Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 | Page 5

and is
approaching a mode of writing which unites the smoothness of the
eighteenth century with the vital vigor of the seventeenth, so that Sir
Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as near to us as Pope
or Addison,--a style penetrated with the best spirit of Carlyle, without a
trace of Carlylism.
Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one fault
ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor
Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be
sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for _mon
carrosse_, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future
Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of
royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. The only thing I
remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric is one admirable verse
of caution which it quoted:--
"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic, if too
new or old; Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last
to lay the old aside."
Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or
Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English
soars and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives an
affluence of synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no
unmixed idiom can show.
While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,--(at
present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the
English,)--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.
American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the
nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle,
Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary
instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies
with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:
Burke uses "pretty considerable"; Miss Burney says, "I trembled a few";
the English Bible says "reckon," Locke has "guess," and Southey
"realize," in the exact senses in which one sometimes hears them used

colloquially here. Nevertheless such improprieties are of course to be
avoided; but whatever good Americanisms exist, let us hold to them by
all means. The diction of Emerson alone is a sufficient proof, by its
unequalled range and precision, that no people in the world ever had
access to a vocabulary so rich and copious as we are acquiring. To the
previous traditions and associations of the English tongue we add
resources of contemporary life such as England cannot rival. Political
freedom makes every man an individual; a vast industrial activity
makes every man an inventor, not merely of labor-saving machines, but
of labor-saving words; universal schooling popularizes all thought and
sharpens the edge of all language. We unconsciously demand of our
writers the same dash and the same accuracy which we demand in
railroading or dry-goods-jobbing. The mixture of nationalities is
constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect: Ireland,
Scotland, Germany, Africa are present everywhere with their various
contributions of wit and shrewdness, thought and geniality; in New
York and elsewhere one finds whole thoroughfares of France, Italy,
Spain, Portugal; on our Western railways there are placards printed in
Swedish; even China is creeping in. The colonies of England are too far
and too provincial to have had much reflex influence on her literature,
but how our phraseology is already amplified by our relations with
Spanish-America! The life-blood of Mexico flowed into our
newspapers while the war was in progress; and the gold of California
glitters in our primer: Many foreign cities may show a greater variety
of mere national costumes, but the representative value of our
immigrant tribes is far greater from the very fact that they merge their
mental costume in ours. Thus the American writer finds himself among
his phrases like an American sea-captain amid his crew: a medley of all
nations, waiting for the strong organizing New-England mind to mould
them into a unit of force.
There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not
elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your
sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make
them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these
devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave
loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged
along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at

her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till she
has one round and comely mass.
Reduce yourself to short allowance of parentheses and dashes; if you
employ them merely from clumsiness, they will lose all their proper
power in your hands. Economize quotation-marks