“Cor. Shall remain!
Hear you this Triton of the minnows? mark you
His absolute shall?”
Again, in Antony and Cleopatra:
“Meno. Wilt thou be lord of the whole world?
Senator. He shall to the market-place.”
Wordsworth, too, who is one of the most accurate writers in our literature, nicely discriminates in his use of shall and will:
“This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.”
In the last passage determination is expressed, and therefore shall is properly used.
When the Bible was translated, the language was in a state of transition; hence we read in Kings ii: “Ahab shall slay me,” for will. In Genesis xliii, 3-5, the two words are nicely discriminated. The distinction between them, strange to say, is entirely ignored in the Revised Version; as e.g., Peter is told, “Thou shalt deny me thrice”; and we read: “One of you shall betray me,” where futurity only is expressed in the Greek.
According to Grimm, “shall” is derived from skalan, the Scandinavian word for the pain of death, which is also the source of our word “kill.” The predominant idea in “shall” is that of doom. When choosing a term to express the inevitable future, the founders of our language chose a term the most expressive possible of a fatal, inevitable future. As “shall” contains the idea of doom, “will” conveys the idea of choice. The general rule to be followed in the use of the two words is, that when the simple idea of future occurrence is to be expressed, unconnected with the speaker’s resolve, we must use shall in the first person, and will in the second and third; as, “I shall die, you will die, he will die”; but when the idea of compulsion or necessity is to be conveyed,—a futurity connected with the will of the speaker,—will must be employed in the first person, and shall in the second and third; as, “I will go, you shall go, he shall go.” “I shall attain to thirty at my next birthday” merely foretells the age to which the speaker will have reached at his next birthday; “I will attain to thirty at my next birthday” would imply a determination to be so old at the time mentioned. “You shall have some money to-morrow” would imply a promise to pay it; “you will have some money to-morrow” would only imply an expectation that the person addressed would receive some money.
Similar to the misuse of shall and will, is that of would for should; as, “You promised that it would be done;” “But for reinforcements we would have been beaten.” Mr. Brace, in his work on Hungary, makes the people of that country say of Kossuth: “He ought to have known that we would be ruined,”—which can only mean “we wished to be ruined.”
The importance of attending to the distinction of shall and will, and to the nice distinctions of words generally, is strikingly illustrated by an incident in Massachusetts. In 1844, Abner Rogers was tried in that state for the murder of the warden of the penitentiary. The man who had been sent to search the prisoner, said in evidence: “He (Rogers) said, ‘I have fixed the warden, and I’ll have a rope round my neck.’ On the strength of what he said, I took his suspenders from him.” Being cross-examined, the witness said his words were: “I will have a rope,” not “I shall have a rope.” The counsel against the prisoner argued that he declared an intention of suicide, to escape from the penalty of the law, which he knew he had incurred. On the other hand, shall would, no doubt, have been regarded as a betrayal of his consciousness of having incurred a felon’s doom. The prisoner was acquitted on the ground of insanity. Strange that the fate of an alleged murderer should turn upon the question which he used of two little words that are so frequently confounded, and employed one for the other! It would be difficult to conceive of a more pregnant comment on the importance of using words with discrimination and accuracy.
It would be impossible, in the limits to which we are restricted, to give all the nice distinctions to be observed in the use of shall and will. For a full explanation of the subject we must refer the unlearned reader to the various English grammars, and such works as Sir E. W. Head’s treatise on the two words, and the works on Synonyms by Graham, Crabb, and Whately. Prof. Schele DeVere, in his late “Studies in Language,” expresses the opinion that this double future is a great beauty of the English language, but that it is impossible to give any rule for its use, which will cover all cases, and that the only sure guide is “that instinct which is given to all who learn a language with their mother’s milk, or who acquire it so successfully as to master its spirit as well as its form.” His use of will for shall, in this very work, verifies the latter part of this statement, and shows that a foreigner may have a profound knowledge of the genius and constitution of a language, and yet be sorely puzzled by its niceties and subtleties. “If we go back,” he says, “for the purpose of thus tracing the history of nouns to the oldest forms of English, we will there find the method of forming them from the first and simplest elements” (page 140). The “Edinburgh Review” denounces the distinction of shall and will, by their neglect of which the Scotch are so often bewrayed, as one of the most capricious and inconsistent of all imaginable irregularities, and as at variance not less with original etymology than with former usage. Prof. Marsh regards it as a verbal quibble, which will soon disappear from our language. It is a quibble just as any distinction is a quibble to persons who are too dull, too lazy, or too careless to apprehend it. With as much propriety might the distinction between the indicative and subjunctive forms of the verb, or the distinction between farther and further, strong and robust, empty and vacant, be pronounced a verbal quibble. Sir Edmund W. Head has shown that the difference is not one which has an existence only in the pedagogue’s brain, but that it is as real and legitimate as that between be and am, and dates back as far as Wicliffe and Chaucer, while it has also the authority of Shakespeare.
We conclude this chapter with the following lines by an English poet:
“Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,
Far as the farthest prairies sweep,
Where forest glooms the nerves appall,
Where burns the radiant western fall,
One duty lies on old and young,—
With filial piety to guard,
As on its greenest native sward,
The glory of the English tongue.
That ample speech! That subtle speech!
Apt for the need of all and each:
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force,—conserve its powers;
And through the maze of civic life,
In letters, commerce, even in strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours.”
PRINCIPAL BOOKS CONSULTED.
Joseph Angus. Hand-Book of the English Tongue. London, 1863.
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by John Gillies. London, 1823.
Samuel Bailey. Discourses on Various Subjects. London, 1862.
W. L. Blackley. Word-Gossip. London, 1869.
Francis Bowen. Treatise on Logic. Boston, 1874.
Breen. Modern English Literature. London.
John Earle. Philology of the English Tongue. Oxford, 1871.
William C. Fowler. The English Language in its Elements and Forms. New York, 1860.
F. W. Farrar. The Origin of Language. London, 1860.
“Chapters on Language. London, 1873.
“Families of Speech. London, 1873.
I. Plant Fleming. Analysis of the English Language. London, 1869.
G. F. Graham. A Book about Words. London, 1869.
Richard Garnett. Philological Essays. London, 1859.
Matthew Harrison. The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language. London, 1848.
Edward N. Hoare. Exotics, or English Words Derived from Latin Roots. London, 1863.
Edmund W. Head. “Shall” and “Will.” London, 1858.
R. G. Latham. The English Language. London, 1873.
George C. Lewis. Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms. Oxford, 1877.
Mark A. Lower. An Essay on Family Nomenclature. (Two Volumes.) London, 1875.
George P. Marsh. Lectures on the English Language. New York, 1860.
“The Origin and History of the English Language. New York, 1862.
J. S. Mill. A System of Logic. New York, 1869.
Max Müller. Lectures on the Science of Language. (First and Second Series.) New York, 1865.
J. H. Newman. The Idea of a University. London, 1873.
Notes and Queries. London, 1852.
Ernest Renan. De l’Origine du Langage. Paris, 1864.
W. T. Shedd. Homiletics and Pastoral Theology. New York, 1867.
Archdeacon Smith. Common Words with Curious Derivations. London, 1865.
John Stoddard. The Philosophy of Language. London, 1854.
William Thomson. Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought. London, 1857.
John Horne Tooke. The Diversions of Purley. London, 1860.
Richard Chenevix Trench. On the Study of Words. London, 1869.
“English, Past and Present. 6th ed. London, 1868.
“Select Glossary of English Words. 3d ed. London, 1865.
Richard Whately. Elements of Logic. New York, 1865.
“Elements of Rhetoric. New York, 1866.
Hensleigh Wedgwood. Etymological Dictionary. London, 1872.
W. D. Whitney. Language and the Study of Language. New York, 1867.
“The Life and Growth of Language. New York, 1875.
E. P. Whittle. Essays and Reviews. Boston, 1856.
“Literature and Life. Boston, 1871.
Essays by a Barrister. London, 1862.