The question is, What does this poem mean? What does it mean, that is, in its intimate and ultimate essence? According to the conventional interpretation these lines are didactic. Their higher import—what we may call their spiritual center of gravity—is believed to reside in a pragmatic moral conveyed, or at least adumbrated, in the last line: "He never went there again." The idea is supposed to be—remember that I am now speaking of the conventional interpretation—that he never went there again because he had learned wisdom by experience—the annoying experience of the puddle. According to this view the dominant note of the poem is not lyrical feeling, but what literary critics are wont to call—usually with a shade of contempt—ethicism. It is supposed to be a sort of psalm of life—pitched to be sure in a minor key, but essentially didactic.
I wish to show you that this conventional interpretation is altogether wrong. I shall try to prove that we have to do here, not with a shallow didactic rime, not with a piece of brain-spun ethicism, such as a common poetaster might produce, but with a lyrical ballad of deeply felt tragic import.
I call your attention, in the first place, to the singular ambiguity in that famous last line. "He never went there again." "Never went where?" one instinctively asks. Are we to understand merely that Foster henceforth avoided the particular puddle into which he had stepped, or that he in after time discontinued his visits to Gloucester altogether? This is evidently a question of vital importance, and the poem at first does not seem to answer it at all. In the absence of biographical data extraneous to the text, we can only attack the problem by analytic methods. Let us consider the only two possible hypotheses.
1. That Foster never went to Gloucester again. This supposition is utterly untenable, because it is clearly inconsistent with Foster's character, which can be read from the poem itself with entire certainty. In the first place, he was clearly a doctor of medicine. Had he been a doctor of laws, or letters, or philosophy, there would have been no special urgency in his call to Gloucester, and he would surely have waited until the weather should clear up. Secondly he was a youngish doctor. Had he been an elderly practitioner he would not have gone himself, but would have sent his assistant. Or perhaps he would have telephoned that he would come immediately, and would then have quietly waited for the rain to cease. But our Dr. Foster "went"—went in a shower of rain. From this we see, in the third place, that he was a man of energy, capable of self-abnegation, dominated by a strong sense of professional duty. Now can we suppose that such a man would have renounced forever his practice in Gloucester merely because he had stepped casually into a puddle in a well meant effort to reach the place? The supposition is an insult to his intelligence and to ours. No doubt the incident of the puddle was humiliating, but we do not read that there were spectators. In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary we must assume that Foster was alone. That being so, a man of his character would surely have extricated himself from his unpleasant dilemma, given vent to his emotions in language suited to the occasion, and gone on his way. It is simply impossible to believe that he can have taken from the puddle such a deep and lasting chagrin that he would have been willing to renounce forevermore his growing practice in Gloucester.
2. We turn now to the other hypothesis, according to which Mater Anser means merely that Foster never again stepped in that particular puddle. This supposition makes the whole poem trivial to the point of banality. Why in the world should any man in his senses deliberately step into a deep puddle a second time? Remember too that it was raining at the time. The puddle did not exist ordinarily, but was a transitory affair due to the freshet. Had Foster chosen to come back the next day, there would have been no puddle there, hence nothing to be afraid of. To assume that a man of Foster's intelligence would have retained through life a morbid dread of a mere depression in the ground where he had once encountered a puddle is contrary to all reason. Evidently we must seek some other interpretation for that mysterious last line, "He never went there again."
And now observe, please, a singular technical defect in a poem which is otherwise technically perfect. I refer to the dubious rime puddle-middle. There has never been a time in the history of the English language, so far as I know, when that was a tolerable rime. If puddle were of French origin and had retained its French ü-sound, "He stepped in a püddle up to his middle" might perhaps pass muster. But puddle is not of French origin. It was this bad rime, coupled with the anatomical vagueness of the phrase "up to his middle," which led me to conjecture that the textus receptus must be corrupt. It is pretty evident that Mater Anser originally wrote not "middle," but some word which was taken for "middle" by a pestilent scribe. And what word can that possibly have been but "noddle"? Perhaps a captious critic may object that, as a matter of rime, puddle-noddle is not much better than puddle-middle. But remember that in early English o and u were often confused. It is altogether likely that the word which we pronounce puddle was familiar to Mater Anser's dialect as poddle. What she wrote was: He stepped in a poddle up to his noddle.
In the light flashed on the poem by this recension of the text, we penetrate at once the mystery of that last line, "He never went there again," because he never went anywhere again. He perished. His promising career came then and there to an untimely end. We now understand why it is that the career of Dr. Foster subsequent to his memorable expedition to Gloucester has failed to interest the Muse. There was no subsequent career.
I trust I have made it clear that Dr. Foster is the hero of a tragical ballad. He is evidently a being of the same order as Achilles and Siegfried—those dazzling heroes of the Dawn who are destined to run a brilliant career in the pride of their youthful strength, and then to meet with an untimely end. It is true that Achilles and Siegfried are invulnerable, except in one place, and that we hear nothing of Foster's invulnerability. But if you look closely you will find something in his case that is quite analogous. The underlying idea of the invulnerability is always simply this: That the hero is fated to die in one particular way, and in no other. Now it is clear that Foster was fated to die by water. Water was his enemy, his fate. A pious mother had no doubt brought him up to dread and avoid it. When he set out on that last journey he of course took an umbrella, but his precautions did not end there. In view of the inclement weather he of course felt the need of something to fortify the inner man, but he durst not and did not drink water. He drank something else. Just what it was we are not told, but it was evidently something that made him a little unsteady on his feet. And so, just as in the case of Oedipus, the very precautions that he took to avoid his predestined fate only served to precipitate it.
I conclude by summing up briefly what my interpretation does for the advancement of science.
1. It converts what has been supposed to be a rather trivial didactic rime into a tragical ballad of heart-rending pathos.
2. It removes the one serious technical defect of the poem.
3. It accounts in a natural way for the oblivion which has settled like a pall over the career of Dr. Foster after his visit to Gloucester.
4. It enables us to connect Foster with the great heroes of epic song.
Language, like society, has to recruit its upper strata from the lower. Here are some recent candidates.
I. The very eminent author of The Baby and the Bee in this number puts into the mouth of one of the characters the word "humans" as an equivalent for human beings. The same use of it has been met elsewhere in quarters of less dignity. Many of our readers must have regretted the absence from the language of a single word equivalent to homo. Is not "human" as a noun worthy of being raised to that dignity?
II. Another new labor-saving locution has already found its way into the Standard Dictionary, and seems worthy of general recognition. The dictionary treats it thus:
thon, 1 thon; 2 thon, pron. sing. pl. [thon's, poss.; thon, obj.] that one; he, she, or it; a pronoun of the 3rd person, common gender; a contracted and solidified form of that one, proposed in 1858 by Charles Crozat Converse, of Erie, Pennsylvania, as a substitute in cases where the use of a restrictive pronoun involves either inaccuracy or obscurity, or its non-employment necessitates awkward repetition. The following examples, first as ordinarily written, and afterward with the substitution of the genderless pronoun, illustrate the grammatical deficiencies of the English language in this particular and the proposed method of removal: "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet him or her (or whichever appears)." "Each pupil must learn his or her own lesson." With the substitution of thon; "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet thon (i.e., that one who comes)." "Each pupil must learn thon's lesson (i.e., his or her own)." Compare he'er, him'er, his'er.
III. A third applicant for the cachet is "near," not as a preposition, but as an adjective signifying imitation or ineffective approximation, as, near pearls, near lover, near artist, etc., etc. It would at least often save several syllables, and sometimes save a circumlocution. It seems to have begun rather low down. We don't half like it, and we were surprised to find it as far up as in an article by an eminent professor in our present number. But there it was, and it seems well on the way to full habilitation.
The invitation in the January number for views on Simplified Spelling has brought some interesting letters from both sides. The best objections that we have seen anywhere are the following:
(1) From an eminent professor:
... This point, briefly, is whether the spoken language is the only entity, so to say, to be considered in the case, and the written language merely an effort to represent it, or whether the written language is equally a reality for the purposes of civilization....
I have just received a holiday greeting ... reading
Harty Crismas Greetings.
The chain of frendship reaching far
Links days that wer with days that ar.
For him [the sender] all written characters are absolutely nothing but the effort to express spoken sounds, and he puts anything on paper which he thinks will represent the sound he wants most immediately for the reader's intelligence. If he is right, if our written language is nothing but this, there should be no delay in altering it radically.
But is my philological friend right? I think certainly not. Since printing came to take a really large place in civilization, the written word has been a logos—a direct means of representing thought—quite as truly as the spoken. As an agency for communicating thought between absent persons, for preserving thought from one time to another, and even for communicating the knowledge of a foreign tongue to a contemporary learner, the written word actually exceeds the spoken in general importance. And to a very large extent it does this not by representing the sounds of the spoken word, but by representing the idea through an independent convention. When I read the word "choir" I do not think first that it represents the syllable kwiir, and then that the syllable kwiir means a company of singers. Some foreigners who have learned English orally doubtless do go through this process; but those who have learned it primarily by reading, or for reading, do not....
The participle finished has a certain real existence as a language fact, undisturbed by the accident that it is now pronounced finisht.
And this great entity, the written English language, the chief medium of scholarship, literature, history, law, and even business ... is what it is proposed to change. Perhaps it should be done; perhaps the times demand an heroic sacrifice of the organ of scholarly and literary communication and tradition, in the interest of increased efficiency on the part of the average man for whom the language of scholarship and literature is negligible. But we should not mistake the meaning of the effort. It is not the mere effort to do better what we are doing already—writing words so-and-so because they sound so-and-so; for we are already doing nothing of the kind. It is the effort to transfer English from the group where, with modern French and other tongues, it now belongs,—the group of languages whose history has differentiated a written and a spoken form,—to the group represented by classic Latin and modern Italian, whose (doubtless happier) history has kept the written form a fairly accurate replica of the spoken....
The impression often prevails that those who hesitate to commit themselves to the enticements of the Spelling Board do so merely because the new spellings "look so queer." Of course this very statement is a clumsy and unpenetrating way of expressing the fact that the whole language psychology of a reading generation is disturbed by the efforts in question.
(II) From a lady:
This unspeakable spelling is history-destroying, tradition-annihilating, and puts the veriest hind on a semblance of equality with a person of elegance.
As Nietsche says: "Let us be free from moralic acid"!!
Possibly to some tastes, a neck without a goitre would be more "elegant" than a neck with one—or tho than though.
(III) From a well-known author:
The tendency of our English speech is constantly to "reform" its Orthography! Witness the betterment between the spelling of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, and between that of Shakespeare and that of the days of Queen Anne! Well then, granting it to be the irresistible tendency of our Orthography to better itself, why not permit it to go on in peace bettering itself? Why assist Fate? Are our awful Spelling Reformers, like the impatient young gentleman in Mr. Stockton's story, appointed to the task of Assisting Fate?
(IV) From a talented author and critic—a lady:
You must allow me, as an old friend of yours and a new friend of the Review's, to protest against the introduction of "reformed spelling" into a literary journal of a high class, which is what we all consider the new venture. To many of us who respect the English language as an inheritance, and are content to leave its simplification to the slow erosion of time, pages like those at the end of the Review give positive pain.
It would indeed be a hardened reformer who would not feel the force of the foregoing objections.
To "Why assist Fate?" and "the slow erosion of time" the answer is that the doctrine of laissez faire has had its day, and can hardly be regarded as open for discussion.
On the other side, we have received many letters favoring the reform from the highest philological authorities:
(I) From a Johns Hopkins Professor:
Serious study of the problem becomes the duty of every thoughtful person.
(II) From a Harvard Professor:
A discussion of orthographic possibilities can hardly fail to be enlightening. I do not much like the scheme you tentatively advocate, but anything that reveals existing absurdities and opens up new vistas is useful at this stage.
(III) On the other hand, the Superintendent of Education in one of the Canadian provinces, whose sympathies are naturally British, writes:
"Your simplified spelling appeals to me in preference to that of the S. S. S. of London."
The main differences are illustrated in (the S. S. B. coming first) tiem and tiim for time, doer and door for door, tiping and tipping for tipping.
(IV) A Nova Scotian, president of an important educational institution, writes:
Your article on simplified spelling is a very courageous one—for an American! Probably it has alredy brought upon you the whips and scorns of the conventional journalist. In the Old Country, scholars are accustomd to stand up against professional journalists. Do you think you can do so with your new scheme? I hope so, for it seems to me simple in principle, and, on the whole, a good working basis. One is tempted, of course, to ask why such inconsistencies as:
Allwaiz—Becauz.
Oonly—Molar.
We accept the aw sound for a before ll, but probably awl is better than all; and in becauz it should undoubtedly be aw.
As to molar, we propose that a single vowel should always, as generally now, be long at the end of a syllable.
The same correspondent continues:
Again, if long vowels are to be indicated by the doubling of the letter, is there any need of doubling the consonant after a short vowel?
(V) Another correspondent joins in the same charge:
It hardly seems logical to double a vowel to indicate its lengthening and at the same time to double a consonant to indicate the closing of a preceding vowel. It strikes me as rather a clumsy artifice at best, and leads to some very cumbrous forms, of which "annuthther," as you point out, is an extreme instance.
But, as just said, it is not proposed that always "long vowels are to be indicated by doubling of the letter," but only when the syllable is closed by a consonant. See also the second paragraph of the following letter answering a correspondent, which shows some aspects of the question that may be worth presenting to other readers as well:
Thanks for your letter.... I wish all that I get on the subject were equally sensible. At the same time, there are two or three things that call for rejoinder.
When a consonant beginning a second syllable, is repeated at the end of the preceding syllable, to prevent the vowel being counted as long, the consonant is by no means "doubled" in the sense that a vowel is doubled to make it count as long, or as the terminal consonant is doubled in fall, call, etc.
In English spelling probably there cannot be carried out any principle that won't land us somewhere into awkwardnesses almost as great as "annuthther." That particular one, I have no doubt, if ever adopted, would work into smaller dimensions, which of course would have some elements of inconsistency. There is no reason, however, why we should not use the methods which lead to absurdities in that word, in hosts of other words where they don't.
I shall never take any part in an attempt to add characters to the English language. The only thing in that line it has done since it began taking shape, is to get rid of two very useful ones; and I don't believe it will ever move in the opposite direction. My humble efforts will be concentrated on doing the best practicable with those we have, though I wish Godspeed to everybody who works for consistency and reasonableness, even if he thinks he can introduce a new alphabet.
It is never going to simplify our language to introduce diacritical marks. My little experience with French satisfies me on that subject.
I am glad you agree with me as to dropping the u after q.
I am not sure about using x without a vowel preceding it (e. g. xpense). Theoretically no consonant carries a vowel, but x is pronounced as if there were a short e before it, though, like any other consonant, it will take the color of any vowel.
I don't believe that I am going to be any farther reformed in regard to vowels than oo in door, ee in feel, aa as suggested by the British Society in "faather," uu in "suun" as also suggested by them; and ii in "tiim," as suggested by me and probably by others whom I don't know of. I only wish you would leave your diacritics and new letters, and fight with me for these vowels. There seems to be some hope in such a fight, as the English Society is for all but the ii, and consistent people will naturally work for their accepting ii; and as nobody that I am aware of, in the direction of either body, is with you for new letters and diacritics.
To the same correspondent:
Your letter of the 5th is very suggestive.
I think one trouble between us is that you think it worth while to strive for ideal perfection in spelling. If we attained it, it would not stay put.
You say: "It seems to me simple arithmetic admonishes us that we have to have new characters for the vowel sounds." There are two reasons why we don't. One is that (me judice) there is no use in seeking absolute perfection. Another is that we can do with existing letters as much of the work as we need to.
It may be "important" to "develop an alphabet in which each character stands for a precise sound" but I haven't the slightest idea that the English-speaking people will ever do it.
Of course all existing languages have come because "peoples ... drift so far apart in pronunciation as sooner or later to become almost unintelligible to each other," but printing and facilities of communication are probably obstructing farther movements in that direction, and I should not be surprised if the present tendency were toward unity.
I am sorry you are one of the reformers who "believe that we should go the whole way, or let things stay as they are." It is not often that any reform goes the whole way, and I suspect that we would be a good deal farther along if people of reforming disposition would be content to go only so far as practicable.
On one side, then, we have habit and sensitive associations, and on the other side the facts which cannot be denied by anyone who is thoughtful and educated (not always synonymous terms) that the anomalies of English spelling not only breed lawlessness in the juvenile mind, increase the difficulties of education, and waste much labor and expense in writing and printing, but also seriously obstruct commerce, diplomacy, and the peace of the world.
No wonder these opposing conditions produce the frame of mind expressed to us by a leading city Superintendent of Schools: "I abominate simplified spelling, but I am in favor of it."
Now between this Scylla and this Charybdis, what is the reasonable course?
We must regard two considerations too often ignored by reformers, though they were insisted on by as great an authority as Spencer. The first is that feeling, more than reason, determines conduct; the other is that everything is so inextricably connected with other things, that raising one is like raising a strand of a net, which involves raising many other strands with it. With this reform are tangled up not only the feelings and habits illustrated in the foregoing quotations, but all existing English literature, including many thousand tons of it in electrotype plates. All these obstruct a sudden reform. Must then the reform be as gradual as that from Chaucer's spelling to ours? Prophecy is dangerous, but we are inclined to think not.
We favor simplified spellings, but we don't want our attention diverted by them from anything that we value more, and we don't want to interfere with anybody's Shakspere or Tennyson, any more than we want anybody to interfere with ours. We are glad, however, when we see the sign of a "Fotografer," or an announcement of a "thru" train. We have no doubt that a large and increasing number of people share both these sets of feelings, and they seem to indicate the way out of the dilemma.
Now there's no question of intrinsic beauty between the new forms and the old. Preference for the latter is simply a matter of habit, but habit is stronger than intelligence; and here, with the student, intelligence balks at habit in a paradoxical way. In reading an impassioned passage, he encounters a "thru"; his thoughts are not only diverted to the spelling, but to the years of association he may have with the problems concerning it. For ourselves, the more we study it, if we meet it in literature the more we "abominate" it, with the superintendent already quoted; but the more we see it in advertisements and other indifferent places, the more we are "in favor of it"; and this we think is apt to be the experience of those who really bring their intellects to the problem. Nay, we even think that, in time, the younger portion of the thinking people whose habits favor the old forms, may perhaps come around to the new: for, after writing the most radical of the new forms, as in the last number of the Review, we have been surprised at the way they linger in the memory and seem for a while more habitual than the old forms. This experience makes it seem probable that if, for our children's sake, and for the sake of the great causes already indicated, we were to condemn ourselves for a few weeks, or possibly even a few days, to the better forms, they would become more natural than the worse.
Press of T. Morey & Son, Greenfield, Mass.
[Titles of Articles are printed in heavier type. The names of authors of articles are printed in italics.]