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Title: Parts of Speech: Essays on English

Author: Brander Matthews

Release Date: February 25, 2022 [eBook #67503]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARTS OF SPEECH: ESSAYS ON
ENGLISH ***





  PARTS OF SPEECH

  ESSAYS ON ENGLISH




 _Books by Brander Matthews_:


 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS

 French Dramatists of the 19th Century

 Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance

 Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays

 The Historical Novel, and other Essays

 Parts of Speech, Essays on English

 The Development of the Drama (_in preparation_)




  PARTS OF SPEECH

  ESSAYS ON ENGLISH


  BY

  BRANDER MATTHEWS
  PROFESSOR IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY


  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1901




  Copyright, 1901, by
  BRANDER MATTHEWS

  _Published September, 1901_


  THE CAXTON PRESS
  NEW YORK.




  TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE
  GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
  PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION
  IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY




PREFATORY NOTE


Altho the various essays which are now brought together in this book
have been written from time to time during the past ten years, nearly
all of them have had their origin in a desire to make plain and to
emphasize one fact: that the English language belongs to the peoples
who speak it--that it is their own precious possession, to deal with at
their pleasure and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be obvious
enough to all of us; and yet there would be no difficulty in showing
that it is not everywhere accepted. Perhaps the best way to present it
so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to draw attention to some of
its implications; and this is what has been attempted in one or another
of these separate papers.

The point of view from which the English language has been approached
is that of the man of letters rather than that of the professed expert
in linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that the professed
expert, even tho he discovers little that is new in these pages, will
find also little that demands his disapproval. The final essay is
frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is an attempt to define
not so much a word as a thing.

So wise a critic of literature and of language as Sainte-Beuve has
declared that “orthography is like society: it will never be entirely
reformed; but we can at least make it less vicious.” In this sensible
saying is the warrant for the simplified spellings adopted in the
following pages. As will be seen by readers of the two papers on our
orthography, the writer is by no means a radical “spelling-reformer,”
so called. But he believes that all of us who wish to keep the English
language up to its topmost efficiency are bound always to do all in our
power to aid the tendency toward simplification--whether of orthography
or of syntax--which has been at work unceasingly ever since the
language came into existence.

  B. M.

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
  July 4, 1901.




  _CONTENTS_


                                                     PAGE

  I _The Stock that Speaks the Language_                3

  II _The Future of the Language_                      29

  III _The English Language in the United States_      47

  IV _The Language in Great Britain_                   81

  V _Americanisms Once More_                           97

  VI _New Words and Old_                              127

  VII _The Naturalization of Foreign Words_           165

  VIII _The Function of Slang_                        187

  IX _Questions of Usage_                             217

  X _An Inquiry as to Rime_                           241

  XI _On the Poetry of Place-Names_                   271

  XII _As to “American Spelling”_                     295

  XIII _The Simplification of English Spelling_       319

  XIV _Americanism--An Attempt at a Definition_       343




  I

  THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS
  THE LANGUAGE


It is a thousand years since the death of the great Englishman, King
Alfred, in whose humble translations we may see the beginnings of
English literature. Until it has a literature, however unpretending
and however artless, a language is not conscious of itself; and it is
therefore in no condition to maintain its supremacy over the dialects
that are its jealous rivals. And it is by its literature chiefly that
a language forever binds together the peoples who speak it--by a
literature in which the characteristics of these peoples are revealed
and preserved, and in which their ideals are declared and passed down
from generation to generation as the most precious heritage of the race.

The historian of the English people asserts that what made Alfred
great, small as was his sphere of action, was “the moral grandeur of
his life. He lived solely for the good of his people.” He laid the
foundations for a uniform system of law, and he started schools,
wishing that every free-born youth who had the means should “abide at
his book till he can understand English writing.” He invited scholars
from other lands to settle in England; but what most told on English
culture was done not by them but by the king himself. He “resolved
to throw open to his people in their own tongue the knowledge which
till then had been limited to the clergy,” and he “took his books as
he found them,” the popular manuals of the day, Bede and Boethius and
Orosius. These he translated with his own hand, editing freely, and
expanding and contracting as he saw fit. “Do not blame me if any know
Latin better than I,” he explained with modest dignity; “for every
man must say what he says and must do what he does according to his
ability.” And Green, from whom this quotation is borrowed, insists
that, “simple as was his aim, Alfred created English literature”--the
English literature which is still alive and sturdy after a thousand
years, and which is to-day flourishing not only in Great Britain, where
Alfred founded it, but here in the United States, in a larger land, the
existence of which the good king had no reason ever to surmise.

This English literature is like the language in which it is written,
and also like the stock that speaks the language, wherever the race
may have planted or transplanted itself, whether by the banks of the
little Thames or on the shores of the broad Hudson and the mighty
Mississippi. Literature and language and people are practical, no
doubt; but they are not what they are often called: they are not
prosaic. On the contrary, they are poetic, essentially and indisputably
poetic. The peoples that speak English are, and always have been,
self-willed and adventurous. This they were long before King Alfred’s
time, in the early days when they were Teutons merely, and had not yet
won their way into Britain; and this they are to-day, when the most
of them no longer dwell in old England, but in the newer England here
in America. They have ever lacked the restraint and reserve which are
the conditions of the best prose; and they have always exulted in the
untiring energy and the daring imagination which are the vital elements
of poetry. “In his busiest days Alfred found time to learn the old
songs of his race by heart,” so the historian tells us; “and he bade
them be taught in the palace-school.”

Lyric is what English literature has always been at its best, lyric and
dramatic; and the men who speak English have always been individual and
independent, every man ready to fight for his own hand; and the English
language has gone on its own way, keeping its strength in spite of
the efforts of pedants and pedagogs to bind it and to stifle it, and
ever insisting on renewing its freshness as best it could. Development
there has been in language and in literature and in the stock itself,
development and growth of many kinds; but no radical change can be
detected in all these ten centuries. “No national art is good which
is not plainly the nation’s own,” said Mr. Stopford Brooke in his
consideration of the earliest English lyrics. “The poetry of England
has owed much to the different races which mingled with the original
English race; it has owed much to the different types of poetry it
absorbed--Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian, Spanish: but below all
these admixtures the English nature wrought its steady will. It seized,
it transmuted, it modified, it mastered these admixtures both of races
and of song.”

The English nature wrought its steady will; but what is this English
nature, thus set up as an entity and endowed with conscious purpose? Is
there such a thing, of a certainty? Can there be such a thing, indeed?
These questions are easier to ask than to answer. It is true that we
have been accustomed to credit certain races not merely with certain
characteristics, but even with certain qualities, esteeming certain
peoples to be specially gifted in one way or another. For example, we
have held it as an article of faith that the Greeks, by their display
of a surpassing sense of form, proved their possession of an artistic
capacity finer and richer than that revealed by any other people since
the dawn of civilization. And again, we have seen in the Roman skill
in constructive administration, in the Latin success in law-making
and in road-building--we have seen in this the evidence of a native
faculty denied to their remote predecessors, the Egyptians. Now come
the advocates of a later theory, who tell us that the characteristics
of the Greeks and of the Romans are not the result of any inherent
superiority of theirs, or of any native predisposition toward art
or toward administration, but are caused rather by circumstances of
climate, of geographical situation, and of historical position. We are
assured now that the Romans, had they been in the place of the Greeks
and under like circumstances, might have revealed themselves as great
masters of form; while the Greeks, had their history been that of the
Romans, would certainly have shown the same power of ruling themselves
and others, and of compacting the most diverse nations into a single
empire.

No doubt the theory of race-characteristics, of stocks variously gifted
with specific faculties, has been too vigorously asserted and unduly
insisted upon. It was so convenient and so useful that it could not
help being overworked. But altho it is not so impregnable as it was
supposed to be, it need not be surrendered at the first attack; and
altho we are compelled to abandon the theory as a whole, we can save
what it contained of truth. And therefore it is well to bear in mind
that even if the Greeks in the beginning had no sharper bent toward art
than had the Phenicians,--from whom they borrowed so much of value to
be made by them more valuable,--even if their esthetic superiority was
the result of a happy chapter of chances, it was a fact nevertheless;
and a time came at last when the Greeks were seen to be possessed of
a fertility of invention and of a sense of form surpassing all their
predecessors had ever exhibited. When this time came the Greeks were
conscious of their unexampled achievements and properly proud of them;
and they proved that they were able to transmit from sire to son this
artistic aptitude--however the aptitude itself had been developed
originally. So whether the Roman power to govern and to evolve the
proper instruments of government was a native gift of the Latins,
or whether it was developed in them by a fortuitous combination of
geographical and historical circumstances, this question is somewhat
academic, since we know that the Romans did display extraordinary
administrative ability century after century. Whenever it was evolved,
the artistic type in Greece and the administrative type in Italy was
persistent; and it reappeared again and again in successive generations.

This indeed needs always to be remembered, that race-characteristics,
whatever their origin, are strangely enduring when once they are
established. The English nature whereof Mr. Stopford Brooke speaks,
when once it was conscious of itself, worked its steady will, despite
the changes of circumstance; and only very slowly is it modified by the
accidents of later history and geography. M. Fouillée has set side by
side the description of the Germans by Tacitus and the account of the
Gauls by Cæsar, drawing attention to the fact that the modern French
are now very like the ancient Gauls, and that the descendants of the
Germans of old, the various branches of the Teutonic race, have the
characteristics of their remote ancestors whom the Roman historian
chose to praise by way of warning for his fellow-citizens.

The Romans conquered Gaul and held it for centuries; the Franks took
it in turn and gave it their name; but the Gallic type was so securely
fixed that the Roman first and then the Frank succumbed to it and were
absorbed into it. The Gallic type is not now absolutely unchanged, for,
after all, the world does move; but it is readily recognizable to this
day. Certain of Cæsar’s criticisms read as tho they were written by
a contemporary of Napoleon. As Cæsar saw them the Gauls were fickle
in counsel and fond of revolutions. Believing in false rumors, they
were led into deeds they regretted afterward. Deciding questions of
importance without reflection, they were ready to war without reason;
and they were weak and lacking in energy in time of disaster. They were
cast down by a first defeat, as they were inflamed by a first victory.
They were affable, light, inconstant, and vain; they were quick-witted
and ready-tongued; they had a liking for tales and an insatiable
curiosity for news. They cultivated eloquence, having an astonishing
facility of speech, and of letting themselves be taken in by words. And
having thus summed up Cæsar’s analysis of the Gaul, M. Fouillée asks
how after this we can deny the persistence of national types.

What Tacitus has to say of the Germans comes home more closely to
us who speak English, since the Teutonic tribes the Latin historian
was considering are not more the ancestors of the modern Prussians
than they are of the wide-spread Anglo-Saxon peoples. As those who
speak English went from the mainland across the North Sea to an
island and dwelt there for centuries, and were joined by earlier kin
from elsewhere, the race-characteristics were obviously modified a
little--just as they have been as obviously modified a little more
when some of those who spoke English went out again from the island
to a boundless continent across the Atlantic, and were joined here by
many others, most of whom were also derived from one or another of the
varied Teutonic stocks.

It is nearly two thousand years since Tacitus studied the Teutonic
race-characteristics, and yet most of the peculiarities he noted
then are evident now. Tacitus tells us that the Teutons were tall,
fair-haired, and flegmatic. They were great eaters, not to say gross
feeders; and they were given to strong drink. They were fond of games,
and were ready to pay their losses with their persons, if need be. They
were individual and independent. Their manners were rude, not to call
them violent. They were possessed of the domestic virtues, the women
being chaste and the husbands faithful. They loved war as they loved
liberty. They had a passionate fidelity to their leaders. They decided
important questions of policy in public assembly.

The several peoples of our own time who are descended from the Teutons
thus described by Tacitus with so sympathetic an insight have been
developing for twenty centuries, more or less, each in its own way,
under influences wholly unlike, influences both geographical and
historical; and it is small wonder that they have diverged as they
have, and that no one of them nowadays completely represents the
original stock. Some of the points Tacitus made are true to-day in
Prussia and are not true in Great Britain; and some hit home here
in the United States, altho they miss the mark in Germany. The
modern Germans still retain a few of these Tacitean characteristics
which the peoples that speak English have lost in their adventurous
career overseas. And on the other hand, certain of the remarks of
Tacitus might be made to-day in the United States; for example, the
willingness to run risks for the fun of the game--is not this a present
characteristic of the American as we know him? And here we have always
been governed by town-meeting, as the old Teutons were, whereas the
modern German is only now getting this back by borrowing it from the
English precedent. In our private litigations we continue to abide by
the customs of our remote Teutonic ancestors, while the German has
accepted as a legal guide the Roman law, wrought out by the countrymen
of Tacitus.

Second only to a community of language, no unifying force is more
potent than a community of law. In the depths of their dark forests the
Teutons had already evolved their own rudimentary code by which they
did justice between man and man; and these customary sanctions were
taken over to Britain by the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes; and
they served as the foundation of the common law by means of which the
peoples that speak English still administer justice in their courts.
And here again we find the handiwork of the great King Alfred, from
whom we may date the codification of an English law as we may also
reckon the establishing of an English literature. With the opportunism
of our race, he had no thought of a new legislation, but merely merged
the best of the tribal customs into a law for the whole kingdom. The
king sought to bring to light and to leave on record the righteous
rulings of the wise men who had gone before. “Those things which I met
with,” so the historian transmits his words, “either of the days of
Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht,
who first among the English race received baptism, those which seemed
to me rightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the rest.”

Law and language--these are the unrelaxing bands that hold a race
firmly together. There are now two main divisions of the Teutonic
stock, separated to-day by language and by law--the people who speak
German and are ruled by Roman law, and the peoples who speak English
and are governed by the common law; and the separation is as wide and
as deep legally as it is linguistically. “By the forms of its language
a nation expresses its very self,” said one of the acutest of British
critics; and we have the proof of this at hand in the characteristic
differences between the English language and the German. By the forms
of its law a people expresses its political beliefs; and we have the
evidence of this in the fact that we Americans regard our rulers merely
as agents of the town-meeting of the old Teutons, while the modern
Germans are submitting to a series of trials for lese-majesty.

Laws have most weight when they are seen to be the expression of the
common conscience; and they are most respected when they best reflect
the ideals that are “the souls of the nations which cherish them,” as
a historian of American literature has finely phrased it--“the living
spirits which waken nationality into being, and which often preserve
its memory long after its life has ebbed away.” The marked difference
now obvious between the two great divisions of the Teutonic stock--that
which speaks English and that which speaks German--is due in part to
their not having each conserved exactly the same portion of the ideals
inherited from their common ancestors, and in part to their having each
acquired other ideals in the course of the many centuries of their
separate existence. And the minor differences to be detected between
the two great divisions of the stock that speaks English, that dwelling
in Great Britain and that dwelling in the United States, are due to
similar causes.

While the ancestors of the people who speak German were abiding at
home, where Tacitus had seen them, the ancestors of the peoples who
speak English went forth across the North Sea and possessed themselves
of the better part of Great Britain and gave it a new name. They
were not content to defeat the earlier inhabitants in fair fight,
and then to leave them in peace, as the Romans did, ruling them and
intermarrying with them; the English thrust the natives out violently
and harried them away. As Green puts it tersely, “The English conquest
for a hundred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession and driving back
of the people whom the English conquered.” No doubt this dispossession
was ruthless; but was it complete? The newcomers took the land for
their own, and they meant to kill out all the original owners; but
was this possible? The country was rough and thickly wooded, and
it abounded in nooks and corners where a family might hide itself.
Moreover, what is more likely than that the invader should often spare
a woman and take her to wife? For centuries the English kept spreading
themselves and pushing back the Britons; but in the long war there
were truces now and again, and what is more likely than an incessant
intermingling of the blood all along the border as it was slowly driven
forward?

Certain it is that one of the influences which have modified the modern
English stock is a Celtic strain. If the peoples that speak English
are now not quite like the people that speak German, plainly this is
one reason: they have had a Celtic admixture, which has lightened them
and contributed elements lacking in the original Teuton. To declare
just what these elements are is not easy; but to deny their presence is
impossible. The Celt has an impetuosity and a swiftness of perception
which we do not find in the original Teuton, and which the man who
speaks English is now more likely to possess than the man who speaks
German. The Celt has a certain shy delicacy; he has a happy sensibility
and a turn for charming sentiment; he has a delightful lyric note;
and he has at times a sincere and puissant melancholy. These are all
qualities which we find in our English literature, and especially in
its greatest figure. “The Celts do not form an utterly distinct part
of our mixed population,” said Henry Morley in a striking passage.
“But for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in
its half-barbarous days invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick,
and that quickened afterward the Northmen’s blood in France, Germanic
England would not have produced a Shakspere.”

Here we see Morley declaring that the Celt had “quickened the
Northmen’s blood in France”; and perhaps by his choice of a word he
meant to remind us that whereas the Northmen who sailed down the
mouth of the Seine were Teutons, the Normans who were to sail up to
Hastings had been materially modified during their sojourn in France,
which had once been Celtic Gaul. Two series of occasions there were
when the English received an accession of Celtic blood: first, when
they conquered England; and second, when they in turn were conquered
by the Normans, who ruled them for centuries, and were finally merged
in them, just as earlier the Romans had been merged in the Gauls. And
this recalls to us the fact that there was more in the Norman than the
intermingling of the Teuton and the Celt; there was in the Norman also
not a little of the Roman who had so long ruled Gaul, and who had so
deeply marked it with certain of his own characteristics. Thus it was
that the Norman brought into England a Latin tradition; he had acquired
something of the Roman administrative skill, something of the Roman’s
genius for affairs. After the Renascence, Latin influences were to
affect the English language and English literature; but it was after
the conquest that the English people itself came first in contact with
certain of the Roman ideals.

Matthew Arnold thought that we owed “to the Latin element in our
language the most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which
it is contradistinguished from the modern German”; and he found in the
Latinized Normans in England “the sense for fact, which the Celts had
not, and the love of strenuousness, clearness, and rapidity, the high
Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not.” Perhaps the English feeling
for style, our command of the larger rhetoric, may be due to this blend
of the Norman; and it cannot be denied that this gift has not been
granted to the modern German. The fantastic brilliancy of De Quincey
and the sonorous picturesqueness of Ruskin are alike inconceivable in
the language of Klopstock; and altho there is a pregnant concision in
the speeches of Bismarck at his best, there is no German orator who
ever attained the unfailing dignity and the lofty affluence of Webster
at his best.

Less than two centuries after the good King Alfred had declared English
law and established English literature, the Normans came and saw and
conquered. Less than three centuries after King William took the land
there was born the first great English poet. If the language is to-day
what it is, it is because of Chaucer, who chose the court dialect of
London to write in, and who made it supple for his own use and the use
of the poets that were to come after. The Norman conquest had brought a
new and needed contribution to the English character; it had resulted
in an immense enrichment of the English language; and it had related
English literature again to the broad current of European life. To the
original Teutonic basis had been added Celtic and Norman and Latin
strains; and still the English nature wrought its steady will, still it
expressed itself most freely and most fully in poetry. And in no other
poet are certain aspects of this English nature more boldly displayed
than in Chaucer, in whom we find a fresh feeling for the visible world,
a true tenderness of sentiment, a joyous breadth of humor, and a
resolute yet delicate handling of human character.

Two centuries after Chaucer came Shakspere, in whom the English nature
finds its fullest expression. The making of England was then complete;
all the varied elements had been fused in the fire of a struggle
for existence and welded by war with the most powerful of foes. The
race-characteristics were then finally determined; and in Elizabethan
literature they are splendidly exhibited. Something was contributed
by the literature of the Spain that the Elizabethans had stoutly
withstood, and something more by the literature of the Italy so many of
them knew by travel; but all was absorbed, combined, and assimilated by
the English nature, like the contributions that came from the classics
of Rome and Greece. Bacon and Cecil, Drake and Ralegh, are not more
typical of that sudden and glorious outpouring of English individuality
than are Marlowe, Shakspere, and Jonson, Spenser, Chapman, and
Massinger. In that greatest period of the race we do not know which
is the greater, the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity, the
ability to govern, that the English then displayed, or the mighty sweep
and range of the imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry. The
works of the Elizabethan writers are with us, like the memory of the
deeds of the Elizabethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was needful,
that the peoples that speak English are of a truth poetic, that they
are not prosaic.

In the days of Elizabeth the English began to go abroad and to settle
here and there. To those who came to America there were added in due
season many vigorous folk from other Teutonic sources; and here in the
centuries that have followed was to be seen a fusion of races and a
welding into one nation such as had been seen in England itself several
centuries earlier. To those who remained in England there came few
accretions from the outside, altho when the edict of Nantes was revoked
the English gained much that the French lost. The Huguenots were stanch
men and sturdy, of great ability often, and of a high seriousness.
Some crossed the Channel and some crossed the ocean; and no one of the
strands which have been twisted to make the modern American is more
worthy than this.

More important than this French contribution, perhaps, was another
infusion of the Celtic influence. When the King of Scotland became
King of England, his former subjects swarmed to London--preceding by a
century the Irishmen who made themselves more welcome in the English
capital, with their airy wit and their touch of Celtic sentiment. Far
heavier than the Scotch raid into England, and the Irish invasion,
was the influx of Scotch, of Irish, and of Scotch-Irish into America.
At the very time when Lord Lyndhurst was expressing the opinion that
the English held the Irish to be “aliens in blood, aliens in speech,
aliens in religion,” the Irish were withdrawing in their thousands
from the rule of a people that felt thus toward them; and they were
making homes for themselves where prejudice against them was not
potent. Yet in England itself the Irish left their mark on literature,
especially upon comedy, for which they have ever revealed a delightful
aptitude; and in the eighteenth century alone the stage is lightened
and brightened by the plays of Steele, of Sheridan, and of Goldsmith.
About the end of the same century also the Scotch began to make their
significant and stimulating contribution to English literature, which
was refreshed again by Burns with his breath of sympathy, by Scott with
his many-sided charm, and by Byron with his resonant note of revolt.

Just as the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes had mingled in Great
Britain to make the Englishman, and had been modified by Celtic and
Norman and Latin influences, so here in the United States the Puritan
and the Cavalier, the Dutchman and the Huguenot and the German, the
Irish and the Scotch and the Scotch-Irish, have all blended to make
the American. Not a few of the original Teutonic race-characteristics
recorded by Tacitus are here now, as active as ever; and not a few
of the English race-characteristics as revealed by the Elizabethan
dramatists survive in America, keeping company with many a locution
which has dropped out of use in England itself. There is to-day in the
spoken speech of the United States a larger freedom than in the spoken
speech of Great Britain, a figurative vigor that the Elizabethans
would have relished and understood. It is not without significance
that the game of cards best liked by the adventurers who worried the
Armada should have been born again to delight the Argonauts of ’49.
The characteristic energy of the English stock, never more exuberantly
displayed than under Elizabeth, suffered no diminution in crossing the
Atlantic; rather has it been strengthened on this side, since every
native American must be the descendant of some man more venturesome
than his kin who thought best to stay at home. Nor is the energy less
imaginative, altho it has not taken mainly a literary expression.
“There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans,” so Lowell reminded
us, “and yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of those very Puritans.” And he added tersely:
“They had enough of it, or they could never have conceived the great
epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this
continent from Maine to California.”

More than half those who speak English now dwell in the United States,
and less than a third dwell within the British Isles. To some it may
seem merely fanciful, no doubt, but still the question may be put,
whether the British or the American is to-day really closer to the
Elizabethan? It has recently been remarked that the typical John Bull
was invisible in England while Shakspere was alive, and that he has
become possible in Great Britain only since the day when these United
States declared their independence. Walter Bagehot, the shrewdest of
critics of his fellow-countrymen, maintained that the saving virtue
of the British people of the middle of the nineteenth century was
a stolidity closely akin to stupidity. But surely the Elizabethans
were not stolid; and the Americans (who have been accused of many
things) have never been accused of stupidity. Mr. Bernard Bosanquet
has just been insisting that the two dominant notes of the British
character at the beginning of the twentieth century are insularity and
inarticulateness. The Elizabethan was braggart and self-pleased and
arrogant, but he was not fairly open to the reproach of insularity,
nor was he in the least inarticulate. Perhaps insularity and
inarticulateness are inseparable; and it may be that it is the immense
variety of the United States that has preserved the American from the
one, as the practice of the town-meeting has preserved him from the
other.

No longer do we believe that there is any special virtue in the purity
of race, even if we could discover nowadays any people who had a just
right to pride themselves on this. The French are descended from the
Gauls, but to the Gauls have been added Romans and Franks; the English
are descended from the Teutons, but they have received many accretions
from other sources; and the Americans are descended from the British,
but it is undeniable that they have differentiated themselves somehow.
The admixture of varied stocks is held to be a source of freshness
and of renewed vitality; and it may be that this is the cause of the
American alertness and venturesomeness. And as yet these foreign
elements have but little modified the essential type; for just as
the English nature wrought its steady will through the centuries, so
the American characteristics have been imposed on all the welter of
nationalities that swirl together in the United States.

Throughout the land there is one language, a development of the
language of King Alfred, and one law, a development of the law of King
Alfred; and throughout the land there are schools such as the good
king wished for. American ideals are not quite the same as British
ideals, but they differ only a little, and they have both flowered
from the English root, as the earlier English ideals had flowered
from a Teutonic root. The English stock has displayed in the United
States the same marvelous assimilating faculty that it displayed
centuries ago in Great Britain, the same extraordinary power of getting
the sojourners within its borders to accept its ideals. The law of
imitation is irresistible, as M. Tarde has shown; and as M. Fouillée
asserts, a nation is really united and unified only when its whole
population thrills at the same appeal and vibrates when the same chord
is struck. Then there is a consciousness of nationality and of true
national solidarity. Throughout the United States there is a unanimous
acceptance of the old English ideals--a liking for energy, a respect
for character, a belief in equality before the law, and an acceptance
of individual responsibility. These are the ideals which will echo
again and again in English literature on both shores of the Atlantic,
as they have echoed so often since King Alfred died. “A thousand years
are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”

 (1901)




II

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE


Two apparently contradictory tendencies are to-day visible. One of
them is revealed by our increasing interest in the less important
languages and in the more important dialects. The other is to be seen
in the immense expansion of the several peoples using the three or four
most widely spoken European tongues, an expansion rapidly giving them
a supremacy which renders hopeless any attempt of the less important
European languages ever to equal them. (It may be noted now once for
all that in this paper only the Indo-European languages are taken into
account, altho Arabic did succeed for a while in making itself the
chief tongue of the Mediterranean basin, overrunning Sicily and even
thrusting itself up into Spain, and altho Chinese may have a fateful
expansion in the dark future.)

As an instance of the first of the two conflicting tendencies, we have
in France the movement of the _félibres_ to revive Provençal, and to
make it again a fit vehicle for poetry. We have in Norway an effort
to differentiate written Norwegian from the Danish, which has hitherto
been accepted as the standard speech of all Scandinavian authors.
We have in Belgium an increasing resistance to French, which is the
official tongue, and an attempt arbitrarily to resuscitate the Flemish
dialect. We have in Switzerland a desire to keep alive the primitive
and moribund Romansh. We have in North Britain a demand for at least a
professorship of broad Scots. We see also that, among the languages of
the smaller nations, neither Dutch nor Portuguese shows any symptoms of
diminishing vitality, while Rumanian has been suddenly encouraged by
the political independence of the people speaking it.

All this is curious and interesting; and yet at the very period when
these developments are in progress, other influences are at work on
behalf of the languages of the greater races. The developments noted
above are largely the work of scholars and of students; they are the
artificial products of provincial pride; and they are destined to
defeat by forces as invincible as those of nature itself. In their
different degrees Provençal and Flemish are struggling for existence
against French; but French itself is not gaining in its old rivalry
with English and with German.

At the end of the seventeenth century French was the language of
diplomacy; it was the speech of the courts of Europe; it was the one
modern tongue an educated man in England or in Germany, in Spain or in
Italy, needed to acquire. As Latin had been the world-language in the
days of the Empire, so French bade fair to be the world-language in the
days when all the parts of the earth should be bound together by the
bands of commerce and finance. In the eighteenth century the supremacy
of French was still indisputable; but in the nineteenth century it
disappeared. And, unless all calculations of probability fail us,
somewhere in the twentieth century French will have fallen from the
first place to the fifth, just below Spanish, just above Italian, and
far, far beneath English and Russian and German.

It was the social instinct of the French which made their language so
neat, so apt for epigram and compliment, so admirable and so adequate
for criticism; and it was the energy of the English-speaking peoples,
their individuality, their independence, which made our language so
sturdy, so vigorous, so powerful.

An excess of the social instinct it is which has kept the French at
home, close to the borders of France, and which has thus restricted the
expansion of their language, while it is also an excess of the energy
of our stock that has scattered English all over the world, on every
shore of all the seven seas. And now that the nineteenth century has
drawn to an end, if we can guess at the future from our acquaintance
with the past, we are justified in believing that the world-language
at the end of the twentieth century--should any one tongue succeed in
winning universal acceptance--will be English. If it is not English,
then it will not be German or Spanish or French; it will be Russian.

This attempt to foretell the future is not a random venture or a
reckless brag; it is based on a comparison of the number of people
speaking the different European languages at different periods. At my
request Mr. N. I. Stone, of the School of Political Science of Columbia
University, made an examination of the statistics, in so far as they
are obtainable. The figures are rarely absolutely trustworthy before
the nineteenth century--indeed, they are sometimes little better than
guesswork. Yet they are approximately accurate, and they will serve
fairly well for purposes of comparison. They make plain the way in
which one language has gained on another in the past; and they afford
material for us to hazard a prediction as to the languages likely to
gain most in the immediate future.

In the fourteenth century the population of France was about ten
millions, and that of the British Isles probably less than four
millions. In both territories there were certainly many who did not
speak the chief language; yet the proportion of those who spoke French
to those who spoke English was at least ten to four.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century the British Isles still had
less than four millions, while France had more than twelve millions. At
this same period Italy had a few more than nine millions, and Spain a
few less, while the Germans (including always the Austrians who spoke
German) were about ten millions.

Coming toward the end of the sixteenth century, we find six millions
in the British Isles, more than fourteen millions in France and in the
French-speaking portions of the adjacent countries, and more than ten
millions in Italy. The Russians then numbered nearly four millions and
a half--only a million and a half less than the British.

At the very end of the seventeenth century the number of those speaking
English was nearly eight millions and a half--most of them still in the
British Isles, but some of them already departed into the colonies in
America and elsewhere. The number of those speaking French was twenty
millions, of those speaking Italian a few less than twelve millions,
and of those speaking Russian about fifteen millions. Those speaking
Spanish were chiefly at home in the Iberian peninsula, but not a few
were in the colonies in America: they amounted to about eight millions
in all, the mother-country having wasted her people in ruinous wars.

At the very end of the eighteenth century we find the English-speaking
peoples on both shores of the Atlantic swollen to twenty-two millions,
having nearly trebled in a hundred years, while the French had added
only a third to their population, amounting in all to a few more than
twenty-seven millions. The Germans were about thirty-three millions,
having passed the French; and the Italians were a few more than
thirteen millions, having increased very slowly. Neither Germans nor
Italians had as yet been able either to achieve unity for themselves or
to found colonies elsewhere. The Spanish, including their pure-blooded
colonists, numbered perhaps ten millions. The Russians had increased to
twenty-five millions, the boundaries of their empire having been widely
extended.

The nineteenth century was a period of unexampled expansion for the
English-speaking race, who have spread to India, to Australia, and to
Africa, besides filling up the western parts of the United States; they
now number probably between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred
and thirty millions. The Russians have also pushed their borders across
Asia, and they also show an immense increase, now numbering about a
hundred and thirty millions, altho probably a very large proportion
of their conglomerate population does not yet speak Russian. The
Germans have supplied millions of immigrants to the United States,
and thousands of expatriated traders to all the great cities of the
world; and in spite of this loss they now number about seventy millions
(including, as before, the German portions of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy). The Spanish-speaking peoples in the old world and the new
are about forty-two millions, not half of them being in Spain itself.

The French lag far behind in this multiplication; they number now a
few more than forty millions, including those Belgians and Swiss who
have French for their mother-tongue. The relative loss of the French
can best be shown by a comparison with the English after an interval of
five hundred years. In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, those
who spoke French were to those who spoke English as ten to four; in
the nineteenth century those who speak English are to those who speak
French as one hundred and thirty to forty. In other words, the French
during five centuries have increased fourfold, while the English have
multiplied more than thirtyfold.

French is still the language most frequently employed by diplomatists;
it is still the tongue in which educated men of differing nationalities
are most likely to be able to converse with each other. But its
supremacy has departed forever. It has long been fighting a losing
battle. Its hope of becoming the world-language of the future vanished,
never to reappear, when Clive grasped India and when Wolfe defeated
Montcalm. At a brief interval the French let slip their final chances
of holding either the east or the west.

The English-speaking peoples and the Russians have entered into the
inheritance which the French have renounced. The future is theirs, for
they are ready to go forth and subdue the waste places of the earth.
They are the great civilizing forces of the twentieth century, each in
its own way and each in its own degree. The Russians have revealed a
remarkable faculty of assimilation, and have taken over the wild tribes
of the east, which they are slowly starting along the path of progress.
The English--by which I mean always the peoples who speak the English
language--have possessed themselves of North America and of South
Africa and of Australia; and there is no sign yet visible of any lack
of energy or of any decrease of vigor in the branches of this hardy and
prolific stock.

At the rate of increase of the nineteenth century, the end of the
twentieth century will find eight hundred and forty millions speaking
English and five hundred millions speaking Russian, while those who
speak German will be one hundred and thirty millions and those who
speak French perhaps sixty millions. But it is very unlikely that the
rate of increase in the twentieth century will be what it was in the
nineteenth. The extraordinary expansion of the United States is the
salient phenomenon of the nineteenth century; and it is doubtfully
possible and certainly improbable that any such expansion can take
place in the twentieth century, even in South Africa. On the other
hand, the building of the Siberian railroad may open to the Russians
an outlet for the overflow of their population not unlike that offered
to the English by the opening of the middle west of the United States.
The outpouring of Germans, hitherto directed chiefly to the United
States (where they have been taught to speak English), may perhaps
hereafter be diverted to German colonies, where the native tongue will
be cherished.

Thus it seems likely that, while the estimate for the year 2000 of
one hundred and thirty million Germans is none too large, that of
five hundred million Russians is perhaps too small, and that of eight
hundred and fifty millions for the English-speaking peoples is
probably highly inflated. What, however, we have no reasonable right
to doubt is that German will be a bad third, as French will be a bad
fourth; and that the English language and the Russian will stand far
at the head of the list, one all-powerful in the west and the other
all-powerful in the east. Which of them will prevail against the other
in the twenty-first century no man can now foretell, nor can he get any
help from statistics.

The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by any inspection of
figures, for it will turn not so much on mere numbers--altho the
possession of these will be an immense advantage: it will be decided
rather by the race-characteristics of the two stocks when thrust into
irresistible opposition. The manners and customs of the people who
speak Russian and of the peoples who speak English, their physical
strength and their vitality, their ideals, social and political--all
these things will be the decisive factors in the final combat. Whether
Russian or English shall be the world-language of the future depends
not on the language itself and its merits and demerits, but on the
sturdiness of those who shall then speak it, on their strength of
will, on their power of organization, on their readiness to sacrifice
themselves for the common cause, and on their fidelity to their ideals.

Russian is a beautiful language, so those say who know it best: it is
fresh and vigorous, as might be expected in a speech the literature of
which is not yet old; it is also as clear and as direct as French. But
it has one insuperable disadvantage: its grammar is as primitive and
as complex as the grammar of German or the grammar of Greek. The verb
has an elaborate conjugation, the noun an elaborate declension, the
adjective an elaborate method of agreement in gender, number, and case.

Now English is fortunate in having discarded nearly all this primitive
machinery, which is always a sign of linguistic immaturity. The English
language has shed almost all its unnecessary complications; it has
advanced from complexity toward simplicity, while Russian still lingers
in its unreformed condition of arbitrary elaboration. One objection,
it may be noted, to Volapük, which a German scholar kindly invented
as the world-language of the future, was that its grammar was of this
primitive and complicated type.

In these days of the printing-press and of the schoolmaster any
radical modification of the mother-tongue is increasingly difficult,
so that it is highly improbable that Russian can now ever shake off
these grammatical encumbrances that really unfit it for use as a
world-language to be acquired by all men. Russian is one of the
most backward of modern languages in its progress toward grammatical
simplicity; and English is one of the most forward. Italian is also a
language which had the good fortune partly to reform its grammar before
the invention of printing made the operation almost impossible; and
Italian is like English in that it is a very easy language to learn
by word of mouth, as the rules of grammar we must needs obey are very
few,--tho in this respect English is superior even to Italian. If
English is hard to learn when it is taught by the eye instead of the
ear, this is because of our cumbersome and antiquated spelling; here
the Italian is far better off than the English.

Indeed, it is not a little strange that the English language, which is
one of the most advanced in grammatical simplicity, is one of the most
belated in orthographic simplicity. In no other modern language is the
system of spelling--if system that can be called which has no rule or
reason--more arbitrary and more chaotic than in English; and no other
peculiarity of our language does more to retard its diffusion than its
wantonly foolish orthography.

Probably much of the violent opposition to the simplification of our
spelling is due to the fanatic zeal of the phonetic reformers, who
have frightened away all the timid respecters of tradition by their
rash insistence upon the immediate adoption of some brand-new and
comprehensive scheme. The English-speaking peoples are essentially
conservative and unfailingly opportunist; they abhor all radical
remedies. They are wont to remove ancient abuses piecemeal, and not
root and branch. The most they can be got to do in the immediate future
is to follow the example of the Italians, and to lop off gradually the
most flagrant inconsistencies and absurdities of our present spelling,
here a little and there a little, going forward hesitatingly, but never
stopping.

In this good work of injecting a little more sense into our
orthography, as in the other good work of still further simplifying our
grammar as occasion serves and opportunity offers, we Americans may
have to take the lead. The English language is ours by inheritance,
and our interest in it is as deep and as wide as that of our British
cousins. As Mark Twain has put it, with his customary shrewdness, it
is “the King’s English” no longer, for it has gone into the hands of
a company, and a majority of the stock is held on our side of the
Atlantic.

We Americans must awake to a sense of our responsibility as the chief
of the English-speaking peoples. The tie that binds the British
colonies to the British crown is strong only because it is loose; and
in Australia and in Canada the conditions of life resemble those of
the United States rather than those of Great Britain. The British Isles
are the birthplace of our race, but they no longer contain the most
important branch of the English-speaking peoples. On both sides of the
Atlantic, and afar in the Pacific also, and along the shores of the
Indian Ocean, are “the subjects of King Shakspere,” the students of
Chaucer and Dryden, the readers of Scott and Thackeray and Hawthorne;
but most of them, or at least the largest single group, will be in the
United States at the end of the twentieth century, as they are at the
end of the nineteenth.

No one has more clearly seen the essential unity of the
English-speaking race, and no one has more accurately stated the
relation of the American branch of this race to the British branch,
than the late John Richard Green. In his chapter on the independence
of America, he recorded the fact that since 1776 “the life of the
English people has flowed not in one current, but in two; and while the
older has shown little sign of lessening, the younger has fast risen
to a greatness which has changed the face of the world. In wealth and
material energy, as in numbers, it far surpasses the mother-country
from which it sprang. It is already the main branch of the English
people; and in the days that are at hand the main current of that
people’s history must run along the channel, not of the Thames or the
Mersey, but of the Hudson and the Mississippi.”

When English becomes the world-language,--if our speech ever is raised
to fill that position of honor and usefulness,--it will be the English
language as it is spoken by all the branches of the English race, no
doubt; but the dominant influence in deciding what the future of that
language shall be must come from the United States. The English of the
future will be the English that we shall use here in the United States;
and it is for us to hand it down to our children fitted for the service
it is to render.

This task is ours, not to be undertaken boastfully or vaingloriously
or in any spirit of provincial self-assertion, on the one hand, or
of colonial self-depreciation on the other, but with a full sense of
the burden imposed upon us and of the privilege that accompanies it.
It is our duty to do what we can to keep our English speech fresh and
vigorous, to help it draw new life and power from every proper source,
to resist all the attempts of pedants to cramp it and restrain its
healthy growth, and to urge along the simplification of its grammar and
its orthography, so that it shall be ready against the day when it is
really a world-language.

 (1898)




III

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES


When Benjamin Franklin was in England in 1760, he received a letter
from David Hume commenting on the style of an essay of his writing and
on his choice of words; and in his reply Franklin modestly thanked his
friend for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his hope that
we Americans would always “make the best English of this island our
standard.” And yet when France acknowledged the independence of the
United States in 1778 and Franklin was sent to Paris as our minister,
Congress duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies to be observed
in doing business with foreign countries, and finally resolved that
“all speeches or communications may, if the public ministers choose it,
be in the language of their respective countries; and all replies or
answers shall be in the language of the United States.”

What is “the language of the United States”? Is it “the best English”
of Great Britain, as Franklin hoped it would always be? Franklin
was unusually far-sighted, but even he could not foresee what is
perhaps the most extraordinary event of the nineteenth century,--an
era abounding in the extraordinary,--the marvelous spread and immense
expansion of the English language. It is not only along the banks of
the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that children are now losing
irrecoverable hours on the many absurdities of English orthography: a
like wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores of the Hudson,
of the Mississippi, and of the Columbia, while the same A B C’s are
parroted by the little ones of those who live where the Ganges rolls
down its yellow sand and of those who dwell in the great island which
is almost riverless. No parallel can be found in history for this
sudden spreading out of the English language in the past hundred
years--not even the diffusion of Latin during the century when the rule
of Rome was most widely extended.

Among the scattered millions who now employ our common speech, in
England itself, in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in the United
States and Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and in South
Africa, there is no stronger bond of union than the language itself.
There is no likelihood that any political association will ever
be sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the more independent
colonies to the mother-country is loose enough now, even if it is
never further relaxed; and less than half of those who have English
for their mother-tongue owe any allegiance whatever to England. The
English-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire are apparently fewer
than the inhabitants of the American republic; and the population
of the United Kingdom itself is only a little more than half the
population of the United States.

To set down these facts is to point out that the English language is
no longer a personal possession of the people of England. The power of
the head of the British Empire over what used to be called the “King’s
English” is now as little recognized as his power over what used to be
called the “king’s evil.” We may regret that this is the case, or we
may rejoice at it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And thus
we are face to face with more than one very interesting question. What
is going to become of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad and
freed from all control by a central authority and exposed to all sorts
of alien influences? Is it bound to become corrupted and to sink from
its high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter of barbarously
fashioned verbal novelties? What, more especially, is going to be the
future of the English language here in America? Must we fear the dread
possibility that the speech of the peoples on the opposite sides of
the Western Ocean will diverge at last until the English language will
divide into two branches, those who speak British being hardly able to
understand those who speak American, and those who speak American being
hardly able to understand those who speak British? Mark Twain is a
humorist, it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has abundant common
sense; and it was Mark Twain who declared a score of years ago that he
spoke the “American language.”

The science of linguistics is among the youngest, and yet it has
already established itself so firmly on the solid ground of ascertained
truth that it has been able to overthrow with ease one and another
of the many theories which were accepted without question before it
came into being. For example, time was--and the time is not so very
remote, it may be remarked--time was when the little group of more or
less highly educated men who were at the center of authority in the
capital of any nation had no doubt whatsoever as to the superiority
of their way of speaking their own language over the manner in which
it might be spoken by the vast majority of their fellow-citizens
deprived of the advantages of a court training. This little group set
the standard of speech; and the standard they set was accepted as
final and not to be tampered with under penalty of punishment for the
crime of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence from the customs
of speaking and writing they themselves cherished was due to ignorance
and probably to obstinacy. They believed that the court dialect which
they had been brought up to use was the only true and original form of
the language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross impropriety every
usage and every phrase with which they themselves did not happen to be
familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole validity of their personal
habits of speech they had no need for self-assertion, since it never
entered into the head of any one not belonging to the court circle to
question for a second the position thus tacitly declared.

Yet if modern methods of research have made anything whatever
indisputable in the history of human speech, they have completely
disproved the assumption which underlies this implicit claim of the
courtiers. We know now that the urban dialect is not the original
language of which the rural dialects are but so many corruptions.
We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are often really closer
to the original tongue than the urban dialect; and that the urban
dialect itself was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes its
preëminence rarely to any superiority of its own over its rivals, but
rather to the fact that it chanced to be the speech of a knot of men
more masterful than the inhabitants of any other village, and able
therefore to expand their village to a town and at last to a city,
which imposed its rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants of
these being by that time forgetful that they had once striven with it
on almost equal terms. Generally it is the stability given by political
pre-eminence which leads to the development of a literature, without
which no dialect can retain its linguistic supremacy.

When the sturdy warriors whose homes were clustered on one or another
of the seven hills of Rome began to make alliances and conquests, they
rendered possible the future development of their rough Italic into the
Latin language which has left its mark on almost every modern European
tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans, who possessed dialects
of an equal antiquity and of an equal possibility of improvement, could
not but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought, perforce, to
bring their vocabulary and their syntax into conformity with that of
the men who had shown themselves more powerful. Thus one of the Italic
dialects was singled out by fortune for an extraordinary future, and
the other Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho they were each
of them as old as the Roman and as available for development. These
other dialects have even suffered the ignominy of being supposed to be
corruptions of their triumphant brother.

The French philologist Darmesteter concisely explained the stages of
this development of one local speech at the expense of its neighbors.
As it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow. A local speech
thus neglected is a patois; and a local speech which achieves the
dignity of literature is a dialect. These written tongues spread on
all sides and impose themselves on the surrounding population as more
noble than the patois. Thus a linguistic province is created, and its
dialect tends constantly to crush out the various patois once freely
used within its boundaries.

In time one of these provinces becomes politically more powerful than
the others and extends its rule over one after another of them. As
it does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the provinces as
the official tongue, and it tends constantly to crush out these other
dialects, as they had tended constantly to crush out the various
patois. Thus the local speech of the population of the tiny island in
the Seine, which is the nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to
the dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech of each of the
neighboring villages sank into a patois--altho originally it was in no
wise inferior. In the course of centuries Paris became the capital of
France, and its provincial dialect became the official language of the
kingdom. When the kings of France extended their rule over Normandy
and over Burgundy and over Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in
imposing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces as superior;
and in time the Norman dialect and the Burgundian and the Provençal
were ousted.

The dialect of the province in which the king dwelt and in which the
business of governing was carried on, could not but dispossess the
dialects of all the other provinces; and thus the French language,
as we know it now, was once only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was
apparently no linguistic inferiority of the _langue d’oc_ to the
_langue d’oil_; and the reasons for the dominion of the one and the
decadence of the other are purely political. Of course, as the Parisian
dialect grew and spread itself, it was enriched by locutions from the
other provincial dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of
many of its grammatical complexities not common to the most of the
others.

The French language was developed from one particular provincial
dialect probably no better adapted for improvement than any one of half
a dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of precision infinitely
finer than any of its pristine rivals, since they had none of them
the good fortune to be chosen for development. But the patois of the
peasant of Normandy or of Brittany, however inadequate it may be as a
means of expression for a modern man, is not a corruption of French,
any more than Doric is a corruption of Attic Greek. It is rather in the
position of a twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fellow,
more adroit in getting the good will of their parents. It was the
literary skill of the Athenians themselves, and not the superiority
of the original dialect, that makes us think of Attic as the only
genuine Greek, just as it was the prowess of the Romans in war and
their power of governing which raised their provincial dialect into the
language of Italy, and then carried it triumphant to every shore of the
Mediterranean.

The history of the development of the English language is like the
history of the development of Greek and Latin and French; and the
English language as we speak it to-day is a growth from the Midland
dialect, itself the victor of a struggle for survivorship with the
Southern and Northern dialects. “With the accession of the royal house
of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England,” so Professor Lounsbury
tells us, “the dialect of Wessex had become the cultivated language of
the whole people--the language in which books were written and laws
were published.” But when the Norman conquest came, altho, to quote
from Professor Lounsbury again, “the native tongue continued to be
spoken by the great majority of the population, it went out of use as
the language of high culture,” and “the educated classes, whether lay
or ecclesiastical, preferred to write either in Latin or in French--the
latter steadily tending more and more to become the language of
literature as well as of polite society.” And as a result of this the
West-Saxon had to drop to the low level of the other dialects; “it had
no longer any preëminence of its own.” There was in England from the
twelfth to the fourteenth centuries no national language, but every one
was free to use with tongue and pen his own local speech, altho three
provincial dialects existed, “each possessing a literature of its own
and each seemingly having about the same chance to be adopted as the
representative national speech.”

These three dialects were the Southern (which was the descendant of
Wessex, once on the way to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland
(which had the sole advantage that it was a compromise between its
neighbors to the north and the south). London was situated in the
region of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore “the tongue mainly
employed at the court” when French slowly ceased to be the language
of the upper classes. As might be expected in those days before the
printing-press and the spelling-book imposed uniformity, the Midland
dialect was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern counties from
the way it was spoken in the Western counties of the region. London
was in the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and London was
the capital. Probably because the speech of the Eastern division of
the Midland dialect was the speech of the capital, it was used as the
vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court--who happened also to
be a great poet and a great literary artist. Just as Dante’s choice of
his native Tuscan dialect controlled the future development of Italian,
so Chaucer’s choice controlled the future development of English. It
was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares, “who first showed to all
men the resources of the language, its capacity of representing with
discrimination all shades of human thought and of conveying with power
all manifestations of human feeling.”

The same writer tells us that “the cultivated English language, in
which nearly all English literature of value has been written, sprang
directly from the East-Midland division of the Midland dialect, and
especially from the variety of the East-Midland which was spoken at
London and the region immediately to the north of it.” That this
magnificent opportunity came to the London dialect was not due to any
superiority it had over any other variety of the Midland dialect: it
was due to the single fact that it was the speech of the capital--just
as the dialect of the Île-de-France in like manner served as the stem
from which the cultivated French language sprang. The Parisian dialect
flourished and imposed itself on all sides; within the present limits
of France it choked out the other local dialects, even the soft and
lovely Provençal; and beyond the boundaries of the country it was
accepted in Belgium and in Switzerland.

So the dialect of London has gone on growing and refining and enriching
itself as the people who spoke it extended their borders and passed
over the wide waters and won their way to far countries, until to-day
it serves not merely for the cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of
Montana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is adequate for the various
needs of the Scotch philosopher and of the American humorist; it is
employed by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the governor of
Alaska, and the general in command over the Philippines. In the course
of some six centuries the dialect of a little town on the Thames has
become the mother-tongue of millions and millions of people scattered
broadcast over the face of the earth.

If the Norman conquest had not taken place the history of the English
race would be very different, and the English language would not be
what it is, since it would have had for its root the Wessex variety
of the Southern dialect. But the Norman conquest did take place, and
the English language has for its root the Eastern division of the
Midland dialect. The Norman conquest it was which brought the modest
but vigorous young English tongue into close contact with the more
highly cultivated French. The French spoken in England was rather the
Norman dialect than the Parisian (which is the true root of modern
French), and whatever slight influence English may have had upon it
does not matter now, for it was destined to a certain death. But this
Norman-French enlarged the plastic English speech against which it was
pressing; and English adopted many French words, not borrowing them,
but making them our own, once for all, and not dropping the original
English word, but keeping both with slight divergence of meaning.

Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that we owe the double
vocabulary wherein our language surpasses all others. While the
framework of English is Teutonic, we have for many things two names,
one of Germanic origin and one of Romance. Our direct, homely words,
that go straight to our hearts and nestle there--these are most of
them Teutonic. Our more delicate words, subtle in finer shades of
meaning--these often come to us from the Latin through the French.
The secondary words are of Romance origin, and the primary words of
Germanic. And this--if the digression may here be hazarded--is one
reason why French poetry touches us less than German, the words of the
former seeming to us remote, not to say sophisticated, while the words
of the latter are akin to our own simpler and swifter words.

One other advantage of the pressure of French upon English in the
earlier stages of its development, when it was still ductile, was
that this pressure helped us to our present grammatical simplicity.
Whenever the political intelligence of the inhabitants of the capital
of a district raises the local dialect to a position of supremacy, so
that it spreads over the surrounding districts and casts their dialects
into the shadow, the dominant dialect is likely to lose those of its
grammatical peculiarities not to be found also in the other dialects.
Whatever is common to them all is pretty sure to survive, and what
is not common may or may not be given up. The London dialect, in its
development, felt the influence, not only of the other division of the
Midland dialect, and of the two rival dialects, one to the north of it
and the other to the south, but also of a foreign tongue spoken by all
who pretended to any degree of culture. This attrition helped English
to shed many minor grammatical complexities still retained by languages
which had not this fortunate experience in their youth.

Perhaps the late Richard Grant White was going a little too far when he
asserted that English was a grammarless tongue; but it cannot be denied
that English is less infested with grammar than any other of the great
modern languages. German, for example, is a most grammarful tongue; and
Mark Twain has explained to us (in ‘A Tramp Abroad’) just how elaborate
and intricate its verbal machinery is; and the Volapük, which was made
in Germany, had the syntactical convolutions of its inventor’s native
tongue.

By its possession of this grammatical complexity, Volapük was unfitted
for service as a world-language. A fortunate coincidence it is that
English, which is becoming a world-language by sheer force of the
energy and determination of those whose mother-speech it is, should
early have shed most of these cumbersome and retarding grammatical
devices. The earlier philologists were wont to consider this throwing
off of needless inflections as a symptom of decay. The later
philologists are coming to recognize it as a sign of progress. They are
getting to regard the unconscious struggle for short-cuts in speech,
not as degeneration, but rather as regeneration. As Krauter asserts,
“The dying out of forms and sounds is looked upon by the etymologists
with painful feelings; but no unprejudiced judge will be able to see
in it anything but a progressive victory over lifeless material.” And
he adds, with terse common sense: “Among several tools performing
equal work, that is the best which is the simplest and most handy.”
This brief excerpt from the German scholar is borrowed here from a
paper prepared for the Modern Language Association by Professor C. A.
Smith, in which may be found also a dictum of the Danish philologist
Jespersen: “The fewer and shorter the forms, the better; the analytic
structure of modern European languages is so far from being a drawback
to them that it gives them an unimpeachable superiority over the
earlier stages of the same languages.” And it is Jespersen who boldly
declares that “the so-called full and rich forms of the ancient
languages are not a beauty, but a deformity.”

In other words, language is merely an instrument for the use of man;
and like all other instruments, it had to begin by being far more
complicated than is needful. The watch used to have more than a
hundred separate parts, and now it is made with less than twoscore,
losing nothing in its efficiency and in precision. Greek and German are
old-fashioned watches; Italian and Danish and English are watches of a
later style. Of the more prominent modern languages, German and Russian
are the most backward, while English is the most advanced. And the end
is not yet, for the eternal forces are ever working to make our tongue
still easier. The printing-press is a most powerful agent on the side
of the past, making progress far more sluggish than it was before books
were broadcast; yet the English language is still engaged in sloughing
off its outworn grammatical skin. Altho in the nineteenth century the
changes in the structure of English have probably been less than in any
other century of its history, yet there have been changes not a few.

For example, the subjunctive mood is going slowly into innocuous
desuetude; the stickler for grammar, so-called, may protest in vain
against its disappearance: its days are numbered. It serves no useful
purpose; it has to be laboriously acquired; it is now a matter of
rule and not of instinct; it is no longer natural: and therefore it
will inevitably disappear, sooner or later. Careful investigation has
shown that it has already been discarded by many even among those
who are very careful of their style--some of whom, no doubt, would
rise promptly to the defense of the form they have been discarding
unconsciously. One authority declares that altho the form has seemed to
survive, it has been empty of any distinct meaning since the sixteenth
century.

This is only one of the tendencies observable in the nineteenth
century; and we may rest assured that others will become visible in
the twentieth. But when English is compared with German, we cannot
help seeing that most of this work is done already. Grammar has
been stripped to the bone in English; and for us who have to use
the language to-day it is fortunate that our remote ancestors, who
fashioned it for their own use without thought of our needs, should
have had the same liking we have for the simplest possible tool, and
that they should have cast off, as soon as they could, one and another
of the grammatical complexities which always cumber every language in
its earlier stages, and most of which still cumber German. In nothing
is the practical directness of our stock more clearly revealed than in
this immediate beginning upon the arduous task of making the means of
communication between man and man as easy and as direct as possible.
Doubly fortunate are we that this job was taken up and put through
before the invention of printing multiplied the inertia of conservatism.

It was the political supremacy of Paris which made the Parisian dialect
the standard of French; and it was the genius of Dante which made the
Tuscan dialect the standard of Italian. That the London dialect is
the standard of English is due partly to the political supremacy of
the capital and partly to the genius of Chaucer. As the French are
a home-keeping people, Paris has retained its political supremacy;
while the English are a venturesome race and have spread abroad and
split into two great divisions, so that London has lost its political
supremacy, being the capital now only of the less numerous portion of
those who have English as their mother-tongue.

It is true, of course, that a very large proportion of the inhabitants
of the United States, however independent politically of the great
empire of which London is the capital, look with affection upon the
city by the Thames. Their feeling toward England is akin to that which
led Hawthorne to entitle his record of a sojourn in England ‘Our Old
Home.’ The American liking for London itself seems to be increasing;
and, as Lowell once remarked, “We Americans are beginning to feel that
London is the center of the races that speak English, very much in the
sense that Rome was the center of the ancient world.” It was at a
dinner of the Society of Authors that he said this, and he then added:
“I confess that I never think of London, which I also confess I love,
without thinking of the palace David built, ‘sitting in the hearing of
a hundred streams’--streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity.”

While the London dialect is the stem from which the English language
has grown, the vocabulary of the language has never been limited by
the dialect. It has been enriched by countless words and phrases and
locutions of one kind or another from the other division of the Midland
dialect and from both the Northern and the Southern dialects--just
as modern Italian has not limited itself to the narrow vocabulary of
Florence. Yet in the earlier stages of the development of English the
language benefited by the fact that there was a local standard. The
attempt of all to assimilate their speech to that of the inhabitants of
London tended to give uniformity without rigidity. As men came up to
court they brought with them the best of the words and turns of speech
peculiar to their own dialect; and the language gained by all these
accretions.

Shakspere contributed Warwickshire localisms not a few, just as Scott
procured the acceptance of Scotticisms hitherto under a ban. As Spenser
had gone back to Chaucer, so Keats went to the Elizabethans and dug
out old words for his own use; and William Morris pushed his researches
farther and brought up words almost pre-Chaucerian. Every language in
Europe has been put under contribution at one time or another for one
purpose or another. The military vocabulary, for instance, reveals the
former superiority of the French, just as the naval vocabulary reveals
the former superiority of the Dutch. And as modern science has extended
its conquests, it has drawn on Greek for its terms of precision.

Under this influx of foreign words, old and new, the framework of the
original London dialect stands solidly enough, but it is visible only
to the scholarly specialist in linguistic research. But the latest
London dialect, the speech of the inhabitants of the British capital
at the end of the nineteenth century, has ceased absolutely to serve
as a standard. Whatever utility there was in the past in accepting
as normal English the actual living dialect of London has long since
departed without a protest. No educated Englishman any longer thinks of
conforming his syntax or his vocabulary to the actual living dialect
of London, whether of the court or of the slums. Indeed, so far is he
from accepting the verbal habits of the man in the street as suggesting
a standard for him that he is wont to hold them up to ridicule as
cockney corruptions. He likes to laugh at the tricks of speech that
he discovers on the lips of the Londoners, at their dropping of their
initial _h_’s more often than he deems proper, and at their more recent
substitution of _y_ for _a_--as in “tyke the cyke, lydy.”

The local standard of London has thus been disestablished in the course
of the centuries simply because there was no longer a necessity for any
local standard. The speech of the capital served as the starting-point
of the language; and in the early days a local standard of usage was
useful. But now, after English has enjoyed a thousand years of growth,
a standard so primitive is not only useless, but it would be very
injurious. Nor could any other local standard be substituted for that
of London without manifest danger--even if the acceptance of such a
standard was possible. The peoples that speak English are now too
widely scattered and their needs are too many and too diverse for any
local standard not to be retarding in its limitations.

To-day the standard of English is to be sought not in the actual living
dialect of the inhabitants of any district or of any country, but in
the language itself, in its splendid past and in its mighty present.
Five hundred years ago, more or less, Chaucer sent forth the first
masterpieces of English literature; and in all those five centuries the
language has never lacked poets and prose-writers who knew its secrets
and could bring forth its beauties. Each of them has helped to make
English what it is now; and a study of what English has been is all
that we need to enable us to see what it will be--and what it should
be. Any attempt to trammel it by a local standard, or by academic
restrictions, or by school-masters’ grammar-rules, is certain to fail.
In the past, English has shaken itself free of many a limitation; and
in the present it is insisting on its own liberty to take the short-cut
whenever that enables it to do its work with less waste of time. We
cannot doubt that in the future it will go on in its own way, making
itself fitter for the manifold needs of an expanding race which has the
unusual characteristic of having lofty ideals while being intensely
practical. A British poet it was, Lord Houghton, who once sent these
prophetic lines to an American lady:

  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; _expand its powers_;
  And through the maze of civic life,
  In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
  Forget not it is yours and ours.

The English language is the most valuable possession of the peoples
that speak it, and that have for their chief cities, not London
alone, or Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and Chicago, Calcutta
and Bombay, Melbourne and Montreal. The English language is one and
indivisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a local standard may
lead it ever to break up into fragmentary dialects. There is really no
danger now that English will not be uniform in all the four quarters of
the world, and that it will not modify itself as occasion serves. We
can already detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary; but these
are only trifles. The steamship and the railroad and the telegraph
bring the American and the Briton and the Australian closer together
nowadays than were the users of the Midland dialect when Chaucer
set forth on his pilgrimage to Canterbury; and then there is the
printing-press, whereby the newspaper and the school-book and the works
of the dead-and-gone masters of our literature bind us together with
unbreakable links.

These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary--London from Edinburgh,
and New York from Bombay--are but evidences of the healthy activity of
our tongue. It is only when it is dead that a language ceases to grow.
It needs to be constantly refreshed by new words and phrases as the
elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to be part of Shakspere’s
good fortune that he came when English was ripe and yet fresh, when
there was an abundance of words ready to his hand, but none of them
yet exhausted by hard work. So Mr. Howells has recently recorded
his feeling that any one who now employs English “to depict or to
characterize finds the phrases thumbed over and worn and blunted with
incessant use,” and experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are
now and again “reported from the lips of the people.”

“From the lips of the people”;--here is a phrase that would have sadly
shocked a narrow-minded scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned
of yesterday denied--and, indeed, have denounced as rank heresy--the
more learned of to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language of
a people is the spoken word, not the written. Language lives on the
tongue and in the ear; there it was born, and there it grows. Man wooed
his wife and taught his children and discussed with his neighbors for
centuries before he perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the work
of the world is done rather by the spoken word than by the written. And
those who are doing the work of the world are following the example of
our remote ancestors who did not know how to write; when they feel new
needs they will make violent efforts to supply those needs, devising
fresh words put together in rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly.
The mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments, to risk a new
locution, to hazard a wrenching of an old term to a novel use. The hand
that writes is always slow to accept the result of these attempts to
meet a demand in an unauthorized way. The spoken language bristles with
innovations, while the written language remains properly conservative.
Few of these oral babes are viable, and fewer still survive; while only
now and again does one of these verbal foundlings come of age and claim
citizenship in literature.

In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our grandfathers handed down
to us there are solemn warnings against neologisms--and neologism was
a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a new word as such. But in
the stimulating study of certain of the laws of linguistics, which
M. Bréal, one of the foremost of French philologists, has called
‘Semantics,’ we are told that to condemn neologisms absolutely would be
most unfortunate and most useless. “Every progress in a language is,
first of all, the act of an individual, and then of a minority, large
or small. A land where all innovation should be forbidden would take
from its language all chance of development.” And M. Bréal points out
that language must keep on transforming itself with every new discovery
and invention, with the incessant modification of our manners, of
our customs, and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work on the
vocabulary of the future, ignorant and learned, authors and artists,
the man of the world and the man in the street; and even our children
have a share in this labor, and by no means the least.

Among all these countless candidates for literary acceptance, the
struggle for existence is very fierce, and only the fittest of the new
words survive. Or, to change the figure, conversation might be called
the Lower House, where all the verbal coinages must have their origin,
while literature is the Upper House, without whose concurrence nothing
can be established. And the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy;
they resist all attempts of which they do not approve. In language, as
in politics, the power of the democratic principle is getting itself
more widely acknowledged. The people blunders more often than not, but
it knows its own mind; and in the end it has its own way. In language,
as in politics, we Americans are really conservative. We are well
aware that we have the right to make what change we please, and we
know better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we do not desire to
do so. We want no more change in our laws or in our language than is
absolutely necessary.

We have modified the common language far less than we have modified
the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning
which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the
seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his
comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for
refreshing old words by novel combinations. When Mr. W. Aldis Wright
drew up a glossary of the words, phrases, and constructions in the
King James translation of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer,
which were obsolete in Great Britain in the sense that they would no
longer naturally find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor
Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of these words, phrases,
and constructions are not now obsolete in the United States, and
would be used by any American writer without fear that he might not
be understood. As Lowell said, our ancestors “unhappily could bring
over no English better than Shakspere’s,” and by good fortune we have
kept alive some of the Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our
trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric vigor now rarely to be
matched in the street-phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his
living. Ben Jonson would have relished one New York phrase that an
office-holder gives an office-seeker, “the glad hand and the marble
heart,” and that other which described a former favorite comedian as
now having “a fur-lined voice.”

When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he thought that we Americans
had already modified the English language. British critics, like Dean
Alford, have often animadverted upon the deterioration of the language
on this side of the Atlantic. American humorists, like Mark Twain,
have calmly claimed that the tongue they used was not English, but
American. It is English as Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force
and a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of the language; but
in so far as American usage differs from British, it was according to
the former and not according to the latter. But they differ in reality
very slightly indeed; and whatever divergence there may be is rather
in the spoken language than in the written. That the spoken language
should vary is inevitable and advantageous, since the more variation is
attempted, the better opportunity the language has to freshen up its
languishing vocabulary and to reinvigorate itself. That the written
language should widely vary would be the greatest of misfortunes.

Of this there is now no danger whatever, and never has been. The
settlement of the United States took place after the invention of
printing; and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a new dialect
nowadays. The disestablishment of the local standard of London leaves
English free to develop according to its own laws and its own logic.
There is no longer any weight of authority to be given to contemporary
British usage over contemporary American usage--except in so far as
the British branch of English literature is more resplendent with
names of high renown than the American branch. That this was the case
in the nineteenth century--that the British poets and prose-writers
outnumber and outvalue the American--must be admitted at once; that
it will be the case throughout the twentieth century may be doubted.
And whenever the poets and prose-writers of the American branch of
English literature are superior in number and in power to those of the
British branch, then there can be no doubt as to where the weight of
authority will lie. The shifting of the center of power will take place
unconsciously; and the development of English will go on just the same
after it takes place as it is going on now. The conservative forces
are in no danger of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether
in the United States or in Great Britain or in any of her colonial
dependencies.

Perhaps the principle which will govern can best be stated in another
quotation from M. Bréal: “The limit within which the right to innovate
stops is not fixed by any idea of ‘purity’ (which can always be
contested); it is fixed by the need we have to keep in contact with
the thought of those who have preceded us. The more considerable the
literary past of a people, the more this need makes itself felt as a
duty, as a condition of dignity and force.” And there is no sign that
either the American or the British half of those who have our language
for a mother-tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to the literary
past of English literature, that most magnificent heritage--the
birthright of both of us.

 (1899)




IV

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN


There is a wide gap between the proverb asserting that “figures never
lie” and the opinion expressed now and again by experts that nothing
can be more mendacious than statistics misapplied; and the truth
seems to lie between these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is the
backbone of history, so a statement of fact can be made terser and more
convincing if the figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we wish
to perceive the change of the relative position of Great Britain and
the United States in the course of the centuries, nothing can help us
better to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case than a comparison
of the population of the two countries at various periods.

In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland numbered between
eight and nine millions, while the inhabitants of what is now the
United States were, perhaps, a scant three hundred thousand. In 1900,
the people of the British Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven
millions more or less, and the people of the United States are almost
exactly twice as many, being about seventy-five millions. To project a
statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazardous proceeding; and
no man can now guess at the probable population either of the United
Kingdom or of the United States in the year 2000; but as the rate of
increase is far larger in America than in England, there is little
risk in suggesting that a hundred years from now the population of the
American republic will be at least four or five times as large as that
of the British monarchy.

Just as the center of population of the United States has been
steadily working its way westward, having been in 1800 in Maryland
and being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of population of the
English-speaking race has been steadily moving toward the Occident.
Just as the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies during
the nineteenth century, so will the second of them have to cross the
Atlantic during the twentieth century. Whether this latter change shall
take place early in the century or late, is not important; one day or
another it will take place, assuredly.

Inevitably it will be accompanied or speedily followed by another
change of almost equal significance. London sooner or later will
cease to be the literary center of the English-speaking race. For
many centuries the town by the Thames has been the heart of English
literature; and there are now visible very few signs that the days of
its supremacy are numbered. Even in the United States to-day the old
colonial attitude, not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to be
as well acquainted with second-rate British authors as the British
are with American authors of the first rank. Yet it is not without
significance that at the close of the nineteenth century the two most
widely known writers of the language should be one of them an American
citizen and the other a British colonial, owing no local allegiance to
London--Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling.

The disestablishment of London as the literary center of English will
be retarded by various circumstances. Only very reluctantly is a
tradition of preëminence overthrown when consecrated by the centuries.
The conditions of existence in England are likely long to continue to
be more favorable to literary productivity than are the conditions
in America. In a new country literature finds an eager rival in
life itself, with all its myriad opportunities for self-expression.
No paradox is it to say that more than one American bard may have
preferred to build his epic in steel or in stone rather than in words.
The creative imagination has outlets here denied it in a long-settled
community, residing tranquilly in a little island, where even the
decorous landscape seems to belong to the Established Church. But the
Eastern States are already, many of them, as orderly and as placid as
Great Britain has been for a century. The conditions in England and in
America are constantly tending toward equalization.

A time will come, and probably long before the close of the twentieth
century, when there will be in the United States not only several
times as many people as there are in the British Isles, but also far
more literary activity. Sooner or later most of the leading authors of
English literature will be American and not British in their training,
in their thought, in their ideals. That is to say, the British in
the middle of the twentieth century will hold to the Americans about
the same position that the Americans held toward the British in the
middle of the nineteenth century. The group of American authors between
1840 and 1860 contained Irving and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne,
Longfellow and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau. These are names
endeared to us and highly important to us, and not to be neglected
in any consideration of English literature; but it is foolish for an
American to seek to set them up as the equal of the British group
flourishing during the same score of years. So in the middle of the
twentieth century the British group will probably not lack striking
individualities; but, as a whole, it will probably be surpassed by
the American group. The largest portion of the men of letters who use
English to express themselves, as well as the largest body of the
English-speaking race, will have its residence on the western shore of
the Western Ocean.

What will then happen to the English language in England when England
awakens to the fact that the center of the English-speaking race is no
longer within the borders of the little island? Will the speech of the
British sink into dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely
stamp out their undue local divergences from the normal English of
the main body of the users of the language in the United States? Will
they frankly accept the inevitable? Will they face the facts as they
are? Will they follow the lead of the Americans when we shall have the
leadership of the language, as the Americans followed their lead when
they had it? Or will they insist on an arbitrary independence, which
can have only one result--the splitting off of the British branch of
our speech from the main stem of the language? To ask these questions
is to project an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation is
not without an interest of its own. And altho it is difficult to
decide so far in advance of the event, yet we have now some of the
material on which to base a judgment as to what is likely to happen.

Of course, the question is not one to be answered offhand; and not a
few arguments could be brought forward in support of the opinion that
the British speech of the future is likely to separate itself from
the main body of English as then spoken in this country. In the first
place, England, altho it has already ceased to be the most populous of
the countries using English, will still be the senior partner of the
great trading-company known as the British Empire. That the British
Empire may be dissolved is possible, no doubt. The Australian colonies
have federated; and having formed a strong union of their own, they
may prefer to stand alone. South Africa may follow the example of
Australia. India may arise in the might of her millions and cast out
its English rulers. Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the
greater American republic. But each of these things is improbable;
and that they should all come to pass is practically inconceivable.
All signs now seem to point not only to a continuance of the British
Empire, but also to its steady expansion. London is likely long to be
the capital of an empire upon which the sun never sets, an empire
inhabited by men of every color and every creed and every language. For
these men English must serve as the means of communication one with
another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck.

That this will put a strain on the language is indisputable. Wherever
any tongue serves as a _lingua franca_ for men of various stocks,
there is an immediate tendency toward corruption. There is a constant
pressure to simplify and to lop off and to reduce to the bare elements.
The Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example of what may
befall a noble language when it is enslaved to serve many masters,
ignorant of its history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling’s
earliest tales are some of them almost incomprehensible to readers
unacquainted with the vocabulary of the competition-walla; and the
reports of the British generals during the war with the Boers were
besprinkled with words not hitherto supposed to be English.

Some observers see in this a menace to the integrity of the language, a
menace likely to become more threatening as the British Empire spreads
itself still farther over the waste places of the earth. But is there
not also a danger in the integrity of English close at home--in England
itself, even in London, and not afar in the remote borders of the
Empire--the danger due to the prevalence of local dialects? To the
student of language one of the most obvious differences between Great
Britain and the United States lies in the fact that we in America have
really no local dialects such as are common in England. Every county
of England has an indigenous population, whose ancestors dwelt in the
same place since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary; and this indigenous population has its own peculiarities of
pronunciation, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down from father
to son, generation after generation. But no one of the United States
was settled exclusively by immigrants from a single English county;
and, therefore, no one of these local dialects was ever transplanted
bodily to America. And no considerable part of the United States
has a stationary population, inbreeding and stagnant and impervious
to outside influences; indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and
there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to grow up in the middle
west, to be married in New York, and to die in Colorado--is not this
a characteristic of us Americans? And it is a characteristic fatal to
the development of real dialects in this country such as are abundant
in England. Of course we have our local peculiarities of idiom and of
pronunciation, but these are very superficial indeed. Probably there
has been a closer uniformity of speech throughout the United States
for fifty years past than there is even to-day in Great Britain, where
the Yorkshireman cannot understand the cockney, and where the Scot sits
silent in the house of the Cornishman.

This uniformity of speech throughout the United States is, perhaps,
partly the result of Noah Webster’s ‘Spelling-Book.’ It has certainly
been aided greatly by the public-school system, firmly established
throughout the country, and steadily strengthening itself. The
school system of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is not yet
adequately organized; it has still to be adjusted to its place in
a proper scheme of national education. In the higher institutions
of learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge, there is no
postgraduate work in English; and whatever instruction an undergraduate
may get there in English literature is incidental, not to say
accidental.

Probably there is no connection between this lack of university
instruction in English and a carelessness in the use of the language
which strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpremeditated letters
of scholarly Englishmen, but sometimes even in their more academic
efforts. Jowett’s correspondence, for example, and Matthew Arnold’s,
offer examples of a slovenliness of phrase not to be found in Lowell’s
letters or in Emerson’s.

Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not merely among the uneducated,
but among the more highly cultivated. _Directly_ is used for _as soon
as_ by Archbishop Trench (the author of a lively little book on words)
and by Mr. Courthope (the Oxford professor of poetry). _Like_ is used
for _as_--that is, “like we do”--by Charles Darwin, and in more than
one volume of the English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John
Morley. The elision of the initial _h_, which the British themselves
like to think a test of breeding, is discoverable far more often than
they imagine on the lips of those who ought to know better. It is said
that Lord Beaconsfield, for example, sometimes dropped his _h_’s, and
that he once spoke of “the ’urried ’Udson.” And if we may rely on the
evidence of spelling, the British often leave the _h_ silent where we
Americans sound it. They write _an historical essay_ from which it is
a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective _’istorical_. In
Mr. Kipling’s ‘From Sea to Sea’ he writes not only _an hotel_ and _an
hospital_, but also _an hydraulic_.

Thus we see that the immense size and variegated population of the
British Empire may be considered as a menace to the integrity of the
English language in the British Isles; and that a second source of
danger is to be discovered in the local dialects of Great Britain; and,
finally, that there is observable in England even now a carelessness
in the use of the language and a willingness to innovate both in
vocabulary and in idiom.

But however formidable these three tendencies may look when massed
together, there is really no weight to be attached to any of them
singly or to all of them combined. The language has already for two
centuries been exposed to contact with countless other tongues in
America and Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration up to the
present time; and there is no reason to fear that this contact will
be more corrupting in the twentieth century than it has been in the
nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather in an enrichment
and refreshment of the vocabulary. The danger from the local dialects
of Great Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by day as
the facilities for travel improve and as the schoolmaster is able to
impose his uniform English upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to
use new words not authorized by the past of the language is in itself
not blameworthy; it may be indeed commendable when it is restrained by
a conservative instinct and controlled by reason.

The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of London newspapers
are like the Americanisms to be seen in the pages of the New York
newspapers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the healthiness
of the language itself. In Latin it may be proper enough for us to set
up a Ciceronian standard and to reject any usage not warranted by the
masterly orator; but in English it is absurd to declare any merely
personal standard and to reject any term or any idiom because it was
unknown to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison or to Franklin, to
Thackeray or to Hawthorne. Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision
as regards the propriety of any usage may be accepted as final. English
is a living tongue, and the great writers of every generation make
unhesitating use of words and of constructions which the great writers
of earlier generations were ignorant of or chose to ignore.

The most of these British innovations, both of to-day and of to-morrow,
will be individual and freakish; and, therefore, they will win no
foothold even in the British vocabulary. But a few of them will prove
their own excuse for being, and these will establish themselves in
Great Britain. The best of them, those of which the necessity is
indisputable, will spread across the Atlantic and will be welcomed by
the main body of users of English over here--just as certain American
innovations and revivals were hospitably received in England when
only the smaller branch of the English-speaking race was on the
American side of the ocean. And, of course, the new terms which spring
into existence in the United States after the literary center of the
language has crossed the Atlantic will be carried over to England in
books and in periodicals.

When the bulk of contemporary English literature is produced by
American authors, and when the British themselves have accepted the
situation and resigned themselves at last to the departure of the
literary supremacy of London, then the weight of American precedent
will be overwhelming. Without knowing it, British readers of American
books will be led to conform to American usage; and American terms will
not seem outlandish to them, as these words and phrases do even now,
when comparatively few American authors are read in Great Britain.
And these American innovations will be very few, for the conservative
instinct is in some ways stronger in the United States than it is in
Great Britain, due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread popular
education here, which gives to every child a certain solidarity with
the past.

It is education and the school-book; it is the printing-press and
the newspaper and the magazine; it is the ease of travel across the
Atlantic and the swiftness of the voyage;--it is a combination of all
these things which will prevent any development of a British branch
of the language after the numerical preponderance of the American
people becomes overwhelming. And working toward the same union is a
loyal conservatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoyment of the great
literature of the language, the common possession of both British and
Americans, having its past in the keeping of the elder division of the
stock, and certain to transfer its future to the care of the younger
division.

To declare that the literary center of English is to be transferred
sooner or later from the British Isles to the United States may seem
to some a hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as any prophecy
before the event can hope to be. Such a transfer, it is true, is
perhaps unprecedented in literary history,--altho the scholar may see
a close parallel in the preëminence once attained by Alexandria as the
capital of Greek culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or not, the
transfer is inevitable sooner or later.

 (1899)




V

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE


It is a reflection upon what we are wont to term a liberal education
that the result of college training sometimes appears to be rather a
narrowing of the mental outlook than the broadening we have a right
to anticipate. What a student ought to have got from his four years
of labor is a conviction of the vastness of human knowledge and a
proper humility, due to his discovery that he himself possesses only an
infinitesimal fraction of the total sum. Many graduates--indeed, most
of them nowadays, we may hope--have attained to this much of wisdom:
that they are not puffed up by the few things they do know, so much
as made modest by the many things they cannot but admit themselves
to be ignorant of. With the increasing specialization of the higher
education, the attitude of the graduate is likely to be increasingly
humble; and a college man will not be led to feel that he is expected
to know everything about everything.

Perhaps the disputatious arrogance of a few of the younger graduates
of an earlier generation was due to the dogmatism of the teaching
they sat under. In nothing is our later instruction more improved
than in the disappearance of this authoritative tone--due in great
measure, it may be, to the unsettling of old theories by new facts.
In no department of learning was the manner more dogmatic than in the
teaching of the English language. The older rhetoricians had no doubts
at all on the subject. They never hesitated as to the finality of their
own judgment on all disputed points. They were sure that they knew
just what the English language ought to be; and it never entered into
their heads to question their own competence to declare the standard of
speech. Yet, as a matter of fact, they knew little of the long history
of the language, and they had no insight into the principles that were
governing its development. At most, their information was limited to
the works of their immediate predecessors; and for a more remote past
they had the same supreme contempt they were ever displaying toward the
actual present. Thus they were ever ready to lay down rules made up out
of their own heads; and their acts were as arbitrary as their attitude
was intolerant.

In his ‘Philosophy of Rhetoric,’ which he tells us was planned in
1750, Dr. George Campbell quotes with approval Dr. Johnson’s assertion
that the “terms of the laboring and mercantile part of the people”
are mere “fugitive cant,” not to be “regarded as part of the durable
matter of a language.” Dr. Campbell himself refuses to consider it
as an evidence of reputable and present use that a word or a phrase
has been employed by writers of political pamphlets or by speakers in
the House of Commons, and he declares that he has selected his prose
examples “neither from living authors, nor from those who wrote before
the Revolution: not from the first, because an author’s fame is not so
firmly established in his lifetime; nor from the last, that there may
be no suspicion that his style is superannuated.” Now contrast this
narrow-mindedness with the liberality discoverable in our more recent
text-books--in the ‘Elements of Rhetoric,’ for example, of Professor
George R. Carpenter, who tells us frankly that “whenever usage seems to
differ, one’s own taste and sense must be called into play.” Professor
Carpenter then pleads “for a considerable degree of tolerance in such
matters. If we know what a man means, and if his usage is in accordance
with that of a large number of intelligent and educated people, it
cannot justly be called incorrect. For language rests, at bottom, on
convention or agreement, and what a large body of reputable people
recognize as a proper word or a proper meaning of a word cannot be
denied its right to a place in the English vocabulary.”

For an Englishman to object to an Americanism as such, regardless
of its possible propriety or of its probable pertinence, and for an
American to object to a Briticism as such--either of these things is
equivalent to a refusal to allow the English language to grow. It is
to insist that it is good enough now and that it shall not expand in
response to future needs. It is to impose on our written speech a
fatal rigidity. It is an attempt on the part of pedants so to bind the
limbs of the language that a vigorous life will soon be impossible.
With all such efforts those who have at heart the real welfare of our
tongue will have no sympathy--least of all the strong men of literature
who are forever ravenous after new words and old. Victor Hugo, for
example, so far back as 1827, when the modern science of linguistics
was still in its swaddling-clothes, had no difficulty in declaring the
truth. “The French language,” he wrote in the preface to ‘Cromwell,’
“is not fixed, and it never will be. A living language does not fix
itself. Mind is always on the march, or, if you will, in movement, and
languages move with it.... In vain do our literary Joshuas command the
language to stand still; neither the language nor the sun stands still
any more. The day they do they fix themselves; it will be because they
are dying. That is why the French of a certain contemporary school is a
dead language.”

In the ‘Art of French Poetry,’ first printed in 1565, Ronsard, one
of the most adroit of Victor Hugo’s predecessors in the mastery of
verse, proffers this significant advice to his fellow-craftsmen (I am
availing myself of the satisfactory translation of Professor B. W.
Wells): “You must choose and appropriate dexterously to your work the
most significant words of the dialects of our France, especially if you
have not such good or suitable words in your own dialect; and you must
not mind whether the words are of Gascony, of Poitiers, of Normandy,
Manche, or Lyonnais, as long as they are good and signify exactly what
you want to say.... And observe that the Greek language would never
have been so rich in dialects or in words had it not been for the great
number of republics that flourished at that time, ... whence came many
dialects, all held without distinction as good by the learned writers
of those times. For a country can never be so perfect in all things
that it cannot borrow sometimes from its neighbors.”

Here we have Ronsard declaring clearly that local varieties of speech
are most useful to the common tongue. Indeed, we may regard the dialect
of any district as a cache--a hidden storehouse--at which the language
may replenish itself whenever its own supplies are exhausted. Whoever
has had occasion to study any of these dialects, whether in Greek
or in French or in English, must have been delighted often at the
freshness and the force of words and phrases unexpectedly discovered.
Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, made an affectionate
collection of Suffolk sea-phrases, and from these a dozen might be
culled, or a score or more, by the use of which the English language
would be the gainer. Lowell’s loving and learned analysis of the speech
of his fellow New-Englanders is familiar to all readers of the ‘Biglow
Papers.’ It was Lowell also who has left us this brilliant definition:
“True Americanisms are self-cocking phrases or words that are wholly of
our own make, and do their work shortly and sharply at a pinch.”

Characteristically witty this definition is, no doubt, but not wholly
adequate. What is an Americanism? And what is a Briticism? Not long ago
a friendly British writer rebuked his fellow-countrymen for a double
failing of theirs--for their twin tricks of assuming, first, that every
vulgarism unfamiliar to them is an Americanism, and that therefore,
and secondly, every Americanism is a vulgarism. In the mouths of many
British speakers “Americanism” serves as a term of reproach; and so
does “Briticism” in the mouths of some American speakers. But this
should not be; the words ought to be used with scientific precision and
with no flush of feeling. Before using them, we must ascertain with
what exact meaning it is best to employ them.

An American investigator gathered together a dozen or two queer words
and phrases that he had noted in recent British books and journals,
and as they were then wholly unknown to America, he branded them as
Briticisms, only to evoke a prompt protest from Mr. Andrew Lang. For
the stigmatized words and phrases Mr. Lang proffered no defense; but
he boldly denied that it was fair to call them Briticisms. True, one
or another of them had been detected in pages of this or that British
author. Yet they were not common property: they were individualisms;
they were to be charged against each separate perpetrator and not
against the whole United Kingdom. Mr. Lang maintained that when Walter
Pater used so odd a term as _evanescing_, this use “scarcely makes it a
Briticism; it was a Paterism.”

This is a plea in confession and avoidance, but its force is
indisputable. To admit it, however, gives us a right to insist that the
same justice shall be meted out to the so-called Americanisms which
Mr. Lang has more than once held up to British execration. If the use
of an ill-made word like _essayette_ or _leaderette_ or _sermonette_
by one or more British writers does not make it a Briticism until it
can be proved to have come into general use in Great Britain, then,
of course, the verbal aberrations of careless Americans, or even the
freakish dislocations of the vocabulary indulged in by some of our
more acrobatic humorists, does not warrant a British writer in calling
any chance phrase of theirs an Americanism. Mr. W. S. Gilbert once
manufactured the verb “to burgle,” and Mr. Gilbert is a British writer
of good repute; but _burgling_ is not therefore a Briticism: it is a
Gilbertism. Mr. Edison, an inventor of another sort, once affirmed that
a certain article giving an account of his kineto-phonograph had his
“entire indorsation.” According to Mr. Lang’s theory, _indorsation_,
not being in use generally in the United States, is not an Americanism:
it is an Edisonism.

The more Mr. Lang’s theory is considered, the sounder it will appear.
Individual word-coinages are not redeemable at the national treasury
either in the United Kingdom or in the United States. Before a word or
a phrase can properly be called a Briticism or an Americanism there
must be proof that it has won its way into general use on its own side
of the Atlantic. _Right away_ for “at once” is an Americanism beyond
all dispute, for it is wide-spread throughout the United States;
and so is _back of_ for “behind.” _Directly_ for “as soon as” is a
Briticism equally indisputable; and so is _different to_ for “different
from.” In each of these four cases there has been a local divergence
from the traditional usage of the English language. All four of these
divergences may be advantageous, and all four of them may even be
accepted hereafter on both sides of the Atlantic; but just now there is
no doubt that two of them are fairly to be called Americanisms and two
of them are properly to be recorded as Briticisms.

Every student of our speech knows that true Americanisms are abundant
enough; but the omission of terms casually employed here and there,
seed that fell by the wayside, springing up only to wilt away--the
omission of all individualisms of this sort simplifies the list
immensely, just as a like course of action in England cuts down the
number of Briticisms fairly to be catalogued as such. It must be
remarked, however, that the collecting of so-called Americanisms
is a pastime that has been carried on since the early years of the
nineteenth century, whereas it was only in the closing decades of that
century that attention was called to the existence of Briticisms, and
to the necessity of a careful collection of them. The bulky tomes which
pretend to be ‘Dictionaries of Americanisms’ are stuffed with words
and phrases having no right there.

These dictionaries would be very slim if they contained only true
Americanisms, that is to say, words and phrases in common use in the
United States and not in common use in the United Kingdom. Yet they
would be slimmer still if another limitation is imposed on the use
of the word. Is a term fairly to be called an Americanism if it can
be shown to have been formerly in use in England, even though it may
there have dropped out of sight in the past century or two? Now,
everybody knows that dozens of so-called Americanisms are good old
English, neglected by the British and allowed to die out over there,
but cherished and kept alive over here. Such is _guess_=“incline to
think”; such is _realise_=“to make certain or substantial”; such is
_reckon_=“consider” or “deem”; such is _a few_=“a little”; such is
_nights_=“at night”; and such are dozens of other words often foolishly
animadverted upon as indefensible Americanisms, and all of them solidly
established in honorable ancestry. An instructive collection of these
survivals can be seen in Mr. H. C. Lodge’s aptly entitled and highly
interesting essay on ‘Shakspere’s Americanisms.’

It is with an amused surprise that an American in his occasional
reading keeps coming across in the pages of British authors of one
century or another what he had supposed to be Americanisms, and even
what he had taken sometimes for mere slang. The _cert_ of the New York
street-boy, apparently a contraction of _certainly_, is it not rather
the _certes_ of the Elizabethans? And the interrogative _how?_=“what
is it?”--a usage abhorred by Dr. Holmes,--this can be discovered in
Massinger’s plays more than once (‘Duke of Milan,’ iii. 3, and ‘Believe
as You List,’ ii. 2). “I’m _pretty considerably_ glad to see you,” says
Manuel, in Colley Cibber’s ‘She Would and She Would Not.’ _To fire
out_=“expel forcibly,” is in Shakspere’s Sonnets and also in ‘Ralph
Roister Doister’--altho, perhaps, with a slightly different connotation
from that now obtaining in America. A theatrical manager nowadays likes
to have the first performance of a new play out of town so that he can
come to the metropolis with a perfected work, and he calls this _trying
it on the dog_; the same expression, almost, is to be found in Pope. In
‘Pickwick,’ Sam Weller proposes to _settle the hash_ of an opponent;
and in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ we find _down to the ground_ used as
a superlative, and quite in our own later sense. The Southern _peart_
is in ‘Lorna Doone,’ and the Southwestern _dog-gone it_ is in the
‘Little Minister.’ In Mr. Barrie’s story also do we find _to go back on
your word_; just as in Mr. William Watson’s ‘Excursions in Criticism’
we discover _grit_=“staying power” or “doggedness.”

Very amusing indeed is the attitude of the ordinary British newspaper
reviewer toward words and phrases in this category. Not being a scholar
in English, he is unaware that scholarship is a condition precedent to
judgment; and he is swift to denounce as American innovations terms
firmly rooted in the earlier masters of the language, while he passes
the frequent Briticisms in the pages of contemporary London writers
without a hint of reproof. From a British author like Rossetti he
accepts “the _gracile_ spring,” while he rejects “_gracile_ ease” in
an American author like Mr. Howells. Behind this arrogant ignorance
is to be perceived the assumption that the English language is in
immediate peril of disease and death from American license if British
newspapers fail to do their duty. The shriller the shriek of protest
is, the slighter the protester’s competence upon the question at issue.
No outcry against the deterioration of English in America has come from
any of the British scholars who can speak with authority about the
language.

What we Americans have done is to keep alive or to revive many a good
old English term; and for this service to our common speech our British
cousins ought to be properly grateful. We must admit that words and
phrases and usages thus reinstated are not true Americanisms--however
much we might like to claim them for our very own. We have already
seen that most of the individualisms of eccentric or careless writers
are also not to be received as true Americanisms. And there is yet a
third group of so-called Americanisms not fairly entitled to the name.
These are the terms devised in the United States to meet conditions
unknown in England. Here is no divergence from the accepted usage of
the language, but a development of the common tongue to satisfy a
new necessity. The need for the new word or phrase was first felt in
America, and here the new term had to be found to supply the immediate
want. But the word itself, altho frankly of American origin, is not
to be styled an Americanism. It is a new English word, that is all--a
word to be used hereafter in the United Kingdom as in the United
States. It is an American contribution to the English language; but
it is not an Americanism--if we limit Americanism to mean a term
having currency only in North America, just as Briticism means a term
having currency only in the British Islands. The new thing exists now,
and as it came into existence in America, we stood sponsors for it;
but the name we gave it is its name once for all, to be used by the
British and the Australians and the Canadians as well as by ourselves.
_Telephone_, for example,--both the thing and the word are of American
invention,--is there any one so foolish as to call _telephone_ an
Americanism?

These American contributions to the English language are not a
few. Some of them are brand-new words, minted at the minute of
sudden demand, and well made or ill made, as chance would have it;
_phonograph_ is one of these; _dime_ is another; and _typewriter_
is a third. Some of them are old words wrenched to a new use, like
_elevator_=“storehouse for grain,” and like _ticker_=“telegraphic
printing-machine.” Some of them are taken from foreign tongues, either
translated, like _statehouse_ (from the Dutch), or unchanged, like
_prairie_ (from the French), _adobe_ (from the Spanish), and _stoop_
(from the Dutch). Some of them are borrowed from the rude tongues of
our predecessors on this continent, like _moccasin_ and _tomahawk_ and
_wigwam_. To be compared with this last group are the words adopted
into English from the native languages of India--_punka_, for example.
And I make no doubt that the Australians have taken over from the
aborigines round about them more than one word needed in a hurry as a
name for something until then nameless in our common language because
the something itself was until then unknown or unnoticed. But these
Australian contributions to English cannot be called Australianisms
any more than _telephone_ and _prairie_ and _wigwam_ can be called
Americanisms.

So far the attempt has been here made to subtract from the immense and
heterogeneous mass of so-called Americanisms three classes of terms
falsely so called: first, the mere individualisms, for which America as
a whole has a right to shirk the responsibility; second, the survivals
in the United States of words and usages that happen to have fallen
into abeyance in Great Britain; and, third, the American contributions
to the English language. As to each of these three groups the case
is clear enough; but as to a fourth group, which ought also to be
deducted, one cannot speak with quite so much confidence.

This group would include the peculiarities of speech existing
sporadically in this or that special locality and contributing what
are often called the American dialects--the Yankee dialect first of
all, then the dialect of the Appalachian mountaineers, the dialect of
the Western cow-boys, etc. Are these localisms fairly to be classed as
Americanisms? The question, so far as I know, has never been raised
before, for it has been taken for granted that if any such things as
Americanisms existed at all, they could surely be collected from the
mouth of Hosea Biglow. And yet if we pause to think, we cannot but
admit that the so-called Yankee dialect is local, that it is unknown
outside of New England, and that a majority of the inhabitants of the
United States find it almost as strange in their ears as the broad
Scotch of Burns. As for the so-called dialect of the cow-boy, it is not
a true dialect at all; it is simply carelessly colloquial English with
a heavy infusion of fugitive slang; and whatever it may be in itself,
it is local to the cow-country. The Appalachian dialect is perhaps more
like a true dialect; but it is even less wide-spread than either of the
others here picked out for consideration. No one of these three alleged
dialects is in any sense national; all three of them are narrowly
local--altho the New England speech has spread more or less into the
middle west.

Perhaps some light on this puzzle may be had by considering how they
regard a similar problem in England itself. The local dialects which
still abound throughout the British Isles are under investigation, each
by itself. No one has ever suggested the lumping of them all together
as Briticisms. Indeed, the very definition of Briticism would debar
this. What is a Briticism but a term frequently used throughout Great
Britain and not accepted in the United States? And if this definition
is acceptable, we are forced to declare that an Americanism is a term
frequently used throughout the United States and not accepted in Great
Britain. The terms of the Yankee dialect, of the Appalachian, and of
the cow-boy, are localisms; they are not frequently used throughout the
United States; they are not to be classed as Americanisms any more than
the cockney idioms, the Wessex words, and the Yorkshire phrases are to
be classed as Briticisms.

It is greatly to be regretted that Dr. Murray and Mr. Bradley and the
other editors of the comprehensive Oxford Dictionary have not been
so careful as they might be in identifying the locality of American
dialectic peculiarities. They have taken great pains to record and
circumscribe British dialectic peculiarities; but they are in the habit
of appending a vague and misleading (U. S.) to such American words and
usages as they may set down. It is to be hoped that they may hereafter
aim at a greater exactness in their attributions, since their present
practice is quite misleading, as it often suggests that a term is a
true Americanism, used freely throughout the United States, when it is
perhaps merely an individualism or at best a localism.

Of true Americanisms there are not so very many left, when we have
ousted from their usurped places these four groups of terms having
no real title to the honorable name. And true Americanisms might be
subdivided again into two groups, the one containing the American
terms for which there are equivalent Briticisms, thus indicating a
divergence of usage, and the other including only the words and phrases
which have sprung up here without correlative activity on the other
side of the Atlantic.

When the attempt is made to set up parallel columns of Briticisms
and Americanisms, each more or less equal to the other, it is with
surprise that we discover how few of these equivalencies there
are. In other words, the variations of usage between Great Britain
and the United States are infrequent. In England the railway was
preceded by the stage-coach, and in America the railroad was
preceded rather by the river steamboat; and probably this accounts
for the slight differentiation observable in the vocabulary of the
traveler. But this is not the reason why we in America make misuse
of a French word, _dépôt_, while the British prefer the Latin word
_terminus_,--restricting its application accurately to the terminal
station of a line. In England they name him a _guard_ whom we in
America name _brakeman_ or _trainman_; and it is to be noted that
when Stevenson was an Amateur Emigrant he sought to use the word of
the country and so mentions the _brakesman_--thus proving again the
difficulty of attaining exactness in local usage. The British call
that a _goods-train_ which we call a _freight-train_; and they speak
of a _crossing-plate_ when they mean what we know as a _frog_. In the
United States a _sleeping-car_ is often termed a _sleeper_, whereas
in Great Britain what they call a _sleeper_ is what we here call a
_tie_. They say a _keyless watch_ where we say a _stem-winder_. They
say _leader_ where we say _editorial_. They call that a _lift_ which
we call an _elevator_; and we call him a _farm-hand_ whom they call
an _agricultural laborer_. They have even borrowed one Americanism,
_caucus_, and made it a Briticism by changing its meaning to signify
what we are wont to describe as the _machine_ or the _organisation_.
It is to be noted also that _corn_ in England refers to _wheat_ and
in America to _maize_; and that in Great Britain _calico_ is a plain
cotton cloth and in the United States a printed cotton cloth.

This list of correlative Americanisms and Briticisms might be extended,
of course; but however sweeping our investigations may be we cannot
make it very long. Far longer is the list of American words and phrases
and usages for which there is no British equivalent--far too long,
indeed, for inclusion in this essay. All that can be done here and
now is to pick up a surface specimen or two from the outcroppings to
show the quality of the vein. For instance, the vocabulary of the
university is largely indigenous--altho we have recently borrowed
a British vulgarism, speaking now of the _varsity team_ and the
_varsity crew_. _Campus_ seems to be unknown to the British, and so
does _sophomoric_, a most useful epithet understood at once all over
the United States. Its absence from the British vocabulary is probably
due to the fact that the four-year course of the old-fashioned American
college is unknown in England, where there are _freshmen_ indeed, but
no _sophomores_.

Going out from the academic groves to the open air of the wider West,
as so many of our college graduates do every year, we meet with a host
of Americanisms vigorous with the free life of the great river and
of the grand mountains. But is _blaze_=“to mark a trail through the
woods by chipping off bits of bark”--is this a true Americanism? Is it
not rather an American contribution to the English language? Surely
every man in Africa or in Asia who wishes to retrace his path through
a virgin forest must needs _blaze_ his way as he goes. But _shack_=“a
cabin of logs driven perpendicularly into the ground”--this is a true
Americanism undoubtedly. And its compound _claim-shack_=“a shack built
to hold a claim on a preëmption”--this is another true Americanism
likely to puzzle a British reader. Even _preëmpt_ and _preëmption_ are
probably Americanisms in that they have with us a meaning somewhat
different from that they may have on the other side of the Atlantic.
Another true Americanism, which comes to us from the plains, is
_mavericks_=“the unbranded cattle at large to become the property of
the first ranch-owner whose men may chance upon them.” And _ranch_,
while it is itself a contribution to the language, has usages in which
it is an Americanism merely--as in the Californian _hen-ranch_, for
example.

There is a large freedom about the Western vernacular and a swift
directness not elsewhere observable in the English language, whether
in the United States or in the British Empire. These are most valuable
qualities, and they are likely to be of real service to English in
helping to refresh the jaded vocabulary of more scholarly communities.
The function of slang as a true feeder of language is certain to get
itself more widely recognized as time goes on; and there is no better
nursery for these seedlings of speech than the territory west of the
Mississippi and east of the Rockies. To say this is not to say that
there are not to be found east of the Mississippi many interesting
locutions still inadequately established in the language. For example,
there are three words applied to the same thing in different parts of
the East; perhaps they ought to be styled localisms, but as they would
be comprehended all over the United States, they are probably entitled
to be received as true Americanisms--if, on the other hand, they are
not in fact good old English words. A pass through the hills is often
called a _notch_ in the White Mountains, a _clove_ in the Catskills,
and a _gap_ in the Blue Ridge. Yet even as I write this I have my
doubts as to there being any narrow geographical delimitation of usage,
since I can recall a Parker Notch in the Catskills, not far from Stony
Clove and Kaaterskill Clove.

One of the best known of true Americanisms is _lumber_=“timber.” When
we speak of the _lumbering_ industry we mean not only the cutting down
of trees and their sawing up into planks, but also their marketing.
From the apparent participle _lumbering_ a verb has been made _to
lumber_--a not uncommon process in the history of the language, one
British analog being the making of the verb _to bant_ from the innocent
name of Mr. Banting. _To lumber_ is apparently now used in the sense
of _to deforest_, if we may rely on a newspaper paragraph which
informed us that a certain tract of twenty-five thousand acres in the
Adirondacks had “been lumbered, but not in such a way as to injure
it for a park.” The verb _to launder_=“to wash,” has been revived of
late in America, if indeed it has not been made anew from the noun
_laundry_; and shirt-makers in their price-lists specify whether
the shirts are to be sold _laundered_ or _unlaundered_. And to the
word _laundry_ itself has been given a further extension of meaning.
In New York, at least,--and the verbal fashions of the metropolis
spread swiftly throughout the Union,--it signifies not only the place
where personal linen is washed but the personal linen itself. An
advertisement in a college magazine informed the lone student that
“gentlemen’s _laundry_” was “mended free.”

When an American student of English printed a collection of Briticisms
in which more than one strange wild fowl of speech had been snared on
the wing in newspapers and advertisements, Mr. Andrew Lang protested
against the acceptance of phrases so gathered as representative
Briticisms; and it is only fair to admit that they represented
colloquial or industrial rather than literary usage. Yet they were
interesting in that they gave us a glimpse of the actual speech of the
common people--just such a glimpse, in fact, as we get from the Roman
inscriptions. This actual speech of the people, whether in Rome or in
London or in New York, is the real language, of which the literary
dialect is but a sublimation. Language is born in the mouth, altho it
dies young unless it is brought up by hand. Language is made sometimes
in the library, it is true, and in the parlor also, but far more often
in the workshop and on the sidewalk; and nowadays the newspaper and
the advertisement record for us the simple and unstilted phrases of the
workshop and the sidewalk.

The most of these will fade out of sight unregretted; but a few will
prove themselves possessed of sturdy vitality. Briticisms, it may be,
or Americanisms, as it happens, they will fight their way up from the
workshop to the library, from the sidewalk to the study. Born in a
single city, they will serve usefully throughout a great nation, and
perhaps in the end all over the world, wherever our language is spoken.

The ideal of style, so it has been tersely put, is the speech of the
people in the mouth of the scholar. One reason why so much of the
academic writing of educated men is arid is because it is as remote
as may be from the speech of the people. One reason why Mark Twain
and Rudyard Kipling are now the best-beloved authors of the English
language is because they have each of them a welcome ear for the speech
of the people. Mark Twain abounds in true Americanisms; on the other
hand, Rudyard Kipling is sparing of real Briticisms--having, indeed,
a certain hankering after Americanisms. Kipling’s case is not unlike
that of Æschylus, who was a native of Greece but a frequent resident
in Sicily, and in whose vocabulary occasional Sicilianisms have been
found by the keen-eyed German critics. So Plautus greedily availed
himself of the vigorous fertility he discovered in the vocabulary of
the Roman populace; and when Cicero went to the works of Plautus for
the words he needed, we had once more the speech of the people in the
mouth of the scholar.

Something of the toploftiness of the elder rhetoricians yet lingers
in the tone many British writers of to-day see fit to adopt whenever
they take occasion to discuss the use of the English language here in
America. A trenchant critic like Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a lecture
on the masters of style, went out of his way to warn his hearers
that though they might be familiar in their writing they were by no
means to be vulgar. “At any rate, be easy, colloquial if you like,
but shun those vocables which come to us across the Atlantic, or from
Newmarket and Whitechapel.” This linking of America and Whitechapel
may seem to us to be rather vulgar than familiar; and it was Goethe--a
master of style well known to Mr. Harrison--who reminded us that
“when self-esteem expresses itself in contempt of another, be he the
meanest, it must be repellant.” It is only fair to say that fewer
British writers than ever before sink to so low a level as this; and
it is right to admit that a definite recognition of the American
joint-ownership of the English language is not now so rare as once it
was in England.

Not often, however, do we find so frank and ungrudging acknowledgment
of the exact truth as is to be found in Mr. William Archer’s ‘America
To-day.’ Part of one of the Scotch critic’s paragraphs calls for
quotation here because it sets forth, perhaps more clearly and
concisely than any American has yet dared to do, what the facts of the
case really are:

“There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has
gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American
continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret
the ‘form and pressure’ of life--the experience, knowledge, thought,
emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. This being so,
the more tap-roots a language sends down into the soil of life, and
the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its
nourishment, whether of vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be
its potentialities as a medium of expression. We must be careful, it
is true, to keep the organism healthy, to guard against disintegration
of tissue; but to that duty American writers are quite as keenly alive
as we. It is not a source of weakness but of power and vitality to
the English language that it should embrace a greater variety of
dialects than any other civilized tongue. A new language, says the
proverb, is a new sense; but a multiplicity of dialects means, for the
possessors of the main language, an enlargement of the pleasures of the
linguistic sense without the fatigue of learning a totally new grammar
and vocabulary. So long as there is a potent literary tradition keeping
the core of the language one and indivisible, vernacular variations can
only tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to promote the
abundance, suppleness, and nicety of adaptation of the language as a
literary instrument. The English language is no mere historic monument,
like Westminster Abbey, to be religiously preserved as a relic of the
past, and reverenced as the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants.
It is a living organism, ceaselessly busied, like any other organism,
in the processes of assimilation and excretion.”

 (1899)




VI

NEW WORDS AND OLD


Not long before the opening of the splendid exhibition which, for the
short space of six months, made Chicago the most interesting city in
the world, its leading literary journal editorially rejoiced that
English was becoming a world-language, but sorrowed also that it was
sadly in danger of corruption, especially from the piebald jargon of
our so-called dialect stories. Not long before the celebration of
the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria a notorious sensation-monger
of London, having founded a review in which to exploit himself,
proclaimed that English was in a parlous state, and that something
ought to be done at once or the language would surely die. The Chicago
editor was grieved at the sorry condition of our language in the
United States, while the London editor wept over its wretched plight
in Great Britain. The American journalist called upon us to take
pattern by the British; and the British journalist cried out for an
Academy like that of the French to lay down laws for the speaking of
our mother-tongue--intending perhaps to propose later the revival of
the pillory or of the ducking-stool for those who shall infringe the
stringent provisions of the new code.

There is nothing novel in these shrill outbreaks, which serve only to
alarm the timid and to reveal an unhesitating ignorance of the history
of our language. The same kind of protest has been made constantly ever
since English has been recognized as a tongue worthy of preservation
and protection; and it would be easy to supply parallels without
number, some of them five hundred years old. A single example will
probably suffice. In Steele’s ‘Tatler’ Swift wrote a letter denouncing
“the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our
English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual
corruption of our style.” Here we find the ‘Tatler’ (of London) in the
first decade of the eighteenth century saying exactly what the ‘Dial’
(of Chicago) echoed in the last decade of the nineteenth. But the
earlier writer had an excuse the later writer was without; Swift wrote
before the history of our language was understood.

We know now that growth is a condition of life; and that only a dead
language is rigid. We know now that it is dangerous to elevate the
literary diction too far above the speech of the plain people. We
have found out that nobody in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin;
Cicero did not speak it himself; he did not even write it naturally;
he wrote it with an effort and not always to his own satisfaction
at the first attempt. We have discovered that there was a wide gap
between the elegance of the orator’s polished periods and the uncouth
bluntness of the vulgar tongue of the Roman people; and we believe
that this divergence was broader than that between the perfect style
of Hawthorne, for example, and the every-day dialect of Salem or of
Concord.

By experts like Whitney we are told that there has been less structural
modification of our language in the second half of the nineteenth
century than in any other fifty-year period of its existence. Our
vocabulary has been enormously enriched, but the skeleton of our speech
has been only a little developed. With the decrease in illiteracy
the conserving force of the printing-press must always hereafter
make change increasingly difficult--even in the obvious cases where
improvement is possible. The indirect influence of the novelist and the
direct influence of the schoolmaster--very powerful each of them and
almost irresistible when united--will always be exerted on the side of
the conservatives. To seize these facts firmly and to understand their
applications is to have ready always an ample answer for all those who
chatter about the impending corruption of our noble tongue.

But we may go further. The study of history shows us that the future
of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not
upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not
upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its
orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of
the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent
upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent
upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British
and the Americans. A language is but the instrument of those who use
it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own
merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of
the masterful English stock. It must rise and fall with us who speak
it. “No speech can do more than express the ideas of those who employ
it at the time,” so a recent historian of our language has reminded us.
“It cannot live upon its past meanings, or upon the past conceptions of
great men that have been recorded in it, any more than the race which
uses it can live upon its past glory or its past achievements.”

When we have once possessed ourselves of the inexorable fact that it
is not in our power to warp the development of our language by any
conscious effort, we can listen with amused toleration to the excited
outcries of those who are constantly protesting against this or that
word or phrase or usage which may seem to them new and therefore
unjustifiable. We discover also that the self-appointed legislators
who lay down the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in exact
proportion to their ignorance of the history of the language.

“Every word we speak,” so Dr. Holmes told us, “is the medal of a dead
thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn
smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to
another.” We must admit that these chance medalists of language have
not always been gifted artists or skilled craftsmen, so the words of
their striking are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always respected
the standard, so there is counterfeit coin in circulation sometimes.
Even when the word is sterling and well minted, be it new or old,

  Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
      And now of a Bloody Mary,

the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the reserve, to be
misrepresented by a shabby paper promise to pay. So fierce is the
popular demand for an increased _per capita_ that the verbal currency
is ever in danger of debasement. This is the apparent justification
of the self-appointed tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of
their own and who venture to throw out much false coin. Their tests are
trustworthy now and again; but more often than not the pieces they have
nailed to the counter are of full weight and ought to pass current.

“There is a purism,” Whitney said, “which, while it seeks to maintain
the integrity of the language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too
fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and colloquial
expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue
than to rush into the opposite extreme.” And Professor Lounsbury goes
further and asserts that our language is not to-day in danger from
the agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it, but rather “from
ignorant efforts made to preserve what is called its purity.” And
elsewhere the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that “the history
of language is the history of corruptions,” and that “the purest of
speakers uses every day, with perfect propriety, words and forms which,
looked at from the point of view of the past, are improper, if not
scandalous.”

There would be both interest and instruction in a list of the many
words securely intrenched in our own vocabulary to-day which were
bitterly assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises himself for
his valiant effort against certain of these intruders: “I have done my
utmost for some years past to stop the progress of _mob_ and _banter_,
but have been plainly borne down by numbers and betrayed by those who
promised to assist me.” Puttenham (or whoever it was that wrote the
anonymous ‘Arte of English Poesie,’ published in 1589) admitted the
need of certain words to which the purists might justly object, and
then adds that “many other like words borrowed out of the Latin and
French were not so well to be allowed by us,” citing then, among those
of which he disapproved, _audacious_, _egregious_, and _compatible_. In
the ‘Poetaster,’ acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston’s verbal
innovations, and among the words he reviled are _clumsy_, _inflate_,
_spurious_, _conscious_, _strenuous_, _defunct_, _retrograde_, and
_reciprocal_; and in his ‘Discoveries’ Jonson shrewdly remarked that
“a man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if
it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the
scorn is assured.”

Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, Jonson at the
beginning of the seventeenth, Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth;
and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find Lady Holland declaring
_influential_ to be a detestable word and asserting that she had tried
in vain to get Sheridan to forego it.

At the end of the nineteenth century the battle was still raging over
_standpoint_, for example, and over _reliable_ and over _lengthy_, and
over a score of others, all of which bid fair to establish themselves
ultimately because they supply a demand more or less insistent. The
fate is more doubtful of _photo_ for _photograph_ and of _phone_ for
_telephone_; they both strike us now as vulgarisms, just as _mob_ (and
for the same reason) struck Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in
time they will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as _mob_ has
survived it. Then there is the misbegotten verb, _to enthuse_, in my
sight the most hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate? Altho I
have detected it in the careful columns of the ‘Nation,’ it has not as
yet been adopted by any acknowledged master of English; none the less,
I fear me greatly, it has all the vitality of other ill weeds. And is
_bike_ going to get itself recognized as a substitute for _bicycle_,
both as verb and as noun? It seems to be possible, since a monosyllable
has always an advantage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths.

Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of words “when we are
already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our
language.” Then he wittily characterizes the process by which _mob_
had been made, _cab_ was to be made, and _photo_ is now in the making:
“Thus we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened
her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running
away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will
certainly answer the end: for I am sure no other nation will desire
to borrow them.” Swift was rash enough to assert that _speculation_,
_operation_, _preliminaries_, _ambassador_, _communication_, and
_battalion_ were words newly introduced, and also to prophesy that
they were too poly-syllabic to be able to endure many more campaigns.
As it happens no attempt has been made to shorten any one of them
except _speculation_, and it can hardly be maintained that _spec_ has
established itself. Certainly it has not disestablished _speculation_,
as _mob_ has driven out _mobile vulgus_.

Dryden declared that he traded “both with the living and the dead
for the enrichment of our native language”; but he denied that he
Latinized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he attempted have not
won acceptance. Lowell thought that Dryden did not add a single word
to the language, unless “he first used _magnetism_ in its present
sense of moral attraction.” Dr. Holmes also discovered that it is not
enough to make a new word when it is needed and to fashion it fitly;
its fortune still depends on public caprice or popular instinct. “I’ve
sometimes made new words,” he told a friend; “I made _chrysocracy_,
thinking it would take its place, but it didn’t; _plutocracy_, meaning
the same thing, was adopted instead.” But _anesthesia_ is a word of Dr.
Holmes’s making which has won its way not only in English but in most
of the other modern languages. It may be doubted whether a like fortune
will follow another word to be found quoted in one of his letters,
_aproposity_, a bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our language.

It is with surprise that in Stevenson’s very Scotch romance ‘David
Balfour’ we happen upon another malformation--_come-at-able_, hitherto
supposed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma. Elsewhere in
the same story we read “you _claim_ to be innocent,” a form which the
cockney critics are wont to call American. Stevenson in this novel
uses both the modern _jeopardize_ and the ancient _enjeopardy_. Just
why _to jeopardize_ should have driven _to jeopard_ out of use, it
is not easy to declare, nor why _leniency_ is supplanting _lenity_.
As _drunk_ seems to suggest total intoxication, it is possible to
discover the cause of the increasing tendency to say “I have _drank_.”
No defense is easy of _in our midst_ for _in the midst of us_, and
yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is a convenient short-cut. Dr.
Holmes confessed to Richard Grant White that he had used it once, and
that Edward Everett (who had also once fallen from grace) made him see
the error of his ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson’s ‘Amateur
Emigrant,’ and again in the ‘Res Judicatæ’ of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a
brisk essayist, altho not an impeccable stylist.

It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To call it a neologism
is but begging the question. Of necessity every word was new once.
It was “struck in the die of human experience,” to come back to Dr.
Holmes’s figure; and it is at its best before it is “worn smooth
by innumerable contacts.” Lowell thought it was a chief element of
Shakspere’s greatness that “he found words ready to his use, original
and untarnished--types of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by
repeated impressions.” He “found a language already established but not
yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers.” For the same reason
Mérimée delighted in Russian, because it was “young, the pedants not
having had time to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry.”

This native relish for the uncontaminated word it was that led Hugo and
Gautier to ransack all sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for
the unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rudyard Kipling to avail
himself of the technical terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not
merely because they are exact, but also because they are unexpected.
The device is dangerous, no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions
can find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot was a little too
fond of injecting into fiction the terminology of science, but there
was nothing blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabulary which
should be at the command of the novelist. Professor Dowden records
that when she used in a story words and phrases like _dynamic_ and
_natural selection_, the reviewer pricked up his delicate ears and
shied; and he makes bold to suggest that “if the thoroughbred critic
could only be led close up to _dynamic_, he would find that _dynamic_
would not bite.” Every lover of our language will sympathize with
Professor Dowden’s assertion that “a protest of common sense is really
called for against the affectation which professes to find obscurity
in words because they are trisyllabic or because they carry with them
scientific associations. Language, the instrument of literary art, is
an instrument of ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in an
age when the air is saturated with scientific thought, would be to
reject those accessions to the language which are the special gain of
the time.”

Where George Eliot erred--if err she did at all in this matter--was in
the use of scientific terms inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully,
whereby she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the purpose in
hand. Every writer needs to consider most carefully both the obvious
and the remote associations of the phrases he employs, that these may
intensify the thought he wishes to convey. A word is known by the
company it has kept. Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the
fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor. The magic of his
art lies largely in the syllables he selects, in their sound and in
their color. Not their meanings merely are important to him, but their
suggestions also--not what they denote more than what they connote. An
American psychologist has recently told us that every word has not only
its own note but also its overtones. With unconscious foresight, the
great poets have always acted on this theory.

Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have ever been ready to rescue
a cast-off word from the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle (of
Oxford) declares that “it has been one of the most interesting features
of the new vigor and independence of American literature, that it has
often displayed in a surprising manner what springs of novelty there
are in reserve and to be elicited by novel combinations”--a statement
more complimentary in its intent than felicitous in its phrasing. And
Professor Earle praises Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill
in enriching our modern English with the old words locked up out of
sight in the treasuries of the past. Lowell said of Emerson that “his
eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a
backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from
the mud of Cotton Mather himself.”

Of course this effort to recover the scattered pearls of speech,
dropped by the wayside in the course of the centuries, is peculiar
neither to the United States nor to the nineteenth century--altho
perhaps it has been carried further in our country and in our time
than anywhere else. Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old
Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused by an acrid critic of
having made a list of obsolete words, which he strove deliberately to
reintroduce into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought to do
with Chaucer’s vocabulary; and it is curious to reflect that, owing,
it may be, in part, to the example set by the author of the ‘Faerie
Queene,’ the language of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ is far less strange,
less remote, less archaic to us to-day than it was to the Elizabethans.

A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going on constantly. Words
are swiftly worn out and used up and thrown aside. New words are made
or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old words are impressed into
service and forced to do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary
completed than the editor sets about his inevitable supplement. And the
dictionary is not only of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate
in its definitions, for it may happen that a word will take on an
added meaning while the big book is at the bindery. Our language is
fluctuating always; and now one word and now another has expanded its
content or has shrunk away into insignificance. No definition is surely
stable for long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of his own style
_disgust_ was fairly equivalent to _dislike_; “and if a more massy way
of writing be never so much disgusted at this day, a better gust will
come on.”

Once upon a time _to aggravate_ meant to increase an offense; now it
is often used as tho it meant to irritate. Formerly _calculated_--as
in the sentence “it was _calculated_ to do harm”--implied a deliberate
intention to injure; now the idea of intention has been eliminated
and the sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to “it was likely
to do harm.” _Verbal_ is slowly getting itself accepted as synonymous
with _oral_, in antithesis to _written_. _Lurid_ was really _pale_,
_wan_, _ghastly_; but how often of late has it been employed as tho it
signified _red_ or _ruddy_ or _bloody_?

At first these new uses of these old words were slovenly and
inadmissible inaccuracies, but by sheer insistence they are winning
their pardon, until at last they will gain authority as they broaden
down from precedent to precedent. It is well to be off with the old
word before you are on with the new; and no writer who respects his
mother-tongue is ever in haste to take up with words thus wrested from
the primitive propriety.

But, as Dryden declared when justifying his modernizing of Chaucer’s
vocabulary, “Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to
be removed; customs are changed, and even statutes are silently
repealed when the reason ceases for which they were enacted.” It was
Dryden’s “Cousin Swift” who once declared that “a nice man is a man
of nasty ideas”--an assertion which I venture to believe to be wholly
incomprehensible to-day to the young ladies of England in whose mouths
_nice_ means _agreeable_ and _nasty_ means _disagreeable_. _Nice_
has suffered this inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States as
well as in Great Britain, but _nasty_ has not yet been emptied of its
original offensiveness here as it has over there. And even in British
speech the transformation is relatively recent; I think Stevenson was
guilty of an anachronism in ‘Weir of Hermiston’ when he put it in the
mouth of a young Scot.

If the Scotch have followed the evil example of the English in misusing
_nasty_, the English in turn have twisted the _ilk_ of North Britain
to serve their own ends. _Of that ilk_ is a phrase added to a man’s
surname to show that this name and the name of his estate are the same;
thus Bradwardine of Bradwardine would be called “Bradwardine _of that
ilk_.” But it is not uncommon now to see a phrase like “people of that
ilk,” meaning obviously “people of that sort.”

In like manner _awful_ and _terrible_ and _elegant_ have been so
misused as mere intensives that a careful writer now strikes them out
when they come off the end of his pen in their original meaning. So
_quite_ no longer implies _completely_ but is almost synonymous with
_somewhat_--_quite poor_ meaning _somewhat poor_ and _quite good_
meaning _pretty good_. _Unique_ is getting to imply merely excellent
or perhaps only unusual; its exact etymological value is departing
forever. _Creole_, which should be applied only to Caucasian natives of
tropical countries born of Latin parents, is beginning to carry with it
in the vulgar tongue of to-day a vague suspicion of negro blood.

While the perversion of _nice_ and _nasty_ is British, there is an
American perversion of _dirt_ not unlike it. To most Americans, I
think, _dirt_ suggests _earth_ or _soil_ or _clay_ or _dust_; to most
Americans, I think, _dirt_ no longer carries with it any suggestion
of _dirtiness_. I have heard a mother send her little boy off to make
mud-pies on condition that he used only “clean _dirt_”; and I know
that a lawn-tennis ground of compacted earth is called a _dirt_ court.
Yet, tho the noun has thus been defecated, the adjective keeps its
earlier force; and there even lingers something of the pristine value
in the noun itself when it is employed in the picturesque idiom of the
Rocky Mountains, where to be guilty of an underhand injury against any
one is _to do him dirt_. Lovers of Western verse will recall how the
frequenters of Casey’s table d’hôte went to see “Modjesky as Cameel,”
and how they sat in silence until the break occurs between the lover
and his mistress:

  At that Three-fingered Hoover says: “I’ll chip into this game,
  And see if Red Hoss Mountain cannot reconstruct the same.
  I won’t set by and see the feelin’s of a lady hurt--
  Gol durn a critter, anyhow, that does a woman dirt!”

Here no doubt, we have crossed the confines of slang; but having done
so, I venture upon an anecdote which will serve to show how completely
sometimes the newer meaning of a word substitutes itself for the older.
Two friends of mine were in a train of the elevated railroad, passing
through that formerly craggy part of upper New York which was once
called Shantytown and which now prefers to be known as Harlem. One of
them drew the attention of the other to the capering young capricorns
that sported over the blasted rocks by the side of the lofty track.
“Just look at those kids,” were the words he used. He was overheard
by a boy of the streets sitting in the next seat, who glanced out of
the window at once, but failed to discover the children he expected to
behold. Whereupon he promptly looked up and corrected my friend. “Them
’s not kids,” declared the urchin of Manhattan; “them’s little goats!”
In the mind of this native youngster there was no doubt at all as to
the meaning of the word _kid_; to him it meant _child_; and he would
have scorned any explanation that it ever had meant _young goat_.

In ignorance is certainty, and with increase of wisdom comes hesitancy.
For example, what does the word _romantic_ really mean? Few adjectives
are harder worked in the history of modern literature; and no two of
those who use it would agree upon its exact context. It suggests one
set of circumstances to the student of English literature, a second set
to a student of German literature, and a third to a student of French
literature; while every student of comparative literature must echo
Professor Kuno Francke’s longing for “the formation of an international
league for the suppression of the terms both _romanticism_ and
_classicism_.”

Other words there are almost as ambiguous--_philology_, for example,
and _college_ and _chapel_. By _classical philology_ we understand
the study of all that survives of the civilizations of Greece and
Rome, their languages, their literature, their laws, their arts. But
has _Romance philology_ or _Germanic philology_ so broad a basis? Has
_English philology_? To nine out of ten of us, this use of the word now
seems to put stress on the study of linguistics as against the study
of literature; to ninety-nine out of a hundred, I think, _philologist_
suggests the narrow student of linguistics; and therefore the wider
meaning seems likely soon to fall into innocuous desuetude.

The change in the application of _college_ is still in process of
accomplishment. In England a college was a place of instruction,
sometimes independent (as Eton College, in which case it is really a
high school) and sometimes a component part of a university (in which
case the rest of the organization is not infrequently non-existent).
An English university is not unlike a federation of colleges; and
the relation of Merton and Magdalen to Oxford is not unlike that of
Massachusetts and Virginia to the United States. In America _college_
and _university_ were long carelessly confused, as tho they were
interconvertible terms; but of late a sharp distinction is being set
up--a distinction quite different from that obtaining in England. In
this new American usage, a _college_ is a place where undergraduates
are trained, and a _university_ is a place where graduate-students
are guided in research. Thus the college gives breadth, and the
university adds depth. Thus the college provides general culture and
the university provides the opportunity of specialization. If we
accept this distinction,--and it has been accepted by all those who
discuss the higher education in America,--we are forced to admit that
the most of the self-styled universities of this country should be
called colleges; and we are allowed to observe that the college and
the university can exist side by side in the same institution, as at
Harvard and at Columbia. We are forced also to admit that what is known
in Great Britain as “University Extension” cannot fairly retain that
title here in the United States, since its object is not the extension
of university work, as we now understand the word _university_ here; it
is at most the extension of college work.

While this modification of the meaning of _college_ is being made in
America, a modification of _chapel_ has been made in England. At first
_chapel_ described a subordinate part of a _church_, devoted to special
services. By natural extension it came to denote a smaller edifice
subsidiary to a large church, as Grace Church, in New York, was once a
chapel of Trinity Church. But in the nineteenth century _chapel_ came
to be applied in England especially to the humbler meeting-houses of
the various sects of dissenters, while _church_ is reserved for the
places of worship of the established religion. Thus Sir Walter Besant
classifies the population of a riverside parish in London into those
who go to _church_ and those who go to _chapel_, having no doubt that
all his British readers will understand the former to be Episcopalians
and the latter Methodists or the like.

This is a Briticism not likely ever to be adopted in America. But
another Briticism bids fair to have a better fortune. Living as they
do on a little group of islands, the British naturally are in the
habit of referring to the rest of Europe as the _Continent_. They run
across the Channel to take a little tour “on the Continent.” They speak
of the pronunciation of Latin that obtains everywhere but in Great
Britain and Ireland as the _continental_ pronunciation. When they
wish to differentiate their authors, for instance, from the French
and the German and the Italians, they lump these last together as
the _continental_ authors. The division of Europe into _continental_
and _British_ is so convenient that it is certain to be adopted on
this side of the Atlantic. Already has a New York literary review,
after having had a series of papers on “Living Critics” (in which
were included both British writers and American), followed it with a
series of “Living Continental Critics” (in which the chief critics of
France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia were considered). Yet there is
no logic in this use of the word over here, since we Americans are not
insular; and since North America is a continent just as Europe is. As
it happens, the word _continental_ in a wholly contradictory meaning is
glorious in the history of the United States. Who does not know how,

  In their ragged regimentals,
  Stood the old Continentals,
      Yielding not?

None the less will the convenience of this British use of the word
outweigh its lack of logic in America--as convenience has so often
overridden far more serious considerations. Language is only a
tool, after all; and it must ever be shaped to fit the hand that
uses it. This is why another illogical misuse of a word will get
itself recognized as legitimate sooner or later--the limitations of
_American_ to mean only that which belongs to the United States. When
we speak of American ideas we intend to exclude not only the ideas of
South America but also those of Mexico and of Canada; we are really
arrogating to ourselves a supremacy so overwhelming as to warrant our
ignoring altogether all the other peoples having a right to share
in the adjective. Our reason for this is that there is no national
adjective available for us. We can speak of _Mexican_ ideas and of
_Canadian_ ideas; but we cannot--or at least we do not and we will
not--speak of _United Statesian_ ideas. And this appropriation to
ourselves of an adjective really the property of all the inhabitants of
the continent seems to be perfectly acceptable to the only other group
of those inhabitants speaking our language,--the English colonists to
the north of us. On both sides of the Niagara River the smaller brother
of the gigantic Horseshoe cataract is known as the “American fall.”
Even in the last century the British employed _American_ to indicate
the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies; and Dr. Johnson wrote in
1775: “That the _Americans_ are able to bear taxation is indubitable.”
But our ownership of _American_ as a national adjective, if tolerated
by the Canadians and the British, is not admitted by those who do not
speak our language. Probably to both the Italians and the Spaniards
South America rather than North is the part of the world that rises in
the mental vision when the word _American_ is suddenly pronounced.

Another distinction not unlike this, but logical as well as convenient,
is getting itself recognized. This distinction results from accepting
the obvious fact that the literature of the English language has
nowadays two independent divisions--that produced in the British Isles
and that produced in the United States. The writers of both nations
speak the English language, and therefore their works--whensoever these
rise to the level of literature--belong to English literature. We are
wont to call one division _American_ literature, and we are beginning
to see that logic will soon force us to call the other division
_British_ literature. Mr. Stedman has dealt with the poetry of the
English language of the past sixty years in two volumes, one on the
‘Victorian Poets,’ and the other on the ‘Poets of America,’ and this
serves to show how sharp is the line of separation. With his customary
carefulness of epithet, Mr. Stedman in the preface to the earlier
volume always uses _British_ as the antithesis of _American_, reserving
_English_ as the broader adjective to cover both branches of our
literature. Probably the many collections of the ‘British Poets,’ the
‘British Novelists,’ the ‘British Theater,’ were so called to allow
the inclusion of works produced in the sister kingdoms; it is well to
remember that Scott and Moore were neither of them Englishmen. There is
a certain piquancy in the fact that the adjective _British_, available
in the beginning of the nineteenth century because it included the
Scotch and the Irish, is even more useful at the end of the nineteenth
century because it differentiates the English, Scotch, and Irish, taken
all together, from the Americans.

_Telegram_ was denounced as a mismade word, and _cablegram_ was
rejected with abhorrence by all defenders of purity. Yet the firm
establishment of _telegraph_ and _telephone_ made certain the ultimate
acceptance of _telegram_. But _cablegram_ is still on probation, and
may fail of admission in the end, perhaps, because a part of the word
seems to be better fitted for its purpose than the whole. A message
received by the telegraph under the ocean is often curtly called a
_cable_, as when a man says, “I’ve just had a cable from my wife in
Paris.” This, I think, is rather American than British; but it is
akin to the British use of _wire_ as synonymous with both _telegram_
and _to telegraph_. An Englishman invites you to a house-party, and
writes that he will meet you at the station “on a _wire_,” intending to
convey to you his desire that you should telegraph him the hour of your
arrival. In a short story by Mr. Henry James, that most conscientious
of recorders of British speech, he tells us that after _wires_ and
_counterwires_ one of the characters of his tale was at last able to
arrive at the house where the action takes place. The locution is hot
from the verbal foundry; and it seems to imply what an American writer
would have expressed by saying that there had been “telegraphing to and
fro.”

American, probably, is the verb _to process_, and also its past
participle _processed_. When new methods of photo-engraving were
introduced here in the United States, a black-and-white artist would
express a preference either to have his drawing engraved on wood or
have it reproduced mechanically by a photo-engraving process; and as
he needed a brief word to describe this latter act, one was promptly
forthcoming, and he asked, “Is this thing of mine to be engraved
or _processed_?” The word _half-tone_ seems also to be of American
manufacture; and it describes one of these methods of photo-engraving.
It is not only a noun, but also, on occasions, a verb; and the artist
will ask if his wash-drawing is to be _half-toned_. Of necessity the
several improvements in the art of photo-engraving brought with them
a variety of new terms absolutely essential in the terminology of the
craft, most of them remaining hidden in the technical vocabulary,
altho now and again one or another has thrust itself up into the
general language.

Any attempt to declare the British or the American origin of an idiom
is most precarious; and he who ventures upon it has need of double
caution. When a friend of mine asked the boy at the door of the club
if it was still raining, and was answered, “No, sir; it’s _fairing
up_ now,” he was at first inclined to think that he had captured an
Americanism hitherto unknown and delightfully fresh; but he consulted
the Century Dictionary, only to find that it was a Scoticism,--there
was even a quotation from Stevenson’s ‘Inland Voyage,’--and that it was
not uncommon in the southwestern states. And when Captain Mahan brought
out the difference between _preparation_ for war and _preparedness_
for war, this friend was ready to credit the naval historian with the
devising not only of a most valuable distinction but also of a most
useful word; but a dip into the Century Dictionary again revealed that
a Scotchman had not waited for an American to use the word, and that it
had been employed by Bain, not even as tho it was a novelty.

Once in the pages of Hawthorne, who was affluent in words and
artistically adroit in his management of them, I met a phrase
that pleased me mightily, “a _heterogeny_ of things”; and I find
_heterogeny_ duly collected in the Century Dictionary but without
any quotation from Hawthorne. Another word of Hawthorne’s in the
‘Blithedale Romance’ is _improvability_: “In my own behalf, I rejoice
that I could once think better of the world’s _improvability_ than it
deserved.” This I fancy may be Hawthorne’s very own; but it is in the
Century Dictionary, all the same, and without any indication of its
origin. Quite possibly the New England romancer disinterred it from
some forgotten tome of the “somniferous school of literature,” as he
had humorously entitled the writings of his theological ancestors.

There is a word of Abraham Lincoln’s that I long for the right to use.
Mr. Noah Brooks has recorded that he once heard the President speak of
a certain man as _interruptious_. This adjective conveys a delicate
shade of meaning not discoverable in any other; it may not be inscribed
in the bead-roll of the King’s English, but it was a specimen of the
President’s English; and has any Speech from the Throne in this century
really rivaled the force and felicity of the Second Inaugural?

It was not the liberator of the negro but one of the freedmen
themselves who made offhand use of a delicious word, for which it is
probably hopeless for us to expect acceptance, however useful the new
term might prove. During a debate in the legislature of South Carolina
in the Reconstruction days, a sable ally of the carpet-baggers rose
to repel the taunts of his opponents, declaring energetically that he
hurled back with scorn all their _insinuendos_. The word holds a middle
ground between _insinuation_ and _innuendo_; and between the two it has
scant chance of survival. But it is an amusing attempt, for all its
failure; and it would have given pleasure to the author of ‘Alice in
Wonderland.’ And how many of Lewis Carroll’s own verbal innovations,
wantonly manufactured for his sport, are likely to get themselves
admitted into the language of literature? _Chortle_ stands the best
chance of them all, I think; and I believe that many a man has said
that he _chortled_, with no thought of the British bard who ingeniously
devised the quaint vocable.

So Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s _burgle_ seems to be winning its way into
general use. At first those who employed it followed the example of
the comic lyrist, and did so with humorous intent; but of late it
is beginning to serve those who are wholly devoid of humor. Perhaps
the verb _to burgle_ (from the noun _burglar_) supplied the analogy
on which was made the verb _to ush_ (from the noun _usher_). With my
own ears I once heard a well-known clergyman in New York express the
thanks of the congregation to “the gentlemen who _ush_ for us.”

It is well that strange uses like these do not win early acceptance
into our speech--that there should be alert challengers at the portal
to cry “Halt!” and to examine a newcomer’s credentials. It is well also
that the stranger should have leave to prove his usefulness and so in
time gain admittance even to the inner sanctuary of the language. John
Dryden discussed the reception into English of new words and phrases
with the sturdy common sense which was one of the characteristics
most endearing him to us as a true type of the man of letters who was
also a man of the world. “It is obvious,” he wrote in his ‘Defense of
the Epilog,’ “that we have admitted many, some of which we wanted,
and therefore our language is the richer for them, as it would be by
importation of bullion; others are rather ornamental than necessary;
yet by their admission the language is become more courtly and our
thoughts are better dressed.”

Historians of the language have had no difficulty in bringing together
a mass of quotations from the British writers of the eighteenth century
to show that they were then possessed of the belief that it was
feasible and necessary to set bounds to the growth of English. They
were afraid that the changes going on in the language would make it
“impossible for succeeding ages to read or appreciate the literature
produced.” In his interesting and instructive lecture on the ‘Evolution
of English Lexicography,’ Dr. Murray remarks that “to us of a later
age, with our fuller knowledge of the history of language, and our
wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to be applied to entirely
new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened to us since the birth
of modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic. But it was
eminently characteristic of the eighteenth century.”

It is small wonder therefore that this absurd notion infected two of
the most characteristic figures of the eighteenth century--Johnson and
Franklin. Dr. Johnson set forth in the plan of his dictionary that
“one great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language.”
Even so shrewd a student of all things as was Franklin seems to have
accepted this current fallacy. When he acknowledged the dedication of
Noah Webster’s ‘Dissertations on the English Language,’ he declared
that he could not “but applaud your zeal for preserving the purity of
our language, both in its expressions and pronunciation.” Then, as tho
to prove to us, once for all, the futility of all efforts to “fix the
language” and to “preserve its purity,” Franklin picks out half a dozen
novelties of phrase and begs that Webster will use his “authority in
reprobating them.” Among these innovations that Franklin disapproved of
are _improved_, _noticed_, _advocated_, _progressed_, and _opposed_.

This letter to Webster was written in 1789; and already in 1760
Franklin had yielded to certain of David Hume’s criticisms upon his
parts of speech: “I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to
some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The
_pejorate_ and the _colonize_, since they are not in common use here, I
give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and
for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression
in the least obscure is a fault. The _unshakable_, too, tho clear, I
give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already
possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be
generally wrong, as it tends to change the language.”

With all his intellect and all his insight and all his common
sense--and with this most precious quality Franklin was better
furnished than either Johnson or Dryden--he could not foresee that
_to notice_ and _to advocate_ and _to colonize_ were words without
which the English language could not do its work in the world. And
when he gives up _unshakable_ “as rather low” he stands confessed
as a contemporary of the men whom Fielding and Goldsmith girded
at. In spite of the example of Steele and Addison, in spite of his
own vigorous directness in ‘Poor Richard’ and in all his political
pamphlets, Franklin feels that there is and that there ought to be
a wide gap between the English that is spoken and the English that
is written. He did not perceive that spoken English, with all its
hazardous expressions, its clipped words, its violent metaphors, its
picturesque slang, its slovenly clumsiness, is none the less the
proving-ground of the literary vocabulary, which is forever tending to
self-exhaustion.

Nobody has better stated the wiser attitude of a writer toward the
tools of his trade than Professor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive
discussion of ‘What is Good English?’ He begins by noting that “the
English language, as a whole, is the richest of all modern tongues,
and it is not to be bounded by the comparatively narrow limits of
its literature. There exists, as well, the easy, fluent usage of
conversation, and there is also the strong, simple, homely speech of
the common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking of the soil, and
having a sturdy power about it that is unsurpassable for downright
force and blunt directness.” And Professor Peck, having pointed out
how an artist in words is free to avail himself of the term he needs
from books or from life, declares that “the writer of the best English
is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now
thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry
is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later
speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon,
and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern
phrase.”

 (1897-99)




VII

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS


When Taine was praising that earliest of analytical novels, the
‘Princess of Cleves,’ he noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette’s
style. “Half of the words we use are unknown to Madame de Lafayette,”
he declared. “She is like the painters of old, who could make every
shade with only five or six colors.” And he asserts that “there is no
easier reading” than this story of Madame de Lafayette’s; “a child
could understand without effort all her expressions and all her
phrases.... Nowadays every writer is a pedant, and every style is
obscure. All of us have read three or four centuries, and three or four
literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criticism have weighted us with
their discoveries and their jargons.”

This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the strange phenomenons of
the nineteenth century was the sudden and enormous swelling of our
vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dictionary is even more
obvious in English than in French, for there are now three times as
many human beings using the language of Shakspere as there are now
using the language of Molière; and while the speakers of French are
compacted in one country and take their tone from its capital, the
speakers of English are scattered in the four quarters of the earth,
and they use each man his own speech in his own fashion. From the wider
variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is
perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be,
since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at
home.

Perhaps the French are at times even too inhospitable to the foreign
phrase. A friend of mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bourget’s
‘Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,’ fresh from the perusal of
the German philosophers, told me that he was pained by M. Bourget’s
vain effort to express the thoughts the French author had absorbed
from the Germans. It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for
speech, and could not say what was in his mind for lack of words in
his native tongue capable of conveying his meaning. Of course it
must be remembered that German philosophy is vague and fluctuating,
and that the central thought is often obscured by a penumbra, while
French is the most precise of languages. Those who are proud of it
have declared that what is not clear is not French. When Hegel was
asked by a traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his system
of philosophy, he smiled and answered that it could not be explained
summarily--“especially in French!”

The English language extends a warmer welcome to the foreign term, and
also exercises more freely its right to make a word for itself whenever
one is needed. The manufactured article is not always satisfactory,
but if it gets into general use, no further evidence is required that
it was made to supply a genuine want. _Scientist_, for example, is an
ugly word (altho an invention of Whewell’s), and yet it was needed. How
necessary it was can be seen by any reader of the late F. W. H. Myers’s
essay on ‘Science and a Future Life,’ who notes that Myers refused
resolutely to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning the author
wanted, and that the British writer preferred to employ instead the
French _savant_, which does not--etymologically at least--contain his
full intention. Myers’s fastidiousness did not, however, prevent his
using _creationist_ as an adjective, and also _bonism_ as a substitute
for _optimism_, “with no greater barbarism in the form of the word and
more accuracy in the meaning.”

Just as Myers used _savant_ so Ruskin was willing to arrest the
rhythm of a fine passage by the obtrusion of two French words: “A
well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able
to speak any but his own; may have read very few books. But whatever
language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces,
he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of
words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance
from words of modern _canaille_; remembers all their ancestry, their
intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they
were admitted, and offices they hold among the national _noblesse_ of
words, at any time and in any country.” There seems to be little or
no excuse for the employment here of _noblesse_=nobility; and as for
_canaille_, perhaps Ruskin held that to be a French word on the way
to become an English word--a naturalization not likely to take place
without a marked modification of the original pronunciation, which is
difficult for the English mouth.

Every one who loves good English cannot but have a healthy hatred
for the style of a writer who insists on bespattering his pages with
alien words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more tolerant, I
think, toward a term taken from one of the dead languages than toward
one derived from any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop who
liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sentence was oversanguine in his
explanation that “everybody knows a little Hebrew.” It is said that
even a Latin quotation is now no longer certain to be recognized in
the British House of Commons; and yet it was a British statesman who
declared that, altho there was no necessity for a gentleman to know
Latin, he ought at least to have forgotten it.

For a bishop to quote Hebrew is now pedantic, no doubt, and even for
the inferior clergy to quote Latin. It is pedantic, but it is not
indecorous; whereas a French quotation in the pulpit, or even the
use of a single French word, like _savant_, for example, would seem
to most of us almost a breach of the proprieties. It would strike
us, perhaps, not merely as a social solecism, but somehow as morally
reprehensible. A preacher who habitually cited French phrases would
be in danger of the council. To picture Jonathan Edwards as using the
language of Voltaire is impossible. That a French quotation should
seem more incongruous in the course of a religious argument than a
Latin, a Greek, or a Hebrew quotation, is perhaps to be ascribed to the
fact that many of us hold the Parisians to be a more frivolous people
than the Romans, the Athenians, or the Israelites; and as the essay
of Mr. Myers was a religious argument, this may be one reason why his
employment of _savant_ was unfortunate.

Another reason is suggested by Professor Dowden’s shrewd remark that “a
word, like a comet, has a tail as well as a head.” An adroit craftsman
in letters is careful always that the connotations of the terms he
chooses shall be in accord with the tone of his thesis. It may be
disputed whether _savant_ denotes the same thing as _scientist_, but
it can hardly be denied that the connotations of the two words are
wholly different. For my own part, some lingering memory of Abbott’s
‘Napoleon,’ absorbed in boyhood, links the wise men of France with the
donkeys of Egypt, because whenever the Mameluke cavalry threatened the
French squares the cry went up, “Asses and _savants_ to the center!”

After all, it is perhaps rather a question whether or not _savant_ is
now an English noun. There are many French words knocking at the door
of the English language and asking for admission. Is _littoral_ for
_shore_ now an English noun? Is _blond_ an English adjective meaning
_light-haired_ and opposed to _brunette_? Is _brunette_ itself really
Anglicized? (I ask this in spite of the fact that a friend of mine once
read in a country newspaper a description of a _brunette_ horse.) Has
_inedited_ for _unpublished_ won its way into our language finally?
Lowell gave it his warrant, at least by using it in his ‘Letters’; but
I confess that it has always struck me as liable to confusion with
_unedited_.

Foreign words must always be allowed to land on our coasts without a
passport; yet if any of them linger long enough to warrant a belief
that they may take out their papers sooner or later, we must decide
at last whether or not they are likely to be desirable residents of
our dictionary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we may fairly
enough insist on their renouncing their foreign allegiance. They must
cast in their lot with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws only.
The French _chaperon_, for example, has asked for admission to our
vocabulary, and the application has been granted, so that we have
now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller was _chaperoned_ by
Becky Sharp at the last ball given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we
have even changed the spelling of the noun to correspond better with
our Anglicized pronunciation, thus _chaperone_. Thus _technique_ has
changed its name to _technic_, and is made welcome; so early as 1867
Matthew Arnold used _technic_ in his ‘Study of Celtic Literature,’ but
even now his fellow-islanders are slow in following his example. Thus
_employé_ is accepted in the properly Anglicized form of _employee_.
Thus the useful _clôture_ undergoes a sea-change and becomes the
English _closure_. And why not _cotery_ also? I note that in his
‘Studies in Literature,’ published in 1877, Professor Dowden put
_technique_ into italics as tho it was still a foreign word, while he
left _coterie_ in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted into English.

So _toilette_ has been abbreviated to _toilet_; at least, I should
have said so without any hesitation if I had not recently seen the
foreign spelling reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant’--and this in the complete Edinburgh
edition prepared by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling in the
British prose of Stevenson is a surprise, especially since the author
of the ‘Dynamiter’ is on record as a contemner of another orthographic
Gallicism. In a foot-note to ‘More New Arabian Nights’ Stevenson
declares that “any writard who writes _dynamitard_ shall find in me a
never-resting fightard.”

I should like to think that the naturalized _literator_ was supplanting
the alien _littérateur_, but I cannot claim confidence as to the
result. _Literator_ is a good English word: I have found it in the
careful pages of Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’; and I make no doubt
that it can prove a much older pedigree than that. It seems to me a
better word by far than _literarian_, which the late Fitzedward Hall
manufactured for his own use “some time in the fifties,” and which he
defended against a British critic who denounced it as “atrocious.”
Hall, praising the word of his own making, declared that “to
_literatus_ or _literator_, for _literary person_ or a longer phrase of
equivalent import, there are obvious objections.” Nobody, to the best
of my belief, ever attempted to use in English the Latin _literatus_,
altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by his series of papers on
the ‘Literati of America.’ Since Poe’s death the word has ceased to be
current, altho it was not uncommon in his day.

Perhaps one of the obvious objections to _literatus_ is that if it be
treated as an English word the plural it forms is not pleasant to the
ear--_literatuses_. Here, indeed, is a moot point: How does a foreign
word make its plural in English? Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing,
writing in _Harper’s Bazar_ on the college education of young women,
spoke of _foci_. Mr. Churton Collins, preparing a book about the study
of English literature in the British universities, expressed his desire
“to raise Greek, now gradually falling out of our _curricula_ and
degenerating into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pedants, to
its proper place in education.” Here we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins
treating _focus_ and _curriculum_ as words not yet assimilated by our
language, and therefore required to assume the Latin plural.

Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on the part of these
writers? If _focus_ and _curriculum_ are not good English words, what
need is there to employ them when you are using the English language
to convey your thoughts? There are occasions, of course, where the
employment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they must always
be very rare. The imported word which we really require we had best
take to ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treating it
thereafter absolutely as an English word, and giving it the regular
English plural. If the word we use is so foreign that we should print
it in italics, then of course the plural should be formed according
to the rules of the foreign language from which it has been borrowed;
but if it has become so acclimated in our tongue that we should not
think of underlining it, then surely it is English enough to take an
English plural. If _cherub_ is now English, its plural is the English
_cherubs_, and not the Hebrew _cherubim_. If _criterion_ is now
English, its plural is the English _criterions_, and not the Greek
_criteria_. If _formula_ is now English, its plural is the English
_formulas_, and not the Latin _formulæ_. If _bureau_ is now English,
its plural is the English _bureaus_, and not the French _bureaux_.

What is the proper plural in English of _cactus_? of _vortex_? of
_antithesis_? of _phenomenon_? In a volume on the ‘Augustan Age,’ in
Professor George Saintsbury’s ‘Periods of European Literature,’ we find
_lexica_--a masterpiece of petty pedantry and of pedantic pettiness.
As Landor made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon Hare, “There
is an affectation of scholarship in compilers of spelling-books, and
in the authors they follow for examples, when they bring forward
_phenomena_ and the like. They might as well bring forward _mysteria_.
We have no right to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their
grammars: we need no _vortices_ when we have _vortexes_ before us; and
while we have _memorandums_, _factotums_, and _ultimatums_, let our
shepherd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as have wandered from
the flock.”

Landor’s own scholarship was too keen and his taste was too fine for
him not to abhor such affectation. He held that Greek and Latin words
had no business in an English sentence unless they had been frankly
acclimated in the English language, and that one of the conditions of
this acclimatizing was the shedding of their original plurals. And
that this is also the common-sense view of most users of English is
obvious enough. Nobody now ventures to write _factota_ or _ultimata_;
and even _memoranda_ seems to be vanishing. But _phenomena_ and _data_
still survive; and so do _errata_ and _candelabra_. Whatever may be
the fate of _phenomena_, that of the three other words may perhaps be
like unto the fate of _opera_--which is also a Latin plural and which
has become an English singular. We speak unhesitatingly of the _operas_
of Rossini; are we going, in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the
_candelabras_ of Cellini? In his vigorous article on the orthography
of the French language--which is still almost as chaotic and illogical
as the orthography of the English language--Sainte-Beuve noted as a
singular peculiarity the fact that _errata_ had got itself recognized
as a French singular, but that it did not yet take the French plural;
thus we see _un errata_ and _des errata_.

It is true also that when we take over a term from another language
we ought to be sure that it really exists in the other language. For
lack of observance of this caution we find ourselves now in possession
of phrases like _nom de plume_ and _déshabille_, of which the French
never heard. And even when we have assured ourselves of the existence
of the word in the foreign language, it behooves us then to assure
ourselves also of its exact meaning before we take it for our own. In
his interesting and instructive book about ‘English Prose,’ Professor
Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe is not yet an
extinct species; and he adds in a note that “the word _levée_ seems to
be another genuine instance of the same insular dialect,” since it is
not French of any date, but an English improvement upon the verb (or
substantive) _lever_, “getting up in the morning.”

An example even more extraordinary than any of these, I think, will
occur to those of us who are in the habit of glancing through the
theatrical announcements of the American newspapers. This is the taking
of the French word _vaudeville_ to designate what was once known
as a “variety show” and what is now more often called a “specialty
entertainment.” For any such interpretation of _vaudeville_ there is no
warrant whatever in French. Originally the “vaudeville” was a satiric
ballad, bristling with hits at the times, and therefore closely akin to
the “topical song” of to-day; and it is at this stage of its evolution
that Boileau asserted that

 Le Français, né malin, créa le vaudeville.

In time there came to be spoken words accompanying those sung, and
thus the “vaudeville” expanded slowly into a little comic play in
which there were one or more songs. Of late the Parisian “vaudeville”
has been not unlike the London “musical farce.” At no stage of its
career had the “vaudeville” anything to do with the “variety show”;
and yet to the average American to-day the two words seem synonymous.
There was even organized in New York, in the fall of 1892, a series of
subscription suppers during which “specialty entertainments” were to
be given; and in spite of the fact that the organizers were presumably
persons who had traveled, they called their society the “Vaudeville
Club,” altho no real “vaudeville” was ever presented before the members
during its brief and inglorious career. Of course explanation and
protest are now equally futile. The meaning of the word is forever
warped beyond correction; and for the future here in America a
“vaudeville performance” is a “variety show,” no matter what it may be
or may have been in France. When the people as a whole accept a word as
having a certain meaning, that is and must be the meaning of the word
thereafter; and there is no use in kicking against the pricks.

The fate in English of another French term is even now trembling in
the balance. This is the word _née_. The French have found a way out
of the difficulty of indicating easily the maiden name of a married
woman; they write unhesitatingly about Madame Machin, _née_ Chose; and
the Germans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a hint from the
French and the Germans, and thus of speaking about Mrs. Brown, _born_
Gray, as they do, not a few English writers have simply borrowed the
actual French word, and so we read about Mrs. Black, _née_ White. As
usual, this borrowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems to be
irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of _née_ by using it in the
sense of “formerly.” Thus in the ‘Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88,’
collected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell, the editor supplies
in foot-notes information about the persons whose names appear in the
correspondence. In one of these annotations we read that the wife of
Sir Anthony de Rothschild was “_née_ Louisa Montefiore” (i. 165),
and in another that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was “_née_ Annie de
Rothschild” (ii. 160). Now, neither of these ladies was _born_ with
a given name as well as a family name. It is obvious that the editor
has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning of _née_ to suit his own
convenience, a proceeding of which I venture to think that Matthew
Arnold himself would certainly have disapproved. In fact, I doubt
if Mr. Russell is not here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious
as that charged against a wealthy western lady now residing at the
capital of the United States, who is said to have written her name on
the register of a New York hotel thus: “Mrs. Blank, Washington, _née_
Chicago.”

Why is it that the wandering stars of the theatrical firmament are
wont to display themselves in a _répertoire_ when it would be so
much easier for them to make use of a _repertory_? And why does the
teacher of young and ambitious singers insist on calling his school
a _conservatoire_ when it would assert its rank just as well if it
was known as a _conservatory_? What strange freak of chance has led
so many of the women who have made themselves masters of the technic
of the piano to announce themselves as _pianistes_ in the vain belief
that _pianiste_ is the feminine of _pianist_? How comes it that a man
capable of composing so scholarly a book as the ‘Greek Drama’ of Mr.
Lionel D. Barnett really is should be guilty of saying that certain
declamations in the later theater “were adapted to the style of popular
_artistes_”? And why does Mr. Andrew Lang (in his ‘Angling Sketches’)
write about the _asphalte_, when the obvious English is either
_asphalt_ or _asphaltum_?

And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this dereliction, has no
hesitation in objecting to a “delightful grammatical form which closes
a scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The author gets his
characters off the stage with the announcement: ‘They exit.’ He seems
to think that _exit_ is a verb. I _exit_, he _exits_, they _exit_. It
would be interesting to learn how he translates _exeunt omnes_. One is
accustomed to ‘a _penetralia_’ from young lions, and to ‘a _strata_,’
but ‘they _exit_’ is original.”

But the verb _to exit_ is not original with the writer in the new
rag-bag journal. It has been current in England for three quarters of a
century at least, and it can be found in the pages of that vigorously
written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trollope’s ‘Domestic Manners of the
Americans’ (published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in which she
describes how the American women, left alone, “all console themselves
together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake by
taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake,
waffle-cake and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers,
ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever
were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this
massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always
appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear
it, and then they rise _en masse_, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.”

The verb _to exit_, with the full conjugation Mr. Lang thought so
strange, has long been common among theatrical folk. The stage-manager
will tell the leading lady “You _exit_ here, and she _exits_ up left.”
The theatrical folk, who probably first brought the verb into use, did
not borrow it from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose; they simply
made a verb of the existing English noun _exit_, meaning a way out. We
old New-Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum’s Museum stood at
the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, remember also the signs which
used to declare

 THIS WAY

 TO THE

 GRAND EXIT

and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of the countryman who
went wonderingly to discover what manner of strange beast the “exit”
might be, and who unexpectedly found himself in the street outside.

The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due to his happening not to
recall the fact that _exit_ had become, first, an English noun, and,
second, an English verb. When once it was Anglicized, it had all the
rights of a native; it was a citizen of no mean country. The principle
which it is well to keep in mind in any consideration of the position
in English of terms once foreign is that no word can serve two masters.
The English language is ever ravenous and voracious; its appetite is
insatiable. It is forever taking over words from strange tongues, dead
and alive. These words are but borrowed at first, and must needs
conform to all the grammatical peculiarities of their native speech.
But some of them are sooner or later firmly incorporated into English;
and thereafter they must cease to obey any laws but those of the
language into which they have been adopted. Either a word is English or
it is not; and a decision on this point is rarely difficult.

 (1895-1900)




VIII

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG


It is characteristic of the interest which science is now taking in
things formerly deemed unworthy of consideration that philologists
no longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. Perhaps, indeed, it
was not the scholar, but the amateur philologist, the mere literary
man, who affected to despise slang. To the trained investigator
into the mutations of language and into the transformations of the
vocabulary, no word is too humble for respectful consideration; and it
is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable lessons are learned.
But until recently few men of letters ever mentioned slang except
in disparagement and with a wish for its prompt extirpation. Even
professed students of speech, like Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn
of their former authority), are abundant in declarations of abhorrent
hostility. De Quincey, priding himself on his independence and on his
iconoclasm, was almost alone in saying a good word for slang.

There is this excuse for the earlier author who treated slang with
contumely, that the differentiation of _slang_ from _cant_ was not
complete in his day. _Cant_ is the dialect of a class, often used
correctly enough, as far as grammar is concerned, but often also
unintelligible to those who do not belong to the class or who are
not acquainted with its usages. _Slang_ was at first the _cant_ of
thieves, and this seems to have been its only meaning until well into
the present century. In ‘Redgauntlet,’ for example, published in 1824,
Scott speaks of the “thieves’ Latin called _slang_.” Sometime during
the middle of the century _slang_ seems to have lost this narrow
limitation, and to have come to signify a word or a phrase used with a
meaning not recognized in polite letters, either because it had just
been invented, or because it had passed out of memory. While _cant_,
therefore, was a language within a language, so to speak, and not to be
understanded of the people, _slang_ was a collection of colloquialisms
gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike the bend sinister of
illegitimacy.

Certain of its words were unquestionably of very vulgar origin, being
survivals of the “thieves’ Latin” Scott wrote about. Among these are
_pal_ and _cove_, words not yet admitted to the best society. Others
were merely arbitrary misapplications of words of good repute, such as
the employment of _awfully_ and _jolly_ as synonyms for _very_--as
intensives, in short. Yet others were violent metaphors, like _in the
soup_, _kicking the bucket_, _holding up_ (a stage-coach). Others,
again, were the temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows
how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disappear
forever, leaving no sign; such as _shoo-fly_ in America and _all
serene_ in England.

An analysis of modern slang reveals the fact that it is possible to
divide the words and phrases of which it is composed into four broad
classes, of quite different origin and of very varying value. Toward
two of these classes it may be allowable to feel the contempt so often
expressed for slang as a whole. Toward the other two classes such a
feeling is wholly unjustifiable, for they are performing an inestimable
service to the language.

Of the two unworthy classes, the first is that which includes the
survivals of the “thieves’ Latin,” the vulgar terms used by vulgar men
to describe vulgar things. This is the slang which the police-court
reporter knows and is fond of using profusely. This is the slang which
Dickens introduced to literature. This class of slang it is which
is mainly responsible for the ill repute of the word. Much of the
dislike for slang felt by people of delicate taste is, however, due to
the second class, which includes the ephemeral phrases fortuitously
popular for a season, and then finally forgotten once for all. These
mere catchwords of the moment are rarely foul, as the words and phrases
of the first class often are, but they are unfailingly foolish. _There
you go with your eye out_, which was accepted as a humorous remark in
London, and _Where did you get that hat?_ which had a like fleeting
vogue in New York, are phrases as inoffensive as they are flat. These
temporary terms come and go, and are forgotten swiftly. Probably
most readers of Forcythe Wilson’s ‘Old Sergeant’ need now to have it
explained to them that during the war a _grape-vine_ meant a lying
rumor.

It must be said, however, that even in the terms of the first class
there is a striving upward, a tendency to disinfect themselves, as any
reader of Grose’s ‘Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ must needs remark
when he discovers that phrases used now with perfect freedom had a
secret significance in the last century. There are also innuendos not a
few in certain of Shakspere’s best-known plays which fortunately escape
the notice of all but the special student of the Elizabethan vocabulary.

The other two classes of slang stand on a different footing. Altho
they suffer from the stigma attached to all slang by the two classes
already characterized, they serve a purpose. Indeed, their utility
is indisputable, and it was never greater than it is to-day. One of
these classes consists of old and forgotten phrases or words, which,
having long lain dormant, are now struggling again to the surface.
The other consists of new words and phrases, often vigorous and
expressive, but not yet set down in the literary lexicon, and still
on probation. In these two classes we find a justification for the
existence of slang--for it is the function of slang to be a feeder of
the vocabulary. Words get threadbare and dried up; they come to be
like evaporated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the duty of
slang to provide substitutes for the good words and true which are worn
out by hard service. And many of the recruits slang has enlisted are
worthy of enrolment among the regulars. When a blinded conservative is
called a _mossback_, who is so dull as not to perceive the poetry of
the word? When an actor tells us how the traveling company in which
he was engaged got _stranded_, who does not recognize the force and
the felicity of the expression? And when we hear a man declare that
he would to-day be rich if only his foresight had been equal to his
_hindsight_, who is not aware of the value of the phrase? No wonder
is it that the verbal artist hankers after such words which renew
the lexicon of youth! No wonder is it that the writer who wishes to
present his thought freshly seeks these words with the bloom yet on
them, and neglects the elder words desiccated as tho for preservation
in a herbarium!

The student of slang is surprised that he is able to bring forward an
honorable pedigree for many words so long since fallen from their high
estate that they are now treated as upstarts when they dare to assert
themselves. Words have their fates as well as men and books; and the
ups and downs of a phrase are often almost as pathetic as those of a
man. It has been said that the changes of fortune are so sudden here
in these United States that it is only three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves. The English language is not quite so fast
as the American people, but in the English language it is only three
centuries from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. What could seem more
modern, more western even, than _deck_ for _pack_ of cards, and _to lay
out_ or to _lay out cold_ for _to knockdown_? Yet these are both good
old expressions, in decay no longer, but now insisting on their right
to a renewed life. _Deck_ is Elizabethan, and we find in Shakspere’s
‘King Henry VI.’ (part iii., act v., sc. i.) that

  The king was slyly finger’d from the deck.

_To lay out_ in its most modern sense is very early English.

Even more important than this third class of slang expressions is the
fourth, containing the terms which are, so to speak, serving their
apprenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or not they will be
admitted finally into the gild of good English. These terms are either
useful or useless; they either satisfy a need or they do not; they
therefore live or die according to the popular appreciation of their
value. If they expire, they pass into the limbo of dead-and-gone slang,
than which there is no blacker oblivion. If they survive it is because
they have been received into the literary language, having appealed to
the perceptions of some master of the art and craft of speech, under
whose sponsorship they are admitted to full rights. Thus we see that
slang is a training-school for new expressions, only the best scholars
getting the diploma which confers longevity, the others going surely to
their fate.

Sometimes these new expressions are words only, sometimes they are
phrases. _To go back on_, for instance, and _to give one’s self away_
are specimens of the phrase characteristic of this fourth and most
interesting class of slang at its best. In its creation of phrases
like these, slang is what idiom was before language stiffened into
literature, and so killed its earlier habit of idiom-making. After
literature has arrived, and after the schoolmaster is abroad, and
after the printing-press has been set up in every hamlet, the
idiom-making faculty of a language is atrophied by disuse. Slang is
sometimes, and to a certain extent, a survival of this faculty, or at
least a substitute for its exercise. In other words (and here I take
the liberty of quoting from a private letter of one of the foremost
authorities on the history of English, Professor Lounsbury), “slang is
an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more
vividly, strongly, concisely than the language as existing permits it
to be said”; and he adds that slang is therefore “the source from which
the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed.”

Being contrary to the recognized standards of speech, slang finds no
mercy at the hands of those who think it their duty to uphold the
strict letter of the law. Nothing amazes an investigator more, and
nothing more amuses him, than to discover that thousands of words now
secure in our speech were once denounced as interlopers. “There is
death in the dictionary,” said Lowell, in his memorable linguistic
essay prefixed to the second series of the ‘Biglow Papers’; “and
where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground
for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a _potted_
literature--Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees.” And in the paper
on Dryden he declared that “a language grows and is not made.” Pedants
are ever building the language about with rules of iron in a vain
effort to keep it from growing naturally and according to its needs.

It is true that _cab_ and _mob_ are clipped words, and there has always
been a healthy dislike of any clipping of the verbal currency. But
_consols_ is firmly established. Two clipped words there are which have
no friends--_gents_ and _pants_. Dr. Holmes has put them in the pillory
of a couplet:

  The things named _pants_, in certain documents,
  A word not made for gentlemen, but _gents_.

And recently a sign, suspended outside a big Broadway building,
announced that there were “Hands wanted on pants,” the building being a
clothing factory, and not, as one might suppose, a boys’ school.

The slang of a metropolis, be that where you will, in the United States
or in Great Britain, in France or in Germany, is nearly always stupid.
There is neither fancy nor fun in the Parisian’s _Ohé Lambert_ or _on
dirait du veau_, nor in the Londoner’s _all serene_ or _there you go
with your eye out_--catchwords which are humorous, if humorous they
are, only by general consent and for some esoteric reason. It is to
such stupid phrases of a fleeting popularity that Dr. Holmes refers,
no doubt, when he declares that “the use of slang, or cheap generic
terms, as a substitute for differentiated specific expressions is at
once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” And this use of slang is
far more frequent in cities, where people often talk without having
anything to say, than in the country, where speech flows slowly.

Perhaps the more highly civilized a population is, the more it has
parted with the power of pictorial phrase-making. It may be that a
certain lawlessness of life is the cause of a lawlessness of language.
Of all metropolitan slang that of the outlaws is most vigorous. It
was after Vidocq had introduced thieves’ slang into polite society
that Balzac, always a keen observer and always alert to pick up unworn
words, ventured to say, perhaps to the astonishment of many, that
“there is no speech more energetic, more colored, than that of these
people.” Balzac was not academic in his vocabulary, and he owed not
a little of the sharpness of his descriptions to his hatred of the
cut-and-dried phrases of his fellow-novelists. He would willingly have
agreed with Montaigne when the essayist declared that the language
he liked, written or spoken, was “a succulent and nervous speech,
short and compact, not so much delicated and combed out as vehement
and brusk, rather arbitrary than monotonous, ... not pedantic, but
soldierly rather, as Suetonius called Cæsar’s.” And this brings us
exactly to Mr. Bret Harte’s

  Phrases such as camps may teach,
  Saber-cuts of Saxon speech,

There is a more soldierly frankness, a greater freedom, less restraint,
less respect for law and order, in the west than in the east; and
this may be a reason why American slang is superior to British and to
French. The catchwords of New York may be as inept and as cheap as the
catchwords of London and of Paris, but New York is not as important
to the United States as London is to Great Britain and as Paris is to
France; it is not as dominating, not as absorbing. So it is that in
America the feebler catchwords of the city give way before the virile
phrases of the west. There is little to choose between the _how’s your
poor feet?_ of London and the _well, I should smile_ of New York, for
neither phrase had any excuse for existence, and neither had any hope
of survival. The city phrase is often doubtful in meaning and obscure
in origin. In London, for example, the four-wheel cab is called a
_growler_. Why? In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a
bar-room is called a _growler_, and the act of sending this can from
the private house to the public house and back is called _working the
growler_. Why?

But when we find a western writer describing the effects of
_tanglefoot_ whisky, the adjective explains itself, and is justified
at once. And we discover immediately the daringly condensed metaphor
in the sign, “Don’t _monkey_ with the _buzz-saw_”; the picturesqueness
of the word _buzz-saw_ and its fitness for service are visible at a
glance. So we understand the phrase readily and appreciate its force
when we read the story of ‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,’ and are told that
“he never _went back on_ his mother,” or when we hear the defender of
‘Banty Tim’ declare that

  “Ef one of you teches the boy
  He’ll _wrestle his hash_ to-night in hell,
    Or my name’s not Tilman Joy.”

_To wrestle one’s hash_ is not an elegant expression, one must admit,
and it is not likely to be adopted into the literary language; but it
is forcible at least, and not stupid. _To go back on_, however, bids
fair to take its place in our speech as a phrase at once useful and
vigorous.

From the wide and wind-swept plains of the west came _blizzard_, and
altho it has been suggested that the word is a survival from some local
British dialect, the west still deserves the credit of having rescued
it from desuetude. From the logging-camps of the northwest came _boom_,
an old word again, but with a new meaning which the language promptly
accepted. From still farther west came the use of _sand_ to indicate
staying power, backbone--what New England knows as _grit_ and old
England as _pluck_ (a far less expressive word). From the southwest
came _cinch_, from the tightening of the girths of the pack-mules, and
so by extension indicating a grasp of anything so firm that it cannot
get away.

Just why a _dead cinch_ should be the securest of any, I confess I
do not know. _Dead_ is here used as an intensive; and the study of
intensives is as yet in its infancy. In all parts of Great Britain
and the United States we find certain words wrenched from their true
meaning and most arbitrarily employed to heighten the value of other
words. Thus we have a _dead cinch_, or a _dead sure thing_, a _dead
shot_, a _dead level_--and for these last two terms we can discover
perhaps a reason. Lowell noted in New England a use of _tormented_ as
a euphemism for _damned_, as “not a _tormented_ cent.” Every American
traveler in England must have remarked with surprise the British use of
the Saxon synonym of _sanguinary_ as an intensive, the chief British
rivals of _bloody_ in this respect being _blooming_ and _blasted_.
All three are held to be shocking to polite ears, and it was with
bated breath that the editor of a London newspaper wrote about the
prospects of “a b----y war”; while, as another London editor declared
recently, it is now impossible for a cockney to read with proper
sympathy Jeffrey’s appeal to Carlyle, after a visit to Craigenputtock,
to bring his “blooming Eve out of her blasted paradise.” Of the other
slang synonyms for _very_--_jolly_, “he was _jolly_ ill,” is British;
_awfully_ was British first, and is now American also; and _daisy_ is
American. But any discussion of intensives is a digression here, and I
return as soon as may be to the main road.

_To freeze to_ anything or any person is a down-east phrase, so Lowell
records, but it has a far-western strength; and so has _to get solid
with_, as when the advice is given that “if a man is courting a girl it
is best _to get solid with_ her father.” What is this phrase, however,
but the French _solidarité_, which we have recently taken over into
English to indicate a communion of interests and responsibilities?
The likeness of French terms to American is no new thing; Lowell
told us that Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented
at some length on the beauty and moral significance of the French
phrase _s’orienter_, and called upon his young friends to practise
it, altho “there was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had
not always been to find out what was _about east_, and to shape his
course accordingly.” A few years ago, in turning over ‘Karikari,’ a
volume of M. Ludovic Halévy’s clever and charming sketches of Parisian
character, I met with a delightful young lady who had _pas pour deux
liards de coquetterie_; and I wondered whether M. Halévy, if he were an
American, and one of the forty of an American Academy, would venture
the assertion that his heroine was _not coquettish for a cent_.

Closely akin to _to freeze to_ and _to be solid with_ is _jumped on_.
When severe reproof is administered the culprit is said to be _jumped
on_; and if the reproof shall be unduly severe, the sufferer is said
then to be _jumped on with both feet_. All three of these phrases
belong to a class from which the literary language has enlisted many
worthy recruits in the past, and it would not surprise me to see them
answer to their names whenever a new dictionary calls the roll of
English words. Will they find themselves shoulder to shoulder with
_spook_, a word of Dutch origin, now volunteering for English service
both in New York and in South Africa? And by that time will _slump_
have been admitted to the ranks, and _fad_, and _crank_, in the
secondary meaning of a man of somewhat unsettled mind? _Slump_ is an
Americanism, _crank_ is an Americanism of remote British descent, and
_fad_ is a Briticism; this last is perhaps the most needed word of the
three, and from it we get a name for the _faddist_, the bore who rides
his hobby hard and without regard to the hounds.

Just as in New York the “Upper Ten Thousand” of N. P. Willis have
shrunk to the “Four Hundred” of Mr. Ward McAllister, so in London the
_swells_ soon became the _smart_ set, and after a while developed into
_swagger_ people, as they became more and more exclusive and felt the
need of new terms to express their new quality. But in no department of
speech is the consumption of words more rapid than in that describing
the degrees of intoxication; and the list of slang synonyms for the
drunkard, and for his condition, and for the act which brings it about,
is as long as Leporello’s. Among these, _to get loaded_ and _to carry
a load_ are expressions obvious enough; and when we recall that _jag_
is a provincialism meaning a light load, we see easily that the man
who _has a jag on_ is in the earlier stages of intoxication. This use
of the word is, I think, wholly American, and it has not crossed the
Atlantic as yet, or else a British writer could never have blundered
into a definition of _jag_ as an umbrella, quoting in illustration a
paragraph from a St. Louis paper which said that “Mr. Brown was seen on
the street last Sunday in the rain carrying a large fine jag.” One may
wonder what this British writer would have made out of the remark of
the Chicago humorist, that a certain man was not always drunk, even if
he did jump “from jag to jag like an alcoholic chamois.”

Here, of course, we are fairly within the boundaries of slang--of the
slang which is temporary only, and which withers away swiftly. But
is _swell_ slang now, and _fad_, and _crank_? Is _boom_ slang, and
is _blizzard_? And if it is difficult to draw any line of division
between mere slang on the one side, and idiomatic words and phrases
on the other, it is doubly difficult to draw this line between mere
slang and the legitimate technicalities of a calling or a craft. Is
it slang to say of a picture that the chief figure in it is _out of
drawing_, or that the painter has got his _values_ wrong? And how could
any historian explain the ins and outs of New York politics who could
not state frankly that the _machine_ made a _slate_, and that the
_mugwumps_ broke it. Such a historian must needs master the meaning of
_laying pipe_ for a nomination, or _pulling wires_ to secure it, of
_taking the stump_ before election, and of _log-rolling_ after it; he
must apprehend the exact relation of the _boss_ to his _henchmen_ and
his _heelers_; and he must understand who the _half-breeds_ were, and
the _stalwarts_, and how the _swallowtails_ were different from the
_short-hairs_.

To call one man a _boss_ and another a _henchman_ may have been slang
once, but the words are lawful now, because they are necessary. It
is only by these words that the exact relation of a certain kind
of political leader to a certain kind of political follower can be
expressed succinctly. There are, of course, not a few political phrases
still under the ban because they are needless. Some of these may some
day come to convey an exact shade of meaning not expressed by any
other word, and when this shall happen, they will take their places
in the legitimate vocabulary. I doubt whether this good fortune will
ever befall a use of _influence_, now not uncommon in Washington. The
statesman at whose suggestion and request an office-holder has received
his appointment is known as that office-holder’s _influence_. Thus
a poor widow, suddenly turned out of a post she had held for years,
because it was wanted by the henchman of some boss whose good will a
senator or a department chief wished to retain, explained to a friend
that her dismissal was due to the fact that her _influence_ had died
during the summer. The inevitable extension of the merit system in
the civil service of our country will probably prevent the permanent
acceptance of this new meaning.

The political is only one of a vast number of technical vocabularies,
all of which are proffering their words for popular consumption. Every
art and every science, every trade and every calling, every sect and
every sport, has its own special lexicon, the most of the words in
which must always remain outside of the general speech of the whole
people. They are reserves, to be drawn upon to fill up the regular army
in time of need. Legitimate enough when confined to their proper use,
those technicalities become slang when employed out of season, and when
applied out of the special department of human endeavor in which they
have been evolved. Of course, if the public interest in this department
is increased for any reason, more and more words from that technical
vocabulary are adopted into the wider dictionary of popular speech; and
thus the general language is still enriching itself by the taking over
of words and phrases from the terminology devised by experts for their
own use. Not without interest would it be if we could ascertain exactly
how much of the special vocabulary of the mere man of letters is now
understandable by the plain people. It is one of the characters in
‘Middlemarch’ who maintains that “correct English” is only “the slang
of prigs who write history and essays, and the strongest slang of all
is the slang of poets.”

Of recent years many of the locutions of the Stock Exchange have won
their way into general knowledge; and there are few of us who do not
know what _bears_ and _bulls_ are, what a _corner_ is, and what is a
_margin_. The practical application of scientific knowledge makes the
public at large familiar with many principles hitherto the exclusive
possession of the experts, and the public at large gets to use freely
to-day technicalities which even the learned of yesterday would not
have understood. _Current_, for example, and _insulation_, made
familiar by the startlingly rapid extension of electrical possibilities
in the last few years, have been so fully assimilated that they are
now used independently and without avowed reference to their original
electrical meanings.

The prevalence of a sport or of a game brings into general use the
terms of that special amusement. The Elizabethan dramatists, for
example, use _vy_ and _revy_ and the other technicalities of the game
of primero as freely as our western humorists use _going it blind_ and
_calling_ and the other technicalities of the game of poker, which has
been evolved out of primero in the course of the centuries. Some of the
technicalities of euchre also, and of whist, have passed into every-day
speech; and so have many of the terms of baseball and of football, of
racing and of trotting, of rowing and of yachting. These made their
way into the vocabulary of the average man one by one, as the seasons
went around and as the sports followed one another in popularity. So
during the civil war many military phrases were frequent in the mouths
of the people; and some of these established themselves firmly in the
vocabulary.

“In language, as in life,” so Professor Dowden tells us, “there is, so
to speak, an aristocracy and a commonalty: words with a heritage of
dignity, words which have been ennobled, and a rabble of words which
are excluded from positions of honor and trust.” Some writers and
speakers there are with so delicate a sense of refinement that they are
at ease only with the ennobled words, with the words that came over
with the conquerer, with the lords, spiritual and temporal, of the
vocabulary. Others there are, parvenus themselves, and so tainted with
snobbery that they are happy only in the society of their betters; and
these express the utmost contempt for the mass of the vulgar. Yet again
others there are who have Lincoln’s liking for the plain words of the
plain people--the democrats of the dictionary, homely, simple, direct.
These last are tolerant of the words, once of high estate, which have
lost their rank and are fallen upon evil days, preferring them over
the other words, plebeian once, but having pushed their fortunes
energetically in successive generations, until now there are none more
highly placed.

Perhaps the aristocratic figure of speech is a little misleading,
because in the English language, as in France after the Revolution,
we find _la carrière ouverte aux talents_, and every word has a fair
chance to attain the highest dignity in the gift of the dictionary. No
doubt family connections are still potent, and it is much easier for
some words to rise in life than it is for others. Most people would
hold that war and law and medicine made a more honorable pedigree for a
technical term than the stage, for example, or than some sport.

And yet the stage has its own enormous vocabulary, used with the utmost
scientific precision. The theater is a hotbed of temporary slang, often
as lawless, as vigorous, and as picturesque as the phrases of the west;
but it has also a terminology of its own, containing some hundreds of
words, used always with absolute exactness. A _mascot_, meaning one who
brings good luck, and a _hoodoo_, meaning one who brings ill fortune,
are terms invented in the theater, it is true; and many another odd
word can be credited to the same source. But every one behind the
scenes knows also what _sky-borders_ are, and _bunch-lights_, and
_vampire-traps_, and _raking-pieces_--technical terms all of them,
and all used with rigorous exactitude. Like the technicalities of
any other profession, those of the stage are often very puzzling to
the uninitiated, and a greenhorn could hardly even make a guess at
the meaning of terms which every visitor to a green-room might use
at any moment. What layman could explain the office of a _cut-drop_,
the utility of a _carpenter’s scene_, or the precise privileges of a
_bill-board ticket_?

There is one word which the larger vocabulary of the public has lately
taken from the smaller vocabulary of the playhouse, and which some
strolling player of the past apparently borrowed from some other
vagabond familiar with thieves’ slang. This word is _fake_. It has
always conveyed the suggestion of an intent to deceive. “Are you going
to get up new scenery for the new play?” might be asked; and the answer
would be, “No; we shall _fake_ it,” meaning thereby that old scenery
would be retouched and readjusted so as to have the appearance of new.
From the stage the word passed to the newspapers, and a _fake_ is a
story invented, not founded on fact, “made out of whole cloth,” as
the stump-speakers say. Mr. Howells, always bold in using new words,
accepts _fake_ as good enough for him, and prints it in the ‘Quality
of Mercy’ without the stigma of italics or quotation-marks; just as in
the same story he has adopted the colloquial _electrics_ for _electric
lights_--i.e., “He turned off the electrics.”

And hereafter the rest of us may use either _fake_ or _electrics_
with a clear conscience, either hiding ourselves behind Mr. Howells,
who can always give a good account of himself when attacked, or
else coming out into the open and asserting our own right to adopt
either word because it is useful. “Is it called for? Is it accordant
with the analysis of the language? Is it offered or backed by good
authority? These are the considerations by which general consent is
won or repelled,” so Professor Whitney tells us, “and general consent
decides every case without appeal.” It happens that Don Quixote
preceded Professor Whitney in this exposition of the law, for when
he was instructing Sancho Panza, then about to be appointed governor
of an island, he used a Latinized form of a certain word which had
become vulgar, explaining that “if some do not understand these terms
it matters little, for custom will bring them into use in the course
of time so that they will be readily understood. That is the way a
language is enriched; custom and the public are all-powerful there.”
Sometimes the needful word which is thought to be too common for use
is Latinized, as Don Quixote preferred, but more often it is ennobled
without change, being simply lifted out from among its former low
companions.

One of the hardest lessons for the amateurs in linguistics to
learn--and most of them never attain to this wisdom--is that
affectations are fleeting, that vulgarisms die of their own weakness,
and that corruptions do little harm to the language. And the reason
is not far to seek: either the apparent affectation, the alleged
vulgarism, the so-called corruption, is accidental and useless, in
which case its vogue will be brief and it will sink swiftly into
oblivion; or else it represents a need and fills a want, in which
case, no matter how careless it may be or how inaccurately formed, it
will hold its own firmly, and there is really nothing more to be said
about it. In other words, slang and all other variations from the high
standard of the literary language are either temporary or permanent.
If they are temporary only, the damage they can do is inconsiderable.
If they are permanent, their survival is due solely to the fact that
they were convenient or necessary. When a word or a phrase has come to
stay (as _reliable_ has, apparently), it is idle to denounce a decision
rendered by the court of last resort. The most that we can do with
advantage is to refrain from using the word ourselves, if we so prefer.

It is possible to go further, even, and to turn the tables on those
who see in slang an ever-growing evil. Not only is there little
danger to the language to be feared from those alleged corruptions,
and from these doubtful locutions of evanescent popularity, but real
harm is done by the purists themselves, who do not understand every
modification of our language, and who seek to check the development
of idiom and to limit the liberty which enables our speech freely to
provide for its own needs as these are revealed by time. It is these
half-educated censors, prompt to protest against whatever is novel to
them, and swift to set up the standard of a narrow personal experience,
who try to curb the development of a language. It cannot be declared
too often and too emphatically how fortunate it is that the care of our
language and the control of its development is not in the hands even of
the most competent scholars. In language, as in politics, the people
at large are in the long run better judges of their own needs than any
specialist can be. As Professor Whitney says, “the language would soon
be shorn of no small part of its strength if placed exclusively in the
hands of any individual or of any class.” In the hands of no class
would it be enfeebled sooner than if it were given to the guardianship
of the pedants and the pedagogs.

A sloven in speech is as offensive as a sloven in manners or in dress;
and neatness of phrase is as pleasant to the ear as neatness of attire
to the eye. A man should choose his words at least as carefully as he
chooses his clothes; a hint of the dandy even is unobjectionable, if
it is but a hint. But when a man gives his whole mind to his dress, it
is generally because he has but little mind to give; and so when a man
spends his force wholly in rejecting words and phrases, it is generally
because he lacks ideas to express with the words and phrases of which
he does approve. In most cases a man can say best what he has to say
without lapsing into slang; but then a slangy expression which actually
tells us something is better than the immaculate sentence empty of
everything but the consciousness of its own propriety.

 (1893)




IX

QUESTIONS OF USAGE


If any proof were needed of the fact that an immense number of people
take an intense interest in the right and wrong use of the English
language, and also of the further fact that their interest is out
of all proportion to their knowledge of the history of our speech,
such proof could be found in the swift and unceasing eruption of
“letters to the editor” which broke out in many of the American
newspapers immediately after the publication of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s
‘Recessional.’ The exciting cause of this rash exhibition was found in
the line which told us that

  The shouting and the tumult dies.

The gross blunder in this sentence leaped to the eyes of many whose
acquaintance with the principles of English construction was confined
to what they chanced to remember of the rules learned by heart in their
grammar-school days. But there were others whose reading was a little
wider, and who were able to cite precedents in Mr. Kipling’s favor
from Milton and from Shakspere and from the King James translation
of the Bible. Yet the argument from the past failed to convince some
of the original protestants, one of whom suggested that the erring
poet should be sent to a night-school, while another objected to any
further discussion of the subject, since “a person who doesn’t know
that the plural form of the verb is used when the subject of said verb
is two or more nouns in the singular number should receive no mention
in a reputable newspaper.” It may be doubted whether the altercation
was really bloody enough to demand attention from the disreputable
newspapers, altho it was fierce and intolerant while it lasted.

The battle raged for a fortnight, and the foundations of the deep
were broken up. Yet it was really a tempest in a teapot, and oil for
the troubled waters was ready at hand had any of those in danger of
shipwreck thought to make use of it. In Professor Lounsbury’s ‘History
of the English Language’--a book from which it is a constant pleasure
to quote, since it combines sound scholarship, literary skill, and
common sense in an uncommon degree--we are told that “rules have been
and still are laid down ... which never had any existence outside of
the minds of grammarians and verbal critics. By these rules, so far
as they are observed, freedom of expression is cramped, idiomatic
peculiarity destroyed, and false tests for correctness set up, which
give the ignorant opportunity to point out supposed error in others,
while the real error lies in their own imperfect acquaintance with the
best usage.”

And then Professor Lounsbury cites in illustration the rule which was
brought up against Mr. Kipling: “There is a rule of Latin syntax that
two or more substantives joined by a copulative require the verb to
be in the plural. This has been foisted into the grammar of English,
of which it is no more true than it is of modern German.... The
grammar of English, as exhibited in the utterances of its best writers
and speakers, has from the very earliest period allowed the widest
discretion as to the use either of the singular or the plural in such
cases. The importation and imposition of rules foreign to its idiom,
like the one just mentioned, does more to hinder the free development
of the tongue, and to dwarf its freedom of expression, than the widest
prevalence of slovenliness of speech, or of affectation of style; for
these latter are always temporary in their character, and are sure to
be left behind by the advance in popular cultivation, or forgotten
through the change in popular taste.”

This is really a declaration of independence for writers of English.
It is the frank assertion that a language is made by those who use
it--made by that very use. Language is not an invention of the
grammarians and of the word-critics, whose business, indeed, is not
to make language or to prescribe rules, but more modestly to record
usage and to discover the principles which may underlie the incessant
development of our common speech. And here in discussing the syntax
Professor Lounsbury is at one with Mr. George Meredith discussing the
vocabulary of our language, when the British novelist notes his own
liking for “our blunt and racy vernacular, which a society nourished
upon Norman English and English Latin banishes from print, largely to
its impoverishment, some think.”

Those who have tried to impose a Latin syntax on the English language
are as arbitrary as those who have insisted on an English pronunciation
of the Latin language. Their attitude is as illogical as it is
dogmatic; and nowhere is dogmatism less welcome than in the attempt to
come to a just conclusion in regard to English usage; and nowhere is
the personal equation more carefully to be allowed for. A term is not
necessarily acceptable because we ourselves are accustomed to it, nor
is it necessarily to be rejected because it reaches us as a novelty.
The Americanism which a British journalist glibly denounces may be
but the ephemeral catchword of a single street-gang, or it may have
come over in the ‘Mayflower’ and be able to trace its ancestry back to
a forefather that crossed with William the Conqueror. The Briticism
which strikes some of us as uncouth and vulgar may be but a chance bit
of cockney slang, or it may be warranted by the very genius of our
language.

Most of the little manuals which pretend to regulate our use of our
own language and to declare what is and what is not good English are
grotesque in their ignorance; and the best of them are of small value,
because they are prepared on the assumption that the English language
is dead, like the Latin, and that, like Latin again, its usage is fixed
finally. Of course this assumption is as far as possible from the fact.
The English language is alive now--very much alive. And because it
is alive it is in a constant state of growth. It is developing daily
according to its needs. It is casting aside words and usages that
are no longer satisfactory; it is adding new terms as new things are
brought forward; and it is making new usages, as convenience suggests,
short-cuts across lots, and to the neglect of the five-barred gates
rigidly set up by our ancestors. It is throwing away as worn out words
which were once very fashionable; and it is giving up grammatical forms
which seem to be no longer useful. It is continually trying to keep
itself in the highest state of efficiency for work it has to do. It is
ever urging ahead in the direction of increased utility; and if any of
the so-called “rules” happens to stand in the path of its progress--so
much the worse for the rule! As Stephenson said, “It will be bad for
the coo!”

The English language is the tool of the peoples who speak English
and who have made it to fit their hands. They have fashioned it to
suit their own needs, and it is quite as characteristic as anything
else these same peoples have made--quite as characteristic as the
common law and as parliamentary government. A language cannot but be
a most important witness when we wish to inquire into the special
peculiarities of a race. The French, for instance, are dominated by the
social instinct, and they are prone to rely on logic a little too much,
and their language is therefore a marvel of transparency and precision.
In like manner we might deduce from an analysis of the German language
an opinion as to the slowness of the individual Teuton, as to his
occasional cloudiness, as to his willingness to take trouble, and as to
his ultimate thoroughness.

The peoples who speak English are very practical and very direct; they
are impatient of needless detail; and they are intolerant of mere
theory. These are some of the reasons why English is less embarrassed
with niceties of inflection than other languages, why it has cut its
syntax to the bone, why it has got rid of most of its declensions
and conjugations--why, in short, it has almost justified the critic
who called it a grammarless tongue. In every language there is a
constant tendency toward uniformity and an unceasing effort to get rid
of abnormal exceptions to the general rule; but in no language are
these endeavors more effective than in English. In the past they have
succeeded in simplifying the rules of our speech; and they are at work
now in the present on the same task of making English a more efficient
instrument for those who use it.

This effort of the language to do its duty as best it can is partly
conscious and partly unconscious; and where the word-critic can be of
service is in watching for the result of the unconscious endeavor, so
that it can be made plain, and so that it can be aided thereafter by
conscious endeavor. The tendency toward uniformity is irresistible;
and one of its results just now to be observed is an impending
disappearance of the subjunctive mood. Those who may have supposed that
the subjunctive was as firmly established in English as the indicative
can discover easily enough by paying a little attention to their own
daily speech and to the speech of their educated neighbors that “if I
_be_ not too late,” for instance, is a form now rarely heard even in
cultivated society.

And the same tendency is to be observed also in the written language.
Letters in the London _Author_ in June and July, 1897, showed that
in a few less than a million words chosen from the works of recent
authors of good repute there were only 284 instances of the subjunctive
mood, and that of these all but fifteen were in the verb “to be.”
This reveals to us that the value of this variation of form is no
longer evident, not merely to careless speakers, but even to careful
writers; and it makes it probable that it is only a question of time
how soon the subjunctive shall be no longer differentiated from the
indicative. Where our grandfathers would have taken pains to say “if I
_were_ to go away,” and “if I _be_ not misinformed,” our grandchildren
will unhesitatingly write, “if I _was_ to go away,” and “if I _am_
not misinformed.” And so posterity will not need to clog its memory
with any rule for the employment of the subjunctive; and the English
language will have cleansed itself of a barnacle.

It is this same irresistible desire for the simplest form and for the
shortest which is responsible for the increasing tendency to say “he
don’t” and “she don’t,” on the analogy of “we don’t,” “you don’t,”
and “they don’t,” instead of the more obviously grammatical “he does
n’t” and “she does n’t.” A brave attempt has been made to maintain
that “he don’t” is older than “he does n’t,” and that it has at least
the sanction of antiquity. However this may be, “he don’t” is certain
to sustain itself in the future because it calls for less effort and
because any willingness to satisfy the purist will seem less and less
worth while as time goes on. It is well that the purist should fight
for his own hand; but it is well also to know that he is fighting a
losing battle.

The purist used to insist that we should not say “the house is _being
built_,” but rather “the house is _building_.” So far as one can judge
from a survey of recent writing the purist has abandoned this combat;
and nobody nowadays hesitates to ask, “What is being done?” The purist
still objects to what he calls the Retained Object in such a sentence
as “he was given a new suit of clothes.” Here again the struggle is
vain, for this usage is very old; it is well established in English;
and whatever may be urged against it theoretically, it has the final
advantage of convenience. The purist also tells us that we should say
“come to see me” and “try to do it,” and not “come and see me” and “try
and do it.” Here once more the purist is setting up a personal standard
without any warrant. He may use whichever of these forms he likes best,
and we on our part have the same permission, with a strong preference
for the older and more idiomatic of them.

Theory is all very well, but to be of any value it must be founded
on the solid rock of fact; and even when it is so established it has
to yield to convenience. This is what the purist cannot be induced
to understand. He seems to think that the language was made once for
all, and that any deviation from the theory acted on in the past is
intolerable in the present. He is often wholly at sea in regard to his
theories and to his facts--more often than not; but no doubt as to his
own infallibility ever discourages him. He just knows that he is right
and that everybody else is wrong; and he has no sense of humor to save
him from himself. And he makes up in violence what he lacks in wisdom.
He accepts himself as a prophet verbally inspired, and he holds that
this gives him the right to call down fire from heaven on all who do
not accept his message.

It was a purist of this sort who once wrote to a little literary weekly
in New York, protesting against the use of _people_ when _persons_
would seem to be the better word, and complacently declaring that
“for twenty-five years or more I have kept my eye on this little word
_people_ and I have yet to find a single American or English author who
does not misuse it.” We are instantly reminded of the Irish juryman who
said, “Eleven more obstinate men I never met in the whole course of my
life.” In this pitiful condition of affairs one cannot discover on what
this purist bases the hope he expresses that “in the course of two or
three hundred years the correct employment of it may possibly become
general.” Rather may it be hoped that in the course of two or three
hundred years a knowledge of the principles which govern English usage
may become general.

What is called the Split Infinitive is also a cause of pain to the
purist, who is greatly grieved when he finds George Lewes in the
‘Life of Goethe’ saying “to completely understand.” This inserting
of an adverb between the _to_ and the rest of the verb strikes the
word-critic as pernicious, and he denounces it instantly as a novelty
to be stamped out before it permanently contaminates our speech. Even
Professor A. S. Hill, in his ‘Foundations of Rhetoric,’ while admitting
its antiquity, since it has been in use constantly from the days of
Wyclif to the days of Herbert Spencer, still declares it to be “a
common fault” not sanctioned or even condoned by good authority.

The fact is, I think, that the Split Infinitive has a most respectable
pedigree, and that it is rather the protest against it which is the
novelty now establishing itself. The Split Infinitive is to be found
in the pages of Shakspere, Massinger, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Burke,
Coleridge, Byron, De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Browning,
Motley, Lowell, and Holmes. But it is a fact also, I think, that
since the protest has been raised there has been a tendency among
careful writers to eschew the Split Infinitive, or at least to employ
it only when there is a gain in lucidity from its use, as there is,
for example, in Professor Lounsbury’s “to more than counterbalance”
(‘Studies in Chaucer,’ i. 447).

A writer who has worked out for himself a theory of style, and who has
made up his mind as to the principles he ought to follow in writing,
often yields to protests the validity of which he refuses to admit. He
gives the protestant the benefit of the doubt and drops the stigmatized
words from his vocabulary and refrains from the stigmatized usages,
reserving always the right to avail himself of them at a pinch. What
such a writer has for his supreme object is to convey his thought
into the minds of his readers with the least friction; and he tries
therefore to avoid all awkwardness of phrase, all incongruous words,
all locutions likely to arouse resistance, since any one of these
things will inevitably lessen the amount of attention which this reader
or that will then have available for the reception of the writer’s
message. This is what Herbert Spencer has called the principle of
Economy of Attention; and a firm grasp of this principle is a condition
precedent to a clear understanding of literary art.

For a good and sufficient reason such a writer stands ready at any
time to break this self-imposed rule. If a solecism, or a vulgarism
even, will serve his purpose better at a given moment than the more
elegant word, he avails himself of it, knowing what he is doing, and
risking the smaller loss for the greater gain. M. Legouvé tells us that
at a rehearsal of a play of Scribe’s he drew the author’s attention
to a bit of bad French at the climax of one of the acts, and Scribe
gratefully accepted the correct form which was suggested. But two or
three rehearsals later Scribe went back unhesitatingly to the earlier
and incorrect phrase, which happened to be swifter, more direct, and
dramatically more expressive than the academically accurate sentence
M. Legouvé had supplied. Shakspere seems often to have been moved by
like motives, and to have been willing at any time to sacrifice strict
grammar to stage-effectiveness.

Two tendencies exist side by side to-day, and are working together
for the improvement of our language. One is the tendency to disregard
all useless distinctions and to abolish all useless exceptions and to
achieve simplicity and regularity. The other is the tendency toward a
more delicate precision which shall help the writer to present his
thought with the utmost clearness.

Of the first of these abundant examples can be cited phrases which the
word-critic would denounce, and which are not easy to defend on any
narrow ground, but which are employed freely even by conscientious
writers, well aware that no utility is served by a pedantic precision.
So we find Matthew Arnold in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’
speaking of “the _four first_,” where the purist would prefer to have
said “the _first four_.” So we find Hawthorne in the ‘Blithedale
Romance’ writing “fellow, clown, or bumpkin, to _either_ of these,”
when the purist would have wished him to say “to any one of these,”
holding that “either” can be applied only when there are but two
objects.

In like manner the word-critics object to the use of the superlative
degree when the comparative is all that is needed; yet we find in the
King James translation of Genesis, “her eldest son, Esau,” and she
had but two sons. And they refuse to allow either a comparative or a
superlative to adjectives which indicate completeness; yet we find in
Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall,’ “its success was not more universal.” They
do not like to see a writer say that anything is “more perfect” or
“most complete,” holding that what is universal or perfect or complete
“does not admit of augmentation,” as one of them declared more than a
century ago in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for July, 1797. In all these
cases logic may be on the side of the word-critic. But what of it?
Obedience to logic would here serve no useful purpose, and therefore
logic is boldly disobeyed. However inexact these phrases may be, they
mislead no one and they can be understood without hesitation.

Side by side with this tendency to take the short-cut exists the
other tendency to go the long way round if by so doing the writer’s
purpose is more easily accomplished. There is a common usage which
is frequently objurgated by the word-critics and which may fall into
desuetude, not through their attacks, but because of its conflict
with this second tendency. This is the insertion of an unnecessary
_who_ or _which_ after an _and_ or a _but_, as in this sentence from
Professor Butcher’s admirable discussion of Aristotle’s ‘Theory of
Poetry’: “Nature is an artist capable indeed of mistakes, but _who_ by
slow advances and through many failures realizes her own idea.” So in
Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ we are told of “a chorus of twenty-seven
youths and as many virgins, of noble family, and _whose_ parents were
both alive.” This locution is proper in French, but it is denounced as
improper in English by the purists, who would strike out the _but_
from Professor Butcher’s and the _and_ from Gibbon’s.

It is a constant source of amusement to those interested in observing
the condition and the development of the language to note the frequency
with which the phrases put under taboo by the word-critics occur in the
writings of the masters of English. In my own recent reading I have
found this despised construction in the pages of Fielding, Johnson,
Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. John Morley,
Mr. Henry James, and Professor Jebb in Great Britain, and in pages of
Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and Mr. John Fiske in the United States.
What is more significant perhaps is its discovery in the works of
professed students of language--Trench, Isaac Taylor, Max Müller, and
W. D. Whitney.

And yet, in spite of this array of authorities, I am inclined to
believe that this usage may perhaps disappear with the increasing
attention which the best writers are now giving to the rhythm and
balance of their sentences. It is not that the form is wrong--that is
a matter not to be decided offhand; it is that the form is awkward
and that it jars on the feeling for symmetry--the feeling which leads
us to put a candlestick on each side of the clock on the mantelpiece.
Professor Whitney began one of his sentences thus: “Castrén, himself a
Finn, and whose long and devoted labors have taught us more respecting
them than has been brought to light by any other man, ventures,” etc.
Would not this sentence have been easier and more elegant if Whitney
had either struck out _and_ (which is not needed at all) or else
inserted _who was_ after Castrén? In the sentence as Whitney wrote
it _and whose_ makes me look back for the _who_ which my feeling for
symmetry leads me to suppose must have preceded it somewhere, and
in this vain search part of my attention is abstracted. I have been
forced to think of the manner of his remarks when my mind ought to have
given itself so far as might be to the matter of them. In other words,
the real objection to this usage is that it is in violation of the
principle of Economy of Attention.

Another usage also under fire from the purists is exemplified in
another extract from Whitney: “It is, I am convinced, a mistake to
commence at once upon a course of detailed comparative philology with
pupils who have _only_ enjoyed the ordinary training in the classical
or modern languages.” Obviously his meaning would be more sharply
defined if he had put _only_ after instead of before _enjoyed_. So
Froude, writing about ‘English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century,’ says
that “the fore-and-aft rig alone would enable a vessel to tack, as
it is called, and this could _only_ be used with craft of moderate
tonnage”; and here again a transposition after the verb would increase
the exactness of the statement.

The proposition of _only_ is really important only when the misplacing
of it may cause ambiguity; and Professor F. N. Scott has shown how
Webster, always careful in the niceties of style, unhesitatingly put
_only_ out of its proper place, if by so doing he could improve the
rhythm of his period, as in this sentence from the second Bunker Hill
oration: “It did not, indeed, put an end to the war; but, in the then
existing hostile state of feeling, the difficulties could only be
referred to the arbitration of the sword.” This is as it should be,
the small effect promptly sacrificed for the larger. The rule--if rule
it really is--must be broken unhesitatingly when there is greater gain
than loss.

There is an anecdote in some volume of French theatrical memoirs
narrating an experience of Mademoiselle Clairon, the great tragic
actress, with a pupil of hers, a girl of fine natural gifts for
the histrionic art, but far too frequent and too exuberant in her
gesticulation. So when the pupil was once to appear before the public
in a recitation, Mademoiselle Clairon bound the girl’s arms to her side
by a stiff thread and sent her thus upon the stage. With the first
strong feeling she had to express the pupil tried to raise her arms,
only to be restrained by the thread. A dozen times in the course of
her recitation she was prevented from making the gestures she desired,
until at the very end she could stand it no longer, and in the climax
of her emotion she broke her bonds and lifted her hands to her head.
When she came off the stage she went humbly to where Mademoiselle
Clairon was standing in the wings and apologized for having snapped the
thread. “But you did quite right!” said the teacher. “That was the time
to make the gesture--not before!”

Rules exist to aid in composition; and by wise men composition is not
undertaken merely to prove the existence of the rules. Circumstances
may alter even codes of manners; in Paris, for instance, it is
permissible to sop bread in the sauce, a practice which is bad form in
London--since nobody would want any more of a British sauce than could
be avoided. This paper, however, has failed of its purpose if it is
taken as a plea for license. Rather is it intended as an argument for
liberty. It has been written as the result of a belief that a frank
protest is needed now and again against the excessive demands of the
linguistic dogmatists. That what the linguistic dogmatists write is
as widely read as it seems to be is a sign of a healthy interest in
the speech which must serve us all, scholars and school-masters and
plain people. This interest should be aroused also to shake off the
shackles with which pedagogs and pedants seek to restrain not only
the full growth of our noble tongue, but even its free use. As Renan
pithily put it, every time that “grammarians have tried deliberately to
reform a language, they have succeeded only in making it heavy, without
expression, and often less logical than the humblest dialect.”

If English is to be kept fit to do the mighty work it bids fair to be
called upon to accomplish in the future, it must be allowed to develop
along the line of least resistance. It must be encouraged to follow its
own bent and to supply its own needs and to shed its worn-out members.
It must not be hampered by syntax taken from Latin or by rules evolved
out of the inner consciousness of word-critics. It must not be too
squeamish or even too particular, since excessive refinement goes only
with muscular weakness. It must be allowed to venture on solecisms, on
neologisms, on Americanisms, on Briticisms, on Australianisms, if need
be, however ugly some of these may seem, for the language uses itself
up fast, and has to be replenished that it shall not lose its vigor and
its ardor.

To say this is not to say that every one of us who uses English in
speaking or in writing should not always choose his words carefully
and decide on his forms judiciously. Only by a wise selection can the
language be kept at its highest efficiency; only thus can its full
powers be revealed to us. And if we decide that we prefer to keep
to the very letter of the law as laid down by the grammarians--why,
that is our privilege and no one shall say us nay. But let us not
think scorn of those who are careless in paying their tithes of mint
and anise and cummin, if also they stand upright and speak the truth
plainly.

For myself--if a personal confession is not here out of place--I shrink
always from profiting by any license I have just claimed for others; I
strive always to eschew the Split Infinitive, to avoid _and who_ when
there is no preceding _who_ which may balance it, and to put _only_
always in the place where it will do most good. It is ever my aim
to avail myself of the phrase which will convey my meaning into the
reader’s mind with the least friction; and out of the effort to achieve
this approach along the line of least resistance, I get something of
the joy an honest craftsman ought always to feel in the handling of
his tools. For this is what words are, after all; they are the tools
of man, devised to serve his daily needs. As Bagehot once suggested,
we may not know how language was first invented and made, “but beyond
doubt it was shaped and fashioned into its present state by common,
ordinary men and women using it for common and ordinary purposes. They
wanted a carving-knife, not a razor or lancet; and those great artists
who have to use language for more exquisite purposes, who employ it to
describe changing sentiments and momentary fancies and the fluctuating
and indefinite inner world, must use curious nicety and hidden but
effectual artifice, else they cannot duly punctuate their thoughts
and slice the fine edges of their reflections. A hair’s breadth is as
important to them as a yard’s breadth to a common workman.”

 (1898)




X

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME


“I have a theory about double rimes for which I shall be attacked by
the critics, but which I could justify perhaps on high authority, or,
at least, analogy,” wrote Mrs. Browning to a friend not long after
the publication of one of her books. “These volumes of mine have
more double rimes than any two books of English poems that ever to
my knowledge were printed; I mean of English poems not comic. Now of
double rimes in use which are perfect rimes you are aware how few there
are; and yet you are also aware of what an admirable effect in making
a rhythm various and vigorous double riming is in English poetry.
Therefore I have used a certain license; and after much thoughtful
study of the Elizabethan writers have ventured it with the public.
And do you tell me--you who object to the use of a different vowel in
a double rime--why you rime (as everybody does, without blame from
everybody) _given_ to _heaven_, when you object to my riming _remember_
to _chamber_? The analogy is all on my side, and I believe that the
spirit of the English language is also.”

Here Mrs. Browning raises a question of interest to all who have paid
any attention to the technic of verse. No doubt double rimes do give
vigor and variety to a poem, altho no modern English lyrist has really
rivaled the magnificent medieval ‘Dies Iræ,’ wherein the double rimes
thrice repeated fall one after the other like the beating of mighty
trip-hammers. There is no doubt also that the English language is not
so fertile in double rimes as the Latin, the German, or the Italian;
and that some of the English poets, clutching for these various and
vigorous effects, have refused to abide by the strict letter of the
law, and have claimed the license of modifying the emphatic vowel from
one line to another. Mrs. Browning defends this revolt, and finds
it easy to retort to her correspondent that he himself has ventured
to link _heaven_ and _given_. Many another poet has coupled these
unwilling words; and not a few have also married _river_ and _ever_,
_meadow_ and _shadow_, _spirit_ and _inherit_.

Mrs. Browning is prepared to justify herself by authority, or at least
by analogy; and yet, in bringing about the espousal of _chamber_ and
_remember_, she is evidently aware that it is no love-match she is
aiding and abetting, but at best a marriage of convenience. She pleads
precedence to excuse her infraction of a statute the general validity
of which she apparently admits. The most that she claims is that the
tying together of _chamber_ and _remember_ is permissible. She seems to
say that these ill-mated pairs are, of course, not the best possible
rimes, but that, since double rimes are scarce in English, the lyrist
may, now and then, avail himself of the second best. An American poet
of my acquaintance is bolder than the British poetess; he has the full
courage of his convictions. He assures me that he takes pleasure in the
tying together of incompatible words like _river_ and _ever_, _meadow_
and _shadow_, finding in these arbitrary matings a capricious and
agreeable relief from the monotony of more regular riming.

This forces us to consider the basis upon which any theory of
“allowable” rimes must rest--any theory, that is, which, after
admitting that certain rimes are exact and absolutely adequate,
asserts also that certain other combinations of terminal words, altho
they do not rime completely and to the satisfaction of all, are still
tolerable. This theory accepts certain rimes as good, and it claims in
addition certain others as “good enough.”

Any objection to the pairing of _spirit_ and _inherit_, of _remember_
and _chamber_, and the like, cannot be founded upon the fact that in
the accepted orthography of the English language the spelling of the
terminations differs. Rime has to do with pronunciation and not with
orthography; rime is a match between sounds. The symbols that represent
these sounds--or that may misrepresent them more or less violently--are
of little consequence. What is absurdly called a “rime to the eye” is a
flagrant impossibility, or else _hiccough_ may pair off with _enough_,
_clean_ with _ocean_, and _plague_ with _ague_. The eye is not the
judge of sound, any more than the nose is the judge of color. _Height_
is not a rime to _eight_; but it is a rime to _sight_, to _bite_,
to _proselyte_, and to _indict_. So _one_ does not rime with either
_gone_ or _tone_; but it does with _son_ and with _bun_. _Tomb_ and
_comb_, and _rhomb_ and _bomb_ are not rimes; but _tomb_ and _doom_,
and _spume_ and _rheum_ are. The objection to the linking together of
_meadow_ and _shadow_, and of _ever_ and _river_ is far deeper than any
superficial difference of spelling; it is rooted in the difference of
the sounds themselves. In spite of the invention of printing, or even
of writing itself, the final appeal of poetry is still to the ear and
not to the eye.

Probably the first utterances of man were rhythmic, and probably poetry
had advanced far toward perfection long before the alphabet was devised
as an occasional substitute for speech. In the beginning the poet had
to charm the ears of those whom he sought to move, since there was
then no way by which he could reach the eye also. To the rhapsodists
verse was an oral art solely, as it is always for the dramatists,
whose speeches must fall trippingly from the tongue, or fail of
their effect. The work of the lyrist--writer of odes, minnesinger,
troubadour, ballad-minstrel--has always been intended to be said or
sung; that it should be read is an afterthought only. Even to-day, when
the printing-press has us all under its wheels, it is by our tongues
that we possess ourselves of the poetry we truly relish. A poem is not
really ours till we know it by heart and can say it to ourselves, or at
least until we have read it aloud, and until we can quote it freely.
If a poem has actually taken hold on our souls, it rings in our ears,
even if we happen to be visualizers also, and can call up at will the
printed page whereon it is preserved.

This fact, that poetry is primarily meant to be spoken aloud rather
than read silently, altho obvious when plainly stated, has not been
firmly grasped by many of those who have considered the technic of the
art, and therefore there is often obscurity in the current discussions
of rime and rhythm. In the rhetoric of verse there is to-day not a
little of the confusion which existed in the rhetoric of prose before
Herbert Spencer put forth his illuminating and stimulating essay on
the ‘Philosophy of Style.’ Even in that paper he suggested that the
principle of Economy of Attention was as applicable to verse as to
prose; and he remarked that “were there space, it might be worth while
to inquire whether the pleasure we take in rime, and also that which we
take in euphony, are not partly ascribable to the same general cause.”

This principle of Economy of Attention explains why it is that any
style of speaking or writing is more effective than another, by
reminding us that we have, at any given moment, only so much power
of attention, and that, therefore, however much of this power has to
be employed on the form of any message must be subtracted from the
total power, leaving just so much less attention available for the
apprehension of the message itself. To convey a thought from one mind
to another, we must use words the reception of which demands more
or less mental exertion; and therefore that statement is best which
carries the thought with the least verbal friction. Some friction there
must be always; but the less there is, the more power of attention the
recipient has left to master the transmitted thought.

It is greatly to be regretted that Spencer did not spare the space
to apply to verse this principle, which has been so helpful in the
analysis of prose. He did go so far as to suggest that metrical
language is more effective than prose, because when “we habitually
preadjust our perceptions to the measured movement of verse” it is
“probable that by so doing we economize attention.” This suggestion
has been elaborated by one of his disciples, the late Mr. Grant Allen,
in his treatise on ‘Physiological Esthetics,’ and it has been formally
controverted by the late Mr. Gurney, in his essay on the ‘Power of
Sound.’ Perhaps both Spencer and Gurney are right; part of our pleasure
in rhythm is due to the fact that “the mind may economize its energies
by anticipating the attention required for each syllable,” as the
former says, and part of it is “of an entirely positive kind, acting
directly on the sense,” as the latter maintains.

Whether or not Spencer’s principle of Economy of Attention adequately
explains our delight in rhythm, there is no doubt that it can easily be
utilized to construct a theory of rime. Indeed, it is the one principle
which provides a satisfactory solution to the problem propounded by
Mrs. Browning. No one can deny that more or less of our enjoyment of
rimed verse is due to the skill with which the poet satisfies with the
second rime the expectation he has aroused with the first. When he ends
a line with _gray_, or _grow_, or _grand_, we do not know which of the
twoscore or more of possible rimes to each of these the lyrist will
select, and we await his choice with happy anticipation. If he should
balk us of our pleasure, if he should omit the rime we had confidently
counted upon, we are rudely awakened from our dream of delight, and
we ask ourselves abruptly what has happened. It is as tho the train
of thought had run off the track. Spencer notes how we are put out by
halting versification; “much as at the bottom of a flight of stairs a
step more or less than we counted upon gives us a shock, so too does a
misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable.”

So, too, does an inaccurate or an arbitrary rime give us a shock. If
verse is something to be said or sung, if its appeal is to the ear
primarily, if rime is a terminal identity of sound, then any theory
of “allowable” rimes is impossible, since an “allowable” rime is
necessarily inexact, and thus may tend to withdraw attention from the
matter of the poem to its manner. No doubt there are readers who do not
notice the incompatibility of these matings, and there are others who
notice yet do not care. But the more accurately trained the ear is, the
more likely these alliances are to annoy; and the less exact the rime,
the more likely the ear is to discover the discrepancy. The only safety
for the rimester who wishes to be void of all offense is to risk no
union of sounds against whose marriage anybody knows any just cause
of impediment. Perhaps a wedding within the prohibited degrees may be
allowed to pass without protest now and again; but sooner or later
somebody will surely forbid the banns.

Just as a misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable gives us a
shock, so does the attempt of Mrs. Browning to pair off _remember_ and
_chamber_; so may also the attempt of Poe to link together _valleys_
and _palace_. The lapse from the perfect ideal may be but a trifle,
but a lapse it is nevertheless. A certain percentage of our available
attention may thus be wasted, and worse than wasted; it may be
called away from the poem itself, and absorbed suddenly by the mere
versification. For a brief moment we may be forced to consider a defect
of form, when we ought to have our minds absolutely free to receive the
poet’s meaning. Whenever a poet cheats us of our expectancy of perfect
rime, he forces us to pay exorbitant freight charges on the gift he has
presented to us.

It is to be noted, however, that as rime is a matching of sounds,
certain pairs of words whose union is not beyond reproach can hardly
be rejected without pedantry, since the ordinary pronunciation of
cultivated men takes no account of the slight differences of sound
audible if the words are uttered with absolute precision. Thus
Tennyson in the ‘Revenge’ rimes _Devon_ and _Heaven_; and thus Lowell
in the ‘Fable for Critics’ rimes _irresistible_ and _untwistable_. In
‘Elsie Venner’ Dr. Holmes held up to derision “the inevitable rime of
cockney and Yankee beginners, _morn_ and _dawn_”; but, at the risk
of revealing myself as a Yankee of New York, I must confess that any
pronunciation of this pair of words seems to me stilted that does not
make them quite impeccable as a rime.

We are warned, however, to be on our guard against pushing any
principle to an absurd extreme. If certain pairs of words have been
sent forth into the world by English poets from a time whereof the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary, then perhaps they may now
plead prescription whenever any cold-hearted commentator is disposed to
doubt the legitimacy of their conjunction. Altho the union is forbidden
by the strict letter of the law,--like marriage with a deceased
wife’s sister in England,--only the censorious are disposed to take
the matter into court. In time certain rimes--falsely so called--“are
legitimated by custom,” one British critic has declared, citing _love_
and _prove_, for example, and asserting that “_river_ has just got
to rime with _ever_ or the game cannot be played.” You must have
_forgiven_ or you will never get to _heaven_. “We expect these licenses
and do not resent them, as we do resent Poe’s _valleys_ and _palace_
and the eccentricities of Mrs. Browning.” That there is force in this
contention cannot be denied; but it must be remembered that those who
urge it are necessarily lovers of poetry, or at least fairly familiar
with a large body of English verse, or else they would not be aware of
the fact that _love_ and _prove_, _heaven_ and _given_, have often been
tied together. But even if these critics, who have been sophisticated
by over-familiarity with poetic license, do not resent this pairing of
unequal sounds, it does not follow that those who for the first time
hear _dove_ linked with _Jove_ are equally forgiving or negligent.
Even if these licenses are pardoned by some as venial offenses, there
are others whose ears are annoyed by them and whose attention is
distracted. In other words, we are here face to face with the personal
equation; and the only way for a writer of verse to be certain that one
or another of his rimes will not be resented by this reader or that is
to make sure that all his marriages are flawless.

Thus and thus only can he avoid offense with absolute certainty. If
his rimes are perfect to the ear when read aloud or recited, then they
will never divert the attention of the auditor from the matter of the
poem to the mere manner. On the other hand, it is only fair to confess
that there are some lovers of poetry who find a charm in lawlessness
and in eccentricity. A series of perfect rimes pleases them; but so
also does an occasional rime in which the vowel is slightly varied. And
the poet’s consolation for the loss of these must lie in the knowledge
that he cannot hope to satisfy everybody. Consolation may lie also in
the belief that any lapse from the perfect rime is dangerous, for even
if there are some who enjoy the divergence when it is delicate,--that
is, when the vowel sound, even if not absolutely identical, is
sympathetically akin,--there are very few who are not annoyed when the
difference becomes as obvious as in the attempt to link together _dial_
and _ball_ or _water_ and _clear_.

And as it is only a sophisticated ear which enjoys the mating of
_valleys_ with _palace_, for example, so the attempted rime of this
type is to be found chiefly in the more labored poets--in those who
are consciously literary. The primitive lyrist, the unconscious singer
who makes a ballad of a May morning or rimes a jingle for the nursery
or puts together a couplet to give point to a fragment of proverbial
wisdom, is nearly always exact in the repetition of his vowel. Where
he is careless is in the accompanying consonants. As is remarked by
the British critic from whom quotation has already been made, “we may
observe that in all early European poetry, from the ‘Song of Roland’ to
the popular ballads, the ear was satisfied with assonance, that is,
the harmony of the vowel sounds; _hat_ is assonant to _tag_, and that
was good enough.” So in the proverbial couplet,

  See a pin and pick it _up_,
  All day long you’ll have good _luck_.

So again more than once in the unaffected lyrics of the laureate of the
nursery, Mother Goose:

  Goosy, goosy _gander_,
    Where do you _wander_?
  Upstairs and downstairs,
    And in my lady’s _chamber_.

  Leave them _alone_
  And they will come _home_.

This assonance is visible in the linking of _wild wood_ and
_childhood_, which many versifiers have proffered as tho it was a
double rime; it is to be seen again in Whittier’s _main land_ and
_trainband_; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte’s ‘Her Letter’:

  Of that ride--that to me was the _rarest_;
    Of--the something you said at the gate.
  Ah! Joe, then I wasn’t an _heiress_
    To the best-paying lead in the State.

Altho this substitution of assonance for rime is uncommon in the more
literary lyrics, which we may suppose to have been composed with the
pen, it is still frequently to be found in the popular song, born on
the lips of the singer, and set down in black and white only as an
afterthought. It abounds in the college songs which have been sung into
being, and in the brisk ballads of the variety-show--which Planché
neatly characterized as “most music-hall, most melancholy.” In one
dime song-book containing the words set to music by Mr. David Braham
to enliven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan’s amusing pictures of life among
the lowly in the tenement-house districts of New York, there can be
discovered at least a dozen instances of this use of assonance as tho
it were rime:

  De gal’s name is _Nannie_,
  And she’s just left her _mammie_.

  He can get a pair of crutches
    From the doctor, it’s well _known_,
  And feel like the King of Persia,
    When he goes marching _home_.

  One husband was a _toper_,
  The other was a _loafer_.

  ’T is there the solid _voters_
  Wear Piccadilly _chokers_.

  On Sundays, then, the _ladies_
  With a hundred million _babies_.

  To the poor of suffering Ireland:
    Time and time _again_;
  We thank you for our countrymen,
    And Donavan is our _name_.

When these lines are sung, rough as they are, the ear is satisfied
by the absolute identity of the final vowel, upon which the voice
lingers--while the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed.
It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of those who heard these
songs ever discovered any deficiency in the rimes. In more literary
ballads only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard; but in
folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance seems to be legal tender by
tacit convention. When Benedick was trying to make a copy of verses
for Beatrice, he declared that he could “find out no rime to _lady_
but _baby_, an innocent rime”--a remark which shows us that Benedick’s
theory of riming was much the same as Mr. Harrigan’s.

Probably, however, the attempt to substitute assonance for rime would
be resented by many of the readers who are tolerant toward such
departures from exactness as _heaven_ and _shriven_ or _grove_ and
_dove_. That is to say, the unliterary ear insists on the identity of
the vowel while careless as to the consonant, and the literary ear
insists on the identity of the consonant while not quite so careful as
to the vowel. And here is another reason for exact accuracy, which
satisfies alike the learned and the unlearned, and is also in accord
with Herbert Spencer’s principle. It is true, probably, that such minor
divergencies as the mating of _home_ and _alone_ and of _shadow_ and
_meadow_--to take one of each class--are not generally conscious on the
part of the poet himself. Nor are they generally noticed by the reader
or the auditor; and even when noticed they are not always resented
as offensive. But just so long as there is a chance that they may be
noticed and that they may be resented, they had best be avoided. The
poet avails himself of his license at his peril. That way danger lies.

It is in the ‘Adventures of Philip’ that Thackeray records his hero’s
disapproval of a poet who makes _fire_ rime with _Marire_. Even
if the rime is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convicting
the lyrist of carelessness of speech--not to call it vulgarity of
pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes himself, sharp as he was upon those who
rimed _dawn_ and _morn_, was none the less guilty of a peccadillo
quite as reprehensible--_Elizas_ and _advertisers_. Whittier ventured
to chain _Eva_ not only with _leave her_ and _receive her_, which
suggest a slovenly utterance, but also with _give her_, _river_,
and _never_, which are all of them wrenched from their true sounds
to force them unto a vain and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred
cockney recklessness can be found in one of Mrs. Browning’s misguided
modernizations of Chaucer:

  Now grant my ship some smooth haven _win her_;
  I follow Statius first, and then _Corinna_.

In each of these cases the poet takes out a wedding license for his
couplet, only at the cost of compelling the reader to miscall the names
of these ladies, and to address them as _Marire_, _Elizer_, _Ever_,
and _Corinner_; and tho the rimes themselves are thus placed beyond
reproach, the poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and
precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of pronunciation is as
disenchanting as any vulgarity in grammar.

Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that makes these rimes are
certain of Mr. Kipling’s, as to which we are a little in doubt whether
he is making his rime by violence to the normal sound or whether his
own pronunciation is so abnormal that the rime itself seems to him
accurate:

  Railways and roads they _wrought_
    For the needs of the soil within;
  A time to scribble in _court_.
    A time to bear and grin.

 Long he pondered o’er the question in his scantly furnished _quarters_,
 Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin’s _daughters_.

  I quarrel with my wife at home.
    We never fight _abroad_;
  But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact,
    I am her only _lord_.

Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness, and yet akin to it,
is the trick of forcing an emphasis upon a final syllable which is
naturally short, in order that it may be made to rime with a syllable
which is naturally long. For example, in the exquisite lyric of
Lovelace’s, ‘To Althea from Prison,’ in the second quatrain of the
second stanza we find that we must prolong the final syllable of the
final word:

  When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
    When healths and draughts go _free_,
  Fishes that tipple in the deep
    Know no such liber_ty_.

Here the rime evades us unless we read the last word _libertee_. But
what then are we to do with the same word in the second quatrain of the
first stanza? To get his rime here, the poet insists on our reading the
last word _libertie_:

  When I lie tangled in her hair
    And fettered to her _eye_,
  The birds that wanton in the air
    Know no such liber_ty_.

Lovelace thus forces us not only to give an arbitrary pronunciation
to the final word of his refrain, but also to vary this arbitrary
pronunciation from stanza to stanza, awkwardly arresting our attention
to no purpose, when we ought to be yielding ourselves absolutely to the
charm of his most charming poem. Many another instance of this defect
in craftsmanship can be discovered in the English poets, one of them in
a lyric by that master of metrics, Poe, who opens the ‘Haunted Palace’
with a quatrain in which _tenanted_ is made to mate with _head_:

  In the greenest of our valleys,
    By good angels tenan_ted_,
  Once a fair and stately palace--
    Radiant palace--reared its _head_.

In the one poem of Walt Whitman’s in which he seemed almost willing
to submit to the bonds of rime and meter, and which--perhaps for that
reason partly--is the lyric of his now best known and best beloved,
in ‘O Captain, My Captain,’ certain of the rimes are possible only by
putting an impossible stress upon the final syllables of both words of
the pair:

  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all _exulting_,
  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and _daring_.

And again:

 For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths, for you the shores _a-crowding_;
 For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces _turning_.

In all these cases--Lovelace’s, Poe’s, Whitman’s--we find that the
principle of Economy of Attention has been violated, with a resulting
shock which diminishes somewhat our pleasure in the poems, delightful
as they are, each in its several way. We have been called to bestow a
momentary consideration on the mechanism of the poem, when we should
have preferred to reserve all our power to receive the beauty of its
spirit.

It may be doubted whether any pronunciation, however violently
dislocated, can justify Whittier’s joining of _bruised_ and _crusade_
in his ‘To England,’ or Browning’s conjunction of _windows_ and
_Hindus_ in his ‘Youth and Art.’ In ‘Cristina’ Browning tries to
combine _moments_ and _endowments_; in his ‘Another Way of Love’ he
conjoins _spider_ and _consider_; and in his ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish
Cloister’ he binds together _horse-hairs_ and _corsair’s_. Perhaps
one reason why Browning has made his way so slowly with the broad
public--whom every poet must conquer at last, or in the end confess
defeat--is that his rimes are sometimes violent and awkward, and
sometimes complicated and arbitrary. The poet has reveled in his own
ingenuity in compounding them, and so he flourishes them in the face
of the reader. The principle of Economy of Attention demands that in
serious verse the rime must be not only so accurate as to escape
remark, but also wholly unstrained. It must seem natural, necessary,
obvious, even inevitable, or else our minds are wrested from a rapt
contemplation of the theme to a disillusioning consideration of the
sounds by which it is bodied forth.

“Really the meter of some of the modern poems I have read,” said
Coleridge, “bears about the same relation to meter, properly
understood, that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exercise, and
pretty severe too, I think.” A master of meter Browning proved himself
again and again, very inventive in the new rhythms he introduced, and
almost unfailingly felicitous; and yet there are poems of his in which
the rimes impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise. In the
‘Glove,’ for example, there not only abound manufactured rimes, each
of which in turn arrests the attention, and each of which demands a
most conscientious articulation before the ear can apprehend it, but
with a persistent perversity the poet puts the abnormal combination
first, and puts last the normal word with which it is to be united in
wedlock. Thus _aghast I’m_ precedes _pastime_, and _well swear_ comes
before _elsewhere_. This is like presenting us with the answer before
propounding the riddle.

In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily vanquished may be a part
of the joke, and an adroit and unexpected rime may be a witticism in
itself. But in the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ and in the ‘Fable for Critics’
it is generally the common word that comes before the uncommon
combination the alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a line of
Barham’s ends with _Mephistopheles_ we wonder how he is going to solve
the difficulty, and our expectation is swiftly gratified with _coffee
lees_; and when Lowell informs us that Poe

  ... talks like a book of iambs and _pentameters_,

we bristle our ears while he adds:

  In a way to make people of common sense _damn meters_.

But the ‘Glove’ is not comic in intent; the core of it is tragic,
and the shell is at least romantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant
playfulness of treatment might not be out of keeping with the
psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but not a few readers
resentfully reject the misplaced ingenuity of the wilfully artificial
double rimes. The incongruity between the matter of the poem and the
manner of it attracts attention to the form, and leaves us the less for
the fact.

It would be interesting to know just why Browning chose to do what he
did in the ‘Glove’ and in more than one other poem. He had his reasons,
doubtless, for he was no unconscious warbler of unpremeditated lays. If
he refused to be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention, he
knew what he was doing. It was not from any heedlessness--like that of
Emerson when he recklessly rimed _woodpecker_ with _bear_; or like that
of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming the same _woodpecker_ with
_hear_. Emerson and Lowell--and Whittier also--it may be noted, were
none of them enamoured of technic; and when a couplet or a quatrain or
a stanza of theirs happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently
they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a fortunate accident. They
were not untiring students of versification, forever seeking to spy out
its mysteries and to master its secrets, as Milton was, and Tennyson
and Poe.

And yet no critic has more satisfactorily explained the essential
necessity of avoiding discords than did Lowell when he affirmed that
“not only meter but even rime itself is not without suggestion in
outward nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each
other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray
answers to spray, strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
an embodied ode, Nature’s triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rime who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o’erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below?... You must not only expect, but you must expect in the
right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fiber by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought.”

Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe, who declared that “what,
in rime, first and principally pleases, may be referred to the human
sense or appreciation of equality.” But there is no equality in the
sound of _valleys_ and _palace_, and so the human sense is robbed of
its pleasure; and there is no consonance, visible or audible, between
_woodpecker_ and _hear_, and so we are suddenly demagnetized by our own
sensibility, and cannot feel what and how we ought.

So long as the poet gives us rimes exact to the ear and completely
satisfactory to the sense to which they appeal, he has solid ground
beneath his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos come again.
Admit _given_ and _heaven_, and it is hard to deny _chamber_ and
_remember_. Having relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound,
you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy. Allow _shadow_
and _meadow_ to be legitimate, and how can you put the bar sinister
on _hear_ and _woodpecker_? Indeed, we fail to see how you can help
feeling that John Phœnix was unduly harsh when he rejected the poem of
a Young Astronomer beginning, “O would I had a telescope with fourteen
slides!” on account of the atrocious attempt in the second line to rime
_Pleiades_ with _slides_.

Lieutenant Derby was a humorist; but is his tying together of
incompatible vocables much worse than one offense of which Keats is
guilty?

      Then who would go
      Into dark Soho,
  And chatter with dack’d-haired _critics_,
      When he can stay
      For the new-mown hay
  And startle the dappled _prickets_?

This quotation is due to Professor F. N. Scott, who has drawn attention
also to an astounding quatrain of Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’:

  Or in a clear-wall’d city on the sea,
    Near gilded organ-pipes, her _hair_
  Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
    An angel look’d at _her_.

Professor Scott declares that he hesitates “for a term by which to
characterize such rimes as these. Certainly they are not eye-rimes
in the proper meaning of that term. Perhaps ... they may be called
nose-rimes.”

Just as every instance of bad grammar interferes with the force of
prose, so in verse every needless inversion and every defective rime
interrupts the impression which the poet wishes to produce. There are
really not so many in Pope’s poems as there may seem to be, for since
Queen Anne’s day our language has modified its pronunciation here and
there, leaving now only to the Irish the _tea_ which is a perfect rime
to _obey_, and the _join_ which is a perfect rime to _line_.

Perhaps the prevalence in English verse of the intolerable “allowable
rimes” is due in part to an acceptance of what seems like an
evil precedent, to be explained away by our constantly changing
pronunciation. Perhaps it is due in part also to the present wretched
orthography of our language. The absurd “rimes to the eye” which abound
in English are absent from Italian verse and from French. The French,
as the inheritors through the Latin of the great Greek tradition,
have a finer respect for form, and strive constantly for perfection
of technic, altho the genius of their language seems to us far less
lyric than ours. Théodore de Banville, in his little book on French
versification, declared formally and emphatically that there is no
such thing as a poetic license. And Voltaire, in a passage admirably
rendered into English by the late Frederick Locker-Lampson, says that
the French “insist that the rime shall cost nothing to the ideas, that
it shall be neither trivial, nor too far-fetched; we exact vigorously
in a verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do not
admit the smallest license; we require an author to carry without a
break all these chains, yet that he should appear ever free.”

In a language as unrhythmic as the French, rime is far more important
than it need be in a lilting and musical tongue like our own; but in
the masterpieces of the English lyrists, as in those of the French,
rime plays along the edges of a poem, ever creating the expectation it
swiftly satisfies and giving most pleasure when its presence is felt
and not flaunted. Like the dress of the well-bred woman, which sets
off her beauty without attracting attention to itself, rime must be
adequate and unobtrusive, neither too fine nor too shabby, but always
in perfect taste.

 (1898-1900)




XI

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES


Plutarch tells us that the tragedian Æsopus, when he spoke the opening
lines of the ‘Atreus,’ a tragedy by Attius,

  I’m Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops’ crown.
  As far as Helle’s sea and Ion’s main
  Beat on the Isthmus,

entered so keenly into the spirit of this lofty passage that he struck
dead at his feet a slave who approached too near to the person of
royalty; and Professor Tyrrel notes how these verses affect us with
“the weight of names great in myth-land and hero-land,” and he suggests
that they produce “a vague impression of majesty,” like Milton’s

  Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban,
  Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond,
  Or whom Biserta sent from Afric’s shore,
  When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
  By Fontarabia.

It is a question how far the beauty of the resonant lines of the
‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus, where the news of the fall of Troy is flashed
along the chain of beacons from hilltop to promontory, is due even
more to the mere sounds of the proper names than it is to the memories
these mighty names evoke. Far inferior to this, and yet deriving its
effect also from the sonorous roll of the lordly proper names (which
had perhaps lingered in the poet’s memory ever since the travels of his
childhood), is the passage in the ‘Hernani’ of Victor Hugo, when, the
new emperor ordering all the conspirators to be set free who are not of
noble blood, the hero steps forward hotly to declare his rank:

  Puisqu’il faut être grand pour mourir, je me lève.
  Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
  M’a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
  Marquis de Mouroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
  De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j’ignore le compte.
  Je suis Jean d’Aragon, grand maître d’Avis, né
  Dans l’exil, fils proscrit d’un père assassiné
  Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille!

Lowell, after telling us that “precisely what makes the charm of poetry
is what we cannot explain any more than we can describe a perfume,”
proceeds to point out that it is a prosaic passage of Drayton’s
‘Polyolbion’ which gave a hint to Wordsworth, thus finely utilized in
one of the later bard’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’:

  Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
  That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
  The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
  Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again;
  The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
  Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
  And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
  A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
  And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
  Helvellyn, far into the clear blue sky,
  Carried the Lady’s voice,--old Skiddaw blew
  His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
  Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
  And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

Not a little of this same magic is there in many a line of Walt
Whitman; especially did he rejoice to point out the beauty of Manahatta:

  I was asking something specific and perfect for my city,
  Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

Longfellow has recorded his feeling that

          The destined walls
  Of Cambalu and of Cathain Can

(from the eleventh book of ‘Paradise Lost’) is a “delicious line.”
Longfellow was always singularly sensitive to the magic power of words,
and not long after that entry in his journal there is this other: “I
always write the name October with especial pleasure. There is a secret
charm about it, not to be defined. It is full of memories, it is full
of dusky splendors, it is full of glorious poetry.” And Poe was so
taken with the melody of this same word that in ‘Ulalume’ he invented a
proper name merely that he might have a rime for it:

  It was night in the lonesome October
    Of my most immemorial year;
  It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
    In the misty mid-region of Weir--
  It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
    In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

The charm of these lines is due mainly to their modulated music, and
to the contrast of the vowel sounds in _Auber_ and _Weir_, just as a
great part of the beauty of Landor’s exquisite lyric, ‘Rose Aylmer,’ is
contained in the name itself. Is there any other reason why Mesopotamia
should be a “blessed word,” save that its vowels and its consonants are
so combined as to fill the ear with sweetness? Yet Mr. Lecky records
Garrick’s assertion that Whitefield could pronounce Mesopotamia so as
to make a congregation weep. And others have found delight in repeating
a couplet of Campbell’s:

  And heard across the waves’ tumultuous roar
  The wolfs long howl from Oonalaska’s shore--

a delight due, I think, chiefly to the unexpected combination of open
vowels and sharp consonants in the single Eskimo word, the meaning of
it being unknown and wholly unimportant, and the sound of it filling
the ear with an uncertain and yet awaited pleasure.

Just as Oonalaska strikes us at once as the fit title for a shore along
which the lone wolf should howl, so Atchafalaya bears in its monotonous
vowel a burden of melancholy, made more pitiful to us by our knowledge
that it was the name of the dark water where Evangeline and Gabriel
almost met in the night and then parted again for years. Charles
Sumner wrote to Longfellow that Mrs. Norton considered “the scene on
the Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each other, so typical
of life that she had a seal cut with that name upon it”; and shortly
afterward Leopold, the King of the Belgians, speaking of ‘Evangeline,’
“asked her if she did not think the word Atchafalaya was suggestive of
experience in life, and added that he was about to have it cut on a
seal”--whereupon, to his astonishment, she showed him hers.

It would be difficult indeed to declare how much of the delight our
ear may take in these words--Atchafalaya, Oonalaska, Mesopotamia,--is
due simply to their own melody, and how much to the memories they
may stir. Here we may see one reason why the past seems so much more
romantic than the present. In tales of olden time even the proper
names linger in our ears with an echo of “the glory that was Greece
and the grandeur that was Rome.” Here is, in fact, an unfair advantage
which dead-and-gone heroes of foreign birth have over the men of our
own day and our own country. “If we dilate in beholding the Greek
energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the
same sentiment,” said Emerson in his essay on ‘Heroism,’ and he added
that the first step of our worthiness was “to disabuse us of our
superstitious associations with places and times.” And he asks, “Why
should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in
the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn,
and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River,
and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves the names
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if we hurry a
little, we may come to learn that here is best.... The Jerseys were
honest ground enough for Washington to tread.”

Emerson penned these sentences in the first half of the nineteenth
century, when we Americans were still fettered by the inherited
shackles of colonialism. Fifty years after he wrote, it would have been
hard to find an American who thought either Boston Bay or Massachusetts
a paltry place. And Matthew Arnold has recorded that to him, when he
was an undergraduate, Emerson was then “but a voice speaking from three
thousand miles away; but so well he spoke that from that time forth
Boston Bay and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment
akin to that which invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar.”

As for the Connecticut River, had not Thoreau done it the service
Irving had rendered long before to the Hudson?--had he not given it a
right to be set down in the geography of literature? It is well that
we should be reminded now and again that the map which the lover of
letters has in his mind’s eye is different by a whole world from the
projection which the school-boy smears with his searching finger, since
the tiny little rivers on whose banks great men grew to maturity, the
Tiber and the Po, the Seine and the Thames, flow across its pages with
a fuller stream than any Kongo or Amazon. And on this literary map
the names of not a few American rivers and hills and towns are now
inscribed.

It is fortunate that many of the American places most likely to be
mentioned in the poetic gazetteer have kept the liquid titles the
aborigines gave them. “I climbed one of my hills yesterday afternoon
and took a sip of Wachusett, who was well content that Monadnock was
out of the way,” wrote Lowell in a letter. “How lucky our mountains
(many of them) are in their names, tho they must find it hard to live
up to them sometimes! The Anglo-Saxon sponsor would Nicodemus ’em to
nothing in no time.” It will be pitiful if the Anglo-Saxons on the
Pacific coast allow Mount Tacoma to be Nicodemused to Mount Rainier, as
the Anglo-Saxons of the Atlantic coast allowed Lake Andiatarocte to be
Nicodemused into Lake George. Fenimore Cooper strove in vain for the
acceptance of Horicon as the name of this lovely sheet of water, which
the French discoverer called the Lake of the Holy Sacrament.

Marquette spoke of a certain stream as the River of the Immaculate
Conception, altho the Spaniards were already familiar with it as the
River of the Holy Spirit; and later La Salle called it after Colbert;
but an Algonquin word meaning “many waters” clung to it always; and so
we know it now as the Mississippi. The Spaniard has been gone from its
banks for more than a hundred years, and the Frenchman has followed the
Indian, and the Anglo-Saxon now holds the mighty river from its source
to its many mouths; but the broad stream bears to-day the name the red
men gave it. And so also the Ohio keeps its native name, tho the French
hesitated between St. Louis and La Belle Rivière as proper titles
for it. Cataraqui is one old name for an American river, and Jacques
Cartier accepted for this stream another Indian word, Hochelaga, but
(as Professor Hinsdale reminded us) “St. Lawrence, the name that
Cartier had given to the Gulf, unfortunately superseded it.”

Much of the charm of these Indian words, Atchafalaya, Ohio,
Andiatarocte, Tacoma, is due no doubt to their open vowels; but is
not some of it to be ascribed to our ignorance of their meanings? We
may chance to know that Mississippi signifies “many waters” and that
Minnehaha can be interpreted as “laughing water,” but that is the
furthermost border of our knowledge. If we were all familiar with the
Algonquin dialects, I fancy that the fascination of many of these names
would fade swiftly. And yet perhaps it would not, for we could never be
on as friendly terms with the Indian language as we are with our own;
and there is ever a suggestion of the mystic in the foreign tongue.

We engrave _Souvenir_ on our sweetheart’s bracelet or brooch; but
the French for this purpose prefer _Remember_. “The difficulty of
translation lies in the _color_ of words,” Longfellow declared. “Is
the Italian _ruscilletto gorgoglioso_ fully rendered by _gurgling
brooklet_? Or the Spanish _pojaros vocingleros_ by _garrulous birds_?
Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only the fascination of foreign
and unfamiliar sounds; and to the Italian and Spanish ear the English
words may seem equally beautiful.”

After the death of the Duke of Wellington, Longfellow wrote a poem on
the ‘Warden of the Cinque Ports’; and to us Americans there was poetry
in the very title. And yet it may be questioned whether the Five Ports
are necessarily any more poetic than the Five Points or the Seven
Dials. So also Sanguelac strikes us as far loftier than Bloody Pond,
but is it really? I have wondered often whether to a Jew of the first
century Aceldama, the field of blood, and Golgotha, the place of a
skull, were not perfectly commonplace designations, quite as common, in
fact, as Bone Gulch or Hangman’s Hollow would be to us, and conveying
the same kind of suggestion.

We are always prone to accept the unknown as the magnificent,--if I may
translate the Latin phrase,--to put a higher value on the things veiled
from us by the folds of a foreign language. The Bosporus is a more
poetic place than Oxford, tho the meaning of both names is the same.
Montenegro fills our ears and raises our expectations higher than could
any mere Black Mountain. The “Big River” is but a vulgar nickname, and
yet we accept the equivalent Guadalquivir and Rio Grande; we even allow
ourselves sometimes to speak of the Rio Grande River--which is as
tautological as De Quincey declared the name of Mrs. Barbauld to be.
Bridgeport is as prosaic as may be, while Alcantara has a remote and
romantic aroma, and yet the latter word signifies only “the bridge.” We
can be neighborly, most of us, with the White Mountains; but we feel a
deeper respect for Mont Blanc and the Weisshorn and the Sierra Nevada.

Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily to force them into
an imported falsehood. Elberon, where Garfield died, was founded by
one L. B. Brown, so they say, and the homely name of the owner was
thus contorted to make a seemingly exotic appellation for the place.
And they say also that the man who once dammed a brook amid the pines
of New Jersey had three children, Carrie, Sally, and Joe, and that he
bestowed their united names upon Lake Carasaljo, the artificial piece
of water on the banks of which Lakewood now sits salubriously. In Mr.
Cable’s ‘John March, Southerner,’ one of the characters explains: “You
know an ancestor of his founded Suez. That’s how it got its name. His
name was Ezra and hers was Susan, don’t you see?” And I have been told
of a town on the Northern Pacific Railroad which the first comers
called Hell-to-Pay, and which has since experienced a change of heart
and become Eltopia.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a thirst for
self-improvement raged among the villages of the lower Hudson River,
and many a modest settlement thought to better itself and to rise in
the world by the assumption of a more swelling style and title. When a
proposition was made to give up the homely Dobbs Ferry for something
less plebeian, the poet of ‘Nothing to Wear’ rimed a pungent protest:

  They say “Dobbs” ain’t melodious;
  It’s “horrid,” “vulgar,” “odious”;
    In all their crops it sticks;
  And then the worse addendum
  Of “Ferry” does offend ’em
    More than its vile prefix.
  Well, it does seem distressing,
  But, if I’m good at guessing,
    Each one of these same nobs
  If there was money in it,
  Would ferry in a minute,
    And change his name to Dobbs!

  That’s it--they’re not partic’lar
  Respecting the auric’lar
    At a stiff market rate;
  But Dobbs’s special vice is
  That he keeps down the prices
    Of all their real estate!
  A name so unattractive
  Keeps villa-sites inactive,
    And spoils the broker’s jobs;
  They think that speculation
  Would rage at “Paulding’s Station,”
    Which stagnates now at “Dobbs.”

In the later stanzas Mr. Butler denounces changes nearer to New York:

  Down there, on old Manhattan,
  Where land-sharks breed and fatten,
    They wiped out Tubby Hook.
  That famous promontory,
  Renowned in song and story,
    Which time nor tempest shook,
  Whose name for aye had been good,
  Stands newly christened “Inwood,”
    And branded with the shame
  Of some old rogue who passes
  By dint of aliases,
    Afraid of his own name!

  See how they quite outrival
  Plain barn-yard Spuyten Duyvil
    By peacock Riverdale,
  Which thinks all else it conquers,
  And over homespun Yonkers
    Spreads out its flaunting tail!

No loyal Manhattaner but would regret to part with Spuyten Duyvil
and Yonkers and Harlem, and the other good old names that recall the
good old Dutchmen who founded New Amsterdam. Few loyal Manhattaners,
I think, but would be glad to see the Greater New York (now at last
an accomplished fact) dignified by a name less absurd than New York.
If Pesth and Buda could come together and become Budapest, why may
not the Greater New York resume the earlier name and be known to
the world as Manhattan? Why should the people of this great city of
ours let the Anglo-Saxons “Nicodemus us to nothing,” or less than
nothing, with a name so pitiful as New York? “I hope and trust,” wrote
Washington Irving, “that we are to live to be an old nation, as well as
our neighbors, and have no idea that our cities when they shall have
attained to venerable antiquity shall still be dubbed New York and New
London and new this and new that, like the Pont Neuf (the new bridge)
at Paris, which is the oldest bridge in that capital, or like the Vicar
of Wakefield’s horse, which continued to be called the colt until he
died of old age.”

Whenever any change shall be made we must hope that the new will be
not only more euphonious than the old, but more appropriate and more
stately. Perhaps Hangtown in California made a change for the better
many years ago when it took the name of Placerville; but perhaps
Placerville was not the best name it could have taken. “We will be
nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the old world or in the new,” wrote
Matthew Arnold when he was declaring the beauty of Celtic literature;
“and when our race has built Bold Street in Liverpool, and pronounced
it very good, it hurries across the Atlantic, and builds Nashville
and Jacksonville and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the
designs of Providence in an incomparable manner.” In this sentence the
criticism cuts both British habits and American. Later in life Matthew
Arnold sharpened his knife again for use on the United States alone.
“What people,” he asked, “in whom the sense for beauty and fitness
was quick, could have invented or tolerated the hideous names ending
in _ville_--the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles--rife from
Maine to Florida?”

Now, it must be confessed at once that we have no guard against a
thrust like that. Such names do abound and they are of unsurpassed
hideousness. But could not the same blow have got home as fatally had
it been directed against his own country? A glance at any gazetteer of
the British Isles would show that the British are quite as vulnerable
as the Americans. In fact, this very question of Matthew Arnold’s
suggested to an anonymous American rimester the perpetration of a copy
of verses, the quality of which can be gaged by these first three
stanzas:

  Of Briggsville and Jacksonville
    I care not now to sing;
  They make me sad and very mad--
    My inmost soul they wring.
  I’ll hie me back to England,
    And straightway I will go
  To Boxford and to Swaffham,
    To Plunger and Loose Hoe.

  At Scrooby and at Gonerby,
    At Wigton and at Smeeth,
  At Bottesford and Runcorn,
    I need not grit my teeth.
  At Swineshead and at Crummock,
    At Sibsey and Spithead,
  Stoke Poges and Wolsoken
    I will not wish me dead.

  At Horbling and at Skidby,
    At Chipping Ongar, too,
  At Botterel Stotterdon and Swops,
    At Skellington and Skew,
  At Piddletown and Blumsdown,
    At Shanklin and at Smart,
  At Gosberton and Wrangle
    I’ll soothe this aching heart.

To discover a mote in our neighbor’s eyes does not remove the mote
in our own, however much immediate relief it may give us from the
acuteness of our pain. When Matthew Arnold animadverted upon “the
jumbles of unnatural and inappropriate names everywhere,” he may have
had in mind the most absurd medley existing anywhere in the world--the
handful of Greek and Roman names of all sorts which was sown broadcast
over the western part of New York State. Probably this region of
misfortune it was that Irving was thinking about when he denounced the
“shallow affectation of scholarship,” and told how “the whole catalog
of ancient worthies is shaken out of the back of Lemprière’s Classical
Dictionary, and a wide region of wild country is sprinkled over with
the names of heroes, poets, sages of antiquity, jumbled into the most
whimsical juxtaposition.”

Along the road from Dublin, going south to Bray, the traveler finds
Dumdrum and Stillorgan, as tho--to quote the remarks of the Irish
friend who gave me these facts--a band of wandering musicians had
broken up and scattered their names along the highway. For sheer
ugliness it would be hard to beat two other proper names near Dublin,
where the Sallynoggin road runs into the Glenageary.

It may be that these words sound harsher in our strange ears than
they do to a native wonted to their use. We take the unknown for the
magnificent sometimes, no doubt; but sometimes also we take it for
the ridiculous. To us New-Yorkers, for instance, there is nothing
absurd or ludicrous in the sturdy name of Schenectady; perhaps there
is even a hint of stateliness in the syllables. But when Mr. Laurence
Hutton was in the north of Scotland some years ago there happened to
be in his party a young lady from that old Dutch town; and when a
certain laird who lived in those parts chanced to be told that this
young lady dwelt in Schenectady he was moved to inextinguishable
laughter. He ejaculated the outlandish sounds again and again in the
sparse intervals of his boisterous merriment. He announced to all his
neighbors that among their visitors was a young lady from Schenectady,
and all who called were presented to her, and at every repetition of
the strange syllables his violent cachinnations broke forth afresh.
Never had so comic a name fallen upon his ears; and yet he himself
was the laird of Balduthro (pronounced Balduthy); his parish was
Ironcross (pronounced Aron-crouch); his railway-station was Kilconquhar
(pronounced Kinŏcher); and his post-office was Pittenweem!

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotchman who had changed his point of
view more often than the laird of Balduthro; he had a broader vision
and a more delicate ear and a more refined perception of humor. When he
came to these United States as an amateur immigrant on his way across
the plains, he asked the name of a river from a brakeman on the train;
and when he heard that the stream “was called the Susquehanna, the
beauty of the name seemed part and parcel of the beauty of the land.
As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word
Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no
other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.”

And then Stevenson breaks from his narrative to sing the praises of
our place-names. The passage is long for quotation in a paper where
too much has been quoted already; and yet I should be derelict to my
duty if I did not transcribe it here. Stevenson had lived among many
peoples, and he was far more cosmopolitan than Matthew Arnold, and more
willing, therefore, to dwell on beauties than on blemishes. “None can
care for literature in itself,” he begins, “who do not take a special
pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world
where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as
the United States of America. All times, races, and languages have
brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid,
with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London
associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own
suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat,
translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and
Arkansas.... Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrow-head under
a steam-factory, below Anglified New York. The names of the States
and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic
vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming,
Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music
for the ear; a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise
from the western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing
spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike
the fancy in a business circular.”

As Campbell had utilized the innate beauty of the word Wyoming, so
Stevenson himself made a ballad on the dreaded name of Ticonderoga;
and these are two of the proper names of modern America that sing
themselves. But there is nothing canorous in Anglified New York; there
is no sonority in its syllables; there is neither dignity nor truth in
its obvious meaning. It might serve well enough as the address of a
steam-factory in a business circular; but it lacks absolutely all that
the name of a metropolis demands. Stevenson thought that the new Homer
would joy in working into his strong lines the beautiful nomenclature
of America; but Washington Irving had the same anticipation, and it
forced him to declare that if New York “were to share the fate of Troy
itself, to suffer a ten years’ siege, and be sacked and plundered, no
modern Homer would ever be able to elevate the name to epic dignity.”
Irving went so far as to wish not only that New York city should be
Manhattan again, but that New York State should be Ontario, the Hudson
River the Mohegan, and the United States themselves Appalachia. Edgar
Allan Poe, than whom none of our poets had a keener perception of the
beauty of sounds and the fitness of words, approved of Appalachia as
the name of the whole country.

Perhaps we must wait yet a little while for Appalachia and Ontario
and the Mohegan; but has not the time come to dig up that old red
arrow-head Manhattan, and fit it to a new shaft?

 (1895)




XII

AS TO “AMERICAN SPELLING”


[This paper is here reprinted from an earlier volume now out of print.]


When the author of the ‘Cathedral’ was accosted by the wandering
Englishmen within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a joke,

  Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends.
  The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,
  Abolished in the truce of common speech
  And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue.

In this common speech other Englishmen are not always ready to
acknowledge the full rights of Lowell’s countrymen. They would put us
off with but a younger brother’s portion of the mother-tongue, seeming
somehow to think that they are more closely related to the common
parent than we are. But Orlando, the younger son of Sir Rowland du
Bois, was no villain; and tho we have broken with the fatherland, the
mother-tongue is none the less our heritage. Indeed, we need not care
whether the division is _per stirpes_ or _per capita_; our share is not
the less in either case.

Beneath the impotent protests which certain British newspapers are
prone to make every now and again against the “American language” as
a whole, and against the stray Americanism which has happened last
to invade England, there is a tacit assumption that we Americans are
outer barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering with something
which belongs to the British exclusively. And the outcry against the
“American language” is not as shrill nor as piteous as the shriek of
horror with which certain of the journals of London greet “American
spelling,” a hideous monster which they feared was ready to devour them
as soon as the international copyright bill should become law. In the
midst of every discussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great
Britain, the bugbear of “American spelling” reared its grisly head.
The London _Times_ declared that English publishers would never put
any books into type in the United States because the people of England
would never tolerate the peculiarities of orthography which prevailed
in American printing-offices. The _St. James’s Gazette_ promptly
retorted that “already newspapers in London are habitually using the
ugliest forms of American spelling, and these silly eccentricities do
not make the slightest difference in their circulation.” The _Times_
and the _St. James’s Gazette_ might differ as to the effect of the
copyright act on the profits of the printers of England, but they
agreed heartily as to the total depravity of “American spelling.” I
think that any disinterested foreigner who might chance to hear these
violent outcries would suppose that English orthography was as the law
of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not; he would be justified
in believing that the system of spelling now in use in Great Britain
was hallowed by the Established Church, and in some way mysteriously
connected with the state religion.

Just what the British newspapers were afraid of it is not easy to say,
and it is difficult to declare just what they mean when they talk of
“American spelling.” Probably they do not refer to the improvements in
orthography suggested by the first great American--Benjamin Franklin.
Possibly they do refer to the modifications in the accepted spelling
proposed by another American, Noah Webster--not so great, and yet not
to be named slightingly by any one who knows how fertile his labors
have been for the good of the whole country. Noah Webster, so his
biographer, Mr. Scudder, tells us, “was one of the first to carry a
spirit of democracy into letters.... Throughout his work one may detect
a confidence in the common sense of the people which was as firm as
Franklin’s.” But the innovations of Webster were hesitating and often
inconsistent; and most of them have been abandoned by later editors of
Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language.

What, then, do British writers mean when they animadvert upon “American
spelling”? So far as I have been able to discover, the British
journalists object to certain minor labor-saving improvements of
American orthography, such as the dropping of the _k_ from _almanack_,
the omission of one _g_ from _waggon_, and the like; and they protest
with double force, with all the strength that in them lies, against
the substitution of a single _l_ for a double _l_ in such words as
_traveller_, against the omission of the _u_ from such words as
_honour_, against the substitution of an _s_ for a _c_ in such words as
_defence_, and against the transposing of the final two letters of such
words as _theatre_. The objection to “American spelling” may lie deeper
than I have here suggested, and it may have a wider application; but
I have done my best to state it fully and fairly as I have deduced it
from a painful perusal of many columns of exacerbated British writing.

Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly the extent of the British
journalistic objections to “American spelling,” the unprejudiced
reader may be moved to ask: “Is this all? Are these few and slight
and unimportant changes the cause of this mighty commotion?” One may
agree with Sainte-Beuve in thinking that “orthography is the beginning
of literature,” without discovering in these modifications from the
Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust. And since I have quoted
Sainte-Beuve once, I venture to cite him again, and to take from the
same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion that “if we write more
correctly, let it be to express especially honest feelings and just
thoughts.”

Feelings may be honest tho they are violent, but irritation is not the
best frame of mind for just thinking. The tenacity with which some
of the newspapers of London are wont to defend the accepted British
orthography is perhaps due rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell
told us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with as fierce a flame
as ever once theological hatred; and any American who chances to note
the force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against
“American spelling” in the columns of the _Saturday Review_, for
example, and of the _Athenæum_, may find himself wondering as to the
date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary
British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the
church was held at which it was made an article of faith.

The _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenæum_, highly pitched as their
voices are, yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to arms against the
possible invasion of the sanctity of British orthography by “American
spelling” than is the London _Times_, the solid representative of
British thought, the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet
the _Times_ is not without orthographic eccentricities of its own,
as Matthew Arnold took occasion to point out. In his essay on the
‘Literary Influence of Academies,’ he asserted that “every one has
noticed the way in which the _Times_ chooses to spell the word
_diocese_; it always spells it _diocess_, deriving it, I suppose, from
_Zeus_ and _census_.... Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself
in an orthographical antic of this sort!”

When we read what is written in the _Times_ and the _Saturday Review_
and the _Athenæum_, sometimes in set articles on the subject, and
even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs in the course of
book-reviews, we wonder at the vehemence of the feeling displayed.
If we did not know that ancient abuses are often defended with more
violence and with louder shouts than inheritances of less doubtful
worth, we might suppose that the present spelling of the English
language was in a condition perfectly satisfactory alike to scholar and
to student. Such, however, is not the case. The leading philologists
of Great Britain and of the United States have repeatedly denounced
English spelling as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic, Professor
Max Müller at Oxford being no less emphatic than Professor Whitney
at Yale. There is now living no scholar of any repute who any longer
defends the ordinary orthography of the English language.

The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now
as it was in Pope’s day. Those who are volubly denouncing “American
spelling” in the columns of British journals are not students of
the history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in
so far as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur
philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly
remarked, “The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the
poor in that we have them always with us.” Altho few of them are as
ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the
obviously jocular _Welsh rabbit_ into a ridiculously impossible _Welsh
rarebit_, still the most of their writing serves no good purpose. Nor
do we discover in these specimens of British journalism that abundant
urbanity which etymology might lead us to look for in the writing of
inhabitants of so large a city as London.

Any one who takes the trouble to inform himself on the subject will
soon discover that it is chiefly the half-educated men who defend the
contemporary orthography of the English language, and who denounce the
alleged “American spelling” of _center_ and _honor_. The uneducated
reader may wonder perchance what the _g_ is doing in _sovereign_; the
half-educated reader discerns in the _g_ a connecting-link between the
English _sovereign_ and the Latin _regno_; the well-educated reader
knows that there is no philological connection whatever between _regno_
and _sovereign_.

Most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the
prevalence of “American spelling,” have never carried their education
so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man
from expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The
object of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he
knows, and also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close
sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not
necessarily qualified to express an opinion in esthetics; and on the
other hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of science. Now
literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Altho men
of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography
is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come
by nature. Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore
without spelling. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection
with literature; still less has orthography. A literary critic is
rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but
being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his
ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the “American spelling”
which the British journalists denounce. This “American spelling” is
less absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied
therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity. Once
upon a time most words that now are spelled with a final _c_ had an
added _k_. Even now both British and American usage retains this
_k_ in _hammock_, altho both British and Americans have dropped the
needless letter from _havoc_; while the British retain the _k_ at the
end of _almanack_ and the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson was
a reactionary in orthography as in politics; and in his dictionary
he wilfully put a final _k_ to words like _optick_, without being
generally followed by the publick--as he would have spelled it.
_Music_ was then _musick_, altho, even as late as Aubrey’s time, it
had been _musique_. In our own day we are witnessing the very gradual
substitution of the logical _technic_ for the form originally imported
from France--_technique_.

I am inclined to think that _technic_ is replacing _technique_ more
rapidly--or should I say less slowly?--in the United States than in
Great Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our words and to make
them our own, while the British have rather a fondness for foreign
phrases. A London journalist recently held up to public obloquy as an
“ignorant Americanism” the word _program_, altho he would have found
it set down in Professor Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. “_Programme_
was taken from the French,” so a recent writer reminds us, “and in
violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was imported into English,
we had already _anagram_, _cryptogram_, _diagram_, _epigram_, etc.”
The logical form _program_ is not common even in America; and British
writers seem to prefer the French form, as British speakers still give
a French pronunciation to _charade_, and to _trait_, which in America
have long since been accepted frankly as English words.

Possibly it is idle to look for any logic in anything which has to
do with modern English orthography on either side of the ocean.
Perhaps, however, there is less even than ordinary logic in the
British journalist’s objection to the so-called “American spelling” of
_meter_; for why should any one insist on _metre_ while unhesitatingly
accepting its compound _diameter_? Mr. John Bellows, in the preface to
his inestimable French-English and English-French pocket dictionary,
one of the very best books of reference ever published, informs us
that “the act of Parliament legalizing the use of the metric system
in this country [England] gives the words _meter_, _liter_, _gram_,
etc., spelled on the American plan.” Perhaps now that the sanction of
law has been given to this spelling, the final _er_ will drive out the
_re_ which has usurped its place. In one of the last papers that he
wrote, Lowell declared that “_center_ is no Americanism; it entered the
language in that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe.” “In
the sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century,” says
Professor Lounsbury, “while both ways of writing these words existed
side by side, the termination _er_ is far more common than that in
_re_. The first complete edition of Shakspere’s plays was published in
1623. In that work _sepulcher_ occurs thirteen times; it is spelled
eleven times with _er_. _Scepter_ occurs thirty-seven times; it is not
once spelled with _re_, but always with _er_. _Center_ occurs twelve
times, and in nine instances out of the twelve it ends in _er_.” So we
see that this so-called “American spelling” is fully warranted by the
history of the English language. It is amusing to note how often a
wider and a deeper study of English will reveal that what is suddenly
denounced in Great Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether
this be a variation in speech or in spelling, is shown to be really a
survival of a previous usage of our language, and authorized by a host
of precedents.

Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of progress, and no
doubt in due season Great Britain and her colonial dependencies will
be content again to spell words that end in _er_ as Shakspere and Ben
Jonson and Spenser spelled them. But when we get so far toward the
orthographic millennium that we all spell _sepulcher_, the ghost of
Thomas Campbell will groan within the grave at the havoc then wrought
in the final line of ‘Hohenlinden,’ which will cease to end with even
the outward semblance of a rime to the eye. We all know that

  On Linden, when the sun was low,
  All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
  And dark as winter was the flow
      Of Iser, rolling rapidly;

and those of us who have persevered may remember that with one
exception every fourth line of Campbell’s poem ends with a _y_,--the
words are _rapidly_, _scenery_, _revelry_, _artillery_, _canopy_, and
_chivalry_,--not rimes of surpassing distinction, any of them, but
perhaps passable to a reader who will humor the final syllable. The one
exception is the final line of the poem--

  Shall be a soldier’s _sepulchre_.

To no man’s ear did _sepulchre_ ever rime justly with _chivalry_ and
_canopy_ and _artillery_, altho Campbell may have so contorted his
vision that he evoked the dim spook of a rime in his mind’s eye. A rime
to the eye is a sorry thing at best, and it is sorriest when it depends
on an inaccurate and evanescent orthography.

Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in and leaving out of
the _u_ in words like _honor_ and _governor_ as he was in many other
things; and the makers of later dictionaries have departed widely
from his practice, those in Great Britain still halting half-way,
while those in the United States have gone on to the bitter end.
The illogic of the burly lexicographer is shown in his omission of
the _u_ from _exterior_ and _posterior_, and his retention of it in
the kindred words _interiour_ and _anteriour_; this, indeed, seems
like wilful perversity, and justifies Hood’s merry jest about “Dr.
Johnson’s Contradictionary.” The half-way measures of later British
lexicographers are shown in their omission of the _u_ from words which
Dr. Johnson spelled _emperour_, _governour_, _oratour_, _horrour_, and
_dolour_, while still retaining it in _favour_ and _honour_ and a few
others.

The reason for his disgust generally given by the London man of
letters who is annoyed by the “American spelling” of _honor_ and
_favor_ is that these words are not derived directly from the Latin,
but indirectly through the French; this is the plea put forward by
the late Archbishop Trench. Even if this plea were pertinent, the
application of this theory is not consistent in current British
orthography, which prescribes the omission of the _u_ from _error_ and
_emperor_, and its retention in _colour_ and _honour_--altho all four
words are alike derived from the Latin through the French. And this
plea fails absolutely to account for the _u_ which the British insist
on preserving in _harbour_ and in _neighbour_, words not derived from
the Latin at all, whether directly or indirectly through the French.
An American may well ask, “If the _u_ in _honour_ teaches etymology,
what does the _u_ in _harbour_ teach?” There is no doubt that the _u_
in _harbour_ teaches a false etymology; and there is no doubt also
that the _u_ in _honour_ has been made to teach a false etymology,
for Trench’s derivation of this final _our_ from the French _eur_ is
absurd, as the old French was _our_, and sometimes _ur_, sometimes even
_or_. Pseudo-philology of this sort is no new thing; Professor Max
Müller noted that the Roman prigs used to spell _cena_ (to show their
knowledge of Greek), _coena_, as if the word were somehow connected
with _κοινή_.

Thus we see that the _u_ in _honour_ suggests a false etymology; so
does the _ue_ in _tongue_, and the _g_ in _sovereign_, and the _c_
in _scent_, and the _s_ in _island_, and the _mp_ in _comptroller_,
and the _h_ in _rhyme_; and there are many more of our ordinary
orthographies which are quite as misleading from a philological point
of view. As the late Professor Hadley mildly put it, “our common
spelling is often an untrustworthy guide to etymology.” But why should
we expect or desire spelling to be a guide to etymology? If it is to
be a guide at all, we may fairly insist on its being trustworthy; and
so we cannot help thinking scorn of those who insist on retaining a
superfluous _u_ in _harbour_.

But why should orthography be made subservient to etymology? What have
the two things in common? They exist for wholly different ends, to be
attained by wholly different means. To bend either from its own work
to the aid of the other is to impair the utility of both. This truth
is recognized by all etymologists, and by all students of language,
altho it has not yet found acceptance among men of letters, who are
rarely students of language in the scientific sense. “It may be
observed,” Mr. Sweet declares, “that it is mainly among the class of
half-taught dabblers in philology that etymological spelling has found
its supporters”; and he goes on to say that “all true philologists
and philological bodies have uniformly denounced it as a monstrous
absurdity both from a practical and a scientific point of view.” I
should never dare to apply to the late Archbishop Trench and the London
journalists who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr. Sweet’s
“half-taught dabblers in philology”; but when a fellow-Briton uses it
perhaps I may venture to quote it without reproach.

As I have said before, the alleged “American spelling” differs but very
slightly from that which prevails in England. A wandering New-Yorker
who rambles through London is able to collect now and again evidences
of orthographic survivals which give him a sudden sense of being in
an older country than his own. I have seen a man whose home was near
Gramercy Park stop short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair,
and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of paper across the glass
door of a bar proclaiming that _CYDER_ was sold within. I have seen the
same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of a _chymist_ in the
window of which _corn-plaisters_ were offered for sale. He wondered
why a British house should have _storeys_ when an American house has
_stories_; and he disliked intensely the wanton _e_ wherewith British
printers have recently disfigured _form_, which in the latest London
typographical vocabularies appears as _forme_. This _e_ in _form_
is a gratuitous addition, and therefore contrary to the trend of
orthographic progress, which aims at the suppression of all arbitrary
and needless letters.

The so-called “American spelling” differs from the spelling which
obtains in England only in so far as it has yielded a little more
readily to the forces which make for progress, for uniformity, for
logic, for common sense. But just how fortuitous and chaotic the
condition of English spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and
in the United States no man knows who has not taken the trouble to
investigate for himself. In England, the reactionary orthography
of Samuel Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In America, the
revolutionary orthography of Noah Webster has been receded from even by
his own inheritors. There is no standard, no authority, not even that
of a powerful, resolute, and domineering personality.

Perhaps the attitude of philologists toward the present spelling of
the English language, and their opinion of those who are up in arms in
defense of it, have never been more tersely stated than in Professor
Lounsbury’s most admirable ‘Studies in Chaucer,’ a work which I should
term eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps give a false
impression of a book wherein the results of learning are set forth with
the most adroit literary art, and with an uninsistent but omnipresent
humor, which is a constant delight to the reader:

“There is certainly nothing more contemptible than our present
spelling, unless it be the reasons usually given for clinging to it.
The divorce which has unfortunately almost always existed between
English letters and English scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed
exhibition of itself than in the comments which men of real literary
ability make upon proposals to change or modify the cast-iron framework
in which our words are now clothed. On one side there is an absolute
agreement of view on the part of those who are authorized by their
knowledge of the subject to pronounce an opinion. These are well aware
that the present orthography hides the history of the word instead of
revealing it; that it is a stumbling-block in the way of derivation
or of pronunciation instead of a guide to it; that it is not in any
sense a growth or development, but a mechanical malformation, which
owes its existence to the ignorance of early printers and the necessity
of consulting the convenience of printing-offices. This consensus of
scholars makes the slightest possible impression upon men of letters
throughout the whole great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly
one of them who is not calmly confident of the superiority of his
opinion to that of the most famous special students who have spent
years in examining the subject. There is hardly one of them who does
not fancy he is manifesting a noble conservatism by holding fast to
some spelling peculiarly absurd, and thereby maintaining a bulwark
against the ruin of the tongue. There is hardly one of them who has
any hesitation in discussing the question in its entirety, while every
word he utters shows that he does not understand even its elementary
principles. There would be something thoroughly comic in turning into a
fierce international dispute the question of spelling _honor_ without
the _u_, were it not for the depression which every student of the
language cannot well help feeling in contemplating the hopeless abysmal
ignorance of the history of the tongue which any educated man must
first possess in order to become excited over the subject at all.”
(‘Studies in Chaucer,’ vol. iii., pp. 265-267.)

Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing. Sometimes it is going
further and further away from the orthography; for example, _either_
and _neither_ are getting more and more to have in their first syllable
the long _i_ sound instead of the long _e_ sound which they had
once. Sometimes it is being modified to agree with the orthography;
for example, the older pronunciations of _again_ to rime with _men_,
and of _been_ to rime with _pin_, in which I was carefully trained as
a boy, seem to me to be giving way before a pronunciation in exact
accord with the spelling, _again_ to rime with _pain_, and _been_ to
rime with _seen_. These two illustrations are from the necessarily
circumscribed experience of a single observer, and the observation of
others may not bear me out in my opinion; but tho the illustrations
fall to the ground, the main assertion, that pronunciation is changing,
is indisputable.

No doubt the change is less rapid than it was before the invention
of printing; far less rapid than it was before the days of the
public school and of the morning newspaper. There are variations of
pronunciation in different parts of the United States and of Great
Britain, as there are variations of vocabulary; but in the future
there will be a constantly increasing tendency for these variations to
disappear. There are irresistible forces making for uniformity--forces
which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Germany, Provençal in France,
Romansch in Switzerland. There is a desire to see a standard set up to
which all may strive to conform. In France a standard of pronunciation
is found at the Comédie Française; and in Germany, what is almost
a standard of vocabulary has been set in what is now known as
_Bühnen-Deutsch_.

In France the Academy was constituted chiefly to be a guardian of the
language; and the Academy, properly conservative as it needs must be,
is engaged in a slow reform of French orthography, yielding to the
popular demand decorously and judiciously. By official action, also,
the orthography of German has been simplified and made more logical
and brought into closer relation with modern pronunciation. Even more
thorough reforms have been carried through in Italy, in Spain, and in
Holland. Yet neither French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or Dutch,
stood half as much in need of the broom of reform as English, for in
no one of these languages were there so many dark corners which needed
cleaning out; in no one of them the difference between orthography and
pronunciation so wide; and in no one of them was the accepted spelling
debased by numberless false etymologies.

Beyond all question, what is needed on both sides of the Atlantic, in
the United States as well as in Great Britain, is a conviction that
the existing orthography of English is not sacred, and that to tamper
with it is not high treason. What is needed is the consciousness that
neither Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his dictionary under
direct inspiration. What is needed is an awakening to the fact that
our spelling, so far from being immaculate at its best, is, at its
best, hardly less absurd than the haphazard, rule-of-thumb, funnily
phonetic spelling of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings. What is needed
is anything which will break up the lethargy of satisfaction with
the accepted orthography, and help to open the eyes of readers and
writers to the stupidity of the present system and tend to make them
discontented with it.

 (1892)




XIII

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING


In a communication to a London review Professor W. W. Skeat remarked
that “it is notorious that all the leading philologists of Europe,
during the last quarter of a century, have unanimously condemned the
present chaotic spelling of the English language, and have received on
the part of the public generally, and of the most blatant and ignorant
among the self-constituted critics, nothing but abusive ridicule,
which is meant to be scathing, but is harmless from its silliness”;
and it cannot be denied that the orthographic simplifications which
the leading philologists of Great Britain and the United States are
advocating have not yet been widely adopted. In an aggressive article
an American essayist has sought to explain this by the assertion that
phonetic-reform “is hopelessly, unspeakably, sickeningly vulgar; and
this is an eternal reason why men and women of taste, refinement,
and discrimination will reject it with a shudder of disgust.”
Satisfactory as this explanation may seem to the essayist, I have
a certain difficulty in accepting it myself, since I find on the
list of the vice-presidents of the Orthographic Union the names of
Mr. Howells, of Colonel Higginson, of Dr. Eggleston, of Professor
Lounsbury, and of President White; and even if I was willing to admit
that these gentlemen were all of them lacking in taste, refinement, and
discrimination, I still could not agree with the aggressive essayist so
long as my own name was on the same list.

What strikes me as a better explanation is that given by the president
of the Orthographic Union, Mr. Benjamin E. Smith, who has suggested
that phonetic-reformers have asked too much, and so have received too
little; they have demanded an immediate and radical change, and as a
result they have frightened away all but the most resolute radicals;
they have failed to reckon with the immense conservatism which gives
stability to all the institutions of the English-speaking race. As
Mr. Smith puts it, “there is a deep-rooted feeling that the existing
printed form is not only _a_ symbol but the _most fitting_ symbol for
our mother-tongue, and that a radical change must impair _for us_ the
beauty and spiritual effectiveness of that which it symbolizes.”

A part of the unreadiness of the public to listen to the advocates of
phonetic-reform has been due also to the general consciousness that
pronunciation is not fixed but very variable indeed, being absolutely
alike in no two places where English is spoken, and perhaps in no two
persons who speak English. The humorous poet has shown to us how the
little word _vase_ once served as a shibboleth to reveal the homes of
each of the four young ladies who came severally from New York and
Boston and Philadelphia and Kalamazoo. The difference between the
pronunciation of New York and Boston is not so marked as that between
London and Edinburgh--or as that between New York and London. And the
pronunciation of to-day is not that of to-morrow; it is constantly
being modified, sometimes by imperceptible degrees and sometimes by a
sudden change like the arbitrary substitution of _aither_ and _naither_
for _eether_ and _neether_. Now, if pronunciation is not uniform in any
two persons, in any two places, at any two periods, the wayfaring man
is not to blame if he is in doubt, first, as to the possibility of a
uniform phonetic spelling, and, second, as to its permanence even if it
was once to be attained.

A glance down the history of English orthography discloses the fact
that, however chaotic our spelling may seem to be now or may seem to
have been in Shakspere’s day, it is and it always has been striving
ineffectively to be phonetic. Always the attempt has been to use
the letters of the word to represent its sounds. From the beginning
there has been an unceasing struggle to keep the orthography as
phonetic as might be. This continuous striving toward exactness of
sound-reproduction has never been radical or violent; it has always
been halting and half-hearted: but it has been constant, and it has
accomplished marvels in the course of the centuries. The most that
we can hope to do is to help along this good work, to hasten this
inevitable but belated progress, to make the transitions as easy as
possible, and to smooth the way so that the needful improvements may
follow one another as swiftly as shall be possible. We must remember
that a half-loaf is better than no bread; and we must remind ourselves
frequently that the greatest statesmen have been opportunists, knowing
what they wanted, but taking what they could get.

We have now to face the fact that in no language is a sudden and
far-reaching reform in spelling ever likely to be attained; and in
none is it less likely than in English. The history of the peoples who
use our tongue on both sides of the Atlantic proves that they belong
to a stock which is wont to make haste slowly, to take one step at a
time, and never to allow itself to be overmastered by mere logic.
By a series of gradations almost invisible the loose confederacy of
1776 developed into the firm union of 1861, which was glad to grant to
Abraham Lincoln a power broader than that wielded by any dictator. Even
the abolition of the corn-laws and the adoption of free-trade in Great
Britain, sudden as it may seem, was only the final result of a long
series of events.

The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling being
impracticable,--even if it was altogether desirable,--the efforts of
those who are dissatisfied with the prevailing orthography of our
language had best be directed toward the perfectly practical end of
getting our improvement on the instalment plan. We must seek now to
have only the most flagrant absurdities corrected. We must be satisfied
to advance little by little. We must begin by showing that there is
nothing sacrosanct about the present spelling either in Great Britain
or in the United States. We must make it clear to all who are willing
to listen--and it is our duty to be persuasive always and never
dogmatic--that the effort of the English language to rid itself of
orthographic anomalies is almost as old as the language itself. We
must show those who insist on leaving the present spelling undisturbed
that in taking this attitude they are setting themselves in opposition
to the past, which they pretend to respect. The average man is open
to conviction if you do not try to browbeat him into adopting your
beliefs; and he can be induced to accept improvements, one at a time,
if he has it made plain to him that each of these is but one in a
series unrolling itself since Chaucer. We must convince the average
man that we want merely to continue the good work of our forefathers,
and that the real innovators are those who maintain the absolute
inviolability of our present spelling.

Even the vehement essayist from whom I have quoted already, and who
is the boldest of later opponents of phonetic-reform, is vehement
chiefly against the various schemes of wholesale revision. He himself
refuses to make any modification,--except to revert now and again to
a medievalism like _pædagogue_,--but he knows the history of language
too well not to be forced to admit that a simplification of some sort
is certain to be achieved in the future. “The written forms of English
words will change in time, as the language itself will change,” he
confesses; “it will change in its vocabulary, in its idioms, in its
pronunciation, and perhaps to some extent in its structural form. For
change is the one essential and inevitable phenomenon of a living
language, as it is of any living organism; and with these changes, slow
and silent and unconscious, will come a change in the orthography.” As
we read this admirable statement we cannot but wonder why a writer who
understands so well the conditions of linguistic growth should wish to
bind his own language in the cast-iron bonds of an outworn orthography.
We may wonder also why he is not consistent in his own practice, and
why he does not spell _phænomenon_ as Macaulay did only threescore and
ten years ago.

Underneath the American essayist’s objection to any orthographic
simplification in English, and underneath the plaintive protests of
certain British men of letters against “American spelling,” so called,
lies the assumption that there is at the present moment a “regular”
spelling, which has existed time out of mind and which the tasteless
reformers wish to destroy. For this assumption there is no warrant
whatever. The orthography of our language has never been stable; it
has always been fluctuating; and no authority has ever been given to
anybody to lay down laws for its regulation. For a convention to have
validity it must have won general acceptance at some period; and the
history of English shows that there has never been any such common
agreement, expressed or implied, in regard to English spelling. Some of
the unphonetic forms which are most vigorously defended, as hallowed by
custom and by sentiment, are comparatively recent; and others which
seem as sacred have had foisted into them needless letters conveying
false impressions about their origins.

That there is no theory or practice of English orthography universally
accepted to-day is obvious to all who may take the trouble to observe
for themselves. The spelling adopted by the ‘Century Magazine’ is
different from that to be found in ‘Harper’s Magazine’; and this
differs again from that insisted upon in the pages of the ‘Bookman.’
The ‘Century’ has gone a little in advance of American spelling
generally, as seen in ‘Harper’s,’ and the ‘Bookman’ is intentionally
reactionary. In the United States orthography is in a healthier state
of instability than it is in Great Britain, where there is a closer
approximation to a deadening uniformity; but even in London and
Edinburgh those who are on the watch can discover many a divergence
from the strict letter of the doctrine of orthographic rigidity.

And just as there is no system of English spelling tacitly agreed on by
all men of education using the English language at present, so there
was also no system of English spelling consistently and continually
used by our ancestors in the past. The orthography of Matthew Arnold
differs a little, altho not much, from the orthography of Macaulay; and
that in turn a little from the orthography of Johnson. In like manner
the spelling of Dryden is very different from the spelling of Spenser,
and the spelling of Spenser is very different from the spelling of
Chaucer. At no time in the long unrolling of English literature from
Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agreement among those who used the
language as to any precise way in which its words should be spelled
or even as to any theory which should govern particular instances.
The history of English orthography is a record still incomplete of
incessant variation; and a study of it shows plainly how there have
been changes in every generation, some of them logical and some of them
arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifications, and some of them gross
perversities.

Thus we see that those who defend any existing orthography, which
they choose to regard as “regular” and outside of which they affect
to behold only vulgar aberration, are setting themselves against the
example left us by our forefathers. We see also that those of us who
are striving to modify our spelling in moderation are doing exactly
what has been done by every generation that preceded us. To repeat
in other words what I have said already, there is not any system of
English orthography which is supported by a universal convention to-day
or which has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity.

The opponents of simplification have been greatly aided by the
general acceptance of this assumption of theirs that the advocates
of simplification wanted to remove ancient landmarks, to break with
the past, to introduce endless innovations. The best part of their
case will fall to the ground when it is generally understood that the
orthography of our language has never been fixed for a decad at a
time. And this understanding of the real facts of the situation is
likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by the wide circulation
of many recent reprints of the texts of the great authors of the past
in the exact spelling of the original edition. So long as we were
in the habit of seeing the works of Shakspere and Steele, of Scott,
Thackeray, and Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not uniform
exactly, did not vary widely, we were sorely tempted to say that the
spelling which was good enough for them is good enough for us and for
our children.

But when we have in our hands the works of those great writers as they
were originally printed, and when we are forced to remark that they
spell in no wise alike one to the other; and when we discover that such
uniformity of orthography they may have seemed to have was due, not to
any theory of the authors themselves, but merely to the practice of
the modern printing-offices and proof-readers--when these things are
brought home to us, any superstitious reverence bids fair to vanish
which we may have had for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere’s
and Steele’s and Scott’s and Thackeray’s and Hawthorne’s.

And one indirect result of this scholarly desire to get as near as may
be to the masterpiece as the author himself presented it to the world,
is that men of letters and lovers of literature--two classes hitherto
strangely ignorant of the history of the English language and of the
constant changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its syntax,
and in its orthography--will at least have the chance to acquire
information at first hand. Their resistance to simplification ought
to become less irreconcilable when the men of letters, now its chief
opponents, have discovered for themselves that there is not now and
never has been any stable system of orthography. When they really grasp
the fact that there has been no permanency in the past and that there
is no uniformity in the present, perhaps they will show themselves
less unwilling to take the next step forward. Just now they are rather
like the Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted to uninvent
printing and to undiscover America.

The most powerful single influence in fixing the present absurd
spelling of our language was undoubtedly Johnson’s Dictionary,
published in the middle of the eighteenth century. We cannot but
respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson and his indomitable energy;
but the making of an English dictionary was not the task for which his
previous studies had preëminently fitted him. Probably he would have
succeeded better with a Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something
characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of the burly doctor’s
spending his toil in compiling a list of the words in a language the
use of which he held to be disgraceful in a friend’s epitaph. Johnson
was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be found to record English
orthography, a task calling for a science the existence of which he
did not even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he lacked
absolutely. In all matters of taste he was an elephantine pachyderm;
and there are only a few of his principles of criticism which are not
now disestablished.

Any one whose reading is at all varied and who strays outside of books
printed within the past quarter-century, can find abundant evidence
of the former chaos of English orthography. In Moxon’s ‘Mechanic
Exercises,’ published in 1683, for example, we read that “how well
other Forrain languages are Corrected by the Author, we may perceive
by the English that is Printed in Forrain Countries”; and this shows
us that the phonetic form _forrain_ is older than the unphonetic
_foreign_. In the ‘Spectator’ (No. 510) Steele wrote _landskip_ where
we should now write _landscape_; in Addison’s criticism of ‘Paradise
Lost,’ contributed to the same periodical, we find _critick_,
_heroick_, and _epick_; and whether Steele or Addison held the pen,
_ribbons_ were then always _ribands_.

On the title-page of the first edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ published
in 1719, we are told that we can read within “an account of how he was
at last strangely delivered by _Pyrates_.” Fielding, in the ‘Champion’
in 1740, tells us that “dinner soon follow’d, being a gammon of bacon
and some chickens, with a most excellent apple-_pye_.” In the same
essay Fielding wrote that “our friends _exprest_ great pleasure at our
drinking”; and in ‘Tom Jones’ he wrote _profest_ for _professed_ (as we
should now spell it). Here we discover that the nineteenth century is
sometimes more backward than the eighteenth, _profest_ and _exprest_
being the very spellings which many are now advocating. Fielding also
wrote _Salique_ where we should now write _Salic_, as Wotton had
written _Dorique_ for _Doric_ in a letter to Milton; and here the
advantage is with us. So it is also in our spelling of the italicized
word in the playbill of the third night of Mr. Cooper’s engagement at
the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796: “_Smoaking_ in the
Theatre Prohibited.”

Attention has already been called to Macaulay’s _phænomenon_ (and to
Professor Peck’s _pædagogue_). The abolition of the digraph has been a
protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a translation of Schlegel’s
‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature,’ published in London early in the
nineteenth century, I have found _æra_ for _era_; and in the eighteenth
century _economics_ was _œconomics_. _Esthetic_ has not yet quite
expelled _æsthetic_, altho _anesthetic_ seems now fairly established.

The Greek _ph_ is also a stumbling-block. We write _phantom_ on the one
hand and _fancy_ on the other, and either _phantasy_ or _fantasy_; yet
all these words are derived from the same Greek root. Probably _phancy_
would seem as absurd to most of us as _fantom_. Yet _fantasy_ has only
recently begun to get the better of _phantasy_. The Italians are bolder
than we are, for they have not hesitated to write _filosofia_ and
_fotografia_. To most of us _fotografer_, as we read it on a sign in
Union Square, seems truly outlandish; and yet if our great-grandfathers
were willing to accept _fancy_ there is no logical reason why our
great-grandchildren may not accept _fotografy_. There is no longer any
logical basis for opposition on the ground of scholarship. Indeed,
the scholarly opposition to these orthographic simplifications is
not unlike the opposition in Germany to the adoption of the Roman
alphabet by those who cling to the old Gothic letter on the ground
that it is more German, altho it is in reality only a medieval
corruption of the Roman letter. With those who speak German, as with
those who speak English, the chief obstacle to the accomplishment of
proposed improvements in writing the language is to be found in the
general ignorance of its history--or perhaps rather in that conceited
half-knowledge which is always more dangerous than modest ignorance.

To diffuse accurate information about the history of English
orthography is the most pressing and immediate duty now before those
of us who wish to see our spelling simplified. We must keep reminding
those we wish to convince that we want their aid in helping along the
movement which has in the past changed _musique_ to _music_, _riband_
to _ribbon_, _phantasy_ to _fantasy_, _æra_ to _era_, _phænomenon_
to _phenomenon_, and which in the present is changing _catalogue_
to _catalog_, _æsthetic_ to _esthetic_, _programme_ to _program_,
_technique_ to _technic_.

There never has been any “regular” spelling accepted by everybody, or
any system of orthography sustained by universal convention. To assume
that there is anything of the sort is adroitly to beg the very question
at issue. There are always in English many words the spelling of which
is not finally fixed; and these doubtful orthographies Professor Peck,
for example, would decide in one way and Professor Skeat would decide
in another. The most of Professor Peck’s decisions would result in
conforming his spelling to that which obtains in the printing-office of
the London _Times_, but in several cases he would exercise the right of
private judgment, spelling _pædagogue_, for example, and _Vergil_. But
if he chooses to exercise the right of private judgment, he is estopped
from denying this right also to Professor Skeat; and the moment either
of them sets up the personal equation as a guide, all pretense of an
accepted system vanishes.

It is our duty also to draw attention to the fact that it is a
wholesome thing that there is no accepted system and that the
orthography of our language should be free to modify itself in the
future as it has in the past. It is this absence of system which gives
fluidity and flexibility and the faculty of adaptation to changing
conditions. The Chief Justice of England, when he addressed the
American Bar Association, recorded his protest against a cast-iron
code in law as tending to hinder legal development; and our language,
like our law, must beware lest it lose its power of conforming to the
needs of our people as these may be unexpectedly developed. Just as the
conservatism of the English-speaking stock makes it highly improbable
that any sweeping change in our spelling will ever be made, so the
enterprise of the English-speaking stock, its energy and its common
sense, make it highly improbable that any system will long endure which
cramps and confines and prevents progress and simplification.

Finally, we must all of us bend our energies to combating the notion
that, as Mr. Smith has put it, “the existing printed form is not
only _a_ symbol but the _most fitting_ symbol of our mother-tongue.”
There is an almost superstitious veneration felt by most of us for
the spellings we learnt at school; they seem to us sanctified by
antiquity; and perhaps even an inquiry into the history of the language
is not always enough to disestablish this reverence for false gods.
Yet knowledge helps to free us from servitude to idols; and when we
are told that the so-called “accepted spelling” has “dignity,” we may
ask ourselves what dignity there can be in the spelling of _harbour_
with an inserted _u_ which is not pronounced, which has been thrust in
comparatively recently, and which is etymologically misleading.

In his effective answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer’s argument against the
metric system, President T. C. Mendenhall remarked that “ignorant
prejudice” is not so dangerous an obstacle to human progress, nor as
common, as what may be called “intelligent prejudice,” meaning thereby
“an obstinate conservatism which makes people cling to what is or has
been, merely because it is or has been, not being willing to take the
trouble to do better, because already doing well, all the while knowing
that doing better is not only the easier, but is more in harmony with
existing conditions. Such conservatism is highly developed among
English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic.” It is just such
conservatism as this that those of us will have to overcome who wish
to see our English orthography continue its lifelong efforts toward
simplification.

To understand how unfortunate for the cause of progress it is when its
leaders miscalculate the popular inertia and when they are therefore
moved to demand more than seems reasonable to the people as a whole,
we have only to consider the result of the joint action, in 1883, of
the Philological Society of England and of the American Philological
Association, in consequence of which certain rules were prepared to
simplify our spelling. Here was a union of indisputable authorities
in favor of an amended orthography; but unfortunately the changes
suggested were both many and various. They were too various to please
any but the most resolute radicals; and they were too many to be
remembered readily by the great majority of every-day folk taking no
particular interest in the subject. They included _theater_, _honor_,
_advertize_, _catalog_; and had they not included anything else, or had
they included only a very few similar simplifications, these spellings
might have won acceptance in the past score of years, even in Great
Britain; the same authorities would now be in a position to make a few
further suggestions equally easy to remember, with a fair hope that
these would establish themselves in turn.

Owing to this attempt to do too much all at once, the joint action of
the two great philological organizations came to naught. Such effect
as it had was indirect at best. It may have been the exciting cause of
the so-called “Printers’ Rules,” which were approved and recommended
by many of the leading typographers of the United States a few years
later. These printers’ rules were few and obvious. They suggested
_catalog_, _program_, _epaulet_, _esthetic_--all of which have become
more familiar of late. They suggested further _opposit_, _hypocrit_,
etc., and also _fotograf_, _fonetic_, etc.; and these simplifications
have not yet been adopted widely enough to prevent the words thus
emended from seeming a little strange to all those who had paid no
special attention to the subject. And these uninterested outsiders are
the very people who are to be converted. To them and to them only must
all argument be addressed. We may rest assured that we have slight
chance of bringing over to our side any of those who have actually
enlisted against us. We must not count on desertions from the enemy; we
must enroll the neutrals at every opportunity.

Probably the most important action yet taken in regard to our
orthography was that of the National Educational Association in
formally adopting for use in all its official publications twelve
simplified spellings--_program_, _tho_, _altho_, _thoro_, _thorofare_,
_thru_, _thruout_, _catalog_, _prolog_, _decalog_, _demagog_,
_pedagog_. These simplified spellings were immediately adopted in the
‘Educational Review’ and in other periodicals edited by members of the
association. They are very likely to appear with increasing frequency
in the school-books which members may hereafter prepare; and any
simplified spelling which once gets itself into a school-book is pretty
sure to hold its own in the future. After an interval of ten or fifteen
years the National Educational Association will be in a position to
consider the situation again; and it may then decide that these twelve
words have established themselves in their new form sufficiently widely
and firmly to make it probable that the association could put forward
another list of a dozen more simplified spellings with a reasonable
certainty that those also will be accepted.

The United States government appointed a board to decide on a uniform
orthography for geographical names; and the recommendations of this
body were generally in the direction of increased simplicity--_Bering_
Straits, for example. The spellings thus officially adopted by the
national government were at once accepted by the chief publishers
of school text-books. And these makers of school-books also follow
the rules formulated by a committee of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science appointed to bring about uniformity in
the spelling and pronunciation of chemical terms. Among the rules
formulated by the committee and adopted by the association were two
which dropped a terminal _e_ from certain chemical terms entering into
more general use. Thus the men of science now write _oxid_, _iodid_,
_chlorid_, etc., and _quinin_, _morphin_, _anilin_, etc., altho the
general public has not relinquished the earlier orthography, _oxide_
and _quinine_. Even the word _toxin_, which came into being since the
adoption of these rules by the associated scientists, is sometimes to
be seen in newspapers as _toxine_.

Thus we see that there is progress all along the line; it may seem
very slow, like that of a glacier, but it is as certain as it is
irresistible. There is no call for any of us to be disheartened by the
prospect. We may, indeed, each of us do what little we can severally
toward hastening the result. We can form the habit of using in our
daily writing such simplified spellings as will not seem affected or
freakish, keeping ourselves always in the forefront of the movement,
but never going very far in advance of the main body. We must not
make a fad of orthographic amelioration, nor must we devote to it a
disproportionate share of our activity--since we know that there are
other reforms as pressing as this and even more important. But we can
hold ourselves ready always to lend a hand to help along the cause; and
we can show our willingness always to stand up and be counted in its
favor.

 (1898-1901)




XIV

AMERICANISM--AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION


There are many words in circulation among us which we understand fairly
well, which we use ourselves, and which we should, however, find it
difficult to define. I think that _Americanism_ is one of these words;
and I think also it is well for us to inquire into the exact meaning
of this word, which is often most carelessly employed. More than
once of late have we heard a public man praised for his “aggressive
Americanism,” and occasionally we have seen a man of letters denounced
for his “lack of Americanism.” Now what does the word really mean when
it is thus used?

It means, first of all, a love for this country of ours, an
appreciation of the institutions of this nation, a pride in the history
of this people to which we belong. And to this extent _Americanism_
is simply another word for _patriotism_. But it means also, I think,
more than this: it means a frank acceptance of the principles which
underlie our government here in the United States. It means, therefore,
a faith in our fellow-man, a belief in liberty and in equality. It
implies, further, so it seems to me, a confidence in the future of this
country, a confidence in its destiny, a buoyant hopefulness that the
right will surely prevail.

In so far as Americanism is merely patriotism, it is a very good thing.
The man who does not think his own country the finest in the world
is either a pretty poor sort of a man or else he has a pretty poor
sort of a country. If any people have not patriotism enough to make
them willing to die that the nation may live, then that people will
soon be pushed aside in the struggle of life, and that nation will be
trampled upon and crushed; probably it will be conquered and absorbed
by some race of a stronger fiber and of a sterner stock. Perhaps it is
difficult to declare precisely which is the more pernicious citizen of
a republic when there is danger of war with another nation--the man who
wants to fight, right or wrong, or the man who does not want to fight,
right or wrong; the hot-headed fellow who would plunge the country
into a deadly struggle without first exhausting every possible chance
to obtain an honorable peace, or the cold-blooded person who would
willingly give up anything and everything, including honor itself,
sooner than risk the loss of money which every war surely entails. “My
country, right or wrong,” is a good motto only when we add to it, “and
if she is in the wrong, I’ll help to put her in the right.” To shrink
absolutely from a fight where honor is really at stake, this is the act
of a coward. To rush violently into a quarrel when war can be avoided
without the sacrifice of things dearer than life, this is the act of a
fool.

True patriotism is quiet, simple, dignified; it is not blatant,
verbose, vociferous. The noisy shriekers who go about with a chip on
their shoulders and cry aloud for war upon the slightest provocation
belong to the class contemptuously known as “Jingoes.” They may be
patriotic,--and as a fact they often are,--but their patriotism is too
frothy, too hysteric, too unintelligent, to inspire confidence. True
patriotism is not swift to resent an insult; on the contrary, it is
slow to take offense, slow to believe that an insult could have been
intended. True patriotism, believing fully in the honesty of its own
acts, assumes also that others are acting with the same honesty. True
patriotism, having a solid pride in the power and resources of our
country, doubts always the likelihood of any other nation being willing
carelessly to arouse our enmity.

In so far, therefore, as Americanism is merely patriotism it is a
very good thing, as I have tried to point out. But Americanism is
something more than patriotism. It calls not only for love of our
common country, but also for respect for our fellow-man. It implies an
actual acceptance of equality as a fact. It means a willingness always
to act on the theory, not that “I’m as good as the other man,” but that
“the other man is as good as I am.” It means leveling up rather than
leveling down. It means a regard for law, and a desire to gain our
wishes and to advance our ideas always decently and in order, and with
deference to the wishes and the ideas of others. It leads a man always
to acknowledge the good faith of those with whom he is contending,
whether the contest is one of sport or of politics. It prevents a man
from declaring, or even from thinking, that all the right is on his
side, and that all the honest people in the country are necessarily of
his opinion.

And, further, it seems to me that true Americanism has faith and
hope. It believes that the world is getting better, if not year by
year, at least century by century; and it believes also that in this
steady improvement of the condition of mankind these United States are
destined to do their full share. It holds that, bad as many things may
seem to be to-day, they were worse yesterday, and they will be better
to-morrow. However dark the outlook for any given cause may be at
any moment, the man imbued with the true spirit of Americanism never
abandons hope and never relaxes effort; he feels sure that everything
comes to him who waits. He knows that all reforms are inevitable in
the long run; and that if they do not finally establish themselves it
is because they are not really reforms, tho for a time they may have
seemed to be.

And a knowledge of the history of the American people will supply ample
reasons for this faith in the future. The sin of negro-slavery never
seemed to be more secure from overthrow than it did in the ten years
before it was finally abolished. A study of the political methods of
the past will show that there has been immense improvement in many
respects; and it is perhaps in our political methods that we Americans
are most open to censure. That there was no deterioration of the moral
stamina of the whole people during the first century of the American
republic any student can make sure of by comparing the spirit which
animated the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies during the Revolution
with the spirit which animated the population of the northern states
(and of the southern no less) during the civil war. We are accustomed
to sing the praises of our grandfathers who won our independence,
and very properly; but our grandchildren will have also to sing the
praises of our fathers who stood up against one another for four years
of the hardest fighting the world has ever seen, bearing the burdens of
a protracted struggle with an uncomplaining cheerfulness which was not
a characteristic of the earlier war.

True Americanism is sturdy but modest. It is as far removed from
“Jingoism” in times of trouble as it is from “Spread-Eagleism” in
times of peace. It is neither vainglorious nor boastful. It knows
that the world was not created in 1492, and that July 4, 1776, is not
the most important date in the whole history of mankind. It does not
overestimate the contribution which America has made to the rest of the
world, nor does it underestimate this contribution. True Americanism,
as I have said, has a pride in the past of this great country of ours,
and a faith in the future; but none the less it is not so foolish as to
think that all is perfection on this side of the Atlantic, and that all
is imperfection on the other side.

It knows that some things are better here than anywhere else in the
world, that some things are no better, and that some things are not
so good in America as they are in Europe. For example, probably the
institutions of the nation fit the needs of the population with less
friction here in the United States than in any other country in the
world. But probably, also, there is no other one of the great nations
of the world in which the government of the large cities is so wasteful
and so negligent.

True Americanism recognizes the fact that America is the heir of the
ages, and that it is for us to profit as best we can by the experience
of Europe, not copying servilely what has been successful in the old
world, but modifying what we borrow in accord with our own needs and
our own conditions. It knows, and it has no hesitation in declaring,
that we must always be the judges ourselves as to whether or not we
shall follow the example of Europe. Many times we have refused to walk
in the path of European precedent, preferring very properly to blaze
out a track for ourselves. More often than not this independence was
wise, but now and again it was unwise.

Finally, one more quality of true Americanism must be pointed out. It
is not sectional. It does not dislike an idea, a man, or a political
party because that idea, that man, or that party comes from a certain
part of the country. It permits a man to have a healthy pride in being
a son of Virginia, a citizen of New York, a native of Massachusetts,
but only on condition that he has a pride still stronger that he is an
American, a citizen of the United States. True Americanism is never
sectional. It knows no north and no south, no east and no west. And
as it has no sectional likes and dislikes, so it has no international
likes and dislikes. It never puts itself in the attitude of the
Englishman who said, “I’ve no prejudices, thank Heaven, but I do hate
a Frenchman!” It frowns upon all appeals to the former allegiance of
naturalized citizens of this country; and it thinks that it ought
to be enough for any man to be an American without the aid of the
hyphen which makes him a British-American, an Irish-American, or a
German-American.

True Americanism, to conclude, feels that a land which bred Washington
and Franklin in the last century, and Emerson and Lincoln in this
century, and which opens its schools wide to give every boy the chance
to model himself on these great men, is a land deserving of Lowell’s
praise as “a good country to live in, a good country to live for, and a
good country to die for.”

 (1896)




Transcriber’s Notes

In a few cases, obvious errors in punctuation have been corrected.

Page 107: “‘Tess of the Durbervilles’” changed to “‘Tess of the
d’Urbervilles’”

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