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.”