Should
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago?
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago?
James Russell Lowell
, I guess ef I was to leave the _nots_ out o' some o' the
c'man'ments, 't'ould soot you full ez wal! '
If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I
have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met
with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my
theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I
have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very
good company. For, as to the _jus et norma loquendi_, I agree with
Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to
Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani's definition of
sublime oratory,--'l'art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans
un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire. ' I profess myself a fanatical
purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect
purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the
engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass jene
gotbische Hoflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges
ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen
als unsern Umgang? ' And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that
'Tis possible to climb,
To kindle, or to slake,
Although in Skelton's rhyme. '
Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral
Rodney's great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, 'Behold, Sir
George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus! '
the Admiral answered, peevishly, 'Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans!
I have other things to think of. ' After the battle was won, Rodney thus
to Sir Charles, 'Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks
and Trojans, and the whole of Homer's Iliad, or as much of it as you
please! ' I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our
pseudo-classicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in.
Should
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very
attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which
therefore nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, which means
nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which
you are born? The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to
be _that_. It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_
written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me
very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to
state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had
said about Hebel's 'Allemannische Gedichte,' which, making proper
deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what
I would have said far better than I could hope to do: 'Allen diesen
innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu
statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte
. . . von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele
kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein
Vortheil fur den Dichter ist.
c'man'ments, 't'ould soot you full ez wal! '
If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I
have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met
with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my
theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I
have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very
good company. For, as to the _jus et norma loquendi_, I agree with
Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to
Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani's definition of
sublime oratory,--'l'art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans
un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire. ' I profess myself a fanatical
purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect
purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the
engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass jene
gotbische Hoflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges
ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen
als unsern Umgang? ' And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that
'Tis possible to climb,
To kindle, or to slake,
Although in Skelton's rhyme. '
Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral
Rodney's great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, 'Behold, Sir
George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus! '
the Admiral answered, peevishly, 'Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans!
I have other things to think of. ' After the battle was won, Rodney thus
to Sir Charles, 'Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks
and Trojans, and the whole of Homer's Iliad, or as much of it as you
please! ' I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our
pseudo-classicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in.
Should
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very
attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which
therefore nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, which means
nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which
you are born? The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to
be _that_. It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_
written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me
very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to
state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had
said about Hebel's 'Allemannische Gedichte,' which, making proper
deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what
I would have said far better than I could hope to do: 'Allen diesen
innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu
statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte
. . . von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele
kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein
Vortheil fur den Dichter ist.
