Brander Matthews

“ Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and the girl are lost in the darkness; and when Tom Sawyer suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single foot-print in the sand of the sea-shore. ”

“ The most timid of American authoresses has no doubt as to her use of railroad, conductor, grade, and to switch, despite her possible knowledge that in British usage the equivalents of these words are railway, guard, gradient, and to shunt. On the contrary, in fact, there is visible now and again, especially on the part of the most highly cultivated writers, an obvious delight in grasping an indigenous word racy of the soil. There is many an American expression of a pungent freshness which authors, weary of an outworn vocabulary, seize eagerly. ”

“ If, as Matthew Arnold declared, "the end and aim of all literature is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that—a criticism of life," then the literature likely to be most useful, most invigorating, and most satisfactory to Americans should be a criticism of life in America. Whether or not the spirit of colonialism still survives in these United States sufficiently to make the majority of readers here prefer books of British authorship is a question hardly worth asking, it seems to me, although there are some, both in London and in New York, who would answer it in the affirmative. ”

“ Bunner's book an unfailing variety, an unflagging ingenuity and an unforced humor, now rich and now delicate. We are delighted by wit, playful and incessant and never obtrusive. We discover ourselves to be dissolved in laughter, and often it is "the exquisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the reasoning faculty," as George Eliot called it in one of her letters. Never is it laughter that we ever feel ashamed of; near the smile there is often a tear, hidden, and to be found only by those who seek. ”

“ No doubt this attitude is not characteristic of the best; it is to be seen only in the East—chiefly in New York and in Boston—chiefly among the half-educated, for the man of wide culture looks for light rather to Paris and Berlin than to London.
Colonel Higginson proves abundantly, with a cloud of witnesses, that one of the differences between the American and the Englishman is the former's greater quickness. We are lighter and swifter in our appreciation of humor, for example. Indeed, it is amusing to observe that we speak of the English as obtuse in humor, just as they speak of the Scotch. ”

“ But nowhere is this speech without stain spoken by man in his daily life—not in London, where cockneyisms abound, not in Oxford, where university slang is luxuriant and where pedantry flourishes. Nowhere has this pure and undefiled language ever been spoken by any community. Nowhere will it ever be spoken other than by a few men here and there gifted by nature or trained by art. ”

“ When a London apprentice laughs at the Scotticisms of the North Briton, and when the London Athenæum is depressed by the language of cultured Americans, there is to be discovered behind the laugh and the scoff an assumption that any departure from the usage which obtains in London is most deplorable. The laugh and the scoff are the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual belief that the Londoner is the sole guardian and trustee of the English language. ”

“ The authoress of The Anglomaniacs and the authoress of Mademoiselle Réséda see Society as it is, and they are not so dazzled by the unexpected glare that they need to put on sea-side spectacles to enable them to observe what is going on about them. It is an old saying that to describe well we must not know too well, for long knowledge blunts the edge of appreciation. But those who, having knowledge, seek rather to reveal than to describe, often render a more valuable service than the more superficial observers who offer us their first impressions. ”

“ But there are critics in Great Britain—and even in the United States, where we are less squeamish and less hypocritical—who refuse to reckon with M. Zola, and who pass by on the other side. A man must be strong of stomach to enjoy much of M. Zola's fiction; he must be feeble in perception if he does not feel its strength and its complex art. M. Zola's strength is often rank, no doubt, and there is a foul flavor about even his most forcible novels, which makes them unfit for the library of the clean-minded American woman. ”

“ Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that." Both boys have their full share of boyish imagination; and Tom Sawyer, being given to books, lets his imagination run on robbers and pirates, having a perfect understanding with himself that, if you want to get fun out of this life, you must never hesitate to make believe very hard; and, with Tom's youth and health, he never finds it hard to make believe and to be a pirate at will, or to summon an attendant spirit, or to rescue a prisoner from the deepest dungeon 'neath the castle moat. ”

“ And not a few of us, whatever our code of literary esthetics, may find delight, fleeting though it be, in the free outline drawing of Cooper, after our eyes are tired by the niggling and cross-hatching of many among our contemporary realists. When our pleasant duty is done, when our examination is at an end, and when we seek to sum up our impressions and to set them down plainly, we find that chief among Cooper's characteristics were, first, a sturdy, hearty, robust, out-door and open-air wholesomeness, devoid of any trace of offence and free from all morbid taint ”

“ An American conscious of the fact that cunning is frequent in the mouths of his fair countrywomen, and that it is sadly wrenched from its true significance, is aware also that the British are trying to cramp our mother-tongue by limiting bug to a single offensive species, by giving to bloody an ulterior significance as of semi-profanity, and by restricting sick to a single form of physical wretchedness, forgetful that Peter's wife's mother once lay sick of a fever, and that an officer in her Majesty's service may even now go home on sick leave. ”

“ Every man who has taught himself to know good English and to love it and to delight in it, must sympathize with Professor Lounsbury's lack of admiration "for that grammar-school training which consists in teaching the pupil how much more he knows about our tongue than the great masters who have moulded it, which practically sets up the claim that the only men who are able to write English properly are the men who have never shown any capacity to write it at all." ”

“ Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore without spelling. Homer, the trouvères, and the minnesingers practised their art perhaps without the aid of letters. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection with literature, still less has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.
Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the "American spelling" which the British journalists denounce. ”

“ Yet the critic mischooses who should shut himself up with the classics of all languages and in rapt contemplation of their beauties be blind to the best work of his own time. If criticism itself is to be seen of men, it must enter the arena and bear a hand in the combat. The books which have come down to us from our fathers and from our grandfathers are a blessed heritage, no doubt ”

“ In most of the novels written by women in the second half of the eighteenth century, the morality is but little more obvious than the genius. Like the fashionable English novels of the first half of this century, now as carefully forgotten as the tales of Smollett's fair contemporaries, the female fiction with which Little Tim Cropdale found himself unable to compete was a curious compound of bad morals, bad manners, and bad grammar. ”

“ Just how it was possible for any clever American woman to write nine essays in criticism, rich in references and quotations, without once happening on Lowell or on Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable.
Colonialism is scarcely an adequate explanation for this devotion to the first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate writers of a foreign country to the neglect of the first-rate writers of her own. Perhaps the secret is to be sought rather in Miss Repplier's lack of literary standards. In literature as in some other things a woman's opinion is often personal and accidental ”

“ He must free his vocabulary from clumsy localisms, whether these be Americanisms or Briticisms. He must be true to the inherent and vital principles of our language, not yielding to temporary defections from the truth, whether these flourish in Great Britain or in the United States.
It cannot be said too often that there is no basis for the belief that somewhere there exists a sublimated English language, perfect and impeccable. This is the flawless ideal to which all artists in style strive vainly to attain, whether they are Englishmen or Americans, Australians or Canadians, Irish or Scotch. ”

“ Like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn is a genuine boy; he is neither a girl in boy's clothes, like many of the modern heroes of juvenile fiction, nor is he a "little man," a full-grown man cut down; he is a boy, just a boy, only a boy. And his ways and modes of thought are boyish. As Mr. F. Anstey understands the English boy, and especially the English boy of the middle classes, so Mark Twain understands the American boy, and especially the American boy of the Mississippi Valley of forty or fifty years ago. ”

“ The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now as it was in Pope's day. Those who are volubly denouncing "American spelling" in the columns of British journals are not students of the history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in so far as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly remarked, "The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the poor in that we have them always with us." ”

“ But if there is a possible loss of energy, there is an indisputable gain in mental flexibility, in openness of mind. There are Philistines in the United States, as there are in Great Britain, a many of them on both sides of the Atlantic; but between the British Philistine and the American there is an essential difference. The British Philistine knows not the light, and he hates it and he refuses to receive it. The American Philistine knows not the light, but he is not hostile, and he is not only ready to receive it, but eager. ”

“ We might as well charge all society in France with being addicted to one form of vice, because recent French fiction occupies itself almost exclusively with this as the material for its plots. The society for which such books are written must have shown that they are to its taste; the society which such books portray may be wholly different and grossly libelled by being made to reflect the vices of the author and his readers. ”

“ To few critics is it given to prophesy the lyric supremacy of a Victor Hugo—it was in a review of Les Feuilles d'Automne that Sainte-Beuve made this declaration of principles. A critic lacking the insight and the equipment of Sainte-Beuve may unduly despise an Ugly Duckling, or he may mistake a Goose for a Swan, only to wait in vain for its song. Indeed, to set out of malice prepense to discover a genius is but a wild-goose chase at best; and though the sport is pleasant for those who follow, it may be fatal to the chance fowl who is expected to lay a golden egg. ”

“ It may be even that some of our children are beginning already to set down in black and white their impressions of life, with a skill and with a truth which shall in due season make them classics also. Sainte-Beuve asserted that the real triumph of the critic was when the poets whose praises he had sounded and for whom he had fought grew in stature and surpassed themselves, keeping, and more than keeping, the magnificent promises which the critic, as their sponsor in baptism, had made for them. ”

“ Thackeray complained that no British novelist had dared to describe a young man's life since Fielding wrote Tom Jones; and Mr. Henry James, praising George Sand, notes the total absence of passion in English novels. If this reproach is ever taken away from our fiction, it will be by some woman. Women are more willing than men to suggest the animal nature that sheathes our immortal souls; they are bolder in the use of the stronger emotions; they are more willing to suggest the possibilities of passion lurking all unsuspected beneath the placidity of modern fine-lady existence. ”

“ Of the two, the more wholesome leaning is towards the forcible idioms of the plain people rather than the tamer precision of the student. The wild flowers of speech, plucked betimes with the dew still on them, humble and homely and touching, such as we find in Franklin and in Emerson, in Lowell and in Thoreau, are to be preferred infinitely before the waxen petals of rhetoric as a school-master arranges them. The grammarian, the purist, the pernicketty stickler for trifles, is the deadly foe of good English, rich in idioms and racy of the soil. ”

“ The fallacy of the Englishman, be he London apprentice or contributor to the Athenæum, is that he erects a merely personal standard in the use of our language. He compares the English he finds in the novels of a Scotchman or in the essays of an American with that which he hears about him daily in London, animadverting upon every divergence from this local British usage as a departure from the strict letter of the law which governs our language. ”

“ In these days, when hosts of honest people throughout the United States are reading with delighted awe long accounts of the manners and customs of a strange tribe of human creatures, the female of which is known as a "Society Lady" and the male as a "Clubman," it is pleasant to find novels of New York life written by ladies who move within the charmed circle of what is called Society, and who can write about the doings of their fellows simply and without either snobbish wonder or caddish envy. ”

“ Owing, it may be, to the consciousness of strength, which is a precious result of the war the British clergyman denounced thus eloquently, the last tie of colonialism which bound us to the mother-country is broken. We know now that the mother-tongue is a heritage and not a loan. It is ours to use as we needs must. In America there is no necessity to plead for the right of the Americanism to exist. The cause is won. No American writer worth his salt would think of withdrawing a word or of apologizing for a phrase because it was not current within sound of Bow Bells. ”

“ It is in relation to America and to American workers that we find British criticism ignorant and insular. The ordinary British critic assumes a very different tone towards us from that he assumes towards the French or the Germans. He may dislike these, but he accepts them as equals. Us he regards as inferiors—as degenerate Englishmen unfortunately cut off from communion with the father-land and the mother-tongue, and to be chided because we do not humbly acknowledge our deficiencies. He does not know that we are now no more English than the English themselves are now Germans. ”

“ I understand that an Englishman stops at a hotel at which an American would stay. I have been led to believe that an Englishwoman of fashion will go to a swagger function, at which she will expect to meet no end of smart people, meaning thereby not clever folks, but swells. I have heard that an Englishman speaks of a wire, meaning a telegram; and I know that an English friend of mine in New York received a letter from his sister in London, bidding him hold himself in readiness to cross the Atlantic at a day's notice, and informing him that he might "have to come over on a wire." ”