Authors: H.L. Mencken
On June 13, 1923, there was a Conference of British and American Professors of English at Columbia University. Under the leadership of Henry van Dyke and Fred Newton Scott
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its deliberations quickly resolved themselves into a violent assault upon every evidence of Americanism in the national speech. Dr. van Dyke, unconsciously echoing Witherspoon after 142 years, denounced “the slovenly way” in which the mother-tongue was spoken in this country, “not only in the streets, but also in the pulpit, on the stage, and even in the classroom.” Such “lazy, unintelligible, syncopated speech,” he continued, “is like a dirty face.” Apparently as an answer to a possible accusation of Anglomania — for he had been one of the most vociferous of English propagandists during the World War —, he added that he had also “heard some folks talk in Lunnon
who were hard to understand,” but after this he returned to his muttons, and closed with the dictum that “the proposal to make a new American language to fit our enormous country may be regarded either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity.” Dr. Scott, going further, allowed that it was “for Americans not a matter of ridicule, but for the hair shirt and the lash, for tears of shame and self-abasement.”
That Anglomania may have actually colored the views of both Dr. van Dyke and Dr. Scott is suggested by the case of their
Corps-bruder
, Dr. Brander Matthews. Before the war Matthews was a diligent collector of Americanisms, and often wrote about them with a show of liking them. But during the war he succumbed to a great upsurge of love for the Motherland, and took up a position almost identical with that of Lounsbury. Thus he once wrote in the intensely pro-English New York
Times
.
We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward the differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so significant as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself will be powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the precious inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples.… So long as the novelists and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew Briticisms and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms only in quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself into a British language and an American language.
After the war Matthews did some wobbling. He undoubtedly noticed that quotation marks were no longer being used to tag Americanisms, but so late as the time of his contribution to Academy Papers,
c
. 1923, he continued to believe that “the divergences of speech between the United States and Great Britain are not important, and are not more marked than those between … Boston and Wyoming.” To this he added a sort of hurrah in the form of a solemn declaration, in his character of scholar, that “to the rest of the world German is still an uncouth tongue.” But by 1926 he had so far returned to his first love that he was praising Logan Pearsall Smith, albeit somewhat cautiously, for speaking kindly of Americanisms in “Words and Idioms.” I quote:
I have called attention more particularly to Mr. Pearsall Smith’s friendly attitude toward American words and phrases, usages and idioms, because I find here evidence of a change of heart in our kin across the sea. Time was when to stigmatize a verbal novelty as an Americanism was to condemn it
utterly. Most of those who took on themselves the duty of defending our common tongue did not doubt that the English language belonged exclusively to the British. They felt — and the feeling was natural enough — that the language was the exclusive possession of the inhabitants of the island where it had come into being. It is pleasant to see signs that this jealousy is now dying a natural death. It was pleasant indeed, to behold our right to our linguistic heritage cordially recognized in the review of Mr. Pearsall Smith’s book in the Literary Supplement of the London
Times
.
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If any speaker arose at the Columbia Conference to defend American speechways, the fact did not appear in the published reports. Apparently, all the assembled “professors of English,” whether actual Englishmen or only American colonials, were of like mind with Drs. Scott and van Dyke. On the lower levels of pedagogy there is the same general attitude. As I have noted, the National Council of Teachers of English, like the American Academy of Arts and Letters, frequently toys with the project of setting up machinery for “purifying” the language, and there are innumerable minor bands of schoolmarms, male and female, consecrated to the same end. But there is a party in the National Council, as in the American Academy, that dissents. One of its spokesmen is J. C. Tressler, head of the English department of the Richmond Hill High-School, New York City. Writing in the
English Journal
, College Edition, in April, 1934, he said:
Although thousands of English teachers [
i.e.
, in the United States] with the blood of crusaders and martyrs in their veins have for decades fought heroically against the corruption and utter ruin of English, their warfare has had by and large slight effect on the language.… It’s hardly wise for the National Council at this late date to attempt to confine it in a strait-jacket.
The great majority of American writers have always held out against the dominant pedagogical opinion, in this as in other matters. In every age, of course, there have been pedantic fellows who out-schoolmarmed the schoolmarms in their devotion to grammatical, syntactical and lexicographical niceties — Ambrose Bierce suggests himself as a good example
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—, and in every age there have been Anglomaniacs of great earnestness — for example, Washington Irving and Henry James,
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not to mention Matthews, van Dyke, and the other faithful colonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, already mentioned. But not many writers of the first distinction have belonged to either faction, and among the lesser ranks there has always been an active movement in the other direction. After the War of 1812, after the Civil War, and again after the World War there were deliberate efforts, among the literati as well as among the folk, to throw off English precept and example altogether, and among the authors concerned were such respectable figures as J. Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.
So long ago as 1820, in the twenty-seventh number of the
North American Review
, Edward Everett sought to turn the fire of the English reviews by arguing that the common language was not only spoken better in America than in England, but also better written. He said:
We challenge any critic who shall maintain the corruption of the English language in America to assume whatever standard he shall choose of the English, the standard of dictionaries, or of good writers, or of good company; and whatever standard be taken, we engaged to detect in English writers of
respectable standing, and in respectable English society, more provincialisms, more good words in false acceptations, and more newly coined words, than can be found in an equal number of American writers, or in American society, of the same relative respectability. We think we should begin such a comparison with the number of the
Edinburgh Review
for March, 1817…. For in the
first article
of that number we fell upon forty-six words not authorized by the standards of our language. The English language corrupted in America! What are the Columbiads, or Webster’s Dictionaries, or any other name of American innovation, compared with the lucubrations of Jeremy Bentham!
In the
North American
for July, 1821, in a review of an anti-American article in the
New London Monthly Magazine
for February of the same year, Everett returned to the subject, arguing that “on the whole, the English language is better spoken here than in England,” and that “there is no part of America in which the corruption of the language has gone so far as in the heart of the English counties.” He did not advocate a severance of American from English, but he insisted that, in the cases of many differences already noticeable, the American practise was better than the English. “We presume,” he concluded somewhat loftily, “that the press set up by the American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands will furnish a good deal better English than Mr. Bentham’s Church-of-Englandism.”
Everett was supported by a number of other authors of the time, including, as I have already noted, Paulding, Timothy Dwight, and J. Fenimore Cooper, whose early Anglomania was by then only a memory. In the second volume of his “Notions of the Americans,” printed anonymously in 1828, but quickly recognized as his and acknowledged by him, Cooper argued stoutly against the artificial English standards, mainly out of the Eighteenth Century, that the contemporary grammarians were trying to impose upon American, and contended that it should be left to its own devices, with due regard, of course, for reason, analogy, and any plausible indigenous authority that might develop. He went on:
This we are daily doing, and I think the consequence will be that in another generation or two far more reasonable English will be used in this country than exists here now.… I think it will be just as much the desire of England then to be in our fashion as it was our desire twenty years ago to be in hers.
In “The American Democrat,” published in 1838, Cooper set himself up as the indigenous authority he had anticipated ten years
before. By this time the American language was far gone upon the grand bust that had begun with the Jackson uprising, and there was a tremendous flow of neologisms from the West. The “common faults” of the popular speech, according to Cooper, were “an ambition of eifect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.” He denounced the democratic substitution of
boss
for
master
, and of
help
for
servant
, and preached a smug sermon upon the true meaning of
lady
and
gentleman
. “To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a
gentleman
,” he said,” is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a
fellow
,… [A true gentleman] never calls his wife his
lady
, but his
wife
, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures
men
and
women
.” Waspish words, but they at least avoided the pedantry of the pedagogues, and yielded no more than its just due to English precedent.
The first really full-length defense of American by an American appeared in a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855. Its author was Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of John Jacob Astor and one of the forgotten worthies of his era. He was graduated from Yale in 1839 and then went to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1845. After that he devoted himself to literary endeavor, and during the next thirty years lived chiefly at Washington. There he gathered a small coterie of dilettanti about him, and became a sort of forerunner of Henry Adams. In 1852 he published “Five Years in an English University,” and three years later he was asked to contribute to the aforesaid volume of “Cambridge Essays.” His contribution bore the title of “The English Language in America”; it remains to this day, despite a few aberrations, the most intelligent brief discussion of the subject ever printed. He began by denouncing the notion, prevalent then as now, that the study of American was somehow undignified, and proceeded to argue that it was really worth any scholar’s while “to investigate the course of a great living language, transplanted from its primitive seat, brought into contact and rivalry with other civilized tongues, and exposed to various influences, all having a
prima facie
tendency to modify it.” He then proceeded to dispose of the familiar arguments against the existence of an American form of English, later to be reassembled and reinforced by Lounsbury —
(1) that most Americanisms “can be traced to an English source,” (2) that “the number of actually new words invented in America is very small,” (3) that “the deviations from standard English which occur in America are fewer and less gross than those which may be found in England herself,” and so on. Here is a specimen passage from his caveat to the first two propositions, which he grouped together as embodying a single argument:
We admit this argument to be true,
so far as it goes
; but it does not go so far, by any means, as its supporters imagine. They seem to forget that there is such a thing as applying a new
meaning
to existing words, and of this novelty the examples in America are sufficiently numerous. Thus
creek
is a perfectly legitimate English word, but its legitimate English meaning is “a small arm of the sea,” whereas in America it is invariably used to designate a small river, except when it happens to be used to designate a large one.
Draw
is an old-established English verb, but the Americans have further employed it as a noun, and made it do duty for
draw-bridge
.
The third proposition Bristed answered thus:
This is the line of argument which sometimes develops itself into the amusingly paradoxical assertion that the Americans speak better English than the English themselves. But such reasoning is on a par with that of one who should consider himself to have demonstrated that the upper classes of America were richer than those of England by showing that the lower classes of England were poorer than those of America, or that the average wealth of the American population per head was greater than that of the English. There is no inconsistency in admitting that the worst English
patois
may be less intelligible than the worst American, and yet maintaining that the best currently spoken American contains appreciable deviations from the true English standard. The English provincialisms
keep their place
; they are confined to their own particular localities, and do not encroach on the metropolitan model. The American provincialisms are most equally distributed through all classes and localities, and though some of them may not rise above a certain level of society, others are heard everywhere. The senate or the boudoir is no more sacred from their intrusions than the farm-house or the tavern.