthographie, both theeye, thevoice, and theearemust consent perfectly without any let, doubt, or maze. Which want of concord in the eye, voice, and ear I did perceive almost thirtie yeares past by the very voice of children, who, guided by the eye with the letter, and giving voice according to the name thereof, as they were taught to name letters, yielded the eare of the hearer a degree contrary sound to the word looked for; hereby grewe quarrels in the teacher, and lothsomeness in the learner, and great payne to both, and the conclusion was that both teacher and learner must go by rote, or no rule could be followed, when of 37 parts 31 kept no square, nor true joint.”
All these reformers, with many subsequent ones, only continued to disclose the uneasy state of the minds of the learned in respect to our inveterate orthography; so difficult was it, and so long did it take to teach the nation how to spell, an art in which we have never perfectly succeeded. Even the learned Mulcaster, in his zealous labour to “theright writing of the English tongue,” failed, though his principle seems one of the most obvious in simplicity. This scholar, a master of St. Paul’s school, freed from collegiate prejudices, maintained that “words should be written as they were spoken.” But where were we to seek for the standard of our orthoepy? Who was to furnish the model of our speech, in a land where the pronunciation varied from the court, the capital, or the county, and as mutable from age to age? The same effort was made among our neighbours. In 1570 the learned Joubert attempted to introduce a new orthography, without, however, the aid of strange characters. His rule was only to give those letters which yield the proper pronunciation; thus he wrote,œuvres, uvres;françoise, fransaise;temps, tems.
Among the early reformers of our vernacular idiom, the name ofRichard Mulcasterhas hardly reached posterity. Our philologer has dignified a small volume ostensibly composed for “the training of children,”5by the elevated view he opened of far distant times from his own of our vernacular literature—and he had the glory of having made this noble discovery when our literature was yet in its infancy.
This learned master of St. Paul’s school developes the historical progress of language, on the great philosophical principle that no impediment existed to prevent the modern from rivalling the more perfect ancient languages. In opposition to the many who contended that no subject can be philosophically treated in the maternal English, he maintained that no one language, naturally, is more refined than another, but is made so by the industry of “eloquent speech” in the writers themselves, and by the excellence of the matter; a native soil becomes more genial in emulating a foreign. I preserve the pleasing illustration of his argument in the purity of his own prose, and because he was the prophet of our literature.
“The people of Athens thus beautified their speech and enriched their tongue with all kinds of knowledge, both bred within Greece and borrowed from without. The people of Rome having plotted (planned) their government much like the Athenians, became enamoured of theireloquence, and translated their learning wherewith they were in love. The Roman authority first planted the Latin among us here, by force of their conquest; the use thereof for matters of learning doth cause it continue, though the conquest be expired. And, therefore, the learned tongues, so termed of their store, may thank their own people both for their fining (refinement) at home and their favour abroad. But did not these tongues use even the same means to brave (adorn) themselves, ere they proved so beautiful?
“There be two special considerations which keep the Latin and other learned tongues, though chiefly the Latin, in great countenance among us; the one is the knowledge which is registered in them; the other is the conference which the learned of Europe do commonly use by them, both in speaking and writing. We seek them for profit, and keep them for that conference; but whatever else may be done in our tongue, either to serve private use, or the beautifying our speech, I do not see but it may well be admitted,even though in the end it displaced the Latin, as the Latin did others, and furnished itself by the Latin learning. For is it not indeed a marvellous bondage to become servants to one tongue for learning sake, the most of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue, with the gain of most time? Our own, bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom; the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom. I honour the Latin, but I worship the English. I wish all were in ours which they had from others; and by their own precedent, do let us understand how boldly we may venture, notwithstanding the opinion of some of our people, as desire rather to please themselves with a foreign tongue wherewith they are acquainted, than to profit their country in her natural language, where their acquaintance should be. The tongues which we study were not the first getters, though by learned travel (labour) they prove good keepers; but they are ready to return and discharge their trust when it shall be demanded, in such a sort, as it was committed for term of years, and not for inheritance.”
“But it is objected,” our learned Mulcaster proceeds, with his engaging simplicity, that “the English tongueis of small reach, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all. What tho’ (then)? It reigneth there, though it go not beyond sea. And be not English folk finish (refined) as well as the foreign, I pray you? And why not our tongue for speaking, and our pen for writing, as well as our bodies for apparel, and our tastes for diet? But you say that we have no cunning (knowledge) proper to our soil to cause foreigners to study it, as a treasure of such store. What tho’ (then)? Why raise not the English wits, if they will bend their wills either, for matter or for method, in their own tongue,TO BE IN TIME AS WELL SOUGHT TO BY FOREIGN STUDENTS FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE, AS OUR SOIL IS SOUGHT TO AT THIS TIME BY FOREIGN MERCHANTS FOR INCREASE OF THEIR WEALTH?”6
We, who have lived to verify the prediction, should not less esteem the prophet; the pedagogue,Mulcaster, is a philosopher addressing men—a genius who awakens a nation. His indeed was that “prophetic eye,” which, amid the rudeness of its own days, in its clear vision contemplated on the futurity of the English language; and the day has arrived, when “in the end it displaced the Latin,” and “FOREIGN STUDENTS” learn our language “FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE.”
The design of Mulcaster to regulate orthography by orthoepy was revived so late as in 1701, in a curious work, under the title of “Practical Phonography,” by John Jones, M.D. He proposed to write words as they are “fashionably” sounded. He notices “the constant complaints which were then rife in consequence of an unsettled orthography.” He proclaims war against “the visible letters,” which, not sounded, occasion a faulty pronunciation. I suspect we had not any spelling-books in 1701. I have seen Dyche’s of 1710, but I do not recollect whether this was the first edition; this sage of practical orthography was compelled to submit to custom, and taught his scholars to read by theear, and not by theeye. “Yet custom,” he adds, “is not the truest way ofspeaking and writing, from not regarding the originals whence words are derived; hence, abundance of errors have crept both into the pronunciation and writing, and English is grown a medley in both these respects.” Such was the lamentation of an honest pedagogue in 1710.
The “Phonography” of Dr. Jones was probably well received; for three years after, in 1704, he returned to his “spelling,” which, he observed, “however mean, concerned the benefit of millions of persons.” He had a notion to “invent a universal language to excel all others, if he thought that people would be induced to use it.”7
Even the learned of our own times have indulged some of these philological reveries. One would hardly have suspected that Dr.Franklin, whose genius was so wholly practical, contemplated to revolutionise the English alphabet: words were to be spelt by the sounds of their letters, which were to be regulated by six new characters, and certain changes in the vowels. He seems to have revived old Bullokar.Pinkertonhas left us a ludicrous scheme of what he calls “an improved language.” Our vowel terminations amount but to one-fourth of the language; all substantives closing in hard consonants were to have a final vowel, and the consonant was to be omitted after the vowel. We were to acquire the Italian euphony by this presumed melody for our harsh terminations. In this disfigurement of the language, aquackwould be aquaco, andthatwould betha. Plurals were to terminate ina:penswould bepena; papers,papera. He has very innocently printed the entire “Vision of Mirza” from the “Spectator,” on his own system; the ludicrous jargon at once annihilates itself. Not many years ago,James Elphinstone, a scholar, and a very injudicious one, performed an extraordinary experiment. He ventured to publish some volumes of a literary correspondence, on the plan of writing the words as they are pronounced. But this editor, being a Scotchman, had two sorts of Scotticisms to encounter—in idiom and in sound. Notwithstanding the agreeable subjects of a literary correspondence, it is not probable that any one ever conquered a single perusal of pages, which tortured the eye, if they did not the understanding.
We may smile at these repeated attempts of the learned English, in their inventions of alphabets, to establish the correspondence of pronunciation with orthography, and at their vowelly conceits to melodise our orthoepy. All these, however, demonstrate that our language has never been written as it ought to have been. All our writers have experienced this inconvenience. Considerable changes in spelling were introduced at various periods, by way of experiment; this liberty was used by the Elizabethan writers, for an improvement on the orthography of Gower and Chaucer. Since the days of Anne we have further deviated, yet after all our efforts we are constrained to read words not as they are written, and to write different words with the same letters, which leaves them ambiguous. And now, no reform shall ever happen, short of one by “the omnipotence of parliament,” which the great luminary of law is pleased to affirm, “can do anything except making a man a woman.” Customary errors are more tolerable than the perplexing innovations of the most perverse ingenuity.8The eye bewildered in such uncouth pages as are here recorded, found the most capricious orthography in popular use always less perplexing than the attempt to write words according to their pronunciation, which every one regulated by thesounds familiar to his own ear, and usually to his own county. Even the dismemberment of words, omitting or changing letters, distracts attention;9and modern readers have often been deterred from the study of our early writers by their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have, therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have transcribed them.
Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye, or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, “a pronouncing dictionary,” which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker, and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the language of the Cherokees.10
We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending inughmust confound him: for instance,though,through, andenough, alike written, are each differently pronounced; and should he give usboughrightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder atcough; if he escape in safety fromthough, the same wind will blow him out ofthought. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written.
That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tensered, as a distinction from the presentread, and anciently I have found it printedredde. Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily contused the times.GbeforeIungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mutebindoubtanddebt, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrotetems, rejecting thepintemps, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original,tempus. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the analogy of languages.
1See “The Paston Letters,” edited by SirJohn Fenn; andLodge’sauthentic and valuable Collection.2George Chalmers’ “Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers,” 94.—See on this subject in “Curiosities of Literature,” art. “Orthography of Proper Names.” [Also a note on the orthography of Shakspeare’s name, in an Essay on that Poet, in a future page of the present volume.]3“An Orthographie, composed by J(ohn) H(art), Chester Herald,” 1569. A book of extreme rarity. A copy at Horne Tooke’s sale was sold for 6l.6s.It is in the British Museum.4“Bullokar’s Booke at large for the Amendment of Orthographie for English Speech,” &c. &c., 1580, 4to; republished in 1586.5“The first part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chieflie of theright writing of our English Tong,” 1582, 12mo.6In this copious extract from Mulcaster’s little volume, we have a specimen of the unadulterated simplicity of the English language. I have only modernised the orthography for the convenience of the reader, but I have not altered a single word.7The second work of our Phonographer is entitled “The New Art of Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read Words by the Sight thereof,—rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c.,” by J. Jones, M.D., 1704.I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are pronounced—VISIBLE LETTERS.CUSTOMARY AND FASHIONABLY.MayorMair.WorcesterWoosterDictionaryDixnaryBoughtBaut.“All words”, he observes, “were originally written as sounded, and all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and pleasure’s sake fromthe harder to the easierthe harsher to the pleasanterthe longer to the shortersound.”8The Grammar prefixed to Johnson’s Dictionary, curiously illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts.9When we began to drop the letter K in such words asphysic,music,public, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790, observed on this new fashion, that “forty years ago no schoolboy had dared to have done this with impunity.” These words in older English had even another superfluous letter, beingphysicke,musicke,publicke. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonantsckhave not been shorn of their finalk. We do not writeattac,ransac,bedec, norbulloc, norduc, nor goodluc.The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though identically the same in point of sound, produces a painful effect on the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of monosyllables in which the final and redundantkis not written,—“DicgaveJacakicwhenJacgaveDicaknocon thebacwith athic stic.” If even such familiar words and simple monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded, disguised by the mutilation of several letters.10A most serious attempt was made a few years ago to establish English spelling by sound. A journal called theFonetic Nuz(sicto give the idea of the pronunciation of the wordNews) was published, and Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” printed with a type expressly cast for the novel forms. The ruin of the projector closed the experiment.—Ed.
1See “The Paston Letters,” edited by SirJohn Fenn; andLodge’sauthentic and valuable Collection.
2George Chalmers’ “Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers,” 94.—See on this subject in “Curiosities of Literature,” art. “Orthography of Proper Names.” [Also a note on the orthography of Shakspeare’s name, in an Essay on that Poet, in a future page of the present volume.]
3“An Orthographie, composed by J(ohn) H(art), Chester Herald,” 1569. A book of extreme rarity. A copy at Horne Tooke’s sale was sold for 6l.6s.It is in the British Museum.
4“Bullokar’s Booke at large for the Amendment of Orthographie for English Speech,” &c. &c., 1580, 4to; republished in 1586.
5“The first part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chieflie of theright writing of our English Tong,” 1582, 12mo.
6In this copious extract from Mulcaster’s little volume, we have a specimen of the unadulterated simplicity of the English language. I have only modernised the orthography for the convenience of the reader, but I have not altered a single word.
7The second work of our Phonographer is entitled “The New Art of Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read Words by the Sight thereof,—rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c.,” by J. Jones, M.D., 1704.
I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are pronounced—
“All words”, he observes, “were originally written as sounded, and all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and pleasure’s sake from
8The Grammar prefixed to Johnson’s Dictionary, curiously illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts.
9When we began to drop the letter K in such words asphysic,music,public, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790, observed on this new fashion, that “forty years ago no schoolboy had dared to have done this with impunity.” These words in older English had even another superfluous letter, beingphysicke,musicke,publicke. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonantsckhave not been shorn of their finalk. We do not writeattac,ransac,bedec, norbulloc, norduc, nor goodluc.
The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though identically the same in point of sound, produces a painful effect on the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of monosyllables in which the final and redundantkis not written,—“DicgaveJacakicwhenJacgaveDicaknocon thebacwith athic stic.” If even such familiar words and simple monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded, disguised by the mutilation of several letters.
10A most serious attempt was made a few years ago to establish English spelling by sound. A journal called theFonetic Nuz(sicto give the idea of the pronunciation of the wordNews) was published, and Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” printed with a type expressly cast for the novel forms. The ruin of the projector closed the experiment.—Ed.
THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE.
A strongpredilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?
These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and the Romans would not only afford a classical ear, long exercised in the nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design—that of elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a privileged class. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days, iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.1Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their native melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance of rhyme.
With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither admired norimitated.2The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published hisVersi e Regole dellaPoesia Nuova—the very term afterwards adopted by the English critics—and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of “new poetry” appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei illustrates “the rules” not only by his own verses, but by those of other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for “the new poetry” were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.
In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars, Jodelle, Passerat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known, later, D’Urfé, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adoptedblank verse, for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that “Les vers sans rime sont morts pour jamais.” French poetry, which at that period could hardly sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The “new poetry” in France, however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned his prejudices leaned in its favour, but as a faithful historian the truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with great curiosity and honest naïveté. “Since only these two nations, the Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe which poetises,who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people for more than seven or eight centuries, even in Italy itself, I can readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry than with that of the Greeks and the Romans.”3
The candour of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries.
It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these experiments on our prosody; and, on the pretence of “reformed verse,” were for revolutionising the whole of our metrical system.
The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks calledrhythmus, the Latinsnumerus, and wemelodyormeasure. But in our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on the poet’s ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music, slow or quick, long or short, which form the quantities or the time of the measured feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble languages of Greece and Rome. The artificial movements in the hexameter were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and, denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the genius of the native idiom.
Several of our scholars, invested by classical authority, and carrying their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by the melody of emotion, as to amechanical and severe scansion. To this Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician—
Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured songFirst taught our English music how to spanWords with justnoteandaccent, not to scanWith Midas’ ears, committing short and long.
Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with justnoteandaccent, not to scan
With Midas’ ears, committing short and long.
The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from “dark forgetfulness” when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his “Fairy Queen” took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy.Stanyhursthas left a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedanticGabriel Harveyhad espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satiricalTom Nash, who scourged with searching humour. “The Hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins.”
A treatise on “the New Poetry,” or “the Reformed Verse,” for it assumed this distinction, was expressly composed byWilliam Webbe, recommendatory of this “Reformation of our English verse.”4Some years after Dr.Thomas Campion, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his rhymes, seating himself in the critic’s chair, renewed the exotic system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of English verse, he denounces “the vulgar and inartificial custom ofRIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise of English poetry.”5He calls it “the childish titillation of rime.”
We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however, he was known in his days as “Sweet Master Campion,” and his title would not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical “Observations,” he has prefixed a poem in what he calls “Licentiate Iambicks,” which is our blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book, consisting only of nearly five leaves:—
Alas, poor book, I rueThy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings;Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.
Alas, poor book, I rue
Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings;
Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.
The poetDanielreplied by his “Defence of Rime,” an elaborate and elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the anti-rhymers.
It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the contest solely turned on their genius.
A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own spontaneous emotions.
Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere “Gothic barbarisms.” Had the practice of the classical writers become a custom, we should now be “committing long and short,” and we should have missed the discovery of the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins could never have imagined the existence.
1For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical superstition, seeQuarterly Review, August, 1834.The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial construction of verses regulated byquantity, and not by the latent delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible.2Quadrio, “Storia e raggione d’ogni Poesia,” i. 606.3Pasquier, “Les Recherches de la France,” p. 624, fo. 1533.4“A Discourse of English Poetrie; together with the Author’s Judgment touching the Reformation of our English Verse,” byWilliam Webbe, graduate, 1586, 4to.5“Observations on the Art of English Poesie, byThomas Campion, wherein is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English tongue will receive eight several kinds of numbers proper to itself, which are all in this Book set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted,” 1602.
1For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical superstition, seeQuarterly Review, August, 1834.
The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial construction of verses regulated byquantity, and not by the latent delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible.
2Quadrio, “Storia e raggione d’ogni Poesia,” i. 606.
3Pasquier, “Les Recherches de la France,” p. 624, fo. 1533.
4“A Discourse of English Poetrie; together with the Author’s Judgment touching the Reformation of our English Verse,” byWilliam Webbe, graduate, 1586, 4to.
5“Observations on the Art of English Poesie, byThomas Campion, wherein is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English tongue will receive eight several kinds of numbers proper to itself, which are all in this Book set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted,” 1602.
ORIGIN OF RHYME.
Contendingtheories long divided the learned world. One party asserted that the use of Rhyme was introduced by the Saracenic conquerors of Spain and of Sicily, for they had ascertained that the Arabian poets rhymed; the other, who had traced Rhyme to a northern source among the Scandinavian bards, insisted that Rhyme had a Gothic origin; and as Rhyme was generally used among the monks in the eighth century, they imagined that in the decline of ancient literature the dexterous monks had borrowed the jingle for their church hymns, to win the ear of their Gothic lords; both parties alike concurred in condemning Rhyme as a puerile invention and a barbarous ornament, and of a comparatively modern invention.
The opinions of the learned are transmitted, till by length of time they are accepted as facts; and in this state was Rhyme considered till our own days. Warton, in the course of his researches in the history of our poetry, was struck at the inaccuracy of one of these statements; for he had found that rhymed verse, both Latin and vernacular, had been practised much earlier than the period usually assigned. But Warton, though he thus far corrected the misstatements of his predecessors, advanced no further. No one, indeed, as yet had pursued this intricate subject on the most direct principle of investigation; conjecture had freely supplied what prevalent opinion had already sanctioned; and we were long familiarised to the opprobrious epithet of “Monkish Rhymes.” The subject was not only obscure, but apparently trivial; for Warton dismisses an incidental allusion to the origin of Rhyme by an apology for touching on it. “Enough,” he exclaims, in his impatience, “has been said on a subject of so little importance;”1and it is curious to observe, that the same vexatious exclamation occurred to a French literary antiquary. “We must not believe,” said Lenglet du Fresnoy,“that we began to rhyme in France about 1250, as Petrarch pretends. The romance of Alexander existed before, and it is not probable that the first essay of our versification was a great poem. Abelard composed love-songs in the preceding century. I believe Rhyme was still more ancient; and it is useless to torment ourselves to discover from whom we learned to rhyme. As we always had poets in our nation, so we have also had Rhyme.”2Thus two great poetical antiquaries in England and France had been baffled in their researches, and came to the same mortifying conclusion. They were little aware how an inquiry after the origin of Rhyme could not be decided by chronology.
The origin of Rhyme was an inquiry which, however unimportant Warton in his despair might consider it, had, though inconclusively treated, often engaged the earnest inquiries of the learned in Italy and in Spain, in Germany and in France. It is remarkable that all the parties were equally perplexed in their researches, and baffled in their conclusions. Each inquirer seemed to trace the use of Rhyme by his own people to a foreign source, for with no one it appeared of native growth. The Spaniard Juan de la Enzina, one of the fathers of the Spanish drama, and who composed an “Art of Poetry,” (Arte de Trovar, as they expressively term the art of invention,) fancied that Rhyme had passed over into Spain from Italy, though in the land of Redondillas the guitar seemed attuned to the chant of their Moorish masters; but in Italy Petrarch, at the opening of his epistles, declares that they had drawn their use of Rhyme from Sicily; and the Sicilians had settled that they had received it from the Provençals; while those roving children of fancy were confident that they had been taught their artless chimes by their former masters, the Arabians! Among the Germans it was strenuously maintained that this modern adjunct to poetry derived its origin and use from the Northern Scalds. Fauchet, the old Gaulish antiquary, was startled to find that Rhyme had been practised by the primitive Hebrews!
Fauchet, struck by discovering the use of Rhyme amongthis ancient people, and finding it practised by the monks in their masses in the eighth century, suggested for its modern prevalence two very dissimilar causes. With an equal devotional respect for “the people of God,” and for the monks, whom he considered as sacred, he concluded that “possibly some pious Christian by the use of Rhyme designed to imitate the holy people;” but at the same time holding, with the learned, Rhyme to be a degenerate deviation from the classical metres of antiquity, he insinuates, “or perchance some vile poetaster, to eke out his deficient genius, amused the ear by terminating his lines with these ending unisons.” He had further discovered that the Greek critics had, among the figures of their rhetoric, mentioned thehomoioteleuton, or consonance. The abundance of his knowledge contradicted every system which the perplexed literary antiquary could propose; and impatiently he concludes,—“Rhyme has come to us from some part of the world, or nation, whoever it may be; for I confess I know not where to seek, nor what to conclude. It was current among the people and the languages which have arisen since the ruin of the Roman empire.”3
Since the days of ancient Fauchet, no subsequent investigators, even such great recent literary historians as Warton, Quadrio, Crescembini and Gray, Tiraboschi, Sismondi and Ginguené, have extricated us by their opposite theories from these uncertain opinions. It was reserved for the happy diligence of the learned Sharon Turner to explore into this abyss of darkness.4To defend the antiquity of the Rhyming Welsh bards, he pursued his researches through all languages, and demonstrated its early existence in all. His researches enable us to advance one more step, and to effect an important result, which has always baffled the investigators of these curious topics.
Rhyming poems are found not only in the Hebrew butin the Sanscrit, in the Bedas, and in the Chinese poetry,5as among the nations of Europe. It was not unknown to the Greeks, since they have named it as a rhetorical ornament; and it appears to have been practised by the Romans, not always from an accidental occurrence, but of deliberate choice.
To deduce the origin of rhyme from any particular people, or to fix it at any stated period, is a theory no longer tenable. The custom of rhyming has predominated in China, in Hindustan, in Ethiopia; it chimes in the Malay and Javanese poetry, as it did in ancient Judea: this consonance trills in the simple carol of the African women; its echoes resounded in the halls of the frozen North, in the kiosque of the Persian, and in the tent of the Arab, from time immemorial.Rhymemust therefore be consideredas universal as poetry itself.
Yet rhyme has been contemned as a “monkish jingle,” or a “Gothic barbarism;” but we see it was not peculiar to the monks nor the Goths, since it was prevalent in the vernacular poetry of all other nations save the two ancient ones of Greece and Rome. Delighting the ear of the man as it did that of the child, and equally attractive in the most polished as in the rudest state of society, rhyme could not have obtained this universality had not this concord of returning sounds a foundation in the human organization influencing the mind. We might as well inquire the origin of dancing as that of rhyming; the rudest society as well as the most polished practised these arts at every era. And thus it has happened, as we have seen, that the origin of rhyme was everywhere sought for and everywhere found.