Ambrose Bierce is generally supposed to have had this quality; certainly he had intelligence and wrote respectable English with a cold pen. His Dictionary does not impress me as the work of a spirit naturally ironical. Ade wrote satirically a long time ago; once in a while something occurs in the Fables to justify the acclaim of which F. P. A. is the curator. There is much more in Artemas Ward, whose glory is kept alive, worthily, by the sardonic leader-writer of The Freeman, Mr Albert Jay Nock. As language neither Ade nor Ward approaches in interest the studies of Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, nor those of Dooley and Lardner. The difference between Bill Nye and Ward on one side and Montague Glass and Lardner on the other, is that the former did not use an actually viable language or dialect, but used distortions of English for a specific effect. (I am far from suggesting that Ward did not use American notably, nor that his language is the better part of his work; he was a real satirist.) It is my guess that in the beginning the misspelled words signified that the speaker was the hard sensible common man with none of “your” refinements. Juvenal and Johnson may have been superior to the thing attacked; it pleased the democratic American to pretend to be beneath it. The literary success of the dialects is another matter, which anyone who believes that ours is still an Anglo-Saxon country will do well to consider. Montague Glass is particularly interesting in this respect. He impresses me as being neither a wise nor a foolish man, but a smart one. What gave him his vogue was his conformity with the norm of business acuteness and his use of a highly complex private racial idiom, which expresses a highly complex integrated almost secret racial life; he transferred, almost transliterated it into recognizable, at least understandable English, with such a climax as “I wish I were dead, God forbid!” which was recognized by the populace as a part of American life ten years before Mr Henry Ford bought the Protocols. The racial dialect is also exploited, but not with so reliable an ear, by Hugh Wiley in his negro stories; it is possible that the stories of Octavus Roy Cohen are more accurate (they are not so entertaining); but the life they represent is, in any case, too near to America to be surprising to us.
I am convinced that nearly all of Mr Dooley and nearly all of the later Lardner would stand without dialect. It is not an odd-looking word that impresses most in Mr Dooley’s masterpieces about the Dreyfus case. “The witness will confine himself to forgeries” is English as Swift would have written it, and is neither better nor worse than, “How th’ divvle can they perjure thimsilves if they ain’t sworn?” or
“’‘Let us proceed,’ says th’ impartial an’ fair-minded judge, ‘to th’ thrile iv th’ haynious monsther Cap Dhry-fuss’ he says. Up jumps Zola, an’ says he in Frinch: ‘Jackuse,’ he says, which is a hell of a mane thing to say to anny man. An’ they thrun him out. ‘Judge’ says th’ attorney f’r th’ difinse, ‘an’ gintlemen iv’ th’ jury’ he says. ‘Ye’re a liar,’ says th’ judge. ‘Cap, ye’re guilty, an’ ye know it,’ he says.... ‘Let us pro-ceed to hearin’ th’ tisti-mony,’ he says.... Be this time Zola has come back; an’ he jumps up, an’, says he, ‘Jackuse,’ he says. An’ they thrun him out.”
It is no wonder that this passage was reprinted by the New York Evening Post after the expulsion of the Socialists from Albany. Nearly everything serious in Dooley has the same relevance, and one reads about war experts and “disqualifying the enemy” (in relation to the Spanish-American and Boer Wars) with a slightly dizzying sensation that this man has said everything that needed to be said twenty years in advance of his time. We needed him badly during the war, but a comic song about him had somehow withdrawn his name from the rank of great literature and we had to do with sad second-bests. There isn’t a chance in the world that he will be forgotten, because he is recognized in England and we shall some day reimport his reputation. For he has the great advantage of being at the same time a humorist and a social historian, an every-day philosopher and the homme moyen sensuel.
His qualities are so immediate that analyzing them appears superfluous. He gets his effects by distortion, not by exaggeration. When he told Mr Roosevelt to call the next edition of his book Alone in Cubia he extracted an essence from it, rather than inflated it. His adversatives are surprising and devastating. He conceives a Blood-is-thicker-than-Water speech in these terms (from the English to the American): “Foolish and frivolous people, cheap but thrue-hearted and insincere cousins.... Ye ar-re savage but inthrestin’.” Sometimes he leaves out the “but”: “They was followed be th’ gin’rals iv th’ Fr-rinch ar-rmy, stalwart, fearless men, with coarse, disagreeable faces.” His unexpectedness goes farther; he once said that left alone General Shafter could have taken “Sandago” without losing an ounce.
I do not wish to write a literary essay about Mr Dooley, and having mentioned Swift I have little to say. I must admit that the Irish of Mr Dooley is stage-Irish; what makes it acceptable is that it is entirely Dooley-Irish, and whatever the spelling, whatever the oddities of words, the intonation is always right. For of course it is possible to write a dialect without imitation of sound, and to do it effectively and honestly. Sherwood Anderson has done it in I Want to Know Why and in I’m a Fool; Lardner has done it in The Golden Honeymoon; and the amiable efforts of Mr John V. A. Weaver are ineffective because in nine out of ten cases he is setting slang words, well observed and accurately recorded, to the rhythm of literary English. Mr Dooley’s rhythm is always that of the estimable, easy-going barkeeper who is speaking.
One looks back with a certain envy to the time when a barkeeper could talk about the world. Our present social situation is disjected, and the period before the war seems incredibly calm and halcyon. It seems to us that then America was settling into the character it had made for itself in the Civil War, a time of consolidation and certainty. A minor passion for social justice seems to have been the only great force hostile to that sense of security and self-satisfaction without which no civilization can become sophisticated and refined. It was pre-eminently the time when a satirist could exist. Mr Dooley is the proof that he did. He understood his America, as in his time, and without bitterness he makes it live again.
Ten years from now, if we settle down, Mr Lardner may have another such opportunity. For the moment he is driven to the surface; he has no point d’appui for his attack; in a bewildering and unsure civilization, he is himself unsure. It is possible that he will become so accustomed to shallow waters that he will never venture into deep; I should be sorry, because he has qualities too precious to be wasted. He is developing a strain of wild imagination, of something approaching fantasy. And his occasional pieces of fiction are far beyond the average of stories written in America. The Golden Honeymoon (which Mr Edward J. O’Brien had the acumen to put in his collection of the best stories of 1922) is almost a masterpiece; it has a sort of artistic wisdom, is without tricks, and is beautifully written. He has also written a burlesque which failed drearily with the 49-ers and a sketch, The Bull Pen, in which the busher reappeared, which was a moderate success in the Ziegfeld Follies. This piece and The Golden Honeymoon show a fresh tendency on Lardner’s part to understate; they are actually quiet, as if he were tired of noisiness. I do not think he is tired of anything. In an interview recently he said, “Some philosopher once said that if you want a thing badly when you’re young you’re likely to get too much of it before you’re old; I hope to God he knew what he was talking about.” He is afraid of nothing; one fancies he doesn’t care for too many things.
He grew weary, a little while ago, of the literary diaries published from week to week by the highbrows, these records “of who they seen and talked to and what they done since the last time we heard from them” and so he wrote his own for the New York Sunday American. Among the items chronicled were:
“When I got home Sousa was there and we played some Brahms and Grieg with me at the piano and him at one end of a cornet. ‘How well you play, Lardy,’ was Sousa’s remark. Brahms called up in the evening and him and his wife come over and played rummy....” (This is grotesque, but he knows his subject.) “Had breakfast with Mayor Hylan and Senator Lodge.... Went home and played some Rubinstein on the black keys.... President Harding called up long distants to say hello. The Mrs talked to him as I was playing with the cat.... Took a ride on the Long Island R.R. to study human nature....” And so on. It is a little better than verbal parody, is it not, Lardy?