Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/146

558 Xhe English Language in America the early days of the RepubUc, that the dignity of the nation requires that it should have a language entirely its own. More would be ready to assent to the implication of one of our aca- demicians that American usage conform itself as far as possible to the practice of British writers. It is an old notion ; Franklin and Webster both gave reverent expression to it, but neither, it should be noted, made any special effort to live up to it, and Webster at other times professed quite a different ideal. They made no more effort, that is, than any educated man does who allows his best reading to be reflected in his best writing. The simple fact is that such differences as exist between English in America and English in Britain are not mainly due to ignorance or perversity. The days are long past when the British re- viewer branded as an "Americanism" every word and every construction which, during a period of enormous growth in the demands made upon the language, he could not remember having met with before. Such differences as there are, it is now well recognized, are due to the historical evolution of the language. It will be well to look at this for a moment before casting up the losses and gains and before pointing out a possi- ble, indeed a very real, danger involved in attempting to alter too drastically the record with which history presents us. The literary dialect of London never, as has been said, got wholly out of touch with the other dialects of the island. They continued to affect it in many ways; it was a "natural" growth in that it was not consciously regulated by groups of literary men in the way that German or French has been regulated. In company with the British Constitution it muddled along, obtaining surprisingly good results, all things considered. Of the spoken language, apart from many rustic dialects of a pedigree as honourable as it is ancient, there are at least two recognized standards in England, a Northern British and a Southern British, and, in addition, educated Scots and Irishmen and Welshmen have ways of speaking that are quite distinctly their own. The farther one travels from London the less noticeable becomes the difference between British English and American. If it be urged that the literary language is largely uniform throughout the British Isles — leaving out works that are frankly in dialect — this can in great part be accounted for by the fact that political and literary life centre