The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined to go on being continuously more merged—until it will finally be almost obliterated—in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become truly unified—an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes—the settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the development of the natural resources—which contributed to the unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth, but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War, but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things immaterial and æsthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national, one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the further corruption of its language.
The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the movement itself could not have come into being without the national desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had but restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in all parts of the country alike.
When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the best London journals. There have of course always been circles—as, notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less truly, in Philadelphia and New York—wherein the speech, whether written or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what we have called the public-school and university class of England, and, no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of such common speech.
In England, on the other hand, the process that has been going on has been quite involuntary and is as yet almost entirely unconscious.
We have spoken so far of only one factor in that process—namely, the democratisation of the English people which is in progress and the blurring of the lines between the classes. Co-operating with this are other forces. Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions to be most careless of their manners—just as only an old-established aristocracy can be truly reckless of the character of new associates whom it may please to take up—so it may be that the well-educated man, confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not consider their own authority—the authority drawn from their school and university training—superior to that of any dictionary or grammar, especially of any American one.[220:1] So it has come about that, while the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency is no less constantly towards a growing laxity; and while the American has been sternly and conscientiously at work pruning the inelegancies out of his language, the Briton has been lightheartedly taking these same inelegancies to himself. It is obviously impossible that such a twofold tendency can go on for long without the gulf between the quality of the respective languages becoming appreciably narrower.
The American writers who now occupy places on the staffs of London journals are thoroughly deserving of their places. They have earned these and retain them on the ground of their capacity as news gatherers, and through the brilliancy of their descriptive writing. They possess what is described as "newspaper ability" as opposed to "literary ability." It is, nevertheless, the fact that in the majority of the newspaper offices, the "copy" of these writers is permitted to pass through the press with an immunity from interference on the part either of editor or proof-reader, which, a decade back, would not have been possible in any London office. Thus the British public, unwarned and unconscious, is daily absorbing at its breakfast table, and in the morning and evening trains, American newspaper English, which is the output of English newspaper offices. It is not now contended that this English is any worse than the public would be likely to receive from the same class of English writers, but the fact itself is to be noted. I am not prepared to agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in holding the English writer necessarily blameworthy who "in serious work introduces, needlessly, into our tongue an American phrase." Such introductions, however needless, may materially enrich the language, and I should, even with the permission of Mr. Lang, extend the same latitude to the introduction of Scotticisms.
A more important matter for consideration is the present condition of the copyright laws of the two countries. English publishers understand well enough why it is occasionally cheaper, or, taking all the conditions together, more advantageous to have put into type in the United States rather than in Great Britain the work of a standard English novelist, and to bring the English edition into print from a duplicate set of American plates. On the other hand, it is exceptional for a novel, or for any book by an American writer, to be put into type in England for publication in both countries. For the purpose of bringing the text of such books into line with the requirements of English readers, it is the practice of the leading American publishers to have one division of their composing-rooms allotted to typesetting by the English standard, with the use by the proof-readers of an English dictionary. It occasionally happens, however, that the attention of these proof-readers to the task of securing an English text limits itself to a few typical examples, such as spelling "colour" with a "u" and seeing that "centre" does not appear as "center," while all that constitutes the essence of American style, as compared with the English style, is passed unmolested and without change.
Such a result is, doubtless, inevitable in the case of a work by an American writer who has his own idea of literary expression and his own standard of what constitutes literary style, but the resulting text not infrequently gives ground for criticism on the part of English reviewers, and for some feeling of annoyance on the part of cultivated English readers.
In the case of books by English authors which are put into type in American printing-offices, there is, of course, no question of modification of style or of form of expression, but with these, as stated, the proof-readers are not always successful in eliminating entirely the American forms of spelling.