Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/171

 every clever young journalist has tried now and then to write a "Chestertonian" column.

But now if we look around at home, what have we done in the last hundred and fifty years when we have tried to express ourselves? What styles have we invented which confess a representative American outlook as "Johnsonese" or "Macaulayese" confesses a representative British outlook? We can distinguish the styles of Franklin, John Adams, and Webster from one another but not, with any assurance, from that of some British contemporary. Franklin, for example, was for the greater part of his life a colonial Englishman, and though he struck out many phrases and maxims saturated in the color and spirit of the American provinces, and though he is a genuine source of our most vital native tendency, his homely idiomatic material style associates itself with the realistic bourgeois movement of early eighteenth century English prose, and does not steadily distinguish itself from the gait of Defoe. Most of the able statesmen and orators from John Adams to Webster represent, stylistically, an essentially undifferentiated American classicism, which did not fit with the closeness of a personal garment, nor with the distinction of a national garment, and which has, for better or for worse, disappeared. Among the older romanticists, Poe and Hawthorne, most musical of our prose writers, perfected, as a dominant trait of their styles, the cadence of the later English "Gothic" novels; but since their time no American prose writer has