The English publisher, even though he give a personal reading to the book in the form in which it finally leaves his hands, (and, in the majority of cases, having read it once in manuscript, he declines to go over the pages a second time, but contents himself with a cursory investigation of the detail of "colour," of "centre,") is not infrequently dissatisfied, but it is too late for any changes in the text, and he can only let the volume go out. In the case of books printed in England from plates made in America, there is nothing at all to warn the reader; while in the case of books bound in England from sheets actually printed in the United States, there is nothing which the reader is likely to notice; and in nine cases out of ten the Englishman is unconscious that he is reading anything but an English book. The critic may understand, and the man who has lived long in the United States and who can recognise the characteristics of American diction, assuredly will understand, but these form, of course, a very small class in the community; and when the rest of the public is constantly reading American writing without a thought that it is other than English writing, it is hardly strange that American forms of speech creep daily more and more largely into the English tongue. What is really strange is that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying American forms of speech and American spelling.
The morality or the wisdom of the English copyright laws is not at the moment under discussion, but it is my own opinion (which I believe to be the opinion of every Englishman who has given any attention to the matter) that not on any ground of literary criticism, or because of any canons of taste, but merely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence to England, and for the sake of securing additional employment for British labour, the laws of copyright are in no less radical and urgent need of amendment than the English postal laws. What we are here concerned with, however, is the effect of the present condition of these laws as one of the contributory factors which are co-operating to lessen the difference, once so wide and now so narrow, between the American and the English tongue.
Nor can there be any doubt of the result of this twofold process if it be allowed to continue indefinitely, working in England towards a democratisation and Americanisation of the speech, and in America towards a higher standard of taste, based on earlier English literary models. The two currents, once divergent, now so closely confluent, will meet; but will they continue to flow on in one stream? Or will the same tendencies persist, so that the currents will cross and again diverge, occupying inverse positions?
In a hundred years from now, when, as a result of the apparently inevitable growth of the United States in wealth, in power, and in influence, its speech and all other of its institutions will come to be held in the highest esteem, is it possible that Londoners may vehemently put forward their claim to speak purer American than the Americans themselves—just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy, good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the nineteenth century—a period which will be to American literature what the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but already there are certain individual Americanisms which have long been taboo in every reputable office in the United States, but are used cheerfully and without comment in London dailies.
Once more it seems necessary to take precaution lest I be interpreted as having said more than I really have said. It would be a mere impertinence to affect to pronounce a general judgment on the level of culture or of achievement of the two peoples in all fields of art and effort; and the most that an individual can do is to take such isolated examples drawn from one or from the other, as may serve in particular matters as some sort of a standard of measurement. What I am striving to convey to the average English reader is, of course, not an impression of any inferiority in the English, but only the fact that the Englishman's present estimate of the American is almost grotesquely inadequate.
FOOTNOTES:
[214:1] Mr. Archer, I find, has this delightful story: "A friend of mine returned from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he heartily disliked the country and would never go back again. Enquiry as to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or damning charge than that 'they' (a collective pronoun presumed to cover the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding them—or vice versa, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is the orthodox process."
[215:1] But I cannot resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform" in its exact modern American political meaning.