Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/145

 Diversities of English 557 Modem English are fairly clear. Then came a period of great expansion. The language was carried, farther than the Roman legionaries carried theirs, into the remotest parts of the world ; it came to be spoken by more people than ever before in the history of the world could hold comfortable converse together. The really surprising thing is not that the result exhibits some variety but that, when the lapse of time afforded opportunity for, and indeed effected, so much change, when groups widely scattered might so easily have completely lost contact when there was so little external compulsion of any kind to keep even the literary language true to itself, there should have resulted a literary language that is almost uniform and a num- ber of spoken dialects which never become unintelligible one to all the rest. In 1789 Noah Webster prophesied that there would develop, "in a course of time, a language in North Amer- ica, as different from the future language of England, as modem Dutch, Danish, and Swedish are from German or from one another." When it was made this was not a foolish guess; all analogy supported it. That it has not come about, that every passing day adds to the unlikelihood of its realization, is one of the things that the observer of the ways of language thinks about when he is invited to be very miserable. Clearly, matters are not so bad as they quite easily might have been. But this is speaking in the large. What of details ? Excel- lence is largely a matter of details. A literary language "al- most uniform" — why not entirely so? "A number of spoken dialects" — why any dialects at all? Confronted with a de- mand for perfect uniformity — one of our academicians very expressly makes it and deplores the fact that Americans use "back of" and "toward" and "spool of thread" instead of British "behind" and "towards" and "reel of cotton" — what can we say ? Obviously, such a demand more nearly concerns the literary English of books than the vernacular of daily in- tercourse; no one seriously hopes to see us all regimented into speaking exactly alike. But even in the former case it is proper to ask not only how far uniformity may be possible, but also how far an absolute uniformity, as opposed to something fairly close to it, is really desirable. On what ground shall this agreement be effected? Few would now feel, as some did in ' Dissertations, pp. 22-23.