IT

T has been frequently asserted by British critics that even among the best educated people and the very men of letters in the United States, the English language is neither written nor spoken with the clearness and strength and the mastery of idiom that are common among the people of Great Britain. Boucher, in his "Glossary," speaks of " Americans" as "making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] language;"* and Dean Alford makes a like charge in a passage of his "Queen's English," which, no less for its reasoning than for its assertions, deserves entire reproduction. it would be ruthless to mar so complete and so exquisite a whole.

"Look, to take one familar example, at the process of deterioration which our Queen's English has undergone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their speech and in their books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the nation its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man, its open disregard of conventional right, where aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world."

*Quoted from Schele de Vere. Boucher's "Glossary" which was designed as a supplement to Johnson's Dictionary, I have not read

Some of our own writers, blindly following, I think, blind British guides, have been misled into the expression of like opinions. Mr. Lowell, in the preface to his second series of the "Biglow Papers," makes this damaging admission:

"Whether it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of culture is simplicity, or for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers and speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision, and force that are as common as the day in the mother country."

Speaking upon the careful observation of several years, I cannot admit the justice of this self-accusation; and I must express no little surprise at the lack of qualification and reserve in Mr. Lowell's language, which I can account for only by supposing that his opinion was formed upon an insufficient examination of this subject. It is true that the writers and speakers of that very large class among us who are neither learned nor unlearned, and who are, therefore, on the one hand without the simplicity that comes of culture, and on the other incapable of that unconscious, intuitive use of idiom which gives life and strength to the simple speech of very humble people, do, most of them, use language awkwardly, and as if they did not feel at home in their own mother tongue. If it were not so, this book would lack one reason of its being. But I do not hesitate to say that British writers, not of the highest grade, but of respectable rank, are open to the same charge; and, moreover, that it is more generally true with regard to them than with regard to writers of the same position in the United States.

Mr. Marsh, in the last of his admirable "Lectures on the English Language," expresses an opinion which, on the whole, is more nearly like that which I have formed than Mr. Lowell's, not to say Dean Alford's. But Mr. Marsh himself has this passage:

"In general, I think we may say that, in point of naked syn tactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England; but we do not discriminate so precisely in the meaning of words; nor do we habitually, either in conversation or in writing, express ourselves so gracefully or employ so classic a diction as the English. Our taste in language is less fastidious, and our licenses and inaccuracies are more frequently of a character indicative of a want of refinement and elegant culture than those we hear in educated society in England."

But here Mr. Marsh himself indicates the point of my objection to all these criticisms. He compares our average speech with that of educated society in the mother country. By such a comparison it would be strange if we did not suffer. The just and proper comparison would be between the average speech of both countries, or between that of people of equal culture in both.

Among living writers few have easier mastery of idiomatic English than Mr. Lowell himself; and setting aside peculiar gifts, as imagination, fancy, humor, many New England men of the present generation and of that which is passing away are of his school, if not of his form. There have been abler statesmen and more accomplished lawyers, but has this century produced anywhere a greater rhetorical master of English than Daniel Webster? While Hawthorne lived, and his grave is not yet as green as his memory, was there a

British writer who used with greater purity or more plastic power the language that we brought with us from the old home? Our very kinsmen themselves, proud in their possession of the old homestead, the plate, the books, and the portraits, made no such pretension; but they settled the question for their own minds, by saying that Hawthorne "was not really an American writer." And Hawthorne's case is not singular in this respect. The Saturday Review,” in an article upon what it calls "American Literature," recently said,

"There is very little that is American about American books, if we except certain blemishes of style and a certain slovenliness of grammar and clumsiness of expression derived from the colonial idioms of the country; and these are wanting in the best American writers. Longfellow, Motley, Prescott, Washingtor Irving are only English writers who happen to print in Americc. Poe's eccentricities are rather individual than national. Cooper is American in little but his choice of subjects." *

And not long ago the London "Spectator," which ought to have known better, declared that it is not among the eminent historians, poets, and essayists of America that we must look for American style, but to the journalists, politicians, and pamphleteers. A more ingenious way of establishing a point to one's own satisfaction than that adopted by both these British critics could not be devised. Proposition: The "American" style is full of blemishes; it is slovenly in grammar and clumsy in expression. Reply: But here are certain historians, novelists, poets, and essayists, who are the standard writers of "America," and in whose style.

* I am glad to read this about Cooper. I shall figh with no one for possession of his literary fame.

the blemishes in question, as you yourself admit,

are wanting." Rejoinder: But these are not "American" writers. They are English writers who happen to print in "America." The "American" writers in "America" are those only who have the blemishes in question. Q. E. D. What a bewitching merry-go-round such reasoning is! And so perfect! It stops exactly at the point from which it started.

Without picking out my examplars, I will take up the last two books by British authors that I have read for pleasure-both by men of note- Mr. John Forster's "Arrest of the Five Members,” and Mr. Froude's "History of England," and turning to passages which I remember noticing amid all my interest in the narratives themselves, I quote; and first from Forster:

"Since his coming to town he had been greatly pleased to observe a very great alteration of the affections of the city to what they had been when he went away." — p. 21.

This is not English, or at least it is English wretchedly deformed and crippled. If the affections of the city were altered to what they were when the person spoken of went away, it is implied that there had been two changes during his absence., one from the condition in which he left the city, and one again to that in which he left it. We have to guess that the writer meant that the person in question observed a very great change in the affections of the city since he went away. The blunder in the bungling phrase "alteration of the affections to what they had been," which is a variety of the phrase "different to." is peculiarly British.