Every student who has given any attention to the historical development of our speech knows that it has changed from age to age no less in form than in pronunciation. Indeed, it could not be a living tongue if it did not constantly change. The oldest form of the language which we call Anglo-Saxon gradually changed in form and sound till Middle English times, and then it continued to change even more rapidly till modern times. It has undergone no small change even since the days of Elizabeth, when our great dramatists spoke and wrote it. So great are these changes through which our vernacular has passed that a modern could not converse with one of his Saxon forebears of the time of the good and great King Alfred except through an interpreter of his own mother-tongue. If any man is skeptical on this point, let him test himself by trying to modernize offhand a passage from one of Alfred’s own works. Indeed, it is not necessary to go so far back. For Shakespeare, not to mention Chaucer, may prove a rock of offence and would no doubt appear to most of us to speak in an unknown tongue, could we hear him speak. Surely the commentators find no end of difficulties in interpreting his writings which have been preserved to us. Even were we to approach Shakespeare from the vantage ground of the famous Tieck and Schlegel translation which some patriotic German scholars with more zeal than knowledge assert is better than the original, no doubt, we should still encounter many hard sayings in the master dramatist’s language. Much less therefore should we be able to understand his spoken tongue, since spoken speech, in the very nature of things, changes far more than written language.
However, it is not our purpose here to use Shakespeare as a concrete illustration to show how our speech has changed even in the last few centuries. We have chosen two other authors who flourished long after the voice of the “sweet swan of Avon” had ceased to sing and his bones had moulded back to dust in the quaint parish church of Stratford. These writers are the distinguished satirists, the vigorous Dryden and the didactic Pope. Their rhymes are a fairly accurate index to the standard contemporary pronunciation.
Dryden has often been taxed with a certain laxity in his rhymes, and to one not recognizing the difference between the pronunciation current in England in the seventeenth century and that accepted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the criticism would appear to be well founded. But it must be borne in mind that the sounds of the English vowels, especially, have undergone a considerable change since Dryden’s day. We should not be surprised then if, when we apply the present standard of English pronunciation to his rhymes, they seem somewhat imperfect. However, this is not intended to extenuate Dryden’s false rhymes, of which there are confessedly some; for he had neither a sensitive ear nor a tender conscience in his work for the stage. His motto expressed in his own words was,
“He who lives to please, must please to live.”
Yet Dryden was, after all, no greater sinner in this respect than others of his day, or even of the present day, whose verses furnish such monstrosities as has rhyming with was, love consorting with move,—rhymes which “keep the word of promise to the eye and break it to the ear.” Let us now cite a few of the received pronunciations of the seventeenth century as indicated in the rhymes of that day. It will be observed that where these are still lingering in our speech to-day, they are regarded simply as vulgarisms.
Such words as please, these, seize, severe, sea, speak, complete, and the like were pronounced, in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth, in a way which, to the modern ear, is decidedly suggestive of the Irish “brogue.” For both Dryden and Pope pronounced these words plase, thase, saze, savare, say, spake, complate: and this was the received pronunciation during that period. Pope, therefore, whose delicate ear was easily fascinated by the vigor and musical cadence of his master Dryden preserves but the aroma of the old tea, in that heroic couplet upon a mock heroic subject:
“Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.”
Likewise, again he says:
“Soft yielding minds to water glide away,
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea.”
Dryden pertinently asks, in his Absalom and Achitophel: