As for Miss Kemble, she has such a pretty face, and so much genius, she may just tell as many lies as she pleases. One prefers to go wrong with her, than right with many a one else. I read her book aboard ship, and was pleased and entertained with it. Indeed, I would go any time, ten miles barefooted only to see a book that speaks what it thinks;—above all, to see a woman of genius, who writes after her own impressions, and sends her thoughts uncorrected by dunces to press.
But is it not a spite that we, who have been so lied upon by the English, should have amongst them a most extensive reputation for lying? It will be a worse spite if we deserve it. We certainly use more licentiously than they do that pretty figure of rhetoric, they call amplification. But from the little knowledge they possess of our country I suspect one may acquire amongst them a notorious reputation for lying by only telling the truth.
Long ago there travelled to the south, an ass, who talked to the king of the beasts, of the length of days and nights, of the congelation of rains into snows, of the Aurora Borealis, and skating on the ice, until he destroyed entirely all credit for veracity, and was at last whipped out of the country for an impostor. It is our business to profit by this long-eared experience.
When you come to Paris, don’t forgot to tell them the Mississippi sends its compliments to the Seine, and if you find in London that the horses trot twelve miles an hour, don’t you say that ours trot fifteen. It is laid down by several of the casuists that a man is not to tell truth merely, but to consider what may be acceptable as such to his audience.
To make the current value of words in England the absolute test of good breeding in America, appears to me scarce reasonable. Something indeed is due to age, prescription, and to establish fame in letters; but I do not see why we should not begin to use modestly our own weights and measures; to pass our gold and silver even in an English market—if the currency there happens to be brass; and I do not see why one may not have a bon-ton at Philadelphia, or New York, without speaking the fashionable jargon of St. James’s.
Language is variable from year to year, and we are too far distant to take the hue and air of an English court. Herodotus spoke in Ionic, Xenophon in Attic, (and Ionia was a colony of Attica) and Plutarch in Æolic, and were all three good Greeks. They did not despise one another because the one said τοισι, and the other τωσι.
“I have known several of your countrymen,” said Mr. John Bull, “very clever men, but not one who had the language of the best society.”
“Our misfortune is, sir, not to have a language of our own. The Henriade and the Messiah are, in France and Germany, titles of distinction. To be something in America, one must out-write Shakspeare and Milton. And how are we to have original views and tastes, if our habits of thought, and proprieties of language, are to be settled in a foreign country? It is to be hoped the time will come when in the United States one may be sick without going to sea, and raised in Kentucky without being a horse or a head of cabbage.—And pray, sir, what is there in the language of a well-educated American so distinguishable?”
“I should know you by your first six words. For example, you say sir too often, and you use it to your equals, where an Englishman would omit it. And I should know you by your many cant phrases, and by your singularity of habits—by your easy familiarity with strangers, &c.”
“As I know you by your drinking your champagne alone, of which you find no example in America.”