Parts of Speech: Essays on English

There is a wide gap between the proverb asserting that “figures never lie” and the opinion expressed now and again by experts that nothing can be more mendacious than statistics misapplied; and the truth seems to lie between these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is the backbone of history, so a statement of fact can be made terser and more convincing if the figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we wish to perceive the change of the relative position of Great Britain and the United States in the course of the centuries, nothing can help us better to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case than a comparison of the population of the two countries at various periods.

In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland numbered between eight and nine millions, while the inhabitants of what is now the United States were, perhaps, a scant three hundred thousand. In 1900, the people of the British Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven millions more or less, and the people of the United States are almost exactly twice as many, being about seventy-five millions. To project a statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazardous proceeding; and no man can now guess at the probable population either of the United Kingdom or of the United States in the year 2000; but as the rate of increase is far larger in America than in England, there is little risk in suggesting that a hundred years from now the population of the American republic will be at least four or five times as large as that of the British monarchy.

Just as the center of population of the United States has been steadily working its way westward, having been in 1800 in Maryland and being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of population of the English-speaking race has been steadily moving toward the Occident. Just as the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies during the nineteenth century, so will the second of them have to cross the Atlantic during the twentieth century. Whether this latter change shall take place early in the century or late, is not important; one day or another it will take place, assuredly.

Inevitably it will be accompanied or speedily followed by another change of almost equal significance. London sooner or later will cease to be the literary center of the English-speaking race. For many centuries the town by the Thames has been the heart of English literature; and there are now visible very few signs that the days of its supremacy are numbered. Even in the United States to-day the old colonial attitude, not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to be as well acquainted with second-rate British authors as the British are with American authors of the first rank. Yet it is not without significance that at the close of the nineteenth century the two most widely known writers of the language should be one of them an American citizen and the other a British colonial, owing no local allegiance to London—Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling.

The disestablishment of London as the literary center of English will be retarded by various circumstances. Only very reluctantly is a tradition of preëminence overthrown when consecrated by the centuries. The conditions of existence in England are likely long to continue to be more favorable to literary productivity than are the conditions in America. In a new country literature finds an eager rival in life itself, with all its myriad opportunities for self-expression. No paradox is it to say that more than one American bard may have preferred to build his epic in steel or in stone rather than in words. The creative imagination has outlets here denied it in a long-settled community, residing tranquilly in a little island, where even the decorous landscape seems to belong to the Established Church. But the Eastern States are already, many of them, as orderly and as placid as Great Britain has been for a century. The conditions in England and in America are constantly tending toward equalization.

A time will come, and probably long before the close of the twentieth century, when there will be in the United States not only several times as many people as there are in the British Isles, but also far more literary activity. Sooner or later most of the leading authors of English literature will be American and not British in their training, in their thought, in their ideals. That is to say, the British in the middle of the twentieth century will hold to the Americans about the same position that the Americans held toward the British in the middle of the nineteenth century. The group of American authors between 1840 and 1860 contained Irving and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne, Longfellow and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau. These are names endeared to us and highly important to us, and not to be neglected in any consideration of English literature; but it is foolish for an American to seek to set them up as the equal of the British group flourishing during the same score of years. So in the middle of the twentieth century the British group will probably not lack striking individualities; but, as a whole, it will probably be surpassed by the American group. The largest portion of the men of letters who use English to express themselves, as well as the largest body of the English-speaking race, will have its residence on the western shore of the Western Ocean.

What will then happen to the English language in England when England awakens to the fact that the center of the English-speaking race is no longer within the borders of the little island? Will the speech of the British sink into dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely stamp out their undue local divergences from the normal English of the main body of the users of the language in the United States? Will they frankly accept the inevitable? Will they face the facts as they are? Will they follow the lead of the Americans when we shall have the leadership of the language, as the Americans followed their lead when they had it? Or will they insist on an arbitrary independence, which can have only one result—the splitting off of the British branch of our speech from the main stem of the language? To ask these questions is to project an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation is not without an interest of its own. And altho it is difficult to decide so far in advance of the event, yet we have now some of the material on which to base a judgment as to what is likely to happen.

Of course, the question is not one to be answered offhand; and not a few arguments could be brought forward in support of the opinion that the British speech of the future is likely to separate itself from the main body of English as then spoken in this country. In the first place, England, altho it has already ceased to be the most populous of the countries using English, will still be the senior partner of the great trading-company known as the British Empire. That the British Empire may be dissolved is possible, no doubt. The Australian colonies have federated; and having formed a strong union of their own, they may prefer to stand alone. South Africa may follow the example of Australia. India may arise in the might of her millions and cast out its English rulers. Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the greater American republic. But each of these things is improbable; and that they should all come to pass is practically inconceivable. All signs now seem to point not only to a continuance of the British Empire, but also to its steady expansion. London is likely long to be the capital of an empire upon which the sun never sets, an empire inhabited by men of every color and every creed and every language. For these men English must serve as the means of communication one with another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck.

That this will put a strain on the language is indisputable. Wherever any tongue serves as a lingua franca for men of various stocks, there is an immediate tendency toward corruption. There is a constant pressure to simplify and to lop off and to reduce to the bare elements. The Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example of what may befall a noble language when it is enslaved to serve many masters, ignorant of its history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling’s earliest tales are some of them almost incomprehensible to readers unacquainted with the vocabulary of the competition-walla; and the reports of the British generals during the war with the Boers were besprinkled with words not hitherto supposed to be English.

Some observers see in this a menace to the integrity of the language, a menace likely to become more threatening as the British Empire spreads itself still farther over the waste places of the earth. But is there not also a danger in the integrity of English close at home—in England itself, even in London, and not afar in the remote borders of the Empire—the danger due to the prevalence of local dialects? To the student of language one of the most obvious differences between Great Britain and the United States lies in the fact that we in America have really no local dialects such as are common in England. Every county of England has an indigenous population, whose ancestors dwelt in the same place since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; and this indigenous population has its own peculiarities of pronunciation, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down from father to son, generation after generation. But no one of the United States was settled exclusively by immigrants from a single English county; and, therefore, no one of these local dialects was ever transplanted bodily to America. And no considerable part of the United States has a stationary population, inbreeding and stagnant and impervious to outside influences; indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to grow up in the middle west, to be married in New York, and to die in Colorado—is not this a characteristic of us Americans? And it is a characteristic fatal to the development of real dialects in this country such as are abundant in England. Of course we have our local peculiarities of idiom and of pronunciation, but these are very superficial indeed. Probably there has been a closer uniformity of speech throughout the United States for fifty years past than there is even to-day in Great Britain, where the Yorkshireman cannot understand the cockney, and where the Scot sits silent in the house of the Cornishman.

This uniformity of speech throughout the United States is, perhaps, partly the result of Noah Webster’s ‘Spelling-Book.’ It has certainly been aided greatly by the public-school system, firmly established throughout the country, and steadily strengthening itself. The school system of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is not yet adequately organized; it has still to be adjusted to its place in a proper scheme of national education. In the higher institutions of learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge, there is no postgraduate work in English; and whatever instruction an undergraduate may get there in English literature is incidental, not to say accidental.

Probably there is no connection between this lack of university instruction in English and a carelessness in the use of the language which strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpremeditated letters of scholarly Englishmen, but sometimes even in their more academic efforts. Jowett’s correspondence, for example, and Matthew Arnold’s, offer examples of a slovenliness of phrase not to be found in Lowell’s letters or in Emerson’s.

Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not merely among the uneducated, but among the more highly cultivated. Directly is used for as soon as by Archbishop Trench (the author of a lively little book on words) and by Mr. Courthope (the Oxford professor of poetry). Like is used for as—that is, “like we do”—by Charles Darwin, and in more than one volume of the English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John Morley. The elision of the initial h, which the British themselves like to think a test of breeding, is discoverable far more often than they imagine on the lips of those who ought to know better. It is said that Lord Beaconsfield, for example, sometimes dropped his h’s, and that he once spoke of “the ’urried ’Udson.” And if we may rely on the evidence of spelling, the British often leave the h silent where we Americans sound it. They write an historical essay from which it is a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective ’istorical. In Mr. Kipling’s ‘From Sea to Sea’ he writes not only an hotel and an hospital, but also an hydraulic.

Thus we see that the immense size and variegated population of the British Empire may be considered as a menace to the integrity of the English language in the British Isles; and that a second source of danger is to be discovered in the local dialects of Great Britain; and, finally, that there is observable in England even now a carelessness in the use of the language and a willingness to innovate both in vocabulary and in idiom.

But however formidable these three tendencies may look when massed together, there is really no weight to be attached to any of them singly or to all of them combined. The language has already for two centuries been exposed to contact with countless other tongues in America and Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration up to the present time; and there is no reason to fear that this contact will be more corrupting in the twentieth century than it has been in the nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather in an enrichment and refreshment of the vocabulary. The danger from the local dialects of Great Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by day as the facilities for travel improve and as the schoolmaster is able to impose his uniform English upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to use new words not authorized by the past of the language is in itself not blameworthy; it may be indeed commendable when it is restrained by a conservative instinct and controlled by reason.

The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of London newspapers are like the Americanisms to be seen in the pages of the New York newspapers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the healthiness of the language itself. In Latin it may be proper enough for us to set up a Ciceronian standard and to reject any usage not warranted by the masterly orator; but in English it is absurd to declare any merely personal standard and to reject any term or any idiom because it was unknown to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison or to Franklin, to Thackeray or to Hawthorne. Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision as regards the propriety of any usage may be accepted as final. English is a living tongue, and the great writers of every generation make unhesitating use of words and of constructions which the great writers of earlier generations were ignorant of or chose to ignore.

The most of these British innovations, both of to-day and of to-morrow, will be individual and freakish; and, therefore, they will win no foothold even in the British vocabulary. But a few of them will prove their own excuse for being, and these will establish themselves in Great Britain. The best of them, those of which the necessity is indisputable, will spread across the Atlantic and will be welcomed by the main body of users of English over here—just as certain American innovations and revivals were hospitably received in England when only the smaller branch of the English-speaking race was on the American side of the ocean. And, of course, the new terms which spring into existence in the United States after the literary center of the language has crossed the Atlantic will be carried over to England in books and in periodicals.

When the bulk of contemporary English literature is produced by American authors, and when the British themselves have accepted the situation and resigned themselves at last to the departure of the literary supremacy of London, then the weight of American precedent will be overwhelming. Without knowing it, British readers of American books will be led to conform to American usage; and American terms will not seem outlandish to them, as these words and phrases do even now, when comparatively few American authors are read in Great Britain. And these American innovations will be very few, for the conservative instinct is in some ways stronger in the United States than it is in Great Britain, due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread popular education here, which gives to every child a certain solidarity with the past.

It is education and the school-book; it is the printing-press and the newspaper and the magazine; it is the ease of travel across the Atlantic and the swiftness of the voyage;—it is a combination of all these things which will prevent any development of a British branch of the language after the numerical preponderance of the American people becomes overwhelming. And working toward the same union is a loyal conservatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoyment of the great literature of the language, the common possession of both British and Americans, having its past in the keeping of the elder division of the stock, and certain to transfer its future to the care of the younger division.

To declare that the literary center of English is to be transferred sooner or later from the British Isles to the United States may seem to some a hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as any prophecy before the event can hope to be. Such a transfer, it is true, is perhaps unprecedented in literary history,—altho the scholar may see a close parallel in the preëminence once attained by Alexandria as the capital of Greek culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or not, the transfer is inevitable sooner or later.