Heres most amorous weather. Is not amorous a good word? Middleton (Roaring Girl v. 1.) 1611. a un As a coiner and connoisseur of language Bacon was pre-eminently conspicuous. When a young lawyer it was noted by a contemporary that marked feature of the new pleader was the " usual words wherewith he had spangled his speech." 1 "A Dictionary of the English language," said Dr Johnson, might be compiled from Bacon's works alone." Lying at the British Museum are fifty pages from a commonplace book belonging to, and mostly in the handwritting of, Bacon. Passed over by Spedding as uninteresting and of no importance these sheets, known as the Promus, remained unpublished until 1883 when they were deciphered and edited by that accomplished Baconian scholar Mrs Henry Pott. In many of the entries we perceive the great artifex verborum apparently in the actual fact of word-making. Jotted down we note real, brazed, peradventure. Next to another entry, uprouse, stands the crucible of its creation, abedd-rose you owt bed. It has already been shewn by short examples (see ante pp. 29, 30) what great artists were Bacon and the dramatists in the elegancies of speech. Folio I of the Promus is endorsed "Formularies and Elegancies." It no doubt forms part of one of those collections by way of " provision or preparatory store for the furniture of speech and readiness of elocution" which Bacon I Letter to Anthony Bacon, quoted in Is it Shakespeare. recommends in The Advancement of Learning. In this neglected MS. we perceive the great phrase artist in his workshop. As Dr Abbott observes the world ought not willingly to let die so courtly a compliment as entry No 1196. " I have not said all my prayers till I have bid you goodmorrow. " or so graceful an epistolary conclusion as entry No 1398. "Wishing you all happiness and myself opportunity to do you service. Not only the fabric of modern language, but many of our common and everyday salutations seem first to have come into existence at this miraculous period. Dr. Murray credits the earliest printed appearance of Good bye, as a form of address at parting, to Shakespeare. We see it in process of formation as follows. " 1588. "I thank your worship. God be wy you ! SHAKESPEARE (Love's Labour's Lost III. 1.) 1591. "God buy my lord!" 1600. IBID (I Henry VI. III. 2.) "Gallants, God buoye all!" HEYWOOD (2 Edward IV.) 1607. "Farewell, God by you Mistress!" MIDDLETON and DEKKER (Roaring Girl.) In his essay Of Travel Bacon writes, "When a traveller return home let him.... prick-in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country. In the Promus we find him thus at work striving to embellish the English tongue and engraft elegancies of foreign growth and extraction. Upon his efforts Dr. Abbott comments as follows : "Independently of other interest, many of the notes in the Promus are valuable as illustrating how Bacon's all-pervasive method of thought influenced him even in the merest trifles. Analogy is always in his mind. If you can say 'Good-morrow, 'why should you not also say 'Good-dawning' (entry 1206) ? If you can anglicise some French words, why not others ? Why not say 'Good-swoear' (sic, entry 1190) for 'Good-night,' and 'Goodmatens (1192) for 'Good-morning?' Instead of 'twilight, why not substitute 'vice-light' (entry 1420) ? Instead of 'impudent, 'how much more forcible is 'brazed' (entry 1418)! On the lines of this suggestive principle Francis Bacon pursues his experimental path, whether the experiments be small or great, sowing as Nature SOWS superfluous seeds, in order that out of the conflict the strongest may prevail. For before we laugh at Bacon for his abortive word-experiments, we had better wait for the issue of Dr. Murray's great Dictionary which will tell us to how many of these experiments we are indebted for words now current in our language. "Many interesting philological or literary questions will be raised by the publication of the Promus. The phrase 'Good-dawning, 'for example, just mentioned, is found only once in Shakespeare, put into the mouth of the affected Oswald (Lear, II. 2, 1), 'Good-dawning to thee, friend. ' The quartos are so perplexed by this strange I This was written in 1883. phrase that they alter 'dawning' into 'even, ' although a little farther on Kent welcomes the 'comfortable beams' of the rising sun. Obviously 'dawning' is right; but did the phrase suggest itself independently to Bacon and Shakespeare ? Or did Bacon make it current among court circles, and was it picked up by Shakespeare afterwards? Or did Bacon jot down this particular phrase, not from analogy, but from hearing it in the court? Here again we must wait for Dr. Murray's Dictionary to help us." Unfortunately, Dr. Murray's readers seem to have missed "good-dawning." The expression is unnoted in the Dictionary. on of In the creation of strange words, and the giving to them currency by weaving them into familiar dialogue, the dramatists well knew how momentous a task they were employed. It would be unjust to assume that the poets' vocabularies were fortuitous, or dropped unconsciously from their pens. Nash asserts that he was compelled to resort to boisterous compound words in order to compensate for the great defect of the English tongue which all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monosyllables."1 Dekker refers to the same fact; "When," says he, the English tongue first learned to speak, it was but broken language: the singlest and the simplest Words flowed from her utterance : for she dealt in nothing but in Monosillables, (as if to have spoken words of greater length would have crackt her Voice) by which meanes her Eloquence was a I Dictionary of National Biography. vol. 40, p. 108. poorest, yet hardest to learne, and so (but for necessity) not regarded amongst Strangers. Yet afterwards those Noblest Languages lent her Words and phrazes, and turning those Borrowings into Good husbandry, shee is now as rich in Elocution, and as aboundant as her prowdest and Beststored Neighbors." (Lanthorne and Candlelight.) In the 'cleansing of our language from barbarism' and the substitution of classicism and exotics it has been shewn how prodigious a share each dramatist respectively bore. In the quality of the coinage I confess myself unable to detect any appreciable distinction between the efforts of the dramatists on the one hand and of the philosophers on the other. In his Apology for Actors (1612), Heywood legitimately glories that "the English tongue, the most harsh, uneven, broken and mixed language in the world, now fashioned by the dramatic art, had grown to a most perfect language.." Whether this new and wonderful creation was appreciated by the theatrical scum History has not recorded. If, in Caliban, Shakespeare has drawn the wild beast monster multitude, the words of Prospero may, it is possible, have a new and unexpected meaning. "I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each [hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known." |