change of almost equal significance. London sooner or later will
cease to be the literary center of the English-speaking race. For
many centuries the town by the Thames has been the heart of English
literature; and there are now visible very few signs that the days of
its supremacy are numbered. Even in the United States to-day the old
colonial attitude, not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to be
as well acquainted with second-rate British authors as the British
are with American authors of the first rank. Yet it is not without
significance that at the close of the nineteenth century the two most
widely known writers of the language should be one of them an American
citizen and the other a British colonial, owing no local allegiance to
London--Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling.
The disestablishment of London as the literary center of English will
be retarded by various circumstances. Only very reluctantly is a
tradition of preëminence overthrown when consecrated by the centuries.
The conditions of existence in England are likely long to continue to
be more favorable to literary productivity than are the conditions
in America. In a new country literature finds an eager rival in
life itself, with all its myriad opportunities for self-expression.
No paradox is it to say that more than one American bard may have
preferred to build his epic in steel or in stone rather than in words.
The creative imagination has outlets here denied it in a long-settled
community, residing tranquilly in a little island, where even the
decorous landscape seems to belong to the Established Church. But the
Eastern States are already, many of them, as orderly and as placid as
Great Britain has been for a century. The conditions in England and in
America are constantly tending toward equalization.
A time will come, and probably long before the close of the twentieth
century, when there will be in the United States not only several
times as many people as there are in the British Isles, but also far
more literary activity. Sooner or later most of the leading authors of
English literature will be American and not British in their training,
in their thought, in their ideals. That is to say, the British in
the middle of the twentieth century will hold to the Americans about
the same position that the Americans held toward the British in the
middle of the nineteenth century. The group of American authors between
1840 and 1860 contained Irving and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne,
Longfellow and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau. These are names
endeared to us and highly important to us, and not to be neglected
in any consideration of English literature; but it is foolish for an
American to seek to set them up as the equal of the British group
flourishing during the same score of years. So in the middle of the
twentieth century the British group will probably not lack striking
individualities; but, as a whole, it will probably be surpassed by
the American group. The largest portion of the men of letters who use
English to express themselves, as well as the largest body of the
English-speaking race, will have its residence on the western shore of
the Western Ocean.
What will then happen to the English language in England when England
awakens to the fact that the center of the English-speaking race is no
longer within the borders of the little island? Will the speech of the
British sink into dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely
stamp out their undue local divergences from the normal English of
the main body of the users of the language in the United States? Will
they frankly accept the inevitable? Will they face the facts as they
are? Will they follow the lead of the Americans when we shall have the
leadership of the language, as the Americans followed their lead when
they had it? Or will they insist on an arbitrary independence, which
can have only one result--the splitting off of the British branch of
our speech from the main stem of the language? To ask these questions
is to project an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation is
not without an interest of its own. And altho it is difficult to
decide so far in advance of the event, yet we have now some of the
material on which to base a judgment as to what is likely to happen.
Of course, the question is not one to be answered offhand; and not a
few arguments could be brought forward in support of the opinion that
the British speech of the future is likely to separate itself from
the main body of English as then spoken in this country. In the first
place, England, altho it has already ceased to be the most populous of
the countries using English, will still be the senior partner of the
great trading-company known as the British Empire. That the British
Empire may be dissolved is possible, no doubt. The Australian colonies
have federated; and having formed a strong union of their own, they
may prefer to stand alone. South Africa may follow the example of
Australia. India may arise in the might of her millions and cast out
its English rulers. Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the
greater American republic. But each of these things is improbable;
and that they should all come to pass is practically inconceivable.
All signs now seem to point not only to a continuance of the British
Empire, but also to its steady expansion. London is likely long to be
the capital of an empire upon which the sun never sets, an empire
inhabited by men of every color and every creed and every language. For
these men English must serve as the means of communication one with
another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck.
That this will put a strain on the language is indisputable. Wherever
any tongue serves as a _lingua franca_ for men of various stocks,
there is an immediate tendency toward corruption. There is a constant
pressure to simplify and to lop off and to reduce to the bare elements.
The Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example of what may
befall a noble language when it is enslaved to serve many masters,
ignorant of its history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling’s
earliest tales are some of them almost incomprehensible to readers
unacquainted with the vocabulary of the competition-walla; and the
reports of the British generals during the war with the Boers were
besprinkled with words not hitherto supposed to be English.
Some observers see in this a menace to the integrity of the language, a
menace likely to become more threatening as the British Empire spreads
itself still farther over the waste places of the earth. But is there
not also a danger in the integrity of English close at home--in England
itself, even in London, and not afar in the remote borders of the
Empire--the danger due to the prevalence of local dialects? To the
student of language one of the most obvious differences between Great
Britain and the United States lies in the fact that we in America have
really no local dialects such as are common in England. Every county
of England has an indigenous population, whose ancestors dwelt in the
same place since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary; and this indigenous population has its own peculiarities of
pronunciation, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down from father
to son, generation after generation. But no one of the United States
was settled exclusively by immigrants from a single English county;
and, therefore, no one of these local dialects was ever transplanted
bodily to America. And no considerable part of the United States
has a stationary population, inbreeding and stagnant and impervious
to outside influences; indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and
there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to grow up in the middle
west, to be married in New York, and to die in Colorado--is not this
a characteristic of us Americans? And it is a characteristic fatal to
the development of real dialects in this country such as are abundant
in England. Of course we have our local peculiarities of idiom and of
pronunciation, but these are very superficial indeed. Probably there
has been a closer uniformity of speech throughout the United States
for fifty years past than there is even to-day in Great Britain, where
the Yorkshireman cannot understand the cockney, and where the Scot sits
silent in the house of the Cornishman.
This uniformity of speech throughout the United States is, perhaps,
partly the result of Noah Webster’s ‘Spelling-Book.’ It has certainly
been aided greatly by the public-school system, firmly established
throughout the country, and steadily strengthening itself. The
school system of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is not yet
adequately organized; it has still to be adjusted to its place in
a proper scheme of national education. In the higher institutions
of learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge, there is no
postgraduate work in English; and whatever instruction an undergraduate
may get there in English literature is incidental, not to say
accidental.
Probably there is no connection between this lack of university
instruction in English and a carelessness in the use of the language
which strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpremeditated letters
of scholarly Englishmen, but sometimes even in their more academic
efforts. Jowett’s correspondence, for example, and Matthew Arnold’s,
offer examples of a slovenliness of phrase not to be found in Lowell’s
letters or in Emerson’s.
Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not merely among the uneducated,
but among the more highly cultivated. _Directly_ is used for _as soon
as_ by Archbishop Trench (the author of a lively little book on words)
and by Mr. Courthope (the Oxford professor of poetry). _Like_ is used
for _as_--that is, “like we do”--by Charles Darwin, and in more than
one volume of the English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John
Morley. The elision of the initial _h_, which the British themselves
like to think a test of breeding, is discoverable far more often than
they imagine on the lips of those who ought to know better. It is said
that Lord Beaconsfield, for example, sometimes dropped his _h_’s, and
that he once spoke of “the ’urried ’Udson.” And if we may rely on the
evidence of spelling, the British often leave the _h_ silent where we
Americans sound it. They write _an historical essay_ from which it is
a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective _’istorical_. In
Mr. Kipling’s ‘From Sea to Sea’ he writes not only _an hotel_ and _an
hospital_, but also _an hydraulic_.
Thus we see that the immense size and variegated population of the
British Empire may be considered as a menace to the integrity of the
English language in the British Isles; and that a second source of
danger is to be discovered in the local dialects of Great Britain; and,
finally, that there is observable in England even now a carelessness
in the use of the language and a willingness to innovate both in
vocabulary and in idiom.
But however formidable these three tendencies may look when massed
together, there is really no weight to be attached to any of them
singly or to all of them combined. The language has already for two
centuries been exposed to contact with countless other tongues in
America and Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration up to the
present time; and there is no reason to fear that this contact will
be more corrupting in the twentieth century than it has been in the
nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather in an enrichment
and refreshment of the vocabulary. The danger from the local dialects
of Great Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by day as
the facilities for travel improve and as the schoolmaster is able to
impose his uniform English upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to
use new words not authorized by the past of the language is in itself
not blameworthy; it may be indeed commendable when it is restrained by
a conservative instinct and controlled by reason.
The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of London newspapers
are like the Americanisms to be seen in the pages of the New York
newspapers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the healthiness
of the language itself. In Latin it may be proper enough for us to set
up a Ciceronian standard and to reject any usage not warranted by the
masterly orator; but in English it is absurd to declare any merely
personal standard and to reject any term or any idiom because it was
unknown to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison or to Franklin, to
Thackeray or to Hawthorne. Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision
as regards the propriety of any usage may be accepted as final. English
is a living tongue, and the great writers of every generation make
unhesitating use of words and of constructions which the great writers
of earlier generations were ignorant of or chose to ignore.
The most of these British innovations, both of to-day and of to-morrow,
will be individual and freakish; and, therefore, they will win no
foothold even in the British vocabulary. But a few of them will prove
their own excuse for being, and these will establish themselves in
Great Britain. The best of them, those of which the necessity is
indisputable, will spread across the Atlantic and will be welcomed by
the main body of users of English over here--just as certain American
innovations and revivals were hospitably received in England when
only the smaller branch of the English-speaking race was on the
American side of the ocean. And, of course, the new terms which spring
into existence in the United States after the literary center of the
language has crossed the Atlantic will be carried over to England in
books and in periodicals.
When the bulk of contemporary English literature is produced by
American authors, and when the British themselves have accepted the
situation and resigned themselves at last to the departure of the
literary supremacy of London, then the weight of American precedent
will be overwhelming. Without knowing it, British readers of American
books will be led to conform to American usage; and American terms will
not seem outlandish to them, as these words and phrases do even now,
when comparatively few American authors are read in Great Britain.
And these American innovations will be very few, for the conservative
instinct is in some ways stronger in the United States than it is in
Great Britain, due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread popular
education here, which gives to every child a certain solidarity with
the past.
It is education and the school-book; it is the printing-press and
the newspaper and the magazine; it is the ease of travel across the
Atlantic and the swiftness of the voyage;--it is a combination of all
these things which will prevent any development of a British branch
of the language after the numerical preponderance of the American
people becomes overwhelming. And working toward the same union is a
loyal conservatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoyment of the great
literature of the language, the common possession of both British and
Americans, having its past in the keeping of the elder division of the
stock, and certain to transfer its future to the care of the younger
division.
To declare that the literary center of English is to be transferred
sooner or later from the British Isles to the United States may seem
to some a hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as any prophecy
before the event can hope to be. Such a transfer, it is true, is
perhaps unprecedented in literary history,--altho the scholar may see
a close parallel in the preëminence once attained by Alexandria as the
capital of Greek culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or not, the
transfer is inevitable sooner or later.
(1899)
V
AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE
It is a reflection upon what we are wont to term a liberal education
that the result of college training sometimes appears to be rather a
narrowing of the mental outlook than the broadening we have a right
to anticipate. What a student ought to have got from his four years
of labor is a conviction of the vastness of human knowledge and a
proper humility, due to his discovery that he himself possesses only an
infinitesimal fraction of the total sum. Many graduates--indeed, most
of them nowadays, we may hope--have attained to this much of wisdom:
that they are not puffed up by the few things they do know, so much
as made modest by the many things they cannot but admit themselves
to be ignorant of. With the increasing specialization of the higher
education, the attitude of the graduate is likely to be increasingly
humble; and a college man will not be led to feel that he is expected
to know everything about everything.
Perhaps the disputatious arrogance of a few of the younger graduates
of an earlier generation was due to the dogmatism of the teaching
they sat under. In nothing is our later instruction more improved
than in the disappearance of this authoritative tone--due in great
measure, it may be, to the unsettling of old theories by new facts.
In no department of learning was the manner more dogmatic than in the
teaching of the English language. The older rhetoricians had no doubts
at all on the subject. They never hesitated as to the finality of their
own judgment on all disputed points. They were sure that they knew
just what the English language ought to be; and it never entered into
their heads to question their own competence to declare the standard of
speech. Yet, as a matter of fact, they knew little of the long history
of the language, and they had no insight into the principles that were
governing its development. At most, their information was limited to
the works of their immediate predecessors; and for a more remote past
they had the same supreme contempt they were ever displaying toward the
actual present. Thus they were ever ready to lay down rules made up out
of their own heads; and their acts were as arbitrary as their attitude
was intolerant.
In his ‘Philosophy of Rhetoric,’ which he tells us was planned in
1750, Dr. George Campbell quotes with approval Dr. Johnson’s assertion
that the “terms of the laboring and mercantile part of the people”
are mere “fugitive cant,” not to be “regarded as part of the durable
matter of a language.” Dr. Campbell himself refuses to consider it
as an evidence of reputable and present use that a word or a phrase
has been employed by writers of political pamphlets or by speakers in
the House of Commons, and he declares that he has selected his prose
examples “neither from living authors, nor from those who wrote before
the Revolution: not from the first, because an author’s fame is not so
firmly established in his lifetime; nor from the last, that there may
be no suspicion that his style is superannuated.” Now contrast this
narrow-mindedness with the liberality discoverable in our more recent
text-books--in the ‘Elements of Rhetoric,’ for example, of Professor
George R. Carpenter, who tells us frankly that “whenever usage seems to
differ, one’s own taste and sense must be called into play.” Professor
Carpenter then pleads “for a considerable degree of tolerance in such
matters. If we know what a man means, and if his usage is in accordance
with that of a large number of intelligent and educated people, it
cannot justly be called incorrect. For language rests, at bottom, on
convention or agreement, and what a large body of reputable people
recognize as a proper word or a proper meaning of a word cannot be
denied its right to a place in the English vocabulary.”
For an Englishman to object to an Americanism as such, regardless
of its possible propriety or of its probable pertinence, and for an
American to object to a Briticism as such--either of these things is
equivalent to a refusal to allow the English language to grow. It is
to insist that it is good enough now and that it shall not expand in
response to future needs. It is to impose on our written speech a
fatal rigidity. It is an attempt on the part of pedants so to bind the
limbs of the language that a vigorous life will soon be impossible.
With all such efforts those who have at heart the real welfare of our
tongue will have no sympathy--least of all the strong men of literature
who are forever ravenous after new words and old. Victor Hugo, for
example, so far back as 1827, when the modern science of linguistics
was still in its swaddling-clothes, had no difficulty in declaring the
truth. “The French language,” he wrote in the preface to ‘Cromwell,’
“is not fixed, and it never will be. A living language does not fix
itself. Mind is always on the march, or, if you will, in movement, and
languages move with it.... In vain do our literary Joshuas command the
language to stand still; neither the language nor the sun stands still
any more. The day they do they fix themselves; it will be because they
are dying. That is why the French of a certain contemporary school is a
dead language.”
In the ‘Art of French Poetry,’ first printed in 1565, Ronsard, one
of the most adroit of Victor Hugo’s predecessors in the mastery of
verse, proffers this significant advice to his fellow-craftsmen (I am
availing myself of the satisfactory translation of Professor B. W.
Wells): “You must choose and appropriate dexterously to your work the
most significant words of the dialects of our France, especially if you
have not such good or suitable words in your own dialect; and you must
not mind whether the words are of Gascony, of Poitiers, of Normandy,
Manche, or Lyonnais, as long as they are good and signify exactly what
you want to say.... And observe that the Greek language would never
have been so rich in dialects or in words had it not been for the great
number of republics that flourished at that time, ... whence came many
dialects, all held without distinction as good by the learned writers
of those times. For a country can never be so perfect in all things
that it cannot borrow sometimes from its neighbors.”
Here we have Ronsard declaring clearly that local varieties of speech
are most useful to the common tongue. Indeed, we may regard the dialect
of any district as a cache--a hidden storehouse--at which the language
may replenish itself whenever its own supplies are exhausted. Whoever
has had occasion to study any of these dialects, whether in Greek
or in French or in English, must have been delighted often at the
freshness and the force of words and phrases unexpectedly discovered.
Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, made an affectionate
collection of Suffolk sea-phrases, and from these a dozen might be
culled, or a score or more, by the use of which the English language
would be the gainer. Lowell’s loving and learned analysis of the speech
of his fellow New-Englanders is familiar to all readers of the ‘Biglow
Papers.’ It was Lowell also who has left us this brilliant definition:
“True Americanisms are self-cocking phrases or words that are wholly of
our own make, and do their work shortly and sharply at a pinch.”
Characteristically witty this definition is, no doubt, but not wholly
adequate. What is an Americanism? And what is a Briticism? Not long ago
a friendly British writer rebuked his fellow-countrymen for a double
failing of theirs--for their twin tricks of assuming, first, that every
vulgarism unfamiliar to them is an Americanism, and that therefore,
and secondly, every Americanism is a vulgarism. In the mouths of many
British speakers “Americanism” serves as a term of reproach; and so
does “Briticism” in the mouths of some American speakers. But this
should not be; the words ought to be used with scientific precision and
with no flush of feeling. Before using them, we must ascertain with
what exact meaning it is best to employ them.