American Language (26 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
In brief, the national feeling, long delayed in appearing, leaped into being at last in truly 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 keynote 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. Unbounded confidence in the material development of the country … prevailed throughout 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 greatness.
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Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually taking form, and with the memory of old wrongs still shutting them off from England, the new American writers turned 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, Irving, Cooper, John P. Kennedy and many another 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 shows, 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 every British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. 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 in his decorous Baptist pulpit to protest that so much patriotism amounted to chauvinism and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. The debate upon the Oregon question gave a gaudy chance to the new breed of super-patriots, and they raged unchecked until the time of the Civil War. Thornton, in his Glossary, quotes a typical speech in Congress, the subject being the American eagle and the orator being the Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas. I give a few strophes:
The proudest bird upon the mountain is upon the American ensign, and not one feather shall fall from her plumage there. She is American in design, and an emblem of wildness and freedom. I say again, she has not perched herself upon American standards to die there. Our great Western valleys were never scooped out for her burial place. Nor were the everlasting, untrodden mountains piled for her monument. Niagara shall not pour her endless waters for her requiem; nor shall our ten thousand rivers weep to the ocean in eternal tears. No, sir, no! Unnumbered voices shall come up from river, plain, and mountain, echoing the songs of our triumphant deliverance, wild lights from a thousand hill-tops will betoken the rising of the sun of freedom.
This tall talk was by no means reserved for occasions of state; it decorated the everyday speech of the people, especially in the Jackson country to the southward and beyond the mountains. It ran, there, to grotesque metaphors and far-fetched exaggerations, and out of it came a great many Americanisms that still flourish. Thornton gives a specimen from a Florida newspaper,
c
. 1840, the speaker being a local fee-faw-fo-fum:
This is
me
, and no mistake! Billy Earthquake, Esq., commonly called Little Billy, all the way from the No’th Fork of Muddy Run!… Whoop! won’t
nobody
come out and fight me? Come out, some of you, and die decently, for I’m spiling for a fight.… I’m a poor man, it’s a fact, and smell like a wet dog, but I can’t be run over.… Maybe you never heard of the time the horse kicked me, and put both his hips out of jint — if it ain’t true, cut me up for catfish bait! W-h-o-o-p! I’m the very infant that refused its milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old rye.… Talk about grinning the bark off a treė — ’tain’t nothing; one squint of mine at
a bull’s heel would blister it. Oh, I’m one of your toughest sort — live forever, and then turn to a white-oak post. I’m the ginewine article, a real double-acting engine, and I can out-run, out-jump, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, and drink more whiskey and keep soberer than any man in these localities.
Another noble example comes from Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” the time being
c
. 1852:
Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentle-men, and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m ’bout to turn myself loose!
To which may be added the testimony of Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, an American who left the United States for England in 1861, and published “Forty Years of American Life” there in 1864:
The language [of the West], like the country, has a certain breadth and magnificence. A Western man “sleeps so sound, it would take an earthquake to wake him” … “Stranger,” he says, “in b’ar hunts I am numerous.” … He tells of a person “as cross as a b’ar with two cubs and a sore tail.” He “laughs like a hyena over a dead nigger.” He “walks through a fence like a falling tree through a cobweb.” He “goes the whole hog.”… “Bust me wide open,” he says, “if I didn’t bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin’ savagerous.”
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This extravagance of metaphor, with its naïve bombast, had but little influence, of course, upon the more decorous native literati. It was borrowed eagerly by the humorous writers, and especially by those who performed regularly in the newspapers, and at the end of the period it was to leave its marks upon two literary artists of the highest quality, Whitman and Mark Twain, but the generality of American authors eschewed it very diligently. Most of them, in fact, looked back toward Addison, or, perhaps more accurately, toward Johnson. The dominant critics of the time — of whom the
Baptist, Griswold, was a good example — followed Eighteenth Century models, and one searches their sonorous periods for even the slightest concession to colloquialism. The grand master of them all, Poe, achieved a style so rotund and ornate that many a contemporary English leader-writer must have envied it. Nor was there any visible yielding to the
sermo vulgus
in Emerson, Irving, Bryant, Cooper and Longfellow. “Whatever differences there may be,” says Sir William Craigie,
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“between the language of Longfellow and Tennyson, of Emerson and Ruskin, they are differences due to style and subject, to a personal choice or command of words, and not to any real divergence in the means of expression.” But meanwhile, says Sir William, there was going on
a rise and rapid growth within the United States of new types of literature which would either give fuller scope to the native element by mingling it with the conventional, or would boldly adopt it as a standard in itself.… The runnels of popular speech, which had trickled underground for a century or more, come again to the light of day; they are joined by many more, which have sprung up in the same obscurity; and together they swell into a stream which at its highest flood may well seem to change and obliterate the old banks and landmarks of the language.
Henry James, in “The Question of Our Speech,” had said much the same thing a quarter of a century before (1905):
Keep in sight the interesting historical truth that no language, so far back as our acquaintance with history goes, has known any such ordeal, any such stress and strain, as was to await the English in this huge new community it was so unsuspectingly to help, at first, to father and mother. It came
over
, as the phrase is, came over originally without fear and without guile — but to find itself transplanted to spaces it had never dreamed, in its comparative humility, of covering, to conditions it had never dreamed, in its comparative innocence, of meeting; to find itself grafted, in short, on a social and political order that was both without precedent and example and incalculably expansive.
Thus, on the levels below the Olympians, a wild and lawless development of the language went on, and many of the uncouth words and phrases that it brought to birth gradually forced themselves into more or less good usage. “The
jus et norma loquendi
,” says W. R. Morfill, the English philologian, “do not depend upon scholars.” Particularly in a country where scholarship is strange, cloistered and timorous, and the overwhelming majority of the people are engaged upon new and highly exhilarating tasks, far
away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their hearts. The old hegemony of the Tidewater gentry, North and South, had been shaken by the revolt of the frontier under Jackson, and what remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the South and the still narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, who were presently recognized as a definite caste of
intelligentsia
, self-charged with carrying the 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, described 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 repute. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. W. C. 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 austere retreat of the literati, but the dignity of speech cultivated there had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper was 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 really 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 denounced it specifically for its bad example, and cited, among its crimes against the language, such inventions as
to doxologize
and
to funeralize
. To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler, who was professor of rhetoric at Amherst, added
to missionate
and
consociational
.
This pressure from below eventually broke down the defenses of the purists, and forced the new national idiom upon them. Pen in hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of the hated English reviewers, 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.”
A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the
Congressional Globe
, in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque literature of humor which began with Thomas C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with the pious horror of Dean Alford.
To citizenize
was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it. Bartlett quotes
to doxologize
from the
Christian Disciple
, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40’s.
To funeralize
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and
to pastor
, along with the aforesaid
to missionate
and
consociational
, were other contributions of the evangelical pulpit; perhaps it also produced
hell-roaring
and
hellion
, the latter of which was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher.
To deacon
, a verb of decent mien in
colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor of the time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate,
e.g.
, to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to extend one’s fences
sub rosa
, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary, in
-ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous
and
-ment
. Such inventions as
to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee
(a sort of diminutive for
coat
) and
citified
appeared in the popular vocabulary and even got into more or less respectable usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited
publishment
and
releasement
with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were made by the simple process of back formation, as,
to resurrect, to excurt, to resolute, to burgle
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and
to enthuse
.