"directly" and "expect," and knows exactly what he means when he says "sick" and "bug," or rather knows exactly why he does not say them. We should be "very disappointed" if he did not do these things; it is all part of the British atmosphere; it goes with the very smell of the book. These things are not good or bad, right or wrong, in themselves; they are merely appropriate, or the reverse. And Americans will generally speak well when they are taught to look for the best in the speech of their neighbours, pruning the more luxuriant growths of dialect and tempering their speech in the glowing heat of the common literary tradition; no longer reluctant to speak well because "good" English is unnatural and unattainable, but conscious that a really good English, such as the world will value according to their worth as individuals and as a nation, is their rightful heritage to enter upon and enjoy.

Great things have been expected of American English in the past. A Frenchman, Roland de la Platière (1791), saw in America, a land so fortunately situated, so happily governed, with a people so constituted that they "fraternized with the universe" and presumably to be trusted to benefit by association with the primitive virtues of Indians and negroes, the country which was most likely to develop its speech into a universal language. Whitman, in the notes published as An American Primer, dug deep in the recesses of language for a word-hoard that should be distinctly American, and rolled the aboriginal names-Monongahela-with venison richness upon his palate. He saw an America cleared of all names that smack of Europe, an American vocabulary enriched with many words not in the print of dictionaries.

American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of words. . . . Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect-words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national bloodwords that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.

No such drastic Americanization of the language as was prophesied has come to pass, or is likely to come to pass. The

'In the senses of as soon as and suppose, not unheard, indeed, in America.

old dream of an America penitùs divisa was grievously troubled at Manila Bay and ended for ever at Château Thierry. A literary America apart was never even a possibility. Henceforward there is less excuse-if there ever was any-for emphasizing 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 American 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 counters; he will always be new-minting them. He is on the lookout for words that say something; he has "a sort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets," which the hypercritical 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 British slang, but words that are things, images; grotesque, preposterous, perhaps, but born 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 newspaper 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 perhaps 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

wrote somewhere the other day of the "whitey-brown" style of American college professors. Such a charge is not directed against too great linguistic daring. A lack of pith, of raciness, an insecure hold on idiom in some of its more slippery turns might very properly be remarked in not a little American writing; in short, an anxiety to play safe in a dangerous game. There is nothing unnatural in an association of boldness and timidity. Both, however, represent excess. The discovery of the mean is the problem, and that will move toward a solution as the standards which express it are more zealously and intelligently sought within the history and present practice of American English itself?

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

For extended bibliographies of all the writers discussed in this volume consult The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21) issued in four volumes by the publishers of this abridgment. In the following lists the name of the publisher is given only when the book is still in print.

General Authorities

Anthologies: Library of Southern Literature, compiled by E. A. Alderman, C. W. Kent, and others, 1908-13, 16 vols.; Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913 [1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921] and Yearbook of American Poetry, edited by W. S. Braithwaite, 1913-(Small, Maynard); American Orations, edited by A. Johnston and J. A. Woodburn, 4 vols. (Putnam); American Familiar Verse, edited by B. Matthews, 1904 (Longmans, Green); The Oxford Book of American Essays, edited by B. Matthews, 1914 (Oxford); Representative Plays by American Dramatists, edited by M. J. Moses, 1917—, 3 vols. (Dutton); American Literary Criticism, edited by W. M. Payne, 1904 (Longmans, Green); Representative American Plays, edited by A. H. Quinn, 1917 (Century); An American Anthology 1787-1900, edited by E. C. Stedman, 1900 (Houghton Mifflin); A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, edited by E. C. Stedman and Ellen M. Hutchinson, 1889-1890, II vols.; Poems of American History, edited by B. E. Stevenson, 1908 (Houghton Mifflin); Colonial Prose and Poetry, edited by W. P. Trent and B. W. Wells, 1901, 3 vols. (Crowell); Southern Writers, edited by W. P. Trent, 1905 (Macmillan).

History and Criticism: A Dictionary of American Authors, by O. F. Adams, 5th edition, 1905 (Houghton Mifflin); A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, by S. A. Allibone, 1857-71, 3 vols., and Supplement, by J. F. Kirk, 1891, 2 vols. (5 vols., Lippincott); American Prose Masters, by W. C. Brownell, 1909 (Scribner); Cyclopædia of American Literature, by E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, 1855, 2 vols., Supplement 1866, revised edition of entire work by M. L. Simons, 1875, 2 vols.; Leading American Novelists, by J. Erskine, 1910 (Holt); A History of the Theatre in America, by A. Hornblow, 1919, 2 vols. (Lippincott); The Spirit of American Literature, by J. Macy, 1911 (Boni and Liveright); American Lands and Letters, by D. G. Mitchell, 1897-99, 2 vols. (Scribner); A History of American Literature Since 1870, by F. L. Pattee, 1915 (Century); American Literature 16071885, by C. F. Richardson, 1887-89, 2 vols. (Putnam); American Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism, by W. Riley, 1915 (Holt); A Manual of American Literature, edited by T. Stanton, 1909 (Putnam); Poets of America, by E. C. Stedman, 1885 (Houghton Mifflin); A History of American Literature 16071865, by W. P. Trent, 1903 (Appleton); Great American Writers, by W. P.