American Language Read Online Free Page B

considerably from the standard adopted in England.” The others, however, sought to stay the flood by invective against Marshall, and, later, against his rival biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The
Annual
, in 1808, pronounced its anathema upon “that torrent of barbarous phraseology” which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which threatened “to destroy the purity of the English language.” In Bancroft’s “Life of George Washington” (1808), according to the
British Critic
, there were “new words, or old words in a new sense,” all of them inordinately offensive to Englishmen, “at almost every page,” and in Joel Barlow’s “The Columbiad” (1807; reprinted in England in 1809) the
Edinburgh
found “a great multitude of words which are radically and entirely new, and as utterly foreign as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese,” and “the perversion of a still greater number of English words from their proper use or signification, by employing nouns substantive for verbs, adjectives for substantives, &c.” The
Edinburgh
continued:
    We have often heard it reported that our transatlantic brethren were beginning to take it amiss that their language should still be called English; and truly we must say that Mr. Barlow has gone far to take away that ground of reproach. The groundwork of his speech, perhaps may be English, as that of the Italian is Latin; but the variations amount already to more than a change of dialect; and really make a glossary necessary for most untravelled readers.
    Some of Barlow’s novelties, it must be granted, were fantastic enough — for example,
to vagrate
and
to ameed
among the verbs,
imkeeled
and
homicidious
among the adjectives, and
coloniarch
among the nouns. But many of the rest were either obsolete words whose use was perfectly proper in heroic poetry, or nonce-words of obvious meaning and utility. Some of the terms complained of by the
Edinburgh
are in good usage at this moment — for example,
to utilize
,
to hill, to breeze, to spade
(the soil),
millenial, crass
, and
scow
. 23 But to the English reviewers of the time words so unfamiliar were not only deplorable on their own account; they were also proofs that the Americans were a sordid and ignoble people with no capacity for prose, or for any of the other elegances of life. 24 “When the vulgar and illiterate lose the force of their animal spirits,” observed the
Quarterly
in 1814, reviewing J. K. Paulding’s “Lay of the Scottish Fiddle” (1813), “they become mere clods.… The founders of American society brought to the composition of their nation few seeds of good taste, and no rudiments of liberal science.” To which may be added Southey’s judgment in a letter to Landor in 1812: “See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” Landor, it should be said, entered a protest against this, and on a somewhat surprising ground, considering the general view. “Americans,” he said, “speak our language; they read ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” But he hastened to add, “I detest the American character as much as you do.”
    The War of 1812 naturally exacerbated this animosity, though when the works of Irving and Cooper began to be known in England some of the English reviewers moderated their tone. Irving’s “Knickerbocker” was not much read there until 1815, and not much talked about until “The Sketch-Book” followed it in 1819,but Scott had received a copy of it from Henry Brevoort in 1813, and liked it and said so. Byron mentioned it in a letter to his publisher, Murray, on August 7, 1821. We are told by Thomas Love Peacock that Shelley was “especially fond of the novels of Charles Brockden Brown,