A short
historical- philological analysis of the transitive verb 'to enter'
I need to add something on John Locke, not 'entering' but 'throwing oneself back into the circumstances and feelings of the writer'(1705-07) . See my remarks Vivian (2016), 211-212.
I need to add something on John Locke, not 'entering' but 'throwing oneself back into the circumstances and feelings of the writer'(1705-07) . See my remarks Vivian (2016), 211-212.
In Johnson's Dictionary under 'To Enter. v.n', we
read "2.To penetrate mentally; to make intellectual entrance."[1] The two literary examples given are from
Addison & Watts: "He is particularly pleased with Livy for his
manner of telling a story, and with Sallust for his entering into
internal principles of action"( Addison, Spect.)[2] & "They were not capable of entering
into the numerous concurring springs of action."(Watts ,
Improv. of the Mind.).
We find a similar definition in Thomas Sheridan's Dictionary:
"To ENTER v.n. To come in, to go in; to penetrate
mentally, to make intellectual entrance; to engage in; to be initiated in."[3]
In the OED, 2nd edition,Vol.V, 1985,
p.288-90, under 'Enter', 6. f. 'To take an interest in; to take an
intelligent interest in, understand, sympathize with. The earliest example
they have, however is from Godwin, and 1797.
It says further that 'enter' in
the 14-17th c. was often prefixed
to Eng[lish] words, many of the compounds so formed being imitations
of synonymous compounds in French. Since the middle of the 17th c. this prefix
has ceased to be employed in the formation of new words, some are obsolete, or
have been refashioned with
'inter-':
'enter-advertise', to inform each other [ Fr. s'entre-avertit ]
'enter-bathe', to bathe each other [ Fr. s'entrebaigner ]
'enter-glancing', [ interchange of glances ]
"Enterfeering - Interfering
Enterfier - Interfere
Enterfire - Interfere
Enterfyre - Interfere
Enterlace - Interlace
Enterlude - Interlude
Enterment - Interment."[4]
Claude Desainliens, who arrived in England
Entrer, to enter
Entrejoindre; to joyne together
S'entrejouër, to play together
Entrelasser, to interlace, to put
betweene
Entremesler- to mingle together[5]
One of the earliest acknowledgements of
this 'shift', that I have found, where the designation of the prefix 'enter' is represented as
an 'old' word, is in John Kersey's ‘Dictionarium
Anglo-Britannicum, 1708’:
"Entermeddled (O.) intermingled";
(O= Old Word)[6]
If this prefix is considered 'old'
in 1708, we have evidence that it still existed, side by side, so to speak, in
the middle of the 17th century. Indeed, James Howell's ‘Lexicon
Tetraglotton. An English, French, Italian, Spanish Dictionary,[....] London
"Enterchangeably;
Reciproquement; reciprocamente; reciprocamente."
In the ‘Orthoepia
Gallica, 1593’, one of the most famous 'interlingual
manuals' of the 16th century, John Eliot in his 'Epistle to the Reader',
had remarked on how:
"...the French is the only
trading tongue of Europe ...the great traffick
and entercourse of merchants from all these parts."[8]
In Henry Cockeram's ‘English Dictionarie, 1623’, 'Enter'
appears unproblematically for words which we normally associate with 'Inter',
such as:
"Enterlude. A Stage play
Enterment A buriall.
Enterre. To burie one."[9]
If we encounter a particularly hard definition
of "Europe" in Cockeram's dictionary, " This part of
the world, contayning England, France, Spaine, &c.[sic]"[10] A famous instance, one is almost tempted to
call it 'Enter-nationalism', is found in Francis Bacon:
"For that all Nations have
Enterknowledge one of another, either by Voyage into Forraigne Parts, or by
Strangers that come to them: And though the Travailer into a Forreine Countrey,
doth commonly know more by the Eye, than he that staiyeth at home can by
relation of the Travailer; Yet both wayes suffice to make a mutuall kowledge,
in some degree, on both parts."[11]
A similar sentiment is expressed by the
poet Samuel Daniel, who speaks of a 'world of men':
"Whose
spirits all are of one communitie;
Whom
neither Ocean, Desarts, Rockes nor Sands
Can keepe
from th' intertraffique of the minde,
But that it
vents her treasure in all lands,
And doth a
most secure commercement finde."[12]
The only poem I know where both forms
(inter & enter) are employed is in John Donne's ‘The Extasie’:
"Where,
like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel'd up, to rest
The violets
reclining head,
Sat we two,
one anothers best.
Our hands
were firmly cimented
With a fast
balme, which thence did spring,
Our
eye-beams twisted, and did thred
Our eyes,
upon one double string;
So to'
entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all our meanes to make us one,
And
pictures on our eyes to get
Was all our
propagation
[...]
When love,
with one another so,
Interinanimates two soules,
That abler
soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of
lonelinesse controules."[13]
It is true that this 'prefix' had become
obsolete in the 18th century although in Johnson's dictionary as well as
Bailey's dictionary we still see such words as:
?????
It is interesting that Thomas Chatterton
(1752-70), who had made 15th century Bristol the setting for the supposed poems
of Thomas Rowley, in his conscious effort to adopt an ‘archaic vocabulary’,
has a ballad fittingly entitled: ‘Aella: A
Tragycal Enterlude ‘[14] Aella, the Saxon hero who defended Bristol
from the Danes
Hume says in the ‘Treatise,
1748’: "when I run over a
book with my eye, I imagine I hear it all; and also, by the force of
imagination, enter into the uneasiness, which the delivery of it wou'd give
the speaker." [Bk. III, Pt.III, Sect. I, p.585/6. ]
[1]It is noteworthy that the
recent definitions of
'Einfühlung'(Empathy) which even the OED attributes as being a 20th
century word with Lipps, &c., 'bracket out', so to speak, any 'intellectual
activity'. See for example A Glossary of German Literary Terms. Second,
revised and enlarged edition. Edited by E.W. Herd. (August Obermayer University
of Otago, Dunedin [New Zealand] Department of German, 1992) [ Otago German Studies,
Vol. 2 ]where 'Einfühlung (empathy)' is defined as:"The
emotional response to a work of art as distinct from an intellectual
understanding of it."[Glossary,1992, p.70].Such a simple definition,
in my opinion, seems to have readily associated 'Sturm & Drang'
characteristics(one thinks especially of Rousseau) and an implicit 'Anti-Cartesianism'
to German thought- when it can be shown, I think, that it is throughout an
intellectual understanding.
[2]"With Sallust for his
entring into those internal Principles of Action which arise from the
Characters and Manners of the Persons he describes,..." [ 'The
Spectator', No. 409. Thursday, June 19, 1712 ]
[
quoted in: "Addison & Steel and others. The Spectator in four
Volumes. Edited by Gregory Smith, Everyman's Library, 1979, vol. 3, p.271"]
[3] A General Dictionary of the English Language,
1780 (Vol.1,
unpaged) [ A Scolar Press Facsimilie, Selected and Edited by R.C.
Alston, English Linguistics 1500-1800, No. 50, 1967. In Two volumes.
[4]In: Jürgen Schäfer, Early Modern English
Lexicography. Vo. 1. A Survey of Monolingual Printed Glossaries and
Dictionaries 1475-1640. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, p.210.
[5][ A Scolar Press
Facsimilie,Selected and Edited by R.C. Alston,English Linguistics 1500-1800,
No. 231, 1970. ]
[6]Dictionarium
Anglo-Britannicum, 1708. (unpaged) [ A Scolar Press Facsimilie,Selected and
Edited by R.C. Alston,English Linguistics 1500-1800, No. 156, 1969. ]
[7]For example: "To
Enterlace; Entrelacer; Tralacciare;". In Howell's work written in 1650
we encounter both forms "... what other passages and entercourses of
state have happened 'twixt us and other Nations since the last
Conquest..." [p.12]
"Such
alliances , and encounters of war.[ ... ]that have intervened 'twixt England and France
[8]Ortho-Epia Gallica. Eliots Fruits for the French [&c.] (1593) [ A Scolar Press
Facsimilie,Selected and Edited by R.C. Alston,English Linguistics 1500-1800,
No. 114, 1967. ] There is a rare copy in the British Library: [ BL.: C.
33. b.43.]
[9] ‘The English Dictionarie: or, An Interpreter
of hard English Words (1623)’[A Scolar Press Facsimilie ,Selected and Edited by R.C.
Alston, English Linguistics 1500-1800, No. 124, 1968. ]; in another work in
this magnificent series, Thomas Blount's ‘Glossographia: or a
Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as are now used
in our refined English Tongue [&c.](London, 1656)’[ A Scolar Press
Facsimilie,Selected and Edited by R.C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500-1800,
No. 153, 1969. ] we read: "To Enterfeíre (from the Lat. inter and
ferire) to rub or dash one heele against the other, to exchange some blowes."
[10]Ibid.
[12] quoted in Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism,
1945'p.158. I recently discovered one of the most astonishing remarks from
him:
"Is
it not a most apparant ignorance, both of the succession of learning in Europe
and the generall course of things, to say, that all lay pittifully deformed in
those lacke-learning times from the declining of the Romane Empire, till the
light of the Latine tongue was reuiued by Rewcline, Ersamus and Moore?....It is
but the clowds gathered about our owne iudgement that makes vs thinke all other
ages wrapt vp in mists....The distribution of giftes are vniuersall and all
seasons hath them in some sort." (Defence of Ryme, 1603), quoted in
J.W.H.Atkins 'English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase, Cambridge
[13]The Metaphysical Poets, Selected
& Edited by Helen Gardner, Penguin Books, 1971, p.74-76.Since writing this I have
come across a fascinating work by Karl
F. Morrison, ‘'I am you'. The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature,
Theology and Art. Princeton
University
"Donne's
use of words with the prefix inter- suggests dialogue. He wrote of the
intergrafting of outward senses, of hands and eyes, that prepared for the
interanimation of love by which soul flows into soul,58 and the interassurance of the round ? by which two loving souls
are one, even when lovers part.59
58
The Extasie, lines 4,9,41,59.
59 A Valediction: Of my in the Window, lines 25-27.
[
p.62.]
[14]cf. 'Poems, Supposed to have
been Written in Bristol, in the Fifteenth Century; the Greatest Part now
Published from the Most Authentic Copies, with an Engraved Specimen of One of
the MSS. Edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt. London
If we
examine Thomas Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', especially
his 'Essay on the Origin of the English Stage', it is possible to see a
change from 'Enterlude' to 'Interlude'. Percy quotes from a license granted by Queen
Elizabeth in 1574 to James Burbage and others, who are only empowered "to
use, excercyse, and occupie the arte and facultye of playenge Comedies,
Tragedies, Enterludes, Stage-Playes and such other like."[Ibid.p.154,
Percy in his 4th edition, actually quotes from Malone's Shakespeare. vol. i.
pt. ii. p.37.] and as late as 1603 in Stow's 'Survey of London', where
it says on the title-page to be written in the year 1598 he also has "Of late days in place of
those Stage Playes hath been used Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes, and
Histories both true and fayned"[Percy, vol.1, p.154] However, in a licence granted by King James I. in
1603, to Shakespeare himself, and the players his fellows; who are authorized
" to use and exercise the arte and faculty of playing Comedies,
Tragedies, Histories, Interludes, Morals, Pastorals, Stage-Plaies, and such
like"[Ibid., p.155(Malone, Ibid.,p.40)] In all further documents
quoted by Percy we see 'Interludes' (1622); 'Interludes'(1660).
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