Authors: H.L. Mencken
In America authors are to be found who make use of new or obsolete words which no good writer in this country would employ; and were it not for my
destitution
of leisure, which obliges me to hasten the
occlusion
of these pages, as I
progress
I should
bottom
my assertation on instances from authors of the first
grade
; but were I to render my sketch
lengthy
I should
illy
answer the purpose which I have in view.
The
British Critic
, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despairingly that the damage was already done — that “the common speech of the United States has departed very considerably from the standard adopted in England.” The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall, and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The
Annual
, in 1808, pronounced its anathema upon “that torrent of barbarous phraseology” which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened “to destroy the purity of the English language.” In Bancroft’s “Life of George Washington” (1808), according to the
British Critic
, there were “new words, or old words in a new sense,” all of them inordinately offensive to Englishmen, “at almost every page,” and in Joel Barlow’s “The Columbiad” (1807; reprinted in England in 1809) the
Edinburgh
found “a great multitude of words which are radically and entirely new, and as utterly foreign as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese,” and “the perversion of a still greater number of English words from their proper use or signification, by employing nouns substantive for verbs, adjectives for substantives, &c.” The
Edinburgh
continued:
We have often heard it reported that our transatlantic brethren were beginning to take it amiss that their language should still be called English; and truly we must say that Mr. Barlow has gone far to take away that ground of reproach. The groundwork of his speech, perhaps may be English, as that of the Italian is Latin; but the variations amount already to more than a change of dialect; and really make a glossary necessary for most untravelled readers.
Some of Barlow’s novelties, it must be granted, were fantastic enough — for example,
to vagrate
and
to ameed
among the verbs,
imkeeled
and
homicidious
among the adjectives, and
coloniarch
among the nouns. But many of the rest were either obsolete words whose use was perfectly proper in heroic poetry, or nonce-words of obvious meaning and utility. Some of the terms complained of by the
Edinburgh
are in good usage at this moment — for example,
to utilize
,
to hill, to breeze, to spade
(the soil),
millenial, crass
, and
scow
.
23
But to the English reviewers of the time words so unfamiliar were not only deplorable on their own account; they were also proofs that the Americans were a sordid and ignoble people with no capacity for prose, or for any of the other elegances of life.
24
“When the vulgar and illiterate lose the force of their animal spirits,” observed the
Quarterly
in 1814, reviewing J. K. Paulding’s “Lay of the Scottish Fiddle” (1813), “they become mere clods.… The founders of American society brought to the composition of their nation few seeds of good taste, and no rudiments of liberal science.” To which may be added Southey’s judgment in a letter to Landor in 1812: “See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” Landor, it should be said, entered a protest against this, and on a somewhat surprising ground, considering the general view. “Americans,” he said, “speak our language; they read ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” But he hastened to add, “I detest the American character as much as you do.”
The War of 1812 naturally exacerbated this animosity, though when the works of Irving and Cooper began to be known in England some of the English reviewers moderated their tone. Irving’s “Knickerbocker” was not much read there until 1815, and not much talked about until “The Sketch-Book” followed it in 1819,
but Scott had received a copy of it from Henry Brevoort in 1813, and liked it and said so. Byron mentioned it in a letter to his publisher, Murray, on August 7, 1821. We are told by Thomas Love Peacock that Shelley was “especially fond of the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the American,” but Cairns says there is no mention of the fact, if it be a fact, in any of Shelley’s own writings, or in those of his other friends. “Knickerbocker” was published in 1809, the
North American Review
began in May, 1815, Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” was printed in its pages in 1817, and Paulding’s “The Backwoodsman,” with an American theme and an American title, came out a year later, but Cooper’s “Precaution” was still two years ahead, and American letters were yet in a somewhat feeble state. John Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession,” and Justice Story, three years later, repeated the saying and sought to account for the fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts.… This obvious reason will explain why we have so few professional authors, and those not among our ablest men.” In 1813 Jefferson, anticipating both Pickering and Story, had written to John Waldo:
We have no distinct class of literati in our country. Every man is engaged in some industrious pursuit, and science is but a secondary occupation, always subordinate to the main business of life. Few, therefore, of those who are qualified have leisure to write.
Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of such native books as were written. “It is much to be regretted,” wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, “that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the States. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any State it should be for sale in all of them.” Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was apparently beyond the possibilities of the time. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the Americans eschewed reading altogether; on the contrary, there is some evidence that they read many English books. In 1802 the
Scot’s Magazine
reported that at a book-fair held shortly before in New York the sales ran to 520,000 volumes, and that a similar fair was
projected for Philadelphia. Six years before this the London bookseller, Henry Lemoine, made a survey of the American book trade for the
Gentleman’s Magazine
.
25
He found that very few books were being printed in the country, and ascribed the fact to the high cost of labor, but he encountered well-stocked bookstores in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and plenty of customers for their importations. He went on:
Their sales are very great, for it is scarcely possible to conceive the number of readers with which every little town abounds. The common people are on a footing, in point of literature, with the middle ranks in Europe; they all read and write, and understand arithmetic. Almost every little town now furnishes a small circulating-library.… Whatever is useful sells, but publications on subjects merely speculative, and rather curious than important, controversial divinity, and voluminous polemical pieces, as well as heavy works on the arts and sciences, lie upon the importer’s hands. They have no ready money to spare for anything but what they find useful.
But other visitors were much less impressed by the literary gusto of the young Republic. Henry Wansey, who came out in 1794, reported in his “Excursion to the United States of North America”
26
that the American libraries were “scanty,” that their collections were “almost entirely of modern books,” and that they were deficient in “the means of tracing the history of questions,… a want which literary people felt very much, and which it will take some years to remedy.” And Captain Thomas Hamilton, in his “Men and Manners in America,”
27
said flatly that “there is … nothing in the United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be extracted. At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of Europe — especially in Germany — as a man comparatively ignorant. Why
does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intellectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?” According to Hamilton, all the books imported from Europe for public institutions during the fiscal year 1829–30 reached a value of but $10,829.
But whatever the fact here, there can be no doubt that the Americans were quickly aware of every British aspersion upon their culture, whether it appeared in a book or in one of the reviews. If nothing else was read, such things were certainly read, and they came with sufficient frequency, and were couched in terms of sufficient offensiveness, to keep the country in a state of indignation for years. The flood of books by English visitors began before the end of the Eighteenth Century, and though many of them were intended to be friendly, there was in even the friendliest of them enough of what Cairns calls “the British knack for saying gracious things in an ungracious way” to keep the pot of fury boiling. At the other extreme the thing went to fantastic lengths. The
Quarterly Review
, summing up in 1814, accused the Americans of a multitude of strange and hair-raising offenses — for example, employing naked colored women to wait upon them at table, kidnapping Scotsmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery, and fighting one another incessantly under rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, and smooth away the nose.” In this holy war upon the primeval damyankee William Gifford, editor of the
Anti-Jacobin
in 1797–98, and after 1809 the first editor of the
Quarterly
, played an extravagant part,
28
but he was diligently seconded by Sydney Smith, Southey, Thomas Moore and many lesser lights. “If the [English] reviewers get hold of an American publication,” said J. K. Paulding in “Letters From the South” in 1817, “it is made use of merely as a pretext to calumniate us in some way or other.” There is an instructive account of the whole uproar in the fifth volume of John Bach McMaster’s “History of the People of the United States From the Revolution to the Civil War.” McMaster says that it
was generally believed that the worst calumniators of the United States were subsidized by the British government, apparently in an effort to discourage emigration. He goes on:
The petty annoyances, the little inconveniences and unpleasant incidents met with in all journeys, were grossly exaggerated and cited as characteristic of daily life in the States. Men and women met with at the inns and taverns, in the stage-coaches and far-away country towns, were described not as so many types, but as the typical Americans. The abuse heaped on public men by partisan newspapers, the charges of corruption made by one faction against the other, the scandals of the day, were all cited as solemn truth.
Even the relatively mild and friendly Captain Hamilton condescended to such tactics. This is what he had to say of Thomas Jefferson:
The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puling about liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of slavery, he brought his own children to the hammer, and made money of his debaucheries.
29
Such violent assaults, in the long run, were bound to breed defiance, but while they were at their worst they produced a contrary effect. “The nervous interest of Americans in the impressions formed of them by visiting Europeans,” says Allan Nevins,
30
“and their sensitiveness to British criticism in especial, were long regarded as constituting a salient national trait.” The native authors became extremely self-conscious and diffident, and the educated classes, in general, were daunted by the torrent of abuse: they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. “The first step of an American entering upon a literary career,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century,
31
“was to
pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen.” Cooper, in his first novel, “Precaution,” (1820) chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously hoped to placate the English critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his “Knickerbocker” was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English libels were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, “The Spy” (1821), boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. “The Spy” ran through three editions in four months, and was followed by a long line of thoroughly American novels. In 1828 Cooper undertook a detailed reply to the more common English charges in “Notions of the Americans,” but he was still too cautious to sign his name to it: it appeared as “by a Travelling Bachelor.” By 1834, however, he was ready to apologize formally to his countrymen for his early truancy in “Precaution.” Irving, who was even more politic, and suffered moreover from Anglomania in a severe form, nevertheless edged himself gradually into the patriot band, and by 1828 he was brave enough to refuse the
Quarterly’s
offer of a hundred guineas for an article on the ground that it was “so persistently hostile to our country” that he could not “draw a pen in its service.”