"Let his dominion slide."
In the one case it is put into the mouth of a clown, in the other, of a gentleman, and was evidently proverbial. It has even higher sanction, for Chaucer writes,
"Well nigh all other cures _let he slide_."
Mr. Bartlett gives "above one"s bend" as an Americanism; but compare Hamlet"s "to the top of my bent." _In his tracks_ for _immediately_ has acquired an American accent, and pa.s.ses where he can for a native, but is an importation nevertheless; for what is he but the Latin _e vestigio_, or at best the Norman French _eneslespas_, both which have the same meaning? _Hotfoot_ (provincial also in England), I find in the old romance of "Tristan,"
"_Si s"en parti_ CHAUT PAS"
_Like_ for _as_ is never used in New England, but is universal in the South and West. It has on its side the authority of two kings (_ego sum rex Romanorum et supra grammaticam_), Henry VIII. and Charles I. This were ample, without throwing into the scale the scholar and poet Daniel.
_Them_ was used as a nominative by the majesty of Edward VI., by Sir P.
Hoby, and by Lord Paget (in Froude"s "History"). I have never seen any pa.s.sage adduced where _guess_ was used as the Yankee uses it. The word was familiar in the mouths of our ancestors, but with a different shade of meaning from that we have given it, which is something like _rather think_, though the Yankee implies a confident certainty by it when he says, "I guess I _du!_" There are two examples in Otway, one of which ("So in the struggle, I guess the note was lost") perhaps might serve our purpose, and Coleridge"s
"I guess "twas fearful there to see"
certainly comes very near. But I have a higher authority than either in Selden, who, in one of his notes to the "Polyolbion," writes, "The first inventor of them (I _guess_ you dislike not the addition) was one Berthold Swartz." Here he must mean by it, "I take it for granted."
Robert Greene, in his "Quip for an Upstart Courtier," makes Cloth-breeches say, "but I _gesse_ your maistership never tried what true honor meant." In this case the word seems to be used with a meaning precisely like that which we give it. Another peculiarity almost as prominent is the beginning sentences, especially in answer to questions, with "well." Put before such a phrase as "How d"e do?" it is commonly short, and has the sound of it _wul_, but in reply it is deliberative, and the various shades of meaning which can be conveyed by difference of intonation, and by prolonging or abbreviating, I should vainly attempt to describe. I have heard _ooa-ahl_, _wahl_, _ahl_, _wal_ and something nearly approaching the sound of the _le_ in _able_. Sometimes before "I" it dwindles to a mere _l_, as ""l _I_ dunno." A friend of mine (why should I not please myself, though I displease him, by brightening my page with the initials of the most exquisite of humorists, J.H.?) told me that he once heard five "wells,"
like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry about the price of land.
The first was the ordinary _wul_, in deference to custom; the second, the long, perpending _ooahl_, with a falling inflection of the voice; the third, the same, but with the voice rising, as if in despair of a conclusion, into a plaintively nasal whine; the fourth, _wulh_, ending in the aspirate of a sigh; and then, fifth, came a short, sharp _wal_, showing that a conclusion had been reached. I have used this latter form in the "Biglow Papers," because, if enough nasality be added, it represents most nearly the average sound of what I may call the interjection.
A locution prevails in the Southern and Middle States which is so curious that, though never heard in New England, I will give a few lines to its discussion, the more readily because it is extinct elsewhere. I mean the use of _allow_ in the sense of _affirm_, as "I allow that"s a good horse." I find the word so used in 1558 by Anthony Jenkinson in Hakluyt: "Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the Christians for the same, and disabling our strengthe, saying we live by eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same, _allowing_ theyr great devouring of flesh and drinking of milke to be the increase of theyr strength." That is, they undervalued our strength, and affirmed their own to be the result of a certain diet. In another pa.s.sage of the same narrative the word has its more common meaning of approving or praising: "The said king, much allowing this declaration, said." Ducange quotes Bracton _sub voce_ ADLOCARE for the meaning "to admit as proved," and the transition from this to "affirm," is by no means violent. Izaak Walton has "Lebault _allows_ waterfrogs to be good meat," and here the word is equivalent to _affirms_. At the same time, when we consider some of the meanings of _allow_ in old English, and of _allouer_ in old French, and also remember that the verbs _prize_ and _praise_ are from one root, I think we must admit _allaudare_ to a share in the paternity of _allow_. The sentence from Hakluyt would read equally well, "contemning our strengthe, ... and praising (or valuing) their great eating of flesh as the cause of their increase in strength."
After all, if we confine ourselves to _allocare_, it may turn out that the word was somewhere and somewhen used for _to bet_, a.n.a.logously to _put up, put down, post_ (cf. Spanish _apostar_), and the like. I hear boys in the street continually saying, "I bet that"s a good horse," or what not, meaning by no means to risk anything beyond their opinion in the matter.
The word _improve_, in the sense of to "occupy, make use of, employ," as Dr. Pickering defines it, he long ago proved to be no neologism. He would have done better, I think, had he subst.i.tuted _profit by_ for _employ_. He cites Dr. Franklin as saying that the word had never, so far as he knew, been used in New England before he left it in 1723, except in Dr. Mather"s "Bemarkable Providences," which he oddly calls a "very old book." Franklin, as Dr. Pickering goes on to show, was mistaken.
Mr. Bartlett in his "Dictionary" merely abridges Pickering. Both of them should have confined the application of the word to material things, its extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use of it. For surely "Complete Letter-Writers" have been "_improving_ this opportunity" time out of mind. I will ill.u.s.trate the word a little further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a pa.s.sage in his "Phyllyp Sparowe," which I quote the rather as it contains also the word _allowed_ and as it distinguishes _improve_ from _employ:_--
"His [Chaucer"s] Englysh well alowed, So as it is _emprowed_ For as it is employd, There is no English voyd."
Here the meaning is to _profit by_. In Fuller"s "Holy Warre" (1647), we have "The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to _improve_ and enforce their darts to the utmost." Here the word might certainly mean _to make use of_. Mrs. Hutchison (Life of Colonel H.) uses the word in the same way: "And therefore did not _emproove_ his interest to engage the country in the quarrel." Swift in one of his letters says: "There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half its advantage; yet it is better _improved_ than the people." I find it also in "Strength out of Weakness" (1652), and Plutarch"s "Morals"(1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely American sense, and that is "a very good _improvement_ for a mill" in the "State Trials" (Speech of the Attorney. General in the Lady Ivy"s case, 1864). In the sense of _employ_, I could cite a dozen old English authorities.
In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse of which we have been deservedly ridiculed. I mean _lady,_ It is true I might cite the example of the Italian _donna_[30] (_domina_), which has been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as _lady_ among us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where bonnets preponderated, that "the ladies were last at the cross and first at the tomb"! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the mother country. In the "Harleian Miscellany" (vol. v. p. 455) I find "this _lady_ is my servant; the hedger"s daughter Ioan." in the "State Trials" I learn of "a _gentlewoman_ that lives cook with" such a one, and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a bagnio as a _gentlewoman_! From the same authority, by the way, I can state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory example of t.i.tus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another "inst.i.tution" which many have thought American: "They speak much of that boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that, having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers, he caus"d divers feather-beds to be rip"d, and all the feathers to be thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked with their bodies oil"d and pitch"d, and to tumble among the feathers."
Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the "boisterous" Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in England before our Revolution.
Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett"s excellent "Dictionary," to which I am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations. "Avails" is good old English, and the _vails_ of Sir Joshua Reynolds"s porter are famous. Averse _from_, averse _to_, and in connection with them the English vulgarism "different _to_;" the corrupt use of _to_ in these cases, as well as in the Yankee "he lives to Salem," "to home," and others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose from confounding the two French prepositions _a_, (from Latin _ad_ and _ab_), and in the other from translating the first of them. I once thought "different to" a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my pointing it out to him in "Henry Esmond," confessed it to be an anachronism. Mr. Bartlett refers to "the old writers quoted in Richardson"s Dictionary" for "different to," though in my edition of that work all the examples are with _from_. But I find _to_ used invariably by Sir R. Hawkins in Hakluyt. _Banjo_ is a negro corruption of O.E. _bandore_. _Bind-weed_ can hardly be modern, for _wood-bind_ is old and radically right, intertwining itself through _bindan_ and _windan_ with cla.s.sic stems. _Bobolink_: is this a contraction for Bob o" Lincoln? I find _bobolynes_, in one of the poems attributed to Skelton, where it may be rendered _giddy-pate_, a term very fit for the bird in his ecstasies. _Cruel_ for _great_ is in Hakluyt.
_Bowling-alley_ is in Nash"s "Pierce Pennilesse." _Curious_, meaning _nice_, occurs continually in old writers, and is as old as Pec.o.c.k"s "Repressor." _Droger_ is O.E. _drugger_. _Educational_ is in Burke.
_Feeze_ is only a form of _fizz_. _To fix_, in the American sense, I find used by the Commissioners of the United Colonies so early as 1675, "their arms well _fixed_ and fit for service." _To take the foot in the hand_ is German; so is to _go under_. _Gundalow_ is old; I find _gundelo_ in Hakluyt, and _gundello_ in Booth"s reprint of the folio Shakespeare of 1623. _Gonoff_ is O.E. _gnoffe_. _Heap_ is in "Piers Ploughman" ("and other names _an heep_"), and in Hakluyt ("seeing such a _heap_ of their enemies ready to devour them"). _To liquor_ is in the "Puritan" ("call "em in, and liquor "em a little"). _To loaf_: this, I think, is unquestionably German. _Laufen_ is p.r.o.nounced _lofen_ in some parts of Germany, and I once heard one German student say to another, _Ich lauf_ (lofe) _hier bis du wiederkehrest_, and he began accordingly to saunter up and down, in short, to _loaf_. _To mull_, Mr. Bartlett says, means "to soften, to dispirit," and quotes from "Margaret,"--"There has been a pretty considerable _mullin_ going on among the doctors,"--where it surely cannot mean what he says it does.
We have always heard _mulling_ used for _stirring, bustling_, sometimes in an underhand way. It is a metaphor derived probably from _mulling_ wine, and the word itself must be a corruption of _mell_, from O.F.
_mesler_. _Pair_ of stairs is in Hakluyt. _To pull up stakes_ is in Curwen"s Journal, and therefore pre-Revolutionary. I think I have met with it earlier. _Raise_: under this word Mr. Bartlett omits "to raise a house," that is, the frame of a wooden one, and also the substantive formed from it, a _raisin"_. _Retire_ for _go to bed_ is in Fielding"s "Amelia." _Setting-poles_ cannot be new, for I find "some _set_ [the boats] with long _poles_" in Hakluyt. _Shoulder-hitters_: I find that _shoulder-striker_ is old, though I have lost the reference to my authority. _Snag_ is no new word, though perhaps the Western application of it is so; but I find in Gill the proverb, "A bird in the bag is worth two on the snag." Dryden has _swop_ and _to rights_. _Trail_: Hakluyt has "many wayes _traled_ by the wilde beastes."
I subjoin a few phrases not in Mr. Bartlett"s book which I have heard.
_Bald-headed_: "to go it bald-beaded;" in great haste, as where one rushes out without his hat. _Bogue_: "I don"t git much done "thout I _bogue_ right in along "th my men." _Carry_: a _portage_. _Cat-nap_: a short doze. _Cat-stick_: a small stick. _Chowder-head_: a muddle-brain.
_Cling-john_: a soft cake of rye. _Cocoanut_; the head. _Cohees_: applied to the people of certain settlements in Western Pennsylvania, from their use of the archaic form _Quo" he_. _Dunnow"z I know_: the nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance.
_Essence-pedler_: a skunk. _First-rate and a half_. _Fish flakes_, for drying fish: O.E. _fleck_ (_cratis_). _Gander-party_: a social gathering of men only. _Gawnicus_: a dolt. _Hawkin"s whetstone_: rum; in derision of one Hawkins, a well-known temperance-lecturer. _Hyper_: to bustle: "I mus" _hyper_ about an" git tea." _Keeler-tub_: one in which dishes are washed. ("And Greasy Joan doth _keel_ the pot.") _Lap-tea_: where the guests are too many to sit at table. _Last of pea-time_: to be hard-up.
_Lose-laid_ (_loose-laid_): a weaver"s term, and probably English; weak-willed. _Malahack_: to cut up hastily or awkwardly. _Moonglade_: a beautiful word: for the track of moonlight on the water. _Off-ox_: an unmanageable, cross-grained fellow. _Old Driver, Old Splitfoot_: the Devil. _On-hitch_: to pull trigger (cf. Spanish _disparar_). _Popular_: conceited, _Rote_: sound of surf before a storm. _Rot-gut_: cheap whiskey; the word occurs in Heywood"s "English Traveller" and Addison"s "Drummer," for a poor kind of drink. _Seem_: it is habitual with the New-Englander to put this verb to strange uses, as "I can"t _seem_ to be suited," "I couldn"t _seem_ to know him." _Sidehill_, for _hillside_.
_State-house_: this seems an Americanism, whether invented or derived from the Dutch _Stad-huys_, I know not. _Strike_ and _string_; from the game of ninepins; to make a _strike_ is to knock down all the pins with one ball, hence it has come to mean fortunate, successful. _Swampers_: men who break out roads for lumberers. _Tormented_: euphemism for d.a.m.ned, as, "not a tormented cent." _Virginia fence, to make a_: to walk like a drunken man.
It is always worth while to note down the erratic words or phrases which one meets with in any dialect. They may throw light on the meaning of other words, on the relationship of languages, or even on history itself. In so composite a language as ours they often supply a different form to express a different shade of meaning, as in _viol_ and _fiddle_, _thrid_ and _thread_, _smother_ and _smoulder_, where the _l_ has crept in by a false a.n.a.logy with _would_. We have given back to England the excellent adjective _lengthy_, formed honestly like _earthy, drouthy_, and others, thus enabling their journalists to characterize our President"s messages by a word civilly compromising between _long_ and _tedious_, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism. Let me give two curious examples of the antiseptic property of dialects at which I have already glanced. Dante has _dindi_ as a childish or low word for _danari_ (money), and in Shropshire small Roman coins are still dug up which the peasants call _dinders_. This can hardly be a chance coincidence, but seems rather to carry the word back to the Roman soldiery. So our farmers say _chuk, chuk_, to their pigs, and _ciacco_ is one of the Italian words for _hog_. When a countryman tells us that he "fell _all of a heap_," I cannot help thinking that he unconsciously points to an affinity between our word _tumble_, and the Latin _tumulus_, that is older than most others. I believe that words, or even the mere intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of propagation by the root, like the gardener"s pest, quitch-gra.s.s,[31]
while the application or combination of them may be new. It is in these last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness of wit, and that sense of subtle a.n.a.logy which needs only refining to become fancy and imagination. Prosaic as American life seems in many of its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity, I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among us is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than that of any other people I have seen. Very many such will be found in Mr. Bartlett"s book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible. Most of them have no character at all but coa.r.s.eness, and are quite too long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always "takes off its coat to it," as a Yankee would say. There are plenty that have a more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and yet new varieties. One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and the West would yield many more. "Mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog;" "Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by starlight;" "Hungry as a graven image;" "Pop"lar as a hen with one chicken;" "A hen"s time ain"t much;" "Quicker "n greased lightnin";"
"Ther"s sech a thing ez bein" _tu_" (our Yankee paraphrase of [Greek: maeden agan]); hence the phrase _tooin" round_, meaning a supererogatory activity like that of flies; "Stingy enough to skim his milk at both eends;" "Hot as the Devil"s kitchen;" "Handy as a pocket in a shirt;"
"He"s a whole team and the dog under the wagon;" "All deacons are good, but there"s odds in deacons" (to _deacon_ berries is to put the largest atop); "So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights;"[32]
may serve as specimens. "I take my tea _barfoot_," said a backwoodsman when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find _barfoot_, by the way, in the Coventry Plays.) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky clearing said, "Stone"s got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land," and I overheard a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him to sing, "Wal, I _did_ sing once, but toons gut invented, an" thet spilt my trade." Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of _slabs_ will feel the picturesque force of the epithet _slab-bridged_ applied to a fellow of shaky character. Almost every county has some good die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage pa.s.ses into the currency of the whole neighborhood. Such a one described the county jail (the one stone building where all the dwellings are of wood) as "the house whose underpinnin" come up to the eaves," and called h.e.l.l "the place where they didn"t rake up their fires nights." I once asked a stage-driver if the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing: "Steep? chain lightnin" couldn" go down it "thout puttin" the shoe on!"
And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke before. To me there is something very taking in the negro "so black that charcoal made a chalk-mark on him," and the wooden shingle "painted so like marble that it sank in water," as if its very consciousness or its vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter. I heard a man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another that a certain Joe, who had been taking mercury, found a lump of quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner. This power of rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic sense that may be refined into faculty. At any rate there is humor here, and not mere quickness of wit,--the deeper and not the shallower quality. The _tendency_ of humor is always towards overplus of expression, while the very essence of wit is its logical precision.
Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had any humor, deceived, perhaps, by their gravity of manner. But this very seriousness is often the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in finding an element of ident.i.ty in things seemingly the most incongruous, and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical. Perhaps Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it. Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself? I doubt it, because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The Captain was walking up and down the veranda of a country tavern in Ma.s.sachusetts while the coach changed horses. A thunder-storm was going on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in condescending to be surprised by American merit, which we find so conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against the door, "Pretty heavy thunder you have here." The other, who had divined at a glance his feeling of generous concession to a new country, drawled gravely, "Waal, we _du_, considerin" the number of inhabitants." This, the more I a.n.a.lyze it, the more humorous does it seem. The same man was capable of wit also, when he would. He was a cabinet-maker, and was once employed to make some commandment-tables for the parish meeting-house. The parson, a very old man, annoyed him by looking into his workshop every morning, and cautioning him to be very sure to pick out "clear mahogany without any _knots_ in it." At last, wearied out, he retorted one day: "Wal, Dr. B., I guess ef I was to leave the _nots_ out o" some o" the c"man"ments, "t"ould soot you full ez wal!"
If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to p.r.o.nunciation, if I have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very good company. For, as to the _jus et norma loquendi_, I agree with Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani"s definition of sublime oratory,--"l"art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire." I profess myself a fanatical purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the engendure, growth, and affinities of the n.o.ble language about whose _mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If _they_ had their way--! "Doch es sey," says Lessing, "da.s.s jene gotbische Hoflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen als unsern Umgang?" And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that
"Tis possible to climb, To kindle, or to slake, Although in Skelton"s rhyme."
c.u.mberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral Rodney"s great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, "Behold, Sir George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus!"
the Admiral answered, peevishly, "d.a.m.n the Greeks and d.a.m.n the Trojans!
I have other things to think of." After the battle was won, Rodney thus to Sir Charles, "Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks and Trojans, and the whole of Homer"s Iliad, or as much of it as you please!" I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our pseudo-cla.s.sicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in. Should we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which therefore n.o.body could be again without being a bore? Is there no way left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naf_, which means nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which you are born? The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to be _that_. It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_ written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope, skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable b.u.t.ter of worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of life"s daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people went on for the next fifty years coaxing his b.u.t.termilk with the regular up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse, of Heine"s _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had said about Hebel"s "Allemannische Gedichte," which, making proper deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what I would have said far better than I could hope to do: "Allen diesen innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte ... von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein Vortheil fur den Dichter ist. Diese Elemente werden durch gluckliche Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedrangt der zu diesem Zwecke vor unserer Buchersprache grosse Vorzuge hat." Of course I do not mean to imply that _I_ have come near achieving any such success as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is _there_, and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand.
Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I valued. With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any vanity, I mention as one of these the late A.H. Clough, who more than any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne, impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we call genius. He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never completed anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at stake, led me to venture some pa.s.sages nearer to what is called poetical than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former series. The time seemed calling to me, with the old poet,--
"Leave, then, your wonted prattle, The oaten reed forbear; For I hear a sound of battle, And trumpets rend the air!"
The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident) was in "The Courtin"." While the introduction to the First Series was going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and improvised another fict.i.tious "notice of the press," in which, because verse would fill up s.p.a.ce more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Presently I began to receive letters asking for the rest of it, sometimes for the _balance_ of it. I had none, but to answer such demands, I patched a conclusion upon it in a later edition. Those who had only the first continued to importune me. Afterward, being asked to write it out as an autograph for the Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other verses, into some of which I fused a little more sentiment in a homely way, and after a fashion completed it by sketching in the characters"
and making a connected story. Most likely I have spoiled it, but I shall put it at the end of this Introduction, to answer once for all those kindly importunings.
As I have seen extracts from what purported to be writings of Mr.
Biglow, which were not genuine, I may properly take this opportunity to say, that the two volumes now published contain every line I ever printed under that pseudonyme, and that I have never, so far as I can remember, written an anonymous article (elsewhere than in the "North American Review" and the "Atlantic Monthly," during my editorship of it) except a review of Mrs. Stowe"s "Minister"s Wooing," and, some twenty years ago, a sketch of the antislavery movement in America for an English journal.
A word more on p.r.o.nunciation. I have endeavored to express this so far as I could by the types, taking such pains as, I fear, may sometimes make the reading harder than need be. At the same time, by studying uniformity I have sometimes been obliged to sacrifice minute exactness.
The emphasis often modifies the habitual sound. For example, _for_ is commonly _fer_ (a shorter sound than _fur_ for _far_), but when emphatic it always becomes _for_, as "wut _for!_" So _too_ is p.r.o.nounced like _to_ (as it was anciently spelt), and _to_ like _ta_ (the sound as in the _tou_ of _touch_), but _too_, when emphatic, changes into _tue_, and _to_, sometimes, in similar cases, into _toe_, as "I didn" hardly know wut _toe_ du!" Where vowels come together, or one precedes another following an aspirate, the two melt together, as was common with the older poets who formed their versification on French or Italian models.
Drayton is thoroughly Yankee when he says "I "xpect," and Pope when he says, "t" inspire." _With_ becomes sometimes _"ith_, _"[)u]th_, or _"th_, or even disappears wholly where it comes before _the_, as, "I went along _th"_ Square" (along with the Squire), the _are_ sound being an archaism which I have noticed also in _choir_, like the old Scottish _quhair_.[33] (Herrick has, "Of flowers ne"er sucked by th" theeving bee.") _Without_ becomes _athout_ and _"thout_. _Afterwards_ always retains its locative _s_, and is p.r.o.nounced always _ahterwurds"_, with a strong accent on the last syllable. This oddity has some support in the erratic _towards"_ instead of _to"wards_, which we find in the poets and sometimes hear. The sound given to the first syllable of _to"wards_, I may remark, sustains the Yankee lengthening of the _o_ in _to_. At the beginning of a sentence, _ahterwurds_ has the accent on the first syllable; at the end of one, on the last; as, "_ah"terwurds_ he tol"
me," "he tol" me _ahterwurds"_." The Yankee never makes a mistake in his aspirates. _U_ changes in many words to _e_, always in _such, brush, tush, hush, rush, blush_, seldom in _much_, oftener in _trust_ and _crust_, never in _mush, gust, bust, tumble_, or (?) _flush_, in the latter case probably to avoid confusion with _flesh_. I have heard _flush_ with the _e_ sound, however. For the same reason, I suspect, never in _gush_ (at least, I never heard it), because we have already one _gesh_ for _gash_. _A_ and _i_ short frequently become _e_ short.
_U_ always becomes _o_ in the prefix _un_ (except _unto_), and _o_ in return changes to _u_ short in _uv_ for _of_, and in some words beginning with _om_. _T_ and _d_, _b_ and _p_, _v_ and _w_, remain intact. So much occurs to me in addition to what I said on this head in the preface to the former volume.
Of course in what I have said I wish to be understood as keeping in mind the difference between provincialisms properly so called and _slang_.
_Slang_ is always vulgar, because it is not a natural but an affected way of talking, and all mere tricks of speech or writing are offensive.
I do not think that Mr. Biglow can be fairly charged with vulgarity, and I should have entirely failed in my design, if I had not made it appear that high and even refined sentiment may coexist with the shrewder and more comic elements of the Yankee character. I believe that what is essentially vulgar and mean-spirited in politics seldom has its source in the body of the people, but much rather among those who are made timid by their wealth or selfish by their love of power. A democracy can _afford_ much better than an aristocracy to follow out its convictions, and is perhaps better qualified to build those convictions on plain principles of right and wrong, rather than on the shifting sands of expediency. I had always thought "Sam Slick" a libel on the Yankee character, and a complete falsification of Yankee modes of speech, though, for aught I know, it may be true in both respects so far as the British provinces are concerned. To me the dialect was native, was spoken all about me when a boy, at a time when an Irish day-laborer was as rare as an American one now. Since then I have made a study of it so far as opportunity allowed. But when I write in it, it is as in a mother tongue, and I am carried back far beyond any studies of it to long-ago noonings in my father"s hay-fields, and to the talk of Sam and Job over their jug of _blackstrap_ under the shadow of the ash-tree which still dapples the gra.s.s whence they have been gone so long.
But life is short, and prefaces should be. And so, my good friends, to whom this introductory epistle is addressed, farewell. Though some of you have remonstrated with me, I shall never write any more "Biglow Papers," however great the temptation,--great especially at the present time,--unless it be to complete the original plan of this Series by bringing out Mr. Sawin as an "original Union man." The very favor with which they have been received is a hindrance to me, by forcing on me a self-consciousness from which I was entirely free when I wrote the First Series. Moreover, I am no longer the same careless youth, with nothing to do but live to myself, my books, and my friends, that I was then. I always hated politics, in the ordinary sense of the word, and I am not likely to grow, fonder of them, now that I have learned how rare it is to find a man who can keep principle clear from party and personal prejudice, or can conceive the possibility of another"s doing so. I feel as if I could in some sort claim to be an _emeritus_, and I am sure that political satire will have full justice done it by that genuine and delightful humorist, the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby. I regret that I killed off Mr. Wilbur so soon, for he would have enabled me to bring into this preface a number of learned quotations, which must now go a-begging, and also enabled me to dispersonalize myself into a vicarious egotism. He would have helped me likewise in clearing myself from a charge which I shall briefly touch on, because my friend Mr. Hughes has found it needful to defend me in his preface to one of the English editions of the "Biglow Papers." I thank Mr. Hughes heartily for his friendly care of my good name, and were his Preface accessible to my readers here (as I am glad it is not, for its partiality makes me blush), I should leave the matter where he left it. The charge is of profanity, brought in by persons who proclaimed African slavery of Divine inst.i.tution, and is based (so far as I have heard) on two pa.s.sages in the First Series--
"An" you"ve gut to git up airly, Ef you want to take in G.o.d,"
and,
"G.o.d"ll send the bill to you,"