The Twentieth Century American / Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations

by Harry Perry Robinson

But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved, it is certain also that English speech has become much less precise—much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly" classes—and English ears are consequently less exacting.

With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could not have dreamed—and whose fathers certainly did not dream—of being counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles, tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no more than middle-aged.

There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once. That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the members of educated society—we are speaking of the men only, for they only counted in those days—had been to one or other of the same "seven great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities, they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship, but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a proportion of the people speak the same speech as he—not so refined as his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture in England—that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American people.

A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who, arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d——d London and South-Western Railway."

An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.

Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1] Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.

We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car," and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of modern American speech are only good old English forms which have survived in the New World after disappearance from their original haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very reason that its discussion has become almost absurd,—because by a process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided which flowed from that original well of English are drawing together—are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee twang" and the "strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two nations will be—already almost is—the same, and English visitors to the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.

The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.

The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere provincialisms—modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that which has taken place in the United States in the present generation. Prior to 1880—really until 1883—Portland, Oregon, was hardly less removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day, and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen, in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the English.