Americanisms

II.

WRITERS upon Americanisms are frequently led, by a union of unlimited self-confidence with limited knowledge, into positive assertions as to usage which are at variance with fact, and therefore entirely misleading. A man may safely assert that such or such a word or phrase is used in England or the States, if he has so heard it or met with it in print; and it is quite proper for him to express, however strongly, his liking for it or his dislike of it, and to show, if he can do so, reasons for his opinion or his feeling in regard to it. As to the latter, if he be wrong, that is if the taste of the best speakers and writers does not agree with his, or if his reasons for the faith that is in him are unsound, he has merely erred, as any man may err; but he has justly exposed himself to no censure excepting that of legitimate criticism of his views, which some other writer mar show him good reason for changing, and which, if he is candid, he will change, and thus merely “ be wiser to-day than he was yesterday.” But a positive and general assertion which proves to be at variance with fact places him in another and a far more unpleasant position. He has revealed, to a certain degree at least, an insufficient knowledge of the subject upon which he professed knowledge and undertook to teach others. And the knowledge of very few men, however wide their acquaintance with language and literature, is sufficient to enable them to assert with safety that a certain word or phrase is not used in one country, or that its use is limited to or even characteristic of another, particularly when the people of both the countries in question have a common origin and a common language and literature.

It is this condition of things in regard to the English language which makes assertions of limited usage so dangerous to writers upon Americanisms.

These remarks are suggested by my finding among the Addenda of the last edition of Mr. Bartlett’s dictionary the word bureau defined as “a ehest of drawers for clothes, etc., especially made an ornamental piece of furniture;” to which definition is added the remark, “ In England the article is invariably called ‘ a chest of drawers.’ ” Of my own knowledge I can bear witness to the contrary. I have heard such a piece of furniture called a bureau twenty times in different parts of England, and by persons of various conditions of life; and although the word has not attracted my particular attention (for it appears now for the first time in Mr. Bartlett’s work),

I am able to refer to the following instances of its use by English writers of repute in past generations and in the present.

In a chapter giving a very lively description of a scene which results in the turning of a chamber-maid out of the house by her enraged mistress (the wife of a rustic inn-keeper), Fielding writes: “ It accidentally occurred to her that her master’s bed was not made; she therefore went directly to his room, where he happened at that time to be engaged at his bureau.” (Joseph Andrews, Book I., chap, xviii.)

Sterne also uses it as follows: “ My father . . . returned to the table, plucked my mother’s thread-paper out of Slawkenbergius’s book, went hastily to his bureau, walked slowly back,” etc. (Tristram Shandy, chap, lxxxv.)

And Horace Walpole thus: “I found her in a little miserable bed-chamber of a ready-furnished house, with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans.” (Letters to Horace Mann.)

Mrs. Leycester, thus: “And a little dressing-room out of our bedroom was furnished with a book-case and bureau.” (Memoirs of a Quiet Life, i. 7.)

The rooms (bedrooms and dressingroom) in which the article is said to have been make its functions plain; and this suggests a reference to the derivation of the word and how it came to be applied to a clothes-press, or a chest of drawers for clothes. Bureau meant originally, in French, a coarse kind of cloth. Then, because this cloth was used to cover the tops of writing-tables, such a table came to be called a bureau. The writing-table next received the addition of drawers to hold paper, and still, of course, retained its name. Finally the table proper disappeared, and over the drawers there was a folding leaf, which shut at an angle and could be locked, and in the cavity thus produced there were smaller drawers made, and some eight or ten pigeon-holes for papers, with a lockable recess between them still more private. The inside of the leaf and the corresponding space before it were at first covered with cloth, and when the leaf was let down this formed the writing-table. On top of the whole was an upright case with folding doors, which was used for papers, or as a book-case. This was the bureau which was found in many houses of the last century, both in England and the States, and, as we have seen by the passages quoted above, and as some of us can remember, they were very frequently placed in bedrooms. A natural consequence of the presence of such an article of furniture in a bedroom was that the lower and larger drawers came to be used for clothes. I am writing at one of these old bureaus now; and such, doubtless, was the sort of bureau that Fielding and Sterne and Walpole and Mrs. Leycester had in mind. Finally, as the name of the cloth was given first to the writing-table which it covered, and was then transferred to the piece of furniture of which the drawers had become the larger and the more important part, it was naturally again transferred to the new piece of furniture composed entirely of drawers, and intended and exclusively used for the same purpose to which the former had been converted, — the holding of clothes. In olden times, down to two or three centuries ago, clothes were laid away in chests or hung up in wardrobes; but chests of drawers for that purpose, under whatever name, are comparatively modern pieces of furniture. But what now becomes of the assertion that in England they are “ invariably ” called chests of drawers? The assertion is one of those imprudent ones into which a writer with perfectly correct purposes may be led by overestimating the extent of his range of observation. It would have been safe to say that bureau is more common in the States than in England, and chest of drawers much more common here than there.

But chief of all those whom overweening self-confidence misleads into unwarrantable assertions upon this subject is Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who is a professor of philology and of Sanskrit, and who undeniably is widely read in English literature. Yet upon the English language he can write very few pages, I might almost say paragraphs, without exhibiting a notable incompetence to pronounce upon its usages, coupled with an enormous pretense and a disposition not only to contradict (which he has a perfect right to do), but to treat with the most offensive disrespect (to do which he has no right), all other writers, of whatever sort and upon whatever subject. He sets down without hesitation the following words, among others, as Americanisms: divine (noun), conclude and conclusion (in the sense of deciding with a purpose), parlor, and make a visit. Of the first (divine) he says that its use to mean a clergyman, a minister of the gospel, is “ now uncurrent in England.” (Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, page 73.) Let us see what the evidence of “ current ” English literature is upon this point. Walter Scott, in the Introductory Epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel, says that “ nobles, statesmen, and divines, the most distinguished of their time, have not scorned to square accounts with their book-sellers.” But setting Scott aside as a little old-fashioned, although he certainly comes within the three generations which Alexander Ellis says form the current language of any period, let us come further down towards the present day. Macaulay, in his famous chapter on the condition of English society in the seventeenth century, speaks of “ the divine who quitted his chaplainship for a benefice.” Lord Houghton applies the word to Sydney Smith in the following characteristic passage: “ ‘ I am very glad I have amused you,’ said Mr. Sydney Smith at parting, ‘ but you must not laugh at my sermon to-morrow.’ ‘ I should hope I know the difference between being here and at church,’ remarked the gentleman with some sharpness. ‘ I am not so sure of that,’ replied the visitor. ‘ I ’ll bet you a guinea on it,’ said the squire. ‘ Take you,’ replied the divine.” (Monographs, 1873, page 251.) Mrs. Trollope, most English of English writers of her sex, and mistress of a very pure and charming style, says, “I really think the commander of this Danube ordinari must receive wages from some practical divine who wishes to impress on all men . . . the uncertain nature of human happiness.” (Vienna and the Austrians, 1837, Letter xxii.) George Eliot, greatest of all English female authors, says, “ The providential government of the world ... in our favored land was clearly seen to be carried forward on Tory and Church of England principles, sustained by the succession of the house of Brunswick and by sound English divines.” (Felix Holt, chap. i.) And again, with the same dry humor, in which she is almost peculiar among her sex: “ There is a resident rector who appeals to the consciences of his hearers with all the immense advantages of a divine who keeps his own carriage.” (Scenes from Clerical Life, Janet, chap, ii.) Matthew Arnold has, “ Surely this is enough to expect a sixteenth century divine to give us in theology.” (Literature and Dogma, page 22.) John Bright, the greatest of living English orators, and one of the greatest living masters of “ current” English, applies the word thus to Presbyterian ministers: “ We may perhaps imagine an equality which would allow the Protestant establishment to remain; . . . and to complete the scheme a Presbyterian establishment also, having a batch of Catholic prelates and of Presbyterian divines in the House of Lords.” (Letters and Speeches, vol. ii., page 532.) In the next example it is applied to a Jesuit priest, the eloquent Bourdaloue: “ He was much surprised, and knocked at the door, when the distinguished divine laid down his instrument,” etc. (History of the Violin, by W. Sandys, F. S. A., and S. A. Forster, London, 1864, page 163.) Dr. Newman, who is regarded by many persous, and particularly by Dr. Hall, as the most correct writer of English now living, uses it thus in a general sense: “ So we must take it for granted, if we would serve God comfortably, that we cannot be our own divines and our own casuists.” (Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 1869, page 50.) As Dr. Newman thus uses it in connection with casuists, so we find Dean Stanley using it in as general a sense in connection with statesmen. “ The vast political pageants of which it has been the theatre, . . . the wrangles of divines or statesmen which have disturbed its sacred peace.” (His. Mems. of Westminster Abbey, 1868, page 37.) Next we have a well-known English writer upon the social problems of his country applying it to the rustic minister of a Wesleyan chapel: “ A number of the farmers left the church and repaired to the Wesleyan chapel in the village. But the minister of the chapel, a plain-spoken divine, told them they had better go back.” (F. G. Heath, The English Peasantry, 1874, page 152.) Lastly, the latest published English dictionary, by the Rev. James Stormouth, gives as the first definition of divine simply “ a minister of the gospel;” then, following, “ a clergyman, a priest.” These examples are enough to establish the point in question; but I wish to add a few more, which, that my readers may not be needlessly wearied, I give in foot-notes to this page. They are from John Wood Warier, ¹ Southey’s son-in-law Angus,² Archbishop Whately,³ Blakey,⁴ Farrar,⁵ Arthur Helps,⁶ Raskin,⁷ Thackeray,⁸ Goldwin Smith,⁹ Anthony Trollope,¹⁰ H. A. Mereweather,¹¹ Sir Henry Holland,¹² Leslie Stephen,¹³ a correspondent in Fors Clavigera,¹⁴ Frances Power Cobbe,¹⁵ The Liverpool Courier,¹⁶ the Saturday Review,¹⁷ and The Week.¹⁸ It thus appears that this word divine, in the sense simply of a minister of the gospel, whether Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Church of England, Congregational, or what not, is in constant use by the best writers and in the best journals in England. It has been so in the past, and it is so down to this very day; and yet we have here a scholar and a philologist pronouncing it without hesitation or qualification uncurrent in that sense. A man may hold to his opinions firmly and assert them strongly, and if wrong merely err in judgment; but what shall be said of him who, planting himself with much parade upon the professed knowledge of facts, makes corrections which are directly at variance with them!

He will have it, too, that parlor, meaning the room in which a family sits and receives company, otherwise called, but generally with reference to a room of some size and pretension in a large house, a drawing-room, is “ obsolete,” “except in the United States and in some of the English colonies.” (Recent Exemplifications, etc., page 48.) And again, “In England people who have a drawing-room no longer call it a parlour, as they called it of old and recently.” (Modern English, by the same writer, page 247.) That this positive assertion is contradicted by the evidence of English writers of the present day the following examples show. They are all taken from novels, the best written guides to the phraseology of society; most of them from novels written by women, the very highest authority upon such points, except, perhaps, Mr. Anthony Trollope, whose books contain a more complete and correct picture of English upper and middle class society, both as to manners and speech, than has ever before been made of any society at any period. scious virtue.” (Mrs. Edwards, A Blue Stocking, 1877, chap, v., and passim.)

“ The kitchen is warm; ... its atmosphere is rich with unctuous and savory viands; the cook is kind; but the parlour is preferred by the dog from an innate love of high society.” (Arthur Helps, Realmah, chap, xii.)

“ The want of constant habitation makes itself felt in the state rooms of palaces as in the parlours of those houses in which the family do not live, but only receive company.” (Idem, Ivan de Biron, Book VII., chap, ix.)

“ It was the once hopeful Godfrey, who was standing with his hands in his side pockets in the dark wainscoted parlour one late November afternoon.” (George Eliot, Silas Marner, chap, iii.)

“ And the brother, he may await you in the parlour.” (Mrs. Alexander, Which Shall it Be? 1873, chap, xxii.)

“ But she soon missed me and came to the library, peeping in [and saying], ‘ Come with me and I will tell you.’ When we were in the parlour,” etc. (My Beautiful Neighbor, chap, xi., in Temple Bar Magazine, October, 1873.)

“ Aunt Gray . . . awaited her in a large, comfortable parlour, cheerfully lighted by three windows.” (Mrs. Alexander, The Wooing O’t, 1874, chap, xxix.)

“ In the evening they had dinner in a small parlour.” (William Black, A Princess of Thule, 1874, chap, xxv.)

“ Jane Grand, dressed in black, pale and listless as usual, training the roses in the way they should go above the parlour window.” (Idem, A Point of Honour, 1876, chap, xiii.)

“ Mr. Masters was sitting at home with his family in the large parlour of his house.” (A. Trollope, The American Senator, 1877, chap, iii.)

“ And upon that she turned back into the parlour with all the majesty of con-

“ Now, Jenny, here is Mr. George Lynton coming, and if he gets off his pony be sure you ask him into the best parlour.” (Cecil Maxwell, Story of Three Sisters, 1876, chap, viii.)

“ The damp haunts you from room to room, until you are all huddled together like Esquimaux in the small close parlour that happens to be over the kitchen fire.” (Saturday Review, September 11, 1875, page 326.)

Other like passages are at my hand, but these are enough. I will add that I find among my memorandums clipped from a London newspaper of 1870 (the Times, I believe, for I neglected the irksome task of particularizing title and date) an advertisement of Drawing-Room Plays and Parlour Pantomimes by Clement Scott, and Parlour Pastimes by Riddleson.

It will be observed that in the first passage quoted Mr. Helps makes his meaning very clear: the parlor is the place for high society, with the usages and language of which he was as familiar as any man in England; and that in the second he also leaves no room for doubt, defining the parlor as the place where the family “do not live, but only receive company. ” In the other passages the meaning is not so sharply defined in words, but is none the less quite unmistakable. It may be wondered why a man of intelligence and a wide acquaintance with English literature should have made an assertion so manifestly untrue. His blunder is probably to be attributed, in the first place, to the lack of familiarity with the usages of society which seems to he implied in his remark (Modern English, page 274), “Mr. Thackeray’s patrician slang affects, I know, many who live out of the world just as it affects myself.” But it comes chiefly from an affectation among some English people of a word that seems to them to lift their domestic arrangements to the level of those of what are known in England as “ great houses; ” in which there is the great drawing-room, or the east and the west, or the red and the blue

drawing-room. This affectation is thus delicately satirized by Miss Broughton:

“ At the hull door . . . Sarah meets her. Sarah is an Englishwoman.

“ ‘ Mr. Brandon is in the parlour ’m.’

“ ‘ Parlour ! My good Sarah, how many times shall I adjure you by all that you hold most sacred to say drawing-room? ’ ” (Red as a Rose is She, chap, ii.)

Dr. Hull also asserts of the phrase make a visit that “ whatever it once was ” it “ no longer is English.” (Recent Exemplifications, etc., page 48.) The implication here that the only other phrase now in common use, “ pay a visit ” or a call, is of very modern introduction is unwarranted, as will be seen by the following, couplet from Samuel Wesley’s Melissa, A. D. 1734: —

Only little later Cowper uses the same phrase in his letters: “ Since the visit you were so kind to pay me in the Temple.” (July 1, 1765. Works, ed. Southey, ii., page 162.)

“ Dr. Cotton, who was intimate with him, paid him a visit about a fortnight before he was seized with his last illness.” (July 12, 1765. Idem, page 168.)

But there was another phrase then in vogue to express the same social event, — to give a call, — as the following examples, also from Cowper’s letters, show: —

“ Both Lady Hesketh and my brother had apprised me of your intention to give me a call.” (Idem, vol. ii., page 171.)

“ To give a morning call, and now and then to receive one.” (Idem, vol. iii., page 61.)

“ Mr. Throckmorton gave me yesterday a morning call.” (Idem, vol. iii., page 341.)

That the phrase “ to make visits ” had not ceased to be English forty years ago, and has not now ceased to be what Dr. Hall calls “ current” English, may be seen by the following examples of its use, half of them by female writers —

“ Or if you prefer making visits, you have two or three hours before you that may be so employed.” (Mrs. Trollope, Vienna and the Austrians, 1838, Letter lii.)

“ After Moscheles had made a round of visits to the artists, he went off,” etc. (A. D. Coleridge, Recent Music and Musicians, 1874, chap, vi.)

“In nothing was this more apparent than in the visiting card which she had prepared for her use. For such an article one would say that she in her present state could have but small need, seeing how improbable it was that, she should make a morning call.” (Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, chap. ix.)

“ He tore a pair of new tea-green gloves into thin strips, like little thongs. He must find it rather expensive work, if he makes many morning calls.” (Miss Broughton, Nancy, chap, v.)

On the other hand, the phrase “ to make” visits or calls is no more common, nor “ to pay ” them less common, here than in England, Of the latter we are all aware from the usage with which we are familiar, of which take one example from a well-known American authoress : —

“ The toilets in which a well-dressed lady now goes shopping on Broadway are as ruffled and puffed, as beflounced and befurbelowed, as those in which she pays calls or attends receptions on Fifth Avenue, the only difference being in the coloring and possibly in the texture.” (Lucy Hooper, Fig Leaves and French Dresses, Galaxy, October, 1874.)

Here we may question the appropriateness of the epithet “ well-dressed,” and we may be annoyed by the unpleasant Scotticism and Southernism, “ on Broadway ” and “ on Fifth Avenue,” but the phrase “ pays calls” will seem strange to no one. Nor is it at all of late introduction into this country, as the following extracts: from the private writings of a distinguished Yankee show: —

“ Wrote letters, paid a few visits, and at five went to dine.” (Diary of John Quincy Adams, October 24, 1794.)

“Afterwards till two, dressing, receiving or paying visits.” (Idem, December 31, 1797.)

“ Paid visits to the president and Mr. Madison, both of whom I found at home.” (Idem, October 31, 1804.)

The introduction of the word pay in reference to a visit, which appears to be so purely a matter of volition and of pleasure that without those motives on the part of the visitor it is worthless, seems to have accompanied the diffusion of a consciousness that calling had become a mere formality, — a mere matter of compliment, if not of etiquette. Cowper’s “give me a call” seems much more significant of friendship and neighborliness; but it is now almost exclusively appropriated to the uses of trade. The supposition that the call is assumed to be paid as the mere performance of a social duty receives illustration, if not support, from the following interesting passage in John Quincy Adams’s Diary, in regard to the etiquette of full dress on occasion of diplomatic visits in Russia:

“ There is so much punctilio in this usage that it admits of no substitute; . . . nay, if you go yourself, unless it be in full dress, the visit is not fully paid. . . . This is called a diplomatic visit paid in person.” (Diary, 1811, vol, ii., page 265.)

Dr. Hall’s assertions on this point, and others of like nature, are merely negative testimony, and have the inherent inconclusiveness of such testimony. But they are something more: they are witnesses to the limitation of a knowledge which — with a display of great reading, and an assumption that sometimes misleads others — he sets forth as, if not absolutely perfect, at least as near perfection as is permitted to human creatures, and far beyond that of any other merely finite being.

Of like nature is his condemnation of the words conclude and conclusion, as implying resolution. On the sentence, “ Ralph, however, like most disappointed lovers, concludes to live,” he thus remarks: “ Conclude means ‘come to a conclusion,’ in one sense of the phrase; that which gives to conclusion the meaning of inference. Conclusion, in this phrase, also signifies ‘resolution;’ but conclude, as equivalent to the phrase when it attaches this sense to conclusion, has long ceased to be English.” (Recent Exemplifications, etc., page 110.) Disentangling the “snarl” and resolving the discords of Dr. Hall’s English, we make out unmistakably that he means simply that conclude implying to resolve, and conclusion implying a resolution, have long ceased to be English. The assertion is very positive, and the period to which it refers is clearly enough defined. How true it is the following passages from English books written during the last few years will show: —

“ The queen concluded on keeping the bulk of the prize to herself. ” (Froude, History of England, chap, lxiv.)

“ So, as these thoughts flashed through his mind, Saxon concluded to stay where he was and not to stop his ears. ” (Mrs. A. B. Edwards, Half a Million of Money, 1866, vol. ii., chap, xix.)

“ Having the whole of Salisbury Plain to think about it upon, interrupted only by an occasional charge of Colonel Marshall and his cavalry, I soon came to the conclusion to go.” (H. A. Mereweather, By Sea and by Land, 1874, chap, i.)

“ And finally he went to sleep on the conclusion that he would wait until that visit had been made.” (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Book III., chap, xix.)

My list is short; but, like Mercutio’s wound, ’t will do. It begins with Froude, and ends with George Eliot; its second item is furnished by one of the most popular British female novelists, and its third is by “ one of her majesty’s counsel,” and a Wiltshire gentleman of family and standing. The point is not one as to correctness or etymology, but simply whether the word has “ long ceased to be English ” in a certain sense; as to which the fact that it is used by such writers as Mrs. Edwards and Mr. Mereweather is evidence quite as good as its use by the eminent author of Adam Bede and Romola. I should have had a much longer array of examples showing that it had not ceased to be English, but my attention had never been drawn to it in that light until after the publication of Dr. Hall’s Recent Exemplifications, etc., in 1872; and my reading for language’ sake having practically ceased long before that time, and my labors in other respects having increased, I have only such examples as I have since then lit upon by chance in books that I took up casually or which were sent to me for review.

But although I had never thought of the word as being charged with Americanism, when used in the sense considered above, it had attracted my attention; for, strange to say, this sense, so common, is passed over entirely by the dictionary makers. Not one English dictionary known to me, from Bailey and Johnson to Webster and Stormouth, gives conclude in the sense of to come to a final resolution, to settle a purpose. It is therefore interesting and of some importance to show what long and wellrooted use it has in our language and literature, which will appear by the following passages: —

“ Then the bishops of Greece and the emperors gathered them together to provide a remedy against that mischief, and concluded that they should be put down for the abuse, thinking it so expedient.” (Tyndale, Answer to Sir Thomas More, 1530. Works, ed. 1827, vol. iii., page 191.)

“ Though [thou] art in as ill a taking as the hare which, being all the day hunted, at last concludes to die; for, said she, whither should I fly to escape these dogs?” (Gabriel Harvey, Trimming of Thomas Nash, 1597, ed. 1871, page 51.)

(Thomas Dekker, Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1607.)

(Idem.)

“ As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded,¹⁹ that they observe no such thing; but that they keep themselves from things offered

to idols.” (Acts xxi. 25, King James’s Translation, 1611.)

“ Matters standing in this woful case, three French noblemen projected, with themselves, to make a cordial for the consumption of the spirits of their king and countrymen. . . . Hereupon they concluded to set up the aforesaid Joan of Arc to make her that she had a revelation from heaven,” etc. (Thomas Fuller, The Profane State, 1648, V.)

“What shall I say, but conclude for his so great and sacred service, both to our king and kingdome, . . . and for their everlasting benefit, there may be everlastingly left here one of his loynes, one of his loynes I say, and stay upon this Bench to be the example of all justice.” (Chapman and Shirley, Tragedy of Chabot, Act. iii., sig. Ei b, ed. 1639.)

“ To whom we have transferr’d an absolute power to conclude and determine without appeale or revocation,” etc. (Thomas Carew, Cœlum Britannicum, 1633, page 211, ed. 1870.)

“This morning Sir G. Carteret, Sir W. Bolten, and I met at the office, and did conclude of our going to Portsmouth next week.” (Pepys’ Diary, April 18, 1662.)

“ Which, having suffered by my supposed silence, I am persuaded, will make her fear the worst; if that is the case she will fly to England, — a most natural conclusion.” (Sterne, Letters, civ. August. 11, 1767.)

Here we have a word, a common word, used in a certain sense from at least 1530 to 1877 by Tyndale, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, the makers of the authorized version of the Bible, Sir Arthur Gorges, Fuller, Hobbes, Chapman and Shirley, Carew, Dryden, Pepys, Sterne, Froude, George Eliot, and minor English writers of the present day; passed over entirely by all the dictionary makers; and also pronounced by Fitzedward Hall, LL.D., philologist and professor of Sanskrit, as having long ceased to be English. From which two things may be learned, — the untrustworthiness of dictionaries, and the fitness of Dr. Hall to write a book on Americanisms, which I observe that he has announced that he has in preparation. This is but a foretaste of what I may possibly find time to show upon the latter point, if not in these pages, elsewhere. It is what might be expected from a man who on his own confession and showing goes to Irving, Thackeray, and Hawthorne, for examples of bad English.

Richard Grant White.