GREAT AMERICAN LANGUAGE.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, 12 May 1925, Page 5

GREAT AMERICAN LANGUAGE.

ENGLISH WILL BE FOREIGN

TONGUE

Miss Clarence Dune, the well-known novelist and playwright, in the “World To-day,” is a doughty champion of what many consider “American slang;” Sue sees in it the birth of a new language, She writes” :

“An American literature is having

the way prepared for it and, in spito of the beautiful work (,clogs ncveruicless by reason of the very excellence on the growth of the new tongue) of Such ‘exiles from Rome’ as Editli

0 Wharton and Henry James the speech | of the American States is daily sepf arating itself from its English origin. “That is to tho good'; indeed one looks forward to tlici day when English will bo so much a foreign language in America that the American would as

Goon think of altering the spelling of a French novel ,as of an English one. To spell th© age-old, beautuul word ‘through’ for instance, ‘thru’ is sheer mutilation, an insult to our English tongue. “But when the American language is developed its now word ‘thru’ will not worry us, for American will be as distantly related to English by that time as modern English to its cousin, modern French.

“It is impossible to read a book by an average medioer© American writer without seeing how amazingly _ newspaper jargon is infecting or, if you like, developing, th© American language. Even in actual modern genre and dialect stories (I am speaking of th© last five years) you are .still confronted' by this most interesting phenomenon of whole . communities evolving individual iiabits of speech and thought,'not out of the fact that they cannot read, but out of th© fact that they can. Journalese is tho material out of which th© American ‘little

i nations’ are fashioning tho most origin--1 al language sine© Babel. In another 9 couple of hundred years it should bo an H unique tongue, th© lingua franca or ji tho new world. 3 “Yet tho American language, until || tho coming and in tho early day of the H newspaper, seems to have begun its " development in a perfectly normal g way. Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, 0. Henry—each represent 2> a stago of national literary developS ment, and their names are four banners jj under which th© lesser writers group | themselves. But this slow, natural | development could not continue, just i because the American nation was i growing, not oak tree fashion, but S Jericho rose fashion, t “When in a hundred years a nation has, not one beginning, but a hundred. I a thousand new beginnings within its 1 borders, when it absorbs ioreignors by 5 the thousand, when it has towns | growing up in a year and cities in a | decade, when this goes on in a country jj far bigger than Europe all tho time g all at once, what of literature. Literi ature, slow growth of slow years, puts S her hands to her giddy head and resigns herself to tho direction of tho

over-ready Press, gasping, ‘Give me time 1’

“And tho good ship, The Press, doing its very best in th© emergency, floods tho heaving, primeval human sea with the oil of uniformity, the uniformity of journal©*" Meanwhile the intellectuals, of course, continue to produoe poems and' novels, hut they have been, so far, jioeins and novels in the English tongue and tho English tradition; for tho conscious artist can hope to subdue journalese only by burlesquing it or by avoiding it ]iko tho plague. “It takes the unconsoious artist to cope with journalese or any other ugli-

ness, and by virtue of bis cwn good faith and simplicity, to reduce it once more to terms ot literature. Anti tha*-, to us observers on this side tho water, is what the American popular writers, as distinguished from tue intellectuals, are beginning to do. They are not yet freed from jargon, not yet convinced that long words do not mean fine writing ; but in practice they are deserting hue writing for tho actual speech of the particular section of tho American nation with which they are at home. “It is tho introduction of plot, however, that makes their _ work so much more important to outsiders than that of the most interesting of tho genre writers; for great literature relies on plot, the clash of human passions, far more than on setting, though neither plot nor setting can live, in turn, without its own specially woven garment of languago. , , “This language is yet young* it baa its first birthday when ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ Mark Twain’s mastorpiece, was published* a tale deliberately written m the languago of a half, quartereducated child of tho peoplo; but it does exist. That is wliy I rosolutoly turn from ‘The Virginian,’ which is written in English, to the experiments of less talented men which are, nevertheless, written in American; why I turn, from the genre tale to the attempts at mixed genre and romance of tho much scorned at ‘wild 1 and woolly school. “Love, heroism, greed—eternal themes of romance —fill tho .somewhat machine-made plots of these American popular novelists: but they are setting these plots in the actual homes of their readers, the ranges, the deserts, the bills, the cities and the swamps. In this fashion, in the long run, is tho epic created. “Bub it is idle to abuse these pioneers because they have not yet attained, in their romantical experiments, the neat charm, the nice management of English, of tho author of ‘The Virginian.’ Their goal is a remoter one. It is scarce in sight. Nevertheless they are creating the beginnings of an American language in which the, American genius of to-morrow shall tell its tales and sing its songs.”