Smith was imitated at once by Charles A. Davis, who borrowed not only his method and manner but also his Jack Downing, and in a little while he had a long stream of followers — Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Charles Henry Smith (Bill Arp), George W. Bagby, George W. Harris (Sut Lovengood), Joseph G. Glover, Frances Miriam Whitcher (the Widow Bedott), Samuel G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), Benjamin P. Shillaber (Mrs. Partington), Thomas C. Haliburton (Sam Slick),2 Charles G. Halpine (Private Miles O’Reilly), Charles G. Leland (Hans Breitmann), Henry W. Shaw (Josh Billings), David R. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby), Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Mortimer Thompson (Philander Doesticks),1 and George H. Derby (John Phoenix). Most of these created characters which, like Smith’s Major Downing, were their spokesmen, and as humorists multiplied their characters began to represent many national types — the Southern cracker, the Western frontiersman, the Negro, the Irishman, the German, as well as the New Englander. The result was a steady infiltration of the new American words and ways of speech, and the laying of foundations for a genuinely colloquial and national style of writing.2 The first masterpiece of this national school was Lowell’s “The Biglow Papers,” Series I of which appeared in 1848. Lowell not only attempted to depict with some care the peculiar temperament and point of view of the rustic New Englander; he also made an extremely successful effort to report Yankee speech.1 His brief prefatory treatise on its peculiarities of pronunciation, though it included a few observations that had been made long before him by Witherspoon, was the first to deal with the subject with any approach to comprehensiveness, and in his introduction to Series II he expanded this preliminary note to a long and interesting essay, with a glossary of nearly 200 terms. In that essay he said:
In choosing the Yankee dialect I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, “divinely illiterate.” … Whether it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision and force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word) to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new suckers from the old root in spite of us.… The first postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a living part of their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg.2
Unhappily, Lowell labored under the delusion that he had sufficiently excused the existence of any given Americanism when he had proved that it was old English, and so a large part of his essay was given over to that popular but vain exercise. But despite his folly in this respect and his timorousness in other directions3 he did a great service to the common tongue of the country, and must be numbered among its true friends.1 His writing in his own person, however, showed but little sign of it: he gradually developed a very effective prose style, but it did not differ materially from that of his New England contemporaries. The business of introducing the American language to good literary society was reserved for Clemens — and, as everyone knows, Clemens had a long, long wait below the salt before it ever occurred to any of the accepted authorities of his generation that he was not a mere zany like Browne and Locke, but a first-rate artist. Unless my records are in error, the first academic dignitary to admit formally that he belonged at the head of the table was the late William Lyon Phelps, who did so in “Essays on Modern Novelists” in 1910, just as old Mark departed this earth for bliss eternal.2 Since then his importance has come to be generally recognized, even by the authors of school and college “literature” books, though a number of the heirs and converts to the standards of the Haircloth Age, notably Van Wyck Brooks, have continued to hack away at him. In 1929 the members of the English department of the Graduate School of the University of Missouri, led by Dr. Robert L. Ramsay and Miss (later Dr.) Frances Guthrie Emberson, undertook an exhaustive study of his vocabulary, and nine years later it was completed. It bears the title of “A Mark Twain Lexicon” and is a very interesting and valuable work,3 for it shows that Mark not only made free use of the swarming Americanisms (and especially the Westernisms) of his time, but also contributed a number of excellent inventions to the store. In a long preliminary note there is a detailed study of his use of both sorts of words and phrases. He was the first American author of world rank to write a genuinely colloquial and native American; there is little if any trace in his swift and vivid prose of classical English example. He had a magnificent artistry, and few other Americans have written so well, but, once he had thrown off the journalese of his first years, he achieved his effects without any resort to the conventional devices. Drs. Ramsay and Emberson, in an elaborate preface to their lexicon, attempt a detailed analysis of his vocabulary. They show that of the 7802 words they list as characteristic no less than 2329 appear to be Americanisms, with 2743 others possibly deserving that classification. Unhappily, their study was made before the publication of the DAE was begun, but it is highly probable that a reexamination of the materials today would produce relatively little change in these figures, for of all the authors listed in the DAE’s bibliography Mark Twain occupies by far the largest space — more than Bret Harte, the runner-up,1 and a great deal more than Cooper, Holmes, Howells, Lowell or the whole corps of early humorists.2 Save for “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” a calculated tour de force, somewhat toilsomely out of character, there is not a book of his that did not yield something to the DAE’s searchers, and some of his major books yielded rich stores. “The flavor of his style,” say Ramsay and Emberson, “is always racy of the American soil, and it owes this quality largely to the prodigious store of native phrases and idioms which he employs.” Nor did he employ them without deliberate purpose. He was, in fact, always very language-conscious, and wrote upon the subject not infrequently. So early as 1872, in “Roughing It,” he was testifying to his delight in “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains,” and in a prefatory note to “Huckleberry Finn,” in 1884, he showed a pardonable pride in his grasp of it by warning his readers that what followed attempted to differentiate between “the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four modified varieties of this last.”1 “The shadings,” he said, “have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.” There was a chapter, “Concerning the American Language,” crowded out of “A Tramp Abroad” in 1880, which antedated all the enormous accumulation of latter-day writing on the subject. In it he said:
Our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the South and far to the West have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meaning of many old ones.… A nation’s language is … not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.… English and American are separate languages.… When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can’t understand me at all.2
Mark’s influence upon the development of American prose was very large, but most of his im
mediate contemporaries fought against it. One of those who followed him, though somewhat gingerly and at a safe distance, was Howells, who came out in the Editor’s Study of Harper’s Magazine, in January, 1886, for American autonomy in speech. “Languages, while they live,” he said, “are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people,… and the common people will use them freely, as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.… We have only to leave our studies, editorial or other, and go into the shops and fields to find the ‘spacious times of great Elizabeth’ again.”3 The spirit of the time, however, was against this yielding to the national speech habits, and most of its other salient writers were not only careful conformists to English precept and example in their writing but abject colonials otherwise. A ludicrous but by no means untypical example was Henry Van Dyke, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., a Presbyterian pastor turned poet, pedagogue and literary politician, whose influence throughout the 1890–1910 period was enormous, and not only enormous but also incredible, for it is impossible to find anything in his numerous books, pamphlets and pronunciamentoes worth reading today.1 When, in 1923, there was a conference of English and American professors of English at Columbia University, he seized the opportunity to declare that “the proposal to make a new American language to fit our vast country may be regarded either as a specimen of American humor or as a serious enormity.”2 The assembled birchmen gave him a hearty round of applause, and one of them, Dr. Fred Newton Scott, of the University of Michigan, leaped up to denounce my burlesque translation of the Declaration of Independence into the American vulgate,3 which he took quite seriously, as a crime against humanity, fit “for the hair shirt and the lash, or tears of shame and self-abasement.”4 Needless to say, the learned pastor had the enthusiastic support of his colleagues of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A year or two later seven of them joined him in publishing “Academy Papers: Addresses on Language Problems,” a series of earnest pleas for a rigid yielding to English standards, with bitter flings at all the current American authors guilty of stooping to the use of Americanisms. The most idiotic chapter in this preposterous volume was by Van Dyke himself: in it he denounced Carl Sandburg with Calvinistic rancor, and said of “The Spoon River Anthology” (including “Ann Rutledge”!) that “to call it poetry is to manhandle a sacred word.”1 Brander Matthews, who was one of the contributors, had been an eager student of American speech-ways in the days before World War I,2 but the sound of the bugles filled him with colonial doubts that there could ever be any essential difference between the English of England and that of this great self-governing Dominion.3
The outbreak of World War II brought on another upsurge of colonialism, but this time it exhibited a certain weakness, and few authors of any dignity or authority were actively associated with it: indeed, its leaders were mainly writers of palpable trash. Nevertheless, it will probably keep on showing itself in the more or less beautiful letters of the country for a long while to come. After all, England is still the fount of honor for America, and almost the only native literati who disdain English approval altogether are those to whom it is plainly sour grapes. But there has certainly been a considerable improvement in independence and self-respect since the days when Lowell could write:
You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought;
With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;
Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean.1
The whole swing of American style, for a quarter century past, has been toward greater and greater freedom in the use of essentially national idioms. The tart admonitions of English purists —as, for example, in the Literary Supplement of the London Times — are no longer directed solely or even mainly to writers who need apology at home: the offenders now include many of the best we have yet produced. And they begin to get the understanding and approval of a larger and larger faction of intelligent Englishmen.2
7. THE POLITICAL FRONT
79. [William Gifford, the bitterly anti-American editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the story that at the close of the Revolution certain members of Congress proposed that the use of English be formally prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew substituted for it.] This charge appeared in the Quarterly in January, 1814, in the course of a review of “Inchiquen, the Jesuit’s Letters,… Containing a Favorable View of the Manners, Literature and State of Society of the United States,” brought out by Charles Jared Ingersoll in 1810.3 The review was a furious (and, at least in some part, apt and effective) onslaught upon the whole American scheme of things, and included the following:4
Nor have there been wanting projects … for getting rid of the English language, not merely by barbarizing it — as when they progress a bill,1 jeopardize a ship,2 guess a probability, proceed by grades,3 hold a caucus, conglaciate a wave,4 etc., when the president of Yale College talks of a conflagrative brand,5 and President Jefferson of belittling the productions of nature6 — but by abolishing the use of English altogether, and substituting a new language of their own. One person indeed had recommended the adoption of Hebrew, as being ready made to their hands, and considering the Americans, no doubt, as the “chosen people” of the new world.7
In 1934 Allen Walker Read called attention to evidence8 that Gifford had probably lifted this tale from the Marquis de Chastellux,9 who served as a major-general under Rochambeau during the Revolution and on his return to France after Yorktown published an account of his observations in America. In Volume II of that work, p. 203, there was the following passage:
The Americans … testify more surprise than peevishness at meeting with a foreigner who does not understand English. But if they are indebted for this opinion to a prejudice of education, a sort of national pride, that pride suffered not a little from the reflection, which frequently occurred, of the language of the country being that of their oppressors. Accordingly they avoided these expressions, You speak English; You understand English well; and I have often heard them say You speak American well; the American is not difficult to learn. Nay, they have carried it even so far as seriously to propose introducing a new language, and some persons were desirous, for the convenience of the public, that the Hebrew should be substituted for the English. The proposal was that it should be taught in the schools and made use of in all public acts. We may imagine that this project went no further, but we may conclude from the mere suggestion that the Americans could not express in a more energetic manner their aversion for the English.1
The substitution of Greek for Hebrew in this legend was apparently made by Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of the original John Jacob Astor. This was done in the essay, “The English Language in America,” that he contributed to a volume of “Cambridge Essays” in 1855.2 But Bristed’s reference to the matter, I suppose, was intended to be jocular, for he reported that Congress had rejected the proposal on the ground that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” Eight years before this another writer, this time a German named Franz Loher, had alleged in a book that, in Pennsylvania at least, an effort had been made to displace English with German.3 He said:
In the State Assembly, not long after the conclusion of peace, a motion was made to establish the German language as the official and legal language of Pennsylvania.… When the vote was taken on this question — whether the prevailing language in the Assembly, in the courts, and in the official records of Pennsylvania should be German — there was a tie. Half voted for the introduction of the German language.… Thereupon the Speaker of the Assembly, a certain Muhlenberg, cast the deciding vote in favor of the English language.
This Muhlenberg was Frederick Augustus Conrad (1750–1801), twice Speaker of the Pennsylvania House and later the first Speaker of the House of Re
presentatives at Washington, 1789–91 and again in 1793–95. The story was afloat for a long while, and many German-Americans believed it; indeed, there were those who execrated the memory of Muhlenberg, who was the son of the founder of Lutheranism in America, for killing so fine a chance to make the language of their Fatherland, and not English, the language of their adopted country. Finally, in 1931, Otto Lohr tracked the tale down to 1813, and discovered, as might have been expected, that it was a fable based upon a misunderstanding. The time was 1794 and the scene was Philadelphia, where Congress was in session. The proposal before it was not to make German the language of the United States, but simply to provide for the publication of some of the laws in a German translation, for the accommodation of immigrants — in Virginia, not Pennsylvania — who had not yet learned English. The whole story was later unearthed by Theodore G. Tappert and printed in the Lutheran of Philadelphia.1 A petition from the Virginia Germans, it appeared, was received on January 9, 1794, and on March 20 it was referred to a committee of three members, one of whom was John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (1746–1807), a brother to the speaker. The committee brought in a favorable report on April 1, but it was laid on the table. On December 1 a new committee was appointed, and on December 23 it likewise brought in a favorable report. This one was discussed by the House committee of the whole on January 13, 1795, and rejected by a vote of 41 ayes to 42 noes. It is possible that the Speaker cast the deciding vote, and that the story told by Loher thus originated, but it is not certain, for there is no record of a roll-call. In 1795 the project was again revived, but apparently it failed again, for an act of March 3 of that year, providing for the printing of the laws, made no mention of an edition in German.2
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