Chapter 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.