As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping
one’s aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last
of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice
purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through
the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that
till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard
in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in
England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish
border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered
far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the
vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low
breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning.
Like the wrong breathing, it is social death “to any he that utters it,”
not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed
by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to
visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and
finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is
even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole
island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing
a woman call herself “a lydy.” It may indeed be the contagion of the
National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of
the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London
through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of
the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of
national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their
manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk
through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop
their aitches.
The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation
among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales
are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They
seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings,
which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is
the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English
fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a
difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a
horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at
their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met
in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money
probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it
was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization
(if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at
Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage,
for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless
you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an
Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a
race.