THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE.
To the English traveller in America the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly but familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams. He recognises its broad lineaments; its lesser details evade, or confuse, him. He acknowledges that the two tongues have a common basis. Their grammatical framework is identical. The small change of language—the adverbs and prepositions,—though sometimes strangely used in America, are not strange to an English ear. And there the precise resemblance ends. Accent, idiom, vocabulary give a new turn to the ancient speech. The traveller feels as though he were confronted with an old friend, tricked out in an odd suit of clothes, and master of a new pose and unaccustomed gesture.
The Americans are commonly reputed to speak through their nose. A more intimate acquaintance with their manner belies this reputation. It is rather a drawl that afflicts the ear than a nasal twang. You notice in every sentence a curious shifting of emphasis. America, with the true instinct of democracy, is determined to give all parts of speech an equal chance. The modest pronoun is not to be outdone by the blustering substantive or the self-asserting verb. And so it is that the native American hangs upon the little words: he does not clip and slur "the smaller parts of speech," and what his tongue loses in colour it gains in distinctness.
If the American continent had been colonised by Englishmen before the invention of printing, we might have watched the growth of another Anglo-Saxon tongue, separate and characteristic. American might have wandered as far from English as French or Spanish has wandered from Latin. It might have invented fresh inflections, and shaped its own syntax. But the black art of Gutenberg had hindered the free development of speech before John Smith set foot in Virginia, and the easy interchange of books, newspapers, and other merchandise ensured a certain uniformity. And so it was that the Americans, having accepted a ready-made system of grammar, were forced to express their fancy in an energetic and a multi-coloured vocabulary. Nor do they attempt to belittle their debt, Rather they claim in English an exclusive privilege. Those whose pleasure it is to call America "God's own country" tell us with a bluff heartiness that they are the sole inheritors of the speech which Chaucer and Shakespeare adorned. It is their favourite boast that they have preserved the old language from extinction. They expend a vast deal of ingenuity in the fruitless attempt to prove that even their dialect has its roots deep down in the soil of classical English. And when their proofs are demanded they are indeed a sorry few. A vast edifice of mistaken pride has been established upon the insecure basis of three words—fall, gotten, and bully. These once were familiar English, and they are English no more. The word "fall," "the fall of the leaf," which so beautifully echoes the thought of spring, survives only in our provinces. It makes but a furtive and infrequent appearance in our literature. Chaucer and Shakespeare know it not. It is found in "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd":
"A honey tongue, a heart of gall
Is fancy's Spring, but Sorrow's Fall."
Johnson cites but one illustration of its use—from Dryden:
"What crowds of patients the town-doctor kills, Or how last fall he raised the weekly hills."
On the other side of the Atlantic it is universally heard and written. There the word "autumn" is almost unknown; and though there is a dignity in the Latin word ennobled by our orators and poets, there is no one with a sense of style who will not applaud the choice of America.
But if she may take a lawful pride in "fall," America need not boast the use of "gotten." The termination, which suggests either wilful archaism or useless slang, adds nothing of sense or sound to the word. It is like a piece of dead wood in a tree, and is better lopped off. Nor does the use of "bully" prove a wholesome respect for the past. It is true that our Elizabethans used this adjective in the sense of great or noble. "Come," writes Ben Jonson in "The Poetaster," "I love bully Horace." {*} But in England the word was never of universal application, and was sternly reserved for poets, kings, and heroes. In modern America there is nothing that may not be "bully" if it meet with approval. "A bully place," "a bully boat," "a bully blaze,"—these show how far the word has departed from its origin. Nor, indeed, does it come down from English in an unbroken line. Overlooked for centuries, it was revived (or invented) in America some fifty years ago, and it is not to Dekker and Ben Jonson that we must look for palliation of its misuse.