CYNTHIA OZICK
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
These are thy glorious works , Parent of good,
Almighty! Thine this universal frame .
Alas! they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above,
And life is thorny, and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness on the brain .
765
So much for Longfellow, Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge. But
also Addison, Cowper, Pope, Ossian, Scott, Ruskin, Thomson,
Wordsworth, Trollope, Gray, Byron, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes,
Moore, Collins, Hood, Goldsmith, Bryant, Dickens, Bacon, Frank–
lin, Locke, the Bible-these appear throughout, in the form of ad–
denda to Participles, Parsing, Irregular Verbs, and the rule of the
Nominative Independent; in addition, a handful of lost presences,
Bushnell, H. Wise, Wayland, Dwight, Blair, Mrs. Welby, and
Anon. The
content
of this volume is not its subject matter, neither its
syntactic lessons nor its poetic maxims. It is the voice of a language;
rather, of language itself, language as texture, gesture, innateness .
To read from beginning to end of a schoolbook of this sort is to
recognize at once that]ames had it backwards and upside down: it is
not that manners lead culture; it is culture that leads manners. What
shapes culture- this is not a tautology or a redundancy- is culture.
"Who makes the country?" was the latent question James was prod–
ding and poking, all gingerly; and it was the wrong- because un–
answerable- one. "What kind of country shall we have?" was Albert
N. Raub's question, and it
was
answerable . The answer lay in the
reading given to the children in the schoolhouse: the institutionaliza–
tion, so to say, of our common speech at its noblest.
My second text is even more striking:
The Etymological Reader,
edited by Epes Sargent and Amasa May, dated 1872. "We here offer
to the schools of the United States," begins the Preface, "the first
systematic attempt to associate the study of etymology with exercises
in reading." What follows is a blitz of "vocabulary," Latin roots,
Saxon roots, prefixes and suffixes, but these quickly subside, and
nine-tenths of this inventive book is an anthology engaging in its
