The American Language
that "the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected" was
making its intelligent study almost impossible, and proposed boldly
that all English grammar-books be burned.[6] Of late his ideas have
begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of
denunciation has grown[7] the grammarians have been constrained to
overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate
decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was "A
Practical Grammar of the English Language," by Thomas W. Harvey.[8]
This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a
long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and
proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling
even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the
elementary schools, are far more analytical and logical. For example,
there is "Longmans' Briefer Grammar," by George J. Smith,[9] a text
now in very wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page
of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination of the complete
sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are
very simply and clearly developed. But before the end the author
begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find [Pg182]
paragraph after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:
Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some
Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the
Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.
The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted
by the Subject.
Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or
being without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals.
And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, "not
so much to 'cover' the subject of grammar as to /teach/ it," and calls
attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted "the
rather hard subject of gerunds," all mention of conjunctive adverbs,
and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he immerses himself
in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, and does not
emerge until the end.[10] "The New-Webster-Cooley Course in
English,"[11] another popular text, carries reform a step further. The
subject of case is approached through the personal pronouns, where it
retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the more lucid /object
form/ is used in place of /objective case/. Moreover, the pupil is
plainly informed, later on, that "a noun has in reality but two
case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form." This is the best
concession to the facts yet made by a text-book grammarian. But no one
familiar with the habits of the pedagogical mind need be told that its
interior pull is against even such mild and obvious reforms. Defenders
of the old order are by no means silent; a fear seems to prevail that
grammar, robbed of its imbecile classifications, may collapse
entirely. Wilcox records how the Council of English Teachers of New
Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke out boldly for the recognition of
no less than five cases [Pg183] in English. "Why five?" asks Wilcox.
"Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? Undoubtedly because there
are five cases in Latin."[12] Most of the current efforts at
improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere revision and multiplication
of classifications; the pedant is eternally convinced that
pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to knowledge. A
curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet entitled
"Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools," compiled by James
Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of Education.[13] The
aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of English, including
grammar, of its accumulated formalism and ineffectiveness--to make it
genuine instruction instead of a pedantic and meaningless routine. And
how is this revolutionary aim set forth? By a meticulous and merciless
splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and
sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and
flatulence.
I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease is
incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is simply
this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life to
teaching grammar to children, or to training school-marms to do it, is
not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it
competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to
grapple with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living and
rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is by
first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization--in brief, by
first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant
proceedings is not unlike that between a gross dissection and a
surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly
mastered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of
laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the
elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is
almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men and
women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. In most
other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective competition and
[Pg184] criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied mathematics,
for example, has practical engineers at his elbow and they quickly
expose and denounce his defects; the college teacher of chemistry,
however limited his equipment, at least has the aid of text-books
written by actual chemists. But English, even in its most formal
shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write it decently and
who get no aid from those who can. One wades through treatise after
treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own style is atrocious.
A Huxley or a Stevenson might have written one of high merit and
utility--but Huxley and Stevenson had other fish to fry, and so the
business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider the standard texts on
prosody--vast piles of meaningless words--hollow babble about
spondees, iambics, trochees and so on--idiotic borrowings from dead
languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew blasts of fresh air through
that fog, but they had no successors, and it has apparently closed in
again. In the department of prose it lies wholly unbroken; no
first-rate writer of English prose has ever written a text-book upon
the art of writing it.
§ 2
/Spoken American As It Is/--But here I wander afield. The art of prose
has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in
grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively
English spoken by the average American in his daily traffic. The thing
of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than
they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The
school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her
effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any
other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at
home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain
of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the
antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of
books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic [Pg185]
of learned and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every
day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a
grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all
the injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules of
tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double
negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives,
confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the
vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it
disdains all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech.
This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English
of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle American
of Joseph Jacobs' composite picture--the mill-hand in a small city of
Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his
diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud membership in the Order
of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees.[14] Go into any part of
the country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes
of his brothers--car conductors in Philadelphia, immigrants of the
second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the
Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty
political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, small farmers in Kansas or
Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in
Chicago,--genuine Americans all, hot for the home team, marchers in
parades, readers of the yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep
on election day, undistinguished norms of the /Homo Americanus/. Such
typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They can read
it--all save the "hard" words, /i. e./, all save about 90 per cent of
the words of Greek and Latin origin.[15] They can understand perhaps
two-thirds of it as it comes from the lips of a political orator or
clergyman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense,
superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent
command of it as the salient mark of a "smart" and [Pg186] "educated"
man, one with "the gift of gab." But they themselves never speak it or
try to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that
direction by their fellows.
In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made more
vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain speech
habits, universally in operation from end to end of the country, the
masses of the people turn almost unanimously to very different speech
habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even accurately
observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere speaks of
"the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate American." He is
apparently the first to call attention to it. It is the national
assumption that no such gap exists--that all Americans, at least if
they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public schools
that they are competent to consider any public question intelligently
and to follow its discussion with understanding. But the truth is, of
course, that the public school accomplishes no such magic. The
inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an inferior man despite
the hard effort made to improve him, and his thoughts seldom if ever
rise above the most elemental concerns. What lies above not only does
not interest him; it actually excites his derision, and he has coined
a unique word, /high-brow/, to express his view of it. Especially in
speech is he suspicious of superior pretension. The school-boy of the
lower orders would bring down ridicule upon himself, and perhaps
criticism still more devastating, if he essayed to speak what his
teachers conceive to be correct English, or even correct American,
outside the school-room. On the one hand his companions would laugh at
him as a prig, and on the other hand his parents would probably cane
him as an impertinent critic of their own speech. Once he has made his
farewell to the school-marm, all her diligence in this department goes
for nothing.[16] The boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue
that is not the one taught in school, and so do the youths with whom
he will begin learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry
later on, and the saloon-keepers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians,
business [Pg187] sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up