An Objectionable Objective

THE cases of overworked particles and adverbs presented by a July Contributor are sad indeed; but is anyone of them so depressing to contemplate as the latest English atrocity, ‘linked up,’ or the American crime, ‘visit with’? The former insinuates itself into such good company that the other day a highly fastidious English paper printed, ‘Linked up one virtue and a thousand crimes,’ as a quotation from Byron. ‘Visited with’ first adorned a ‘Woman’s Page,’ one of those newspaper departments warranted (according to the regular advertisements, the annual prospectus, and the calendars showered upon subscribers) to cheer, hearten, brighten, ‘ enthuse,’ stimulate; and even to ‘exert a human uplift’; and its vicious preposition made the phrase so conspicuous in the neighboring drab and dull conglomerate of words as to impress both the well-informed and the ignorant; and although the former shuddered, the latter scented something esoteric, and, being properly thrilled, longed to use the phrase on dear John or on the ladies of the club.

‘Visit with,’ be it understood, is substituted for ' talk with ’ or ‘talk to,’ and has no essential connection with a visit. The Woman’s Page, telling of a girl who sits beside her mother’s work-table for five minutes chatting about family matters, says, ‘Eleanor had a charming little visit with her mother’; if Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith, meeting on the summit of Mount Washington, exchange data as to their points and regions of personal refrigeration, and send an account of the incident to the Woman’s Page, the editor records their ‘mutual visit, with one another’ as‘an event of which the outcome will undoubtedly be seen in a renewed forthputting of society activity.’ If Mrs. Brown, buying a postage stamp at suburban station X, inquire for the health of the postmaster’s cat, the overworked editor of the suburban weekly paper remarks, ‘We saw the postmaster most hilariously visiting with Mrs. Brown the other morning, when we called at the post-office to empty our large but overflowing box. Mrs. Brown is always witty.’

On the other hand, it is hardly safe to use ‘ to visit ’ in its proper sense, lest one be suspected of chattering in a church or a library, or gossiping to a public school; and ‘to visit with’ is slowly displacing to talk, to speak, to converse, to chat, to discourse, even to caterwaul and to bark. ‘That’s the colonel’s dog visiting with our cat,’ says the small boy, by way of accounting for a yell of sudden and portentous birth.

As to the case of Felicia Dorothea, the delightfully-named lady so dear in her time to romantic childhood, did she write ‘but he’ or ‘but him’ in that ballad of Casabianca which it pleases scoffers at ancient virtues to find absurd. The point in this case is by no means the same as in ‘It is me,’ preferred by a certain Harvard professor to the form of the King James Bible. ‘All but he’ is the compound subject of the verb ‘had fled,’ its two pronouns being connected by the disjunctive conjunction ‘ but.’

In George Eliot’s sentence, ‘Not liberty, but duty, is the law of life ’; in the schoolbook example, ‘Not John but James went to Boston,’ the most luckless victim of ‘word-study,’ his mind entirely ‘uncramped by definitions,’ cannot escape seeing that ‘ liberty ’ and ‘duty’ are similarly related to ‘ is,’ and that ‘John’ and ‘James’ are similarly related to ‘went,’ although his teacher may have thought it shame to teach the child such words as ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ and ‘nominative.’ The nouns have no incorrect form for him to use, the nominative and objective of English nouns being the same, but if he know of two forms of any word he instinctively avoids that which is correct, and as naturally as he says, ’It is him,’ ‘You and me will go,’ ‘He said to you and I,’ he thinks and reads, and says, ‘All but him had fled.’ Give him Tennyson and Browning and he may possibly read,

' Who but I ’ when he sees it on the page, but it is because the form so startles him that he cannot unconsciously neglect to follow the printed text. He has no prejudices in favor of the nominative, and very possibly, if he have heard of it, thinks that it has something to do with the city elections. But in the day of Felicia Dorothea, the nominal ive was perfectly real to all adults; and long after her day, indeed as late as 1870, children were freely exposed to nominatives, possessives, conjugations, comparisons, and similar insalubrities, and such is the elasticity of youth that no great consequent mortality is recorded.

But ‘reading without tears,’ and spelling without letters, and arithmetic without the painful toil of the multiplication table, and geography with so little left on the maps that a baby could reproduce them, and mathematical geography in which each child makes his definitions in his own way, were coming, and grammar fled; and now the public-school pupil’s vocabulary contains no words in which he can be told why ‘all but him’ is not grammatical, and his mind has no strength to grasp reasoning based on parallel phrases. All that can be done is to tell him that Mrs. Hemans wrote ‘all but he.’

The presumption is that she did so write, exactly as Moore wrote ‘all but he departed ’ in ‘The Light of Other Days, ' but, no first edition being at hand, one is compelled to seek the testimony of anthologies and school text-books. Palgrave prints ‘All but he’; so do Whipple and Fields in the Family Library of Poetry and Song, and so does Epes Sargent in his Stand-ard Reader, which was copyrighted in 1855, and he indexes the poem as unaltered. Against these three excellent authorities are Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song, and Dr. Samuel Eliot’s Poetry for Children, edited for use in the Boston schools, and an army of American ‘Readers’ and ‘Speakers’ all declaring that ‘all but him had fled.’ Who made the original error is of no consequence; evidently the American printer and proof-reader found no harm in it, and the stirring verses are made the vehicle of mischief.

‘ Up’ is undeniably misused in a hundred annoying ways, but surely the people ‘ sat down to eat and rose up to play ’ in King James’s days; and ‘up’ and ‘down’ historically record the point of origin and the direction of growth in so many cities that they are used in popular speech. The visitor, whether from another American city or from a foreign land, invariably finds these adverbs misapplied. He has an obsession that as the South is at the bottom of the map he should always go ‘down’ South, in a city; and if the northern quarter of the city, either because of comparative elevation, or because it was first, settled, and became the business region, is ‘down town,’ he warmly remonstrates with the natives. Standing in Winter Street, the visitor to Boston will inquire whether he would better go up to the Old South or down to the New Old South first, and being advised to go ‘down’ to the old Old South and ‘over’ to the new Old South, he will cry ‘A plague on both your meeting-houses!’ and announce that he is going ‘across’ to Trinity.

Particles are fiery, as Byron said. Meantime let the very largest stones be reserved for the man who steps ‘onto’ a car, and steps off on a ‘nearby’ cat.