VAMERICANISMS 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 ofthe 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 approvalDr.Johnson’s assertion thatthe “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 meaningof 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; itwill 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—atwhich 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 aterm 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 fromMr.Andrew Lang. For the stigmatized words and phrasesMr.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 asevanescing, 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 whichMr.Lang has more than once held upto British execration. If the use of an ill-made word likeessayetteorleaderetteorsermonetteby 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,” andMr.Gilbert is a British writer of good repute; butburglingis 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 toMr.Lang’s theory,indorsation, not being in use generally in the United States, is not an Americanism: it is an Edisonism.
The moreMr.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 awayfor “at once” is an Americanism beyond all dispute,for it is wide-spread throughout the United States; and so isback offor “behind.”Directlyfor “as soon as” is a Briticism equally indisputable; and so isdifferent tofor “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 isguess=“incline to think”; such isrealise=“to make certain or substantial”; such isreckon=“consider” or “deem”; such isa few=“a little”; such isnights=“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 inMr.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 inthe 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. Thecertof the New York street-boy, apparently a contraction ofcertainly, is it not rather thecertesof the Elizabethans? And the interrogativehow?=“what is it?”—a usage abhorred byDr.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’mpretty considerablyglad 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 thistrying it on the dog; the same expression, almost, is to be found in Pope. In ‘Pickwick,’ Sam Weller proposes tosettle the hashof an opponent; and in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ we finddown to the groundused as a superlative, and quite in our own later sense. The Southernpeartis in ‘Lorna Doone,’ and the Southwesterndog-gone itis in the ‘Little Minister.’ InMr.Barrie’s story also do we findto go back on your word; just as inMr.William Watson’s ‘Excursions in Criticism’ we discovergrit=“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 “thegracilespring,” while he rejects “gracileease” in an American author likeMr.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 mustadmit 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 Australiansand 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 calltelephonean 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;phonographis one of these;dimeis another; andtypewriteris a third. Some of them are old words wrenched to a new use, likeelevator=“storehouse for grain,” and liketicker=“telegraphic printing-machine.” Some of them are taken from foreign tongues, either translated, likestatehouse(from the Dutch), or unchanged, likeprairie(from the French),adobe(from the Spanish), andstoop(from the Dutch). Some of them are borrowed from the rude tongues of our predecessors on this continent, likemoccasinandtomahawkandwigwam. 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 contributionsto English cannot be called Australianisms any more thantelephoneandprairieandwigwamcan 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 theso-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 inGreat 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 thatDr.Murray andMr.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 Americanterms 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 wordterminus,—restricting its application accurately to the terminal station of a line. In England they name him aguardwhom we in America namebrakemanortrainman; 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 thebrakesman—thus proving again the difficulty of attaining exactness in local usage. The British call that agoods-trainwhich we call afreight-train; and they speak of acrossing-platewhen they mean what we know as afrog. In the United States asleeping-caris often termed asleeper, whereas in Great Britain what they call asleeperis what we here call atie. They say akeyless watchwhere we say astem-winder. They sayleaderwhere we sayeditorial. They call that aliftwhich we call anelevator; and we call him afarm-handwhom they call anagricultural 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 themachineor theorganisation. It is to be noted also thatcornin England refers towheatand in America tomaize; and that in Great Britaincalicois 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 thevarsity teamand thevarsity crew.Campusseems to be unknown to the British, and so doessophomoric, 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 arefreshmenindeed, but nosophomores.
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 isblaze=“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 needsblazehis way as he goes. Butshack=“a cabin of logs driven perpendicularly into the ground”—this is a true Americanism undoubtedly. And its compoundclaim-shack=“a shack built to hold a claim on a preëmption”—this is another true Americanism likely to puzzle a British reader. Evenpreëmptandpreëmptionare probably Americanisms in that they have with us a meaning somewhat different fromthat they may have on the other side of the Atlantic. Another true Americanism, which comes to us from the plains, ismavericks=“the unbranded cattle at large to become the property of the first ranch-owner whose men may chance upon them.” Andranch, while it is itself a contribution to the language, has usages in which it is an Americanism merely—as in the Californianhen-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 entitledto 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 anotchin the White Mountains, aclovein the Catskills, and agapin 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 islumber=“timber.” When we speak of thelumberingindustry we mean not only the cutting down of trees and their sawing up into planks, but also their marketing. From the apparent participlelumberinga verb has been madeto lumber—a not uncommon process in the history of the language, one British analog being the making of the verbto bantfrom the innocent name ofMr.Banting.To lumberis apparently now used in the sense ofto 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 verbto launder=“to wash,” has been revived of late in America, if indeed it has not been made anew from the nounlaundry; and shirt-makers in their price-lists specify whetherthe shirts are to be soldlaunderedorunlaundered. And to the wordlaundryitself 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’slaundry” 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 workshopand 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 havebeen 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 likeMr.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 toMr.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 Englishlanguage 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 inMr.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 ofdialects 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)
(1899)