'And the common people heard him gladly'
Of what shall be said herein of dialect, let it be
understood the term dialect referred to is of
that general breadth of meaning given it to-day,
namely, any speech or vernacular outside of the
prescribed form of good English in its present state.
The present state of the English is, of course, not
any one of its prior states. So first let it be
remarked that it is highly probable that what may
have been the best of English once may now by some
be counted as a weak, inconsequent patois, or
dialect.
To be direct, it is the object of this article to show
that dialect is not a thing to be despised in any event
--that its origin is oftentimes of as royal caste as
that of any speech. Listening back, from the stand-
point of to-day, even to the divine singing of that old
classic master to whom England's late laureate
refers as
". . . the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still";
or to whom Longfellow alludes, in his matchless
sonnet, as
". . . the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song"--
Chaucer's verse to us is NOW as veritably dialect as
to that old time it was the chastest English; and even
then his materials were essentially dialect when his
song was at best pitch. Again, our present dialect,
of most plebeian ancestry, may none the less prove
worthy. Mark the recognition of its own personal
merit in the great new dictionary, where what was,
in our own remembrance, the most outlandish dialect,
is now good, sound, official English.
Since Literature must embrace all naturally
existing materials--physical, mental and spiritual--we
have no occasion to urge its acceptance of so-called
dialect, for dialect IS in Literature, and HAS been
there since the beginning of all written thought and
utterance. Strictly speaking, as well as paradoxically,
all verbal expression is more or less dialectic,
however grammatical. While usage establishes
grammar, it no less establishes so-called dialect.
Therefore we may as rightfully refer to "so-called
grammar."
It is not really a question of Literature's position
toward dialect that we are called upon to consider,
but rather how much of Literature's valuable time
shall be taken up by this dialectic country cousin.
This question Literature her gracious self most
amiably answers by hugging to her breast voluminous
tomes, from Chaucer on to Dickens, from
Dickens on to Joel Chandler Harris. And this
affectionate spirit on the part of Literature, in the
main, we all most feelingly indorse.
Briefly summed, it would appear that dialect
means something more than mere rude form of
speech and action--that it must, in some righteous
and substantial way, convey to us a positive force
of soul, truth, dignity, beauty, grace, purity and
sweetness that may even touch us to the tenderness
of tears. Yes, dialect as certainly does all this as
that speech and act refined may do it, and for the
same reasons: it is simply, purely natural and
human.
Yes, the Lettered and the Unlettered powers are
at sword's points; and very old and bitter foemen,
too, they are. As fairly as we can, then, let us look
over the field of these contending forces and note
their diverse positions: First, THE LETTERED--they
who have the full advantages of refined education,
training, and association--are undoubtedly as
wholly out of order among the UNLETTERED as the
Unlettered are out of order in the exalted presence
of the Lettered. Each faction may in like aversion
ignore or snub the other; but a long-suffering Providence
must bear with the society of both. There
may be one vague virtue demonstrated by this feud:
each division will be found unwaveringly loyal to
its kind, and mutually they desire no interchange of
sympathy whatever.--Neither element will accept
from the other any PATRONIZING treatment; and,
perhaps, the more especially does the UNLETTERED faction
reject anything in vaguest likeness of this spirit. Of
the two divisions, in graphic summary,--ONE knows
the very core and center of refined civilization, and
this only; the OTHER knows the outlying wilds and
suburbs of civilization, and this only. Whose, therefore,
is the greater knowledge, and whose the just
right of any whit of self-glorification?
A curious thing, indeed, is this factional pride, as
made equally manifest in both forces; in one, for
instance, of the Unlettered forces: The average
farmer, or countryman, knows, in reality, a far better
and wider range of diction than he permits himself
to use. He restricts and abridges the vocabulary
of his speech, fundamentally, for the reason
that he fears offending his rural NEIGHBORS, to whom
a choicer speech might suggest, on his part, an
assumption--a spirit of conscious superiority, and
therewith an implied reflection on THEIR lack of
intelligence and general worthiness. If there is any
one text universally known and nurtured of the
Unlettered masses of our common country, it is that
which reads, "All men are created equal." Therefore
it is a becoming thing when true gentility prefers
to overlook some variations of the class who,
more from lack of cultivation than out of rude
intent, sometimes almost compel a positive doubt of
the nice veracity of the declaration, or at least a
grief at the munificent liberality of the so-bequoted
statement. The somewhat bewildering position of
these conflicting forces leaves us nothing further to
consider, but how to make the most and best of the
situation so far as Literature may be hurt or helped
thereby.
Equally with the perfect English, then, dialect
should have full justice done it. Then always it is
worthy, and in Literature is thus welcome. The
writer of dialect should as reverently venture in its
use as in his chastest English. His effort in the
SCHOLARLY and ELEGANT direction suffers no neglect--
he is SCHOOLED in that, perhaps, he may explain.
Then let him be SCHOOLED in DIALECT before he sets
up as an expounder of it--a teacher, forsooth a
master! The real master must not only know each
varying light and shade of dialect expression, but
he must as minutely know the inner character of the
people whose native tongue it is, else his product is
simply a pretense--a wilful forgery, a rank
abomination. Dialect has been and is thus insulted,
vilified, and degraded, now and continually; and
through this outrage solely, thousands of generous-
minded readers have been turned against dialect
who otherwise would have loved and blessed it in
its real form of crude purity and unstrained sweetness--
Honey dripping from the comb.
Let no impious faddist, then, assume its just
interpretation. He may know everything else in the
world, but not dialect, nor dialectic people, for both
of which he has supreme contempt, which same, be
sure, is heartily returned. Such a "superior"
personage may even go among these simple country
people and abide indefinitely in the midst of them,
yet their more righteous contempt never for one instant
permits them to be their real selves in his presence.
In consequence, his most conscientious report
of them, their ways, lives, and interests, is absolutely
of no importance or value in the world. He
never knew them, nor will he ever know them. They
are not his kind of people, any more than he is their
kind of man; and THEIR disappointment grieves us
more than his.
The master in Literature, as in any art, is that
"divinely gifted man" who does just obeisance to
all living creatures, "both man and beast and bird."
It is this master only who, as he writes, can sweep
himself aside and leave his humble characters to do
the thinking and the talking. This man it is who
celebrates his performance--not himself. His work
he celebrates because it is not his only, but because
he feels it to be the conscientious reproduction of
life itself--as he has seen and known and felt it;--a
representation it is of God's own script, translated
and transcribed by the worshipful mind and heart
and hand of genius. This virtue is impartially
demanded in all art, and genius only can fully
answer the demand in any art for which we claim
perfection. The painter has his expression of it,
with no slighting of the dialect element; so, too, the
sculptor, the musician, and the list entire. In the
line of Literature and literary material, an illustration
of the nice meaning and distinction of the art
of dialect will be found in Charles Dudley Warner's
comment on George Cable's work, as far back as
1883, referring to the author's own rendition of it
from the platform. Mr. Warner says:
While the author was unfolding to his audience a life
and society unfamiliar to them and entrancing them with
pictures, the reality of which none doubted and the spell
of which none cared to escape, it occurred to me that here
was the solution of all the pother we have recently got into
about the realistic and the ideal schools in fiction. In
"Posson Jone," an awkward camp-meeting country preacher
is the victim of a vulgar confidence game; the scenes are
the street, a drinking-place, a gambling-saloon, a bull-ring,
and a calaboose; there is not a "respectable" character in
it. Where shall we look for a more faithful picture of low
life? Where shall we find another so vividly set forth in
all its sordid details? And yet see how art steps in, with
the wand of genius, to make literature! Over the whole the
author has cast an ideal light; over a picture that, in the
hands of a bungling realist, would have been repellent he
has thrown the idealizing grace that makes it one of the
most charming sketches in the world. Here is nature, as
nature only ought to be in literature, elevated but never
departed from.
So we find dialect, as a branch of literature,
worthy of the high attention and employment of
the greatest master in letters--not the merest
mountebank. Turn to Dickens, in innumerable
passages of pathos: the death of poor Jo, or that
of the "Cheap John's" little daughter in her father's
arms, on the foot-board of his peddling cart before
the jeering of the vulgar mob; smile moistly, too,
at Mr. Sleary's odd philosophies; or at the trials
of Sissy Jupe; or lift and tower with indignation,
giving ear to Stephen Blackpool and the stainless
nobility of his cloyed utterances.
The crudeness or the homeliness of the dialectic
element does not argue its unfitness in any way.
Some readers seem to think so; but they are wrong,
and very gravely wrong. Our own brief history as
a nation, and our finding and founding and maintaining
of it, left our forefathers little time indeed
for the delicate cultivation of the arts and graces
of refined and scholarly attainments. And there
is little wonder, and utter blamelessness on their
part, if they lapsed in point of high mental
accomplishments, seeing their attention was so absorbed
by propositions looking toward the protection of
their rude farm-homes, their meager harvests, and
their half-stabled cattle from the dread invasion of
the Indian. Then, too, they had their mothers and
their wives and little ones to protect, to clothe, to
feed, and to die for in this awful line of duty, as
hundreds upon hundreds did. These sad facts are
here accented and detailed not so much for the sake
of being tedious as to indicate more clearly why it
was that many of the truly heroic ancestors of "our
best people" grew unquestionably dialect of caste
--not alone in speech, but in every mental trait and
personal address. It is a grievous fact for us to
confront, but many of them wore apparel of the
commonest, talked loudly, and doubtless said "thisaway"
and "thataway," and "Watch y' doin' of?"
and "Whur yi goin' at?"--using dialect even in
their prayers to Him who, in His gentle mercy,
listened and was pleased; and who listens verily
unto this hour to all like prayers, yet pleased; yea,
haply listens to the refined rhetorical petitions of
those who are NOT pleased.
There is something more at fault than the language
when we turn from or flinch at it; and, as
has been intimated, the wretched fault may be
skulkingly hidden away in the ambush of OSTENSIBLE
dialect--that type of dialect so copiously produced
by its sole manufacturers, who, utterly stark and
bare of the vaguest idea of country life or country
people, at once assume that all their "gifted pens"
have to do is stupidly to misspell every word;
vulgarly mistreat and besloven every theme, however
sacred; maim, cripple, and disfigure language never
in the vocabulary of the countryman--then smuggle
these monstrosities of either rhyme or prose somehow
into the public print that is innocently to smear
them broadcast all over the face of the country they
insult.
How different the mind and method of the true
intrepreter. As this phrase goes down the man
himself arises--the type perfect--Colonel Richard
Malcolm Johnston, who wrote "The Dukesborough
Tales"--an accomplished classical scholar and
teacher, yet no less an accomplished master and
lover of his native dialect of middle Georgia. He,
like Dickens, permits his rustic characters to think,
talk, act and live, Just as nature designed them. He
does not make the pitiable error of either
patronizing or making fun of them. He knows them and
he loves them; and they know and love him in
return. Recalling Colonel Johnston's dialectic
sketches, with his own presentation of them from
the platform, the writer notes a fact that seems
singularly to obtain among all true dialect-writers,
namely, that they are also endowed with native
histrionic capabilities: HEAR, as well as read, Twain,
Cable, Johnston, Page, Smith, and all the list with
barely an exception.
Did space permit, no better illustration of true
dialect sketch and characterization might here be
offered than Colonel Johnston's simple story of
"Mr. Absalom Billingslea," or the short and simple
annals of his like quaint contemporaries, "Mr. Bill
Williams" and "Mr. Jonas Lively." The scene is
the country and the very little country town, with
landscape, atmosphere, simplicity, circumstance--all
surroundings and conditions--VERITABLE--everything
rural and dialectic, no less than the simple,
primitive, common, wholesome-hearted men and women
who so naturally live and have their blessed being
in his stories, just as in the life itself. This is the
manifest work of the true dialect writer and
expounder. In every detail, the most minute, such
work reveals the master-hand and heart of the
humanitarian as well as artist--the two are indissolubly
fused--and the result of such just treatment
of whatever lowly themes or characters we can but
love and loyally approve with all our human hearts. Such masters
necessarily are rare, and such ripe
perfecting as is here attained may be in part the
mellowing result of age and long observation,
though it can be based upon the wisest, purest
spirit of the man as well as artist.
With no less approval should the work of Joel
Chandler Harris be regarded: His touch alike is
ever reverential. He has gathered up the bruised
and broken voices and the legends of the slave,
and from his child-heart he has affectionately
yielded them to us in all their eery beauty and
wild loveliness. Through them we are made to
glorify the helpless and the weak and to revel in
their victories. But, better, we are taught that even
in barbaric breasts there dwells inherently the sense
of right above wrong-equity above law-and the
One Unerring Righteousness Eternal. With equal
truth and strength, too, Mr. Harris has treated the
dialectic elements of the interior Georgia country--
the wilds and fastnesses of the "moonshiners." His
tale of Teague Poteet, of some years ago, was
contemporaneous with the list of striking mountain
stories from that strong and highly gifted Tennesseean,
Miss Murfree, or "Charles Egbert Craddock."
In the dialectic spirit her stories charm and
hold us. Always there is strangely mingled, but
most naturally, the gentle nature cropping out amid
the most desperate and stoical: the night scene in
the isolated mountain cabin, guarded ever without
and within from any chance down-swooping of the
minions of the red-eyed law; the great man-group
of gentle giants, with rifles never out of arm's-
reach, in tender rivalry ranged admiringly around
the crowing, wakeful little boy-baby; the return, at
last, of the belated mistress of the house--the sister,
to whom all do great, awkward reverence. Jealously
snatching up the babe and kissing it, she
querulously demands why he has not long ago been
put to bed. "He 'lowed he wouldn't go," is the
reply.
Thomas Nelson Page, of Virginia, who wrote
Meh Lady--a positive classic in the negro dialect:
his work is veritable--strong and pure and
sweet; and as an oral reader of it the doubly gifted
author, in voice and cadence, natural utterance,
every possible effect of speech and tone, is doubtless
without rival anywhere.
Many more, indeed, than may be mentioned now
there are of these real benefactors and preservers
of the wayside characters, times, and customs of our
ever-shifting history. Needless is it to speak here of
the earlier of our workers in the dialectic line--of
James Russell Lowell's New England Hosea Biglow,
Dr. Eggleston's Hoosier School-Master, or
the very rare and quaint, bright prattle of Helen's
Babies. In connection with this last let us very
seriously inquire what this real child has done that
Literature should so persistently refuse to give him
an abiding welcome? Since for ages this question
seems to have been left unasked, it may be timely
now to propound it. Why not the real child in
Literature? The real child is good enough (we all
know he is bad enough) to command our admiring
attention and most lively interest in real life, and
just as we find him "in the raw." Then why do we
deny him any righteous place of recognition in our
Literature? From the immemorial advent of our
dear old Mother Goose, Literature has been especially
catering to the juvenile needs and desires, and
yet steadfastly overlooking, all the time, the very
principles upon which Nature herself founds and
presents this lawless little brood of hers--the
children. It is not the children who are out of order;
it is Literature. And not only is Literature out of
order, but she is presumptuous; she is impudent.
She takes Nature's children and revises and corrects
them till "their own mother doesn't know them."
This is literal fact. So, very many of us are coming
to inquire, as we've a right, why is the real child
excluded from a just hearing in the world of letters
as he has in the world of fact? For instance,
what has the lovely little ragamuffin ever done of
sufficient guilt to consign him eternally to the
monstrous penalty of speaking most accurate grammar
all the literary hours of the days of the years of his
otherwise natural life?
"Oh, mother, may I go to school
With brother Charles to-day?
The air is very fine and cool;
Oh, mother, say I may!"
--Is this a real boy that would make such a request,
and is it the real language he would use? No, we
are glad to say that it is not. Simply it is a libel,
in every particular, on any boy, however fondly
and exactingly trained by parents however zealous
for his overdecorous future. Better, indeed, the
dubious sentiment of the most trivial nursery jingle,
since the latter at least maintains the lawless though
wholesome spirit of the child-genuine.--
"Hink! Minx! The old witch winks--
The fat begins to fry;
There's nobody home but Jumping Joan,
Father and mother and I."
Though even here the impious poet leaves the scar
of grammatical knowledge upon childhood's native
diction; and so the helpless little fellow is again
misrepresented, and his character, to all intents and
purposes, is assaulted and maligned outrageously
thereby.
Now, in all seriousness, this situation ought not
to be permitted to exist, though to change it seems
an almost insurmountable task. The general public,
very probably, is not aware of the real gravity of
the position of the case as even unto this day it
exists. Let the public try, then, to contribute the
real child to the so-called Child Literature of its
country, and have its real child returned as promptly
as it dare show its little tousled head in the presence
of that scholarly and dignified institution. Then
ask why your real child has been spanked back
home again, and the wise mentors there will virtually
tell you that Child Literature wants no real children in it, that
the real child's example of
defective grammar and lack of elegant deportment
would furnish to its little patrician patrons suggestions
very hurtful indeed to their higher morals,
tendencies, and ambitions. Then, although the general
public couldn't for the life of it see why or
how, and might even be reminded that it was just
such a rowdying child itself, and that its FATHER--
the Father of his Country--was just such a child;
that Abraham Lincoln was just such a lovable, lawless
child, and yet was blessed and chosen in the
end for the highest service man may ever render
unto man,--all--all this argument would avail not
in the least, since the elegantly minded purveyors
of Child Literature can not possibly tolerate the
presence of any but the refined children--the very
proper children--the studiously thoughtful, poetic
children,--and these must be kept safe from the
contaminating touch of our rough-and-tumble little
fellows in "hodden gray," with frowzly heads,
begrimed but laughing faces, and such awful, awful
vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity,
and brazen faith and trust, and love of life and
everybody in it. All other real people are getting
into Literature; and without some real children
along will they not soon be getting lonesome, too?