Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/58

 470 Scholars The forward look is equally characteristic of his work in orthography and lexicography, which assumed that neither in meaning nor in form is language to be dominated by its past. He consistently and lucidly favoured a reformed speUing, but here too his common sense and regard for present actualities controlled his doctrine, and he never made among the lay pub- lic any propaganda looking to the adoption of a phonetic sys- tem. In the same way, when he came to the making of The Century Dictionary, he conceived it as bound to offer, not a standard of "correctness" derived from classical periods in the past, but a compendium of the actual use and movement of the word throughout its history. Together with this kinetic con- ception both of the vocabulary and of the semantics of his Dictionary, Whitney gave the most minute attention to his etymologies and definitions. Among the editors of Webster's Dictionary in 1864, Whitney and Daniel Coit Oilman had had special charge of the revision of the definitions ; for the Century Whitney obtained the assistance of his brother Josiah in de- fining the technological words, and the assistance of other ex- perts in their special fields. The result was an extensive vocabu- lary intensively defined. The etymologies are brought up to the state of knowledge in 1891. The quotations (undated) illustrate rather than fully set forth the semantic history of the word; the Century in this respect is surpassed by the Oxford Dictionary, to which alone among English dictionaries it is in any respect second. Whitney's own writing is a model of lucid exposition. It neither has nor needs adventitious ornament ; it does not even need the play of humour to make his most technical essays readable. There are to be sure, flashes of a polemic wit, but what keeps the text alive and at work is the reader's sense that he is in powerful hands that bear him surely along. Whitney seems to divine that particular analysis of his material which will carry the reader cleanly through it. The ultimate impres- sion left by his writings is that of a powerful intellect controlling enormous masses of fact and moving among them as their mas- ter. To be interesting, such power needs no play other than its own. English philology of the nineteenth century in America began with old-fashioned descriptive rhetoric and with in-