Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/179

 road, where one group of our native explorers branches off into the periphrastic Fifth Avenue style, which seems, at any rate, to fit them "like a glove," while the other group goes careening through Main Street on a "flivver," the entire stylistic baggage on the running board, naked to dust and derision. Both groups, singular to relate, are still animated by an inherited "Emersonian" desire to be themselves. Both are moving toward that consummation, without clear prevision of the end, with little acknowledged guidance, blazing the trail as they go, without any fear of trespass, rather with strengthening sense that nothing in all the wide forest is marked Verboten, and cheering one another from time to time with their marching song: "Get your effect, and with God be the rest." I should like, inter alia, to compare our aristocratic with our proletarian slang, and to inquire which is the more savory. But I will summarize our main tendency toward a universal American style, cutting across all dialectal differences, by remarking that John Adams or Chesterfield would probably have said: "Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re"; James Russell Lowell or Disraeli might have said, "The iron hand in the kid glove;" but Theodore Roosevelt said: "Speak softly and carry a big stick;" and in an American novel of the season I find: "The wallop in the velvet mitt." It sounds like "home."

For the recreation of the curious, I will add an exercise in the higher criticism, which consists in