our place-names. The passage is long for quotation in a paper where
too much has been quoted already; and yet I should be derelict to my
duty if I did not transcribe it here. Stevenson had lived among many
peoples, and he was far more cosmopolitan than Matthew Arnold, and more
willing, therefore, to dwell on beauties than on blemishes. “None can
care for literature in itself,” he begins, “who do not take a special
pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world
where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as
the United States of America. All times, races, and languages have
brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid,
with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London
associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own
suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat,
translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and
Arkansas.... Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrow-head under
a steam-factory, below Anglified New York. The names of the States
and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic
vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming,
Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music
for the ear; a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise
from the western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing
spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike
the fancy in a business circular.”
As Campbell had utilized the innate beauty of the word Wyoming, so
Stevenson himself made a ballad on the dreaded name of Ticonderoga;
and these are two of the proper names of modern America that sing
themselves. But there is nothing canorous in Anglified New York; there
is no sonority in its syllables; there is neither dignity nor truth in
its obvious meaning. It might serve well enough as the address of a
steam-factory in a business circular; but it lacks absolutely all that
the name of a metropolis demands. Stevenson thought that the new Homer
would joy in working into his strong lines the beautiful nomenclature
of America; but Washington Irving had the same anticipation, and it
forced him to declare that if New York “were to share the fate of Troy
itself, to suffer a ten years’ siege, and be sacked and plundered, no
modern Homer would ever be able to elevate the name to epic dignity.”
Irving went so far as to wish not only that New York city should be
Manhattan again, but that New York State should be Ontario, the Hudson
River the Mohegan, and the United States themselves Appalachia. Edgar
Allan Poe, than whom none of our poets had a keener perception of the
beauty of sounds and the fitness of words, approved of Appalachia as
the name of the whole country.
Perhaps we must wait yet a little while for Appalachia and Ontario
and the Mohegan; but has not the time come to dig up that old red
arrow-head Manhattan, and fit it to a new shaft?
(1895)
XII
AS TO “AMERICAN SPELLING”
[This paper is here reprinted from an earlier volume now out of print.]
When the author of the ‘Cathedral’ was accosted by the wandering
Englishmen within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a joke,
Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends.
The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,
Abolished in the truce of common speech
And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue.
In this common speech other Englishmen are not always ready to
acknowledge the full rights of Lowell’s countrymen. They would put us
off with but a younger brother’s portion of the mother-tongue, seeming
somehow to think that they are more closely related to the common
parent than we are. But Orlando, the younger son of Sir Rowland du
Bois, was no villain; and tho we have broken with the fatherland, the
mother-tongue is none the less our heritage. Indeed, we need not care
whether the division is _per stirpes_ or _per capita_; our share is not
the less in either case.
Beneath the impotent protests which certain British newspapers are
prone to make every now and again against the “American language” as
a whole, and against the stray Americanism which has happened last
to invade England, there is a tacit assumption that we Americans are
outer barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering with something
which belongs to the British exclusively. And the outcry against the
“American language” is not as shrill nor as piteous as the shriek of
horror with which certain of the journals of London greet “American
spelling,” a hideous monster which they feared was ready to devour them
as soon as the international copyright bill should become law. In the
midst of every discussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great
Britain, the bugbear of “American spelling” reared its grisly head.
The London _Times_ declared that English publishers would never put
any books into type in the United States because the people of England
would never tolerate the peculiarities of orthography which prevailed
in American printing-offices. The _St. James’s Gazette_ promptly
retorted that “already newspapers in London are habitually using the
ugliest forms of American spelling, and these silly eccentricities do
not make the slightest difference in their circulation.” The _Times_
and the _St. James’s Gazette_ might differ as to the effect of the
copyright act on the profits of the printers of England, but they
agreed heartily as to the total depravity of “American spelling.” I
think that any disinterested foreigner who might chance to hear these
violent outcries would suppose that English orthography was as the law
of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not; he would be justified
in believing that the system of spelling now in use in Great Britain
was hallowed by the Established Church, and in some way mysteriously
connected with the state religion.
Just what the British newspapers were afraid of it is not easy to say,
and it is difficult to declare just what they mean when they talk of
“American spelling.” Probably they do not refer to the improvements in
orthography suggested by the first great American--Benjamin Franklin.
Possibly they do refer to the modifications in the accepted spelling
proposed by another American, Noah Webster--not so great, and yet not
to be named slightingly by any one who knows how fertile his labors
have been for the good of the whole country. Noah Webster, so his
biographer, Mr. Scudder, tells us, “was one of the first to carry a
spirit of democracy into letters.... Throughout his work one may detect
a confidence in the common sense of the people which was as firm as
Franklin’s.” But the innovations of Webster were hesitating and often
inconsistent; and most of them have been abandoned by later editors of
Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language.
What, then, do British writers mean when they animadvert upon “American
spelling”? So far as I have been able to discover, the British
journalists object to certain minor labor-saving improvements of
American orthography, such as the dropping of the _k_ from _almanack_,
the omission of one _g_ from _waggon_, and the like; and they protest
with double force, with all the strength that in them lies, against
the substitution of a single _l_ for a double _l_ in such words as
_traveller_, against the omission of the _u_ from such words as
_honour_, against the substitution of an _s_ for a _c_ in such words as
_defence_, and against the transposing of the final two letters of such
words as _theatre_. The objection to “American spelling” may lie deeper
than I have here suggested, and it may have a wider application; but
I have done my best to state it fully and fairly as I have deduced it
from a painful perusal of many columns of exacerbated British writing.
Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly the extent of the British
journalistic objections to “American spelling,” the unprejudiced
reader may be moved to ask: “Is this all? Are these few and slight
and unimportant changes the cause of this mighty commotion?” One may
agree with Sainte-Beuve in thinking that “orthography is the beginning
of literature,” without discovering in these modifications from the
Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust. And since I have quoted
Sainte-Beuve once, I venture to cite him again, and to take from the
same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion that “if we write more
correctly, let it be to express especially honest feelings and just
thoughts.”
Feelings may be honest tho they are violent, but irritation is not the
best frame of mind for just thinking. The tenacity with which some
of the newspapers of London are wont to defend the accepted British
orthography is perhaps due rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell
told us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with as fierce a flame
as ever once theological hatred; and any American who chances to note
the force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against
“American spelling” in the columns of the _Saturday Review_, for
example, and of the _Athenæum_, may find himself wondering as to the
date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary
British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the
church was held at which it was made an article of faith.
The _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenæum_, highly pitched as their
voices are, yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to arms against the
possible invasion of the sanctity of British orthography by “American
spelling” than is the London _Times_, the solid representative of
British thought, the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet
the _Times_ is not without orthographic eccentricities of its own,
as Matthew Arnold took occasion to point out. In his essay on the
‘Literary Influence of Academies,’ he asserted that “every one has
noticed the way in which the _Times_ chooses to spell the word
_diocese_; it always spells it _diocess_, deriving it, I suppose, from
_Zeus_ and _census_.... Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself
in an orthographical antic of this sort!”
When we read what is written in the _Times_ and the _Saturday Review_
and the _Athenæum_, sometimes in set articles on the subject, and
even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs in the course of
book-reviews, we wonder at the vehemence of the feeling displayed.
If we did not know that ancient abuses are often defended with more
violence and with louder shouts than inheritances of less doubtful
worth, we might suppose that the present spelling of the English
language was in a condition perfectly satisfactory alike to scholar and
to student. Such, however, is not the case. The leading philologists
of Great Britain and of the United States have repeatedly denounced
English spelling as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic, Professor
Max Müller at Oxford being no less emphatic than Professor Whitney
at Yale. There is now living no scholar of any repute who any longer
defends the ordinary orthography of the English language.
The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now
as it was in Pope’s day. Those who are volubly denouncing “American
spelling” in the columns of British journals are not students of
the history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in
so far as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur
philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly
remarked, “The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the
poor in that we have them always with us.” Altho few of them are as
ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the
obviously jocular _Welsh rabbit_ into a ridiculously impossible _Welsh
rarebit_, still the most of their writing serves no good purpose. Nor
do we discover in these specimens of British journalism that abundant
urbanity which etymology might lead us to look for in the writing of
inhabitants of so large a city as London.
Any one who takes the trouble to inform himself on the subject will
soon discover that it is chiefly the half-educated men who defend the
contemporary orthography of the English language, and who denounce the
alleged “American spelling” of _center_ and _honor_. The uneducated
reader may wonder perchance what the _g_ is doing in _sovereign_; the
half-educated reader discerns in the _g_ a connecting-link between the
English _sovereign_ and the Latin _regno_; the well-educated reader
knows that there is no philological connection whatever between _regno_
and _sovereign_.
Most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the
prevalence of “American spelling,” have never carried their education
so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man
from expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The
object of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he
knows, and also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close
sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not
necessarily qualified to express an opinion in esthetics; and on the
other hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of science. Now
literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Altho men
of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography
is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come
by nature. Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore
without spelling. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection
with literature; still less has orthography. A literary critic is
rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but
being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his
ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.
Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the “American spelling”
which the British journalists denounce. This “American spelling” is
less absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied
therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity. Once
upon a time most words that now are spelled with a final _c_ had an
added _k_. Even now both British and American usage retains this
_k_ in _hammock_, altho both British and Americans have dropped the
needless letter from _havoc_; while the British retain the _k_ at the
end of _almanack_ and the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson was
a reactionary in orthography as in politics; and in his dictionary
he wilfully put a final _k_ to words like _optick_, without being
generally followed by the publick--as he would have spelled it.
_Music_ was then _musick_, altho, even as late as Aubrey’s time, it
had been _musique_. In our own day we are witnessing the very gradual
substitution of the logical _technic_ for the form originally imported
from France--_technique_.
I am inclined to think that _technic_ is replacing _technique_ more
rapidly--or should I say less slowly?--in the United States than in
Great Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our words and to make
them our own, while the British have rather a fondness for foreign
phrases. A London journalist recently held up to public obloquy as an
“ignorant Americanism” the word _program_, altho he would have found
it set down in Professor Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. “_Programme_
was taken from the French,” so a recent writer reminds us, “and in
violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was imported into English,
we had already _anagram_, _cryptogram_, _diagram_, _epigram_, etc.”
The logical form _program_ is not common even in America; and British
writers seem to prefer the French form, as British speakers still give
a French pronunciation to _charade_, and to _trait_, which in America
have long since been accepted frankly as English words.
Possibly it is idle to look for any logic in anything which has to
do with modern English orthography on either side of the ocean.
Perhaps, however, there is less even than ordinary logic in the
British journalist’s objection to the so-called “American spelling” of
_meter_; for why should any one insist on _metre_ while unhesitatingly
accepting its compound _diameter_? Mr. John Bellows, in the preface to
his inestimable French-English and English-French pocket dictionary,
one of the very best books of reference ever published, informs us
that “the act of Parliament legalizing the use of the metric system
in this country [England] gives the words _meter_, _liter_, _gram_,
etc., spelled on the American plan.” Perhaps now that the sanction of
law has been given to this spelling, the final _er_ will drive out the
_re_ which has usurped its place. In one of the last papers that he
wrote, Lowell declared that “_center_ is no Americanism; it entered the
language in that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe.” “In
the sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century,” says
Professor Lounsbury, “while both ways of writing these words existed
side by side, the termination _er_ is far more common than that in
_re_. The first complete edition of Shakspere’s plays was published in
1623. In that work _sepulcher_ occurs thirteen times; it is spelled
eleven times with _er_. _Scepter_ occurs thirty-seven times; it is not
once spelled with _re_, but always with _er_. _Center_ occurs twelve
times, and in nine instances out of the twelve it ends in _er_.” So we
see that this so-called “American spelling” is fully warranted by the
history of the English language. It is amusing to note how often a
wider and a deeper study of English will reveal that what is suddenly
denounced in Great Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether
this be a variation in speech or in spelling, is shown to be really a
survival of a previous usage of our language, and authorized by a host
of precedents.
Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of progress, and no
doubt in due season Great Britain and her colonial dependencies will
be content again to spell words that end in _er_ as Shakspere and Ben
Jonson and Spenser spelled them. But when we get so far toward the
orthographic millennium that we all spell _sepulcher_, the ghost of
Thomas Campbell will groan within the grave at the havoc then wrought
in the final line of ‘Hohenlinden,’ which will cease to end with even
the outward semblance of a rime to the eye. We all know that
On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly;
and those of us who have persevered may remember that with one
exception every fourth line of Campbell’s poem ends with a _y_,--the
words are _rapidly_, _scenery_, _revelry_, _artillery_, _canopy_, and
_chivalry_,--not rimes of surpassing distinction, any of them, but
perhaps passable to a reader who will humor the final syllable. The one
exception is the final line of the poem--
Shall be a soldier’s _sepulchre_.
To no man’s ear did _sepulchre_ ever rime justly with _chivalry_ and
_canopy_ and _artillery_, altho Campbell may have so contorted his
vision that he evoked the dim spook of a rime in his mind’s eye. A rime
to the eye is a sorry thing at best, and it is sorriest when it depends
on an inaccurate and evanescent orthography.
Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in and leaving out of
the _u_ in words like _honor_ and _governor_ as he was in many other
things; and the makers of later dictionaries have departed widely
from his practice, those in Great Britain still halting half-way,
while those in the United States have gone on to the bitter end.
The illogic of the burly lexicographer is shown in his omission of
the _u_ from _exterior_ and _posterior_, and his retention of it in
the kindred words _interiour_ and _anteriour_; this, indeed, seems
like wilful perversity, and justifies Hood’s merry jest about “Dr.
Johnson’s Contradictionary.” The half-way measures of later British
lexicographers are shown in their omission of the _u_ from words which
Dr. Johnson spelled _emperour_, _governour_, _oratour_, _horrour_, and
_dolour_, while still retaining it in _favour_ and _honour_ and a few
others.
The reason for his disgust generally given by the London man of
letters who is annoyed by the “American spelling” of _honor_ and
_favor_ is that these words are not derived directly from the Latin,
but indirectly through the French; this is the plea put forward by
the late Archbishop Trench. Even if this plea were pertinent, the
application of this theory is not consistent in current British
orthography, which prescribes the omission of the _u_ from _error_ and
_emperor_, and its retention in _colour_ and _honour_--altho all four
words are alike derived from the Latin through the French. And this
plea fails absolutely to account for the _u_ which the British insist
on preserving in _harbour_ and in _neighbour_, words not derived from
the Latin at all, whether directly or indirectly through the French.
An American may well ask, “If the _u_ in _honour_ teaches etymology,
what does the _u_ in _harbour_ teach?” There is no doubt that the _u_
in _harbour_ teaches a false etymology; and there is no doubt also
that the _u_ in _honour_ has been made to teach a false etymology,
for Trench’s derivation of this final _our_ from the French _eur_ is
absurd, as the old French was _our_, and sometimes _ur_, sometimes even
_or_. Pseudo-philology of this sort is no new thing; Professor Max
Müller noted that the Roman prigs used to spell _cena_ (to show their
knowledge of Greek), _coena_, as if the word were somehow connected
with _κοινή_.
Thus we see that the _u_ in _honour_ suggests a false etymology; so
does the _ue_ in _tongue_, and the _g_ in _sovereign_, and the _c_
in _scent_, and the _s_ in _island_, and the _mp_ in _comptroller_,
and the _h_ in _rhyme_; and there are many more of our ordinary
orthographies which are quite as misleading from a philological point
of view. As the late Professor Hadley mildly put it, “our common
spelling is often an untrustworthy guide to etymology.” But why should
we expect or desire spelling to be a guide to etymology? If it is to
be a guide at all, we may fairly insist on its being trustworthy; and
so we cannot help thinking scorn of those who insist on retaining a
superfluous _u_ in _harbour_.
But why should orthography be made subservient to etymology? What have
the two things in common? They exist for wholly different ends, to be
attained by wholly different means. To bend either from its own work
to the aid of the other is to impair the utility of both. This truth
is recognized by all etymologists, and by all students of language,
altho it has not yet found acceptance among men of letters, who are
rarely students of language in the scientific sense. “It may be
observed,” Mr. Sweet declares, “that it is mainly among the class of
half-taught dabblers in philology that etymological spelling has found
its supporters”; and he goes on to say that “all true philologists
and philological bodies have uniformly denounced it as a monstrous
absurdity both from a practical and a scientific point of view.” I
should never dare to apply to the late Archbishop Trench and the London
journalists who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr. Sweet’s
“half-taught dabblers in philology”; but when a fellow-Briton uses it
perhaps I may venture to quote it without reproach.
As I have said before, the alleged “American spelling” differs but very
slightly from that which prevails in England. A wandering New-Yorker
who rambles through London is able to collect now and again evidences
of orthographic survivals which give him a sudden sense of being in
an older country than his own. I have seen a man whose home was near
Gramercy Park stop short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair,
and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of paper across the glass
door of a bar proclaiming that _CYDER_ was sold within. I have seen the
same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of a _chymist_ in the
window of which _corn-plaisters_ were offered for sale. He wondered
why a British house should have _storeys_ when an American house has
_stories_; and he disliked intensely the wanton _e_ wherewith British
printers have recently disfigured _form_, which in the latest London
typographical vocabularies appears as _forme_. This _e_ in _form_
is a gratuitous addition, and therefore contrary to the trend of
orthographic progress, which aims at the suppression of all arbitrary
and needless letters.