[34] Imaginary Conversations. Archdeacon Hare and Walter Landor.
CHAPTER V
METHODS OF RELIEF
He who has taken the pains to master the details given in the chapter on English sounds and the signs which are intended to represent them, will have received some conception of the nature of the orthographic slough in which we are wallowing, and also of the difficulty which exists of getting out of it. He will recognize that the obstacles which stand in the way of the reform of English spelling are not merely greater in number but are harder to overcome than those which beset any other cultivated tongue of modern Europe. Incomplete as is the survey, it is a melancholy picture which it presents. To him who has not become so accustomed to disorder that he has learned to love it for its own sake, the view is distinctly disheartening. The present orthography fulfills neither its legitimate office of denoting pronunciation nor its illegitimate one of disclosing derivation. It is consistent only in inconsistency. It is not necessary for us to consider here how this state of things came about. It is enough to know that it exists. A thorough-going reform of English orthography would therefore be one of the most gigantic of enterprises, even if men were fully informed about it and their hearts were set upon it. But a distinct majority of the educated class, though not educated on this subject, are opposed to it. Naturally the profounder their ignorance, the more intense is their hostility. It is no wonder, therefore, that many, in contemplating this dead-weight of prejudice that must be unloaded, have come to despair of the language ever being relieved in the slightest of the burden.
Let it be assumed, however, for the sake of the argument, that a general agreement exists that a reform of some kind is regarded not merely as desirable, but as practicable. At once arises the question: What shall be its nature? How far shall it be carried? Two courses are clearly open. One is to make a thorough-going reform of English orthography in order to have it accord with a genuine phonetic ideal, so that when a man sees a word he will know how to pronounce it, and when he hears a word he will know how to spell it. Then harmony between orthography and orthoepy will be complete. Now there is certainly nothing either irrational or of itself offensive in the idea, whatever opinion we may hold as to the practicability or desirability of its attainment. Were we starting out to create a brand-new language, it is not likely that any one would be found wrong-headed or muddle-headed enough to look upon such an aim as improper or unwise. But conceding this ideal to be incapable of realization in the present state of public opinion, there is presented to our consideration the other course. This is to reduce the existing anomalies in our spelling, serving no use and displaying no sense, to the lowest possible number; to discard from words their unneeded and misleading letters; to bring all the words of the same general class under the operation of phonetic law, so as to produce uniformity where an unintelligible diversity now prevails. These are distinct objects. They constitute two separate movements which may be characterized by a slight difference in the wording. One is reform of English orthography; the other is reform in English orthography.
There have been in the past, and are likely to be in the future, many attempts at solving the perplexing problems involved in the furtherance of the first of these two movements. Some of them have been logical and consistent throughout. But one difficulty there is which has stood in the way of their acceptance. It will for a long time to come stand in the way. They must necessarily be addressed to generations which have not even an elementary conception of what the sounds of the language are, what are their real values, and what is the proper way of representing these values. As language is now learned full as much by the eye as by the ear, if not, indeed, more so, the form of the word as it is spelled, not as it is pronounced, becomes what is associated in the common mind with the word itself. In modern times this has begot an unreasoning devotion. Accordingly, as difference in a hitherto unheard method of pronunciation has always affected men by the mere sound of it, so does now a new spelling affect them by the sight of it. It arrests the attention of all. Of some it excites the resentment; to others it almost causes convulsions of agony. Hence, those who advocate a pure phonetic spelling—in itself the only strictly rational method—are holding forth a counsel of perfection to a body of persons who are so steeped in orthographic iniquity that they have come to think it the natural condition of the race. This is a situation which has to be recognized. Therefore, in the present state of public opinion, largely unintelligent and hostile in proportion to its lack of intelligence, it seems to me that reform of English orthography—using the distinction just made—is not practicable. We must content ourselves with reform in English orthography, imperfect and unsatisfactory in many particulars as it necessarily must be. Still, the middling possible is better than the ideally unattainable.
In a certain sense the latter course is, or ought to be, included in the former. Any reform in English orthography which conflicts with the ideal of reform of English orthography is not really a reform at all. It is nothing more than a temporary makeshift which puts an obstacle in the way of proper future effort. A piecemeal restoration of anything which is not in full conformity with the just restoration of the whole will do more than leave something to be desired. It will introduce much to be deprecated. Any process of simplification in a language whose spelling is so inherently vicious as ours is sure to be attended with inconsistencies. In any partial reform there will always arise exceptions which can never be swept away until that thorough-going reform is made for which the public mind is not prepared. These exceptions will be seized upon and triumphantly paraded by the opponents of change as proof that as the reform proposed cannot be made perfect at once, it ought not to be begun at all. There would be truth in the last contention if the alterations recommended were not, as far as they go, in full conformity with that phonetic ideal which, though we shall never reach, we ought always to keep in view. The one essential thing to be insisted upon in the reform in English orthography is that it shall follow the path of reform of English orthography, no matter how far it may lag behind it. There should be no resort to temporary expedients which result in bringing out about a mere external uniformity at the cost of sacrificing the principle that the spelling should represent the sound. Furthermore, it must not bow down to the false god of derivation when such a course brings the form of the word into conflict with its pronunciation.
Much, indeed, of the discredit and ill success which have attended previous efforts in behalf of spelling reform have been due to the imperfect knowledge and erroneous action of those who have undertaken them. They saw that there was an evil; they did not see what the nature of the evil was. Hence, they adopted wrong methods of relief. They did not propose their half-measures as preparations for something better. They looked upon them as final in themselves. It need hardly be said that reform of this particular kind could never be pressed consciously as reform until after uniformity of spelling had practically been established. Consequently, changes in orthography, as distinguished from change of orthography, can hardly be said to go back to an early period. Nearly all noteworthy attempts of the sort took place in the latter half of the eighteenth century or the former half of the nineteenth. Johnson’s method of spelling was felt, especially in the earlier of these two periods, more than it was later, as a tyranny. It was still so new that all had not become used to it, and none had learned to love it with the gushing affection of our time. Many there were who still remembered the former state of freedom. A few were found who sought to set up rival thrones of their own. The crotchets, moreover, in which individual writers indulged have been numberless. In the vast majority of cases the changes proposed by them have been based upon no scientific principles. Still less have they been the product of any thoroughly worked-out theory. Accordingly, they have served little other purpose than to arrest momentarily the attention of the curious, and have had absolutely no influence whatever upon the orthography generally received.
In truth, many of these attempts at reform have been worse than partial. They have been merely in the direction of a mechanical uniformity which was not based in the slightest upon the nature of things. One illustration of this effort to bring about change which was not improvement can be found in the alterations proposed at the end of the eighteenth century by Joseph Ritson. To scholars Ritson is well known as the fiercest of antiquaries, who loved accuracy with the same passion with which other men love persons, and who hated a mistake, whether arising from ignorance or inadvertence, as a saint might hate a deliberate lie. He is equally well known for his devotion to a vegetable diet, and also for the manifestation, noticeable in others so addicted, of a bloodthirstiness of disposition in his criticism which the most savage of carnivorous feeders might have contemplated with envy. The alterations he proposed and carried out in his published works tended in certain ways toward formal regularity; but they also tended to make the divergence between the spelling and the pronunciation still wider. For instance, the so-called regular verb in our tongue adds ed to form the preterite. Ritson made the general rule universal. He appended the termination also to verbs ending in e. Accordingly the past tense, for illustration, of love, oblige, and surprise appeared as loveed, obligeed, and surpriseed. As nobody pronounces the one e which already exists in these preterites, the insertion of another unnecessary letter could have only the effect of adding an extra weight to the burden which these unfortunate words were carrying as it was.
There were other changes proposed by Ritson. None were so bad as this, but they were all valueless. He himself, however, was too thoroughly honest a man to pretend that he had arrived at any knowledge of the principles which underlie the reconstruction of our orthography. He appears at last to have lost all confidence in his own alterations. Under his influence his nephew had also been affected with the fever of reform, and spelled many words in a way different from that commonly followed. In a letter written in 1795, Ritson informed his kinsman that he—the latter—was entirely ignorant of the principles both of orthography and of punctuation, and rather wished to be singular than studied to be right. “For my part,” he added, “I am as little fitted for a master as you are for a scholar.”
Such changes as those of Ritson provoked amusement rather than opposition. The knowledge of them, indeed, hardly came to the ears of those devoted but never very well-informed idolaters of the existing orthography who feel that the future of the English language and literature depends upon its present spelling, and that the preservation of that spelling in its purity, or, rather, in its impurity, rests largely upon them. They did not attack Ritson’s views, because they never heard of them. The changes, again, were too unscientific in their nature to be worthy of serious consideration by him who had the least comprehension of the real difficulties under which our orthography labors. Ritson himself lived long enough not only to doubt the value of his own efforts, but to see that these efforts had been attended by positive pecuniary disadvantage to himself. The worship of the orthographical fetish was then well under way. In a letter to Walter Scott, written in 1803, Ritson told him that his publishers, the Longmans, thought that the orthography made use of in his Life of King Arthur had been unfavorable to its sale. Yet this was a work addressed to a class of persons who might be presumed to be peculiarly free from prejudices which affect so powerfully the semi-educated. Such a fact speaks stronger than volumes of dissertations as to the opposition which reform of spelling must overcome before it can meet with any sort of consideration at the hands of many.