Chapter 11

What does a student of five and twenty years ago still remember of his college? My own first and fondest recollection is of the walks and talks, _noctes coenaeque deum_, with loved and honored companions, in the bonds of a friendship that can be realized only in youth, under the inspiration of a common intellectual purpose, and, one is tempted to add, in the atmosphere of college halls; next arise golden hours passed in the library; and lastly there come back other hours, not always golden, spent in the classroom. This is, of course, only to enumerate the three influences that are, or should be, strongest in a student's life: the society of his fellows, his private reading, and his studies. Of these three factors of culture the first and the last are fairly constant, but the second is apt to vary in the experience of any small group of students from the foremost place, as in the case of John Hay, to no place at all. It is of this varying element in the student's conduct of life that I have undertaken to write.

Unless student intercourse has an intellectual basis, such as reading furnishes, it has nothing to distinguish it from any other good fellowship and can hardly escape triviality. The little groups of students at Cambridge which included such members as the three Tennysons, Hallam, Spedding, Fitzgerald, and Thackeray, while they were no doubt jovial enough, were first of all intellectual associations, where

Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

In such companionship men not only share and correct the culture which they have acquired in private, but they are stimulated to higher and wider attainment. The classroom at its best is hardly equal to a good book; from its very nature it must address an abstract average rather than the individual, while a good book startles us with the intimacy of its revelation to ourselves. The student goes to college to study; he has his name thence. But while the classroom is busied, patiently, sedulously doling him out silver, he discovers that there is gold lying all around, which he may take without asking. Twenty-five years after he finds that the silver has grown black with rust, while the gold shines on untarnished. Librarians are often besought for a guide in reading, a set of rules, a list of books. But what is really needed, and what no mentor can give, is a hunger and thirst after what is in books; and this the student must acquire for himself or forego the blessing. Culture cannot be vicarious. This is not to say that a list of books may not be useful, or that one set of books is as good as another, but only that reading is the thing, and, given the impulse to read, the how and the what can be added unto it; but without this energizing motive, no amount of opportunity or nurture will avail.

But, having not the desire to read, but only a sense that he ought to have it, what shall a student do? I will suggest three practicable courses from which a selection may be made according to the needs of the individual. The first is to sit down and take account of stock, to map out one's knowledge, one's previous reading, and so find the inner boundaries of the vast region yet to be explored. This process can hardly fail to suggest not merely one point of departure, but many. The second method is, without even so much casting about, to set forth in any direction, take the first attractive unread book at hand, and let that lead to others. The third course is intended for the student whose previous reading has been so scanty and so perfunctory as to afford him no outlook into literature, a case, which, it is to be feared, is only too common. We will consider this method first. Obviously such a student must be furnished with a guide, one who shall set his feet in the right paths, give him his bearings in literature, and inspire him with a love for the beauty and grandeur of the scenery disclosed, so that he shall become not only able to make the rest of his journey alone, but eager to set out.

Where shall the student find such a guide? There are many and good at hand, yet perhaps the best are not the professional ones, but rather those who give us merely a delightful companionship and invite us to share their own favorite walks in Bookland. Such a choice companion, to name but one, awaits the student in Hazlitt's "Lectures on the English Poets." Of the author himself Charles Lamb says: "I never slackened in my admiration of him; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion." And of his books Stevenson confesses: "We are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt." In this little volume which the most hard-pressed student can read and ponder in the leisure moments of a single term, the reader is introduced at once into the wonderland of our English literature, which he is made to realize at the outset is an indivisible portion of the greater territory of the literature of the world.

Hazlitt begins with a discussion of poetry in general, shows what poetry is, how its various forms move us, and how it differs from its next of kin, such as eloquence and romance. He then takes up the poetry of Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Ossian, and sets forth the characteristics of each. In his chapter on our first two great poets, Chaucer and Spenser, he points out the great and contrasted merits of these two writers who have so little in common except a superficial resemblance in language. Hazlitt is fond of presenting his authors to us in pairs or groups. His next chapter is devoted to Shakespeare and Milton; and we may remark that, while the student is in no danger of forgetting the existence of Shakespeare, he is likely to need just such a tribute to the greatness of Milton as the critic here presents. The volume contains later chapters of great interest on Milton's "Lycidas" and "Eve." It is not necessary for us to mention here all the subjects treated; Dryden and Pope, Thomson and Cowper, Burns and the Old English Ballads are among them. In every case we are not tantalized with mere estimates and characterizations, but are furnished with illustrative specimens of the poems discussed. But the initiation into English literature which we receive from Hazlitt does not end with the authors of whom he treats directly. Resuming our figure of a landscape, we may say that he takes us through a thousand bypaths into charming nooks and upon delightful prospects of which he has made no announcement beforehand.

I spoke of reading and pondering his book in a single college term. But, while this may easily be done, it will be far more profitable for the student, as soon as he feels drawn away from the volume to some author whom it presents, to lay it aside and make an excursion of his own into literature. Then let him take up the volume again and go on with it until the critic's praise of the "Faerie Queene," or the "Rape of the Lock," or the "Castle of Indolence" again draws his attention off the essay to the poem itself. And as one poem and one author will lead to another, the volume with which the student set out will thus gradually fulfill its highest mission by inspiring and training its reader to do without it. If the student has access to the shelves of a large library, the very handling of the books in their groups will bring him into contact with other books which he will be attracted to and will dip into and read. In fact it should not be long before he finds his problem to be, not what to read, but what to resist reading.

Suppose, however, that the student finds himself already possessed of a vague, general knowledge of literature, but nothing definite or satisfying, nothing that inspires interest. He it is who may profitably take up the first attractive unread book at hand; but he should endeavor to read it, not as an isolated fragment of literature, but in its relations. Suppose the book happens to be "Don Quixote." This is a work written primarily to amuse. But if the reader throws himself into the spirit of the book, he will not be content, for instance, with the mere mention of the romances of chivalry which turned the poor knight's brain. He will want to read about them and to read some of them actually. He will be curious as to Charlemagne and his peers, Arthur and his knights, and will seek to know their true as well as their fabulous history. Then he will wonder who the Moors were, why they were banished, and what was the result to Spain of this act in which even his liberal and kindly author acquiesced. He will ask if antiquity had its romances and if any later novelists were indebted to Cervantes. The answer to the last query will bring him to Gil Blas in French literature and to the works of the great English romancers of the eighteenth century. Fielding will lead him to Thackeray, Smollett to Dickens, Dickens to Bret Harte, and Bret Harte to Kipling. If he reads Cervantes in English, he will have a choice of translations, and he will not fail to mark the enormous difference in language, literary style, and ideals of rendering between the three versions of Shelton in the seventeenth century, Motteux in the eighteenth, and Ormsby in the nineteenth. If, like many another, he becomes so interested in the great romance as to learn Spanish for the sake of coming into direct communication with his author, a whole new literature will be opened to him. Furthermore, in the cognate languages which a mastery of Spanish will make easy for him, a group of literatures will be placed at his command; and, while he began with Cervantes, who threw open for him the portals of the middle ages, we may leave him with Dante, looking before and after over all human achievement and destiny.

All this the student will not do in one term nor in one year, but he will have _found himself_ in the library, he will have acquired a bond to culture that will not break as he steps out of his last recitation, that will not yield when time and distance have relegated his college friendships, with his lost youth, to the Eden or the Avilion of memory. And if afterwards he comes, with Emerson, to find the chief value of his college training in the ability it has given him to recognize its little avail, he will thus disparage it only in the spirit in which a more advanced student of an earlier day, looking back upon the stupendous revelations of his "Principia," likened them to so many pebbles or shells picked up on the shore of the illimitable ocean of knowledge.

ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM

Seldom have controversies brought out so much humor, on both sides, as that over the reform of English spelling, and few have excited so little interest in proportion to the energy expended. Both these results are due perhaps to the fact that the subject, from its very nature, does not admit of being made a burning question. Yet one has to look only a little way into it to see that important interests--educational, commercial, and possibly racial--are involved. Thus far the champions have been chiefly the newspapers for spelling as it is, and scholars and educators for spelling as it ought to be. But, in spite of the intelligence of the disputants, the discussion has been singularly insular and deficient in perspective. It would gain greatly in conclusiveness if spelling and its modifications were considered broadly and historically, not as peculiar to English, but as common to all languages, and involving common problems, which we are not the first to grapple with, but rather seem destined to be the last to solve.

As is usually the case in controversies, the chief obstacle to agreement is a lack of what the lawyers call a meeting of minds. The two sides are not talking about the same thing. The reformer has one idea of what spelling is; the public has another idea, which is so different that it robs the reformer's arguments of nearly all their force. The two ideas for which the same word is used are hardly more alike than mother of pearl and mother of vinegar. To the philologist spelling is the application of an alphabet to the words of a language, and an alphabet is merely a system of visible signs adapted to translate to the eye the sounds which make up the speech of the people. To the public spelling is part and parcel of the English language, and to tamper with it is to lay violent hands on the sacred ark of English literature. To the philologist an alphabet is not a thing in itself, but only a medium, and he knows many alphabets of all degrees of excellence. Among the latest formed is that which we use and call the Roman, but which, though it was taken from Italy, made its way back after a course of form development that carried it through Ireland, England, and Germany. This alphabet was originally designed for writing Latin, and, as English has more sounds than Latin, some of the symbols when applied to English have to do multiple duty; though this is the least of the complaints against our current spelling. In fact any inventive student of phonetics could in half an hour devise a better alphabet for English, and scores have been devised. But the Roman has the field, and no one dreams of advocating a new alphabet for popular use. Meanwhile, though the earliest English may have been written in Runic, and the Bibles which our Pilgrim fathers brought over were printed in Black-letter, still to the great English-reading public the alphabet of current books and papers is the only alphabet. Even this is a double alphabet, consisting as it does of capitals and small letters; and we have besides Italic, Black-letter, and Script, all in common use, all with double forms, and all differing greatly from one another. At best the Roman alphabet, though beautiful and practical, is not so beautiful as the Greek nor nearly so efficient for representing English sounds as the Cherokee syllabary invented by the half-breed, Sequoyah, is for representing the sounds of his mother tongue.

Let us now turn from the alphabet, which is the foundation of spelling, to spelling itself. Given a scientific alphabet, spelling, as a problem, vanishes; for there is only one possible spelling for any spoken word, and only one possible pronunciation for any written word. Both are perfectly easy, for there is no choice, and no one who knows the alphabet can make a mistake in either. But given a traditional alphabet encumbered with outgrown or impracticable or blundering associations, and spelling may become so difficult as to serve for a test or hallmark of scholarship. In French, for instance, the alphabet has drifted so far from its moorings that no one on hearing a new word spoken, if it contains certain sounds, can be sure of its spelling; though every one on seeing a new word written knows how to pronounce it. But in English our alphabet has actually parted the cable which held it to speech, and we know neither how to write a new word when we hear it nor how to pronounce one when we see it. Strangest of all, we have come, in our English insularity, to look on this as a matter of course. But Germans and Spaniards, Italians and Dutchmen, have no such difficulty and never have to turn to the dictionary to find out how to spell a word that they hear or how to pronounce a word that they see. For them spelling and speech are identical; all they have to make sure of is the standard pronunciation. They have done what we have neglected to do--developed the alphabet into an accurate phonetic instrument, and our neglect is costing us, throughout the English-speaking world, merely in dealing with silent letters, the incredible sum of a hundred million dollars a year.[5] Our neighbors look after the alphabet and the spelling looks after itself; if the pronunciation changes, the spelling changes automatically, and thus keeps itself always up to date.

But this happy result has not been brought about without effort, the same kind of effort that our reformers are now making for our benefit. In Swedish books printed only a hundred years ago we find words printed with the letters _th_ in combination, like the word _them_, which had the same meaning, and originally the same pronunciation, as the English word. At that time, however, Swedes had long ceased to be able to pronounce the _th_, but they kept the letters just as we still keep the _gh_ in _brought_ and _through_, though for centuries no one who speaks only standard English has been able to sound this guttural. In the last century the Swedes reformed their spelling, and they now write the word as they pronounce it--_dem_. German spelling has passed through several stages of reform in recent decades and is now almost perfectly phonetic. Germans now write _Brot_ and no longer _Brod_ or _Brodt_. It must be frankly confessed that the derivation of some words is not so obvious to the eye as formerly. The appearance of the Swedish _byrå_ does not at once suggest the French _bureau_, which it exactly reproduces in sound. But Europeans think it more practical, if they cannot indicate both pronunciation and etymology in spelling, to relegate the less important to the dictionary. Much, to be sure, has been made of the assumed necessity of preserving the pedigree of our words in their spelling, but in many cases this is not done now. Who thinks of _alms_ and _eleemosynary_ as coming from the same Greek word? Scholars say that a complete phonetic spelling of English would actually restore to the eye as much etymology as it took away.

But the most deep-seated opposition to changing our current spelling arises from its association, almost identification, with English literature. If this objection were valid it would be final, for literature is the highest use of language, and if reformed spelling means the loss of our literature we should be foolish to submit to it. But at what point in the history of English literature would reformed spelling begin to work harm? Hardly before Shakespeare, for the spelling of Chaucer belongs to the grammatical stage of the language at which he wrote, and Spenser's spelling is more or less an imitation of it made with a literary purpose. Shakespeare and Milton, however, wrote substantially modern English, and they are therefore at the mercy of the spelling reformer--as they always have been. The truth is, Shakespeare's writings have been respelt by every generation that has reprinted them, and the modern spelling reformer would leave them at least as near to Shakespeare's spelling as our current spelling is. The poet himself made fun of his contemporaries who said _det_ instead of _debt_, but what would he say of us who continue to write the word _debt_, though it has not been so pronounced for three hundred years? In old editions (and how fast editions grow old!) antiquated spelling is no objection, it is rather an attraction; but new, popular editions of the classics will be issued in contemporary spelling so long as the preservation of metre and rhyme permit. We still occasionally turn to the first folio of Shakespeare and to the original editions of Milton's poems to enjoy their antique flavor, and, in the latter case, to commune not only with a great poet, but also with a vigorous spelling reformer. Thus, whatever changes come over our spelling, standard old editions will continue to be prized and new editions to be in demand. But for the most part, though we might not readily understand the actual speech of Shakespeare and Milton, could we hear it, we like to treat them as contemporaries and read their works in our everyday spelling.

Our libraries, under spelling reform, will become antiquated, but only a little faster than they are now doing and always have done. Readers who care for a book over ten years old are few in number and will not mind antiquated spelling in the future any more than they do now. The printer, therefore, must not flatter himself with the prospect of a speedy reprinting of all the English classics in the new spelling. English is certain to have some day as scientific a spelling as German, but the change will be spread over decades and will be too gradual to affect business appreciably. On the other hand, he need not fear any loss to himself in the public's gain of the annual hundred million dollar tax which it now pays for the luxury of superfluous letters. Our printer's bills in the future will be as large as at present, but we shall get more for our money.

It will indeed be to the English race a strange world in which the spelling book ends with the alphabet; in which there is no conflict of standards except as regards pronunciation; in which two years of a child's school life are rescued from the needless and applied to the useful; in which the stenographer has to learn not two systems of spelling, but only two alphabets; in which the simplicity and directness of the English language, which fit it to become a world language, will not be defeated by a spelling that equals the difficulty of German grammar; in which the blundering of Dutch printers, like _school_, false etymologies, like _rhyme_, and French garnishes, as in _tongue_, no longer make the judicious grieve; and in which the fatal gift of bad spelling, which often accompanies genius, will no longer be dependent upon the printer to hide its orthographic nakedness from a public which, if it cannot always spell correctly itself, can always be trusted to detect and ridicule bad spelling. But it is a world which the English race will some day have, and which we may begin to have here and now if we will.

THE PERVERSITIES OF TYPE

That searching analyst of the soul, Edgar Allan Poe, found among the springs of human nature the quality of perverseness, the disposition to do wrong because it is wrong; in reality, however, Poe's Imp of the Perverse is active far beyond the boundaries of the human soul; his disturbances pervade the whole world, and nowhere are they more noticeable than in the printing office. This is so because elsewhere, when things fall out contrary to rule, the result may often be neutral or even advantageous; but in the printing office all deviations, or all but a minute fraction, are wrong. They are also conspicuous, for, though the standard is nothing less than perfection, the ordinary human eye is able to apply the standard. These tricks of the malicious imp are commonly called "misprints," "printer's errors," "errors of the press," or, more impartially, "errata" or "corrigenda." In the first three names there is a tinge of unfairness, because the printer is by no means responsible for all the mistakes that appear in type. The author is usually partly to blame and may be chiefly; yet when he suffers a lapse of memory or knowledge, he usually passes it off as a "printer's error." Sometimes the author's handwriting may mislead the printer, but when so good a biblical scholar as Mr. Gladstone wrote of _Daniel_ in the fiery furnace, there was no possibility that the single name could have stood in his manuscript for the names of the three men whose trial is mentioned in the _book_ of Daniel. Even here the submission of proof fixes the final responsibility on the author. But, quite apart from the responsibility for them, the mistakes embalmed in type are among the most interesting of all literary curiosities.