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.