I
With regard to dialect, the literary law, I take it, is about this: To
be allowable in either verse or prose it must be the mother-speech,
not only of the characters using it, but of the writer himself, who,
also, must be unable to write equally well in the larger tongue. This
was the case with Burns. Had he not been to the manner born how absurd
it would have been in him to write for the few who, naturally or by
study and with difficulty, can understand, instead of the many who read
and love good English! For my part, I am unable to read Burns with
satisfaction; and I am steadfast in the conviction that, excepting
among his countrymen, few of those who parrot his praise are better
able than I. Of another thing I am tolerably well assured, albeit it is
nothing to the purpose, namely, that Burns was more wit than poet. Upon
that proposition I am ready to do battle with all Caledonia, the pipers
alone excepted.
In humorous and satirical work like, for example, _The Biglow Papers_,
the law is relaxed, even suspended; and in serious prose fiction if the
exigencies of the narrative demand the introduction of an unlettered
hind whose speech would naturally be “racy of the soil” he must needs
come in and sport the tangles of his tongue. But he is to be got rid
of as promptly as possible—preferably by death. The making of an
entire story out of the lives and loves and lingoes of him and his
co-pithecans—that is effrontery. If it be urged in deprecation of this
my view that it is incompatible with relish of and respect for, Miss
Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss Mary Murfree, Mr. Hamlin Garland and other
curled darlings of the circulating libraries, I candidly confess that
it is open to that objection. Of all such offenders against sweetness
and sense I have long cherished a comfortable conviction that it were
better if instead of writing things “racy of the soil” they would till
it.
The talk of intelligent persons in an unfamiliar language is a
legitimate literary “property,” but the talk of ignorant persons
misusing their own language has value and interest to nobody but other
ignorant persons and, possibly, the philologist. Literature, however,
is not intended for service in advancing the interests of philology.
The “general reader” whose interest in the characters of a tale is
quickened by their faulty speech may reasonably boast that the ties of
affinity connecting him with their intellectual condition have not been
strained by stretching: it is not overfar from where he is to where he
came from.
For several months the booksellers of the principal cities in this
country reported that the book _David Harum_ sold better than any
other. The sales went into the hundreds of thousands. It was reviewed
with acclamation by all the popular newspapers and magazines, stared
at you from every “centre table” and was flung into your ears whenever
you had the hardihood to enter a “parlor.” _David Harum_ is one of the
most candidly vulgar and stupid books ever proffered to the taste and
understanding of “the general reader.” It is of course largely written
in “dialect”—that is, in the loutly locution of an illiterate clown
making a trial at his mother-speech. Its “dialect” is so particularly
offensive that I suppose it to be a “transcript from nature:” persons
from whom it is possible would certainly not deny themselves the
happiness of speaking it; and the book may have some value to the
hardy philologer tracing backward the line of linguistic evolution to
the grunt of the primeval pig. To record the vocal riddances of the
ignorant may be one of the purposes of popular fiction, for anything
that I know, but at least its authors might, in the interest of art,
charge its horrible words with something that one unaffected by
softening of the brain might think to be thoughts; and perhaps they
would if that pandemic infirmity had not marked them for its own.
Male and female created He them. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman furnishes
forth her annual output of New-English antiques and detestables, filing
their teeth with their tongues, to the inexpressible uncomforting
of the auditory nerve. Mary Murfree, in perpetual session on the
Delectable Mountains, with a lapful of little clay-eaters and
snuff-rubbers, sweats great beads of blood to build the lofty crime
and endow it with enough galvanic vitality to stand alone while she
reaches for more mud for a new creation. There follows an interminable
line of imitators and imitatresses, causing two “dialects” to grow
where but one grew before, and rabbiting the literary preserve with a
multiplication of impossibles to speak them. And we forbid them not,
for of such is the kingdom of American letters.
Now, the “dialect” of which these persons are so enamored as to
fill whole volumes with it is not dialect; it is simply English as
spoken by none but uneducated persons and “recorded” by those to whom
ignorance is attractive and seems picturesque. To a sane intelligence
it is neither. Such an intelligence regards it with tolerance or
aversion—that depends on whether in life it is modest or presumptuous;
in letters, subordinate and incidental or dominant and essential. The
writers named—they and their literary co-populists, an innumerable
commonalty—love ignorance for its own sake. They seem to think, and
indubitably do think, that the lives and adventures, the virtues and
vices, joys and sorrows of the illiterate are more interesting than
those prone to grammar and ablution. To those fortuitous collocations
of peasant instincts and pithecan intuitions which these writers call
their understandings a sentiment is deemed to have an added value when
expressed in coarse and faulty speech. So they give us whole books of
it, coddle the resulting popularity as “fame” and prosper abundantly
by their sin.
There are dialects which in literary work are legitimate and
acceptable—to those who understand. That of Burns, for example,
is spoken by thousands of cultivated persons and was his own
mother-tongue. He erred in writing in it, as do all having command of
the better and more spacious speech that assures a wider attention,
but in so doing, he broke no laws of taste nor of sense. The matter
is simple enough. A true dialect is legitimate; the faulty speech of
an educated person in an unfamiliar tongue is legitimate, as is that
of a child; but the lame locution of the merely ignorant—the language
of the letterless—that is not dialect, and in any quantity in excess
of an amount that may be needful in fiction for _vraisemblance_, or
in verse for humor, is reasonless and offensive. As to poetry, our
literature contains no line of that in any such speech. The muse is not
so feasible; she does not submit herself to the embrace of a yokel—not
even to a Tennyson wearing the smock of a northern farmer.
In fiction the limits of dialect that is not dialect are plainly
defined, not by usage of the masters, for none than masters go more
often wrong—as none but they can afford to do—but by reason and the
sense of things. If in evolution of his plot the story teller find
it expedient to seek assistance from the “man o’ the people” as a
subordinate character, that worthy person must needs use the speech
of his tribe; as actors, having to wear something—a regrettable
necessity—may garb themselves in the costume of the time of the play,
however hideous it may be. But beyond this the teller of stories that
are not true is denied the right to go. To take for hero or heroine a
person unable to speak the language of the tale, whose conversations
are turbid swirls in the clear stream of the narrative, is an affront
justifiable only by a moral purpose presumably in equal need of
justification.