CHAPTER XI.

IS BEING DONE.

O a man who has reached what Dante calls

The middle of the journey of our life, nothing in

the outside world is more remarkable than the unconscious freedom with which people ten or fifteen years younger than himself adopt new fashions and fangles of dress, of manners, and of speech, except, perhaps, their persistence in these novelties after the absurdity thereof has been fully set forth and explained. His difficulty is, that for a long time he does not see does not unless he combines, unusually, quickness of penetration and readiness of reflection that what seems so new and strange to him seems to younger people neither strange nor new. The things are new, indeed, to them, but only in that they are not yet old; they are not novelties that disturb their peace as they disturb his. He wonders that that beautiful girl of seventeen goes about in public unconcerned, and in fact almost unnoticed, that is the strangest feature of the case, in such amazing apparel as would ten years ago have made her mother the laughing-stock of the whole town, and which yet she wears as calmly as if from Eve's day down the sex had known no other

garments. Why should she not? The fashion of to-day is all that she knows of fashion, and she cares to know no more, except for the sake of curiosity. All the rest is to her in the keeping of history, where she may, perhaps, in an idle moment, look at it, and find it food for wonder or for laughter. In it there is nought to her of personal

concern.

When does a fashion cease to be new? When does it become old? when obsolete? Before these questions can be answered, we must know the measure of time used by him who asks them. What would be new to a young elephant of thirty or forty years would be old to an aged cony of nine or ten; what to the butterfly of a meadow and a summer would date from the beginning of all things, would hardly be a memory to an eagle that had soared for half a century above half a continent. What is new to one man may be old to men only five years younger than he, and to men ten years younger, obsolete. Few truths are more difficult of apprehension than this, apparently so obvious. Few mental faculties are rarer than that which gives to a mature man the prompt, intuitive recognition of the fact that there are human beings whose opinions and habits, if not worthy of consideration, must yet be considered, to whom that which is to him a part of the present is not merely unfamiliar, but shut out among the things of the past as completely as the siege of Troy, or the building of the Pyramids. Five thousand years ago, five hundred, fifty, five — what is the difference as to that which is beyond the grasp of consciousness, out of the record of ex perience?

This elasticity of the standard by which the new is measured, is in no respect more worthy of consideration than in that of language. Unless a man is a monster of pedantry and priggishness, and, indeed, not then, the words and the forms of speech he uses are not made, or even chosen, by himself. The first condition of language that it shall be a means of communication between men— forbids the near approach to a vocabulary or a construction which is, even in part, the work or the choice of any one man. As we get our food and our breath from the earth and the air around us, so we get our language from our neighbors. - not the language in which we work out and discuss questions in science, in art, or in letters, but that which serves the needs of our daily life. A little comes to us from abroad; but this is mere spicery, much of which is neither wholesome nor appetizing.

A fastidious precisian in language might carry his nicety so far as to leave himself almost speechless. A man must speak the language of his people and his time. As to the first, there can be no doubt; but what is his time? Generally, to-day. If A hears B use a word or a phrase to-day which, although it is entirely new to him, has a meaning that he readily apprehends, and that saves trouble, and "will do," he will use it himself, if he has need, to-morrow. And so it will go on from mouth to mouth, until within a year it may pervade a neighborhood; and in these days of railways and newspapers, a year or two may spread it over a whole country. The child that was in the cradle when the new word first was spoken, on going to school

finds it a part of the common speech. For that child it is neither new nor old; it simply is. And that impression of its far-off, unknown origin-for "I am" expresses the eternal- the child will carry through life, although he may afterward learn that it was new when he first heard it. But to him who was a man when the word came in, and who reflects at all upon the language that he uses, it will always have upon it the stamp of newness, because it is one of the things of which he remembers the beginning.

In bad eminence, at the head of those intruders in language which to many persons seem to be of established respectability, but the right of which to be at all is not yet fully admitted, stands out the form of speech is being done, or rather, is being, which, about seventy or eighty years ago, began to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English. That it should be pronounced a novelty will seem strange to most of my readers; for we have all heard it from our earliest childhood. But so slow has been its acceptance among unlettered people, so stoutly has it been resisted by the lettered, that we have heard it under constant protest; yet it is so much used, and seems to suit so well the mental tone of those who now do most to mould the common speech, that to check its diffusion would be a hopeless undertaking. But to examine it may be worth our while, for the sake of a lesson in language.

Mr. Marsh says of this form of speech, that it is "an awkward neologism, which neither convenience, intelligibility, nor syntactical congruity de

mands," and that it is the contrivance of some grammarian. But that it is the work of any grammarian is more than doubtful. Grammarians, with all their faults, do not deform language with fantastic solecisms, or even seek to enrich it with new and startling verbal combinations. They rather resist novelty, and devote themselves to formulating that which use has already established. It can hardly be that such an incongruous and ridiculous form of speech as is being done was contrived by a man who, by any stretching of the name, should be included among grammarians. But, nevertheless, it is a worthy offspring of English grammar; a fitting, and, I may say, an inevitable consequence of the attempt to make our mother tongue order herself by Latin rules and standards. Some precise and feeble-minded soul, having been taught that there is a passive voice in English, and that, for instance, building is an active participle, and builded or built a passive, felt conscientious scruples at saying, The house is building. For what could the house build? A house cannot build; it must be built. And yet to say, The house is built, is to say (I speak for him), that it is finished, that it is done built." Therefore we must find some form that will be a continuing present tense of this passive verb to be built; and he found it, as he thought, in the form is being built; supposing that, by the introduction of the present participle, expressive of continued existence, between is and built, he had modified the meaning both of the former and the latter. Others, like him, half taught and badly taught, precise and fussy, caught up the phrase