be serious endeavor to improve the usage. The laws of the language are commonly violated from mere carelessness. Slang and provincialisms creep into the speech and destroy its force and elegance; the expression becomes slovenly and the thought obscure; and what constitutes good English is forgotten unless reasonable attention is paid to the speech.

Language itself is merely an instrument. Beautiful English does not constitute a meritorious discourse. The speaker or writer who uses language correctly and fluently but expresses no important thought is a failure; for the sole service good English can render is to convey the speaker's thought and purpose fully and accurately to the minds of his auditors. But this service alone will amply repay years of study and a life of care and attention to the use of the English language.

VI

The Standard of Usage

By Thomas R. Lounsbury 1

IN HIS life of Story, Mr. Henry James mentions the presence of the sculptor at a dinner given in London by the critic and essayist John Forster. During the course of it the talk chanced to turn upon a letter from Hampden to Sir John Elliot which had been read. The peculiar beauty of its expression struck all present. Story observed that the English language seemed no longer to have its old elegance. This remark led to an outburst from the host. "As soon," said Forster," as grammar is printed in any language,

1 This essay is taken from The Standard of Usage in English, by Thomas R. Lounsbury, copyright, 1907, 1908, by Harper and Brothers, and is reproduced here by special arrangement with that firm. Thomas R. Lounsbury, 1838-1915, served actively for twenty-five years as Professor of English in Yale University, and is the author of important works in literary history and philology. This essay and the book from which it is taken are especially noteworthy as expressing in popular form the principles of usage recognized by authorities on language but violated often by purists and pedantic teachers, who, in their anxiety for correctness, tend to go to the other extreme and to curtail the legitimate resources and variety of the English language. Questions of usage are clear enough as to principle but difficult in practice: they are to be mastered not mainly by reference to grammars and rhetorics and dictionaries, but by observation of the practice of standard authors: it is much easier to make a positive statement, based on one's reading, as to what is good, than to make the negative one, as to what is not. All of which indicates that instruction in language is not only more profitable but also more likely to be sound if it is positive rather than negative in character.-EDITOR.

it begins to go. The Greeks had no grammar when their best works were written, and the decline of style began with the appearance of one."

Forster has not been the only one to take this view, nor was he the first to give it utterance. Extravagantly stated as it is, there is in it a certain element of truth. The early authors of a tongue have in their minds no thought of possible censure from any linguistic critic. Every one does what is right in his own eyes, restrained, so far as he is restrained, only by that sense of propriety which genius possesses as its birthright and great talents frequently acquire. But in later times, when grammars and manuals of usage have come to abound, there is frequent consultation of them, or, rather, a constant dread of violating rules which they have promulgated. Such a method of proceeding is not conducive to the best results in the matter of expression. When men think not so much of what they want to say as of how they are going to say it, what they write is fairly certain to lose something of the freshness which springs from unconsciousness. No one can be expected to speak with ease when before his mind looms constantly the prospect of possible criticism of the words and constructions he has employed. If grammar, or what he considers grammar, prevents him from resorting to usages to which he sees no objection, it has in one way been harmful if in another way it has been helpful. Correctness may have been secured, but spontaneity is gone. The rules laid down for the writer's guidance may be desirable, but they are likewise depressing. He thinks of himself as 'under the charge of a paternal government, and he is not happy; for our race, in its

linguistic as well as in its political activity, bears with impatience the sense of feeling itself governed.

Such a result would be sure to follow, were grammars and manuals of usage absolutely trustworthy. But no such statement can be made of most of them, if, indeed, of any. It is an unfortunate fact that since the middle of the eighteenth century, when works of this nature first began to be much in evidence and to exert distinct influence, far the larger proportion of them have been produced by men who had little acquaintance with the practice of the best writers and even less with the history and development of grammatical forms and constructions. Their lack of this knowledge led them frequently to put in its place assertions based not upon what usage really is, but upon what in their opinion it ought to be. They evolved or adopted artificial rules for the government of expression. By these they tested the correctness of whatever was written. They were thereby enabled to proclaim their own superiority to the great authors of our speech by pointing out the numerous violations of this assumed propriety into which these had been unhappily betrayed. As the rules they proclaimed were copied and repeated by others, a fictitious standard of usage was set up in numerous instances and is largely responsible for many of the current misconceptions which now prevail as to what is grammatical.

It is the belief in this fictitious standard which is responsible not merely for numerous misstatements about the correctness of particular phrases and constructions, but for the frequent failure to comprehend the nature of prevailing linguistic conditions. One of the latter requires special mention here. It is no in

frequent remark that in these later days there exists a distinct tendency towards lawlessness in usage, a distinct indisposition to defer to authority. We are told that the language of the man in the street is held up as the all-sufficient standard. If this statement were ever true, it was never less true than now. There might have been apparent justification for an assertion of this sort in the great creative Elizabethan period. Then no restraints upon expression seem to have been recognized outside of the taste or knowledge of the writer. As a consequence, the loosest language of conversation was reproduced with fidelity in the speech of the drama, then the principal national literature. But nothing of this freedom is found now. constant supervision over speech is exercised by amateur champions of propriety. These are ensconced at every fireside. In colleges and academies and high schools they constitute an army of assumed experts, who are regularly engaged in holding in check any attempt to indulge in real or supposed lawlessness.

A

It is not, therefore, from the quarter of license that any danger to our speech arises. If peril exist at all, it comes from the ignorant formalism and affected precision which wage perpetual war with the ancient idioms of our tongue, or array themselves in hostility to its natural development. That this, so far as it is effective, is a positive injury to the language was pointed out several years ago by a scholar who, in consequence of the study he had given to the usage of the great writers, was enabled to speak on this subject with an authority to which few have attained. He was discussing the remarks of certain critics who had professed to consider as inaccurate and ungrammatical