In many respects Johnson is a surprising thinker. After completing his work, he reflected that at the outset ‘I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled’. But he half admires the tangle even as he labours to sort it out, and when he writes of ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’ and ‘the exuberance of signification’ it is possible, I think, to hear a note of awe. He regards the efforts of academies, set up ‘to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders’, as empty, for language is volatile, and it is as foolish to think one can ‘enchain syllables’ as to believe one can ‘lash’ – that is, bind – ‘the wind’.6 This is the language of a poet – which Johnson was.
Johnson’s efforts were painted as heroic by his friends and admirers. Claiming that the Dictionary was better than the Académie Française’s Dictionnaire, David Garrick wrote that ‘Johnson, well arm’d like a hero of yore, / Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more’. Johnson characterized lexicography as ‘dull work’, but it was a Herculean sort of dullness, which established a potent image of Britain’s linguistic and cultural heritage. His selection of authors, for the more than 100,000 quotations he provided to show words in use, established an English literary canon.
The guide to grammar that Johnson included in the Dictionary was limited. It was not methodically produced. Much of it was borrowed: Johnson relied on John Wallis, Ben Jonson and Lily’s Grammar. Within the main body of the Dictionary, he copiously illustrated what he considered correct usage, but made few comments about the practices of the authors he cited. The Dictionary’s chief contribution to grammar was that it goaded others into examining English more minutely.
The development of the Dictionary reflected Johnson’s own changing attitude to English. When he began work on the project, he believed he could embalm the language, yet by the time he completed it he was conscious of the necessary mutability of English; he had also come to recognize the need for lexicography to say how things are rather than to specify how they ought to be. Even in the Plan of 1747, he oscillates between active and passive imagery; he writes of fixing and guarding, but also of observing and recording, and he pictures himself as both a conqueror and a collector. Eight years later, in the preface to the finished work, he sounds less like a legislator than a sort of cleaner. He opens by characterizing ‘the writer of dictionaries’ as one of those ‘who toil at the lower employments of life … rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good’, and as ‘doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress’. When he began, he says, he fantasized about the ‘obscure recesses’ of learning he would ‘enter and ransack’ and about being able to ‘pierce deep into every science’ and ‘limit every idea by a definition strictly logical’ – ‘But these were the dreams of a poet doomed to wake a lexicographer.’7 Some of the grandeur of his original design persists, but reality has infringed upon it. We sense this in all that Johnson wrote about creating the Dictionary. The battle that occurred within his intellectual conscience was a reflection of the quarrel between prescriptivists and descriptivists, which would become a large and public matter in the twentieth century.
Johnson is an important figure in the history of arguments about English not only because of his creation of the Dictionary, but also because his sheer presence as a cultural panjandrum made him the point of reference for several generations of writers on usage. Over the next century it was a feature of works dealing with English that they engaged with Johnson’s legacy, often explicitly and disparagingly. They seemed to be animated either by the desire to augment his achievements or by a manic conviction that those achievements needed extirpating.
When we hear today about the prescriptive tradition, Johnson is often wrongly identified as its founding father. It is usually claimed that its other begetter was Robert Lowth, who in 1762 published a book entitled A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Despite its success this volume has repeatedly been castigated in recent times. Its reputation now is undeservedly low; anyone looking on the internet for information about Lowth will soon come across a website proclaiming that ‘Bishop Lowth was a Fool’(he was Bishop of London from 1777 to 1787), and there is plenty more in this vein.
Yet rather than being a narrow-minded nit, Lowth was a man of formidable learning, a scholar of Hebrew who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and later a Fellow of the Royal Society. His lectures on sacred Hebrew poetry were subtly attentive to different traditions in the reading of the scriptures, and his biblical scholarship was celebrated for its detail. Yet when he wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar, he was responding to an immediate need: the education of his young son Thomas. He intended the book as a broad and gentle overview of the language, and he published it in 1762 only at the suggestion of his friend Robert Dodsley, whom we previously saw urging Johnson to embark on his Dictionary. Even then, he did not put his name to it. It is tempting to imagine an encounter between Lowth and Johnson, given that Dodsley was their mutual friend, but there is no evidence that they met. Still, it is remarkable that Dodsley was responsible for bringing both works to the market, and it may be that his awareness of the limitations of Johnson’s remarks on grammar in the Dictionary lay behind his encouragement of Lowth. His close familiarity with the popular periodicals of the day, in which critics often condemned writers’ grammar, must also have helped him see that there was an audience for a clear-sighted overview of the subject.8
The first edition of the Short Introduction was a sort of trial run, used to gauge public interest in a book of its kind. Lowth invited feedback, and the second edition incorporated some of this. A third edition continued the process. Issued in small and large formats, and repeatedly tweaked by Lowth over the next two decades, the Short Introduction was popular not only in Britain but also in America and Germany, and was still being actively used by students in leading American universities such as Harvard almost a hundred years after its publication.
It is often suggested that at the heart of Lowth’s Short Introduction is the notion that antiquity offers solutions to the linguistic problems of the modern world. According to this view, Lowth’s idea of grammar was grounded in his knowledge of Latin – indeed, it is claimed that the essence of his grammar was Latin. Lowth is regarded as the culmination of a tradition which emphasized the usefulness of Latin as a means of categorizing and stabilizing English – of imposing consistency on its wildness.
The truth is not so simple. Lowth seems to have worked with a selection of the writings of what he calls ‘our best Authors’, and to have spotted in them moments when even these leading writers used English poorly. He provides examples of what he considers their mistaken usage. He thus shows the language in use, and then comments on it, rather than simply chiselling out a set of eternal commandments.
Lowth’s readers loved his exposé of famous authors’ grammatical misadventures. Shakespeare is a favourite target, and when Lowth adds thirty-eight new snippets of Shakespeare to the second edition, twenty-three of them are disparaged.9 Yet while Lowth considers his own judgement superior, and seems to enjoy finding the blips and slips, the most dogmatic moments are kept to the footnotes, rather than appearing in the main text. Moreover, he is proscriptive more than he is prescriptive. And his admiration for Latin was less deep than his admiration for Hebrew.
Notions of logic and propriety are plainly important to Lowth: he has a brisk and serious way of laying down the law. He tells his readers that a full stop signals a pause twice as long as a colon, a colon ‘or Member’ one twice as long as a semi-colon, and a semi-colon ‘or Half-member’ one twice as long as a comma.10 He complains about the use of worser, noting its occurrence in a line by Dryden, considers the pronoun thou all but obsolete – though William Cobbett was
still concerned with its correct use more than half a century later – and thinks the word because, ‘used to express the motive or end’, is ‘either improper or obsolete’.11 Other matters that trouble him are what he sees as the erroneous use of adjectives instead of adverbs, as when something is said to be ‘marvellous graceful’ rather than ‘marvellously graceful’; ‘you was’ (‘an enormous Solecism’); the use of who rather than whom in what he calls the ‘Objective Case’; and the confusion of lay and lie.12
‘You was’ is of particular interest. Judging from collections of private correspondence, it seems that the form began to spread towards the end of the seventeenth century, peaking twenty or thirty years before Lowth was writing. Many well-educated writers were inconsistent, making no clear distinction between ‘you was’ and singular ‘you were’. Apparently, men started to write ‘you was’ earlier than women did, and women maintained the form longer.13 Lowth was not the first to condemn ‘you was’, but his explicit disparagement – when he writes ‘an enormous Solecism’ we may imagine him holding his nose – was a seminal moment, establishing a principle that the next generation of grammarians would reassert.
Perhaps most influentially, Lowth popularizes the distinction between would and should, and in the second edition emphasizes it by adding that the former ‘primarily denotes inclination of will’, the latter ‘obligation’.14 He also inserts in the second edition the rule that double negatives are to be avoided; they equal an affirmation, since they ‘destroy’ each other.15 Occasionally this destruction can serve a rhetorical purpose. The statement ‘He’s not unamusing’ subtly differs from ‘He’s amusing’. Some would say the difference is not even subtle. But Lowth’s real target was utterances such as the protest ‘I didn’t steal nothing’. We may well find this statement clumsy and may complain that it is open to misinterpretation, but in practice few of us would hear someone say this and believe it equalled an affirmation – an admission of guilt. In English, as the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen observed, negation is logically important but often formally unimportant; we mark it modestly, as by adding -n’t to does, and consequently the urge to reinforce the negation is strong.16
Still, Lowth’s line on double negatives has proved lastingly popular. At the time he was writing, double negation was not common in written English, and it seems likely that Lowth was motivated to condemn it because it was regarded as a mark of poor education or breeding, and was thus the sort of thing his son (and other learners) must avoid. Since he did not mention it in the first edition of the Short Introduction, it seems plausible that double negation was not something he had come across in practice, and that it was brought to his attention by one of his early readers. Alternatively, he may have seen it condemned in another grammar – the most likely being James Greenwood’s An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar (1711).17 The examples Lowth gives of double negatives are from books more than a hundred years old, though his contemporary Robert Baker writes in Reflections on the English Language (1770) that in ‘very animated Speeches, where a Man were delivering himself with Vehemence and Heat’ two negatives ‘might perhaps be used not with an ill Grace’.18
Although Lowth is clear about double negatives and ‘you was’, he is sometimes tentative. The very first thing he says in the Short Introduction is that ‘Grammar is the Art of rightly expressing our thoughts by Words’. When he calls it an art, he is implying that it is an acquired ability and also that it is governed by aesthetics. He then states, ‘The Grammar of any particular Language … applies … common principles … according to the established usage and custom of it.’ ‘Established usage’ and ‘custom’ are not rock-solid. A little later he writes, ‘Words are articulate sounds, used by common consent as signs of ideas.’19 Again, his model of usage suggests room for manoeuvre. He admits that some of his rules are flimsy. Of would and should he concedes in the second edition, though not in the first, that ‘they both vary their import’.20 Of the marks of punctuation, he admits, ‘The precise quantity or duration of each Pause or Note cannot be defined,’ and ‘Much must be left to the judgement and taste of the writer.’21 Additionally, he is unclear about the use of apostrophes, and spells the possessive pronouns hers, ours, yours and theirs with an apostrophe before the s. His, he explains, is really hee’s.22 The use of apostrophes was very uncertain during the eighteenth century, and Lowth does not clear matters up. He says that the possessive form of it is its, but is not emphatic about the need to write its rather than it’s.
The eighteenth-century uncertainty about its and it’s may surprise us now; getting them muddled is widely considered a sloppy, immature error. Yet the possessive its was a sixteenth-century novelty, and even in the early nineteenth century many educated people wrote it’s when signifying possession. The OED shows the scholarly Irish clergyman Thomas Sheridan – father of the more noted Thomas Sheridan, an actor and elocutionist – using possessive it’s in 1728, and the novelist and educational writer Maria Edgeworth using it in 1802. In a work entitled Aristarchus, or The Principles of Composition (1788), Philip Withers writes, ‘I hope that the English Language will come in for it’s Share of Improvement’.23 Until the sixteenth century, his was the possessive form of it in written English, and this use of his continued into the seventeenth century. But in the sixteenth, writers started to avoid using his of subjects that were not male, and would find roundabout ways of expressing themselves, writing ‘of it’ or using the Old English thereof. In the King James Bible, its appears only once: in a verse in Leviticus which begins ‘That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap’. Its occurs in none of the works of Shakespeare published in his lifetime, and in the First Folio of 1623 possessive it’s occurs nine times and its once.
Lowth draws a distinction between what one may say and the forms of expression one should use when writing. He states that in formal written English it is unacceptable to end a sentence with a preposition, but accepts the practice in ‘familiar’ use. To make the point he even writes that ‘This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to’; he then uses a semi-colon and continues his sentence, but the phrasing seems like a small joke on his part, since a moment before he was remarking on the unloveliness of writing ‘Horace is an author, whom I am much delighted with.’24 There is other evidence that Lowth has a sense of humour. He describes the power of speech as ‘bestowed’ by the Creator – ‘but alas! how often do we pervert it to the worst of purposes?’ Shortly after this he writes, ‘The interjection alas! expresses the concern and regret of the speaker; and though thrown in with propriety, yet might have been omitted without injuring the construction of the sentence.’25 The self-referential gesture is almost cute.
Most tellingly, in his correspondence Lowth again and again breaks his own rules, and he is inconsistent in his habits. He writes ‘you was’, ends sentences with prepositions, uses contractions such as ’twill, doubles final consonants unexpectedly (‘admitt’, ‘successfull’), and forms the past tense with ‘to be’ rather than ‘to have’, saying that a letter ‘is just come’.26 In this he is behaving normally: there is one standard for casual communications, another for formal ones. Nevertheless, Lowth’s inconsistency is a key part of his legacy. His successors in prescriptivism (and in his real speciality, proscriptivism) hand down their judgements in the name of science, but their message is unscientific and their efforts originate not in the rigour of research and philosophy but in a sense of life’s encroaching chaos and myriad uncertainties.
Lowth is concerned with usage, not with the structure of language. He sustains the convention in books about English of making simple statements about the language and then in footnotes (which most people will not read) addressing more complex theoretical matters. As John Barrell observes, in the second half of the eighteenth century ‘the rational grounds of grammar almost disappear and they come to be regarded as the subject of a different sort of book’. Sceptical about the search for a universal grammar, whic
h seemed too dependent on psychological intuitions rather than the facts of a particular language, Lowth pointed interested parties in the direction of James Harris’s Hermes (1751), a difficult work which investigated grammar from a philosophical perspective. Whereas French grammarians were interested in the relationship between grammatical structures and the structure of reality, British grammarians were suspicious of the abstract. ‘With the disappearance of theory from the grammars,’ notes Barrell, ‘they become simply manuals of rules, teaching how to conform.’ Theory was kept out of grammar books because they were intended for learners and had to be of an affordable length, but also to repress public awareness of how controversial language could be. It made custom seem comfortable, rather than a matter for debate.27 The Short Introduction represents the general condition of English grammars up until the twentieth century: there is a reluctance to wrestle with difficult questions, an emphasis on using literature to illustrate aspects of language, an affection for examples and learnable points rather than larger rational procedures, an inherited set of labels that are variably used, and a rarely explored awareness that there is something wrong with all of this.
The Language Wars Page 12
