Cooper, always a snob, then proceeded to a discussion of the true inward and glorious meaning of gentleman, at that time laboring under derisory suspicions in the new Republic. He said:
The word has a positive and limited signification. It means one elevated above the mass of society by his birth, manners, attainments, character, and social conditions. As no civilized society can exist without these social differences, nothing is gained by denying the use of the term. If blackguards were to be called gentlemen, and gentlemen blackguards, the difference between them would be as obvious as it is today. The word gentleman is derived from the French gentilhomme, which originally signified one of noble birth. This was at a time when the characteristics of the condition were never found beyond a caste. As society advanced, ordinary men attained the qualifications of nobility, without that of birth, and the meaning of the word was extended. It is now possible to be a gentleman without birth, though, even in America, where such distinctions are purely conditional, they who have birth, except in extraordinary instances, are classed with gentlemen. To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a gentleman, is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a fellow. The word must have some especial signification, or it would be synonymous with man. One may have gentlemanlike feelings, principles and appearance, without possessing the liberal attainments that distinguish the gentleman. Least of all does money alone make a gentleman, though, as it becomes a means of obtaining the other requisites, it is usual to give it a place in the claims of the class. Men may be, and often are, very rich, without having the smallest title to be deemed gentlemen. A man may be a distinguished gentleman, and not possess as much money as his own footman.
This word, however, is sometimes used instead of the old terms, sirs, my masters, &c., &c., as in addressing bodies of men. Thus we say gentlemen in addressing a public meeting, in compliance, and as, by possibility, some gentlemen may be present. This is a license that may be tolerated, though he who should insist that all present were, as individuals, gentlemen, would hardly escape ridicule.
What has just been said of the word gentleman is equally true with that of lady. The standard of these two classes, rises as society becomes more civilized and refined; the man who might pass for a gentleman in one nation, or community, not being able to maintain the same position in another.
The inefficiency of the effort to subvert things by names, is shown in the fact that, in all civilized communities, there is a class of men, who silently and quietly recognize each other as gentlemen; who associate together freely and without reserve, and who admit each other’s claims without scruple or distrust. This class may be limited by prejudice and arbitrary enactments, as in Europe, or it may have no other rules than those of taste, sentiment and the silent laws of usage, as in America.
The same observations may be made in relation to the words master and servant. He who employs laborers, with the right to command, is a master, and he who lets himself to work, with an obligation to obey, a servant. Thus there are house, or domestic servants, farm servants, shop servants, and various other servants; the term master being in all these cases the correlative.
In consequence of the domestic servants of America having once been Negro slaves, a prejudice has arisen among the laboring class of the whites, who not only dislike the term servant, but have also rejected that of master. So far has this prejudice gone, that in lieu of the latter, they have resorted to the use of the word boss, which has precisely the same meaning in Dutch!1 How far a subterfuge of this nature is worthy of a manly and common sense people, will admit of question.
A similar objection may be made to the use of the word help, which is not only an innovation on a just and established term, but which does not properly convey the meaning intended. They who aid their masters in the toil may be deemed helps, but they who perform all the labor do not assist, or help to do the thing, but they do it themselves. A man does not usually hire his cook to help him cook his dinner, but to cook it herself. Nothing is therefore gained, while something is lost in simplicity and clearness, by the substitution of new and imperfect terms for the long established words of the language. In all cases in which the people of America have retained the things of their ancestors, they should not be ashamed to keep the names.
The love of turgid expressions is gaining ground, and ought to be corrected. One of the most certain evidences of a man of high breeding is his simplicity of speech; a simplicity that is equally removed from vulgarity and exaggeration. He calls a spade a spade. His enunciation, while clear, deliberate and dignified, is totally without strut, showing his familiarity with the world, and, in some degree, reflecting the qualities of his mind, which is polished without being addicted to sentimentalism, or any other bloated feeling. He never calls his wife his lady, but his wife, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures men and women. He does not say, in speaking of a dance, that “the attire of the ladies was exceedingly elegant and peculiarly becoming at the late assembly,” but that “the women were well dressed at the last ball;” nor is he apt to remark “that the Rev. Mr. G. — gave us an elegant and searching discourse the past Sabbath,” but that “the parson preached a good sermon last Sunday.”2
Cooper’s plea for “simplicity of speech,… totally without strut … or any other bloated feeling,” had little effect upon his contemporaries, or indeed upon himself. All of them were still under the influence of the Johnsonian or bow-wow style of the Eighteenth Century, and not many of them attempted to make any use of the new and vivid native vocabulary that was flourishing about them. Bryant, born in 1794 and surviving until 1878, was essentially a conformist,3 and after he became editor of the New York Evening Post he drew up a list of terms prohibited to his staff which included some of the Americanisms denounced by the English reviewers, e.g., reliable, balance, standpoint, bogus, lengthy, to jeopardize, to donate and to progress — all of them now perfectly sound American, and even sound English. This Index was imitated in many other American newspaper offices, and its blight is not altogether thrown off to this day.1 The younger Americans of the classical period showed but little more interest in the evolving national speechways, and Joseph Warren Beach was hardly guilty of hyperbole when he called them “cultivated and anemic writers milk-fed upon the culture of England.”2 Mamie Meredith has directed attention to the fact that Emerson, in the seclusion of his diaries, was not above a certain bold experimentation in words,3 but in his published work he wrote like a university-trained Englishman — to be sure, like one of unusual originality and force, but still like an Englishman. It may be true, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that “The American Scholar,” 1837, was “the intellectual declaration of independence” of America, but if so the independence it declared was a good deal more in ideas than in speech. Poe and Melville delighted in strange words, but very few of them came out of the rising American vocabulary of their time. In a list of 180 terms found in Melville before the earliest dates of their recording from other sources, compiled by James Mark Purcell in 1941,4 only a small number are properly describable as Americanisms: the overwhelming majority are either borrowings from or adaptations of the argot of English sailors, or nonce-words of no significance, and usually of very small ingenuity. As for Poe, a similar study published by J. H. Neumann in 19431 shows even rarer inventions of any substance, and none that reveal genuinely American influence or have got into the common store. Poe had a weakness for the grandiloquent, and was thus fond of such monsters as circumgyratory, concentralization, paragraphism and supremeness, but his actual vocabulary was relatively small; indeed, Robert L. Ramsay estimates that in his poetry it was limited to between 3,100 and 3,200 words.2 He is often credited with tintinnabulation, which occurs in “The Bells,” 1831, but it is really no more than an obvious derivative of a Latin loan traced by the NED to 1398.3 Po
e used the phrase American language in “The Rationale of Verse,” and denounced Noah Webster, in “Fifty Suggestions,” as “more English than the English — plus Arabe qu’en Arabie,” but his other discussions of language, in “Marginalia” and elsewhere, showed that he was a rigid purist, and could imagine no standards for American English save those in favor in England. Nor could Hawthorne,4 or Thoreau, or Longfellow, or Holmes.
Whitman, the precise contemporary of Melville, was more language-conscious than any of the other writers so far mentioned, and it fitted into his romantic confidence in democracy to praise the iconoclastic and often uncouth American speechways of his time. Two formal treatises on the subject survive, beside a number of notes and reports of conversations. In November, 1885, he contributed a paper to the North American Review under the title of “Slang in America,” and three years later he included it in “November Boughs.”1 Thirty years before, in the period of “Leaves of Grass,” he prepared a lecture entitled “An American Primer,” and at various times afterward he seems to have devoted himself to its revision. But it was apparently never delivered, and the manuscript did not get into print until 1904, twelve years after his death, when it was published in the Atlantic Monthly by his faithful retainer, Horace Traubel.2 Both the paper and the lecture, like all of Whitman’s prose writings, are somewhat vague and flowery, but their central purpose remains plain enough, to wit, to make war upon the old American subservience to Eighteenth Century English pedantry, and open the way for the development of a healthy and vigorous autochthonous language in the United States. In “Slang in America” he said:
Language, be it remember’d, is not an abstract construction of the learn’d, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea.
He labored this theme in many conversations with Traubel in Mickle street, and once said:
I sometimes think the “Leaves” is only a language experiment — that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech — an American, a cosmopolitan (the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas, need a tongue according — yes, what is more, will have such a tongue — will not be satisfied until it is evolved.
To which may be added the following from “An American Primer”:
The words continually used among the people are, in numberless cases, not words used in the dictionaries by authority. There are just as many words in daily use, not inscribed in the dictionary, and seldom or never in print. Also, the forms of grammar are never persistently obeyed, and cannot be. The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of laws, even violating them if necessary.
But these bold words found little realization in Whitman’s actual practise. His prose certainly fell very far short of colloquial ease. In his early days he wrote the dingy, cliché-laden journalese of the era, and after his discovery of Carlyle he indulged himself in a heavy and sometimes absurd imitation of the Scotsman’s gnarled and tortured style. Not many specimens of the popular speech that he professed to admire ever got into his writings, either in prose or in verse. He is remembered for a few, e.g., yawp and gawk, but for a few only.1 His own inventions were mainly cacophonous miscegenations of roots and suffixes, e.g., scientism, presidentiad, civilizee, venerealee, erysipalite, to memorandize, diminute (adjective), omnigenous, aidancy, poemet and infidelistic, and not one of them has ever gained any currency. Moreover, more than half his innovations were simply borrowings from finishing-school French, with a few examples of Spanish and Italian added for good measure. Dr. Louise Pound, in a study of his French loans,2 suggests that he must have picked them up during his brief newspaper days in New Orleans, but it is hard to believe that they were used with any frequency by journalistic colleagues who actually knew French. Most of them were what Dr. Pound, in another place, describes as “social words,” which is to say, pearls from the vocabulary of the primeval society editors of his time, e.g., coiffeur, restaurateur, mon cher, mélange, rapport, faubourg, début, distingué, morceau, bijouterie, résumé, ensemble, insouciance, cortège, haut ton, soirée, ennui, aplomb, douceur and éclat.3 A number of these have been naturalized, but I doubt that Whitman had anything to do with the process. Nor did he succeed any better with his Spanish and Italian favorites, e.g., camerado, libertad, Americano, romanza and cantabile. Like Poe, he was fond of airing foreign words chat struck him as tony, but like Poe again, he wrote a stiff and artificial English, and seldom showed any command of the vernacular riches that he professed to admire.1
Of the lesser American writers who flourished in the era running from the publication of “Thanatopsis” in 1817 to that of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, only the professed humorists showed any active interest in American speechways. N. P. Willis, like J. K. Paulding, resented the gross libels of all things American in the current English reviews and travel books, and sought revenge in 1835, in his “Pencillings By the Way,” by giving the English a dose of their own medicine. This work, which still repays reading, is an impudent and often satirical picture of the English life of the time, especially on the more pretentious intellectual levels, and in it there are some effective hits, as when, for example, Willis compliments the second Lord Grenville, who had visited America, on speaking “American English … with all the careless correctness and fluency of a vernacular tongue, [and without] a particle of the cockney drawl, half Irish and half Scotch, with which many Englishmen speak.” “Pencillings By the Way” made a considerable uproar in England, and was attacked violently by the Quarterly Review,2 but it seems to have been read, and there was an English reprint so recently as 1943.3 It would be, however, an exaggeration to call Willis an advocate of American independence in speech; on the contrary, he wrote in what he regarded as the best English fashion of the period, and disdained the neologisms that were beginning to show themselves in the work of the popular humorists. His own contributions to the vocabulary were such banalities as biggerness, haughty culture (for high culture), other-people-ness, un-get-about-able, super finery, whirlsated (confused), Caesar-or-nobody-dom and to brickify. He was denounced for these confections by a reviewer in Putnam’s Monthly twenty years after the appearance of “Pencillings By the Way.”1 But the same reviewer revealed the prissy standards still prevailing in the American reviews by denouncing him likewise, but quite irrationally, for “the recurring substitution of a passive verb, with a preposition and the objective case of the actor, instead of the usual active verb with the actor in the nominative — thus: ‘That was repeatedly heard by me’ instead of ‘I repeatedly heard that.’ ” No one, as yet, has searched the American reviews of the pre-Civil War era, as the English reviews have been searched by Pickering, Cairns and Read, but some light upon their position with regard to American English is to be found in a paper by Read, dealing, inter alia, with their treatment of the early American dictionaries.2 On the appearance of Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1806, it was generally denounced for its inclusion of Americanisms, and the same treatment was given to the works of John Elliott, Caleb Alexander, William Woodbridge and the American Samuel Johnson, Jr., for somewhat less conspicuous offendings. Both the American Review and the Monthly Anthology protested bitterly against the listing of composuist, a substitute for composer, then “much used” according to Pickering, “at some of our colleges,” but now happily obsolete. The Monthly Magazine laid down the doctrine that, save for a few “technical and scientific terms,… any other species of American words are manifest corruptions, and to embalm these by the lexicographic process would only be a waste of time and abuse of talents.” Rather curiously, two eminent p
edagogues of the time took the other line. One was Jeremiah Atwater, president of Middlebury College in Vermont, who declared that “local words are always with propriety inserted in dictionaries, especially when marked as being local.” The other was Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, already mentioned as giving aid and. comfort to Paulding. He drew up, in 1807, and not only signed himself but had nine members of his faculty sign, a letter to Webster saying:
The insertion of local terms in your small dictionary we approve. No good reason can be given why a person who meets with words of this kind should not be able to find their meaning in a dictionary — the only place where they can usually be found at all.
It was not, however, such scholastic bigwigs as Webster and Dwight who forced the seasoning of American writing with the pungent herbs of the vernacular, nor was it such literary rebels as Paulding and Whitman; it was the lowly humorists whose buffooneries began to appear in the newspapers soon after the War of 1812, and whose long line culminated in James Russell Lowell and Samuel L. Clemens. The first of them whose work got between covers was Seba Smith, who published his “Letters of Major Jack Downing” in 1830. Of him Will D. Howe has said:
Almost immediately after his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1818 he began to contribute a series of political articles in the New England dialect to the papers of Portland, Maine. These illustrated fairly well the peculiarities of New England speech and manners, and doubtless had a great influence in encouraging similar sketches in other parts of the country. Smith was in several ways a pioneer. He led the way for “The Biglow Papers” and all those writings which have exploited back-country New England speech and character. He anticipated, in the person of Jack Downing, confidant of Jackson, David Ross Locke’s Petroleum V. Nasby, confidant of Andrew Johnson. He was the first in America, as Finley Peter Dunne, with his Mr. Dooley, is the latest, to create a homely character and through him to make shrewd comments on politics and life.1
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