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-be-quoted 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 pretence--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 the conscientious reproduction of the 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 in all art is impartially demanded, 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
dialectic 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 dialectic art will
be found in Charles Dudley Warner's comment of 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 repellant 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
great 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 meagre 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 more clearly indicate why it was that many of the truly
heroic ancestry 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 y' 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, and yet pleased; yea, haply listens even 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 to
stupidly 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 to
innocently smear them broadcast all over the face of the country they
insult.
How different the mind and method of the true interpreter. As this
phrase goes down the man himself arises--the type perfect--Colonel
Richard Malcolm Johnston, who wrote "The Dukesborough Tales"--an
accomplished classic 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 but be
based upon the wisest, purest spirit of the man as well as artist.
In no less excellence 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 eerie
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
eternally consign him 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?
* * * * *
Books By
James Whitcomb Riley
NEGHBORLY POEMS
SKETCHES IN PROSE, WITH INTERLUDING VERSES
AFTERWHILES
PIPES O' PAN (Prose and Verse)
RHYMES OF CHILDHOOD
FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
GREEN FIELDS AND RUNNING BROOKS
ARMAZINDY
A CHILD-WORLD
HOME-FOLKS
OLD-FASHIONED ROSES
(English Edition)
THE GOLDEN YEAR
(English Edition)
POEMS HERE AT HOME
RUBÁIYÁT OF DOC SIFERS
CHILD-RHYMES, WITH HOOSIER PICTURES
RILEY LOVE-LYRICS
(Pictures by Dyer)
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
Moved List of Books by James Whitcomb Riley to end of book.
Page 204: Corrected typo genious to genius
(and genious only can fully answer the demand in any art).
Made minor punctuation corrections.