No More Learning

To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half
fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to
Orientalism, at least in diction. But it seems tome that a great deal of
what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called
intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in
full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and
formless material in which poetry is to work. By and by, perhaps, the
world will see it fashioned into poem and picture, and Europe, which
will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a
new sensation. The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated
because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak
of a 'steep price,' or say that they 'freeze to' a thing. The first
postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their
language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of
their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education
or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose
in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Mr.
Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and
called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out
what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm
which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.
set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I
cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too
much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would
not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as
coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the
unfamiliarity of the language.
But, however this may be, it is certain
that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words
back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a
delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for
example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the
Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the
goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a
little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may
well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech,
and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who
use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I
have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.

But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee
dialect. M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un
patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue
toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune. _' The first part of his
definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the
Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems
to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but
rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of
pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by
side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French,
for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI. , could hardly be
called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a
_lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few words now fallen
into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_,
_fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some,
as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the
broad Norman pronunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of
his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the
like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words
like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to
take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt
_dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in
it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English
provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb
to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of
silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A.