in the tone many British writers of to-day see fit to adopt whenever
they take occasion to discuss the use of the English language here in
America. A trenchant critic like Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a lecture
on the masters of style, went out of his way to warn his hearers
that though they might be familiar in their writing they were by no
means to be vulgar. “At any rate, be easy, colloquial if you like,
but shun those vocables which come to us across the Atlantic, or from
Newmarket and Whitechapel.” This linking of America and Whitechapel
may seem to us to be rather vulgar than familiar; and it was Goethe--a
master of style well known to Mr. Harrison--who reminded us that
“when self-esteem expresses itself in contempt of another, be he the
meanest, it must be repellant.” It is only fair to say that fewer
British writers than ever before sink to so low a level as this; and
it is right to admit that a definite recognition of the American
joint-ownership of the English language is not now so rare as once it
was in England.
Not often, however, do we find so frank and ungrudging acknowledgment
of the exact truth as is to be found in Mr. William Archer’s ‘America
To-day.’ Part of one of the Scotch critic’s paragraphs calls for
quotation here because it sets forth, perhaps more clearly and
concisely than any American has yet dared to do, what the facts of the
case really are:
“There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has
gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American
continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret
the ‘form and pressure’ of life--the experience, knowledge, thought,
emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. This being so,
the more tap-roots a language sends down into the soil of life, and
the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its
nourishment, whether of vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be
its potentialities as a medium of expression. We must be careful, it
is true, to keep the organism healthy, to guard against disintegration
of tissue; but to that duty American writers are quite as keenly alive
as we. It is not a source of weakness but of power and vitality to
the English language that it should embrace a greater variety of
dialects than any other civilized tongue. A new language, says the
proverb, is a new sense; but a multiplicity of dialects means, for the
possessors of the main language, an enlargement of the pleasures of the
linguistic sense without the fatigue of learning a totally new grammar
and vocabulary. So long as there is a potent literary tradition keeping
the core of the language one and indivisible, vernacular variations can
only tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to promote the
abundance, suppleness, and nicety of adaptation of the language as a
literary instrument. The English language is no mere historic monument,
like Westminster Abbey, to be religiously preserved as a relic of the
past, and reverenced as the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants.
It is a living organism, ceaselessly busied, like any other organism,
in the processes of assimilation and excretion.”
(1899)
VI
NEW WORDS AND OLD
Not long before the opening of the splendid exhibition which, for the
short space of six months, made Chicago the most interesting city in
the world, its leading literary journal editorially rejoiced that
English was becoming a world-language, but sorrowed also that it was
sadly in danger of corruption, especially from the piebald jargon of
our so-called dialect stories. Not long before the celebration of
the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria a notorious sensation-monger
of London, having founded a review in which to exploit himself,
proclaimed that English was in a parlous state, and that something
ought to be done at once or the language would surely die. The Chicago
editor was grieved at the sorry condition of our language in the
United States, while the London editor wept over its wretched plight
in Great Britain. The American journalist called upon us to take
pattern by the British; and the British journalist cried out for an
Academy like that of the French to lay down laws for the speaking of
our mother-tongue--intending perhaps to propose later the revival of
the pillory or of the ducking-stool for those who shall infringe the
stringent provisions of the new code.
There is nothing novel in these shrill outbreaks, which serve only to
alarm the timid and to reveal an unhesitating ignorance of the history
of our language. The same kind of protest has been made constantly ever
since English has been recognized as a tongue worthy of preservation
and protection; and it would be easy to supply parallels without
number, some of them five hundred years old. A single example will
probably suffice. In Steele’s ‘Tatler’ Swift wrote a letter denouncing
“the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our
English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual
corruption of our style.” Here we find the ‘Tatler’ (of London) in the
first decade of the eighteenth century saying exactly what the ‘Dial’
(of Chicago) echoed in the last decade of the nineteenth. But the
earlier writer had an excuse the later writer was without; Swift wrote
before the history of our language was understood.
We know now that growth is a condition of life; and that only a dead
language is rigid. We know now that it is dangerous to elevate the
literary diction too far above the speech of the plain people. We
have found out that nobody in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin;
Cicero did not speak it himself; he did not even write it naturally;
he wrote it with an effort and not always to his own satisfaction
at the first attempt. We have discovered that there was a wide gap
between the elegance of the orator’s polished periods and the uncouth
bluntness of the vulgar tongue of the Roman people; and we believe
that this divergence was broader than that between the perfect style
of Hawthorne, for example, and the every-day dialect of Salem or of
Concord.
By experts like Whitney we are told that there has been less structural
modification of our language in the second half of the nineteenth
century than in any other fifty-year period of its existence. Our
vocabulary has been enormously enriched, but the skeleton of our speech
has been only a little developed. With the decrease in illiteracy
the conserving force of the printing-press must always hereafter
make change increasingly difficult--even in the obvious cases where
improvement is possible. The indirect influence of the novelist and the
direct influence of the schoolmaster--very powerful each of them and
almost irresistible when united--will always be exerted on the side of
the conservatives. To seize these facts firmly and to understand their
applications is to have ready always an ample answer for all those who
chatter about the impending corruption of our noble tongue.
But we may go further. The study of history shows us that the future
of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not
upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not
upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its
orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of
the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent
upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent
upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British
and the Americans. A language is but the instrument of those who use
it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own
merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of
the masterful English stock. It must rise and fall with us who speak
it. “No speech can do more than express the ideas of those who employ
it at the time,” so a recent historian of our language has reminded us.
“It cannot live upon its past meanings, or upon the past conceptions of
great men that have been recorded in it, any more than the race which
uses it can live upon its past glory or its past achievements.”
When we have once possessed ourselves of the inexorable fact that it
is not in our power to warp the development of our language by any
conscious effort, we can listen with amused toleration to the excited
outcries of those who are constantly protesting against this or that
word or phrase or usage which may seem to them new and therefore
unjustifiable. We discover also that the self-appointed legislators
who lay down the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in exact
proportion to their ignorance of the history of the language.
“Every word we speak,” so Dr. Holmes told us, “is the medal of a dead
thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn
smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to
another.” We must admit that these chance medalists of language have
not always been gifted artists or skilled craftsmen, so the words of
their striking are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always respected
the standard, so there is counterfeit coin in circulation sometimes.
Even when the word is sterling and well minted, be it new or old,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary,
the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the reserve, to be
misrepresented by a shabby paper promise to pay. So fierce is the
popular demand for an increased _per capita_ that the verbal currency
is ever in danger of debasement. This is the apparent justification
of the self-appointed tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of
their own and who venture to throw out much false coin. Their tests are
trustworthy now and again; but more often than not the pieces they have
nailed to the counter are of full weight and ought to pass current.
“There is a purism,” Whitney said, “which, while it seeks to maintain
the integrity of the language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too
fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and colloquial
expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue
than to rush into the opposite extreme.” And Professor Lounsbury goes
further and asserts that our language is not to-day in danger from
the agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it, but rather “from
ignorant efforts made to preserve what is called its purity.” And
elsewhere the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that “the history
of language is the history of corruptions,” and that “the purest of
speakers uses every day, with perfect propriety, words and forms which,
looked at from the point of view of the past, are improper, if not
scandalous.”
There would be both interest and instruction in a list of the many
words securely intrenched in our own vocabulary to-day which were
bitterly assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises himself for
his valiant effort against certain of these intruders: “I have done my
utmost for some years past to stop the progress of _mob_ and _banter_,
but have been plainly borne down by numbers and betrayed by those who
promised to assist me.” Puttenham (or whoever it was that wrote the
anonymous ‘Arte of English Poesie,’ published in 1589) admitted the
need of certain words to which the purists might justly object, and
then adds that “many other like words borrowed out of the Latin and
French were not so well to be allowed by us,” citing then, among those
of which he disapproved, _audacious_, _egregious_, and _compatible_. In
the ‘Poetaster,’ acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston’s verbal
innovations, and among the words he reviled are _clumsy_, _inflate_,
_spurious_, _conscious_, _strenuous_, _defunct_, _retrograde_, and
_reciprocal_; and in his ‘Discoveries’ Jonson shrewdly remarked that
“a man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if
it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the
scorn is assured.”
Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, Jonson at the
beginning of the seventeenth, Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth;
and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find Lady Holland declaring
_influential_ to be a detestable word and asserting that she had tried
in vain to get Sheridan to forego it.
At the end of the nineteenth century the battle was still raging over
_standpoint_, for example, and over _reliable_ and over _lengthy_, and
over a score of others, all of which bid fair to establish themselves
ultimately because they supply a demand more or less insistent. The
fate is more doubtful of _photo_ for _photograph_ and of _phone_ for
_telephone_; they both strike us now as vulgarisms, just as _mob_ (and
for the same reason) struck Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in
time they will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as _mob_ has
survived it. Then there is the misbegotten verb, _to enthuse_, in my
sight the most hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate? Altho I
have detected it in the careful columns of the ‘Nation,’ it has not as
yet been adopted by any acknowledged master of English; none the less,
I fear me greatly, it has all the vitality of other ill weeds. And is
_bike_ going to get itself recognized as a substitute for _bicycle_,
both as verb and as noun? It seems to be possible, since a monosyllable
has always an advantage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths.
Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of words “when we are
already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our
language.” Then he wittily characterizes the process by which _mob_
had been made, _cab_ was to be made, and _photo_ is now in the making:
“Thus we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened
her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running
away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will
certainly answer the end: for I am sure no other nation will desire
to borrow them.” Swift was rash enough to assert that _speculation_,
_operation_, _preliminaries_, _ambassador_, _communication_, and
_battalion_ were words newly introduced, and also to prophesy that
they were too poly-syllabic to be able to endure many more campaigns.
As it happens no attempt has been made to shorten any one of them
except _speculation_, and it can hardly be maintained that _spec_ has
established itself. Certainly it has not disestablished _speculation_,
as _mob_ has driven out _mobile vulgus_.
Dryden declared that he traded “both with the living and the dead
for the enrichment of our native language”; but he denied that he
Latinized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he attempted have not
won acceptance. Lowell thought that Dryden did not add a single word
to the language, unless “he first used _magnetism_ in its present
sense of moral attraction.” Dr. Holmes also discovered that it is not
enough to make a new word when it is needed and to fashion it fitly;
its fortune still depends on public caprice or popular instinct. “I’ve
sometimes made new words,” he told a friend; “I made _chrysocracy_,
thinking it would take its place, but it didn’t; _plutocracy_, meaning
the same thing, was adopted instead.” But _anesthesia_ is a word of Dr.
Holmes’s making which has won its way not only in English but in most
of the other modern languages. It may be doubted whether a like fortune
will follow another word to be found quoted in one of his letters,
_aproposity_, a bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our language.
It is with surprise that in Stevenson’s very Scotch romance ‘David
Balfour’ we happen upon another malformation--_come-at-able_, hitherto
supposed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma. Elsewhere in
the same story we read “you _claim_ to be innocent,” a form which the
cockney critics are wont to call American. Stevenson in this novel
uses both the modern _jeopardize_ and the ancient _enjeopardy_. Just
why _to jeopardize_ should have driven _to jeopard_ out of use, it
is not easy to declare, nor why _leniency_ is supplanting _lenity_.
As _drunk_ seems to suggest total intoxication, it is possible to
discover the cause of the increasing tendency to say “I have _drank_.”
No defense is easy of _in our midst_ for _in the midst of us_, and
yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is a convenient short-cut. Dr.
Holmes confessed to Richard Grant White that he had used it once, and
that Edward Everett (who had also once fallen from grace) made him see
the error of his ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson’s ‘Amateur
Emigrant,’ and again in the ‘Res Judicatæ’ of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a
brisk essayist, altho not an impeccable stylist.
It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To call it a neologism
is but begging the question. Of necessity every word was new once.
It was “struck in the die of human experience,” to come back to Dr.
Holmes’s figure; and it is at its best before it is “worn smooth
by innumerable contacts.” Lowell thought it was a chief element of
Shakspere’s greatness that “he found words ready to his use, original
and untarnished--types of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by
repeated impressions.” He “found a language already established but not
yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers.” For the same reason
Mérimée delighted in Russian, because it was “young, the pedants not
having had time to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry.”
This native relish for the uncontaminated word it was that led Hugo and
Gautier to ransack all sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for
the unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rudyard Kipling to avail
himself of the technical terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not
merely because they are exact, but also because they are unexpected.
The device is dangerous, no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions
can find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot was a little too
fond of injecting into fiction the terminology of science, but there
was nothing blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabulary which
should be at the command of the novelist. Professor Dowden records
that when she used in a story words and phrases like _dynamic_ and
_natural selection_, the reviewer pricked up his delicate ears and
shied; and he makes bold to suggest that “if the thoroughbred critic
could only be led close up to _dynamic_, he would find that _dynamic_
would not bite.” Every lover of our language will sympathize with
Professor Dowden’s assertion that “a protest of common sense is really
called for against the affectation which professes to find obscurity
in words because they are trisyllabic or because they carry with them
scientific associations. Language, the instrument of literary art, is
an instrument of ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in an
age when the air is saturated with scientific thought, would be to
reject those accessions to the language which are the special gain of
the time.”
Where George Eliot erred--if err she did at all in this matter--was in
the use of scientific terms inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully,
whereby she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the purpose in
hand. Every writer needs to consider most carefully both the obvious
and the remote associations of the phrases he employs, that these may
intensify the thought he wishes to convey. A word is known by the
company it has kept. Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the
fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor. The magic of his
art lies largely in the syllables he selects, in their sound and in
their color. Not their meanings merely are important to him, but their
suggestions also--not what they denote more than what they connote. An
American psychologist has recently told us that every word has not only
its own note but also its overtones. With unconscious foresight, the
great poets have always acted on this theory.
Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have ever been ready to rescue
a cast-off word from the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle (of
Oxford) declares that “it has been one of the most interesting features
of the new vigor and independence of American literature, that it has
often displayed in a surprising manner what springs of novelty there
are in reserve and to be elicited by novel combinations”--a statement
more complimentary in its intent than felicitous in its phrasing. And
Professor Earle praises Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill
in enriching our modern English with the old words locked up out of
sight in the treasuries of the past. Lowell said of Emerson that “his
eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a
backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from
the mud of Cotton Mather himself.”
Of course this effort to recover the scattered pearls of speech,
dropped by the wayside in the course of the centuries, is peculiar
neither to the United States nor to the nineteenth century--altho
perhaps it has been carried further in our country and in our time
than anywhere else. Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old
Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused by an acrid critic of
having made a list of obsolete words, which he strove deliberately to
reintroduce into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought to do
with Chaucer’s vocabulary; and it is curious to reflect that, owing,
it may be, in part, to the example set by the author of the ‘Faerie
Queene,’ the language of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ is far less strange,
less remote, less archaic to us to-day than it was to the Elizabethans.
A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going on constantly. Words
are swiftly worn out and used up and thrown aside. New words are made
or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old words are impressed into
service and forced to do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary
completed than the editor sets about his inevitable supplement. And the
dictionary is not only of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate
in its definitions, for it may happen that a word will take on an
added meaning while the big book is at the bindery. Our language is
fluctuating always; and now one word and now another has expanded its
content or has shrunk away into insignificance. No definition is surely
stable for long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of his own style
_disgust_ was fairly equivalent to _dislike_; “and if a more massy way
of writing be never so much disgusted at this day, a better gust will
come on.”
Once upon a time _to aggravate_ meant to increase an offense; now it
is often used as tho it meant to irritate. Formerly _calculated_--as
in the sentence “it was _calculated_ to do harm”--implied a deliberate
intention to injure; now the idea of intention has been eliminated
and the sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to “it was likely
to do harm.” _Verbal_ is slowly getting itself accepted as synonymous
with _oral_, in antithesis to _written_. _Lurid_ was really _pale_,
_wan_, _ghastly_; but how often of late has it been employed as tho it
signified _red_ or _ruddy_ or _bloody_?
At first these new uses of these old words were slovenly and
inadmissible inaccuracies, but by sheer insistence they are winning
their pardon, until at last they will gain authority as they broaden
down from precedent to precedent. It is well to be off with the old
word before you are on with the new; and no writer who respects his
mother-tongue is ever in haste to take up with words thus wrested from
the primitive propriety.
But, as Dryden declared when justifying his modernizing of Chaucer’s
vocabulary, “Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to
be removed; customs are changed, and even statutes are silently
repealed when the reason ceases for which they were enacted.” It was
Dryden’s “Cousin Swift” who once declared that “a nice man is a man
of nasty ideas”--an assertion which I venture to believe to be wholly
incomprehensible to-day to the young ladies of England in whose mouths
_nice_ means _agreeable_ and _nasty_ means _disagreeable_. _Nice_
has suffered this inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States as
well as in Great Britain, but _nasty_ has not yet been emptied of its
original offensiveness here as it has over there. And even in British
speech the transformation is relatively recent; I think Stevenson was
guilty of an anachronism in ‘Weir of Hermiston’ when he put it in the
mouth of a young Scot.