# Points of View (Sherman)/American Style

"Have we a style that is recognizably American?" If one accepts Buffon's identification of style with "the man himself," and if one then inquires whether an English street urchin can recognize an American at sight, the answer is, yes. The street urchin can recognize us, and by some power of the higher criticism not dependent, as I shall testify, on the cut of our jib, the sound of our klaxon, or any merely sartorial distinctions in which we may garb ourselves.
Some years ago, before the angularities and rotundities of our dispositions had much developed, one of my compatriots, since become an editorial luminary, and I, at the crowded hour in the Strand, were weaving our way through the fog and the London citizenry in what we thought was a complete national incognito. Enveloped in two-shilling cyclist's capes, with ten-shilling knickerbockers, and caps and stockings purchased in Edinburgh, and with an accent studied for a month in the Highlands and for a week in Oxford, we were just flattering ourselves that we walked with national characteristics invisible, nube cava amicti, when a newsboy darted ​upon us from the rear, extending a pink sheet and crying in dolorous tones, "Terrible accident in the Stites!—Brooklyn Bridge falls—Thousands killed!" While we were sounding in our Scotch tweeds for the big red coppers, the youth explained, with an ingratiating grin, that he knew we were "good-natured Yankees," then pocketed our gratuity and ran on with his sporting extra. There is only one way to account for his penetration of our disguise: he recognized our style—incessu patuit dea, or as Virgil might have said, in American, "You could pipe the dame by the way she operated her stilts."
If an American can so easily be identified in an English crowd, it should seem to follow that an Englishman may by similar tests be identified in an American crowd. And as a matter of fact, on the "colorful" coast of California, where the sea washes up Mexican pottery, Hawaiian flowers and music, Japanese gods, jade, ivory, ginger, blue-and-tawny rugs from China, Russian tea, fire opals from South Africa, and some sun-loving Odysseus or other from every land, I have detected the English style in an Australian who was disguised by a good American tailor and an accent levelled by long colonial and American residence. Something more indelible than garb, vocabulary, or accent betrayed him: it was a latent quality of his entire gait and manner as he accosted our American Pierce-Arrow bus; it was some ineffaceable hint of the British Isles in his quiet scrutiny of his fellow passengers, and even ​in his fugitive contact with our American ticket taker or conductor. Acclimated, naturalized, and settled for life in a grove of eucalyptus by the bay of Monterey, he still retained a distinction amid all 'the exotic color of the coast. Walking the streets of an Indiana village in wartime, he would have been brought to the attention of the vigilance committee as a suspicious alien.
But let us turn from "the man himself" to his self-presentment in literature. Since a foreign language puts an unmistakable mark on any style, our comparison must necessarily be confined to English and American writers. And we may fairly ask, to begin with, whether our transmarine relatives have themselves a literary style that is recognizably English. When William James met in our journals with an article, by an unknown hand, which particularly pleased him, it was, one regrets to reveal, almost customary with him to write in and inquire whether it was by an Englishman. He had a notion, it appears, that certain types of writing are definitely classifiable as not-American. He was probably right.
The following passage on public life, for example, has no contemporary American mark upon it. Possibly it might have been felt by Roosevelt in some rare interval of serenity. It could hardly have been written by any American later than John Adams. It is actually marked by its breadth and elevation and still more strongly by its balance and discrimination and by its logical and stylistic con​catenation as belonging to the great age of English classicism, and, specifically, to Burke:
It is, therefore, our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigor and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth, so to be patriots that we are gentlemen. To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities. To have both strong, but both selected; in the one to be placable; in the other immovable. To model our principles to our duties and our situation. To be fully persuaded, that all virtue which is impracticable is spurious; and rather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which leads us to act with effect and energy, than to loiter out our days without blame and without use.
The following description of the perfected intellect is obviously not-American. No American conceives of a perfected intellect as the object or as "the result" of education. No American expresses such experienced delight in the things of the mind. It is un-American to attempt to see things steadily and to see them whole. It is not in the American mode to present in a single sentence a conspectus of an elaborate analytical process. These are the marks of a mind which has been effectively to school under Socrates—they are the marks of Newman:
But the intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows and ​thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every eginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.
Let us have a case more nearly contemporary. Though it is American enough to attempt "plucking out" the heart of mysteries, it is not American to lay a long meditative siege to them, to sit brooding before a pictured woman's face till all experience seems to glimmer under her half-closed eyelids. It is not American to listen to the fall of one's phrases nor to imitate in the structure of a sentence the smooth gliding swell, the poising arch, abrupt break, and long creamy subsidence of a shattered wave. These are the marks of Englishmen infatuated with the music of their seventeenth century and with decadent Latin—modern euphuists, who weigh words like gold dust, and who are studious to preserve in the modern industrial world something of the "cadence, mysticity, and unction" of the Middle Ages. These are the marks of Pater:
If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day went back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even, as ​we have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or two of more scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, like the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own century, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a single step onward—the perfected new manner, in the consummation of time, alike as regards the things of the imagination and the actual conduct of life.
These three specimens are, I think, all easily recognizable as by English writers. Without going back of 1776, one could readily extend the exhibit by adding, for instance, specimens of Johnson, Reynolds, Landor, Macaulay, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Ruskin, Stevenson, and Mr. Chesterton. All these writers show traits due to a common classical ancestry and to an unbroken English tradition. Though several of them have given their names to stylistic excesses—as the "Macaulayese" antithesis, the "Chestertonian" paradox—most of them are truly representative men, that is, men whose individual genius expresses with emphasis and splendor a spirit common to all classicists of George III's time, or to all Edinburgh reviewers, or to all neo-romantic Tories, or what not. Many of them have been widely influential in America. In the earlier numbers of "The North American Review" one can find specimens of "Macaulayese." A description of the Milan cathedral in a short story by Henry James in the 'sixties contains perfectly constructed "Ruskinian" sentences. Henry van Dyke has worn the "Stevensonian" velvet jacket in his day. And ​every clever young journalist has tried now and then to write a "Chestertonian" column.
But now if we look around at home, what have we done in the last hundred and fifty years when we have tried to express ourselves? What styles have we invented which confess a representative American outlook as "Johnsonese" or "Macaulayese" confesses a representative British outlook? We can distinguish the styles of Franklin, John Adams, and Webster from one another but not, with any assurance, from that of some British contemporary. Franklin, for example, was for the greater part of his life a colonial Englishman, and though he struck out many phrases and maxims saturated in the color and spirit of the American provinces, and though he is a genuine source of our most vital native tendency, his homely idiomatic material style associates itself with the realistic bourgeois movement of early eighteenth century English prose, and does not steadily distinguish itself from the gait of Defoe. Most of the able statesmen and orators from John Adams to Webster represent, stylistically, an essentially undifferentiated American classicism, which did not fit with the closeness of a personal garment, nor with the distinction of a national garment, and which has, for better or for worse, disappeared. Among the older romanticists, Poe and Hawthorne, most musical of our prose writers, perfected, as a dominant trait of their styles, the cadence of the later English "Gothic" novels; but since their time no American prose writer has ​had the ear to sustain their melody. So complete, indeed, is the present exclusion of musical elements from our prose, that whenever one of us discovers a stray cadence in his work, he joins the Poetry Society.
The research for a distinctive American style may fairly be said to begin with Emerson's first essay on "Nature," of which the gist is this: Discover, become, and express yourselves and nothing but yourselves. It was an injunction congenial to the spirits of a people who were then scrutinizing their own bosoms for new theories of government, religion, and social intercourse. Emerson himself and his more intelligent friends knew from experience of what immense assistance classical models are in this great business of self-discovery; but the main Emersonian impetus was toward a fresh exploratory contact with nature, and its not infrequent consequence was a self-reliant "blurting out" of whatever whim for the moment possessed the disciple. "Hundreds of writers," Emerson declares in a passage which called for revolt and indicated its direction, "hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things."
​The first step—and some phenomena of the season suggest that we have not yet progressed beyond the first step—the first step in the search for an American style was a rather excited research for the rudiments—for words and images; logical concatenation, melody and harmony could wait. Emerson is not always Emersonian; sometimes he weaves, sometimes he flows. But he made himself a style, called Emersonian, of which the effect is like that of a man in moccasins dashing into a dense wood with sharp little ax, leaping from log to log, and calling out his discoveries to his followers, with sharp little cries. It is definitely American. Here are some specimens recognizable as not-English:
Whilst we use this grand cipher (Nature) to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relation to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced is Dante or Washington.
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or ​Provençal ministrelsy. I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
Emerson and Thoreau worked in the same vineyard, sometimes in the same garden; and they so freely exchanged tools and horticultural ideas that one cannot always distinguish the original possessor. "I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy," said Thoreau, "but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. . . . I want the flower and the fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious." Those sentences might have been written by Emerson. But Thoreau has a nonchalant and phlegmatic swing—a better all-day gait than Emerson's. He goes nearer the ground, adheres more strictly to the homely material manner of Franklin; and he so regularly comes to his writing desk with the taste and stain of wild grapes on his lips and with spoils of his rustic truancy, that one can hardly find a complete paragraph of his that is not marked Thoreau's and "made in America:"
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have ​drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven.
We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a taste of that musty old cheese that we are.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud. . . . I am no more Tonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horsefly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star or the south wind . . . or the first spider in a new house.
The piercing of "rotten diction," the fastening of words to our own "visible things"—this special pioneer quest of the American stylist, led by Emerson, followed by Thoreau, was pursued with immense and devouring gusto by Whitman and all his tribe.
"Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else." The conviction which underlies the Emersonian theory is that everyone has a style. In a sense, of course, the theory is sound, since style, speaking broadly, is only a comprehensive term for the total effect conveyed through all the various means by which a man reveals that he is himself and not someone else. And Providence, with infinite ingenuity, has contrived in some way to distinguish every one of us, if only by our thumb prints. When without resort to these, a man "gives himself away" by everything that he is and says and does, we say that he has a personality, meaning a distinctive personality. When such a personality, happening to be a writer, marks his diction, his images, his speed, breathing intervals, and emphasis, his ideas, point of view, and temper as unmistakably belonging to him, we say that he has style, meaning a distinctive style. Whose "song" is this?
So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:
"The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam."
"You bet!"
"What did I understand you to say, madam?"
"You Bet!"
Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
"Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers ​was deef and dumb. I did b'gosh. Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bustin' musketeers and wonderin' what was ailin' ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say."
Nothing so strikingly demonstrates the presence and the power of a distinctive style as its complete metamorphosis of any foreign substance which is cast into it. A play of Molière, for example, cast into the distinctive Anglo-Irish style of Synge and his friends becomes not a French play with Irish costume but an Irish play with an Irish soul. Mr. Untermeyer, a clever mimic, has recently demonstrated that many of our contemporary American poets possess distinguishable personal styles, by casting into them and transforming an ode of Horace, so that it reappears as recognizably the work of Mr. Sandburg or Mr. Frost—to mention two of his successful metamorphoses. We have therefore a variety of American styles; and that these are American you can judge by the shock that you feel in finding strains of Mr. Lindsay's "Congo" in the latest long poem of Mr. Masefield.
In similar fashion an ingenious person could doubtless translate, say "Pilgrim's Progress," into a half dozen of our rustic sectional idioms, that of Tennessee, or Maine, or Georgia; and, if he were sufficiently ingenious, the version would be stamped not merely with the obvious marks of dialectal difference but also with subtler distinctions in the ​processes of thought and the shades of feeling. Since the gait and total effect of any work in these provincial idioms is readily distinguishable from that of the Anglo-Irish, Lancashire, or other provincial dramatists, we have manifestly several American styles which are more than personal styles.
Interest in these provincial styles has, beyond spelling and vocabulary, affected the character of what, for the moment, we may call "Standard American." Nothing perhaps in our literature is more remarkable than the immense abundance of our studies in "local color," the work of innumerable novelists and short-story writers. An impulse passes from them to the poets, making for a new intimacy of expression. If, eliminating prose writers who spell like Joel Chandler Harris and poets who spell like James Whitcomb Riley, we examine writers who employ standard American spelling, like Mr. Frost and Mr. Robinson, we find styles which have been formed in part by listening to the infrequent slow speech and harkening to the cautious, difficult, inexpressive soul of the New England farmer. "Something there is which does not love a wall:" that is the way the farmer would take hold of the thought; and that is about as far as he would get with it. Poets who listen to the calliope, the saxophone, and the Chicago Tribune betray still other subtleties of the national soul, into which I cannot now enter.
I should like to dwell on the fork in the stylistic ​road, where one group of our native explorers branches off into the periphrastic Fifth Avenue style, which seems, at any rate, to fit them "like a glove," while the other group goes careening through Main Street on a "flivver," the entire stylistic baggage on the running board, naked to dust and derision. Both groups, singular to relate, are still animated by an inherited "Emersonian" desire to be themselves. Both are moving toward that consummation, without clear prevision of the end, with little acknowledged guidance, blazing the trail as they go, without any fear of trespass, rather with strengthening sense that nothing in all the wide forest is marked Verboten, and cheering one another from time to time with their marching song: "Get your effect, and with God be the rest." I should like, inter alia, to compare our aristocratic with our proletarian slang, and to inquire which is the more savory. But I will summarize our main tendency toward a universal American style, cutting across all dialectal differences, by remarking that John Adams or Chesterfield would probably have said: "Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re"; James Russell Lowell or Disraeli might have said, "The iron hand in the kid glove;" but Theodore Roosevelt said: "Speak softly and carry a big stick;" and in an American novel of the season I find: "The wallop in the velvet mitt." It sounds like "home."
For the recreation of the curious, I will add an exercise in the higher criticism, which consists in ​detecting the American soul in each of the following specimens:
The American Joke
A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it, though. It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.
The Life of the Mind
He saw that she had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so. The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have one.
A Bit of National Color
There floated from somewhere the scent of boiled corned-beef-and-cabbage and the clatter of dishes on the American plan. (Quoted from memory.)
Pragmatic Distinctions
The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth. The trust magnate "estimates it." The rich malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The Caliph ​merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses.
Eternal Pathos of the Babe
The greatest and most wonderful thing in the world is a baby. Not so much for what he is, though that's astounding enough, but for his chemical and explosive possibilities. He's a marvelous little machine, an infant dynamo, and he has juice enough in his storage battery for a seventy-two-hour run, but the moment that is gone he goes out like a blown candle, muy pronto, unless he has connected up with his surroundings.
Circumstances Over Which We Have No Control
"I like this very much myself," he will explain. "It's great stuff. I wish I could use it. That part about the bobbed hair is a scream. But none of it would mean anything to the farmer in Iowa. Won't you show me something again that isn't quite so sophisticated?"
Picturesqueness of Labor
In those far-off times, in the city where I lived, all the hod-carriers were colored men—usually great, shiny fellows with immense knots of muscles in their legs and arms. The Irish had already become lawyers, city detectives, saloonkeepers, gang bosses, and Todsaufer for breweries. These colored men, in summer, liked to work with their chests bare. Swarming up the ladders in long files, each with his heavy hod on his shoulder, they made ​an exotic, Egyptian, picture. One could fancy them descended in a direct line from the Nubians who carried the hod when Cheops built his pyramid.
Something Always, Always Sings
It was flattering too—to have two personal slaves at once—the barber and the bootblack. He could have been completely happy if he could also have had the manicure girl. The barber snipped at his hair and asked his opinion of the Havre de Grace races, the baseball season, and Mayor Prout. The young negro bootblack hummed "The Camp Meeting Blues" and polished in rhythm to his tune, drawing the shiny shoe-rag so taut at each stroke that it snapped like a banjo string.
The Nuance
For the bumptious and silly sides of them will fatten his soup—the other side won't. So he goes on, until his world is one vast nauseous Pullman smoker full of Rotarians, Fraternians, Boomers, Realtors, and Baboons getting off one damn fool remark after another.
* ↑ Mark Twain in "Roughing It"
* ↑ Mrs. Wharton in "The Age of Innocence"
* ↑ O. Henry
* ↑ O. Henry in "Strictly Business"
* ↑ Woods Hutchinson in "The Saturday Evening Post"
* ↑ Heywood Broun in "Pieces of Hate"
* ↑ Editor of "The Smart Set"
* ↑ Sinclair Lewis in "Babbitt"
* ↑ Anonymous in the Bookman