te as necessary then to learn
orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already
noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated
to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the
difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be
overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or
if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have
need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need
to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to
turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a
Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it
will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and
yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions
of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only
exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to
lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of
being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one
another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of
letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye;
you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in
language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely
out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of
and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of
things, in the fact that man's _voice_ can effect so much more than ever
his _letter_ can{232}. You will then perceive that there would be as
much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself
phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just
as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card
even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines
of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,

"But errs not nature from this gracious end,
From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep"?

when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes
in the following attractive form:

"But {?} erz not n{e}tiur from {dh}is gr{e}cus end,
from burni{ng} sunz wh