Noah Webster, schoolmaster to America

Title

Creator

Warfel, Harry R.

Language

English

Year

1966

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

The qualifications and ability of a competent dictionary writer.

Fulltext

■ The qualifications and ability of a competent dic tionary writer. NOAH WEBSTER, SCHOOLMASTER TO AMERICA Harry Warfel's biography of Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer and journalist, is a well-balanced and important contribution to America’s cultural and educational history. Noah Webster (1758-1848) was the son of a Connecticut farmer who mortgaged his farm to send Noah to Yale. After graduation he taught school, studied law and was admitted to the bar. In 178385 he published a Gramma tical Institute of the English Language in three parts — a spelling book, a grammar, and a reader. This was the first American work of its kind, and it soon found a place in the schools of the United States. While Webs ter worked on his dictionary, the famous spelling book was the principal source of income for his family. Be fore 1861 the sale of the spelling book had reached more than a million copies a year. The American Dictionary, which came out in 1828, over a quarter of a century after it was first announced, con tained 12,000 words and from 80,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any previous dictionary. Harry Warfel writes the following in his biography of Webster: On his seventieth birthday, October 16, 1828, Noah Webster lifted his eyes from the last proof sheet of the scholarly Introduction to his Dictionary. Slowly he wiped the ink from the quill, laid it down, and methodically capped the inkwell. His moist eyes blinked. He turn ed to his wife and colleague, caught her hands. Together they knelt by the desk and prayed tremblingly in giving thanks to God for His pro vidence in sustaining them through their long labor. Since June 4, 1800, when the project was first publicly an nounced, Webster had dan14 Panorama died his book on his knee to the tune of a public lullaby of jeers, insults, and misre presentation. Every oppro brious epithet in the voca bularies of calumny and abuse had been showered upon him. Undeterred by it, he had completed singlehanded America’s first mo numental work of scholar ship. An American Diction ary of the English Language was immediately acclaimed, in England and Germany as well as in America, the best work of its kind ever pre pared. Today, Webster and dic tionary are synonymous terms in our language. No tribute can surpass this one. Yet, curiously enough, al though the name Webster is on the tip of every person’s tongue who wants to consult that indispensable reference book, the dictionary, few can give the lexicographer’s first name. When asked the ques tion, the average informed person looks blank a mo ment, then hesitantly ven tures ‘Daniel I guess.’ Thus Noah Webster, who eminent ly deserves a niche in the Hall of Fame, not only is not memorialized in that pan theon, but has suffered an even worse fate: his name has coalesced with that of the famous orator and state man who was not even his kinsman. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary lost ground as Webster’s gained, Noah Webster was more than a ‘harmless drudge,’ a writer of definitions. Before announ cing his dictionary at the age of forty-two, Noah Webster had become the pivotal figure in American education and literature. As the author of a series of pri mary school textbooks and as the expounder of a nation alistic theory of education, he had become the young nation’s first schoolmaster. As an itinerant propagandist for a Constitution, he had done more than any other single individual to prepare a climate of opinion in which a Constitutional Con vention could be successful. As a clear-visioned economist, a humanitarian, a magazine and newspaper editor, a his torical scholar, and a mo ralist, he ceaselessly drove his pen in furthering the best interests of his country. Although he completed the February 1966 15 Dictionary in 1828, he never surrendered work until death called him in his eighty fifth year, May 28, 1843. Something of the manysided intellectual quality of Benjamin Franklin reappear ed in Webster. Both pos sessed astonishing versatility and delved into every area of knowledge, leaving marks of influence in almost every field of activity developed in their times. It was fitting that Franklin, in his old age, befriended the young school master and tutored him in simplified spelling. But Webster, unlike Franklin, did not permanently slough off the iron mantle of New England Calvinism. And Webster never sought or ob tained high political posi tion. Essentially a scholar and1 publicist, Webster wield ed his pen as a weapon in the perennial warfare against social injustice, scientific error, mental torpor, and na tional instability. Early in life he called himself The Prompter, the man who sits behind the scenes to correct errors or assist the memory. Webster became our great est schoolmaster. He passed successively from the desk of a Connecticut log school house to the lecture platform, to the editorial chair, and finally, to the home library table as the arbiter of every English-speaking reader’s and writer’s diction. His school books were carried from the hills of New England across the Alleghenies; his were among the first books printed in every new settlement. Across the prairies and over the Rocky Mountains his carefully marshaled columns of words marched like 'war riors against the ignorance that tended to disrupt the primitive society of thinly spread and localized culture of America. Dialect varia tion disappeared from our writing and spelling, and to his blue-backed Speller, of which nearly one hundred million copies were sold be fore it went out of general use, America owes its remark able uniformity of language. No^other book, the Bible ex cepted, has strained so many heads, or done so much good. It taught millions to read, and not one to sin. And today the monolithic ‘Web ster’ on every schoolteacher’s desk, on the reference tables 16 Panorama of libraries, at the elbow of the justice, and on the study table of the scholar, bears silent testimony to Noah Webster’s enduring labors and superb genius. Patient, indefatigable la borer for American cultural advancement that Webster was, he yet never won the warm personal sympathy of his countrymen. A pugna ciousness in propagating his own strongly phrased ideas, a gesture many people consid e r e d egotistic, rendered Webster socially unattractive. His tall, spare, Yankee form stiffened under opposition. His massive head grew rigid ly upright in an inflexible ambition to do good. The mountainous forehead, crowned with a forest of au tumn-tinted hair, sloped to beetling crags of eyebrows. Deep set, as in a cave, small gray eyes flashed lightning warnings of intense mental operations. A massive square jaw and a jutting nose per suaded opponents that here was one endowed by nature to hold his own against any and all opposition. The nar row, thin line of lips held taut a tongue ever ready to castigate error. 'If my name is a terror to evildoers,’ Webster once wrote, ‘men tion it.’ In this respect, too, Webster was the typical schoolmaster, the man who is more concerned to have lessons well learned than to secure the adulation of shirk ing, fawning ignorance. — By Harry R. Warfel. NOT SIN BUT ERROR A young girl came to the late Father Healey of Dublin and confessed that she feared she had incur red the sin of vanity. "What makes you think that?” asked her father confessor. “Because every morning when I look into the mirror I think how beautiful I am.” "Never fear, my girl,” was the reassuring reply. "That isn’t a sin, it’s only a mistake.” February 1966 17

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