The town is not behind the country. For, whatever is the current fancy, pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-building, or the opera, its idioms invade the talk. The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities. We are not "well-informed," but "posted" or "posted up." We are not "hospitably entreated" any more, but "put through." We do not "meet with misadventure," but "see the elephant," which we often do through the Hibernian process of "fighting the tiger."
Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We "panned out," the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling over the word "socdollager," which Bartlett, we think, defines as "Anything very large and striking,"--Anglicé, a "whopper,"--"also a peculiar fish-hook." The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper's "Home as Found," applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman's random-shot at the word "doxology." This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or "j'ined in," by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,--the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."
We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place. It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses,--at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.
And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the prolétaire. The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "noblesse oblige," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the Patent-Office, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.
MIDSUMMER AND MAY.
[Continued.]
II.
When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle's death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle's commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory: nights, when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable and full of pain,--warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man's identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.
In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,--the merchants wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,--the strange faces, modes, and manners,--the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell to India.