respect for a book language which few of
us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That
language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has
merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to
the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and
heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably
the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English
parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for
the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by
flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his
ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain
something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of
the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom
encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it,
which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its
artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial
Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks
in it or quite feels it.

Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive; but he is not so
constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into
which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language
which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us
that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true
in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was
fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles
which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal
Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln
himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than
the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten
almost as soon as they are learned.

Personally, in youthful days, I could make nothing out of the "grammar"
of the English language until I had begun to study Latin prosody; and
then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of
English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of
the English tongue would