Delphi complete works of.., p.801
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 801
But for the full appreciation of this exquisite humour we must refer the reader to the story itself. We are only dealing here with its bearing on the use and application of rules of grammar.
One may imagine a school teacher writing up these sentences on the blackboard, with the words, ‘Correct the errors in the above sentences.’ Once corrected there would be, or shall we say ‘they’d be,’ little left for the author’s purpose.
It is clear that the writer, or speaker, of these sentences has got the grammatical forms all wrong. Here is ‘him’ used as the subject of a sentence, and ‘me’ along with it, although these forms do not belong with the nominative case, but are reversed for the objective. Here is the verb ‘is’ used in place of ‘are,’ in other words a singular form in place of a plural. Here is ‘they’ instead of ‘there’ and ‘wouldn’t of’ instead of ‘wouldn’t have,’ mistakes that arise from mixing up the sound and the spelling of similar words. Here is the phrase, ‘concerts which they give you music for all tastes’ — in which the logic of language collapses in a heap. Who gives which to what?
But let it be noted that ever so many people who use what is called cultivated speech and would not make any of the errors above, would be quite unable to talk of them as ‘cases’ and ‘numbers’ and such, having long ago forgotten what such things are, or having never understood them. This brings us back to the grammar of people in good society.
Now we can realize from the quotations above into what an exuberant overgrowth, into what a tangle of conflicting forms, living language would have grown if there had been no grammarians and logicians to clip and prune and trim it. We can understand how and why, in the days before printing set language into a mould, speech broke and disintegrated into dialects that became mutually unintelligible. The printer and the grammarian, the spelling book and the logician have all been among the servants of humanity; nor to any part of humanity more than to the British and the American nations in whose unity of language, whose mutual comprehension, lies a principal hope for world salvation. But even at that we must remember that servants must never move up from the servants’ hall to the higher table. We must realize that the rules of grammar and such formal regulations of what we may say and write rest for the most part on usage, that is, on what we actually do say, and do write.
In a certain broad sense, no doubt, the form and sequence of language is based on reason and logic, but this is only true in the general and not of necessity in the particular. An accepted form may be quite contrary to the logic of thought, and yet carry its meaning without any ambiguity. Who, except by pedantic ingenuity, could make logic of such forms as, ‘John was given a stick.’
‘This is a thing we could do with more of.’ Sometimes an illogical form is accepted in one language as correct and even commendable and in another is supposed to be a vulgar usage. ‘I have never seen nobody,’ ought logically to mean, ‘I have always been within sight of somebody.’ Instead of that it is just an emphatic form of saying ‘I have never seen anybody,’ and is bad English but excellent French and admirable Greek. For emphasis’ sake, language breaks away from tenses, substituting present forms for past, as when we say, ‘He enters, what does he see? A lifeless body on the floor’ — but we don’t mean that this is going on now. We mean that it happened in the past. The change of tense makes it vivid; it seems to happen again. Accepted usage, even admired usage, often breaks away, in the form of metaphor and hyperbole, from truth and even from consistency. We talk of people being ‘bathed in tears’ or ‘drowned in grief’ or ‘crushed with sorrow.’ Where is a man standing when he is ‘beside himself with excitement’? If a man near him has ‘one foot in the grave’ where is the other?... And if a third man is present but is ‘wrapped up in himself,’ where is he lying around? No wonder children find it hard to understand the talk of grown-up people.
Hence what we call correct grammar, correct language and recognized syntax, depends really upon usage and upon who does the using. People who start to study grammar in the formal sense, and people who try to learn to write by beginning in that way, are apt to be misled. They get the idea that there exists a set of rules which must not be broken, of forms which must, or must not, be used. They get the further idea that correct forms of language have to be logical and consistent, but in reality there is no test but that of usage. Grammar is only an analysis after the facts, a post-mortem on usage. Usage must come first and usage must rule. The only difficulty is to know, whose usage? The answer is obviously the usage of the best writers; this leads to the further difficulty of knowing who are the best writers. We find them to be the writers recognized as the best by the best people. With that we are getting dangerously near again writing done by gentlemen for gentlemen. The search for a final authority thus becomes as difficult as the search for a first cause in physics.
Various nations, or rather, the ‘people of quality’ of various nations, have often tried to establish a fixed authority as to what should be correct language and approved literature. One thinks of the famous example of the French Academy, a royal institution founded under the fostering care of Cardinal Richelieu. Its forty members were supposed to be the chief literary men of France, its judgment in criticism final and its ‘Dictionary’ the guardian of the French language against perversion or deterioration. It took sixty years to produce its first dictionary (1694). The Academy, as organized, perished in the French Revolution, but came to life again (1796) and lived (till 1940) as the language and literature section of the Institute of France, to which its name was commonly transferred.
For the English language the people of Britain and America have not and never had any such constituted authority as the French Academy. We have as our standards various dictionaries of high repute, from the lexicon of Dr. Johnson down. We have the standard called the King’s English, though no one knows where to find it; such centres of authority as Harvard or Oxford; and a whole library of text books. But none of these things have the authority of the French Academy. These are not sovereigns; these are umpires. An umpire doesn’t make the rules.
One can realize what is apt to happen as the result of setting up authoritative standards by recalling what happened in France. Literature under academic control began to comform to set patterns. The drama, for instance, had to follow the noble lead given to it by Racine and Corneille. It had to remain ‘elevated.’ It must deal with noble and distinguished characters, such as Achilles, Iphigenia and Beelzebub. Its scene must be a court or a palace or a temple; its language the stately periods of classical metre — sonorous, regular, each thought complete within its allotted space.
Now noble subjects are noble subjects and regularity is pleasing and symmetry is symmetrical. But even of a good thing there can be too much. Uniformity gets wearisome. The ornaments become fetters, the symmetry that of a prison wall. Hence presently came the great revolt in France against the classical drama. There was the terrific excitement, almost a free fight, over the production of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830). Here was a play which abandoned Achilles and Beelzebub in favour of a Spanish bandit, and which defied all the laws of metre by actually running the sense over from one fine till the next. By the time the excitement had died down French literature had broken out of its academic prison and was loose on the streets.
Even earlier in the same epoch Walter Scott had discovered that if you were writing in English you needn’t write about Julius Caesar or Desdemona, provided you had a Highland chieftain and a girl in a tartan. Then presently Charles Dickens found that even if you had only a gin-shop and a debtors’ prison you could find literature in it somewhere.
Thus did literature emancipate itself from authority and fixed models, still preserving a real or pretended reverence for the higher models of Greece.
It is proper to remind ourselves at this point of the bearing of this discussion of authority on the question of how to write. It bears thus. Every young writer must decide for himself whether he is trying to walk in old paths or find new ones, to cultivate the style of the recognized writers or to manufacture a style for himself. Obviously there are difficulties both ways. Too much imitation is like a monkey at a looking-glass. But innovation for innovation’s sake is like a monkey without a looking-glass. In other words it is just silly. Witness the great quantities of ‘free verse,’ written anyhow and anyway, just to be different, and succeeding in being as ‘free’ as the dancing fancy of a lunatic. Novelty is not in itself merit. A new word may be a very poor word, taking the place of a better one.
Yet on the other hand mere imitation and repetition falls asleep. China folded its hands and fell asleep over its primitive books thousands of years ago till the very sleep made the books sacred. It is possible perhaps that we have fallen asleep over Greek and Latin; that we are dozing off over the long, rolling sentences of the Gibbons and the Macaulays, as resonant as the sound of the sea; that our rules of grammar are gradually setting like cement. If so, the first thing for a writer is to wake up, to break loose from authority and convention.
It is doubtful then whether the attempt at authoritative control is of real benefit to national language and literature. In the history of letters as in the history of political development there is the same age-long struggle between liberty and despotism, or, as others see it, between licence and order. The attempt to lay down rules of grammar, canons of taste, laws of the paragraph will provoke rebellion as surely as a decree of the Star Chamber or the provisions of the Stamp Act. The man who first splits an infinitive is as bold a rebel as the man who cracks a skull. The abolition of English suffixes was as great a triumph as the abolition of English serfdom. The levelling out of our English plurals into s was as glorious an advance as the overthrow of the strong verb (... sang... swam... ran...) by the weak, the ones with the past tense in -ed, such as, I skidded, instead of I scud, which now hold almost the whole field and apply to all the new additions. In our own day we have witnessed, or are witnessing, the final suppression of the subjunctive, and the confused revolt of the pronouns.
Even at that there still remains for each of us the question how much of the change is good, how much is bad. Where does change become mere senseless destruction? Each of us in accepting changes of grammar will be inclined to go a little beyond what was current in his youth, and then pause just as the youthful radical slowly passes into the elderly conservative. For the individual, innovation runs out. Personally I find that I strongly object to such changes as the use of ‘due’ instead of ‘owing,’ a thing unknown in my youth. I objected, but have long since forgotten it, to the use of the vocative ‘Oh,’ in calling out to anybody ‘Oh, Bill, ‘Oh, Jim,’ instead of the simple if sudden call of ‘Bill!’ or ‘Jim!’ as current in England in my childhood.
But all such decisions about changes to be accepted or refused stand on a different ground from the rooted objections of grammarians to any change at all, the attempt to set up a formal authority, to prevent language from degenerating. The real source of this attitude was the belief so widely held by scholars until our own day that modern languages were degenerating, in fact that they had steadily degenerated from the stately classical languages; that French and Spanish were broken-down languages; a sort of wreckage still constantly tending to disintegrate, and English a sort of peasant dialect that never had the early advantage of a Latin origin, but had come up by being blended with French and by being buttressed by Latin, like a workhouse boy steadily improved by Sunday school until almost fit to associate with the quality.
The truth is all the other way. It is of course an act of literary heresy to say it, but there is to my mind no doubt about the superiority of the English language over any and every ancient tongue. Language undergoes progress. Scholars, we know, can still go into ecstasies over Greek, the more so as they have their ecstasies to themselves. They show us the subtlety of Greek in its having not two numbers, singular and plural, but three — singular, dual and plural. The dual means two people. ‘I love,’ is singular; ‘we love,’ is plural; but ‘we two love’ is dual — as snug for lovers as love itself. Yet to me the distinction merely suggests the uncertain counting of a hen, or the primitive races who count, ‘one, two, three — a whole lot,’ and let it go at that.
Yet it is only fair to remember that people of such wide reading and such marvellous command of language as Macaulay have acknowledged, indeed have taken for granted, the superiority of Greek. Macaulay can find no higher praise for our language than to say that it is ‘inferior to the tongue of Greece alone.’
In such a matter there is, also, no tribunal or court of reference. Very few people now study Greek; fewer still succeed in learning it. The few who claim to know Greek literature in Greek hug their knowledge to their hearts like a child with a rag doll; thus does each of us with such poor things as are our own. So there is no one to tell the world that language has vastly improved in the last two thousand years. Scholars could weep over the intrusion of the preposition to obliterate the Latin ablative case, over the intrusion of auxiliary verbs, in reality as handy as the adjustable parts of an up-to-date machine. Greek often said in one word what we say in four. But so does Zulu.
The elaborate forms and suffixes for cases, numbers, moods and tenses in Greek and Latin are primitive and clumsy. You will find them, or similar things, in the Bantu or the Objibway or any primitive speech. As beside our easy and flexible system of indicating the connection of things by means of prepositions as connecting words, they are nowhere. Even a person quite unacquainted with philology and language study will understand what is meant if he will permit a simple example. In English we still have a few surviving broken off forms that can be tacked on anywhere just like a Latin or a Zulu suffix. We can use the ‘wards’ in ‘homewards,’
‘landwards,’
‘seawards,’ etc., or in a new combination, let us say, ‘Town-wards,’ and find it intelligible. We can say, he went ‘London-wards’ or ‘Kent-wards,’ or ‘shore-wards.’ Still more alive is the suffix ‘less’ — He came into the room, hatless, coatless, breathless, almost pantless. We could turn the suffix ‘less’ — if we wanted to set the clock backwards and ‘go Latin’ (or go Zulu) — into a case and call it the ‘Separative Case’ Grammarians would then talk of the subtlety of the Separative Case as used to show that the thing indicated is not there, such as pantless — having no pants. But why such a word is superior to without any pants it is hard to see.
So much then for the idea that the breaking and shifting of English in the past was a form of degeneration. It was progress, and if we recognize this fact it means that we need not seek in ancient languages models for our own. A thing is not correct because it is classical. A rule is not binding because it bound Julius Caesar. The question then is, where are we to look for guidance as to correct English?
Any student looking into a technical book on errors in the use of English will be apt to find himself badly perplexed. There seems to be a standing contrast between the forms of speech which we commonly use and the forms required by the rules of grammar. This is especially so in the case of our pronouns. If anybody calls out ‘Who is there?’ Most of us would answer ‘Mel’ or ‘It’s me!’ The rule demands T,’ on the ground that this is a nominative case after a copulative (or coupling) verb. But the French language forgot about this copulative verb centuries ago and all French people say ‘C’est moi.’ This grammatical point was made a focus of fun in the once favourite comedy, Id on parle français (the shop sign for ‘French spoken here).’ A customer entering the shop asks ‘Qui est la personne ici qui parle français?’ The young man behind the counter bows deeply and answers ‘Je.’ The audience give him a laugh, but the English grammarian would give him a medal.
Suppose anybody said to you, ‘Have you seen my scissors anywhere about?’ and you pointed to a pair of scissors on a table, would you say ‘Are these they?’ and would the person say ‘Yes, thank you, those are they’? Surely not. ‘That’s them,’ is as familiar and honest as it is incorrect under the rule.
The truth is that our English pronouns are a disorderly and drunken lot. We no sooner straighten them up on one side than they fall over on the other. Take the case of the widespread, and still spreading, tendency to use I instead of me. ‘He gave a present to Mary and I.’
‘He came over to see Sis and I.’ This ‘error,’ if it is one, may have existed for ever so long, but of late years it has spread like a weed in a neglected garden. I think the explanation is very simple. People were taught at school that they mustn’t say, as they were inclined to say in their home talk, ‘Me and Mary went to the village.’ They must put Mary first for politeness’ sake, and put I for me for grammar’s sake. ‘Mary and I went to the village.’ It sounded affected but they knew it was correct. The lesson was learned too well. People lost track of what they learned at school about the subject of a verb and the object of a verb, me being the form for the object, and lumped the phrase Mary and I together as high-class English, subject, object or anything. It is not really a case of a weed of error in a neglected garden. It is a grammatical plant gone wrong from over-watering.
The difficulties of our pronouns drive some modest people to try to get out of using them at all. Compare the case of those who avoid me and Mary and Mary and I by saying ‘Mrs. J. and self... Or observe the queer use of ‘one’ as a substitute for ‘I,’ much in vogue among English people, in such sentences as: Of course one finds oneself very much at home in Canada. One sees so many things that one has always been used to, etc.... I don’t know whether this is modesty or affectation. The trouble is that it is very hard to find the answering dialogue to fit it. Are you to say, Would one like a cigar or does one prefer cigarettes?
