WRITERS OF DIALECT

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 personsand, 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 bookDavid Harumsold 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 Harumis 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 certainlynot 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 theresulting 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 forvraisemblance, 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 moreoften 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.

One reads Mr. Hay’s earlier poems with a thrill of pride. They open glimpses of unselfish courage and sublime devotion compared with which the prancing pageantry of Homer afflicts us like the cheap tinsel of the melodrama.

Such is the serious judgment of a reputable writer living in the capital of the nation. It has a particular reference to “LittleBreeches” and “Jim Bludso,” which are not poems at all, but formless blobs of coarse, rank sentimentality in the speech of snuff-rubbers and clay-eaters—the so-called “dialect.” They are no better and could not be worse than the “Hoosier” horrors of Riley and the “barrack-room” afflictions of Kipling. I do not doubt that Hay’s dislike of them and his wish that they might be forgotten incited him to literary silence, whereby we are deprived of the poetry that he might have given us had he remained in the field. There is not a true poet in this country who has not experienced the deep disgust of observing the superior “popularity” of his own worst work. That here and there a few should give up in despair, taking to politics, to business, to any coarse pursuit “understanded of the people,” is natural and not to be condemned. These accept their dreadful fame as a punishment fitting the crime, and promise atonement by resolving to write no more “dialect poetry” while stealing is more honorable and indigence more interesting.

John Hay was a true poet; so is Riley; so is Kipling. In addition to their panderings to peasants all have written well. At their best they stir the blood and thrill the nervesof all who can be trusted to feel because taught to think. Yet the late Charles A. Dana, who for years successfully posed as a judge of poetry, had at last the indiscretion to disclose himself by a specific utterance of his taste: he pronounced Kipling’s “Gunga Din” one of the greatest of English poems! After that there was no more to say about Dana, but Dana had not the reticence to say it. Poetry, like any other art, is a matter of manner. If the manner is that of a clown the matter will not redeem it, but, as the dyer’s hand is “subdued to what it works in,” will itself be smirched by its environment. English of the cornfield and the slum is suited to certain kinds of humor and in moderation may itself be amusing, but it has no place in serious or sentimental composition, either verse or prose. Persons writing it confess their peasant understandings, and those who like “dialect poems” like them because they do not know any better than to like them, and that’s all there is to it.

The prose writer whom I have quoted probably does know better, but prefers to march with the procession. Since he mentions Homer and Tennyson (to affirm the greater glory of the author of “LittleBreeches” and “Jim Bludso”), perhaps he will permit himself to be asked if he sees no “unselfish courage” in Hector?—no “sublime devotion” in Penelope?—none in Enid?—nothing magnanimous in Arthur’s tenderness to Guinevere? Does he think these noble qualities would shine with a diviner light in the character of a corn-fed lout of the stables, a whiskey-sodden riverman or a slattern of the slums?

The higher virtues are not a discovery of yesterday; they were known as long ago as last week; and some of us who affect an acquaintance with antiquity profess to have found traces of them in the poetry of an even earlier period, before all men began to be born equal. In “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” there were singing pigs, as there are to-day, and doubtless they had their special wallows with mud of a particular brew; but they were not permitted to thrust their untidy muzzles into the sweet water of the Pierian Spring, turn it into slime and scatter plenty of it o’er a smiling land. It has remained for the “fierce democracies” of the Brand-New World to impose upon letters the law of the Dominion of Dirt.

The leader of the New Movement is indubitably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and here is an example of his work. It is called “His Pa’s Romance,” and these two passages are quoted with effusion by one of the “critics”:

Elsie lisps so, she can’t sayHer own name, ist any wayShe says ‘Elthy’—like they wuzFeathers on her words, an’ theyIst stuck on her tongue like fuzz.

Elsie lisps so, she can’t say

Her own name, ist any way

She says ‘Elthy’—like they wuz

Feathers on her words, an’ they

Ist stuck on her tongue like fuzz.

How charming!—it affects the sensibilities like the ripple of a rill of buttermilk falling into a pig-trough. “Ist,” by the way, means (to an idiot) “just”—it is not easy to say why. Here followeth the other inspiring passage:

One timeElsie start to say the rhyme“Thing a thong o’ thixpenth”—whee!I ist yell; an’ ma say I’mUnpolite as I can be.

One time

Elsie start to say the rhyme

“Thing a thong o’ thixpenth”—whee!

I ist yell; an’ ma say I’m

Unpolite as I can be.

If this is not poetry, what kind of an abysmal imbecility has it the characteristic distinction to be? Mr. Riley turns off this stuff by the linear mile, it is received with enthusiasmand reviewed with acclamation by nearly every “literary critic” in America, and the peasants whose taste they share and ignorance reflect are generous enough to give him a living. Think not, observer from another land, whose eye may chance to note these lines, that all these “dialect poets” wear smocks and toil in the fields; it is the peculiar glory of this great country that its peasants wear as good clothing, pursue as high vocations and talk as glibly about art and literature as anybody. Say not in your lack of light that the American gentleman has boorish taste; say, rather, that the American boor has visible signs of the prosperity of a gentleman, and to an alien eye is not readily distinguishable from his betters.

To put a good thought, a tender sentiment, a passionate emotion into faulty words is to defile it. Does a precious stone acquire an added value from a setting of brass? Is a rare and excellent wine better when drunk out of a gourd?

In Herman Scheffauer’s first book,Of Both Worlds, are two little poems of such naturalness,simplicity and beauty that I hardly know of anything better in their kind. My purpose in quoting them here is, partly, to bring them to the attention of those who may be unfamiliar with Mr. Scheffauer’s work, but chiefly to suggest to the “dialect poets” that they undertake to give them an added charm by rewriting them in their own manner.

THE SLEEPERS

The winds lie hushed in the hillAnd the waves upon the seas;The birds are mute and still,Deep in their dreaming trees;The earth lies dumb in night,And the stars in their degreesSleep with the suns in space,With angels, with seraphs bright,In the light of God His face.Softly lie the headsOf the sleepers in their beds;But the sleepers in the ground—They alone sleep sweet and sound,They alone know rest profound.Fear not—soon a rest as deepComes to thee—thou, too, shalt sleep.

The winds lie hushed in the hill

And the waves upon the seas;

The birds are mute and still,

Deep in their dreaming trees;

The earth lies dumb in night,

And the stars in their degrees

Sleep with the suns in space,

With angels, with seraphs bright,

In the light of God His face.

Softly lie the headsOf the sleepers in their beds;But the sleepers in the ground—They alone sleep sweet and sound,They alone know rest profound.Fear not—soon a rest as deepComes to thee—thou, too, shalt sleep.

Softly lie the heads

Of the sleepers in their beds;

But the sleepers in the ground—

They alone sleep sweet and sound,

They alone know rest profound.

Fear not—soon a rest as deep

Comes to thee—thou, too, shalt sleep.

MISERERE

The last few prayers are done,The pall and shroud are spread;Seven tapers at thy feetAnd seven at thy head.Thy hands are crossed uponThy bosom white where nowThy heart is stilled. O Death,How beautiful art thou!

The last few prayers are done,The pall and shroud are spread;Seven tapers at thy feetAnd seven at thy head.

The last few prayers are done,

The pall and shroud are spread;

Seven tapers at thy feet

And seven at thy head.

Thy hands are crossed uponThy bosom white where nowThy heart is stilled. O Death,How beautiful art thou!

Thy hands are crossed upon

Thy bosom white where now

Thy heart is stilled. O Death,

How beautiful art thou!

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