Page:America Today, Observations and Reflections.djvu/226

 ought to be allowed to use it "without fear and without reproach."

Take, now, a colloquialism. How formal and colourless is the English phrase "I have enjoyed myself" beside the American "I have had a good time"! Each has its uses, no doubt. I am far from suggesting that the one should drive out the other. It is precisely the advantage of our linguistic position that it so enormously enlarges the stock of semi-synonyms at our disposal. To reject a forcible Americanism merely because we could, at a pinch, get on without it, is—Mr. Lang will understand the forcible Scotticism—to "sin our mercies."

Mr. Lang is under a certain illusion, I think, in his belief that in hardening our hearts against Americanisms we should raise no barrier between ourselves and the classical authors of America. He says: "Let us remark that they [Americanisms] do not occur in Hawthorne, Poe, Lowell, Longfellow, Prescott, and Emerson, except when these writers are consciously reproducing conversations in dialect." He made the same remark on a previous occasion; when his opponent (see the Academy, March 30, 1895) opened a volume of Hawthorne and a volume of Emerson, and in five minutes found in Hawthorne "He had named his two children, one for Her Majesty and one for Prince Albert," and in Emerson "Nature tells every secret once. Yes; but in man she tells it all the time." The latter phrase is one which Mr. Lang explicitly puts under his ban. He