University of Virginia Library

3

The Gilded Age and the Corruption of
Language

The nineteenth-century book on language that is most likely
to have influenced Mark Twain's fiction directly is Richard
Grant White's Words and Their Uses. Based on articles that had
appeared in the Galaxy from 1867 through 1869, the book was
published in 1870 and went through over thirty editions in
as many years. The most prominent American verbal "shaman"—to
use Dwight Bolinger's term—of the latter part of the
nineteenth century, White retained his popularity well into
the twentieth century, thanks no doubt to his unintimidating
style and careful avoidance of anything resembling Germanic
philology.[1] (In an essay on received notions about language,
linguist Leonard Bloomfield recalled that his undergraduate
instructors in the early 1900s "advised us to read Richard
Grant White," while the immeasurably more important work
of his contemporary William Dwight Whitney "was not mentioned.")[2]
In White's own words, his book concerns itself "almost
exclusively with the correctness and fitness of verbal expression,
and any excursion into higher walks of philology is
transient and incidental."[3] Like all prescriptivists, White contended
that tradition and reason must temper the authority of
common usage; in practice, this means a preference for the
conservative rules of grammar and usage that had been
handed down from rhetoric manual to rhetoric manual on
both sides of the Atlantic for a hundred years. He offers a precedent
for Twain's disapproval of both the adverbial like and
the American confusion between shall and will, but Twain
might have found similar proscriptions in any number of
writers.[4] On the other hand, Twain would not have sided with
White at his most reactionary, as when he spends an entire

chapter in a futile rearguard action against the continuous
passive "is being done" (pp. 334-63). But the linguistic arbitration
that occupies most of Words and Their Uses is less
relevant to the reader of Mark Twain than its chapters entitled
"Newspaper English" and "Big Words for Small Thoughts,"
which vigorously attack the "corruptions . . . consequent
upon pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity" (p. 19).
Mark Twain bought a copy of White's book in 1873; he and
Warner composed The Gilded Age between February and April
of that year. Thus it is probably more than coincidence that the
excesses of language satirized in Twain's, and even Warner's,
portions of the novel resemble those that White criticizes.[5]

Calling for a purified American diction, Emerson had written
in Nature that "the corruption of man is followed by the
corruption of language."[6] White goes a step further in his
preface by claiming that the equation is commutative: "The influence
of man upon language is reciprocated by the influence
of language upon man; and the mental tone of a community
may be vitiated by a yielding to the use of loose, coarse, low,
and frivolous phraseology" (p. 5). If corrupt language is at
once a symptom and a cause of social decadence, linguistic
criticism is a form of social criticism. In a country with no
Academy, no central authority over language, the only guardian
against corruption is the independent, self-selected, elite
judge of usage. Like the social ills of The Gilded Age, the diseases
of language that White diagnoses are caused by abuses
of democratic institutions and the distortion of laissez-faire
into license. White's villains, like Twain's, are journalists, politicians,
and advertisers, those who at once represent and
create American mass culture.

White in his introduction implicitly equates social democracy
with linguistic democracy, seeing both as dangerous. The
fashionable philological doctrine that words are merely arbitrary
signs of ideas is nothing new, White says, quoting Oliver
Cromwell, who long since affirmed that words acquire their
meaning "from the consent of those that use them, and arbitrarily
annex certain ideas to them" (p. 13). But despite his
apparent social-contract theory of semantics, Cromwell refused

Parliament's request that he call himself king, because
(says White), "king meant something that he was not," since
"words have, like men, a history, and alliances, and rights of
birth and inherent powers which endure as long as they live,
and which they can transmit, although somewhat modified,
to their rightful successors" (p. 14). Unlike eighteenth-century
conservative language theorists (notably Samuel Johnson),
White does not bemoan change in language; as societies
change, so must languages. More important for White is who
directs that change: "The changes of our day are mostly the
result of the very superficial instruction of a large body of
people, who read much and without discrimination, whose
reading is chiefly confined to newspapers hastily written by
men also very insufficiently educated. . . . The tendency of
this intellectual condition of a great and active race is to the
degradation of language. . . . Against this tendency it behooves
all men who have means and opportunity to strive"
(p. 18). Language must always be the product of the mass of
language users, but "when that mass is misled by a little learning,"
license and corruption follow (p. 26). Hence the need for
criticism, for a class of "trained and cultivated minds" to form
the ranks of "those who are, if not the framers, at least the
arbiters, of linguistic law" (p. 27). Granting that language cannot
be controlled by an absolute monarch, White would have
a republic whose elected representatives are the critics. One
of his reviewers responded appreciatively to the political resonance
of his verbal criticism: "In the introductory chapter . . .
we are very glad to find Mr. White protesting against the
heresy that usage is to be our supreme guide. This position
has been stoutly maintained, and by persons who, moreover,
understand usage, not as the practice of the best writers, but
as popular custom, an average of Tom, Dick, and Harry, Tag,
Rag, and Bobtail, Birdofredom Sawin, Hans Breitmann, and
Miles O'Reilly."[7]

Mark Twain, too, was unsympathetic to a political system
that allowed democracy to act as a leveler. In a political utopia
he described in 1875, the "curious republic" of Gondour, the
weight of one's vote is directly proportional to one's learning.

Gondour had "at first tried universal suffrage pure and simple,
but had thrown that form aside because the result was not satisfactory.
It had seemed to deliver all power into the hands of
the ignorant and non-tax-paying classes." Under the new
scheme, an individual was allowed extra votes according to
his property and particularly according to the level of his education,
and "the learned voters, possessing the balance of
power, became the vigilant and efficient protectors of the
great lower rank of society."[8] Twain here agrees with his later
rival Matthew Arnold: to the educated falls the responsibility
of political as well as cultural government in the best of representative
systems.

White's antidemocratic bias is still more apparent in his
chapter "Newspaper English," which blames corrupt language
on the desire of the middle class for upward social mobility.
In White's view, journalists, politicians, and advertisers
gain social authority by pretending to knowledge. Whereas
the lower classes are content with their humble ignorance and
the gentry secure in their native attainments, the rising middle
class is a brood of confidence men: "The curse and the peril of
language in this day, and particularly in this country, is, that it
is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it
well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to
their affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant;
who, being empty, would seem full; who make up in
pretence what they lack in reality" (p. 28).[9] Against the tendency
of "pretentious ignorance" and "aggressive vulgarity"
to abolish "simple, clear, and manly speech," the educated
must strive "almost as if it were a question of morals" (p. 18).
White's major target is the popular press, which had already
come under attack in both England and the United States for
its partiality to "newspaper English," the euphemistic, Latinate
prose style of "big words for small thoughts." Neither
the fault nor the complaint is new, White admits; what is new
in this chapter is his equation of the style with social insincerity
of all sorts.[10] "Writing like this," White says, "is a fruit
of a pitiful desire to seem elegant when one is not so . . .

which manifests itself in the use of words as well as in the
wearing of clothes, the buying of furniture, and the giving of
entertainments" (pp. 33-34).

Twain's sharpest attack on pretentious language occurs in
The Gilded Age, in the brilliant parody of the conversation of
Washington's "Aristocracy of the Parvenues." These nouveaux
arrivés are confident that their wealth has purchased entry
into fashionable society, but their awkward mimicry of fine
language betrays their origins. The Honorable Mrs. Higgins,
whose "English was fair enough, as a general thing," retains
the New Yorker's pronunciation of "saw" and "law" as "sawr"
and "lawr" (WMT 6:16). The O'Reillys stayed in Paris for two
years "and learned to speak English with a foreign accent—
not that it hadn't always had a foreign accent . . . but now the
nature of it was changed" (WMT 6:20).[11] The parvenue aristocracy
mistakenly believe that a few tricks of "genteel" pronunciation
and vocabulary are enough to produce an elevated
style of speech. But their speech is thinly gilded at best, and
the tin underneath peeks through. White had complained
about a policeman who, when asked about a neighboring
building, replied, "That is an institootion inaugurated under
the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them
young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood"
(p. 30). This absurd mixture of elegant and vernacular styles
characterizes the speech of Twain's parvenues, one sample of
which should suffice to convey its flavor. (I have altered the
original to highlight the clash of styles: markedly "genteel"
expressions are in italics; nonstandard or regional usages are
in boldface.) The speaker is Mrs. Higgins:

(WMT 6:23)

Twain evidently shares White's feeling that whereas "simple
unpretending ignorance" and genuine culture are respectable,
the speech of "pretentious ignorance and aggressive
vulgarity" (White, p. 19) merits only disdain. It is important
to distinguish here between Mrs. Higgins's language and the
superficially similar comic mingling of styles that characterizes
the Mark Twain persona from the 1860s on. Mark Twain
is in full control of his styles, and when in, say, a burlesque
account of a San Francisco ball he lets the vocabulary of haute
couture collide with mining slang, we recognize the effect as
studied. So too with the author who has created Mrs. Higgins;
but Mrs. Higgins herself is the victim of her own language,
plainly incapable of the critical distance that would
allow her to perceive its absurdity. Those who are pretentiously
ignorant hypocritically disavow and attempt to hide a
native tongue of low social origin; their superficial and purely
instrumental interest in the genteel style shows that for them
language is simply a material possession. Worst of all, they
are not even skillful at their linguistic confidence game.

Laura, on the other hand, wins our (perhaps horrified) respect
because she assimilates so successfully the manner of
the society in which she desires to move. Her aims are no
more honorable than those of the parvenues, but she pursues
them with more skill. To prepare for her encounter with Washington
society, she had entered upon a "tireless and elaborate
course of reading. . . . The quality of her literary tastes had
necessarily undergone constant improvement under this regimen,
and . . . the quality of her language had improved,
though it connot be denied that now and then her former condition
of life betrayed itself in just perceptible inelegancies of
expression and lapses of grammar" (WMT 6:30).[12] When
Laura flirts with Congressman Buckstone to win his vote, she
shows herself a master of the badinage of Victorian romantic
comedy. Laura reminds Buckstone of his promise to tell her
about his trip to Egypt:

(WMT 6:56)

The perspectives on Laura's language are complex. Buckstone
takes her speech as serious evidence that he has charmed an
accomplished coquette. Laura herself has no doubt that her
speech is part of the strategy of a "desperate game" (WMT
6:58). For the reader this language is simultaneously part of
Twain and Warner's parody of sentimental romantic fiction
and a realistic mark of Laura's skill at altering her discourse to
suit the occasion. But Laura and Mrs. Higgins represent opposite
dangers: Laura grows to be too accomplished a rhetorician,
too successful at aiming her language entirely toward
her audience. Being wholly other-directed, she has no voice of
her own. It is thus appropriate that after her murder of Selby
has destroyed her career in Washington, she should seek her
living as a lecturer. "She would array herself in fine attire, she
would adorn herself with jewels, and stand in her isolated
magnificence before massed audiences and enchant them
with her eloquence" (WMT 6:295). (Note, again, the conjunction
of language and material display.) She will exist only as
reflected in the response of her hearers. But when her first
and last lecture audience consists of a handful of coarse, jeering
men and women, she loses her speech and therefore her
self. Debating whether her ensuing death is suicide or "natural"
is misguided: Laura is effectually dead from the moment
her opportunity to speak is denied.

"Language," according to White, is "perverted in this country
chiefly in consequence of the wide diffusion of very superficial
instruction among a restless, money-getting, and self-confident
people" (p. 39). For him the money-making spirit
can lead to verbal simony, the mercenary use of sacred language,
as when a real-estate agent in a newspaper ad urges
prospective buyers to "come unto me" (echoing Matt. 11:28).
A murderer works less "diffusive" evil than a man who publicly
mingles sacred and profane styles, a man who is "the

representative of a class of men which increases among us
year by year—men whose chief traits are greed and vulgarity,
who often get riches, and whose traits, when riches come, are
still greed and vulgarity, with the addition of purse-pride and
vanity" (p. 41). White's meditation on the etiology of corrupt
language leads him to blame the "money-getting spirit," and
the socioeconomic forces that create it, because his own insistence
on standards that establish the real value of different
forms of language presupposes the "monetary metaphor" of
language that has underlain Western semiotic thought for
over two millennia.[13] Words are tokens of exchange valuable
only insofar as they stand for, or are guaranteed by, the ideas
that lie behind them. "Newspaper English" is "inflated" language,
verbal currency that does not possess the worth its circulators
mistakenly ascribe to it. White notes that scholars
have adduced as evidence of richness the thousand synonyms
in Eastern languages for sword and the hundred for
horse. "But this, unless the people who use these languages
have a thousand kinds of swords and a hundred kinds of
horses, is no proof of wealth in that which makes the real
worth of language" (pp. 80-81). Language creates floating
symbols that like paper money have no material value of their
own. Language and economics meet in the word speculation if
baseless ideation and worthless investment are seen as twin
manifestations of a single phenomenon. And at this level Words
and Their Uses and The Gilded Age meet most profoundly. For
the fundamental theme of at least Twain's portions is deceitful
elimination of the distance between appearance and reality,
symbol and referent—a crime far more serious than the pretentious
use of genteel idioms. To the social climbers who
populate the novel, money and language are interchangeable
means of speculation, of promising, of bribing. Both an issue
of worthless stock and a hypocritical Sunday-school speech
are symptoms of a society whose favorite activity is to get
something for nothing.

The three basic images in Twain's part of The Gilded Age, and
especially in the first eleven chapters, are inflation, facade,

and creation ex nihilo. As embodied in characters like Squire
Hawkins, Washington Hawkins, and Colonel Sellers, these
images have both linguistic and economic significance. Language
is necromantic; it "enchants," creating the illusion of
value where none exists in reality. Inflated language in the
novel characterizes a society that blindly rushes to expand,
exploit, multiply, climb. To vary the metaphor, language is a
stimulant that overexcites the metabolism of the body politic
to the point of apoplexy.

"I must talk or I'll burst!": Squire Hawkins averts psychic
explosion by venting himself in a jet of language that expands
until it no longer conforms to reality. The whole tract of his
Tennessee lands, he tells his wife, "would not sell for over a
third of a cent an acre now, but some day people will be glad
to get it for twenty dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an
acre! What should you say to . . . a thousand dollars an acre!"
(WMT 5:7). Language is always potentially inflationary, since
the mere substitution of one word for another increases the
apparent value of the referent. In fact Squire Hawkins's riches
are only imaginary. Arguing against Descartes's ontological
proof for the existence of God, Kant appealed to a monetary
analogy: "[The proof] that claims to demonstrate the existence
of a Being through concepts is futile, and simple ideas make
one no richer in knowledge than a merchant becomes if with
the notion of increasing his wealth, he adds several zeros to
his checkbook."[14] Wealth is the God, the transcendental signifier,
of The Gilded Age, whose existence is "proved" by the
sheer ability of language to project it. The Hawkinses in fact
prefer the imaginary to the real. In chapter 6 Squire Hawkins is
offered ten thousand dollars cash for his lands. About to ask
fifteen thousand, he changes his mind and demands thirty
thousand. The prospective buyer departs, never to be seen
again. Squire Hawkins is shattered: "Too late—too late! He's
gone! Fool that I am!—always a fool! Thirty thousand—ass
that I am! Oh, why didn't I say fifty thousand! . . . Fool as I am
I told him he could have half the iron property for thirty thousand—and
if I only had him back here he couldn't touch it for
a cent less than a quarter of a million!" (WMT 5:56-57). Twain

is explicit about the theological significance of the Hawkins
land, for the squire's thoughts turn to that land rather than to
God as he lies on his deathbed: "A better day is—is coming.
Never lose sight of the Tennessee Land! . . . There is wealth
stored up for you there—wealth that is boundless!" (WMT
5:91).[15] Washington Hawkins is a direct inheritor of his father's
apocalyptic hope. The capital city, a "world of enchantment"
that "teemed with speculation," is "paradise" to him
(WMT 5:241-42). He translates a tentative offer of forty thousand
dollars for the land—a "little sum"—into "operations
. . . that will increase it a hundredfold, yes, a thousandfold,
in a few months" (WMT 5:247). Twain comments ironically
on all this inflation in the imaginary realm in describing the
effect of Colonel Sellers's turnips on Washington Hawkins's
stomach, the material realm par excellence: the "dire inflation
that had begun in his stomach . . . grew and grew, it became
more and more insupportable" (WMT 5:110).

Inflation is a special case of creation ex nihilo, and Colonel
Sellers is the Twain character who refuses most stubbornly
to admit that "nothing will come of nothing."[16] As an
"enchanter" whose tongue makes others' fortunes and raises
cities in the wilderness, he is a parody of the Creator-Logos
and the evangelical Savior. So we see him in his letter to the
Hawkinses in chapter 1, his first directly quoted language in
The Gilded Age and one of the most brilliant pieces of verbal
characterization Twain ever wrote:

(WMT 5:13)

This is stunning intertextuality, for despite the lack of direct
quotation nearly every phrase resonates with Gospel overtones:
Sellers is the Good Shepherd, the Way In, promising
salvation to those who believe, Paradise to those who sell all
they have and follow him. But the nub of Mark Twain's joke is
the equivocal phrase "take in," which tips off the reader to the
deception Sellers practices. The description of his fraudulent
scheme not only satirizes ill-judged investment but creates
doubts about the trustworthiness of any referential language.
If faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen," does not all speech require an act of faith,
since we have no guarantee that the words we use are backed
by corresponding objects? Beyond the obvious point that Sellers's
Missouri is an illusion is the far more unsettling suggestion
that the theological promises he echoes are deceptions as
well. A latent suggestion, the merest hint: Mark Twain in the
1870s is not yet the Mark Twain of the Mysterious Stranger
tales, and his targets in The Gilded Age remain social rather
than metaphysical.

In his popularization of Alfred Korzybski's "general semantics,"
S. I. Hayakawa notes that major abuses of logic and language
occur when a map is mistaken for the territory.[17] When
in a wonderful scene Colonel Sellers creates a "map" of a proposed
railroad line with the aid of every kitchen implement he
can lay his hands on, it becomes clear that his particular form
of insanity is to believe that the map creates the territory. An
authentic map is a symbolic representation of the real; Sellers's
maps are all symbolic representations of the imaginary, which
he mistakes for the real. One specific linguistic correlate of
this semiotic confusion is Sellers's (and the Hawkinses') conflation
of present and future tense. Chapter 27 begins with a
dialogue between Sellers and his wife, who as usual lack
ready cash. Sellers reassures her: "It's all right, my dear, all
right; it will all come right in a little while." The railroad appropriation
will shortly bring in two hundred thousand dollars,
he insists, and the railroad itself infinitely more. Since
she is prospectively wealthy, Sellers chides his wife for her current
uneasiness: "Bless your heart, you dear women live right
in the present all the time—but a man, why a man lives—"
"In the future, Beriah? But don't we live in the future most too

much, Beriah?" (WMT 5:265-66). As his wife sees, Sellers
constantly moves from a postulated "will" to an assured "is."
The best description of this verbal speculation occurs in a passage
written by Warner rather than Twain. Harry Brierly has
been boasting to some new acquaintances about a "big diamond
interest" in Arizona that certain "parties" want him to
investigate. His friend Philip rebukes him for "going on" in
such a style. " 'Go on?' cried Harry. 'Why shouldn't I try
to make a pleasant evening? And besides, ain't I going to do
those things? What difference does it make about the mood
and tense of a mere verb?' " (WMT 5:225). All the difference in
The Gilded Age, where the ontological status of modal verbs is
highly suspect. "I have two million dollars" is—if true—a
statement convertible in full for specie. "I will/may/might/
should have two million dollars" is a note on a wildcat bank.
(Speaking of wildcat banks, one of Sellers's schemes is to buy
up a hundred and thirteen of them whose notes are being
sold at a large discount—"buy them all up, you see, and then
all of a sudden let the cat out of the bag! Whiz! the stock of
every one of those wildcats would spin up to a tremendous
premium . . . [bringing] profit on the speculation not a dollar
less than forty millions!" [WMT 5:78]. Between the wish and
the reality falls the would.) To put it another way, the finite
verb is "reality," which is corrupted by the addition of a modal
into "appearance." "Will have" is like the colonel's stove that
glows but gives no heat, the central metaphor of the novel. He
keeps a lighted candle in it because "what you want is the appearance
of heat, not the heat itself—that's the idea" (WMT
5:72). But "the idea," as Twain expects us to see, never fed
anybody.

Mark Twain's portions of The Gilded Age exhibit abundant
pessimism about the extent to which language is used appropriately.
Like White, he believed that language could be corrupted,
degraded, or inflated so as to create a gap between
appearance and reality. J. Hammond Trumbull provided chapter
13 with a heading from William Caxton about a man whose
speech "semeth vnto manys herying / not only the worde,
but veryly the thyng" (WMT 5:122). Twain would have us underline

the "semeth." The Gilded Age presents a web of words
that create nonexistent "things." Obscure letters shadow forth
Laura's real father.[18] Town gossip creates a "past" for her. Colonel
Selby promises romance but delivers an invalid marriage.
Congressional rhetoric turns a swindle into a philanthropic
scheme for elevating the Negro. Language is never ideologically
neutral: every variation in usage corresponds to a social
fact or to an instrumental intent. There are offenses against
linguistic rules that are more serious than mere errors of grammar,
as both White and Twain are aware. The flexibility and
internal variety of language can add richness and color to social
intercourse, or it can provide handles for manipulators
who know how to wield their words to others' harm.

One "great abuse of words is the taking them for things," John
Locke wrote.[19] Like Cobbett, Emerson, and White before him,
Mark Twain in The Gilded Age judges the voices he hears every
day against the standard of a pure language that might repair
the rent between word and thing through a resolute honesty.
His social satire at once measures how far we Americans have
betrayed that ideal tongue and calls pragmatically for reform.
The part of Mark Twain that believed in progress toward perfection
necessarily had to conceive of a unitary language, that
is, one whose unique standard could be formulated in rules of
grammar and usage equally accessible and intelligible to all
members of the speech community. The grammatical language,
the pure language, would seem to be both the cause
and the effect of a well-ordered and harmonious society. A
central tenet of Lockean theory is that language should unite
its users: "The chief end of language in communication being
to be understood, words serve not well for that end . . . when
any word does not excite in the hearer the same idea which it
stands for in the mind of the speaker."[20] A curious republic
indeed it would be, a world where all words meant the same
to all speakers, where language could not say "the thing
that is not" (the virtue, or defect, of the speech of Swift's rational
horses). Such a republic could be built only in a utopia, no
place, because physical and social place in the sublunary

world entails an inescapable difference between speaker and
listener, which makes meaning possible. Mark Twain hardly
needed twentieth-century theory to tell him this; his own experience
as he moved from state to state and country to country
confronted him with what George Steiner has called "the
problem of Babel," and brought him to an intuitive awareness
that "inside or between languages, human communication equals
translation" (Steiner's italics).[21]

I have insisted in this chapter and the previous one on
Mark Twain's debts and even subservience to traditional authorities
over grammar and usage, partly to counter a widespread
view that Twain's fascination with the vernacular signifies
linguistic populism (a claim I will return to in chapter
5). Yet his conscious allegiance to rules and standards coexists
with a radical awareness, sometimes joyous and sometimes
fearful, of the irreducible multeity of human expression. Paradoxically,
to create the defiantly monoglot Huck, Mark Twain
had to learn to speak as many languages as possible. The
route to his fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, led him through
Europe—and Babel.