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.