Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed.

A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time? Fowler was a great lexicographer, but he was also the founding father of the language column, and patron saint to all of us who are concerned — sometimes to the point of obsession — with the wayward or faulty use of language. One of his most characteristic entries in Modern English Usage is didacticism. It may not have struck Fowler that there was an amusing contradiction when that tendency is condemned in a book which is by definition didactic, the work of a pedant and a pedagogue. In some ways an exemplary and learned one, but certainly opinionated and cantankerous.

Born a clergyman’s son in 1853, Henry Watson Fowler went to Rugby and Balliol, where after Jowett’s meiotic testimonial —‘quite a gentleman in manner and feeling’ with ‘a natural aptitude for the profession of Schoolmaster’ — he became one, first at Tonbridge and then Sedbergh until he conscientiously resigned rather than prepare boys for confirmation. He was in fact a characteristic Victorian type, a muscular agnostic or secular puritan, one of those ‘who don’t have the faith but won’t have the fun’. He swam in the open air every morning of the year all his life, and when he came to London to try his hand as a journalist he got by on a little inherited money while earning around £30 a year, which was not much even then. Like the great James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary, he lived for nothing more material than words.

In The King’s English, Fowler was comparatively restrained, but in Modern English Usage he let rip. His targets were every form of solecism, semiliteracy, pretentiousness and what hadn’t then been named journalese. Karl Kraus was engaged on much the same mission in Vienna at the same time. His journal the Fackel had a feature, and a very funny one, called ‘Desperanto’, with one vertical column of overblown, knowing, fatuous gobbets from the press and, next door in a parallel column, Kraus’s rendering of these into lucid German. This was a technique close to Fowler’s own.

Over and again he plays the irate beak, trying not always successfully to govern his irritation with an unruly form. He quotes one writer and then thwacks him, ‘Why, certainly, but was it worth while to tell us so obvious a fact?’ and another is given six of the best for unnecessarily adorning his prose with a French phrase: ‘How not to use it can hardly be better shown.’

Some of Fowler’s headings have passed into the language: genteelism, polysyllabic humour, popularised technicalities. Some dropped out: Wardour Street is gone, if only because one now associates that esteemed thoroughfare (as a polysyllabic humorist might say) with the film business and various manifestations of concupiscence, but not with imitation-antique furniture, from which conceit Fowler draws his condemnation of ‘anent, perchance, varlet’, and other specimens of imitation-antique English.

Much else of what he damns is now defunct, in part thanks to him. Any journalist who wrote ‘Milesian’ today would have to explain that this was a laborious appellation for an Irishman. And then, under irrelevant allusion, Fowler hauls up another offender who describes a scene in the Commons when ‘Mr Law drew, not a dial, but what was obviously a penny memorandum book from his pocket’. Fowler goes on scornfully:

Pockets are humdrum things; how give a literary touch? call it a poke? no, we can better that; who was it drew a dial from his poke? why Touchstone a dial, to be sure! & there you are.

But what strikes us today is not the irrelevance of the allusion so much as what it says about the reader’s presumed learning. What parliamentary sketchwriter would now dare allude to Touchstone’s dial?

Other signs of his time are more alarming. It’s one thing when Fowler says that ‘girl rhymes with curl, whirl, pearl’ and that the pronunciation ‘gal’ is

much affected by persons who aim at peculiar refinement. Novelists who write gurl as a representation of coarse speech are presumably of this refined class.

Or again when he says that ‘Scotchman’ is the form the English use ‘by nature’. But one stops in one’s tracks when he airily observes that nigger betrays ‘a very arrogant inhumanity’ when ‘applied to others than full or partial negroes’.

Not every battle was won. He defends the very proper principle that ‘English’ is ‘entitled to give what form it chooses to foreign words’. If not, ‘why do we say Germany & Athens & Lyons & Constantinople instead of Deutschland and the rest?’ But we don’t use the last two any more, not if the didacts can help it. The orientalist who thinks Khalif is the correct spelling ‘is determined to cure us of the delusion’ implanted in our childish minds by reading the Arabian Nights ‘that there ever was such a being as our old friend the Caliph’. I think of those words whenever I see a reference to the K’r’n (or however the sacred book of Islam is now meant to be rendered), not to say to Beijing and Mumbai.

If the good and truthful use of language matters — and that was the burden of Orwell’s life’s work — then Fowler was more than the harmless drudge of Johnson’s phrase and more than a great English eccentric. He was a hero. The March after next will be his hemiocentenary: time for a celebration.