In
choosing
the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought.
James Russell Lowell
Sawin for the clown of my little
puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious _un_morality
which I had noticed as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism
that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long
gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find
room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and
opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have
received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear
them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere
unconscious memories of sign-boards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang
from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I
purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not
more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny,' in
other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to
avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.
The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to
make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a
weapon instead of the mere fencing-stick I had supposed. Very far from
being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be
almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; saw
them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship
debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one
of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in
the pauses of a concert, that _I_ was utterly incompetent to have
written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter
worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire,
but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had
its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned,
too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and
definite purpose, whether aesthetic or moral, and that even good
writing, to please long, must have more than an average amount either of
imagination or common-sense. The first of these falls to the lot of
scarcely one in several generations; the last is within the reach of
many in every one that passes; and of this an author may fairly hope to
become in part the mouthpiece. If I put on the cap and bells and made
myself one of the court-fools of King Demos, it was less to make his
majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain
serious things which I had deeply at heart. I say this because there is
no imputation that could be more galling to any man's self-respect than
that of being a mere jester. I endeavored, by generalising my satire, to
give it what value _I_ could beyond the passing moment and the immediate
application. How far I have succeeded I cannot tell, but I have had
better luck than I ever looked for in seeing my verses survive to pass
beyond their nonage.
In choosing the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought. It
had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and
speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of
coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in
the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only
chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who
were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate. '
President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter
days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master--witness his
speech at Gettysburg--of a truly masculine English, classic, because it
was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest of
his countrymen. I learn from the highest authority that his favorite
reading was in Shakespeare and Milton, to which, of course, the Bible
should be added. But whoever should read the debates in Congress might
fancy himself present at a meeting of the city council of some city of
Southern Gaul in the decline of the Empire, where barbarians with a
Latin varnish emulated each other in being more than Ciceronian. Whether
it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or
for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or
speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision, and
force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like
Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that
we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than
with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy
with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word)
to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new
suckers from the old root in spite of us. It is only from its roots in
the living generations of men that a language can be reinforced with
fresh vigor for its needs; what may be called a literate dialect grows
ever more and more pedantic and foreign, till it becomes at last as
unfitting a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. That we should
all be made to talk like books is the danger with which we are
threatened by the Universal Schoolmaster, who does his best to enslave
the minds and memories of his victims to what he esteems the best models
of English composition, that is to say, to the writers whose style is
faultily correct and has no blood-warmth in it. No language after it has
faded into _diction_, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices
secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth
a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass
from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and
the lips suppled by downright living interests and by passion in its
very throe. Language is the soil of thought, and our own especially is a
rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed foliage of feeling,
fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the
vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living
green. There is death in the dictionary; and, where language is too
strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is
limited also; and we get a _potted_ literature, Chinese dwarfs
instead of healthy trees.
But while the schoolmaster has been busy starching our language and
smoothing it flat with the mangle of a supposed classical authority, the
newspaper reporter has been doing even more harm by stretching and
swelling it to suit his occasions. A dozen years ago I began a list,
which I have added to from time to time, of some of the changes which
may be fairly laid at his door.
puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious _un_morality
which I had noticed as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism
that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long
gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find
room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and
opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have
received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear
them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere
unconscious memories of sign-boards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang
from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I
purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not
more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny,' in
other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to
avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.
The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to
make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a
weapon instead of the mere fencing-stick I had supposed. Very far from
being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be
almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; saw
them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship
debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one
of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in
the pauses of a concert, that _I_ was utterly incompetent to have
written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter
worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire,
but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had
its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned,
too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and
definite purpose, whether aesthetic or moral, and that even good
writing, to please long, must have more than an average amount either of
imagination or common-sense. The first of these falls to the lot of
scarcely one in several generations; the last is within the reach of
many in every one that passes; and of this an author may fairly hope to
become in part the mouthpiece. If I put on the cap and bells and made
myself one of the court-fools of King Demos, it was less to make his
majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain
serious things which I had deeply at heart. I say this because there is
no imputation that could be more galling to any man's self-respect than
that of being a mere jester. I endeavored, by generalising my satire, to
give it what value _I_ could beyond the passing moment and the immediate
application. How far I have succeeded I cannot tell, but I have had
better luck than I ever looked for in seeing my verses survive to pass
beyond their nonage.
In choosing the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought. It
had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and
speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of
coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in
the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only
chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who
were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate. '
President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter
days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master--witness his
speech at Gettysburg--of a truly masculine English, classic, because it
was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest of
his countrymen. I learn from the highest authority that his favorite
reading was in Shakespeare and Milton, to which, of course, the Bible
should be added. But whoever should read the debates in Congress might
fancy himself present at a meeting of the city council of some city of
Southern Gaul in the decline of the Empire, where barbarians with a
Latin varnish emulated each other in being more than Ciceronian. Whether
it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or
for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or
speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision, and
force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like
Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that
we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than
with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy
with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word)
to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new
suckers from the old root in spite of us. It is only from its roots in
the living generations of men that a language can be reinforced with
fresh vigor for its needs; what may be called a literate dialect grows
ever more and more pedantic and foreign, till it becomes at last as
unfitting a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. That we should
all be made to talk like books is the danger with which we are
threatened by the Universal Schoolmaster, who does his best to enslave
the minds and memories of his victims to what he esteems the best models
of English composition, that is to say, to the writers whose style is
faultily correct and has no blood-warmth in it. No language after it has
faded into _diction_, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices
secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth
a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass
from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and
the lips suppled by downright living interests and by passion in its
very throe. Language is the soil of thought, and our own especially is a
rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed foliage of feeling,
fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the
vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living
green. There is death in the dictionary; and, where language is too
strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is
limited also; and we get a _potted_ literature, Chinese dwarfs
instead of healthy trees.
But while the schoolmaster has been busy starching our language and
smoothing it flat with the mangle of a supposed classical authority, the
newspaper reporter has been doing even more harm by stretching and
swelling it to suit his occasions. A dozen years ago I began a list,
which I have added to from time to time, of some of the changes which
may be fairly laid at his door.
