Strange accident in the history of men! What men most care for, what a particular society most cherishes, what is most vital to it, dies as the individual dies and can never be recovered by posterity. Would you understand a century in the past? You read of it and at once you are bewildered at finding a passionate attachment to things long since grown indifferent; at discovering standards taken for granted, and a scale of values taken for granted, which to-day have disappeared; what is more, at stumbling continually upon terms obviously fundamental then, and yet referring to things now so dead that we cannot even translate them. And all this is true of the immediate past as well as of the remote past.

Among these astonishingly important things which disappear with the disappearance of living men, consider accent.

If there is one thing really important to-day, it is accent. After money, it most distinguishes the divisions of our society. And what do you think posterity will make of that?

There was a man who made a statement in Parliament a few years ago which seemed to his hearers so fantastic as to be hardly sane. He was talking of a certain religious minority, an obscure sect, and its peculiar form of education, and he said: "So strongly do we feel upon this matter" (meaning the right to pursue a separate form of education for the children of this sect) "that we would rather our children should drop their h's than lose the Faith." That sounded to a mixed public assembly of modern Englishmen something very nearly mad. The idea that a man would rather have his son drop his h's than lose his religion was something so thoroughly out of their accepted scale of values that it savoured of the unreal. It was like saying that rather than wear brown boots a man would wear no boots at all, or that rather than eat foreign food he would eat nothing. Yet this intensity of feeling upon particular modes of pronunciation is quite modern—at least, as distinguishing classes within the State. As distinguishing foreigners and enemies from natives, the value of accent is, of course, as old as the hills, but as distinguishing the superior social tradition from the inferior, it is brand-new.

It is interesting to note what accents are tolerated and what not; what this modern religion regards as heresy and what as no more than a "diocesan use."

The Irish accent in its various forms is universally admitted. People talking English with an Irish accent do not thereby declare any difference of rank—that is, of inherited wealth—but only a difference of nationality, which is respected. And the same thing is true—though very much modified—of the Scotch accent. I am not quite sure that it is true of the Welsh. Perhaps there is not a sufficiently large body of wealthy men boasting the Welsh accent to determine the matter.

But other accents, not national but local, are barred with a religious bar. They are profane. And that is the more remarkable when one considers their strength in the three elements of number, of intensity and of difference.

If people recognised real truths of experience instead of being led away by print they would admit that the northern speech is, in southern ears, almost a foreign tongue. A man brought up in the south and finding himself among the populace in a Lancashire town will at first not understand half of what he hears. It is true that the roots are so similar and the words in common so often repeated that the new dialect is mastered much more quickly than would be a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, if the speech of Lancashire belonged to a separate realm, and if the Kentish man, let us say, came into Lancashire as a foreign country, he would think of the Lancashire dialect as a foreign language. Had the two forms of speech developed in different Royal Courts and adopted each its own experiment in spelling (let alone each its alphabet) the one would be more foreign to the other than is Low German to Dutch.

The first of all words, the personal pronoun, is an example. The Kentish man says "I"; he translates the classic word "ego" by a sound which is a rapid diphthong of the pure A, "Ah," and the pure I, "EE." The Lancashire man expresses exactly the same idea by the open A, "AH"; a completely different sound. When he talks in his own name the personal pronoun rhymes with "BAH." When the Kentish man says exactly the same thing the personal pronoun rhymes with "PIE." And you could not get two vowel sounds more distinct. You may take any number of instances. The "o" of "OLD" in the south is "ow" in the north. Then there is the closed "e" of the south and the open "e" of the north—"Yes" and "Yaahs," and, on the contrary, the closed "a" of the north and the open "a" of the south—"path" and "pahth."

There is another point about accent which is its curious variability within a short space of time. It varies so rapidly that within one human life a vulgarism or a jest becomes meaningless. What has happened to the "v" replacing the "w" in the Cockney speech, for instance? When the Pickwick Papers came out it was universal; Dickens was as close an observer of the physical realities of his time as Mr. Bernard Shaw is to-day. Compare Dickens's Cockney with Mr. Bernard Shaw's admirable and exact transliteration of that noble tongue in its present phase. They are almost two different things! Some have explained this by saying that there has been a change in race, that London has been invaded from the north and from the Midlands; that it was the old Kentish accent which London spoke with in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and that a Mercian accent has displaced it. The late Professor Yorke Powell maintained this. It may be so; more probably the change is a change in situ. Mr. Weller's great grandson (who, I am sorry to say, is now driving a motor-bus instead of a stage coach) talks the modern tongue, and it is utterly different from his forbear's speech.

The imposition of a standard education upon the poorer people in the State Schools is having an effect, but we hardly know in what direction, although the agency has been at work for some fifty years. Its chief observable effect so far seems to be not in the modification of accent, but in the syllabic pronunciation of certain words, especially names of places.

I have heard—like a tale from a far country—the astonishing story that little innocent children were told to say CI-REN-CES-TER in the place of "Cisseter." And there is again with this change another change, which is the introduction of new and usually pedantic GrÆco-Latin terms in the place of the old native terms. This is not only the effect of the schools, it is also the effect of the Press and of the ubiquitous action of the modern English State official, who plays a far larger part in our society than do his colleagues in any other province of Europe, not excepting the Germanies. He impresses himself especially in medicine: but also in law, in the payment of State doles and insurances, in the gathering of State dues, in minute and continual inquisition upon every detail of daily life in the home and the factory and the field.

Would you believe that a stout peasant could use the word "circumference" (which is not quite accurate) for the outside headlands of a ploughed field? It was used to me only last week by a man on my farm. And as for "dilution," "percentage," "contributory" and "implement," they have become the tame kittens of cottage speech and roam about at large. With such have also come a great mass of legal and quasi-legal terms, and these are modifying the language as much as anything. There we have a most interesting parallel to a thing which changed all the speech of Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, for a great mass of our words which used to be called "Teutonic" have turned out, as Wiener shows in his revolutionary essay, to be no more "Teutonic" than the Æneid. They are corruptions of the technical terms used in the Roman Law Courts and Bureaus of Administration. Such, for instance, is all the group of words "Ritter, Rider, Road"—they come from the Posting system of the Roman Empire and its taxation.

But this is taking me very far from my original text of accents, and I return to it with a certain matter for conclusion—it is a matter really near my heart, and it has been haunting me ever since I began this article. It is the slight differences of pronunciation between people of my own social rank (which may be called the professional middle class) and the richer class above it. I mean (in so far as it still exists) the permanently rich class. Here I must say at once that I champion, not only without hesitation but with contempt for all other opinion, the pronunciation of my own class. Not only in accent but in every other thing it is the class which has made the civilisation of Europe, and when the people above us differ from us, they are just as wrong as the people below us. So much for them....

But it rankles all the same, that my superiors should put on airs, and I will take a test case: the word "PIANO." When I say "Curse the piano" (and it is a horrible instrument, is it not?) I make it rhyme with the name of the suffete "HANNO," but those above me make it rhyme with "AH NO." They make of it a more pathetic, and I a more downright word.

It is curious that these slight differences in accent should exist, for the two sets of people are brought up together in the same schools, they meet daily, and even (I am ashamed to say) inter-marry. Many would pretend that by this time of day there was no difference left. But there is; and if you watch half a dozen typical words closely I think you will agree with me. I am not speaking of locutions, you will note, but of accent. Now in our locutions we differ enormously from those above and below us, and when I say above and below I do not mean above and below in any scale except the ludicrous but powerful, constant scale of social vanity. Our locutions, I am afraid, we tend to submit to the judgment of those wealthier than ourselves. It is a pity, for our locutions are right and theirs are wrong. For instance, it is right to say "Riding in a carriage," and wrong to say "Driving in a carriage," but "Riding in a carriage" has been heavily defeated by "Driving in a carriage," and is now on the run. Personally, I regret it.

It is high time that a new etiquette book came out about these things. The last one I remember reviewing is now twelve years old, and it was not quite satisfactory, because it dealt largely with (a) the abuse of vulgarisms of which no one ever heard, and (b) the assertion of rules which were not sound rules at all. It came as a message from the rich to the middle class, and was therefore a very unnatural pronouncement. For it is our part to teach them and not their part to teach us. For instance, this book said: "Do not talk of people by their postal towns, do not say (if you are going to stop at a rich man's house) that you are going to stop at Puddiford, or whatever the name of the nearest market town may be, but give his palace its full title, and with due respect." But I, for my part, never heard any one allude to a rich man's house by the nearest postal town. On the contrary, my experience is that people tumble over each other to underline or shout the name of the palace in which they propose to find a brief and humiliating entertainment from Saturday to Monday.

Again, in this book we were told not to say "Port," but "Port Wine"—but that would lead me into the most bitter controversy of modern times, compared with which the old quarrel between Te?t???? [Greek: theotokos] and ?e?????? [Greek: theogonos] was but a lovers' tiff. So I end.... But talking of accents, have I got those Greek accents right? I doubt it, for I write this in Wolverhampton, a town divorced from Hellas and heavily blanketing the Alexandrians.