[24] Faerie Queene, Book II, canto ix, st. 21.
[25] Moore’s Diary, vol. v, p. 249.
[26] The Life of William Morris, by J. W. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. i, p. 8.
CHAPTER IV
THE QUESTION OF HONOR
“Well, honor is the subject of my story,” says Cassius to Brutus, in his effort to persuade his friend to join the conspiracy against the dictator. It was h-o-n-o-r however that he spoke of, not h-o-n-o-u-r. So the word appeared in the folio of 1623, in which the play of Julius Cæsar was published for the first time. Unfortunately, the spelling of Shakespeare has not escaped the tampering to which that of nearly all our authors has been subjected by unscrupulous modern editors and publishers. Take the following speech of Brutus, found shortly before the line already quoted, as it is printed in the original edition:
Set Honor in one eye and Death i’ th’ other,
And I will looke on both indifferently;
For let the Gods so speed mee, as I loue
The name of Honor, more then I feare death.
In defiance of the authority of Shakespeare, so far as it is represented by the folio of 1623, honor in the passages cited above appears in modern editions as honour. This spelling did not make its appearance in them until comparatively late. In the second folio of 1632 the word was still honor. So it remained in the third folio of 1663-64. It was not till the edition of 1685, the last and poorest of the folios, that the corrupt form honour displaced in these passages the original form honor. There it has since been generally, if not universally, retained.
It is fair to say that in this method of spelling the word the usage of Shakespeare was far from invariable. Either one of the two forms just given seems to have been used by him indifferently, just as they were by his contemporaries. In his writings honor, either as a verb or noun, occurs very nearly seven hundred times. According to the sufficient authority of the New Historical English Dictionary, the spelling honor in the folio of 1623 was “about twice as frequent as honour.” This confirms my own impressions; but these were based merely upon the examination of only about a hundred passages of the seven hundred in which the word occurs. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s practice varied widely in the use of individual words of this class, as exemplified in the two poems he himself published. Humor appears in them twice. In both instances it is without the u—once in Venus and Adonis,[27] once in The Rape of Lucrece.[28] Such also is the spelling of the word the two times it is found in the Sonnets,[29] but there this fact does not make certain the practice of the poet. On the other hand, labor, either as a noun or verb appears seven times in the two pieces just mentioned. Six times out of the seven it is spelled labour.[30] Color also appears invariably as colour in the ten times the word is found in these same poems.
The words with the terminations or or our number now several hundred in our speech. Many of them go back to that early period when the French element was first introduced into English. Many others have been added at various periods since. In the case of those of earlier introduction both terminations are found. Still, it is the impression produced upon me by my comparatively little reading that there was at first a distinct preference for the ending our. This, if true, was due largely, if not mainly, to the fact that it reflected more accurately the then prevailing pronunciation. The accent fell upon the end of the word. It was not, as now, thrown back upon the penult or antepenult, with the result of placing only the slightest of stress upon the final syllable. However this may be, many words were once often spelled with the termination our, which have now replaced it by the termination or. The ryme-index to Chaucer’s poetry shows that he uses about forty words with this ending at the close of a line. Some are obsolete, but most are still in current use. Among these latter so spelled are ambassadour, confessour, emperour, governour, mirrour, senatour, servitour, successour, and traitour. These in modern English have replaced the ending our by or. Again other words with this same terminations which he employs have now substituted for it er. Such are reportour, revelour, and riotour. In truth, each one of the words belonging to the class has a history of its own. But honor is in most respects typical of them all. Accordingly, while there is no purpose to neglect the others, upon it the attention will be mainly fixed.
It was in the fourteenth century that the wholesale irruption of the French element into our vocabulary took place. But before the great invasion in which words came into the speech by battalions, single words had already entered, as if to prepare the way. One of these earlier adventurers was the term under consideration. It made its appearance in the language as early, at least, as the beginning of the thirteenth century. Unlike most of its class, its first syllable demands attention as well as its last. As a foreign word, it naturally exhibited at its original introduction the forms that belonged to it in the tongue from which it was derived. There was no prejudice in those days in favor of a fixed orthography. Each author did what was right in his own eyes; or perhaps it would be more correct to say, what was right to his own ears. In the Romance tongues the hostility to the aspirate, which has animated the hearts of so large a share of the race, had caused it to be dropped in pronunciation. As a result, writers being then phonetically inclined, discarded it from the spelling. Hence, honor presented itself in our language without the initial h. Its first recorded appearance is in a work, the manuscript of which is ascribed to the neighborhood of 1200 A.D. In that it was written onur, just as hour sometimes appeared as ure. It hardly needs to be said that the vowel in these cases does not represent the now common sound we call “short u.”