The American Language
sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what
passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a
"tuneful sister" surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the
New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would
eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome.
"What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured by the
Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by
the Connecticut or the Potomack?"
In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped
into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of
that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book
taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief
in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything
said and done. All things American are to be grand--our territory,
population, products, wealth, science, art--but especially our
political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the
material development of the country which now characterizes the
extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly
throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years
of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for,
materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of
achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national
[Pg071] greatness."[10] Nor was that vast optimism wholly without
warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and
with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new
American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for
inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish
springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses
from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them;
Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and
John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary
material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in
imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was
preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as
Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American
Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of
the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good
many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to
exploit."
Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national
consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all
British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy,
when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to
all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them
employ only "the American language" in communicating with him. The
Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838,
establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11] provided that it
should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been
admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign
languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos [Pg072]
well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12] It was a time of
expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only produce a
civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for
all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the
enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so
much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems
to have been no one to second the motion. It took, indeed, the vast
shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists. While the Jackson
influence survived, it was the almost unanimous national conviction
that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned."
§ 2
/The Language in the Making/--All this jingoistic bombast, however,
was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as
the national beautiful letters. True enough, an English attack upon a
definite American locution always brought out certain critical
minute-men, but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the
racy neologisms that kept crowding up from below, and most of them
were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox English and very
sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with
Americanisms. A glance through the native criticism of the time will
show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots imitated the
Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold
followed pantingly in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is
extraordinarily ornate and self-conscious, and one searches it in vain
for any concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all,
achieved a style so elephantine that many an English leader-writer
must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have seen,
spoke out for national freedom in language as well as in
letters--among them, Channing--but in the main the Brahmins of the
time were conservatives in [Pg073] that department, and it is
difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the
innovations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt
Whitman, in fact, were the first men of letters, properly so called,
to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in
the national speech during the half century between the War of 1812
and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series
of "The Biglow Papers." Whitman made his declaration in "An American
Primer." In discussing his own poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to
give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities
of speech--an American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is the
best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression." And then: "The
Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people
in the world--and the most perfect users of words. The new times, the
new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according--yes, and what
is more, they will have such a new tongue." To which, as everyone
knows, Whitman himself forthwith contributed many daring (and still
undigested) novelties, /e. g./, /camerado/, /romanza/, /Adamic/ and
/These States/.
Meanwhile, in strong contrast to the lingering conservatism above
there was a wild and lawless development of the language below, and in
the end it forced itself into recognition, and profited by the
literary declaration of independence of its very opponents. "The /jus
et norma loquendi/," says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, "do
not depend upon scholars." Particularly in a country where scholarship
is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming majority of
the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating tasks, far
away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The
remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped out by the rise of
the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was fine and sensitive in
it had died with it. What remained of an urbane habit of mind and
utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the
south, and to the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now,
for the first time, a definitely recognized caste of /intelligentsia/,
self-charged with carrying the [Pg074] torch of culture through a new
Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became
"a bundling, gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals,
literature, religion or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for
land and dollars, party politics was the chief concern of the people,
and with the disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of
pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an
incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second
edition of his Glossary, describes the effect upon the language. First
the enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western
rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they
were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then they
were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers; and finally
they came into more or less good usage. Much contemporary evidence is
to the same effect. Fowler, in listing "low expressions" in 1850,
described them as "chiefly political." "The vernacular tongue of the
country," said Daniel Webster, "has become greatly vitiated, depraved
and corrupted by the style of the congressional debates." Thornton, in
the appendix to his Glossary, gives some astounding specimens of
congressional oratory between the 20's and 60's, and many more will
reward the explorer who braves the files of the /Congressional Globe/.
This flood of racy and unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and
finally penetrated the retreat of the /literati/, but the purity of
speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the
vulgate. The newspaper was now enthroned, and /belles lettres/ were
cultivated almost in private, and as a mystery. It is probable,
indeed, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both
published in the early 50's, were the first contemporary native books,
after Cooper's day, that the American people, as a people, ever read.
Nor did the pulpit, now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a
corrective voice. On the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett
denounces it specifically for its bad example, and cites, among its
crimes against the language, such inventions as /to doxologize/ and
/to funeralize/. [Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any
thought of their uncouthness, Fowler adds to /missionate/ and
/consociational/.
As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the
purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in
hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and
Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes to
talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the
most refined and best educated American, who has habitually resided in
his own country, the very man who would write, on some serious topic,
volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will, in half a
dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot fail to strike
the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the first time."
Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, calculated to
flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find it in the
volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to explain and
defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of English reviling,
and he succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful and
persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his purpose failed
and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the Very Rev. Henry
Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous assault. "Look at those
phrases," he said, "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."[13] In his American edition of 1866
Dr. Alford withdrew this reference to the Civil War and somewhat
ameliorated his indignation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts
in his indictment, and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a
certain support. The American is no longer a [Pg076] "vain,