Noah Webster Part 8

"Calculate, _v. i._ To make a computation; as, we calculate better for ourselves than for others. In _popular use_, this word is often equivalent to _intend_ or _purpose_, that is, to make arrangements and form a plan; as, a man _calculates_ to go a journey. This use of the word springs from the practice of _computing_ or _estimating_ the various circ.u.mstances which concur to influence the mind in forming its determinations.

"Shaver, _n._ A boy or young man. This word is still in common use in New England. It must be numbered among our original words.

"Span, _n._ A _span of horses_ consists of two of nearly the same color, and otherwise nearly alike, which are usually harnessed side by side.

The word signifies properly the same as _yoke_, when applied to horned cattle, from buckling or fastening together. But in America, _span_ always implies resemblance in color at least; being an object of ambition with gentlemen and with teamsters to unite two horses abreast that are alike.

"Likely, _a._ Such as may be liked; pleasing; as a _likely_ man or woman. [This use of _likely_ is not obsolete as Johnson affirms, nor is it vulgar. But the English and their descendants in America differ in the application. The English apply the word to external appearance; and with them _likely_ is equivalent to _handsome_, _well-formed_, as a _likely_ man, a _likely_ horse. In America the word is usually applied to the endowments of the mind, or to pleasing accomplishments. With us a _likely_ man is a man of good character and talents, or of good dispositions or accomplishments, that render him pleasing or respectable.]

"Clever, _a._ In _New England_, good-natured, possessing an agreeable mind or disposition. In _Great Britain_ this word is applied to the body or its movements, in its literal sense; in _America_ it is applied chiefly to the mind, temper, disposition. In Great Britain a _clever man_ is a dextrous man, one who performs an act with skill or address.

In New England a _clever man_ is a man of a pleasing, obliging disposition and amiable manners, but often implying a moderate share of talents.

"Raise, _v. t._ To cause to grow; to procure to be produced, bred or propagated; as, to raise wheat, barley, hops, etc.; to _raise_ horses, oxen, or sheep. _New England_. [The English now use _grow_ in regard to crops; as, to _grow_ wheat. This verb intransitive has never been used in New England in a transitive sense, until recently some persons have adopted it from the English books. We always use _raise_, but in New England it is never applied to the breeding of the human race, as it is in the Southern States.]

"Realize, _v. t._ To bring into actual existence and possession; to render tangible or effective. He never _realized_ much profit from his trade or speculation.

"Locate, _v. t._, 2. To select, survey, and settle the bounds of a particular tract of land; or to designate a portion of land by limits; as, to _locate_ a tract of a hundred acres in a particular township. _U.

States._ 3. To designate and determine the place of; as, a committee was appointed to _locate_ a church or a court-house. _N. England._

"Rail, _n._, 1. A cross beam fixed at the ends in two upright posts.

_Moxon_. [In New England this is never called a _beam_; pieces of timber of the proper size for rails are called _scantling_.] 2. In the _United States_ a piece of timber cleft, hewed, or sawed, rough or smooth, inserted in upright posts for fencing. The common _rails_ among farmers are rough, being used as they are split from the chestnut or other trees. The _rails_ used in fences of boards or pickets round gentlemen's houses and gardens are usually sawed scantling, and often dressed with the plane. 4. A series of posts connected with cross beams, by which a place is inclosed. _Johnson._ In New England we never call this series a _rail_, but by the general term _railing_. In a picket fence, the pales or pickets rise above the rails; in a ball.u.s.trade, or fence resembling it, the ball.u.s.ters usually terminate in the rails.

"Tallow, _n._ A sort of animal fat, particularly that which is obtained from animals of the sheep and ox kinds.... The fat of swine we never call _tallow_, but _lard_ or _suet_. I see in English books, mention is made of the tallow of hogs, but in America I never heard the word thus applied.

"Prairy, _n._ [Fr. _prairie_.] An extensive tract of land, mostly level, dest.i.tute of trees, and covered with tall, coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. These _prairies_ are numerous in the United States, west of the Alleghany Mountains, especially between the Ohio, Mississippi, and the great lakes.

"Widen, _v. t._ To make wide or wider; to extend in breadth; as, to _widen_ a field; to _widen_ a breach. [Note. In America, females say, to _widen_ a stocking.]

"Window, _n._ An opening in the wall of a building for the admission of light, and of air when necessary. This opening has a frame on the sides, in which are set movable sashes, containing panes of gla.s.s. In the U.

States the sashes are made to rise and fall, for the admission or exclusion of air. In France _windows_ are shut with frames or sashes that open and shut vertically, like the leaves of a folding door.

"Ch.o.r.e, _n._ [Eng. _char._] In America this word denotes small work of a domestic kind, as distinguished from the princ.i.p.al work of the day. It is generally used in the plural, _ch.o.r.es_, which includes the daily or occasional business of feeding cattle and other animals, preparing fuel, sweeping the house, cleaning furniture, etc. (See char.)"

From these examples one may gather some notion of Webster's method of treating words which were either exclusively American, or had undergone some change in meaning and use. He regards them all not as departures from the English standard of the day, but diversities from an older use, like the English current forms, and it was no disgrace in his eyes for a word to be an Americanism, nor did it require apology or defense of any kind. There are indeed many words not to be found in Johnson, of American origin, or at least of American adoption, which he enters silently with the belief that they have quite as fair a claim to a place in his Dictionary as if they had been used by Dryden or Addison. I have already quoted the pa.s.sage in his preface relating to the ill.u.s.trative quotations; the promise made by Webster is faithfully kept, and the diligent reader may garner many of the brief thoughts of Mason, Smith, Barlow, and other American writers whose light has now faded.

By all these means, by a certain contempt of Great Britain, by constant reference to American usage, by citations from American authors, Webster made the t.i.tle to his Dictionary good in every part of it, while by the exercise of individual caprice and of a personal authority, which had grown out of his long-continued and solitary labor, he attached his own name to it. Both names remain. The existing Dictionary is "An American Dictionary of the English Language," and bears indubitable evidence of its application to American use, but it is no longer the organ of an over-zealous patriotism. It bears Noah Webster's name on the t.i.tle-page, but the work has been revised, not out of all likeness to its original form, but with a fullness and precision which, being impossible to any one man, required the cooperation of a company of scholars. His original Preface to the edition of 1828 has been preserved as a memento of his att.i.tude in the presence of his great work, but his Introduction and Advertis.e.m.e.nt and Grammar of the English Language have been swept away, and their place supplied by the maturer and more scholarly work of Webster's successors.

It has been said by some nice critic, anxious to be just before he was generous, that the book commonly known as Webster's Dictionary, sometimes, with a ponderous familiarity, as The Unabridged, should more properly be called The Webster Dictionary, as indicating the fact that the original private enterprise had, as it were, been transformed into a joint stock company, which might, out of courtesy, take the name of the once founder but now merely honorary member of the literary firm engaged in the manufacture and arrangement of words. Indeed, the name Webster has been a.s.sociated with such a vast number of dictionaries of all sizes and weights, that it has become to many a most impersonal term, and we may almost expect in a few generations to find the word "Webster"

defined in some revised edition of the Unabridged as the colloquial word for a Dictionary. The bright-eyed, bird-like looking gentleman who faces the t.i.tle-page of his Dictionary may be undergoing some metempsychosis, but the student of American literature will at any time have little difficulty in rescuing his personality from unseemly transmigration, and, by the aid of historical gla.s.ses, may discover that the Dictionary maker, far from being either the arid, bloodless being which his work supposes, or the reckless disturber of philological peace which his enemies aver, was an exceedingly vigilant, determined American school-master, who had enormous faith in his country, and an uncommon self-reliance, by which he undertook single-handed a task which, once done, prepared the way for lexigraphical work far more thorough and satisfactory than could have been possible without his pioneer labor.

Not only have the successive Dictionaries which bear his name resulted from his labor, but it is not unfair to refer the other great lexicon begun and carried out by one of his early a.s.sistants to the impetus which he gave. Indeed, the commercial success of the great American Dictionary may reasonably have been taken as a ground of confidence for the production of the corresponding works of an encyclopaedic and dictionary character which attest the enterprise of American publishers and the thoroughness of American scholars.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION.

The publication of "An American Dictionary" in 1828 was followed by increased activity on Dr. Webster's part. He was more than ever ambitious to secure a standard, especially in orthography, and he began the arrangement of his various text-books in a series which should const.i.tute an imposing phalanx, each supporting its neighbor. The work of preparation, revision, and publication occupied the rest of his life.

The quarto Dictionary in two volumes cost twenty dollars. He provided soon an abridgment in octavo, and a "Dictionary for Schools, the Counting-House, and for Families in Moderate Circ.u.mstances;" he was constantly revising his most lucrative book, the "Elementary Spelling-Book," and he issued new editions of his "History of the United States," his "Teacher," a supplement to the "Elementary," his "Improved Grammar," and he prepared a "Manual of Useful Studies." All of these books had friends and enemies, and one of the most energetic of the latter, Lyman Cobb, published "a Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster's Series of Books for Systematick Instruction in the English Language," which, in spite of some injustice and much quibbling, is a most searching and exhaustive commentary on Webster's weaknesses. The contest over Webster's Dictionary, however, did not a.s.sume great proportions until after the publication of Worcester's Dictionary, which afforded Webster's opponents a flag about which they could rally. The war of the dictionaries occurred after Webster's death, and it is not within the province of this sketch to enter upon that military campaign.

Within Webster's own life-time a revision of the Dictionary appeared in 1840-1841, and he was at work upon a further revision when he died in 1843.

Our study of Webster has easily led us away from Webster's personal history, except so far as this has ill.u.s.trated social, literary, and historical movements. There are still living those who, as young men, were a.s.sociated with him in New Haven, and these with his grandchildren, as well as his only surviving daughter, bear a memory of his person entirely distinct from its public reputation. The resolute old man, working at his lexicography to the last moment, was for them also the tender-hearted head of a family, coming out from his study to hear the music he loved so well, joining in the home life, making affectionate pilgrimages to the old homestead in West Hartford, and putting in a plea there for the preservation of the old fruit trees and vines which dated from his childhood. He was a st.u.r.dy, upright man, with the courtesy of an old Federalist, and his figure was a familiar one in the streets of New Haven. It was there that he died, May 28, 1843, in the eighty-fifth year of his age, surrounded by his family, and cheerful with the sense of a full life and of Christian trust and expectation.

Noah Webster's name abides, connected with the great work which he initiated, and the monument will keep his name imperishable. It never can be an uninteresting study to the people how the man, whose name is a household word, wrought and achieved; the solid expression of character, which I have tried to outline, is worthy of a fuller, more thorough treatment; and it is to be hoped that the st.u.r.dy life of more than three score years and ten, which he lived, with its dreams, its discoveries, its ventures, its toil, and its honest achievements may some day be told with all the minuteness which records, researches, and reminiscences will permit. Yet I do not believe the fullest account of Webster would disclose any important traits not discovered by the exhibition of such of his writings and labors as we have included in this survey. There was nothing concealed in his nature. His vanity made him open, and his strong self-reliance gave him a boldness of expression which makes it possible for any student to measure his aims.

The chief discovery yet to be made of Webster, if any is possible, lies in the direction of history. I do not suppose that if the entire correspondence of Webster with his contemporaries could be produced, we should find him any more potent as a public man than we have seen him to be; but a more thorough comprehension of the forces at work in the organization of national life may yet enable us to see with greater distinctness the degree of Webster's power and function. The last result of historical study is the determination of national genius, and for that time and the slow evolution of national character are requisite. I am sure that the dignity of Webster's position in our history is more intelligible to-day than it was in his own time. I am confident that the twentieth century will give him a juster meed than we are giving him to-day.

It was at once his fortune and his misfortune to pa.s.s his life contemporaneously with the birth and adolescence of a great nation, and to feel the pa.s.sion of the hour. There is unquestionably a parochial sort of nationality which it is easy to satirize. No one could well set it out in stronger light than Webster himself in those pa.s.sages in the preface to his Dictionary which I have already quoted. He is judiciously silent concerning the American poets of his time, being careful, even,--most unkindest cut!--not to commit himself to the support of Joel Barlow's heroic verse; but he produces a list of American prosaists, whom he places back to back with their English fellows. He has a proper sense of the importance of language to a nation, and appears to be perplexed by the implied question: If Englishmen and Americans speak the same language, how in the world are we to tell them apart and keep them apart? Then again, since there has been a revolution resulting in governmental independence, what stands in the way of a complete independence, so that the spick and span new nation may go to the language tailors and be dressed in a new suit of parts of speech?

"Let us seize the present moment," he cries, "and establish a national language as well as a national government." Never was there such a chance, he thinks, for clearing away the rubbish which has acc.u.mulated for generations in our clumsy, inelegant language. Hand him the Bible which people have foolishly regarded as a great conservator of the English tongue, and he will give you a new edition "purified from the numerous errors." Knock off the useless appendages to words which serve only to m.u.f.fle simple sounds. Innocent iconoclast, with his school-master ferrule!

It is worth our while to make serious answer to these serious propositions, since the true aspect of native literature may thus be disclosed. The Revolution, which so filled Webster's eyes, was unquestionably a great historic event by reason of its connection with the formal inst.i.tution of a new nation; but the roots of our national life were not then planted. They run back to the first settlements and the first charters and agreements; nor is the genesis of the nation to be found there; sharp as are the beginnings of our history on this continent, no student could content himself with a conception of our national life which took into account only the events and conditions determined by the people and the soil of America. Even in actual relations between America and Europe there never has been a time when the Atlantic has not had an ebbing as well as a flowing tide, and the instinct which now sends us to the Old World on pa.s.sionate pilgrimages is a const.i.tuent part of our national life, and not an unfilial sentiment. In the minds of Webster and many others, England was an unnatural parent, and the spirit of anger, together with an elation at success in the severing of governmental ties, made them impatient of even a spiritual connection. But the Revolution was an outward, visible sign of an organic growth which it accelerated, but did not produce; and the patriotic outcries of the generation were incoherent expressions of a profounder life which had been growing, scarcely heeded, until wakened by this event. The centripetal force of nationality was at work, and it is possible now, even from our near station, to discover the conjunction of outward circ.u.mstance and inward consciousness which marks nationality as an established fact. It was a weak conception of nationality which was bounded by Webster's definition; but his belief in his country and his energetic action were, in reality, constantly overpa.s.sing that conception. In spite of the disposition to regard a written const.i.tution as the bottom fact, there was the real, substantial, organic nation, and that saved the paper nation from erasure,--a fate which easily overtakes South American republics. A nation which could immediately be placed in the world's museum, duly ticketed and catalogued, with its distinct manners, dress, language, and literature,--this was a conception which resulted logically from theories which held the nation itself to be the creation of popular will or historic accident; but a nation slowly struggling against untoward outward circ.u.mstance and inward dissension, collecting by degrees its const.i.tuent members, forming and reforming, plunging with rude strength down dangerous ways, but nevertheless growing into integral unity,--this has been the historical result of the living forces which were immanent in the country when the nation was formally inst.i.tuted.

Now there never has been a time from Webster's day to this when Americans have not believed and a.s.serted that nationality consisted mainly in independence, and waxed impatient not merely of foreign control and influence, but even of hereditary influence: the temper which calls for American characteristics in art and literature is often scarcely less hostile to the past of American history than to the present of European civilization. It is a restless, uneasy spirit, goaded by self-consciousness. It finds in nature an aid and abettor; it grows angry at the disproportionate place which the Cephissus, the Arno, the Seine, the Rhine, and the Thames hold on the map of the world's pa.s.sion. We are all acquainted with the typical American who added to his name in the hotel book on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Como, "What pygmy puddles these are to the inland seas of tremendous and eternal America!"

But these are coa.r.s.er, more palpable signs of that uneasy consciousness which frets at a continued dependence on European culture.

There is no doubt that Webster was right when he set himself the task of Americanizing the English language by a recourse to the Spelling-Book.

He succeeded very largely in determining the form of words; but he did more than this, while he failed in the ambitious and preposterous task which he set himself. He did more; by his shrewdness and his ready perception of the popular need he made elementary education possible at once, and furnished the American people with a key which moved easily in the lock; he failed where he sought the most, because language is not a toy or a patent machine, which can be broken, thrown aside at will, and replaced with a better tool, ready-made from the lexicographer's shop.

He had no conception of the enormous weight of the English language and literature, when he undertook to shovel it out of the path of American civilization. The stars in their courses fought against him. It is so still. We cannot dispense with European culture, because we refuse to separate ourselves from the mighty past, which has settled there in forms of human life unrepresented among us. We cannot step out of the world's current, though it looks sluggish beside our rushing stream, because there is a spiritual demand in us which cries louder than the thin voice of a self-conscious national life. This demand is profoundly at one with the deeper, holier sense of national being which does not strut upon the world's stage. The humility of a great nation is in its reverence for its own past, and, since that is incomplete, in its admiration for whatever is n.o.ble and worthy in other nations. It is out of this reverence and humility and this self-respect that great works in literature and art grow, and not out of the overweening sensitiveness which makes one's nationality but a petty jealousy of other people.

It is possible for us thus to discriminate between a nationality which is a mere posture and that which is a plain expression of positive organic life. When we measure the force of the latter we are compelled to a finer a.n.a.lysis, and its ill.u.s.trations are to be sought in subtler manifestations. Webster well exemplifies, by the very rudeness of his mind, phases of Americanism which may be traced in more delicate lines elsewhere. There can be no doubt that self-reliance, which was both the cause and the effect of local self-government long practiced, has been a powerful factor in American life; that an indifference to the past has often been only the obverse of an elastic hope, a consciousness of destiny; that a fearlessness and a spirit of adventure have been invited by the large promises held out by nature; that an expansiveness of mind, and an alertness and facility in intellectual device, have been encouraged by the flexile condition of American society. All things have seemed possible to the ardent American, and each has secretly said to himself:--

"I ... had resolved to be The maker of my destiny."

These elements of character have entered into literature, the exponent of character; and Webster, with his self-reliance, his indifference to the past, his consciousness of destiny, his courage and resolution and quick fitting into his country's work, stands easily as the first aggressive American in our literature. In him we see roughly marked what future critics will discern of men more readily a.s.signed a place in universal literature. The Americanism of Hawthorne, for example, differs from that of Webster in quality rather than in essence. They were both content with America and New England. Hawthorne, with his shrug at old buildings and his wish that all over two hundred years of age should be burnt down, was repeating Webster's contempt of the musty halls of collegiate Cambridge; and Hawthorne, Yankeeizing the Greek myths, and finding all Rome but the background for his Puritan maiden, was a.s.serting that new discovery of Europe by America which has ever since been going on, and was ill.u.s.trated by Webster's excursions in language to bring back English variations from American usage.

The ease with which Webster walked about the Jericho of English lexicography, blowing his trumpet of destruction, was an American ease, born of a sense that America was a continent and not a province. He transferred the capital of literature from London to Boston, or New York, or Hartford,--he was indifferent so long as it was in the United States. He thought Washington as good an authority on spelling as Dr.

Johnson, and much better than King George. He took the Bible as a book to be used, not as a piece of antiquity to be sheltered in a museum, and with an American practicality set about making it more serviceable in his own way. He foresaw the vast crowds of American children; he knew that the integrity of the country was conditioned on the intelligibility of their votes, and he turned his back on England less with indifference to her than with an absorption in his own country. He made a Speller which has sown votes and muskets; he made alone a Dictionary, which has grown, under the impulse he gave it, into a national encyclopaedia, possessing an irresistible momentum. Indeed, is not the very existence of that book in its current form a witness to the same Americanism which Webster displayed, only now in a firmer, finer, and more complex form?

In the high walks of scholarship, where nationality would seem to be effaced, we have had very recently a capital ill.u.s.tration of the inevitable tendency of national traits to seek expression. The Appendix to the "Revised Version of the New Testament" contains the variations proposed by the American company from the text as otherwise determined.

There were in the English company men of radical temperament and of conservative; there were in the American company like distinctions; nevertheless the final separation between the two companies is largely on this line, and one can easily see how much sympathy, Webster, for example, would have expressed with the position which the American company took, a position not of dissent but of independent a.s.sertion.

The separation between England and America which was so effectual in Webster's conception, and thus determined much of his thought, was really incipient and not complete. The two countries are more widely separate to-day than they were then, while the outward signs of separation are in many ways less conspicuous. The forces of national life have been diverging, and the resultant in character and literature is more sure and ineffaceable.

It should be observed that the individualism which characterizes American life was more marked in the first years of the republic than it is now. After we have reasoned away all we will of a revolutionary cataclysmal element in the separation of the United States from the British Empire, there still remains a sharp determination of individual life, historically evident, and very influential in the formation of national character. In the earliest years the centripetal force for union was barely superior to the centrifugal force for state independence; but the political thought which justified state sovereignty had its logical issue in an isolated individuality. Common sense and prudence, to be sure, are always defeating logic; but the logical conception helps us to understand tendencies, and it is not difficult to see that the word independence, which was on every one's lips at the close of the last century, was not the sign of a political thought only, but expressed the habit of mind with which persons everywhere regarded life in its varied relations. The breaking up of old political connections not only unsettled the social fabric, it affected necessarily all the relations which the person held to society; and it was only as a profounder political unity disclosed itself in the nation that each man put forth more confidently his hand to his fellow. The historian of the Union will not fail to observe how with the growth of that Union there began to spring up societies and corporations of every kind, the interdependence of the States extending itself to the interdependence of all interests involved in the State, and the whole fabric of society feeling its web and woof grow firmer and denser.

The career of Webster ill.u.s.trates this truth. He worked alone, and his solitariness was not wholly due to his idiosyncrasies. It was in part the penalty paid by a student of the time. The resolution and self-reliance of an American were his, and so was the individuality.

That such enterprises are not now conducted single-handed is owing not to a lack of courage but to the greater complexity of life, the more constant sense of interdependence, the existence of greater solidarity in intellectual pursuits. Webster was unable to believe that a company of scholars could ever be formed who should carry forward a revision of the Bible, and therefore he made the attempt himself. Individual criticism has been abundant ever since, but no one, however learned or popular, has ever been able to impress his work upon the community. The most carefully organized body of scholars submits the results of its ten years' conference to the votes of the world. The history of Webster's Dictionary is parallel with the growth of national life out of individualism.