Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/153

Standards 565 harmful in its results just so far as it breeds in the mind of speakers and writers an uneasy feeling that really good English is something vaguely and beautifully beyond them, something they can never hope to attain to, something so high and delicate that they would not care to use it if they could get it, certainly not for even the best moments of every day. This brings us to the very centre of the problem. The trouble with American English, it might reasonably be urged, is that it has been so constantly disparaged in comparison with a standard so vague, so remote, so "superior, " but of so little practical guidance, that the fine sense of possession, the feeling that the way one goes about one's mores is inevitably the right way, has been in many cases completely lost. ' ' I say ' dawg, ' ' ' said an American teacher of English, "but I know 'dahg' is correct and I make my pupils say it. " We can be sure that her pupils do not say "dahg" outside the classroom, and carry away with them only a conviction that "good English" is something with which they can and will have nothing to do. "All this is very different in English English, " says another of our academicians. ' ' They believe in English and have the ideal of good usage. ' ' But the standard, it should be noted, is a native standard; it is fairly well defined; it is not impossible of attainment ; and it is not flagrantly at variance with the practice of the linguistic environment in which the fortunate young Britisher is being fitted by governesses, tutors, and public- school masters to take his place. Conditions so favourable must be somewhat limited in their occurrence even in England. In America those who inherit a sound native tradition in their homes are more than likely to spend large parts of their lives in regions of quite other language habits. In school they wiU encounter many who have been brought up in an environment distinctly foreign, the teacher even may have an unsure con- trol of the language, and he — or more generally she — is sure to have some very extravagant and ill-informed notions of what constitutes good English. In the university they may learn a good deal about correctness in composition but will encounter no very definite standards of speech, for both teachers and students are usually drawn from all parts of the country and represent every sort of social opportunity. All this sounds much worse than it actually turns out to be.