XIX.
Foreigners’ English.
I. A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treatment of our language either colloquially or with a literary object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Grammar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 The English Schoolmaster, for teaching strangers to pronounce English. That such a book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the Familiar Letters, who brought out in 1662 A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English. This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howell was both a linguist and a scholar.
Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not much appreciated; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices. Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic community; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account, probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabularies and primers elsewhere noticed.
In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making, consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and grammar; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear’s Dr. Caius, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchman’s broken English. The Duke de Jarmany of the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gibberish put into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of dramatis persona was among the comic effects.
The Mrs. Plawnish of a modern novelist thought that bad English might be good French; but the jargon of Caius is sui generis; he “hacks our English.” as mine host puts it, but not naturally, although Shakespear must have had the opportunity of studying such a character from the original. But he even confers on the French doctor in the Merry Wives the very name of an actual English one, who was living in his boyhood, and who was not merely a contributor to literature, but a writer on philological subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real Caius were apt to feel some mystification at his dramatic presentment, claiming a nationality which did not belong to him, and murdering a language which was his own.
As regards the familiarity of the French and Germans with our idiom, the position is changed; for while that of the former remains nearly stationary, that of Germany has grown more accurate and more general.
II. But the conversance with our language in former times, even among those who devoted their attention to philology and instruction, was excessively scanty and inexact. If no more than a bare quotation, example, or equivalent in English is given, the solecisms are sometimes ludicrous in the extreme; and this branch of the subject is sufficiently interesting and novel to induce me, before I conclude my inquiry, to shew somewhat farther than I have done in the account of the foreign professors of languages settled in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ignorance of English exhibited by two distinct classes of writers, namely, by foreigners occupying among us of old the position of tutors or teachers, and by the authors of publications designed for employment by ourselves visiting the Continent, or by our neighbours coming hither.
The notions entertained by educated professional Frenchmen, and even by Hollanders and Germans, about our grammar and idiom were from the outset down nearly to the present century of the vaguest and most puerile character. Perhaps one of the most edifying monuments of this inveterate repugnance to the acquisition of so much as the alphabet of our poor tongue is to be found in a volume printed at Nürnberg so late as 1744 under the title Representation of the High-landers who arrived at the Camp of the Confederated Army, 1743, where beneath the first of a series of plates occurs this elucidation: “The Highlanders in their accostumes clothes and downwards hanging cloak.” The explanatory description of the next engraving is “A High-lander who puts on his cloak about his schoulders, when weather is sed to rain.” These solecisms of course arose from the incompetence of the foreign artist or publisher, or both; but even where an ignorant typographer in a Continental town was employed to set up an English book by the author himself, the liability to blunders was very great, and we are not to be surprised at slips of the press in such a work as Bishop Hooper’s Declaration of the Commandments, printed at Zurich in 1549, when at the end the writer apprises us that “the setters of the print understand not one word of our speech!”
The most diverting illustrations of the jargon which was intended to pass for good conversational English abound in the pocket-guides and dictionaries, of which some went through several editions, and were evidently in great request by the sections of society to which they appealed. One of them is an octoglot vocabulary, 1548, and a second a series of Colloquies in six languages, accompanied by a dictionary, 1576. The English examples in the latter are highly curious, as affording an insight into our language as it was spoken at that date by foreign students and visitors; and, in point of fact, it is hard to choose between the two, which is the more remarkable. Let us take the Preface to the earlier publication from an impression of 1631 before me:—
“To the Reader.
“Beloved Reader this boocke is so need full and profitable / and the vsance of the same so necessarie / that his goodnes euen of learned men / is not fullie to be praised for ther is noman in France / nor in thes Nederland / nor in Spayne / or in Italie handling in these Netherlandes which hat not neede of the eight speaches that here in are writen and declared: Fer whether thad any man doo marchandise / or that hee do handle in the Court / or that hee fo lowe the warres or that hee be a trauailling man / hy should neede to haue an interpretour / for som of theese eight speaches. The which wee considering have at our great cost and to your great profite / brought the same speaches here in suchwise to gether / and set them in order / so that you fromyence fouath shall not neede eny interpretour / but shalbe able to speake them your self / ....”
An extract from one of the interlocutions must suffice:—
“D. Peeter / is that your sone?
P. Yea it is my sonne.
D. it is a goodlie childe. God let hun al wayes prosper in virtue.
P. I thancke you coosen.
D. Doth he not go to the scole?
P. Yes / hee learneth to speake French.
D. Doth hee? it is very well done. John / can you well speake French?
J. Not very well coosen, but I learne.
D. Wher go you too schoole?
J. In the Lumbeardes streat.
D. Have you gon long too schoole?
J. About half a yeare.”
So the dialogue goes on, and there is a series of them.
III. A second exemplification of the superlative obstacles which persons born out of England have at all periods encountered in the endeavour to comprehend on their own part, and render intelligible to others, our insular speech, is taken from the Italian Grammar of Henry Pleunus, printed at Leghorn at the end of the seventeenth century.
Now, here, in lieu of the alleged width of acceptability, which meets the eye in the traveller’s pocket-dictionary just described, we get a positive assurance that the author was a master of the English tongue; and it may be predicated of him that, compared with the majority of foreigners, he exhibits a proficiency very considerably above the average, though we honestly believe it to be grossly improbable that “every one speaks English at Legorne,” as he says in one of the Anglo-Italian dialogues. There can be no desire to be hypercritical in judging such a production, or to lay stress on occasional slips of spelling and prosody; but the English of Pleunus very often strikes one—nor is it surprising that it should be so—as Italian literally rendered. He probably never attained an idiomatic phraseology; and one would have said less about it, had it not been for that sort of professorial assumption on the title-page.
Going back in order of time, I shall furnish some specimens of the tetraglot History of Aurelio and of Isabel Daughter to the King of Scotland, translated from the Spanish, and printed in 1556 at Antwerp. I propose to quote a passage where two knights in love with Isabel propose to cast lots for her:—“I fynde none occasion that is so iuste, that by the same lof you, or you of me maye complayne vs: inasmuch that euery one of vs by him selfe is ynoughe more bounde vnto the loue, that he beareth to Isabell, then vnto any other bounde of frendshippe. And therfore I see not, that I for respecte of you, nor you also for mine to be ought to withdrawe from the high enterprise alreadie by vs begonne. Nor in likewise might be called a vertuouse worke, that we both together in one place sould displane the louingly sailes [voilles amoureuses in the French column], for that shoulde be to defile, that so great betwene vs and more, then of brother conioyned frendship.”
Here it is not so conspicuously the orthography that is at fault, as the composition and syntax. But up and down this little book, too, there are some drolleries of spelling. The translator from the Spanish of Juan de Flores, whoever he was (a Frenchman probably), understood French and Italian; but surely his conversance with the remaining tongue was on a par with that of the majority of his Continental fellow-dwellers then, before, and since; and doubtless his printer has not failed to contribute to the barbarous unintelligibility of the English text. This is the book to which Collins the poet mistakenly informed Warton that Shakespear had resorted for the story of the Tempest.
But a far stranger monument of orthographical and grammatical heresies exists in The historijke Pvrtreatvres of the woll[4] Bible, printed at Lyons in 1553. It is a series of woodcuts, with a quatrain in English beneath each picture descriptive of its meaning, and is introduced by an elaborate epistle by Peter Derendel and an Address from the printer to the reader. Both, however, probably proceeded from the pen of Derendel, who was doubtless connected with Pierre Erondelle, a well-known preceptor in London at a somewhat later date.
The verses which occur throughout the volume are literal translations, presumably by Erondelle, from the French, and are singular enough, and might have tempted quotation; but, eccentric as they are, they are completely thrown into the background by the prolegomena, and more especially by the preface purporting to come from the printer of the work, which is the common set of blocks relating to Biblical subjects, made in the present case to accompany an English letterpress.
I will transcribe only the commencement of the preface, whoseever it may be:—“The affection mine all waies towarde the hartlie ernest, louing reader, being cōtinuallie commaunded of the dutie of mi profession, mai not but dailie go about to satisfie the in this, withe thow desirest and lookest for in mi vacation, the withe, to mai please the, I wolde it were to mi minde so free and licentiouse streched at large, as it is be the mishappe of the time restrained.”
The discovery of Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter is thus poetically set forth:—
“The kinges daughter fonde him in great pitie
The russhes amonge, withe to him fauourable,
As god did please, him to saue thought worthie,
His owne mother giuing him for noorce able.”
Once more, the fall of Abimelech in Judges ix. is portrayed after the ensuing fashion:—
“Hauing killed his bretherne on a stone,
Abimelech was forced ielde the ghoast:
For besieging with for warre Thebes, anon
A strocke he had, of a woman with lost.”
The spelling and the syntax in these examples are equally outrageous; yet they are possibly not more so than might be expected from persons unversed in the intricacies and anomalies of our language. But the point is, that the undertaking was executed for the special behoof, not alone of English residents abroad, but also of English students of sacred history at home; for there was nothing of the class at that time in our literature or our art. It is almost incomprehensible on what ground English was selected, as French would have been as serviceable to the educated reader here, while the Anglo-Gallic patois must have proved a puzzle to all alike.
The early English educational books produced by foreign printers were not quite invariably so wide of the mark in an idiomatic respect. Some of them were doubtless read in proof by the English author or editor; and such may have been the case with a version of the Short Catechisme of Cardinal Bellarmine published in 1614 at Augsburgh, where the slips do not exceed an ordinary Table of Errata.
Now and then, too, the writer himself was alone responsible for the eccentricities which presented themselves in his book, as where Stanyhurst, in his version of the Æneid, published at Leyden in 1582, renders the opening lines of Book the Second thus:—
“With tentive list’ning each wight was setled in harckning;
Then father Æneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie.
You me bid, O Princesse, too scarrifie a festered old soare,
How that the Troians wear prest by Grecian armie.”
Here it was the idiosyncrasy of the Briton which reduced a translation to a burlesque, and disregarded the canons of his own language, as well as taste and propriety in diction. For the entire work is cast in a similar mould, and is heterodox in almost every particular; some passages are too grossly absurd even for an Irishman who had spent most of his life in Belgium or Holland.