Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/158

 570 The English Language in America old dream of an America penitHs divisa was grievously troubled at Manila Bay and ended for ever at Chateau Thierry. A liter- ary America apart was never even a possibility. Hencefor- ward there is less excuse — if there ever was any — for emphasiz- ing differences merely as differences. The burden of this chapter has been to crave a certain intelligent respect for what exists. And it is directed mainly, perhaps, at the theorizings of men of letters, of all amateur critics of language, and at the practice of most school teachers, who so peculiarly hold the destinies of American speech in their hands. American writers have generally been bold enough. Emerson, Whitman, Mark Twain — but that is the subject of this whole work and needs no recapitulation in a final chapter. The wish to see things afresh and for himself is indeed so characteristic of the Amer- ican that neither in his speech nor his most considered writing does he need any urging to seek out ways of his own. He refuses to carry on his verbal traffic with the well-worn coun- ters ; he will always be new-minting them. He is on the look- out for words that say something ; he has ' ' a §ort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets, " which the hy- percritical authors of the "King's English" ascribe to Kipling, who is ' ' americanizing us. ' ' The American's slang is not made up of words that look like words, as is the case with much Bri- tish slang, but words that are things, images; grotesque, pre- posterous, perhaps, but bom of a quick fancy. He has an Elizabethan love of exuberant language. The highfalutin' spread-eagleism of the old-fashioned Fourth of July oration, the epistolary style of Lorenzo Altisonant in his Letters of Squire Pedant, who "merged his plumous implement of chirography into the atramented fluid, " the sort of polysyllabic eloquence of which Holmes and Lowell made such excellent fun, now linger perhaps only in the columns of the rural weekly news- paper and in a Congressional speech which is delivered to be heard a long way off. There is in this view of the American speech a good deal of carefully cherished tradition. No American writer has per- haps played with words as daringly as Meredith or expressed himself as whimsically as Carlyle. There is in American speech and writing a good deal of timidity, as well as audacity, quite as much colourlessness as picturesqueness. A British critic