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AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS _WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON OTHER ISMS_

BY BRANDER MATTHEWS

NEW YORK HARPER AND BROTHERS MDCCCXCII

Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

TO

THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY

YALE UNIVERSITY

_My dear Lounsbury,--In reading over the proof-sheets of these pages, I have happened on your name more often than I thought I had written it, and yet not so often by once as I wish to write it. So I set it here, in the forefront of this little book, to bear witness that much of what may be good in these essaylets of mine is due to help given by you, either directly by word of mouth or indirectly by the printed page. And that is why I take pleasure now in subscribing myself as_

_Yours gratefully_,

BRANDER MATTHEWS

Columbia College _September, 1892_

CONTENTS

Page AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS 1

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 32

THE LITERARY INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES 60

THE CENTENARY OF FENIMORE COOPER 89

IGNORANCE AND INSULARITY 103

THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS 114

THREE AMERICAN ESSAYISTS 135

DISSOLVING VIEWS: I. OF MARK TWAIN'S BEST STORY 151 II. OF A NOVEL OF M. ZOLA'S 161 III. OF WOMEN'S NOVELS 169 IV. OF TWO LATTERDAY HUMORISTS 177

AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS

In a novel written in the last decade but one of the nineteenth century by an Australian lady in collaboration with a member of Parliament, one of the characters stops another "to ask for the explanation of this or that Australian phrase," wondering whether "it would be better to give the English meaning of each word after the word itself, and to keep on repeating it all through, or would it do to put a footnote once for all, or how would it do to have a little glossary at the end?" As it happens, oddly enough, the authors of _The Ladies' Gallery_ have not themselves done any one of these things; and therefore, if we chance to read their fiction, we are left to grope for ourselves when in the first two chapters we are told of "the wild howling of the _dingoes_ in the _scrub_," and when we learn that the hero had "eaten his evening meal--_damper_ and a hard junk of _wallabi_ flesh"--while his "_billy_ of tea was warming." Then we are informed that "he had arranged a bed with his blankets, his _swag_ for a pillow," and that he wished for a good mate to share his watch, or even "a black _tracker_ upon whom he could depend as a scout." We are told also that this hero, who "was not intended to _grub_ along," hears a call in the night, and he reflects "that a black fellow would not _cou-ee_ in that way." Later he cuts up "a _fig_ of tobacco;" he says "we can _yarn_ now;" he speaks of living on "wild plums and _bandicoot_;" and he makes mention of "a certain _newchum_." From the context we may fairly infer that this last term is the Australian equivalent of the Western _tenderfoot_; but who shall explain the meaning of _damper_ and _dingoes_, _cou-ee_ and _bandicoot?_ And why have _scrub_ and _billy_, _grub_ and _fig_, taken on new meanings, as though they had suffered a sea-change in the long voyage around the Cape or through the canal?

As yet, so far as I know, no British critic has raised a cry of alarm against the coming degradation of the English language by the invasion of Australianisms. It can hardly be doubted, however, that the necessities of a new civilization will force the Australian to the making of many a new word to define new conditions. As the San Francisco _hoodlum_ is different from the New York _loafer_, so the Melbourne _larrikin_ has differentiated himself from the London _rough_, and in due season a term had to be developed to denote this differentiation. There are also not a few Canadian phrases to be collected by the curious; and the exiles in India have evolved a vocabulary of their own by a frequent adoption of native words, which makes difficult the reading of certain of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's earlier tales. To recall these things is but to recognize that the same causes are at work in Canada, in India, and in Australia as have been acting in the United States. It remains to be seen whether the British critic will show the same intolerance towards the colonial and dependent Australian and Canadian that he has been wont to show towards the independent American. The controversy, when it comes, is one at which the American will look on with disinterested amusement, remembering that those laugh best who laugh last, and that Dean Alford omitted from the later editions of his dogmatic discussion of the _Queen's English_ a passage which was prominent in the first edition, issued in 1863, during the war of the rebellion, and which animadverted on the process of deterioration that the Queen's English had undergone at the hands of the Americans. "Look at those phrases," he cried, "which so amuse us in their speech and books, at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity, and then compare the character and history of the nation--its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man, its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandizement is to be obtained, and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world." Time can be relied on to quash an indictment against a nation, and we Americans should be sorry to think that there are to-day in England any of those who in 1863 sympathized with the Dean of Canterbury, and who are not now heartily ashamed of their attitude then.

Owing, it may be, to the consciousness of strength, which is a precious result of the war the British clergyman denounced thus eloquently, the last tie of colonialism which bound us to the mother-country is broken. We know now that the mother-tongue is a heritage and not a loan. It is ours to use as we needs must. In America there is no necessity to plead for the right of the Americanism to exist. The cause is won. No American writer worth his salt would think of withdrawing a word or of apologizing for a phrase because it was not current within sound of Bow Bells. The most timid of American authoresses has no doubt as to her use of _railroad_, _conductor_, _grade,_ and to _switch_, despite her possible knowledge that in British usage the equivalents of these words are _railway_, _guard_, _gradient,_ and to _shunt_. On the contrary, in fact, there is visible now and again, especially on the part of the most highly cultivated writers, an obvious delight in grasping an indigenous word racy of the soil. There is many an American expression of a pungent freshness which authors, weary of an outworn vocabulary, seize eagerly. It may be a new word, but it would not be in accord with our traditions to refuse naturalization to a welcome new-comer; or it may be a survival flourishing here in our open fields, although long since rooted out of the trim island garden on the other side of the Atlantic, and in such case we use it unhesitatingly to-day as our forefathers used it in the past, "following," as Lowell remarks, "the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's."

In the preface to the first edition of his dictionary, issued in 1825, Noah Webster declared that although in America "the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist," since "language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas" with the people of another country, they are not likely to retain an absolute identity of language; and Webster had no difficulty in showing that differences of physical and political conditions had already in his day, only half a century after the Revolution, and when the centre of population was still close to the Atlantic seaboard, produced differences of speech. It is too much to expect, perhaps, that the British critic shall look at this Yankee independence from our point of view. Professor Lounsbury tells us in his admirable biography that in Fenimore Cooper's time the attitude of the Englishman towards the American "in the most favorable cases ... was supercilious and patronizing, an attitude which never permits the nation criticising to understand the nation criticised." Things have changed for the better since Cooper was almost alone in his stalwart Americanism, but the arrogance which General Braddock of his Majesty's army showed towards Colonel Washington of the Virginia contingent survives here and there in Great Britain, even though another dean sits in Dr. Alford's stall in Canterbury Cathedral; it prompted a British novelist not long ago to be offensively impertinent to an American lady (_Athenaeum_, September 1, 1888), and it allowed Lord Wolseley to insult the memory of Robert E. Lee with ignorant praise. It finds expression in a passage like the following from a _Primer of English Composition_, by Mr. John Nichols: "Americanisms, as 'Britisher,' 'skedaddle,' and the peculiar use of 'clever,' 'calculate,' 'guess,' 'reckon,' etc., with the mongrel speech adopted by some humorists, are only admissible in satirical pictures of American manners" (p. 35). When we read an assertion of this sort, we are reduced to believe that it must be the dampness of the British climate which has thus rusted the hinges of British manners.

Far more often than we could wish can we hear the note of lofty condescension in British discussion of the peculiarities of other races. When Englishmen are forced to compare themselves with men of any other country, no doubt it must be difficult for them not to plume themselves on their superior virtue. But modesty is also a virtue, and if this were more often cultivated in Great Britain, the French, for example, would have fewer occasions for making pointed remarks about _la morgue britannique_. Even the gentle Thackeray--if the excursus may be forgiven--is not wholly free from this failing. In spite of his familiarity with French life and French art, he could not quite divest himself of his British pride, and of the intolerance which accompanies it, and therefore we find him recording that M. de Florac confided gayly to Mr. Clive Newcome the reason why he preferred the coffee at the hotel to the coffee at the great cafe "with a _duris urgens in reb[=u]s egests[=a]s!_ pronounced in the true French manner" (_Newcomes_, chapter xxviii.). But how should a Frenchman pronounce Latin?--like an Englishman, perhaps? When even the kindly Thackeray is capable of a sneering insularity of this sort, it is small wonder that the feeling of the French towards the British is well expressed in the final line of the quatrain inscribed over the gate at Compiegne through which Joan Darc went to her capture:

"Tous ceux-la d'Albion n'ont faict le bien jamais!"

And we are reminded of the English lady who was taken to see Mr. Jefferson's performance of Rip Van Winkle, and who liked it very much indeed, but thought it such a pity that the actor had so strong an American accent!

"Ignorance of his neighbor is the character of the typical John Bull," says Mr. R. L. Stevenson, who also declares that "the Englishman sits apart bursting with pride and ignorance." What a Scot has written a Yankee may quote. And the quotation has pertinence here in view of the fact that in the last century the English were just as keen against Scotticisms and Hibernicisms, and just as bitter, as they have been in this century against Americanisms, and as they may be in the next against Australianisms. Macaulay asserted that there were in _Marmion_ and in _Waverley_ "Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would laugh;" and there are to be seen in the English newspapers now and again petty attacks on the style and vocabulary of American authors of distinction, which it is perhaps charitable to credit to London apprentices. One of these it was no doubt who began a review of Mr. Brownell's subtle and profound study of _French Traits_ with the statement that "the language most depressing to the educated Englishman is the language of the cultured American." Probably the small sword will always be exasperating to those who cling to the boxing-glove.

When a London apprentice laughs at the Scotticisms of the North Briton, and when the London _Athenaeum_ is depressed by the language of cultured Americans, there is to be discovered behind the laugh and the scoff an assumption that any departure from the usage which obtains in London is most deplorable. The laugh and the scoff are the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual belief that the Londoner is the sole guardian and trustee of the English language. But this is a belief for which there is no foundation whatever. The English language is not bankrupt that it needs to have a receiver appointed; it is quite capable of minding its own business without the care of a committee of Englishmen. If indeed a guardian were necessary, what Englishman would it be who would best preserve our pure English--the shepherd of Dorset or the miner of Northumberland, the Yorkshire man or the cockney? If it is not the London apprentice who is to set the standard, but the Englishman of breeding, it is hard to discover the ground whereon this Englishman can claim superiority of taste or knowledge over the other educated men to whom English is the mother-tongue, whether they were born in Scotland, Ireland, or America, in Australia, India, or Canada.

The fallacy of the Englishman, be he London apprentice or contributor to the _Athenaeum_, is that he erects a merely personal standard in the use of our language. He compares the English he finds in the novels of a Scotchman or in the essays of an American with that which he hears about him daily in London, animadverting upon every divergence from this local British usage as a departure from the strict letter of the law which governs our language. It is, of course, unfair to suggest that a parochial self-satisfaction underlies this utilization of personal experience as the sole test of linguistic propriety; but the procedure is amusingly illogical.

The cockney has no monopoly of good English if even he has his full portion. The Englishman in England is but the elder brother of the Anglo-Saxon elsewhere; and by no right of primogeniture does he control the language which is our birthright. Noah Webster, in the preface from which quotation has already been made, remarked that American authors had a tendency to write "the language in its genuine idiom," and he asserted that "in this respect Franklin and Washington, whose language is their hereditary mother-tongue, unsophisticated by modern grammar, present as pure models of genuine English as Addison or Swift." It may be doubted whether English is now more vigorously spoken or better understood in London than in New York or in Melbourne; but it is indisputable that the student detects in the ordinary speech of the Englishman many a lapse from the best usage. This contaminating of the well of English undefiled is not to be defended because it is due to Englishmen who happen to live in England. A blunder made in Great Britain is to be stigmatized as a Briticism, and it is to be avoided by those who take thought of their speech just as though the impropriety were a Scotticism or a Hibernicism, an Americanism or an Australianism. When a locution of the London apprentice is not in accord with the principles of the language, there is no prejudice in its favor because it happened to arise beside the Thames rather than on the shores of the Hudson or by the banks of the St. Lawrence.

Of Briticisms there are as many and as worthy of collection and collocation as were the most of the Americanisms the all-embracing Bartlett gathered into his dictionary. Indeed, if a Scot or a Yankee were to prepare a glossary of Briticisms on the ample scale adopted by Mr. Bartlett, and with the same generous hospitality, the result would surprise no one more than the Englishman. We should find in its pages many a word and phrase and turn of speech common enough in England and quite foreign to the best usage of those who speak English--Briticisms as worthy of reproof as the worst specimen of "the mongrel speech adopted by some humorists in America." These are to be sought rather in the written language than in oral speech, though there are Briticisms a-plenty in the talk of the Londoner, from the suppression of the initial _h_ among the masses to the dropping of the final _g_ among the classes. Of a truth, precision of speech is not frequent in London, and not seldom the delivery of the Englishman of education nowadays may fairly be called slovenly. As I recall the list of those whom I have heard use the English language with mingled ease and elegance, I find fewer Englishmen than either Scotchmen or Americans. Quintilian tells us that an old Athenian woman called the eloquent Theophrastus a stranger, and declared "that she had discovered him to be a foreigner only from his speaking in a manner too Attic." Something of this ultra-precision is perhaps to be observed to-day in the modern Athens, be that Edinburgh or Boston.

In the ordinary speech of Englishmen there are not a few vocables which grate on American ears. Sometimes they are ludicrous, sometimes they are hideous, sometimes they seem to us simply strange. Thus when Matthew Arnold wrote about Tolstoi, he told us that Anna Karenina "throws herself under the wheels of a _goods_ train." To us Americans this sounds odd, as it is our habit to call the means of self-destruction chosen by the Russian heroine "a _freight_ train." But it is simply due to the accidental evolution of railroad terminology in England and in America at the same time, whereby the same thing came to be called by a different name on either side of the Atlantic. Neither term has a right of way as against the other; and it would be interesting to foresee which will get down to our great-grandchildren. In like manner the _keyless watch_ of Great Britain is the _stem-winder_ of the United States; and here, again, there is little to choose, as both words are logical.

The use of _like_ for _as_, not uncommon in the Southern States, has there always been regarded as an indefensible colloquialism; but in England it is heard in the conversation of literary men of high standing, and now and again it even gets itself into print in books of good repute. It will be found, for instance, in the sketch of Macaulay which the late Cotter Morrison wrote for the series of _English Men of Letters_ edited by Mr. John Morley. And Walter Bagehot represents the dwellers in old manor-houses and in rural parsonages asking, "Why can't they [the French] have Kings, Lords, and Commons, _like_ we have?" Here occasion serves to remark that Bagehot's own writing is besprinkled with Briticisms; his style is slouchy beyond belief; it is impossible to imagine a Frenchman or an American capable of thinking as clearly and as cogently as Bagehot, and willing to write as carelessly.

To be noted also is the British habit of saying "very pleased," when the tradition of the language and the best American usage alike require one to say "very much pleased." Equally noteworthy is the misuse of _without_ for _unless_, condemned in America as a vulgarism, but discoverable in England in the pages of important periodical publications; for example, in the number of the _New Review_ for August, 1890, we find Sir Charles Dilke, who, as a member of her Majesty's Privy Council, ought to be familiar with the Queen's English, writing that "nothing can be brought before the Vestry _without_ the Vestry is duly summoned." Among the political Briticisms which deserve collection as well as political Americanisms, although far less picturesque, are to be recorded the use of _the government_ when _the ministry_ rather is intended, and also the habit of accepting these nouns of multitude as plural, and therefore of writing "the ministry _are_" and "the government _are_" where an American would more naturally write "the administration is." Another more recent Briticism is the growing habit of dropping the article, and saying that "ministers are," meaning thereby that the cabinet as a whole is about to take action. As yet I have not seen "ministers is," but even this barbaric locution bids fair to be reached in course of time. It must be admitted that the terminology of politics is independent in its tendencies, and frequently "breaks the slate" of the regular grammar. It was the speech-making of an American Senator which appeared to the late George T. Lanigan as "a foretaste of that grammatical millennium when the singular verb shall lie down with the plural noun, and a little conjunction shall lead them."

Perhaps the two most frequent Briticisms and the most obvious are the use of _different to_ where the American more appropriately and logically says _different from_, and the employment of _directly_ and its synonym _immediately_ for _as soon as_ in such phrases as "directly he arrived, he did thus." Even Thackeray, in his most carefully written and most artistic novel, allowed Henry Esmond to write _instantly_ for _as soon as_, whereby he was guilty also of an anachronism, as this blunder is a Briticism of comparatively recent origin, and is not yet to be found in the pages of any American author of authority. It is perhaps worthy of note that in that triumph of psychologic insight _Barry Lyndon_, which also is written in the first person, we find _like_ for _as_, much as though it were a Hibernicism, which we do not understand it to be.

I am informed and believe--for in matters of language I prefer to testify on information and belief only, and not to make affidavit of my own knowledge, necessarily circumscribed by individual experience--I am informed and believe that an Englishman says _lift_ where we say _elevator_, and that he calls that man an _agricultural laborer_ whom an American would term a _farm hand_. In the one case the Briticism is the shorter, and in the other the Americanism. I am told that an Englishman calls for a _tin_ of condensed milk, when an American would ask for a _can_, and that an Englishman even ventures to taste _tinned_ meat, which we Americans would suspect to be tainted by the metal, although we have no prejudice against _canned_ meats. I understand that an Englishman _stops_ at a hotel at which an American would _stay_. I have been led to believe that an Englishwoman of fashion will go to a _swagger function_, at which she will expect to meet _no end_ of _smart_ people, meaning thereby not clever folks, but _swells_. I have heard that an Englishman speaks of a _wire_, meaning a _telegram_; and I know that an English friend of mine in New York received a letter from his sister in London, bidding him hold himself in readiness to cross the Atlantic at a day's notice, and informing him that he might "have to come over on a _wire_." To an American, going over the ocean "on a wire" seems an unusual mode of travelling, and too Blondin-like to be attempted by less expert acrobats.