Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose
opinions
I
valued.
valued.
James Russell Lowell
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 illustrate the word a little
further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a
passage 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 Titus 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
'institution' 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 classic 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 Pecock'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 pronounced _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
damned, 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 analogy 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-grass,[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 analogy 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 coarseness, 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 passes 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 hell '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 identity 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
Massachusetts 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
analyze 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 pronunciation, 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 noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass 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. '
Cumberland 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, 'Damn the Greeks and damn 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-classicality 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 nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, 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 butter 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 buttermilk 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 passages 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 fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because
verse would fill up space 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 pronunciation. 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 pronounced 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 pronounced 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 grass 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 institution, and is
based (so far as I have heard) on two passages in the First Series--
'An' you've gut to git up airly,
Ef you want to take in God,'
and,
'God'll send the bill to you,'
and on some Scriptural illustrations by Mr. Sawin.
Now, in the first place, I was writing under an assumed character, and
must talk as the person would whose mouthpiece I made myself. Will any
one familiar with the New England countryman venture to tell me that he
does _not_ speak of sacred things familiarly? that Biblical allusions
(allusions, that is, to the single book with whose language, from his
church-going habits, he is intimate) are _not_ frequent on his lips? If
so, he cannot have pursued his studies of the character on so many
long-ago muster-fields and at so many cattle-shows as I. But I scorn any
such line of defence, and will confess at once that one of the things I
am proud of in my countrymen is (I am not speaking now of such persons
as I have assumed Mr. Sawin to be) that they do not put their Maker away
far from them, or interpret the fear of God into being afraid of Him.
The Talmudists had conceived a deep truth when they said, that 'all
things were in the power of God, save the fear of God;' and when people
stand in great dread of an invisible power, I suspect they mistake quite
another personage for the Deity. I might justify myself for the passages
criticised by many parallel ones from Scripture, but I need not. The
Reverend Homer Wilbur's note-books supply me with three apposite
quotations. The first is from a Father of the Roman Church, the second
from a Father of the Anglican, and the third from a Father of Modern
English poetry. The Puritan divines would furnish me with many more
such. St. Bernard says, _Sapiens nummularius est Deus: nummum fictum non
recipiet_; 'A cunning money-changer is God: he will take in no base
coin. ' Latimer says, 'You shall perceive that God, by this example,
shaketh us by the noses and taketh us by the ears. ' Familiar enough,
both of them, one would say! But I should think Mr. Biglow had verily
stolen the last of the two maligned passages from Dryden's 'Don
Sebastian,' where I find
'And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me! '
And there I leave the matter, being willing to believe that the Saint,
the Martyr, and even the Poet, were as careful of God's honor as my
critics are ever likely to be.
II. GLOSSARY TO THE BIGLOW PAPERS
Act'lly, _actually_.
Air, _are_.
Airth, _earth_.
Airy, _area_.
Aree, _area_.
Arter, _after_.
Ax, _ask_.
Beller, _bellow_.
Bellowses, _lungs_.
Ben, _been_.
Bile, _boil_.
Bimeby, _by and by_.
Blurt out, _to speak bluntly_.
Bust, _burst_.
Buster, _a roistering blade_; used also as a general superlative.
Caird, _carried_.
Cairn, _carrying_.
Caleb, _a turncoat_.
Cal'late, _calculate_.
Cass, _a person with two lives_.
Close, _clothes_.
Cockerel, _a young cock_.
Cocktail, _a kind of drink_; also, _an ornament peculiar to
soldiers_.
Convention, _a place where people are imposed on; a juggler's show_.
Coons, _a cant term for a now defunct party_; derived, perhaps, from
the fact of their being commonly _up a tree_.
Cornwallis, _a sort of muster in masquerade_; supposed to have had
its origin soon after the Revolution, and to commemorate the surrender
of Lord Cornwallis. It took the place of the old Guy Fawkes procession.
Crooked stick, _a perverse, froward person_.
Cunnle, _a colonel_.
Cus, _a curse_; also, _a pitiful fellow_.
Darsn't, used indiscriminately, either in singular or plural number,
for _dare not, dares not_, and _dared not_.
Deacon off, _to give the cue to_; derived from a custom, once
universal, but now extinct, in our New England Congregational churches.
An important part of the office of deacon was to read aloud the hymns
_given out_ by the minister, one line at a time, the congregation
singing each line as soon as read.
Demmercrat, leadin', _one in favor of extending slavery; a free-trade
lecturer maintained in the custom-house_.
Desput, _desperate_.
D[=o]', _don't_.
Doos, _does_.
Doughface, _a contented lick-spittle_; a common variety of Northern
politician.
Dror, _draw_.
Du, _do_.
Dunno, dno, _do not_ or _does not know_.
Dut, _dirt_.
Eend, _end_.
Ef, _if_.
Emptins, _yeast_.
Env'y, _envoy_.
Everlasting, an intensive, without reference to duration.
Ev'y, _every_.
Ez, _as_.
Fence, on the; said of one who halts between two opinions; a trimmer.
Fer, _for_.
Ferfle, ferful, _fearful_; also an intensive.
Fin', _find_.
Fish-skin, used in New England to clarify coffee.
Fix, _a difficulty, a nonplus_.
Foller, folly, _to follow_.
Forrerd, _forward_.
Frum, _from_.
Fur, _for_
Furder, _farther_.
Furrer, _furrow_. Metaphorically, _to draw a straight furrow_ is to
live uprightly or decorously.
Fust, _first_.
Gin, _gave_.
Git, _get_.
Gret, _great_.
Grit, _spirit, energy, pluck_.
Grout, _to sulk_.
Grouty, _crabbed, surly_.
Gum, _to impose on_.
Gump, _a foolish fellow, a dullard_.
Gut, _got_.
Hed, _had_.
Heern, _heard_.
Hellum, _helm_.
Hendy, _handy_.
Het, _heated_.
Hev, _have_.
Hez, _has_.
Holl, _whole_.
Holt, _hold_.
Huf, _hoof_.
Hull, _whole_.
Hum, _home_.
Humbug, _General Taylor's antislavery_.
Hut, _hurt_.
Idno, _I do not know_.
In'my, _enemy_.
Insines, _ensigns_; used to designate both the officer who carries the
standard, and the standard itself.
Inter, intu, _into_.
Jedge, _judge_.
Jest, _just_.
Jine, _join_.
Jint, _joint_.
Junk, _a fragment of any solid substance_.
Keer, _care_.
Kep', _kept_.
Killock, _a small anchor_.
Kin', kin' o', kinder, _kind, kind of_.
Lawth, _loath_.
Less, _let's, let us_.
Let daylight into, _to shoot_.
Let on, _to hint, to confess, to own_.
Lick, _to beat, to overcome_.
Lights, _the bowels_.
Lily-pads, _leaves of the water-lily_.
Long-sweetening, _molasses_.
Mash, _marsh_.
Mean, _stingy, ill-natured_.
Min', _mind_.
Nimepunce, _ninepence, twelve and a half cents_.
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 illustrate the word a little
further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a
passage 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 Titus 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
'institution' 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 classic 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 Pecock'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 pronounced _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
damned, 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 analogy 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-grass,[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 analogy 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 coarseness, 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 passes 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 hell '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 identity 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
Massachusetts 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
analyze 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 pronunciation, 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 noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass 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. '
Cumberland 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, 'Damn the Greeks and damn 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-classicality 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 nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, 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 butter 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 buttermilk 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 passages 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 fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because
verse would fill up space 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 pronunciation. 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 pronounced 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 pronounced 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 grass 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 institution, and is
based (so far as I have heard) on two passages in the First Series--
'An' you've gut to git up airly,
Ef you want to take in God,'
and,
'God'll send the bill to you,'
and on some Scriptural illustrations by Mr. Sawin.
Now, in the first place, I was writing under an assumed character, and
must talk as the person would whose mouthpiece I made myself. Will any
one familiar with the New England countryman venture to tell me that he
does _not_ speak of sacred things familiarly? that Biblical allusions
(allusions, that is, to the single book with whose language, from his
church-going habits, he is intimate) are _not_ frequent on his lips? If
so, he cannot have pursued his studies of the character on so many
long-ago muster-fields and at so many cattle-shows as I. But I scorn any
such line of defence, and will confess at once that one of the things I
am proud of in my countrymen is (I am not speaking now of such persons
as I have assumed Mr. Sawin to be) that they do not put their Maker away
far from them, or interpret the fear of God into being afraid of Him.
The Talmudists had conceived a deep truth when they said, that 'all
things were in the power of God, save the fear of God;' and when people
stand in great dread of an invisible power, I suspect they mistake quite
another personage for the Deity. I might justify myself for the passages
criticised by many parallel ones from Scripture, but I need not. The
Reverend Homer Wilbur's note-books supply me with three apposite
quotations. The first is from a Father of the Roman Church, the second
from a Father of the Anglican, and the third from a Father of Modern
English poetry. The Puritan divines would furnish me with many more
such. St. Bernard says, _Sapiens nummularius est Deus: nummum fictum non
recipiet_; 'A cunning money-changer is God: he will take in no base
coin. ' Latimer says, 'You shall perceive that God, by this example,
shaketh us by the noses and taketh us by the ears. ' Familiar enough,
both of them, one would say! But I should think Mr. Biglow had verily
stolen the last of the two maligned passages from Dryden's 'Don
Sebastian,' where I find
'And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me! '
And there I leave the matter, being willing to believe that the Saint,
the Martyr, and even the Poet, were as careful of God's honor as my
critics are ever likely to be.
II. GLOSSARY TO THE BIGLOW PAPERS
Act'lly, _actually_.
Air, _are_.
Airth, _earth_.
Airy, _area_.
Aree, _area_.
Arter, _after_.
Ax, _ask_.
Beller, _bellow_.
Bellowses, _lungs_.
Ben, _been_.
Bile, _boil_.
Bimeby, _by and by_.
Blurt out, _to speak bluntly_.
Bust, _burst_.
Buster, _a roistering blade_; used also as a general superlative.
Caird, _carried_.
Cairn, _carrying_.
Caleb, _a turncoat_.
Cal'late, _calculate_.
Cass, _a person with two lives_.
Close, _clothes_.
Cockerel, _a young cock_.
Cocktail, _a kind of drink_; also, _an ornament peculiar to
soldiers_.
Convention, _a place where people are imposed on; a juggler's show_.
Coons, _a cant term for a now defunct party_; derived, perhaps, from
the fact of their being commonly _up a tree_.
Cornwallis, _a sort of muster in masquerade_; supposed to have had
its origin soon after the Revolution, and to commemorate the surrender
of Lord Cornwallis. It took the place of the old Guy Fawkes procession.
Crooked stick, _a perverse, froward person_.
Cunnle, _a colonel_.
Cus, _a curse_; also, _a pitiful fellow_.
Darsn't, used indiscriminately, either in singular or plural number,
for _dare not, dares not_, and _dared not_.
Deacon off, _to give the cue to_; derived from a custom, once
universal, but now extinct, in our New England Congregational churches.
An important part of the office of deacon was to read aloud the hymns
_given out_ by the minister, one line at a time, the congregation
singing each line as soon as read.
Demmercrat, leadin', _one in favor of extending slavery; a free-trade
lecturer maintained in the custom-house_.
Desput, _desperate_.
D[=o]', _don't_.
Doos, _does_.
Doughface, _a contented lick-spittle_; a common variety of Northern
politician.
Dror, _draw_.
Du, _do_.
Dunno, dno, _do not_ or _does not know_.
Dut, _dirt_.
Eend, _end_.
Ef, _if_.
Emptins, _yeast_.
Env'y, _envoy_.
Everlasting, an intensive, without reference to duration.
Ev'y, _every_.
Ez, _as_.
Fence, on the; said of one who halts between two opinions; a trimmer.
Fer, _for_.
Ferfle, ferful, _fearful_; also an intensive.
Fin', _find_.
Fish-skin, used in New England to clarify coffee.
Fix, _a difficulty, a nonplus_.
Foller, folly, _to follow_.
Forrerd, _forward_.
Frum, _from_.
Fur, _for_
Furder, _farther_.
Furrer, _furrow_. Metaphorically, _to draw a straight furrow_ is to
live uprightly or decorously.
Fust, _first_.
Gin, _gave_.
Git, _get_.
Gret, _great_.
Grit, _spirit, energy, pluck_.
Grout, _to sulk_.
Grouty, _crabbed, surly_.
Gum, _to impose on_.
Gump, _a foolish fellow, a dullard_.
Gut, _got_.
Hed, _had_.
Heern, _heard_.
Hellum, _helm_.
Hendy, _handy_.
Het, _heated_.
Hev, _have_.
Hez, _has_.
Holl, _whole_.
Holt, _hold_.
Huf, _hoof_.
Hull, _whole_.
Hum, _home_.
Humbug, _General Taylor's antislavery_.
Hut, _hurt_.
Idno, _I do not know_.
In'my, _enemy_.
Insines, _ensigns_; used to designate both the officer who carries the
standard, and the standard itself.
Inter, intu, _into_.
Jedge, _judge_.
Jest, _just_.
Jine, _join_.
Jint, _joint_.
Junk, _a fragment of any solid substance_.
Keer, _care_.
Kep', _kept_.
Killock, _a small anchor_.
Kin', kin' o', kinder, _kind, kind of_.
Lawth, _loath_.
Less, _let's, let us_.
Let daylight into, _to shoot_.
Let on, _to hint, to confess, to own_.
Lick, _to beat, to overcome_.
Lights, _the bowels_.
Lily-pads, _leaves of the water-lily_.
Long-sweetening, _molasses_.
Mash, _marsh_.
Mean, _stingy, ill-natured_.
Min', _mind_.
Nimepunce, _ninepence, twelve and a half cents_.
