Dunces in Good Company

A woeful voice has sounded over the land. One of our bishops has discovered that Young England cannot spell, does not write a good hand, and knows too little of music and geography. He does not like our youthful dunces, and it is right, of course, that he and all of us should spur these youthful sluggards to better things.

But while the bishop fixes an accusing eye on the humbler schools one of our judges has raised his glance to the judicial Bench, to recall that four of the wisest judges we have there were among the dunces of their day. Between the four of them they never earned one prize.

But they are all in most excellent company, these dunces great and small. We have been looking into the life of one of the popular soldiers of our time, Lord Wolseley. The soldier is largely forgotten with his battles, but the memory of the man is fragrant and his books are admirable. What we like is a letter he had from his wife in the hour of his triumph in the hard-won Sudan. In the midst of the radiant affection and sparkling fun of the proud wife’s message there flashes out this little rebuke:

A word about your spelling: Week (semaine, not faiblesse) is not spelt weak, and development has not got two ps and ls.

That puts us on terms with the great man at once; he is fallible, like some of the rest of us, and there is not a boy in England who will not open his heart still wider to the soldier who was shaky with his spelling.

There are those to whom spelling is a mystery not to be mastered by normal intelligence. To them the arrangement of letters in an agreed form is as queer as mathematics to the student who could not bear the “low cunning” of figures. What did poor Robert Louis Stevenson think of the way in which the builders of our language have decided that letters should represent the various parts of speech? It was an art beyond him. Apparently he gave it up and let his pen run as it would.

It adds a sort of roguish enjoyment to the reading of his stories and essays to know that they were spelt as a boy at an early stage of his education would have spelt them. “I have not held myself bound (says the editor of the Stevenson Letters) to reproduce all the author’s minor eccentricities of spelling and the like. As all his friends are aware, to spell was a thing this master of English letters was never able to learn.”

The efforts made by our spelling reformers are arduous and well-meant, but there is not a schoolboy in England who does not practise their system without any training or searching after phonetics. They spell as Artemus Ward did. Half the American humorist’s laughs spring from his quaint-looking words.

We find the same word spelt in many different ways in Chaucer, Spenser, and other early writers. They had no fixed models; they submitted a word to the ear, then sounded it in various forms pronounced according to the custom of the age, and set out its letters as seemed best at the moment. Not even surnames were uniformly spelt. Shakespeare signed himself as Shakespere, Shakespeare, and Shakspeare. His father’s name appears in 16 forms in the records of the Council of Stratford-on-Avon, and Shaxpeare is the most common. Queen Elizabeth, mistress of eight languages and ever mindful of the meaning of Sovereign, hardly ever wrote that tremendous word twice alike; seven forms of its spelling have been traced to her hand. But, of course, Queen Elizabeth was ahead of her subjects, for she prided herself on scholarship. One of the most accomplished ladies of her Court, the Duchess of Norfolk, famous as the friend of scholars and a patron of literature, produced this result when she attempted to write her 16th-century English:

My ffray gode lord, her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a glasse hoff Setyl set in Sylver gyld. I pra you tak hit in wort. An hy wer habel het showlde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone.

Such was her Grace’s little note to the Earl of Essex. Put into our spelling it means this:

My very good lord, Here I send you, in token of the New Year, a glass of setyll set in silver gilt; I pray you take it in worth. If I were able it should be better. I would it were worth a thousand crowns.

Not because better English did not exist, but because she could not better express herself, that was the way a great lady of Elizabeth’s Court addressed a gallant in the days of Shakespeare.

No wonder that when Caxton began to print books he did not know where to turn for a standard spelling. He had mastered the art of the printer, but how could he master the language? Whose was the right pronunciation? Whose was the orthodox spelling?

With warm and grateful hearts we tender praise and thanks to the memory of the men who fought to popularise and fix our mother tongue, but we have a score against them. There have been many attempts to render our language more simple, but our masters would not have it.

A child and a Stevenson can spell doubt and debt quite easily if we allow them to drop the b, but no, the old masters would not hear of it. Drop the b from those words and you forget their Latin origin, they said.

It is singular that the noble literature of the Elizabethan era should arise when it was as necessary to fight the battle of English speech for English people as to fight an Armada to preserve our English liberty.

Richard Mulcaster, Headmaster of St. Paul’s School, pleaded for the honour of English as Richard Hakluyt pleaded for honour to our explorers. “Our language,” he declared, “beareth the joyful title of our freedom and liberty, the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom. I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.”

Did Shakespeare ever read Mulcaster’s valiant writings, we wonder? The old schoolmaster sounded as brave a note for our speech as ever Shakespeare sounded for our souls.

What though English carried only to the frontiers of our land? Were not Englishmen refined enough to have a language of their own? he asked. Why not our tongue for speaking and our pen for writing as well as our bodies for apparel and our tastes for diet?

But (he said) you say that we have no cunning knowledge proper to our soil to cause foreigners to study it as a treasure of such store. What though, then? Why raise not the English wits, if they will bend their wills, wither for matter or for method, in their own tongue, to be in time as well sought to by foreign students for increase of their knowledge as our soil is sought to at this time by foreign merchants for increase of their wealth?

Four years after that message rang out a countryman from Warwickshire was holding horses at the stage door of a wooden theatre, creeping inside as an odd man and patching up old plays, and filling minor roles on the stage. Within a dozen years as many plays had come from that ostler’s hand, the English language was fixed for ever, and English wits had been so raised that all the world might come to us to improve their knowledge. It has been doing so ever since.

It would be hard to spell wrongly some of the names of Shakespeare’s age for the reason already mentioned, that they changed their spellings so frequently. Every variation seems be provided for, and if we take one of his contemporaries, Sir Walter Raleigh, we have over seventy spellings of his name. Even now the popular form seems to be incorrect, for the pronunciation was undoubtedly Rawley. What he called himself we do not know, but it is certain that to the end of his days he spoke broad Devonshire, so that his English would have a curious sound in the ears of those who sought to write according to his diction.

So that our dunces are, as we said, in good company. They could not spell when Shakespeare trod the Earth; many never have been able to spell since. Boys who could not spell at school are on the Bench today, at the head of States, sitting in the House of Commons.

There was a man who broke his teacher’s heart by his stupidity, who sat in Parliament and never raised his voice there except to ask for the closing of a window which caused a draught, who was so forgetful that he used his sister’s finger to stop his red-hot pipe; yet his epitaph is nobly phrased in two immortal lines:

Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be, and all was light.

It does not follow that ignorance in spelling foretells a Newton, or even a Stevenson, but it is cheering to a dunce to know that a Newton was once a dullard too.

We ought to spell correctly and to be in every way perfect, of course, and bad spelling is something to be heartily ashamed of, a sign, we think we should say, of bad manners as well as of bad schooling, yet hundreds of millions of people worship Mahommed the prophet who could not spell, and millions read writers who bungled all their letters. Some day there will be no dull dogs anywhere, but, in the meantime - how do you spell Irresistible, and how many cs has Recommend?

From My Magazine, ed. Arthur Mee, Volume 25 number 229, March 1929, pages 243-245

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