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Certain Personal Matters - For Freedom of Spelling · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter twenty one of Certain Personal Matters. This is a
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox accordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by VWN Certain Personal Matters by H. G. Wells.
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  Speaker 1: For freedom of spelling the discovery of an art, it
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  Speaker 1: is curious that people do not grumble more at having
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  Speaker 1: dispelled correctly. Yet one may ask, do we not a
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  Speaker 1: little over estimate the value of orthography? This is a
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  Speaker 1: natural reflection enough when the maker of artless happy phrases
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  Speaker 1: has been ransacking the dictionary for some elusive wretch of
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  Speaker 1: a word, which in the end proves to be not
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  Speaker 1: yet naturalized or technical, or a mere local vulgarity. Yet
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  Speaker 1: one does not often hear the idea canvassed in polite conversation.
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  Speaker 1: Dealers in small talk of the less prolific kind are
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  Speaker 1: continually falling back upon the silk hat or dress suit,
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  Speaker 1: or some rule of etiquette or other convention as a
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  Speaker 1: theme that spelling seems to escape them. The suspicion seems quaint,
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  Speaker 1: but one may almost fancy that an allusion to spelling
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  Speaker 1: savored a little of indelicacy, it must be admitted, though
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  Speaker 1: where the scruples come from would be hard to say
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  Speaker 1: that there is certain diffidence even here in broaching my
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  Speaker 1: doubts in a matter. For some inexplicable reason, spelling has
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  Speaker 1: become mixed up with moral feeling. One cannot pretend to
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  Speaker 1: explain things in a little paper of this kind. The
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  Speaker 1: fact is so, spelling is not appropriate or inappropriate, elegant
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  Speaker 1: or inelegant. It is right or wrong. We do not
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  Speaker 1: greatly blame a man for turn down colors when the
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  Speaker 1: vogue is erect, nor in these liberal days, for theological eccentricity.
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  Speaker 1: But we esteem him knitting in an outcast. If you
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  Speaker 1: but drop a pee from opportunity, it is not an
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  Speaker 1: anecdote but a scandal. If we say a man cannot
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  Speaker 1: spell his own name, there is only one thing es
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  Speaker 1: deemed worse before we come to the deadly crime, and
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  Speaker 1: that is the softening of language by dropping the aspirate.
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  Speaker 1: After all, it is an unorthodox age. We are all
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  Speaker 1: horribly afraid of being bourgeois. An unconventionality is the ideal
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  Speaker 1: of every respectable person. It is strange that we should
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  Speaker 1: cling so steadfastly to correct spelling. Yet again, one can
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  Speaker 1: partly understand the business if one thinks of the little
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  Speaker 1: ways of your schoolmaster and schoolmistress. This sanctity of spelling
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  Speaker 1: is stamped upon us in our earliest years. The writer
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  Speaker 1: recalls a period of youth wherein six hours a week
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  Speaker 1: were given to the study of spelling, and four hours
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  Speaker 1: to all other religious instruction. So important is it that
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  Speaker 1: a writer who cannot spell is almost driven to abandon
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  Speaker 1: his calling, however urgent the thing he may have to say,
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  Speaker 1: or his need of the incidentals of fame. Yet in
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  Speaker 1: the crisis of such a struggle, rebellious thoughts may arise
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  Speaker 1: even this, Why, after all, should correct spelling be the
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  Speaker 1: one absolutely essential literary merit? For it is less fatal
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  Speaker 1: for an ambitious scribe to be as dull as Hoxton
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  Speaker 1: than the spell in diverse ways. Yet, correct spelling of
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  Speaker 1: English has not been traced to revelation. There was no
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  Speaker 1: grammatical scenai, but a dictionary instead of tables of stone. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: we do not even know certainly when correct spelling began,
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  Speaker 1: Which word in the language was first spelled the right way,
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  Speaker 1: and by whom correct spelling may have been evolved, or
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  Speaker 1: it may be the creation of some mastermind. Its inventor,
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  Speaker 1: if it had an inventor, is absolutely forgotten. Thomas Cobbett
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  Speaker 1: would have invented it, but that he was born more
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  Speaker 1: than two centuries too late, poor man. All that we
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  Speaker 1: certainly know is that contemporaneously with the rise of extreme Puritanism,
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  Speaker 1: the belief in orthography first spread among Elizabethan printers, and
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  Speaker 1: with the Hanoverian succession, the new doctrine possessed the whole
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  Speaker 1: length and breadth of the land. At that time, the
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  Speaker 1: world passed through what extension lecturers call for no particular reason.
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  Speaker 1: The classical epoch. Nature, as indeed all the literature manuals testify,
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  Speaker 1: was in the remotest background then of human thought. The
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  Speaker 1: human mind, in a mood of the severest logic, brought
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  Speaker 1: everything to the touchdown of an orderly reason. The conception
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  Speaker 1: of correctness dominated all mortal affairs. For instance, one's natural hair,
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  Speaker 1: with its vagaries of rattails, ducktails, errant curls, and baldness,
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  Speaker 1: gave place to an orderly wig, or was at least
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  Speaker 1: decently powdered. The hoop remedied the deficiencies of the feminine form.
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  Speaker 1: And the gardener clipped his hues into respectability. All poetry
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  Speaker 1: was written to one measure in those days, and a
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  Speaker 1: royal academy with a lady member was inaugurated that art
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  Speaker 1: might become at least decent. Dictionaries began, the crowning glory
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  Speaker 1: of Hanoverian literature. Was a great lexicographer. In those days.
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  Speaker 1: It was believed that the spelling of every English word
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  Speaker 1: had to be settled for all time thence to the
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  Speaker 1: present day. Though the severities then inaugurated, so far as
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  Speaker 1: meter and artistic composition are concerned, when generously relaxed, though
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  Speaker 1: we have had a whistler, a whitman, and a wagner,
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  Speaker 1: the rigors of spelling have continued unabated. There is just
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  Speaker 1: one right way of spelling, and all others are held
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  Speaker 1: to be not simply inelegant or undesirable, but wrong and unorthodox. Spelling,
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  Speaker 1: like original morality, goes hand in hand with shame. Yet,
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  Speaker 1: even at the risk of shocking the religious convictions of some,
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  Speaker 1: may not one ask whether spelling is in truth a
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  Speaker 1: matter of right and wrong at all? Might it not
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  Speaker 1: rather be an art? It is too much to advocate
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  Speaker 1: the indiscriminate sacking of the alphabet. But yet it seems
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  Speaker 1: plausible that there is a happy medium between a reckless
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  Speaker 1: debauch of errant letters and their present dead rigidity. For
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  Speaker 1: some words, at any rate, may there not be sometimes
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  Speaker 1: one way of spelling a little happier, sometimes another. We
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  Speaker 1: do something of this sort even now, with our fantasy
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  Speaker 1: and fantasy, and we might do more. How one would
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  Speaker 1: spell this word or that would become if this latitude
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  Speaker 1: were conceded a subtle anxiety of the literary exquisite. People
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  Speaker 1: are scarcely prepared to realize what shades of meaning may
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  Speaker 1: be got by such a simple device. Let us take
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  Speaker 1: a simple instance. You write, let us say to all
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  Speaker 1: your cousins, many of your friends, and even it may
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  Speaker 1: be to this indifferent intimate and that familiar enemy, my
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  Speaker 1: dear so and so. But at times you feel, even
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  Speaker 1: as you write, sometimes that there is something too much,
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  Speaker 1: and sometimes something lacking. You may even get so far
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  Speaker 1: in the right way occasionally as to write, my doctor
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  Speaker 1: so and so, when your heart is chill. And people
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  Speaker 1: versed in the art of social intercourse notice subtle insult
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  Speaker 1: of misspelling a person's name or flicking it off flippantly
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  Speaker 1: with a mere waggling wipe of the pen. But these
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  Speaker 1: are mere beginnings. Let the reader take a pen in
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  Speaker 1: hand and sit down and write my very wife, clean,
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  Speaker 1: cold and correct. This is speaking of orderly affection, settled
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  Speaker 1: and stereotyped long ago in such letters is butcher's meat, also,
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  Speaker 1: very dear tray, now, my very dear wife. Is it
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  Speaker 1: not immediately infinitely more soft and tender? Is there not
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  Speaker 1: something exquisitely pleasant and lingering over those redundant letters, leaving
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  Speaker 1: each word as it were, with a reluctant caress. Such
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  Speaker 1: spelling is a soft, domestic, lovingly wasteful use of material.
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  Speaker 1: Or again, if you have no wife or object to
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  Speaker 1: an old fashioned conjugal tenderness, try my own, sweet dearest Mary.
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  Speaker 1: There is the tremble of a tenderness no mere arrangement
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  Speaker 1: of trim everyday letters can express. In those double rs.
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  Speaker 1: Sweet my lady must be sweet. White pump water and
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  Speaker 1: inferior champagne. Spirits of nitrous ether and pancreatic juice are sweet.
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  Speaker 1: For my own part. I always spell so with lots
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  Speaker 1: of f's and g's and such like tailly surly loopy things.
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  Speaker 1: When my heart is in the tender vein, and a
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  Speaker 1: hold of the man who will not do so, now
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  Speaker 1: he has been shown how to do. It is in
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  Speaker 1: plain English, neither more nor less than a prig. The
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  Speaker 1: advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great.
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  Speaker 1: Industrious rather than intelligent people have given not a little
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  Speaker 1: time and such minds as they have, to the discussion
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  Speaker 1: of the right spelling of our great poet's name. But
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  Speaker 1: he himself never dreamt of tying himself down to one
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  Speaker 1: presentation of himself, And was we have his hand for it.
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  Speaker 1: Shakespeare Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and so forth. As the mood
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  Speaker 1: might be, it will be almost as reasonable to debate
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  Speaker 1: whether Shakespeare smiled or frowned. My dear friend Simongs is
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  Speaker 1: the same. He is Sims, a mere slash of the
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  Speaker 1: pen to those who scorns Simmons, or Symongs to his familiar,
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  Speaker 1: and Simmons at Simmons esquire to all Europe from such
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  Speaker 1: mere introductory departures from precision, such petty escapads as these
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  Speaker 1: we would we might seduce the reader into an utter
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  Speaker 1: debauch of spelling. But a sudden may not. Dance of
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  Speaker 1: letters on the page, gleeful and iridescent spelling, a wild
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  Speaker 1: rush in procession of howling vowels and clattering consonants might
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  Speaker 1: startle the half won reader back into orthodoxy. Besides, there
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  Speaker 1: is another reader, the printer's reader, to consider. For if
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  Speaker 1: an author let his wrun to his matters, he must
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  Speaker 1: write elaborate, marginal exhortations to this authority, begging his mercy
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  Speaker 1: to let the little flowers spelling alone, else the ploy
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  Speaker 1: of that philistine's uniformity will utterly root them out. Such
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  Speaker 1: high art of spelling, as is thus hinted at, is
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  Speaker 1: an art that has still to gather confidence and brave
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  Speaker 1: delight of publicity. A few indeed practice it secretly for love,
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  Speaker 1: in letters and on spare bits of paper. But for
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  Speaker 1: the most part people do not know that there is
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  Speaker 1: so much as an art of spelling possible. The tyranny
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  Speaker 1: of orthography lays so heavily on the land. Your common
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  Speaker 1: editors and their printers are a mere orthodox spelling police,
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  Speaker 1: and at the least they rigorously blot out all the
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  Speaker 1: delightful frolics of your artists in spelling before his writings
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  Speaker 1: reach the public eye. But commonly, as I have proved
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  Speaker 1: again and again, the slightest lapse into rocalicoat spelling is
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  Speaker 1: sufficient to secure the rejection of a manuscript without further ado.
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  Speaker 1: And to end a word about phonographers, it may be
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  Speaker 1: that my title has led the reader to anticipate some
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  Speaker 1: mention of these before. They are a kind of religious sect,
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  Speaker 1: a heresy from the orthodox spelling. They bind one another
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  Speaker 1: by their mysteries and a five shilling subscription in a
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  Speaker 1: society to introduce an improved method of spellinge. They come
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  Speaker 1: across the artistic vision. They in their society with an
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  Speaker 1: altogether indefinable offense. Perhaps the essence of it is the
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  Speaker 1: indescribable meanness of their motive. For this photography really amounts
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  Speaker 1: to a study of the cheapest way of spelling words.
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  Speaker 1: These phonographers are sweaters of the Queen's English, living meanly
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  Speaker 1: on the salvage of honest mental commerce by clipping the
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  Speaker 1: coin of thought. But enough of them. They are mentioned
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  Speaker 1: here only to be disavowed. They would substitute one narrow
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  Speaker 1: orthodoxy for another, and I would unfold the banner of freedom.
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  Speaker 1: Spell my brethren, as you will awake right, oh language
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  Speaker 1: living in chain let butter spelling be or Bastille. So
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  Speaker 1: with a prophetic vision of liberated words pouring out the
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  Speaker 1: dungeons of a spelling book. Displea for freedom concludes, what
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  Speaker 1: trivial arguments there are for a uniform spelling I must
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  Speaker 1: leave the reader to discover. This is no place to
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  Speaker 1: carp against the liberation I foresee, with the glow of
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  Speaker 1: the dawn in my eyes, and of for freedom of spelling,