The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown (free ebook reader .txt) 📕

35. But the publication of an other work designed for schools, "An Essay an Elocution" shows the progress of the author's mind. Nothing can be more radically opposite, than are some of the elementary doctrines which this gentleman is now teaching; nothing, more strangely inconsistent, than are some of his declarations and professions. For instance: "A consonant is a letter that cannot be perfectly sounded without the help of a vowel."—Kirkham's Gram., p. 19. Again: "A consonant is not only capable of being perfectly sounded without the help of a vowel, but, moreover, of forming, like a vowel, a separate syllable."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 32. Take a second example. He makes "ADJECTIVE PRONOUNS" a prominent division and leading title, in treating of the pronouns proper; defines the term in a manner peculiar to himself; prefers and uses it in all his parsing; and yet, by the third sentence of the story, the learner is conducted to this just conclusion: "Hence, such a thing as an adjective-pronoun cannot exist."—Grammar, p. 105. Once more. Upon his own rules, or such as he had borrowed, he comments thus, and comments truly, because he had either written them badly or made an ill choice: "But some of these rules are foolish, trifling, and unimportant."—Elocution, p. 97. Again: "Rules 10 and 11, rest on a sandy foundation. They appear not to be based on the principles of the language."—Grammar, p. 59. These are but specimens of his own frequent testimony against himself! Nor shall he find refuge in the impudent falsehood, that the things which I quote as his, are not his own.[14] These contradictory texts, and scores of others which might be added to them, are as rightfully his own, as any doctrine he has ever yet inculcated. But, upon the credulity of ignorance, his high-sounding certificates and unbounded boasting can impose any thing. They overrule all in favour of cue of the worst grammars extant;—of which he says, "it is now studied by more than one hundred thousand children and youth; and is more extensively used than all other English grammars published in the United States."—Elocution, p. 347. The booksellers say, he receives from his publishers ten cents a copy, on this work, and that he reports the sale of sixty thousand copies per annum. Such has of late been his public boast. I have once had the story from his own lips, and of course congratulated him, though I dislike the book. Six thousand dollars a year, on this most miserable modification of Lindley Murray's Grammar! Be it so—or double, if he and the public please. Murray had so little originality in his work, or so little selfishness in his design, that he would not take any thing; and his may ultimately prove the better bargain.

36. A man may boast and bless himself as he pleases, his fortune, surely, can never be worthy of an other's envy, so long as he finds it inadequate to his own great merits, and unworthy of his own poor gratitude. As a grammarian, Kirkham claims to be second only to Lindley Murray; and says, "Since the days of Lowth, no other work on grammar, Murray's only excepted, has been so favourably received by the publick as his own. As a proof of this, he would mention, that within the last six years it has passed through fifty editions."—Preface to Elocution, p. 12. And, at the same time, and in the same preface, he complains, that, "Of all the labours done under the sun, the labours of the pen meet with the poorest reward."—Ibid., p. 5. This too clearly favours the report, that his books were not written by himself, but by others whom he hired. Possibly, the anonymous helper may here have penned, not his employer's feeling, but a line of his own experience. But I choose to ascribe the passage to the professed author, and to hold him answerable for the inconsistency. Willing to illustrate by the best and fairest examples these fruitful means of grammatical fame, I am glad of his present success, which, through this record, shall become yet more famous. It is the only thing which makes him worthy of the notice here taken of him. But I cannot sympathize with his complaint, because he never sought any but "the poorest reward;" and more than all he sought, he found. In his last "Address to Teachers," he says, "He may doubtless be permitted emphatically to say with Prospero, 'Your breath has filled my sails.'"—Elocution, p. 18. If this boasting has any truth in it, he ought to be satisfied. But it is written, "He that loveth silver, shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase." Let him remember this.[15] He now announces three or four other works as forthcoming shortly. What these will achieve, the world will see. But I must confine myself to the Grammar.

37. In this volume, scarcely any thing is found where it might be expected. "The author," as he tells us in his preface, "has not followed the common 'artificial and unnatural arrangement adopted by most of his predecessors;' yet he has endeavoured to pursue a more judicious one, namely, 'the order of the understanding.'"—Grammar, p. 12. But if this is the order of his understanding, he is greatly to be pitied. A book more confused in its plan, more wanting in method, more imperfect in distinctness of parts, more deficient in symmetry, or more difficult of reference, shall not easily be found in stereotype. Let the reader try to follow us here. Bating twelve pages at the beginning, occupied by the title, recommendations, advertisement, contents, preface, hints to teachers, and advice to lecturers; and fifty-four at the end, embracing syntax, orthography, orthoëpy, provincialisms, prosody, punctuation, versification, rhetoric, figures of speech, and a Key, all in the sequence here given; the work consists of fourteen chapters of grammar, absurdly called "Familiar Lectures." The first treats of sundries, under half a dozen titles, but chiefly of Orthography; and the last is three pages and a half, of the most common remarks, on Derivation. In the remaining twelve, the Etymology and Syntax of the ten parts of speech are commingled; and an attempt is made, to teach simultaneously all that the author judged important in either. Hence he gives us, in a strange congeries, rules, remarks, illustrations, false syntax, systematic parsing, exercises in parsing, two different orders of notes, three different orders of questions, and a variety of other titles merely occasional. All these things, being additional to his main text, are to be connected, in the mind of the learner, with the parts of speech successively, in some new and inexplicable catenation found only in the arrangement of the lectures. The author himself could not see through the chaos. He accordingly made his table of contents a mere meagre alphabetical index. Having once attempted in vain to explain the order of his instructions, he actually gave the matter up in despair!

38. In length, these pretended lectures vary, from three or four pages, to eight-and-thirty. Their subjects run thus: 1. Language, Grammar, Orthography; 2. Nouns and Verbs; 3. Articles; 4. Adjectives; 5. Participles; 6. Adverbs; 7. Prepositions; 8. Pronouns; 9. Conjunctions; 10. Interjections and Nouns; 11. Moods and Tenses; 12. Irregular Verbs; 13. Auxiliary, Passive, and Defective Verbs; 14. Derivation. Which, now, is "more judicious," such confusion as this, or the arrangement which has been common from time immemorial? Who that has any respect for the human intellect, or whose powers of mind deserve any in return, will avouch this jumble to be "the order of the understanding?" Are the methods of science to be accounted mere hinderances to instruction? Has grammar really been made easy by this confounding of its parts? Or are we lured by the name, "Familiar Lectures,"—a term manifestly adopted as a mere decoy, and, with respect to the work itself, totally inappropriate? If these chapters have ever been actually delivered as a series of lectures, the reader must have been employed on some occasions eight or ten times as long as on others! "People," says Dr. Johnson, "have now-a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as a private reading of the books from which the lectures are taken. I know of nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chymistry by lectures—you might teach the making of shoes by lectures." —Boswell's Life of Johnson.

39. With singular ignorance and untruth, this gentleman claims to have invented a better method of analysis than had ever been practised before. Of other grammars, his preface avers, "They have all overlooked what the author considers a very important object; namely, a systematick order of parsing."—Grammar, p. 9. And, in his "Hints to Teachers," presenting himself as a model, and his book as a paragon, he says: "By pursuing this system, he can, with less labour, advance a pupil farther in the practical knowledge of this abstruse science, in two months, than he could in one year, when he taught in the old way."—Grammar, p. 12. What his "old way" was, does not appear. Doubtless something sufficiently bad. And as to his new way, I shall hereafter have occasion to show that that is sufficiently bad also. But to this gasconade the simple-minded have given credit—because the author showed certificates that testified to his great success, and called him "amiable and modest!" But who can look into the book, or into the writer's pretensions in regard to his predecessors, and conceive the merit which has made him—"preëminent by so much odds?" Was Murray less praiseworthy, less amiable, or less modest? In illustration of my topic, and for the sake of literary justice, I have selected that honoured "Compiler" to show the abuses of praise; let the history of this his vaunting modifier cap the climax of vanity. In general, his amendments of "that eminent philologist," are not more skillful than the following touch upon an eminent dramatist; and here, it is plain, he has mistaken two nouns for adjectives, and converted into bad English a beautiful passage, the sentiment of which is worthy of an author's recollection:

   "The evil deed or deeds that men do, lives after them;
    The good deed or deeds is oft interred with their bones." [16]
                    Kirkham's Grammar, p. 75.

40. Lord Bacon observes, "Nothing is thought so easy a request to a great person as his letter; and yet, if it be not in a good cause, it is so much out of his reputation." It is to this mischievous facility of recommendation, this prostituted influence of great names, that the inconvenient diversity of school-books, and the continued use of bad ones, are in a great measure to be attributed. It belongs to those who understand the subjects of which authors profess to treat, to judge fairly and fully of their works, and then to let the reasons of their judgement be known. For no one will question the fact, that a vast number of the school-books now in use are either egregious plagiarisms or productions of no comparative merit. And, what is still more surprising and monstrous, presidents, governors, senators, and judges; professors, doctors, clergymen, and lawyers; a host of titled connoisseurs; with incredible facility lend their names, not only to works of inferior merit, but to the vilest thefts, and the wildest absurdities, palmed off upon their own and the public credulity, under pretence of improvement. The man who thus prefixes his letter of recommendation to an ill-written book, publishes, out of mere courtesy, a direct impeachment of his own scholarship or integrity. Yet, how often have we seen the honours of a high office, or even of a worthy name, prostituted to give a temporary or local currency to a book which it would disgrace any man of letters to quote! With such encouragement, nonsense wrestles for the seat of learning, exploded errors are republished as novelties, original writers are plundered by dunces, and men that understand nothing well, profess to teach all sciences!

41. All praise of excellence must needs be comparative, because the thing itself is so. To excel in grammar, is but to know better than others wherein grammatical excellence consists. Hence there is no fixed point of perfection beyond which such learning may not be carried. The limit to improvement is not so much in the nature of the subject, as in the powers of the mind, and in the inducements to exert them upon a theme so humble and so uninviting. Dr. Johnson suggests, in his masterly preface, "that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient." Who then will suppose, in the face of such facts