And just as there is no system of English spelling tacitly agreed on by all men of education using the English language at present, so there was also no system of English spelling consistently and continually used by our ancestors in the past. The orthography of Matthew Arnold differs a little, altho not much, from the orthography of Macaulay; and that in turn a little from the orthography of Johnson. In like manner the spelling of Dryden is very different from the spelling of Spenser, and the spelling of Spenser is very different from the spelling of Chaucer. At no time in the long unrolling of English literature from Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agreement among those who used the language as to any precise way in which its words should be spelled or even as to any theory which should govern particular instances. The history of English orthography is a record still incomplete of incessant variation; and a study of it shows plainly how there have been changes in every generation, some of them logical and some of them arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifications, and some of them gross perversities.
Thus we see that those who defend any existing orthography, which they choose to regard as “regular” and outside of which they affect to behold only vulgar aberration, are setting themselves against the example left us by our forefathers. We see also that those of us who are striving to modify our spelling in moderation are doing exactly what has been done by every generation that preceded us. To repeat in other words what I have said already, there is not any system of English orthography which is supported by a universal convention to-day or which has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity.
The opponents of simplification have been greatly aided by the general acceptance of this assumption of theirs that the advocates of simplification wanted to remove ancient landmarks, to break with the past, to introduce endless innovations. The best part of their case will fall to the ground when it is generally understood that the orthography of our language has never been fixed for a decad at a time. And this understanding of the real facts of the situation is likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by the wide circulation of many recent reprints of the texts of the great authors of the past in the exact spelling of the original edition. So long as we were in the habit of seeing the works of Shakspere and Steele, of Scott, Thackeray, and Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not uniform exactly, did not vary widely, we were sorely tempted to say that the spelling which was good enough for them is good enough for us and for our children.
But when we have in our hands the works of those great writers as they were originally printed, and when we are forced to remark that they spell in no wise alike one to the other; and when we discover that such uniformity of orthography they may have seemed to have was due, not to any theory of the authors themselves, but merely to the practice of the modern printing-offices and proof-readers—when these things are brought home to us, any superstitious reverence bids fair to vanish which we may have had for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere’s and Steele’s and Scott’s and Thackeray’s and Hawthorne’s.
And one indirect result of this scholarly desire to get as near as may be to the masterpiece as the author himself presented it to the world, is that men of letters and lovers of literature—two classes hitherto strangely ignorant of the history of the English language and of the constant changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its syntax, and in its orthography—will at least have the chance to acquire information at first hand. Their resistance to simplification ought to become less irreconcilable when the men of letters, now its chief opponents, have discovered for themselves that there is not now and never has been any stable system of orthography. When they really grasp the fact that there has been no permanency in the past and that there is no uniformity in the present, perhaps they will show themselves less unwilling to take the next step forward. Just now they are rather like the Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted to uninvent printing and to undiscover America.
The most powerful single influence in fixing the present absurd spelling of our language was undoubtedly Johnson’s Dictionary, published in the middle of the eighteenth century. We cannot but respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson and his indomitable energy; but the making of an English dictionary was not the task for which his previous studies had preëminently fitted him. Probably he would have succeeded better with a Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of the burly doctor’s spending his toil in compiling a list of the words in a language the use of which he held to be disgraceful in a friend’s epitaph. Johnson was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be found to record English orthography, a task calling for a science the existence of which he did not even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he lacked absolutely. In all matters of taste he was an elephantine pachyderm; and there are only a few of his principles of criticism which are not now disestablished.
Any one whose reading is at all varied and who strays outside of books printed within the past quarter-century, can find abundant evidence of the former chaos of English orthography. In Moxon’s ‘Mechanic Exercises,’ published in 1683, for example, we read that “how well other Forrain languages are Corrected by the Author, we may perceive by the English that is Printed in Forrain Countries”; and this shows us that the phonetic form forrain is older than the unphonetic foreign. In the ‘Spectator’ (No. 510) Steele wrote landskip where we should now write landscape; in Addison’s criticism of ‘Paradise Lost,’ contributed to the same periodical, we find critick, heroick, and epick; and whether Steele or Addison held the pen, ribbons were then always ribands.
On the title-page of the first edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ published in 1719, we are told that we can read within “an account of how he was at last strangely delivered by Pyrates.” Fielding, in the ‘Champion’ in 1740, tells us that “dinner soon follow’d, being a gammon of bacon and some chickens, with a most excellent apple-pye.” In the same essay Fielding wrote that “our friends exprest great pleasure at our drinking”; and in ‘Tom Jones’ he wrote profest for professed (as we should now spell it). Here we discover that the nineteenth century is sometimes more backward than the eighteenth, profest and exprest being the very spellings which many are now advocating. Fielding also wrote Salique where we should now write Salic, as Wotton had written Dorique for Doric in a letter to Milton; and here the advantage is with us. So it is also in our spelling of the italicized word in the playbill of the third night of Mr. Cooper’s engagement at the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796: “Smoaking in the Theatre Prohibited.”
Attention has already been called to Macaulay’s phænomenon (and to Professor Peck’s pædagogue). The abolition of the digraph has been a protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a translation of Schlegel’s ‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature,’ published in London early in the nineteenth century, I have found æra for era; and in the eighteenth century economics was œconomics. Esthetic has not yet quite expelled æsthetic, altho anesthetic seems now fairly established.
The Greek ph is also a stumbling-block. We write phantom on the one hand and fancy on the other, and either phantasy or fantasy; yet all these words are derived from the same Greek root. Probably phancy would seem as absurd to most of us as fantom. Yet fantasy has only recently begun to get the better of phantasy. The Italians are bolder than we are, for they have not hesitated to write filosofia and fotografia. To most of us fotografer, as we read it on a sign in Union Square, seems truly outlandish; and yet if our great-grandfathers were willing to accept fancy there is no logical reason why our great-grandchildren may not accept fotografy. There is no longer any logical basis for opposition on the ground of scholarship. Indeed, the scholarly opposition to these orthographic simplifications is not unlike the opposition in Germany to the adoption of the Roman alphabet by those who cling to the old Gothic letter on the ground that it is more German, altho it is in reality only a medieval corruption of the Roman letter. With those who speak German, as with those who speak English, the chief obstacle to the accomplishment of proposed improvements in writing the language is to be found in the general ignorance of its history—or perhaps rather in that conceited half-knowledge which is always more dangerous than modest ignorance.