Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/43

Rh of literary eminence, indeed, were not often likely to display hostility towards a locution which they themselves were in the habit of using consciously or unconsciously. In this matter the practice of English authors has been generally much more creditable than the attitude of English scholarship. The latter has constantly allowed ignorant criticism of the idiom to be made without entering any protest. Men have in consequence been led to assume that the censure of it has not been questioned because it cannot be questioned. Take as an illustration of too frequent comment the remark of Mrs. Orr, in her life of Robert Browning. She quoted a passage from a letter of his in which he used the expression "I had better say." Then she informs us that Mr. Browning would have been very angry with himself if he had known that he ever wrote I had better. If he did not know that he had written it, he was inexcusably ignorant of his own poetry. Assuredly if he took pains to make himself familiar with that, he would have been furnished with several opportunities for being angry with himself for using both had better and had rather.

It seems, indeed, rarely to occur to purists that an expression which is heard everywhere from the lips of cultivated men, which has also, as authority for its employment, the usage of the great writers of our speech, must have justification for its existence, even if they cannot comprehend what that justification is. In such cases we are bound to accept on faith, even if sight be denied. But in this instance sight is not denied. That the idiom in question is in accordance with the requirements of the most exacting syntax an analysis of any one of the three locutions specified, wherever it occurs, shows conclusively. Let us take, for example, the had rather be of the text from the Psalms which has been already given, and subject to examination each one of its constituent parts.

In regard to the first of these three words two things are to be taken into consideration—its grammatical character and its meaning. At the outset it is to be observed that had is here not an auxiliary, but an independent verb. Furthermore, it is in the past tense of the subjunctive mood and not of the indicative. The use of this subjunctive form has never died out, though its place is usually taken by would have or should have. Yet, if in later times its employment has become more restricted, it cannot be called uncommon, especially in conditional sentences. In the raising of Lazarus described in the Gospel of John, both Mary and Martha are represented as saying to Christ, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." "But for delays of the press he had had this answer some months ago," wrote the great scholar Bentley. So Byron represents the pirates, at the close of their song in "The Corsair," when deploring the fate of their comrades, as exclaiming, while they divide the spoil,

It is needless to multiply illustrations. In fact, the instances where had is thus employed, though not common in colloquial speech like would have or should have, are so frequent that its occurrence creates no ambiguity and causes no surprise.

As regards the meaning of the verb in this particular locution, it is to be said that the original sense of the word have, which is to hold a material thing in one's hands, underwent a natural extension to holding a conception in the mind. Hence it came to mean "account," "esteem," "consider," "regard"; to signify, in fact, the idea which is often expressed by the word hold itself. In this respect it has gone through precisely the same course of development as the Latin habere, and the corresponding verbs in various other languages. In English it remains no unfamiliar usage. The phrases "had in reverence," "had in contempt"—for the verb of which we might substitute held—are heard not infrequently, and do not strike us at all peculiar. Combining, therefore, what is implied by the grammatical form and the meaning, the I had of I had rather be can be exactly represented in ordinary English by "I would hold, or deem."

So much for the first word; now comes the second. Few need to be told that rather is the comparative of both the adverb rathe, meaning "quickly," "early," and the corresponding adjective rath(e). The positive forms of each practically died out long ago. When they appear