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is for humanity's sake, as science, business, government, and all the activities are for human service. In his appeal to the emotions Inness, Jr., strikes a high note in the use of his art. "Can I," said he, "arouse an emotion for good through form and color?" From this lofty vantage-point he never lowered his purpose, his ideal. He was certain that only by the highest that was in him could he arouse the best emotion in another. One senses this when gazing on one of his landscapes, such as "A Morning in Florida." Here one feels the freshness of the early morn, the diffused light among the trees, the limpid cooling stream, the wetness of the grass and verdure underneath. Here poet and artist meet in the lines of Carruth:

"The shimmer of dew on the needles,
A lone bird's wistful call,
The whisper of wind-blown grasses,
The gray mist over all;
The pine trees slowly bending
O'er paths as yet untrod―
Some of us call it Morning,
And others call it God."

Here we behold the mystic bond of a common vision, the feeling that the spiritual in life is supreme.

On June 14, 1926, came a happy occasion when Tufts College conferred upon him the honorary degree of master of arts. What President Cousens said at that time may be fittingly repeated: "Even in a state of savagery the human soul feels the urge of esthetic emotion. As far back as the progress of mankind can be traced this urge has found. expression in line and color. Always in every age those who by brush and pencil made real the artistic spirit have been held in high esteem. Mr. Inness, you are of the gifted few. We salute you as master of arts."

He leaves us, the gracious, kindly, generous friend and companion, to carry on.

"So I am glad,-not that my friend has gone,

But that the earth he laughed and lived upon

Was my earth, too; that I had closely known

And loved him, and that my love I'd shown.

Tears over his departure? Nay, a smile,

That I had walked with him a little while."

I

SPEECH, COMMON AND PREFERRED

Word-Manufacture in the United States

THOMAS L. MASSON

Is undeniable that as our environment and our material equipment change, with the material progress of the world, we must create unceasingly new terms with which to express ourselves. Unabridged dictionaries, which formerly plumed themselves upon their importance in carrying about 100,000 words, now grow apologetic with only 450,000. Any scientific jargon, such as psychoanalysis, electricity, or biology, which cannot boast of its thousands of words, is a mere straggler behind the great army.

In the opening words of his essay "On Expression," John Galsworthy, who in 1924 was president of the English Association, remarks, "The soul of good expression is an unexpectedness, which, still, keeps to the mark of meaning, and does not betray truth." This power comes only through constant practice, constant study of the meaning of words, constant tracing of individual words back to their sources.

We are all the victims of vicious and unwholesome conditions which make it unfair to hold up a single individual as a bad example. These conditions are the outgrowth of expansion in printing, hurry, economic pressure, and the confusion in thought that comes from the enor

mous increase in words. Even as I write I am aware of as much guilt as any one. But it will be a great step on the road to recovery when teacher and pupil alike admit their common fault, and work together for the right word, for simpler and more

accurate terms.

As far as the profession of writing is concerned, it requires a strong character to keep rehearsing one's words all the time, and to do this while one is selling one's wares at the highest rate. The English writers undoubtedly do this better than we do, because of their traditions, grounded in the classics, and because their audience is more homogeneous. As a typical instance of our own shortcoming, I know a young American who attempted years ago to make a living by writing. He had a fairly good common-school education, and wrote with much care. He failed, and his failure made him even more careful. He still failed, until one day his wife said to him, "Why not write as you talk?"

Now it chanced that in his daily life he was what is termed in the American language a regular guy. He mingled with all sorts and conditions of people, particularly with sporting characters. And so, without more ado, he sat down and wrote

a story in the lingo that he knew. He wrote what he heard, recreating it for his purpose by a spontaneous talent which, up to that time, had been dormant. His story was immediately successful. This young This young man-now advancing to middle age —makes a very large income, and if any philologist, burning with wordzeal, should go to him and ask him to learn his mother-tongue in its purity, he might blush with shame, but fearing the loss of his bread and butter, he would continue to "carry on" in his own manner.

If now we contrast this American writer with, say, Mr. Galsworthy, we shall see at once that Galsworthy does not hesitate to write as he listens. Take any of his novels, and he reproduces the slang, the characteristic utterances of his period, just as all great novelists have done. But side by side with this, he is constantly rehearsing his words. grooms his technic as if it were a thoroughbred. He is en famille with other writers.

He

On this side of the water, we have, quite naturally, writers who are equally painstaking. We have them, although some of our best writers, I am afraid, do not study their vocabularies. We can trace this defect and it is a national defect back to the public and private schools and universities. There is no method of teaching English practised in America at present-judging from results-that is worth a whoop. Is the English system any better? It would seem so.

No one is more keenly aware of this defect than are many of our own leading educators. Of course words must be classified, grammar

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For years the best among our educators have undoubtedly been trying to extricate our system of teaching English from the deadening influence of over-refinement, from the fatal tendency to stifle the minds of pupils with a mass of useless definitions, just as our lawmakers stifle us with an ever increasing number of laws; the passion for system grows by what it feeds on.

Our decadent tendency to run out into definitions is universal and deepseated. We see it in science, in theology, in philosophy. It takes a man of very strong character to become a grammarian and not lose his soul. The reason lies in the fact that we never can fasten on any word a lasting identity.

When we try to group all our words into eight parts of speech, we have started on the road to Babel. The old grammars declared that a noun was the name of a person, place, or thing. That was correct for a person or a place, but when it came to things, the grammarians had to explain that a thing might be an abstract idea, such as love, or dutysomething you could not see. Then again, the nouns had a habit of slipping away from their scholastic

moorings and becoming almost anything else. The grammarians then thought that by giving a new name to the relationship of any two or three words they could develop in the young a renewed interest in language. Fancy that for intelligence! Putting salt on the tails of young eagles is child's play compared with it. Human beings in their search for expression are hideously reckless and wholly irresponsible. They will grab up any word or set of words to convey their meaning, with complete disregard for grammatical forms. A writer who has what we may term the feel of life and experience in writing does only what all human beings do, except that he does it better because he practises more.

A single example will be enough to show my meaning. In a screen version of Miss Edna Ferber's story, "Classified," the hero, a "mongrel" car-driver, admonishes the heroine, a flapper with a soul, to "cut out the eye-chatter." Here is a compound word coined to make a certain character alive. In this instance, both "eye" and "chatter" are nouns, and combined by Miss Ferber, they thus appear to be united into a common noun. Yet is this so? Don't they merely do their bit by helping to describe the kind of a girl she is, and therefore take on the quality of an adjective? It is interesting, by the way, to note that the word chatter is mentioned only once in the Bible; Isaiah 38:14: "Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter." And Miss Ferber was writing only as Homer wrote, when he called Apollo the far-darter, Zeus the cloud-gatherer, Hera the ox-eyed queen, or ushered in the fair-tressed Demeter.

So it is with all words. At any instant they may change their form. An adjective may become a noun; a noun may become an adjective. At one time we were accustomed to react. Now everybody experiences a reaction. At one time region was an honest noun. Now we have regional advertising. A word is like a human being. It is likely at any moment to be anything that its sponsor wants it to be. A film is a noun. To film is not a noun. This tendency, in some cases very proper and highly useful, and in others deplorable, has undoubtedly been encouraged by those hidden magicians, the makers of newspaper head-lines. In a headline, which is limited to a definite space, there may not be room for John Smith to commit suicide; but he may suicide. I suppose that the head-line "Lauds Wilson" appears a thousand times in this country the morning after any anniversary of the birth of Woodrow Wilson. A prohibitionist becomes a dry, and a real-estate man a realtor.

In this same story of Miss Ferber's, the mother, who is made to reveal an innate domesticity, is much distressed because her pretty daughter insists on referring to their home as "a joint." In desperation, the mother finally exclaims, "I won't have you call this dump a joint."

The word dump in American life is highly significant. Who was the wise man who defined patriotism as territorial prejudice? Here, in dump, we have that contempt for environment which comes from changing material conditions. It is the outward and visible word-sign of an inward spiritual restlessness. The plain people, who scorn expletives,

constantly drag up words out of their inner consciousness which reveal their spiritual limitations. Any man you meet in the crowd, if he has occasion to address you, will call you "brother." In apparent contrast to this, but really due to the same cause, we have Pullman car porters meeting and formally protesting against being called "George," this common name offending their dignity. Nothing in the life of young people can take the place of a cultured home. Is it not plain that when Miss Ferber's characters are made to use the words dump and joint as applied to their lodging-place, they are unconsciously expressing their own lack? And is it not plain that if we are to purify our language we must purify our life?

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Before a specific remedy can be suggested, however, for the undoubted slovenliness which marks so much of our writing and for the faulty teaching in our public schools, some brief reference should be made to what has already been done to correct our faults. Without doubt, three of the most useful and practical philologists in this country are H. L. Mencken, editor and critic at large, George Philip Krapp, author of "The English Language in America," and Frank H. Vizetelly, managing editor of "The New Standard Dictionary." Mr. Mencken first published his own book, "The American Language," in 1918. It was followed by two editions, each with notable revisions, the third issued in one volume. The merit of this work it would be difficult to exaggerate. It seems to me unfortunate that Mr. Mencken's reputation as an iconoclast should so overcast our sense of his value as a

practical philologist. In ability and penetration his book exceeds anything else we have except Professor Krapp's more recent volumes. Both books should be in the hands of every American who wishes to understand the difficulties of the problem. Professor Vizetelly's works on "Errors in English," "Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases," and "Essentials of English Speech and Literature" are more broadly popular than the others, but all are useful desk companions, and, to any one interested in getting on intimate terms with living words, fascinating reading.

A more recent attempt to arouse the great public to our language and speech is contained in a volume of "Academy Papers." These papers are a reprint of lectures delivered before the American Academy of Arts and Letters by some of its literary members, including Paul Elmer More, William Milligan Sloane, William Crary Brownell, Brander Matthews, Paul Shorey, and Henry Van Dyke. It shows quite clearly the futility of the super-cultured when it attempts to define that which is as broad as life and not to be confined within the narrow limits of the thing we have come to call "highbrow."

As the right of free speech is guaranteed by the Constitution, is it not clear that the professional critic, no matter how much culture he may have absorbed, cannot by comment or edict stop people from using the words they want to use? What is pure English or pure American anyway, if it is not what we make of it of our own free will, and this based on our purity of thought? And who is to determine this but ourselves? Not long ago I was asked to read and

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