The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-10-18
M E N w o M EN
 A N D T H IN c s


 recently started an article in this column with Dean Swifts query, Who reads an American book?" and sought to snow that since the days of Cooper we had produced authors whose writings were read even in England.
 
 for years on this side of the Atlantic, EoeIore our status was firmly established. we were a bit sensitive to the criticism or the early travellers who came to our Shores, and after a hurried visit went nome to scatter much transformation about the social, political, commercial and religious situation in the states. Even Charles Dickens, whose works are beloved and more read in the United States than in his own native home land, ieit behind an unpleasant taste on ac- l count or his failure to appreciate our people, when he came here on his lecture tour to be feted and entertained, only to return home to set down things which were to say the least tasteless.
 
 Matthew Arnold who came later with NA-~ SSP~t ehe5a IllilSliHlSn, LdlkInR or sweetness and light" somehow failed to catch the popular fancy on account of his insularity and cocksureness, and gave of- fense to many because of his strictures on certain phases of our American life 1 owe Arnold much as a teacher, but some how in spite of my gratitude, there is an air of patronage in his writings of us which rub me the wrong way. l Fifty years or more ago, James Russell Lowell, an American of Americans, with Ia culture as broad and as deep as any man of his times here or abroad wrote an essay, "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners which is a classic, and therefore worthy to be read every now and then by our young men who turn up their trouser legs every time it rains 1 in London, and whose highest ambition | Is to be able to wear monocle a la Brit 1 isher.
 ] But Lam not going into the question of | international manners in this article. as interesting as it might prove to be, but will rather confine myself to the cool i way in which an "Englishman, for ex- ample,' according to Lowell, should feel | himself defrauded, nay even outraged, when he comes over here and finds a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and yet so very different from Cor, as he would say) 1 those he left at home"
 
 l l suppose it is easy for an Englishman to appropriate for himself the Kings English" because the Declaration of h. dependence broke the political unity of l the Anglo-Saxon race, but any fair minded critic of English is bound to ad- init that the document was expressed in language so unmistakable as to be un- derstood- even by George III and Parlia- nent. Take it all for all it stands as monument not merely to American Ib- erty, but to the fact that in the United States there were men who could write vigorously in the mother tongue l It took our English cousins sometime to admit the fact, but Dean Afford left out in the later editions of his dog matic discussion of the Queens English a passage which was prominent in the first edition, issued in 1863, during the Civil war, and which animadverted on the process of deterioration that the Queens S English had undergone at the hands of the Americans. More than century be- fore another dean, the eaptious Swift, had fired his insolent query, which 1 | quoted at the head of this article; and now, more than I0o years later, another one of the tribe accuses us of towering | English speech.
 | One of the keenest thrusts made by Lowell in his keen criticism lon the con descension of certain foreigners" is that our ancestors, "unhappiiy could bring over no English better than Shake- l speare's." When the first permanent Eng llSh settlement was made at Jamestown, | in America, in 1607 the great Queen Bess was dead, but the two supreme geniuses O. what we call the Elizabethan era were still in the meridian and plenitude of their powers. Francis Bacon had published his Advancement of Learning and the Bard of Avon had produced in success 1 sIon his immortal tragedies, "Othello," Macbeth" and King Lear"
 1 It was an age of giants in thought, writing, and in action Just year later | in London was born John Milton, the | ''God-gifted voice of England" Lowell was eminently right in calling attention 1 to the kind of English which the first settlers in America brought with them. | Brander Matthews well says, "The Eng lishman in England is but the elder brother of the Anglo-Saxon elsewhere; and by no right of primogeniture does he control the language which is our birth right" This is worth keeping in mind when you feel yourself going under the bland attacks of English authors when engaged in the gentle pastime of casting slurs against our use of the mother i tongue"
 !! Noah Webster remarked that American authors had tendency to write the lan- guage in it's genuine idiom." and he as- serted that lin this respect Franklin and Washington, whose language is their he reditary mother tongue, unsophisticated | by modern grammar, present as sure models of genuine English as Addison or | Swift" I have been a close student of the great English essayists, and I ehai- | lenge any English author to show me ! in any English writer finer prose than ! is to be read in Lincolns Gettysburg ad- { dress. and yet he was a man of the people ianf typically American.
 1 I think that possibly Lowell, in the, following passage. is twisting the lion's' tail a bit too much, but anyway it is an antidote to the sycophancy of some Amer 1 ican expatrateS who '1ove'' a lord" Here it is with it's Yankee tang: Tt will 1 take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage towards us. or even