Vulgarisms With a Pedigree

— Dryden has often been taxed with a certain laxity in his rhymes, and, to one not recognizing the difference between the pronunciation of the seventeenth century and that of the last decade of the nineteenth, the point would seem to be well taken. But it must be borne in mind that the sounds of the vowels have changed since Dryden’s day, so that we must not be surprised if, when we apply the norm of our pronunciation to his rhymes, they do not all square with it. The writer, however, does uot intend to set up a plea for the strictures made upon Dryden’s false rhymes, of which there are confessedly many, for he had neither a sensitive ear nor a tender conscience in his work for the stage.

Yet that poet was, after all, no greater sinner in this respect than others of his day, or even of our day, whose verses furnish such monstrosities as has rhyming with was, move with love, — rhymes which “ keep the word of promise to the eye and break it to the ear.” Let us now adduce a few of these pronunciations of the seventeenth century, which were then correct, but are now regarded as “vulgarisms.”

Such words as please, these, seize, severe, sea, speak, complete, and the like were pronounced in the seventeenth century, and in the first half of the eighteenth, in a way which, to a modern ear, is strongly suggestive of a decided Irish brogue. For example, Dryden and Pope both pronounced these words as plase, thase, saze, savare, say, spake, complate: and this was the received pronunciation in the seventeenth century. Pope, therefore, whose delicate ear was early fascinated by the vigor and musical cadences of his master Dryden, preserves but the aroma of the old tea in that heroic couplet upon a mock-heroic subject : —

“ Here thou, great Anna ! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea.”

Dryden pertinently asks in his Absalom and Achitophel,

“ But when should people strive their bonds to break,
If not when kings are negligent or weak ? ”

So Pope also pronounced weak, making it rhyme with take. And both Dryden and he offer numerous examples of speak rhyming with wake, sphere with bear, shear with care, retreat and complete with great, and treat with the French tête.

Here occurs also the obsolete pronunciation of says rhyming with days, and said wedded to maid, and even have consorting with slave and wave, and air with star, and creature with greater, and nature with satire, all of which, though long since rejected by standard English, still survive in the speech of the rustics and among the Irish.

There is one other old pronunciation which is especially to be noted, because it is now never heard except from the unlettered. This is the obsolete pronunciation of such words as oblige, join, poison, and the like. In his Epistle to Arbuthnot, in which Pope has pilloried so many of his contemporary poetasters, and there left them to the vulgar gaze of all subsequent ages, among others he damned Addison with faint praise as

“ Dreading ev’n fools, by flatterers besieg’d,
And so obliging, that he ne’er oblig’d.”

Our join, poison, point, soil, spoil, and so on would have offended the ear of Dryden and Pope, who always said jine, pison, pint.

In the words of Pope himself : —

“ Good-nature and good-sense must ever join ;
To err is human ; to forgive, divine.”
“’ T is not enough, taste, judgment, learning join ;
In all you speak, let truth and candor shine.”
“ In grave Quintilian’s copious work we find
The justest rules and clearest method join’d.”
“ Waller was smooth ; but Dryden taught to join
The varying sense, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine.”

It is interesting to note that we still say choir. These words with the oi-diphthong are well-nigh all of Anglo-French origin, except boil in the sense of tumor, where the Anglo-Saxon byle proves that its development into the now vulgar bile is regular. But in standard English the word has been wrested from its normal course of development, probably through association in the popular mind with the verb boil, or to avoid confusion with bile (secreted by the liver), and its spelling has been changed to boil to satisfy, in Lowell’s apt phrase, the logic of the eye.

In the light of these facts, then, we appreciate more fully the significance of the words of Ellis, in his monumental work on Early English Pronunciation : “ For the polite sounds of a past generation are the bêtes noires of the present. Who at present, with any claim to eddication, would jine in praising the pints of a pictert ? But certainly there was a time when education, join, points, picture, would have sounded equally strange.”