Ah, birdie, what for was thy life, Are red and sair wi' greetin' O, Are red and sair wi' greetin' 0.1 The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek Anthology have their counterpart in Latin. Mr. Thompson, who rendered Catullus's Funus Passeris so daintily, has tried his hand at a passage from Statius: 2. ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD. Shall I not mourn thee, darling boy? with whom, Childless I missed not children of my own; I, who first caught and pressed thee to my breast, And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words, And solved the riddle of thy murmurings, And stoop'd to catch thee creeping on the ground, In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of the mysteries of nature: "Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother's womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life." Lucretius displayed a profound reverence for human affection. Scattered through his great poem are fine lines in which childhood appears. "Soon," he says, in one mournful passage, shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome, nor thy dear chil - "soon 1 D'Arcy W. Thompson, in Ancient Leaves. 2 Silvæ, v. 5, 79-87. dren run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with silent gladness." Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman life would be incomplete which left out of view the supernatural element. We need not inquire whether there was a conscious materialization of spiritual forces, or an idealization of physical phenomena. We have simply to do with certain shapes and figures which dwelt in the mind and formed a part of its furniture; coming and going like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a forming substance; embodying belief and symbolizing moods. In that overarching and surrounding world, peopled by the countless personages of Greek and Roman supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, a vague, distorted, yet sometimes transcendent reflection of the life which men and women were living upon the more palpable and tangible earth. What, then, has the childhood of the gods to tell us? We have the playful incident of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his cradle to steal the oxen of Admetos, and the similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes that attacked him just after his birth; but these are simply stories intended to carry back into childhood the cunning of the one and the strength of the other. It is more to our purpose to note the presence in the pantheon of the child who remains always a child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, or Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth includes the union of Cupid and Psyche; nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of a boy, winged, armed with bow and arrows, the son and messenger of Venus. It may be said that the myth gradually adapted itself to this form, which is not especially apparent in the earlier stories. The figure of Love, as thus presented, has been more completely adopted into 3 De Rerum Natura, V. 222-227. Sellar's The Roman Poets of the Republic, page 396. 4 III. 894-896. Sellar, page 364. modern poetry than any other in the old mythology, and it cannot be said that its characteristics have been materially altered. It is doubtful whether the ancient idea was more simple than the same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen's sculpture, or in Ben Jonson's Venus' Runaway. The central conception is essentially an unmoral one; it knows not right or wrong, good or evil; the mischief-making is capricious, and not malicious. There is the idea only of delight, of an innocence which is untutored, of a will which is the wind's will. It would seem as if, in fastening upon childhood as the embodiment of love, the ancients, as well as their modern heirs, were bent upon ridding life of conscience and fate, upon making love to have neither memory nor foresight, but only the joy of the moment. This sporting child was a refuge, in their minds, from the ills of life, a residence of the one central joy of the world. There is an infinite pathos in the erection of childhood into a temple for the worship of Love. There was, indeed, in the reception of this myth a wide range from purity to grossness, as the word love itself has to do service along an arc which subtends heaven and hell; but when we distill the poetry and art which gather about the myth of Cupid, the essence will be found in this conception of love as a child, - a conception never wholly lost, even when the child was robbed of the purity which we recognize as its ideal property. It should be noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of this idea more eagerly than did the Greeks; for the child itself, though more artistically set forth in Greek literature, appears as a more vital force in Roman literature. H. E. Scudder. THE H MALADY IN ENGLAND. SOME years ago, at an evening entertainment at the house of a New York friend, I met an old acquaintance, Sir George -; one of those men, not rare in Eugland, who, not being professed authors, are yet of recognized literary ability, - a sort of which we have not many examples. The occasion was not at all of a literary character; and indeed I believe that in that large company we were the only persons at all connected with literature. It is directly to our present purpose to say not only this, but also that not a few of that company were persons who, although they were, because of their wealth, of more or less social prominence, had not had in early life the advantages of the best social culture, and that this was soon discovered by my discriminating British friend. For late in the evening I found that he had been observing his fellow guests pretty closely. As we stood apart, looking at the gay throng which filled two large drawing-rooms, and which in a "World of Society" column would have been styled "brilliant," he said, breaking into a little laugh, "It's very funny, very droll indeed! How comes it that in this country you never hear an h left off or misplaced, - never ; and yet in England you hear it everywhere, go where you will, except among people of a certain social rank, and even from some of the people that get into their houses; but here, among your native Americans, never. I have not heard it once." It need hardly be said that I laughed, too, as I expressed my entire concurrence in his criticism; but I did not then undertake an explanation of the phenomenon. He was evidently very much impressed by it, for he recurred to it again with emphasis. Plainly, our British guest, as he found in some persons in that company a lack of certain graces of manner and speech to which he had been accustomed, had expected to find also an accompanying lack of h's. He might as well have expected the men to wear scalp-locks and tomahawks, and the women embroidery of porcupines' quills. He was, however, guiltless not only of this, but of all kindred misapprehension. He fully recognized the fact that he was among a people who in blood, language, and manners were essentially English; and for that very reason he was struck by this difference in the speech of the two peoples. It is truly a remarkable fact, in the history of language, that two peoples of the same race, acknowledging only one standard of speech, whether in vocabulary, construction, or pronunciation, using the same dictionaries, the literature of both being chiefly produced by the elder, should not only be distinguishable from each other in great measure by such a very trifling variation in speech, but that the younger and the less cultivated, the one which does not pretend, and cannot rightly pretend, to establish the standard of that speech, and which produces much the smaller and much the inferior part of the literature common to the two, should in this respect, universally, even among those of inferior condition and no social or intellectual culture, be correct upon a point which is in the other almost a distinctive trait of superiority in social position, if not in education. The phenomenon is the more impressive because the difference is so very slight, and re 1 Not exactly of mere social position. For, as the very competent British critic referred to in the opening of this paper said, people who maltreat their h's do get into the houses of born gentlefolk. How this happens, and what a social touchstone the letter is, the following passages from novels of the day illustrate. In the first, lates to what can hardly be called a letter. H is indeed a character in the English alphabet; but it is properly neither a consonant nor a vowel. It is simply a breathing; the "rough breathing" of the Greek, in which it is indicated by an accent-like sign over the Vowel which it introduces. And this breathing, too, is so very slight that it is just perceptible. To make it at all prominent, so that it would attract attention, would be almost as great a solecism as to omit it altogether, or to use it out of place. To say Hotel (with a big, rough h) would be at least as bad as to say 'otel; and Hoist would be little less startling than hoyster. Although a very large majority of the subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty do say 'otel, and most of them, yet a much smaller number, do say hoyster, to assume that all of them do so would be unwarranted and injurious. Those who say hotel are, it is true, not many, nor easily found; but those who say hoyster, although very numerous, a vast multi tude, forming, indeed, the bulk of the people of England, are much fewer than those who, on the point in question, violate, in degrees various but less atrocious, the now-accepted standard of speech in that country. These two words, thus pronounced, represent the two extremes of the H malady. An Eton and Oxford bred peer may (I do not say always does; far from it) say 'otel; but hoyster and the like are heard only from those whose associations in their early years were with people in the lowest condition of life. For it is always to be borne in mind that h in England is a shibboleth distinctive of birth and breeding.1 Not only men of wealth, but highly educat the speaker is a high-born young "swell," who coaches new aspirants to social honors : "To tell you the truth, I could pull the Tompkinses through another season, but I am keeping all my best ideas for the Bodwinkles. Bodwinkle's first ball is to cost £2000. He wanted me to do it for £1500, and I should have been able to do it ed men, scholars and men of scientific acquirements, who write capital letters after their names, "drop their h's" in England; just as in America men of like position have a nasal twang, and say Mu'ica for America, and the like. Not long ago I heard the president of one of our colleges say fambly for family, and chimbly for chimney, half a dozen times in half an hour. Habits of speech acquired in youth are almost, if not quite, ineradicable. They are surely so after twenty years of age. The British H malady seems, however, to be the most irremediable of all the ills of speech. I have had opportunities of observing that it cannot be removed by long residence in this country, even under conditions the most favorable for the acquirement, through contact and example, of a correct enunciation in this respect, if not in any other. One man whom I have known well for many years, and whom I supposed, on my making his acquaintance, to be American born and bred, startled me, in the first five minutes of our conversation, by saying, "Ee came into my office." I saw at once my mistake; and I discovered afterwards that he was born in a remote rural county in England, that he had never been in London, and had not left his native place until he set out for Liverpool, to emigrate with his family to this country. He was then only four or five years old; but although he was educated here, and his associations were always with intelligent and educated Americans, he had not at thirty-eight years of age acquired the ability to say he, or to utter the aspirate before any for that if Mrs. Bodwinkle had had any h's; but the crême de la créme require an absence of aspirations to be made up to them somehow." (Piccadilly, by Lawrence Oliphant, Part III.) In the next, a very highly finished marquis is persuading his son and heir to marry the daughter of a rich trader, whom the son has not yet seen: "She is quite all she ought to be, as far as features go.' "Am I then to suppose she drops her h's?' asks Lord Clontarf [the son] gloomily. accented vowel. Another man, of equal intelligence and much greater acquirements, for he was a member of one of the learned professions, surprised me by revealing his birth as suddenly and in the same manner. He was an elderly man; and I learned from him that he had been in New York no less than fifty years! But the speech of his native country and of his infancy clung to him through the attrition of half a century. It is a good thing that we so generally conform, on this one point at least, to the accepted standard of speech in England, which, it should always be remembered, is the only standard; yet it is not well for us to vaunt ourselves upon our unconscious correctness, nor to flout those of our British cousins who fail in this respect. It would be much better for us to emulate them in those respects not a few-in which many of the least educated among them are superior to many of the best educated among ourselves. For this pronunciation of h, as to which my British friend so frankly confessed the general failing of his countrymen and the universal correctness of mine, and which furnishes humorous writers and comic papers in England a neverfailing occasion of girding and gibing at the peculiarities of those who, through no fault of their own, have been de prived in youth of the advantage of the best training and associations, - a too common occasion of sneering and scoffing on the part of those who, by no merit of their own, have enjoyed such advantages, -this h breathing is a fashion in speech "For the second time,' says the marquis reproachfully, you would seek to convict me of wanton cruelty. There can be no question about h's, because she is an Irish woman.'" (Doris, by "The Duchess," chap. i.) I have an illustration cut from the London Punch or Fun, upon which I cannot just now lay my hand, which represents a peer and a member of Parliament chatting together in the peer's house; and the M. P. slaughters his h's. which, I venture to say, is, among the "best people" in modern England, hardly more than seventy-five years old. So far as I have been able to discover the evidence upon the point, it all goes to show that even in the early years of our century the present rule as to the h breathing was far from being absolute, and still farther from being generally followed among those who were regarded as the best speakers. It is shocking to think of Chesterfield in the last century, and Sir Philip Francis in this, saying 'e and 'im, and 'ead and 'eart; but the sad probability is that they did so, or at least that they might have donc so without attracting the attention of their elegant and high-born associates. But only a careful investigation of the traces of language in past generations can reveal the capricious changes which have taken place in pronunciation. The speech of our own day is to most of us the only utterance of our mother tongue of which we have any conception. Even slight deviation from that is to us not only strange, but ridiculous. But for that very reason, if our forefathers could and should rise up among us, our pronunciation would be just as strange and just as ridiculous to them. In either case there would be the same reason for surprise and laughter; that is, in both cases there would be none. Custom, the custom of the best society, is the only absolute law as to pronunciation, and in most respects and within certain limits the only law of language. The evidence in regard to the recentness of the change as to his, most of it, necessarily of a negative sort. Nowadays a British writer of novels, tales, dramas, or humorous sketches of life, who wishes to portray a personage of inferior social position, makes his speech a strong point of external characterization. This is more common now than it was in past times; but it has always been a main resource for local color and individuality. In England at the present day, and among writers of the generation which has just passed or is just passing away, the misuse of this h breathing is almost the distinctive mark of what is called "vulgarity" in speech. It is something quite different from rusticity or from provincialism in dialect, and is made prominent in the speech of personages who do not exhibit the slightest trace of either. Nor has it more connection with ignorance than with rusticity. A dandy guardsman, who is almost as ignorant as the horse on which he rides to hounds, and whose spelling, when on rare occasions he writes, is hardly as correct as that of the learned pig, could no more be guilty of maltreating his h's than an American born and bred artisan could, or an Irish peasant, in whose very cabin the orthographical pig may have first seen the light; and the "swell," who heard a man of science or an accomplished journalist violate the present law of English speech in this regard (and both of the supposed cases I have met with) would mentally set him down at once as a cad. It is the vocal sign and token of vulgarity in England; and it is one which is a never-ending, never-failing provocation of hilarity among the "hupper classes." Now it is noteworthy, as I have casually remarked before,' that there is in English literature of only two generations ago not the slightest indication that the omission of the h breathing was regarded as peculiar to persons of inferior breeding. It is only within sixty years that the novelists and talewriters and journalists of England have made 'ead and 'eart, for head and heart, and like pronunciations, a sign of the social condition of inferior people. It is only within that time that they have used those pronunciations at all for the purpose of exciting mirth and characterizing the speech of their personages. All other kinds of vulgarity as well 1 England Without and Within, chap. xvi. |