Parts of Speech: Essays on English

When Benjamin Franklin was in England in 1760, he received a letter from David Hume commenting on the style of an essay of his writing and on his choice of words; and in his reply Franklin modestly thanked his friend for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his hope that we Americans would always “make the best English of this island our standard.” And yet when France acknowledged the independence of the United States in 1778 and Franklin was sent to Paris as our minister, Congress duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies to be observed in doing business with foreign countries, and finally resolved that “all speeches or communications may, if the public ministers choose it, be in the language of their respective countries; and all replies or answers shall be in the language of the United States.”

What is “the language of the United States”? Is it “the best English” of Great Britain, as Franklin hoped it would always be? Franklin was unusually far-sighted, but even he could not foresee what is perhaps the most extraordinary event of the nineteenth century,—an era abounding in the extraordinary,—the marvelous spread and immense expansion of the English language. It is not only along the banks of the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that children are now losing irrecoverable hours on the many absurdities of English orthography: a like wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores of the Hudson, of the Mississippi, and of the Columbia, while the same A B C’s are parroted by the little ones of those who live where the Ganges rolls down its yellow sand and of those who dwell in the great island which is almost riverless. No parallel can be found in history for this sudden spreading out of the English language in the past hundred years—not even the diffusion of Latin during the century when the rule of Rome was most widely extended.

Among the scattered millions who now employ our common speech, in England itself, in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in the United States and Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and in South Africa, there is no stronger bond of union than the language itself. There is no likelihood that any political association will ever be sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the more independent colonies to the mother-country is loose enough now, even if it is never further relaxed; and less than half of those who have English for their mother-tongue owe any allegiance whatever to England. The English-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire are apparently fewer than the inhabitants of the American republic; and the population of the United Kingdom itself is only a little more than half the population of the United States.

To set down these facts is to point out that the English language is no longer a personal possession of the people of England. The power of the head of the British Empire over what used to be called the “King’s English” is now as little recognized as his power over what used to be called the “king’s evil.” We may regret that this is the case, or we may rejoice at it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And thus we are face to face with more than one very interesting question. What is going to become of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad and freed from all control by a central authority and exposed to all sorts of alien influences? Is it bound to become corrupted and to sink from its high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter of barbarously fashioned verbal novelties? What, more especially, is going to be the future of the English language here in America? Must we fear the dread possibility that the speech of the peoples on the opposite sides of the Western Ocean will diverge at last until the English language will divide into two branches, those who speak British being hardly able to understand those who speak American, and those who speak American being hardly able to understand those who speak British? Mark Twain is a humorist, it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has abundant common sense; and it was Mark Twain who declared a score of years ago that he spoke the “American language.”

The science of linguistics is among the youngest, and yet it has already established itself so firmly on the solid ground of ascertained truth that it has been able to overthrow with ease one and another of the many theories which were accepted without question before it came into being. For example, time was—and the time is not so very remote, it may be remarked—time was when the little group of more or less highly educated men who were at the center of authority in the capital of any nation had no doubt whatsoever as to the superiority of their way of speaking their own language over the manner in which it might be spoken by the vast majority of their fellow-citizens deprived of the advantages of a court training. This little group set the standard of speech; and the standard they set was accepted as final and not to be tampered with under penalty of punishment for the crime of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence from the customs of speaking and writing they themselves cherished was due to ignorance and probably to obstinacy. They believed that the court dialect which they had been brought up to use was the only true and original form of the language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross impropriety every usage and every phrase with which they themselves did not happen to be familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole validity of their personal habits of speech they had no need for self-assertion, since it never entered into the head of any one not belonging to the court circle to question for a second the position thus tacitly declared.

Yet if modern methods of research have made anything whatever indisputable in the history of human speech, they have completely disproved the assumption which underlies this implicit claim of the courtiers. We know now that the urban dialect is not the original language of which the rural dialects are but so many corruptions. We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are often really closer to the original tongue than the urban dialect; and that the urban dialect itself was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes its preëminence rarely to any superiority of its own over its rivals, but rather to the fact that it chanced to be the speech of a knot of men more masterful than the inhabitants of any other village, and able therefore to expand their village to a town and at last to a city, which imposed its rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants of these being by that time forgetful that they had once striven with it on almost equal terms. Generally it is the stability given by political pre-eminence which leads to the development of a literature, without which no dialect can retain its linguistic supremacy.

When the sturdy warriors whose homes were clustered on one or another of the seven hills of Rome began to make alliances and conquests, they rendered possible the future development of their rough Italic into the Latin language which has left its mark on almost every modern European tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans, who possessed dialects of an equal antiquity and of an equal possibility of improvement, could not but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought, perforce, to bring their vocabulary and their syntax into conformity with that of the men who had shown themselves more powerful. Thus one of the Italic dialects was singled out by fortune for an extraordinary future, and the other Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho they were each of them as old as the Roman and as available for development. These other dialects have even suffered the ignominy of being supposed to be corruptions of their triumphant brother.

The French philologist Darmesteter concisely explained the stages of this development of one local speech at the expense of its neighbors. As it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow. A local speech thus neglected is a patois; and a local speech which achieves the dignity of literature is a dialect. These written tongues spread on all sides and impose themselves on the surrounding population as more noble than the patois. Thus a linguistic province is created, and its dialect tends constantly to crush out the various patois once freely used within its boundaries.

In time one of these provinces becomes politically more powerful than the others and extends its rule over one after another of them. As it does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the provinces as the official tongue, and it tends constantly to crush out these other dialects, as they had tended constantly to crush out the various patois. Thus the local speech of the population of the tiny island in the Seine, which is the nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to the dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech of each of the neighboring villages sank into a patois—altho originally it was in no wise inferior. In the course of centuries Paris became the capital of France, and its provincial dialect became the official language of the kingdom. When the kings of France extended their rule over Normandy and over Burgundy and over Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in imposing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces as superior; and in time the Norman dialect and the Burgundian and the Provençal were ousted.

The dialect of the province in which the king dwelt and in which the business of governing was carried on, could not but dispossess the dialects of all the other provinces; and thus the French language, as we know it now, was once only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was apparently no linguistic inferiority of the langue d’oc to the langue d’oil; and the reasons for the dominion of the one and the decadence of the other are purely political. Of course, as the Parisian dialect grew and spread itself, it was enriched by locutions from the other provincial dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of many of its grammatical complexities not common to the most of the others.

The French language was developed from one particular provincial dialect probably no better adapted for improvement than any one of half a dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of precision infinitely finer than any of its pristine rivals, since they had none of them the good fortune to be chosen for development. But the patois of the peasant of Normandy or of Brittany, however inadequate it may be as a means of expression for a modern man, is not a corruption of French, any more than Doric is a corruption of Attic Greek. It is rather in the position of a twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fellow, more adroit in getting the good will of their parents. It was the literary skill of the Athenians themselves, and not the superiority of the original dialect, that makes us think of Attic as the only genuine Greek, just as it was the prowess of the Romans in war and their power of governing which raised their provincial dialect into the language of Italy, and then carried it triumphant to every shore of the Mediterranean.

The history of the development of the English language is like the history of the development of Greek and Latin and French; and the English language as we speak it to-day is a growth from the Midland dialect, itself the victor of a struggle for survivorship with the Southern and Northern dialects. “With the accession of the royal house of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England,” so Professor Lounsbury tells us, “the dialect of Wessex had become the cultivated language of the whole people—the language in which books were written and laws were published.” But when the Norman conquest came, altho, to quote from Professor Lounsbury again, “the native tongue continued to be spoken by the great majority of the population, it went out of use as the language of high culture,” and “the educated classes, whether lay or ecclesiastical, preferred to write either in Latin or in French—the latter steadily tending more and more to become the language of literature as well as of polite society.” And as a result of this the West-Saxon had to drop to the low level of the other dialects; “it had no longer any preëminence of its own.” There was in England from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries no national language, but every one was free to use with tongue and pen his own local speech, altho three provincial dialects existed, “each possessing a literature of its own and each seemingly having about the same chance to be adopted as the representative national speech.”

These three dialects were the Southern (which was the descendant of Wessex, once on the way to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland (which had the sole advantage that it was a compromise between its neighbors to the north and the south). London was situated in the region of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore “the tongue mainly employed at the court” when French slowly ceased to be the language of the upper classes. As might be expected in those days before the printing-press and the spelling-book imposed uniformity, the Midland dialect was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern counties from the way it was spoken in the Western counties of the region. London was in the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and London was the capital. Probably because the speech of the Eastern division of the Midland dialect was the speech of the capital, it was used as the vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court—who happened also to be a great poet and a great literary artist. Just as Dante’s choice of his native Tuscan dialect controlled the future development of Italian, so Chaucer’s choice controlled the future development of English. It was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares, “who first showed to all men the resources of the language, its capacity of representing with discrimination all shades of human thought and of conveying with power all manifestations of human feeling.”

The same writer tells us that “the cultivated English language, in which nearly all English literature of value has been written, sprang directly from the East-Midland division of the Midland dialect, and especially from the variety of the East-Midland which was spoken at London and the region immediately to the north of it.” That this magnificent opportunity came to the London dialect was not due to any superiority it had over any other variety of the Midland dialect: it was due to the single fact that it was the speech of the capital—just as the dialect of the Île-de-France in like manner served as the stem from which the cultivated French language sprang. The Parisian dialect flourished and imposed itself on all sides; within the present limits of France it choked out the other local dialects, even the soft and lovely Provençal; and beyond the boundaries of the country it was accepted in Belgium and in Switzerland.

So the dialect of London has gone on growing and refining and enriching itself as the people who spoke it extended their borders and passed over the wide waters and won their way to far countries, until to-day it serves not merely for the cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of Montana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is adequate for the various needs of the Scotch philosopher and of the American humorist; it is employed by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the governor of Alaska, and the general in command over the Philippines. In the course of some six centuries the dialect of a little town on the Thames has become the mother-tongue of millions and millions of people scattered broadcast over the face of the earth.

If the Norman conquest had not taken place the history of the English race would be very different, and the English language would not be what it is, since it would have had for its root the Wessex variety of the Southern dialect. But the Norman conquest did take place, and the English language has for its root the Eastern division of the Midland dialect. The Norman conquest it was which brought the modest but vigorous young English tongue into close contact with the more highly cultivated French. The French spoken in England was rather the Norman dialect than the Parisian (which is the true root of modern French), and whatever slight influence English may have had upon it does not matter now, for it was destined to a certain death. But this Norman-French enlarged the plastic English speech against which it was pressing; and English adopted many French words, not borrowing them, but making them our own, once for all, and not dropping the original English word, but keeping both with slight divergence of meaning.

Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that we owe the double vocabulary wherein our language surpasses all others. While the framework of English is Teutonic, we have for many things two names, one of Germanic origin and one of Romance. Our direct, homely words, that go straight to our hearts and nestle there—these are most of them Teutonic. Our more delicate words, subtle in finer shades of meaning—these often come to us from the Latin through the French. The secondary words are of Romance origin, and the primary words of Germanic. And this—if the digression may here be hazarded—is one reason why French poetry touches us less than German, the words of the former seeming to us remote, not to say sophisticated, while the words of the latter are akin to our own simpler and swifter words.

One other advantage of the pressure of French upon English in the earlier stages of its development, when it was still ductile, was that this pressure helped us to our present grammatical simplicity. Whenever the political intelligence of the inhabitants of the capital of a district raises the local dialect to a position of supremacy, so that it spreads over the surrounding districts and casts their dialects into the shadow, the dominant dialect is likely to lose those of its grammatical peculiarities not to be found also in the other dialects. Whatever is common to them all is pretty sure to survive, and what is not common may or may not be given up. The London dialect, in its development, felt the influence, not only of the other division of the Midland dialect, and of the two rival dialects, one to the north of it and the other to the south, but also of a foreign tongue spoken by all who pretended to any degree of culture. This attrition helped English to shed many minor grammatical complexities still retained by languages which had not this fortunate experience in their youth.

Perhaps the late Richard Grant White was going a little too far when he asserted that English was a grammarless tongue; but it cannot be denied that English is less infested with grammar than any other of the great modern languages. German, for example, is a most grammarful tongue; and Mark Twain has explained to us (in ‘A Tramp Abroad’) just how elaborate and intricate its verbal machinery is; and the Volapük, which was made in Germany, had the syntactical convolutions of its inventor’s native tongue.

By its possession of this grammatical complexity, Volapük was unfitted for service as a world-language. A fortunate coincidence it is that English, which is becoming a world-language by sheer force of the energy and determination of those whose mother-speech it is, should early have shed most of these cumbersome and retarding grammatical devices. The earlier philologists were wont to consider this throwing off of needless inflections as a symptom of decay. The later philologists are coming to recognize it as a sign of progress. They are getting to regard the unconscious struggle for short-cuts in speech, not as degeneration, but rather as regeneration. As Krauter asserts, “The dying out of forms and sounds is looked upon by the etymologists with painful feelings; but no unprejudiced judge will be able to see in it anything but a progressive victory over lifeless material.” And he adds, with terse common sense: “Among several tools performing equal work, that is the best which is the simplest and most handy.” This brief excerpt from the German scholar is borrowed here from a paper prepared for the Modern Language Association by Professor C. A. Smith, in which may be found also a dictum of the Danish philologist Jespersen: “The fewer and shorter the forms, the better; the analytic structure of modern European languages is so far from being a drawback to them that it gives them an unimpeachable superiority over the earlier stages of the same languages.” And it is Jespersen who boldly declares that “the so-called full and rich forms of the ancient languages are not a beauty, but a deformity.”

In other words, language is merely an instrument for the use of man; and like all other instruments, it had to begin by being far more complicated than is needful. The watch used to have more than a hundred separate parts, and now it is made with less than twoscore, losing nothing in its efficiency and in precision. Greek and German are old-fashioned watches; Italian and Danish and English are watches of a later style. Of the more prominent modern languages, German and Russian are the most backward, while English is the most advanced. And the end is not yet, for the eternal forces are ever working to make our tongue still easier. The printing-press is a most powerful agent on the side of the past, making progress far more sluggish than it was before books were broadcast; yet the English language is still engaged in sloughing off its outworn grammatical skin. Altho in the nineteenth century the changes in the structure of English have probably been less than in any other century of its history, yet there have been changes not a few.

For example, the subjunctive mood is going slowly into innocuous desuetude; the stickler for grammar, so-called, may protest in vain against its disappearance: its days are numbered. It serves no useful purpose; it has to be laboriously acquired; it is now a matter of rule and not of instinct; it is no longer natural: and therefore it will inevitably disappear, sooner or later. Careful investigation has shown that it has already been discarded by many even among those who are very careful of their style—some of whom, no doubt, would rise promptly to the defense of the form they have been discarding unconsciously. One authority declares that altho the form has seemed to survive, it has been empty of any distinct meaning since the sixteenth century.

This is only one of the tendencies observable in the nineteenth century; and we may rest assured that others will become visible in the twentieth. But when English is compared with German, we cannot help seeing that most of this work is done already. Grammar has been stripped to the bone in English; and for us who have to use the language to-day it is fortunate that our remote ancestors, who fashioned it for their own use without thought of our needs, should have had the same liking we have for the simplest possible tool, and that they should have cast off, as soon as they could, one and another of the grammatical complexities which always cumber every language in its earlier stages, and most of which still cumber German. In nothing is the practical directness of our stock more clearly revealed than in this immediate beginning upon the arduous task of making the means of communication between man and man as easy and as direct as possible. Doubly fortunate are we that this job was taken up and put through before the invention of printing multiplied the inertia of conservatism.

It was the political supremacy of Paris which made the Parisian dialect the standard of French; and it was the genius of Dante which made the Tuscan dialect the standard of Italian. That the London dialect is the standard of English is due partly to the political supremacy of the capital and partly to the genius of Chaucer. As the French are a home-keeping people, Paris has retained its political supremacy; while the English are a venturesome race and have spread abroad and split into two great divisions, so that London has lost its political supremacy, being the capital now only of the less numerous portion of those who have English as their mother-tongue.

It is true, of course, that a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the United States, however independent politically of the great empire of which London is the capital, look with affection upon the city by the Thames. Their feeling toward England is akin to that which led Hawthorne to entitle his record of a sojourn in England ‘Our Old Home.’ The American liking for London itself seems to be increasing; and, as Lowell once remarked, “We Americans are beginning to feel that London is the center of the races that speak English, very much in the sense that Rome was the center of the ancient world.” It was at a dinner of the Society of Authors that he said this, and he then added: “I confess that I never think of London, which I also confess I love, without thinking of the palace David built, ‘sitting in the hearing of a hundred streams’—streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity.”

While the London dialect is the stem from which the English language has grown, the vocabulary of the language has never been limited by the dialect. It has been enriched by countless words and phrases and locutions of one kind or another from the other division of the Midland dialect and from both the Northern and the Southern dialects—just as modern Italian has not limited itself to the narrow vocabulary of Florence. Yet in the earlier stages of the development of English the language benefited by the fact that there was a local standard. The attempt of all to assimilate their speech to that of the inhabitants of London tended to give uniformity without rigidity. As men came up to court they brought with them the best of the words and turns of speech peculiar to their own dialect; and the language gained by all these accretions.

Shakspere contributed Warwickshire localisms not a few, just as Scott procured the acceptance of Scotticisms hitherto under a ban. As Spenser had gone back to Chaucer, so Keats went to the Elizabethans and dug out old words for his own use; and William Morris pushed his researches farther and brought up words almost pre-Chaucerian. Every language in Europe has been put under contribution at one time or another for one purpose or another. The military vocabulary, for instance, reveals the former superiority of the French, just as the naval vocabulary reveals the former superiority of the Dutch. And as modern science has extended its conquests, it has drawn on Greek for its terms of precision.

Under this influx of foreign words, old and new, the framework of the original London dialect stands solidly enough, but it is visible only to the scholarly specialist in linguistic research. But the latest London dialect, the speech of the inhabitants of the British capital at the end of the nineteenth century, has ceased absolutely to serve as a standard. Whatever utility there was in the past in accepting as normal English the actual living dialect of London has long since departed without a protest. No educated Englishman any longer thinks of conforming his syntax or his vocabulary to the actual living dialect of London, whether of the court or of the slums. Indeed, so far is he from accepting the verbal habits of the man in the street as suggesting a standard for him that he is wont to hold them up to ridicule as cockney corruptions. He likes to laugh at the tricks of speech that he discovers on the lips of the Londoners, at their dropping of their initial h’s more often than he deems proper, and at their more recent substitution of y for a—as in “tyke the cyke, lydy.”

The local standard of London has thus been disestablished in the course of the centuries simply because there was no longer a necessity for any local standard. The speech of the capital served as the starting-point of the language; and in the early days a local standard of usage was useful. But now, after English has enjoyed a thousand years of growth, a standard so primitive is not only useless, but it would be very injurious. Nor could any other local standard be substituted for that of London without manifest danger—even if the acceptance of such a standard was possible. The peoples that speak English are now too widely scattered and their needs are too many and too diverse for any local standard not to be retarding in its limitations.

To-day the standard of English is to be sought not in the actual living dialect of the inhabitants of any district or of any country, but in the language itself, in its splendid past and in its mighty present. Five hundred years ago, more or less, Chaucer sent forth the first masterpieces of English literature; and in all those five centuries the language has never lacked poets and prose-writers who knew its secrets and could bring forth its beauties. Each of them has helped to make English what it is now; and a study of what English has been is all that we need to enable us to see what it will be—and what it should be. Any attempt to trammel it by a local standard, or by academic restrictions, or by school-masters’ grammar-rules, is certain to fail. In the past, English has shaken itself free of many a limitation; and in the present it is insisting on its own liberty to take the short-cut whenever that enables it to do its work with less waste of time. We cannot doubt that in the future it will go on in its own way, making itself fitter for the manifold needs of an expanding race which has the unusual characteristic of having lofty ideals while being intensely practical. A British poet it was, Lord Houghton, who once sent these prophetic lines to an American lady:

That ample speech! That subtle speech!
Apt for the need of all and each;
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force; expand its powers;
And through the maze of civic life,
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours.

The English language is the most valuable possession of the peoples that speak it, and that have for their chief cities, not London alone, or Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and Chicago, Calcutta and Bombay, Melbourne and Montreal. The English language is one and indivisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a local standard may lead it ever to break up into fragmentary dialects. There is really no danger now that English will not be uniform in all the four quarters of the world, and that it will not modify itself as occasion serves. We can already detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary; but these are only trifles. The steamship and the railroad and the telegraph bring the American and the Briton and the Australian closer together nowadays than were the users of the Midland dialect when Chaucer set forth on his pilgrimage to Canterbury; and then there is the printing-press, whereby the newspaper and the school-book and the works of the dead-and-gone masters of our literature bind us together with unbreakable links.

These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary—London from Edinburgh, and New York from Bombay—are but evidences of the healthy activity of our tongue. It is only when it is dead that a language ceases to grow. It needs to be constantly refreshed by new words and phrases as the elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to be part of Shakspere’s good fortune that he came when English was ripe and yet fresh, when there was an abundance of words ready to his hand, but none of them yet exhausted by hard work. So Mr. Howells has recently recorded his feeling that any one who now employs English “to depict or to characterize finds the phrases thumbed over and worn and blunted with incessant use,” and experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are now and again “reported from the lips of the people.”

“From the lips of the people”;—here is a phrase that would have sadly shocked a narrow-minded scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned of yesterday denied—and, indeed, have denounced as rank heresy—the more learned of to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language of a people is the spoken word, not the written. Language lives on the tongue and in the ear; there it was born, and there it grows. Man wooed his wife and taught his children and discussed with his neighbors for centuries before he perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the work of the world is done rather by the spoken word than by the written. And those who are doing the work of the world are following the example of our remote ancestors who did not know how to write; when they feel new needs they will make violent efforts to supply those needs, devising fresh words put together in rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly. The mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments, to risk a new locution, to hazard a wrenching of an old term to a novel use. The hand that writes is always slow to accept the result of these attempts to meet a demand in an unauthorized way. The spoken language bristles with innovations, while the written language remains properly conservative. Few of these oral babes are viable, and fewer still survive; while only now and again does one of these verbal foundlings come of age and claim citizenship in literature.

In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our grandfathers handed down to us there are solemn warnings against neologisms—and neologism was a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a new word as such. But in the stimulating study of certain of the laws of linguistics, which M. Bréal, one of the foremost of French philologists, has called ‘Semantics,’ we are told that to condemn neologisms absolutely would be most unfortunate and most useless. “Every progress in a language is, first of all, the act of an individual, and then of a minority, large or small. A land where all innovation should be forbidden would take from its language all chance of development.” And M. Bréal points out that language must keep on transforming itself with every new discovery and invention, with the incessant modification of our manners, of our customs, and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work on the vocabulary of the future, ignorant and learned, authors and artists, the man of the world and the man in the street; and even our children have a share in this labor, and by no means the least.

Among all these countless candidates for literary acceptance, the struggle for existence is very fierce, and only the fittest of the new words survive. Or, to change the figure, conversation might be called the Lower House, where all the verbal coinages must have their origin, while literature is the Upper House, without whose concurrence nothing can be established. And the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy; they resist all attempts of which they do not approve. In language, as in politics, the power of the democratic principle is getting itself more widely acknowledged. The people blunders more often than not, but it knows its own mind; and in the end it has its own way. In language, as in politics, we Americans are really conservative. We are well aware that we have the right to make what change we please, and we know better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we do not desire to do so. We want no more change in our laws or in our language than is absolutely necessary.

We have modified the common language far less than we have modified the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for refreshing old words by novel combinations. When Mr. W. Aldis Wright drew up a glossary of the words, phrases, and constructions in the King James translation of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer, which were obsolete in Great Britain in the sense that they would no longer naturally find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of these words, phrases, and constructions are not now obsolete in the United States, and would be used by any American writer without fear that he might not be understood. As Lowell said, our ancestors “unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakspere’s,” and by good fortune we have kept alive some of the Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric vigor now rarely to be matched in the street-phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his living. Ben Jonson would have relished one New York phrase that an office-holder gives an office-seeker, “the glad hand and the marble heart,” and that other which described a former favorite comedian as now having “a fur-lined voice.”

When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he thought that we Americans had already modified the English language. British critics, like Dean Alford, have often animadverted upon the deterioration of the language on this side of the Atlantic. American humorists, like Mark Twain, have calmly claimed that the tongue they used was not English, but American. It is English as Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force and a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of the language; but in so far as American usage differs from British, it was according to the former and not according to the latter. But they differ in reality very slightly indeed; and whatever divergence there may be is rather in the spoken language than in the written. That the spoken language should vary is inevitable and advantageous, since the more variation is attempted, the better opportunity the language has to freshen up its languishing vocabulary and to reinvigorate itself. That the written language should widely vary would be the greatest of misfortunes.

Of this there is now no danger whatever, and never has been. The settlement of the United States took place after the invention of printing; and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a new dialect nowadays. The disestablishment of the local standard of London leaves English free to develop according to its own laws and its own logic. There is no longer any weight of authority to be given to contemporary British usage over contemporary American usage—except in so far as the British branch of English literature is more resplendent with names of high renown than the American branch. That this was the case in the nineteenth century—that the British poets and prose-writers outnumber and outvalue the American—must be admitted at once; that it will be the case throughout the twentieth century may be doubted. And whenever the poets and prose-writers of the American branch of English literature are superior in number and in power to those of the British branch, then there can be no doubt as to where the weight of authority will lie. The shifting of the center of power will take place unconsciously; and the development of English will go on just the same after it takes place as it is going on now. The conservative forces are in no danger of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether in the United States or in Great Britain or in any of her colonial dependencies.

Perhaps the principle which will govern can best be stated in another quotation from M. Bréal: “The limit within which the right to innovate stops is not fixed by any idea of ‘purity’ (which can always be contested); it is fixed by the need we have to keep in contact with the thought of those who have preceded us. The more considerable the literary past of a people, the more this need makes itself felt as a duty, as a condition of dignity and force.” And there is no sign that either the American or the British half of those who have our language for a mother-tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to the literary past of English literature, that most magnificent heritage—the birthright of both of us.