THE NEW ENGLISH.*
KINGTON OLIPHANT'S book, The New English, is the out- come of years of devoted labour, and makes a very valuable contribution to the history and philology of the language. The excellence of his treatise, published in 1878, on The Old and Middle English, which threw so much light on the earlier history of our speech, canoed his long-promised work dealing with its later stages to be looked forward to with an interest which, we are glad to say, its appearance has fully justified. This is the more satisfactory, as the task Mr. Oliphant set him- self to carry out was indeed an arduous one, no lee, than to trace the development of the language from the beginning of the fourteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The plan Mr. Oliphant adopted was to take a number of authors from each period, to examine them carefully, and to set out the words, phrases, and altered meanings which he found in use for the first time, showing also the dialect in which the work was written, the proportion of native and Romance words it con- tained, and such peculiarities of grammar or orthography as might attract his attention. His method will be better under- • TN IAN SNligh. By T. L. Rington Oliphant, of Balliol College. Snob. London Macmillan and Co.
stood if seen in practice. We choose the following extract for its shortness :—
"The siege of Rouen in 1418 was described in a long poem by Jolla Page, an eye-witness, writing after the surrender. (p.1 ) Page was a Northern man, as we can tell by his use of gain (props), bean (paratne) marcyfull, manful, fray, and thrill (not tale!). We see the sound i or y replacing the old ea, as lykys (leeks), the former leac. The old calk-trap loses its k. The fight between Teutonic and Romance forms was still lasting ; one manuscript of the poem has neweltie, where another has novyltye ; the form reward is often seed for regard. The starved French garrison, so it is written, were but bonys and bare skyn- (p. 43.) A curious idiom connected with our definite artiole is first seen in p. 8; while he lived, he was the mon ; that is, the very model of a man ; we know our common 'he's the fellow.' There are also a hundryd or two and two halfe henrys. Among the verbs are take ground, put him unto grete cost, end up a sego (like dish up), come of (evadere, our get off). There is the curious verb to pyttefall, also to outefall (sally); an ontfall was a word in use in the British Army down to 1715, as we see in Colonel Blackader's diary. In p. 15, our men, when fighting the enemy, gaffe helm mete ; we should now say gave them their bellyful.' Among the French words are ordynatinca (canon ; it would seem, a more restricted eense than in the Man- deville treatise), turnepykys, p. 17 (some warlike engine). The French Chartreuse appears as a howse of Chartere. The verb pyll bad hitherto been used for plunder ; it now mean, the peeling of
vegetables
The value of Mr. Oliphant's work lies in his endeavour to give the earliest dates at which new words, new meanings, and new turns of expression came into use. Historical accidence, on the other hand, does not easily lend itself to a treatment in which all the linguistic facts have necessarily to appear out of their proper classification in a disordered and disconnected way, just as they happen to come up in the author under examination. It is not always easy, even for a competent scholar, to draw the right inference from the appearance of a single isolated form, without any explanation as to how or why it came there. The great number of recorded facts may, of course, when sifted and classified, throw fresh light upon the development of our accidence ; otherwise they are only useful as examples of what we know already, and for the information a particular form will often give about the writer who uses it.
Some idea of what Mr. Oliphant's undertaking with regard to the history of the vocabulary means, may be gathered from his estimate that to take up his work from 1811 and bring it down to the present day would be enough to occupy the labours of a committee of philologers. "All the volumes of Punch," he writes, "must be examined and carefully studied, if the latest idioms are to be remarked." Still more in point is the case of Dr. Murray's New English Dictionary. That monumental work, now in course of publication, goes over much the same ground as Mr. Oliphant's work. It is based on materials accumulated during twenty-five years by some thirteen hundred readers, who in the course of that period went through some five thousand authors; yet Dr. Murray tells us that the very first time when three-fourths of the words in the language are found in extant literature has probably escaped notice, and he expresses himself content if he is able to come across a new word or a new meaning within fifty years after its coming into use. Theee reservations apply with tenfold force to Mr. Oliphant's single handed labours ; and, indeed, he himself expresses the hope that be may live to revise these pages by the light of the additional information which the complete publication of Dr. Murray's Dictionary will put at his disposal. One curious oversight might already be mended by its aid. Mr. Oliphant tells us that that most im- portant word " atonement " was coined by Tyndale for his translation of the Bible; but on referring to the Dictionary, we find More using it twice, at least twelve years before Tyndale began to write. In such a vast mass of detail, it is but natural that there should be many slips and inaccuracies. To take, for example, his treatment of William of Palerne, he tells us that " scold " is there found for the first time, but gives no hint that the word there in use is the strong preterite of "scald," and not our word "scold." And in the same poem, the line, Schal no gom under god other gate it make, is thus commented on,—" This phrase was long afterwards turned into another guess, which became common in the eighteenth century." We fail utterly to eee any connection between the two phrases ; Mr. Oliphant often strains a point to connect old and modern idioms. Dealing still with the same author, he writes :—" The curious word bakkee (vestis) appears on p. 78; it seems to be Salopian, being afterwards used in Piers Plowman ; we still have the slang term bags for an important part of our raiment ; Lord Eldon was called ' Old Bags." Etymology is not Mr. Oliphant's strong point ; and looking at the absence of any continuous use of the word bakkee, we are inclined to think that the more obvious derivation of the
modern word is the correct one. The strange explanation of
the devil to pay," as meaning "to please the Devil," is not likely to meet with any acceptance. Mr. Oliphant is not always very reliaMe in the dates which he assigns to some of the oolder works. The pseudo-Chancerian Romaunt of the Rose he endeavours to prove from internal evidence must have been writ'en about 1520; this theory he, indeed, withdraws in defer- ence to Dr. Murray's opinion that the only extant mann- meript clearly belongs to the earlier portion of the fifteenth century ; bat he still hopes for a new Bentley to dissect this counterpart of the Letters of Phalaris. In refusing to recog- nise this as the work which Lydgate refers to as Chaucer's, editors have hitherto based their opinion on peculiarities of versification rather than of language, and we cannot but think that the latter test is a somewhat unsafe one. Many of the forms, which Mr. Oliphant argues are not found earlier than the sixteenth century, belong to the Northern dialect, which, as he himself points out, was always much in advance of the other dialects, and nearer to the language of to-day. Occleve's De Beg imine Principmn was certainly written about the date generally assigned to the Ro mount of the Rose, yet in that work Mr. Oliphant notes various phrases which are hardly found again until one hundred years later, a fact that might have made him hesitate before putting the Romaunt and the Court of Love so late.
Without delaying further over the blemishes which are almost inseparable from a work of this kind, we prefer to say something of the valuable information it contains. Taking up the history of the language in the early part of the fourteenth century, when the heavy and continuous loss of Teutonic words which had been going on for so long received a check, and when the new standard of English founded on the East-Midland dialect was beginning to assert itself as the language of literature and society, Mr. Oliphant enables us to trace its development step by step to its present con- dition. The authors chosen for examination are generally well nailed for the purpose, and Mr. Oliphant has been wise "in leaning to those that are comic and colloquial, not to the master- spirits of our literature." In looking through the book, one cannot but be struck with the number of very old phrases that have kept their youth, and have still quite a modern air. About 1360, a lady speaks of herself as "a young thing," and within the next two hundred years we find, "we have a crow to pall,"
he should have been and, procured," and "not at home" for troublesome visitors. The much-derided " horribly " can vouch the authority of Katherine of Aragon, who writes," I am horrible besy." Gardiner uses " platform " for scheme, or policy, a use which we have recently adopted again from America. We cannot, however, see any connection between the phrase "her Majesty's Opposition" and what Queen Mary of France wrote of as "my party adversary," by which she merely meant her opponents. Mr. Oliphant is sometimes too eager to find analogies.
One of the moat interesting chapters in the book is that which deals with Tyndale and his translation of the Bible. Tyndale's version, as Mr. Oliphant points out, contains a much smaller proportion of foreign words than Wickliffe's, and of all the Teutonic words he uses, only twelve have become obsolete since his time, a strong proof of his influence, continued through the Authorised Version, in fixing the language. The value of the book is greatly increased for reference by an excellent index of nearly three hundred pages, which enables the reader to trace the continuone history of each separate word. It contains all the Teutonic, and a great many of the Romance words mentioned in the text.
It would not do to pass over the views which, as one who has gone through the English monuments of twelve centuries, Mr. Oliphant puts forth on the English of to-day. In his eyes, a style is good or bad as the proportion of native to Romance words is large or small. In excepting some of the weekly papers—' the perusal of which," he is good enough to say, "is a liberal education most cheaply procured "—from his attack on the shortcomings of the Press, he bestows on them a praise which their modesty will make them blushingly decline.
Their merit as authors," he writes, "is beyond that of Chaucer, for they cast aside a huge pile of Romance words that he never knew, and they employ almost as great a propor- tion of Teutonic words as he did in his prose." "Merit beyond that of Chaucer !" Here is high praise indeed ; but not the highest Mr. Oliphant has to give. Mr. Morris has done still better, and in his Sigurd cuts down his proportion of French words
"to the scale which Chaucer's grandfather would have need." A writer of prose, in Mr. Oliphant's view, may go so far back as Tyndale, a writer of poetry so far back as Chaucer, in employ- ing old words ; and to this we are willing to assent. It is operwise when he tries to set up a canon which should keep out all foreign words that are not" stamped with the authority of the great writers of Dryden's school, the men of Swift's lifetime," unless, indeed, they have been brought in to 611 up a gap, and express some distinctly new idea. It is surely idle to take no account of the growth of the language during the last one hundred and fifty years, and of all the increase of wealth it has acquired within that time. Nor is it tolerable that a period, which in literary merit can, at any rate, hold its own, should have such a slight put upon it. The coarse Mr. Oliphant advocates would involve a wanton impoverishment of our speech. It need hardly be said that a good style is not to be attained by a hard-and-fast rate of this kind. He writes beat who uses words that best express his meaning, wherever he finds them. Obscurata din papule bonus cruet, as Mr. Oliphant would see him ; but also, Adscisect nova, qua genitor produxerit usue Fundet apes Latiumque beabit divite lingua. It is, of course, easy to make fan of the unfortunate penny-a-liner ; but most of the absurdities Mr. Oliphant comments on arise even more from a want of direct- ness than from the use of foreign words and idioms. We can all see how ludicrous is the sentence, "The revanche com- mences to be a quantite negligiable ; but I fail to see that this new departure in haute politigue is a factor that commends itself to the public;" but, as old Wilson, quoted by Mr. Oliphant, tells us, "He that commeth lately out of France, will talke Frenche-English, and never blush at the matter ;" and this is truer still of the foreign correspondent who always lives there. "A sharp-eyed gamekeeper nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn-door;" and even so Mr. Oliphant would have editors gibbet at the head of their columns such words as solidarity, egoism, collaborateur, acerbity, dubiety, donate, banalities. Solidarity and collaborateur are surely as worthy of adoption as protege, which Mr. Oliphant would himself admit, while acerbity dates from before the time of Dryden. In leaving this topic of style, we are glad to note that Mr. Oliphant acknowledges that the choice of words of the best living writers leaves little to be desired, a fact which makes the injustice of an arbitrary rule the more unnecessary.
Not the least interesting feature of the book is the personality of the author. It is constantly asserting itself to enliven the somewhat hard and dry mass of detail of which the work in the main consists. There is something very pleasing in the enthu- siasm for his work which prompts Mr. Kington Oliphant to call on young authors to "turn away from poems and novels (wherein hardly one man of fifty makes a name for himself)," and betake themselves to philology. So will they be "read with interest scores of years hence," and "be promoted to higher company than that of Bcevins and Mcevins on the other side of the Styx." Then, too, there is the fierce wrath he pours forth on offenders against his canons. "Han non agitem t" and "The hunt is up, the game is afoot," are the kind of phrases he uses against them. Very carious, too, is the evident delight, worthy of Sir David Lyndsay or John Knox, or some other fire-eating Reformationist, with which besets down carefully all the abusive epithets he finds anywhere aimed at the Pope, or the monks or priests, without very much regard to the philological importance of the invective. In conclusion, we would express the hope that Mr. Oliphant may live to carry out his intention, and add to the completeness of this very valuable work by incorporating in a second edition such additional knowledge as Dr. Murray's Dictionary is sure to supply.
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