226 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



the history of that literary language would have been the same if 

 he had never lived. Between these extremes it is not hard to find the 

 truth; but it is hard to prove it, hard even to get it accepted as a 

 working hypothesis. What we should be careful to remember is that 

 there is a vast amount of work still to be done before we can know 

 exactly what happened in England, linguistically speaking, between 

 1350 and 1450. That work, too, does not consist merely in writing 

 dissertations of the statutory length on the basis of a conventionally 

 orthodox scheme of Middle English dialectology. For (may one dare 

 to whisper it?) Middle English dialectology is not by any means 

 reducible, in the present state of our knowledge, to any such hard and 

 fast scheme as one might think from the confident little treatises 

 that appear from time to time from aspirants for academic honors. 

 There has been too much cocksureness in assigning this, that, or 

 the other-document to the southwest corner of the northeast Midland 

 district, or in declaring that a writer must have been born five or 

 six miles from Lichfield and passed some of his maturer years in the 

 outskirts of Warwick, occasionally passing through Coleshill as he 

 returned to his native town on a visit to his kinsfolk. Here again I 

 would not be misunderstood. Far be it from me to refuse recognition 

 to the painstaking labors of those (great scholars and small) who have 

 toiled in this field, whether in gathering materials or in ordering them 

 and drawing inferences. What is meant is merely that there is 

 a fictitious air of completeness and scientific certainty about the 

 dialectology of Middle English as at present understood which will 

 not stand the test of scrutiny on the part of one who asks for evidence 

 and requires sometimes more than a medieval subservience to au- 

 thority. What is purely an inductive inquiry has come to be too 

 much a matter of deduction. It is incumbent on the younger gener- 

 ation of English scholars to reopen the case, not in a hostile spirit, 

 but with a determination to prove all things and hold fast only that 

 which is good. 



Hitherto, study of the Middle English dialects has been too much 

 confined to their phonology, partly, no doubt, because of its im- 

 portance as a criterion, but partly also because of the somewhat 

 disproportionate attention which this branch of linguistic science has 

 received for so many years, and partly (alas !) from inertia. Here were 

 certain schemes already drawn to fill up; here was a diagram; here 

 was the line of least resistance. Many an American, in recent years, 

 has become intensely interested in his own ancestors because he 

 had come into possession of a genealogical chart and took a fancy 

 for filling the blanks. Now, though admittedly there can be no inves- 

 tigation of dialects that is not based on sound phonology, it ought 

 to be equally evident (though it seems not to have been found so) 

 that, when the sound-chart of a dialect has been properly drawn up, 



