(Written in 1886. Delivered at an Army and Navy Club dinner in New York
City)
Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding
fault with General Grant's English. That would be fair enough, maybe, if
the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in
General Grant's book than they do in Arnold's criticism on the book--but
they do not. It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were
commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the
average standard author--but they are not. In fact, General Grant's
derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more
frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the
professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors
as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was
General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a random statement: it
is a fact, and easily demonstrable. I have a book at home called Modern
English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a
countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and
slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam,
Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay,
Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole,
Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin
Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray (who made the
grammar).
In Mr. Arnold's criticism on General Grant's book we find two
grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and
slovenly English, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the
illustrious list of delinquents just named.
The following passage all by itself ought to elect him:
“Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately
under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He
begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the
service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him,
and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc.”
To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read
it four times would make him drunk.
Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark: “To suppose that because
a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to
suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder
of medicine.”
People may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all,
the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant's book
is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable
literary masterpiece. In their line there is no higher literature than
those modest, simple memoirs. Their style is at least flawless and no
man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by
their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their
grammar.
There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we
think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we
only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the
silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the
art of the schools and put into them a something which will still
bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his
vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for
grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, “Unconditional and
immediate surrender,” “I propose to move immediately upon your works,”
“I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Mr.
Arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly
grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred
million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound
grammar from another mouth could not have done. And finally we have that
gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man,
shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory
war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: “Let us
have peace.”