CHAPTER XXIII.
RURAL LABOURERS NEAR LONDON.—OUR MOTHER TONGUE.—COCKNEYS.—PROVINCIALISTS.—ON THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS.—AUTHORITIES.—SUBURBAN LONDON.—LONDON.—THE THAMES.—“SAINT PAUL’S FROM BLACKFRIAR’S BRIDGE.”
Upon our asking directions, a gentleman who left the first-class carriage offered to be our guide for a little way. He led us between fields in which some men were hay-making. We spoke of the “London lads” we had been riding with, and the gentleman agreed with us that, wicked as they might appear, they were less degraded than the mass of agricultural labourers.
“We could not stop to rest here on the stile,” said he, “but that every single man in that field, in the course of five minutes, would come to us to ask something for drink; and the worst of it is, it is not an excuse to obtain money by indirect begging for the support of their families, but they would actually spend it immediately at the public-house.”
We told him we had never been in London, and after a little conversation he said that he had been trying to discover where we came from, as from our accent he should have thought us Londoners. He had thought that he could always tell from what part of England any stranger in London came, but he could not detect any of the provincial accents or idioms in our language. We told him that we had supposed the cockney dialect was quite distinct, but certainly never imagined it at all like our own. On the contrary, he said, except among the vulgar classes, the Londoner alone has no dialect, but, much more than the native of any other part of England, speaks our language from infancy in its purity, and with the accent generally approved by our most elegant orators and generally acknowledged authorities.
“But a liberal education must remove provincialisms, both of idiom and accent.”
“In a degree only. A boy will generally retain a good deal of his provincial accent through the public school and university. At least, I have paid considerable attention to the matter, and I think I am always able to detect it, and say with confidence in which quarter of the kingdom a man spent his youth. You would yourself probably have no difficulty in detecting a Scotchman.”
“I have noticed that Scotchmen who have resided long in England, and who had in a considerable degree lost their original peculiarities, usually spoke in a disagreeably high key and with great exactness and distinctness of utterance.”
“That is the result of the original effort which it was necessary for them to use to speak correctly. They speak from the book, as it were, and the same is more or less noticeable in all provincialists who do not habitually speak with the accent of their youth.”
We then informed him that we were Americans, which much surprised him. I somewhat doubt myself the correctness of his observation. I am aware of habitually using many Yankeeisms myself, and have no desire to avoid them. The New England accent of words, except such as are not very commonly used, I should think might be generally agreeable to the most approved standards in England. The educated English certainly speak with much greater distinctness and more elegance than we commonly do; perhaps they generally err in being too precise and methodical, and it may be that the Londoners converse with more rapidity and ease, or carelessness, than others. That what are shown to us as peculiarities of cockney dialect are mere vulgarisms and slang, not altogether peculiar to the metropolis, is very true.
Agreeably to Walker, the educated English often give the sound of a to e, pronouncing Derby, Darby; clerk, clark, &c. This at first seemed very odd; but when I returned home, our own way had become foreign to me. Vase is universally vawze or vaze; route, rute. With us, except in society which has a more than ordinary European element, these, and some other foreign words in common use, are Anglicized; and though when one is accustomed to the more polite sound there may seem an affectation of simplicity in this, I cannot but wish that the custom was more general. The French almost universally adapt foreign words of which they have need for common use to the requirements of their habitual tongue, changing not only the pronunciation but the spelling: they write rosbif for the old English roast beef, biftek for beef-steak. So we write and pronounce cotelette cutlet; why need we say “angtremay” for entremets? or if we choose that sound, and like it also better than “side-dishes,” why not print it “angtremay?” We write Cologne for Köln; why not Leeong for Lyons? or if Lyons, let us also speak it Lyons, and consider Leeong an affectation except when we speak it in connection with other plainly French words. The only rule with regard to such matters is, to follow custom. Singularity is impertinent where it can be gracefully avoided; but as there is more tendency to Anglicize foreign words that are in general use in America than in England, and this is a good and sensible tendency, let us not look for our rules to English custom. Let us read Venus de Medicis Venus de Medicis, rather than stammer and blush over it because we are not perfect in Italian. I once heard a clergyman call it “Venu-de-Medisy:” two-thirds of his congregation understood what he meant as well as if he had given it the true Italian pronunciation; but if he had read it with the sound they would naturally attach in English reading to that connection of letters, nearly all would have known what he meant, and no one would have had a reasonable occasion to laugh at him. But why is not our own language fit to speak of it in—the Medicean Venus? Why should the French word envelope be used by us when we have the English envelop? Why the Italian chiaro-oscuro, when there is the English clare-obscure expressing the same? I am glad to see some of our railroad companies accepting the word station, which is good old English, in place of the word depot, which, as we pronounce it, is neither French nor English. In England, the designation station is invariable. Depot is only used as a military technicality, with the French pronunciation, dapo. If we really want a foreign word or phrase to express ourselves, it shows a deficiency in our language. Supply this by making your foreigner English: we in America must not be chary of admitting strangers. Naturalize it as soon as possible.
Neither let us think it of great consequence whether we say Rush-an or Ru-shan for Russian; trawf or truf (as usual in England) for trough; def or deef for deaf; or whether we spell according to Johnson, or Walker, or Webster, (or Webster modified;) the custom varies, not only between England and America, but between elegant scholars of each country in itself. The man is impudent who condemns me, let me speak or write almost how I may, for I always have some giant to back me.
Half-a-mile’s walk brought us to a village of plain, low, detached, paltry shops, where our guide, having given us a very simple direction, took leave of us. We followed up the broad street; the shops, a large number of which were ale-houses, soon were displaced in a great measure by plain, small villas, of stone, or stuccoed brick, standing two or three rods back from the street, with dense shrubbery, enclosed by high brick walls before them. Gradually the houses ran together and became blocks; omnibuses, market-carts, heavy vans, (covered luggage-wagons,) and pleasure-carriages, constantly met and passed, and when we had walked about three miles, the village had become a compact, busy town—strangely interrupted once by a large, wild, wholly rustic common. Then the town again: the side-walk encroached upon by the grocers and hucksters; monster signs of “entire” ales and ready-made coffins, and “great sacrifices” of haberdashery and ladies’ goods; the street wide and admirably paved, and crossed at short but irregular intervals by other narrower streets, and growing more busy every moment. Still it is nothing remarkable; a wide street, plain brick houses, a smell of gas now and then, and a crowd. I would hardly have known, from any thing to be seen, that I was not entering some large town in our country, that I had never visited before. Indeed, it’s quite like coming down the Bowery.
People were looking up; following the direction of their eyes, we saw a balloon ascending. The air was calm, and it rose to a great height—greater, says the Times this morning, than any ever reached before.
A shrill cry in the distance, rising faintly above the rumble of the wheels, and hum and patter of the side-walks, grows rapidly more distinct, until we distinguish, sung in a high key, “Strawberrie—Sixpenny-pottle. Who’ll buy?” The first of “London cries.”
We have been walking steadily, in a nearly straight line, for two hours, and now the crowd thickens rapidly until it is for a moment at full tide of Broadway density. There is a long break in the brick house-fronts, and we forge aside out of the crowd and halt to take an observation. We are leaning over the parapet of Blackfriar’s Bridge. The Thames looks much as I had supposed; something wider than our travellers like to represent it, hardly an “insignificant stream” even to an eye accustomed to American rivers, but wide enough and deep enough and strong enough to make bridges of magnificence necessary to cross it, and answering all the requirements needed in a ship-canal passing through the midst of a vast town. A strong current setting upward from the sea gurgles under the arches; heavy coal-barges slowly sweep along with it; dancing, needle-like wherries shoot lightly across it, and numerous small, narrow steamboats, crowded with passengers, plough white furrows up and down its dark surface.
Upon the bank opposite—almost upon the bank, and not distant in an artist’s haze—stand blackened walls and a noble old dome, familiar to us from childhood. It is only nearer, blacker, and smaller—wofully smaller—than it has always been. We do not even think of telling each other it is Saint Paul’s.
There is a low darkness, and the houses and all are sooty in streaks, but there is a pure—so far as our lungs and noses know—pure, fresh, cool breeze sweeping up the river, and overhead a cloudless sky; and in the clear ether, clear as Cincinnati’s, there is a new satellite—beautiful, beautiful as the moon’s young daughter. It is the balloon, now so high that the car is invisible, and without any perceptible motion it blushes in golden sunlight,—while we have been some time since left to evening’s dusk.
“Move on! move on, if you please, gentlemen,” says a policeman. The crowd tramps hastily behind us. We turn and are sucked into the motley channel, which soon throws us out from the bridge upon a very broad street; up this, in a slackening tide, we are still unresistingly carried, for it is London, and that was what we were looking for; and for a while we allow ourselves to be absorbed in it without asking what is to become of us next.