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.