oration, proximity, repudiate, subsequently, and vicinity. But we ought not to wonder at any judgment, or at any crotchet, how eccentric soever, as regards the English language, from a man who ascends a declivity; who meets with a pond of at least three diameters of different lengths, and a wall built of parallelograms, figures of only two dimensions; and who can write: To use a phrase very common in England, they are the most extraordinary pictures I ever saw.' 25 As lately as 1873, Mr. Bryant brought out a volume entitled Orations and Addresses, of his own composition. To give all desirable completeness to our body of evidence as to what this gentleman, afterwards so severe a censor of the language of others, was then capable of, in the way of sinning against good English, we remit the curious to pp. 3, 45, 50, 70, 99, 104, 112, 163, 164, 168, 169, 191, 202, 228, 247, 275, 371, 391 of the volume in question, where will be found 'of that nature that,' a public dinner to his honour,' 'conclusions to which he arrived,'' booked for a pleasantry,' 'written to such acceptance,'' with no enemy to lay the axe at its root,' &c. &c. The violations of idiomatic propriety, with the occasional bad grammar and vulgarity, observable in the passages referred to, speak abundantly for themselves. In particular, it is, we apprehend, a writer's appropriate choice of prepositions, quite as much as anything else, that evidences conclusively his genuine familiarity with the tongue he is using; and herein the punctilious Mr. Bryant failed most egregiously. It is instructive, also, to see, in the case of many things which, eventually, he would not suffer in his newspaper, how soon before he was unconvinced of their disreputableness. In the volume under notice, though he employs afterward twelve times, he employs afterwards, which he later came to turn his back on, eight times. Parties, when not technical for persons, at last was ostracised, and with reason; but, at p. 116, Mr. Washington Irving and the lady he would have married are spoken of as 'both parties.' Further, at p. 320, he has 'for nearly half a century past;' at p. 186, poetess; at p. 357, the substantive progress; at p. 70, the verb state; at p. 159, 'years had been spent ;' at pp. 221, 223, tariff; at p. 326, telegram; at p. 116, try an experiment. His party-record,' -exemplifying an American innovation which he subsequently repudiated, occurs at p. 282. Indeed, the very title of his book contains a word which was forbidden to his contributors, orations. How any literary assistant of his could have obeyed the law laid down for him, if he had taken this book as the subject of a review, passes our conjecture. But enough of this, if not more than enough. Here, it must be admitted, is a rather startling portrait of a verbal critic, as outlined by himself. Who can now question, that, in the function which he arrogated, the artist had vastly more to learn than to teach? Not only Germans, Hollanders, Danes, Russians, 25 Letters, &c., p. 165. Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and Finns, but divers Hindus, Parsees, and Japanese, distinctly better versed than Mr. Bryant in the employment of the English language, have, from first to last, crossed our path. Fully regardful of the claims to venerable memory which may be urged in behalf of a high-minded, energetic, and altogether estimable man, who lived to weather more than four-score winters, we submit for consideration whether he has not exhibited himself as a very novice in the management of our mother-tongue. To speak within compass, his qualifications to pose as an Aristarchus were, for the most part, barely, if at all, short of ludicrous. Living, as he did, among a people among whom, in the case of all but a very few writers and speakers, our language is daily becoming more and more depraved,26 he is not to be refused praise for having exerted himself, according to his lights and opportunities, to prevent the diffusion of unquestionable inaccuracies and vulgarisms; for of these there are, in his catalogue of unpermitted expressions, many, not remarked on in this paper, which every one would do well to avoid. But why, it is obvious to ask, did he pass by scores of such things, including a large number of Americanisms, which contributors to his journal must have been just as likely to trespass into as into those which he has particularised? Was it, as his silence and his own practice lead us to infer, because they had his approval? Be this as it may, he is seen to have stigmatised an abundance of forms and modes of speech against which there is no rational objection whatever, as must be clear to all who know what is, in England, deemed unexceptionable English. And whence did he derive his opinions as regarded impure English? We have no hesitation in hazarding a surmise on this point. The consensus as to words and uses of words, to be discovered by perusing the best English writers of this century, can have counted, in his estimation, as only most unimportant. On the other hand, unless we suppose as possible an amount of consentaneous whimsicality bordering on a miracle, the unweighed judgments of the criticasters whose noxious sway we set out with deploring, were, to him, so many laws, and laws precluded from all reversal. Nor was he peculiar, in this respect, among Americans. He was simply an exponent of an enormous class of them. Independence of determination touching what is 26 While preparing this paper, we have chanced to run through Edgar Huntly, by Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist of the end of the last century and beginning of this. Edgar Huntly was finished and published in 1799. Despite its occasional oddities and inaccuracies of expression, it seldom reminds one of its author's nationality. Whoever compares it 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 Americans. According to Mr. C. A. Bristed, the admitted classics' of American literature, 'such as Irving and Bryant, for example, use language in which the most fastidious would be puzzled to detect any deviation from the purest English models.'-Cambridge Essays, 1855, p. 62. good English, or bad, founded on observation of the usage of the most creditable modern authors, they, with rare exceptions, apparently acknowledge to be beyond their competence. To the decisions of sundry Englishmen and Scotchmen, mainly shallow pretenders, whom they are pleased to take for deep philologists, they defer, however, with uninquiring submission. These decisions are reissued and countersigned among them, with amplifications, in books, and magazines, and newspapers, by persons who, for no more solid reason than their positiveness in asserting, are recognised as of authority; and misconceptions of the grossest and most absurd cast are thus obtruded upon all who can read. Something of this kind of result is seen in England; but, in the United States, the evil of which we speak is far more conspicuous. So influential there are the lessons of prejudice and caprice, inculcated by indigenous teachers, that, for instance, afterwards, instead of afterward, is usually accounted an error quite unpardonable. As to imperfects passive, like is being built,7 to say that they have been reprobated as seemingly on a plane with moral turpitude, is not to exaggerate facts. Again, Professor William C. Fowler, in his English Grammar, rules that any manner of means, demoralise, first-rate, fogy, full swing, goings-on, humbug, on to, out of sorts, snooze, to stave off, &c. &c., are Americanisms. The doings of American philologasters are, in truth, a curious study. On the aversion, entertained by so many Americans who affect immaculate English, to reputable words of recent introduction, or, where the words are old, to current senses of them which lack, or are thought to lack, the countenance of long prescription, we forbear to dilate. Yet we may note, that, as a type of the rest, Mr. Bryant, while he disdained certain of these words and senses, patronised still more, probably from being unaware of their comparative novelty. Nor shall we dwell on other salient features of the misplaced precisianism of Americans, of which the greater share is to be attributed, where not to ignorance, at least to misappreciation, of those precedents of usage which Englishmen are content to abide by. And, as these characteristics of unwisdom and bad taste have been illustrated sufficiently, so, it will be granted, we have given a full measure of attention to Mr. Bryant and his fantastic and parcel-learned ambition to render æsthetic aid and comfort, in the province of speech, to the upward or to the downward career of the American ochlocracy. E27 Lord Macaulay, we are informed by his biographer, Mr. Trevelyan, reproved, as solecistic, 'the tea is being made.' Yet, at different dates, beginning with 1826, he himself, in familiar letters, did not scruple at while it is being read,' 'all the Edinburgh Reviews are being bound,' 'measures are being taken.' See Life, &c. (1st ed.), vol. i. pp. 140, 354; vol. ii. p. 124, foot-note. That imperfects passive were creeping into use upwards of a hundred years ago, is now ascertained. James Harris, the philologist, wrote, in 1779, Sir Guy Carlton was... being examined;' and his wife wrote, ten years earlier, there is a good Common-sense, if duly exercised, would, assuredly, avail to put an end to false philology. In every ancient language whose literature has reached us, we can clearly mark an era when, in the combined articles of expressiveness, perspicuity, and other qualities of excellence, it was eminently at its best. This era we call classical; and locutions which belong to a posterior era we are taught to look upon with a certain contempt; as if Tacitus, and even St. Augustine and the first Pope Gregory, among the later developments with which they abound, did not offer, in many a normal derivative, and in many a terse and pregnant phrase, genuine improvements on Ciceronian circumlocution and diffuseness. Nevertheless, not to award the palm of merit to thẹ Roman writers who flourished just before and during the reign of Augustus, would be preposterous. With the strictest propriety, we may speak of the golden age of Latin; only it is for a reason which forbids that we should speak of a golden age of English. Latin has a finished history; whereas it may still be early, twenty centuries hence, to tell how English rose, culminated, and gradually parted with its identity. And yet there are many, at this day, as there probably have been from time out of mind, so unthinking as to bewail the decadence of our mother-tongue. It has likewise been, and it still is, the express wish of these visionaries, with Dean Swift as their spokesman, 'to settle our language, and put it into a state of continuance.' Heedless that new discoveries, inventions, and speculations, converse with foreign nations and their literary productions, and various other causes tending to modify human speech, have always been working changes in English, our linguistic conservatives unconsciously demand, for the realisation of their insensate chimera of fixity, that the course of nature should be suspended, and, withal, that the mind of man should be reduced to complete stagnation. Page after page might be filled with absurdities conceived in the same spirit as that of these rhymes of Robert Gould,29 dated in the year 1687 > 28 Our language is at best; and it will fail, To turn to dreamers of another species, not a whit behind Gould, on the score of irrationality, is Gilbert Wakefield, with his idolatry, whatever its consequences, of analogy and grammar. These being in his contemplation, not in their real character, as things in perpetual flux, but as though they possessed the constancy of space, or of the folly of the wise, he thus delivers himself: 30 It is, certainly, high time 28 If we may believe Lord Macaulay, the consummation here wished for has been attained; for, referring to the seventeenth century, he speaks of it as a time' 'long after our speech had been fixed.' (Essays, vol. i. p. 405, 7th ed.) 20 Prefixed to Fairfax's Godfrey of Bulloigne. See his Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 231. for our unconstructed and solecistic style to be modelled by the rectitude of their immutable and applicable standard, which, sooner or later, must be called in to our assistance, and will then essentially impair the beauties and diminish the utilities of our noblest writers, in prose and verse, to future generations.' Jupiter forbid that we should ever give ourselves to the worship of Wakefield's false gods, and incur the retribution for it which is so frigidly presaged! Nor shall we; but, to the very end, we shall do as countless generations have done before us. When it shall come to be at all patent, that the English nation, whether from luxury, neglect of mental culture, or any other moral or intellectual cancer, has entered on the downhill road to barbarism, or to some like calamity, the day will have arrived, and not till then, to view the later fortunes of our speech with misgiving. In the meantime, despondents and small critics would evince a discretion beyond expectation, by the modesty of silence, and by being satisfied with following, instead of aiming to lead. To the small critics, moreover, it cannot be too often reiterated, that what Dr. Johnson 31 frivolously speaks of as the more airy and elegant studies of philology and criticism,' are not things on which, without long and patient preparation, it is otherwise than rash to trust one's self as a legislator. They may rest assured, that we of the nineteenth century, who have worked our way to so much that is good, have shaped our English to a fashion which harmonises, and more fitly than any other fashion of it could harmonise, with the grand total of our complex environment. In the vigour and intrepidity which signalise our time, there is something wholly alien to an apprehensive and emasculate finicalness of expression. Having ceased largely to think as our fathers thought, we can no longer, with justice to the change which has passed on us, write as they wrote. For the rest, given in combination those disciplines which, as a whole, alone deserve to be entitled education, one will hardly select the most appropriate vesture for one's ideas, if one makes it a subject of harassing inquisition. And, on the part of the world at large, we shall not, it is likely, see in it anything better than reminders of the pharisaic tithe-paying and slight of matters much weightier, as the fruit of deferring to the conceits and the counsels of a piddling and nibbling philology. 81 In the Idler, No. 91. FITZEDWARD HALL. |