For Freedom of Spelling - Page 2

revelation; there
was no grammatical Sinai, with a dictionary instead of tables of stone.
Indeed, we do not even know certainly when correct spelling began, which
word in the language was first spelt the right way, and by whom. Correct
spelling may have been evolved, or it may be the creation of some master
mind. Its inventor, if it had an inventor, is absolutely forgotten.
Thomas Cobbett would have invented it, but that he was born more than
two centuries too late, poor man. All that we certainly know is that,
contemporaneously with the rise of extreme Puritanism, the belief in
orthography first spread among Elizabethan printers, and with the
Hanoverian succession the new doctrine possessed the whole length and
breadth of the land. At that time the world passed through what
extension lecturers call, for no particular reason, the classical epoch.
Nature--as, indeed, all the literature manuals testify--was in the
remotest background then of human thought. The human mind, in a mood of
the severest logic, brought everything to the touchstone of an orderly
reason; the conception of "correctness" dominated all mortal affairs.
For instance, one's natural hair with its vagaries of rat's tails,
duck's tails, errant curls, and baldness, gave place to an orderly wig,
or was at least decently powdered. The hoop remedied the deficiencies of
the feminine form, and the gardener clipped his yews into
respectability. All poetry was written to one measure in those days, and
a Royal Academy with a lady member was inaugurated that art might become
at least decent. Dictionaries began. The crowning glory of Hanoverian
literature was a Great Lexicographer.

In those days it was believed that the spelling of every English word
had been settled for all time. Thence to the present day, though the
severities then inaugurated, so far as metre and artistic composition
are concerned, been generously relaxed--though we have had a Whistler, a
Walt Whitman, and a Wagner--the rigours of spelling have continued
unabated. There is just one right way of spelling, and all others are
held to be not simply inelegant or undesirable, but wrong; and
unorthodox spelling, like original morality, goes hand in hand with
shame.

Yet even at the risk of shocking the religious convictions of some, may
not one ask whether spelling is in truth a matter of right and wrong at
all? Might it not rather be an art? It is too much to advocate the
indiscriminate sacking of the alphabet, but yet it seems plausible that
there is a happy medium between a reckless debauch of errant letters and
our present dead rigidity. For some words at anyrate may there not be
sometimes one way of spelling a little happier, sometimes another? We do
something of this