CHAPTER ONE

IS OUR ENGLISH DEGENERATING?

"When the American Ambassador tells us, in some degree at least seriously, that better English is spoken in America than in England, it is really a little too much. . . . The Americans. are rich. They are, or seem to be, confident of themselves. They excel at the business of games. They make things 'hum.' But it is absurd to pretend they speak good English. Their English, and their spelling of English, which we are sorry to say is imitated by English writers who should know better, are most unpleasant. Their twang is sometimes so."Saturday Review, Dec. 13, 1913.

The above quotation from an editorial in an important London journal epitomizes, in a form very convenient for consideration, the view that seems to be rather generally held in Great Britain of the differences existing, or supposed to exist, between the language of that country and the language of the United States. "We are continually girding at the Americans, and criticizing in a more or less disparaging manner their speech," wrote the late George Augustus Sala in the Illustrated London News. The "girding" has been indulged in at not very protracted intervals, for a long, long time, and by all sorts and conditions of British writers. A well known essayist on matters

verbal, Dean Alford, devoted some pages, in his treatise on what he rather absurdly called "The Queen's English" (as if terms like "the king's English" or "the king's highway" or "the king's evil" needed correction in gender when the sovereign happens to be a woman!) to "the process of deterioration which our queen's English has undergone at the hands of the Americans." A writer of a very different type, John Ruskin, admonished the workmen of Great Britain (Fors Clavigera, No. 42) to remember that "England taught the Americans all they have of speech," the words they have not learned from England being "unseemly words, the vile among them not being able to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds." Speaking of a book by Mark Twain, the Westminster Review remarked that "English as written, and still more as spoken, by Americans, is another thing from native English," adding that in Mr. Clemens' writings "there are scarcely half a dozen consecutive lines of what we should call pure English," and further that "the modifications which differentiate 'American' from English are for the most part vulgarisms." A book called "The Abounding American," by T. W. H. Crosland, published in London in 1907, informs us (page 14) that the Americans, "having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful language, willfully and of set purpose degrade, distort and misspell it." Any number of similar expressions from British writers might be given, and some expatriated

Such an Amer

Americans delight in echoing them. ican was Dr. Fitzedward Hall, a recognized authority in philology, who informed the readers of the Nineteenth Century that William Cullen Bryant lived "among a people among whom our language is daily becoming more and more depraved," and that whoever will compare "Edgar Huntly," a novel published in 1799, with Mr. Bryant's letters, "the English of which is not much worse than that of ninety-nine out of every hundred of his college-bred compatriots, will very soon become aware to what degree the art of writing our language has declined among educated" people in the United States.

Now of course there is great temptation to make sharp retorts to statements like the foregoing, especially as our critics generally reveal rather plainly very vulnerable joints in their armor. Dean Alford, for instance, displayed, on the same page on which he spoke of the language as having deteriorated in our hands, a certain lack of familiarity with matters in this country, in his reference to the Northern States as having been engaged in 1864 in "reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world"; and what is more to the present point, he fell continually into verbal errors himself. Ruskin was guilty of such expressions as these, all in Fors Clavigera too: "A daisy is common, and a baby not uncommon; neither are vulgar" (No. 25, note); "None of these minor errors

are of the least consequence" (No. 43); "Any one may be a Companion of St. George who sincerely does what they can to make themselves useful and earn their daily bread" (No. 67). Mr. Crosland says (page 105) that "the Chicago method of treating meats are unhealthy," which may possibly be a typographical error; but he doubtless wrote as printed the sentence on page 111, "I have never been to the United States." The qualifications for passing judgment on the language of a country possessed by a writer who could speak of being "to" it, and who confesses that he has never been what in good English is called being "in" it, need hardly be discussed. (I regret to note the same blunder in a book by a writer of widely different calibre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-"The Vital Message," page 158-and what is unaccountable, Sir Arthur insists, in a courteous private letter to the present writer, that it is correct to say "I have been to Crewe.")

As for "Edgar Huntly," so greatly admired by Dr. Hall for its fine diction, the style of that almost forgotten book is regarded by the historian Prescott (who reviewed it, sympathetically and on the whole admiringly, in one of his miscellaneous essays) as characterized by "unnatural condensation, unusual and pedantic epithets and elliptical forms of expression, in perpetual violation of idiom❞—an opinion in which I think every reader of the novel will concur. The second sentence runs thus: "At length does the im

petuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder, permit me to recollect"; the transports does. In the second chapter: "Those with whom he lived and were the witnesses of his actions"; no subject for the verb were. "A suspicion suggested itself whether my guide did not perceive that he was followed, and thus prolonged (meaning prolong) his journey in order to fatigue his pursuer." Chapter Four: "My leisure was considerable, and my emoluments large"; emoluments was large. Chap. Five: "There is no event on which our felicity and usefulness more materially depends": two things depends. "The choice was not likely to obtain the parental sanction, to whom the moral qualities of their son-in-law were inferior to the considerations of wealth"; no antecedent to the pronoun whom. "The ties of kindred, corroborated by habit, was not the only thing that united them"; the ties was not. Chap. Seven: "I charged him to have a watchful eye upon every one that knocked at the gate, and that, if this person should come, by no means to admit him." If anybody can find English like that in anything that Mr. Bryant ever wrote, I should like to have him point it out; and it has seemed worth while, considering Dr. Hall's undoubted eminence in philology, which gives importance to any deliverance of his on any topic relating to language, to show the value of his judgment on questions of grammar and style (philology not being involved), as illustrating the importance that should be attached