The Stakes of the Game

It is perhaps unfair to consider H. L. Mencken’s compendium of the American language from the point of view of what it does not contain; but its press has been excellent and its popularity sufficient for what it does contain: a vast, gusty, profoundly undigested survey of the superficies of the game of language, the formulary of communication. As such, “The American Language” is and must remain an unfinishable monument of instruction and amusement. Others will add to it, and no matter how, for it is its essence to be ungainly; and doubtless Mr. Mencken will bring out a fifth edition, that the reviewers may demonstrate the need of a sixth. Its very unfinishableness is part of its merit, as its errors contribute to its practical success. Every reader is at once at home in the book and sees Mr. Mencken as a democrat for once; the temptation is almost a spur to write Mr. Mencken one’s additions and corrections. The game of language has perennially the obsessive attraction of miniature golf, war, or beano; and Mr. Mencken is a master commentator on the minutiae of that obsessive game, and on nothing else.

Of the burden of language he says nothing, and there is nothing in his work that suggests he ever felt enough of its weight and forward stress to require response. The burden of language is its meaning, what is felt when any word, any use of language, large or small, is recognized as a metaphor, as the expressive or representative form, the absolute idiom and maximum mirror, of actuality experienced. The burden of language is not felt or mastered only by poets; poetry is in this respect merely the objective resource of the reader who wishes to measure and establish his own experience of that burden; the burden of language, language as metaphor, is the life’s blood of speech. As we feel it, we give ear; as it is inconspicuous, inarticulate, or difficult beyond our power of attention, we ignore it, call it nonsense, or find it mere irritating verbiage. Mr. Mencken as a literary critic has been, guilty of all three failures in response. I believe he retains a conviction that poetry is either adolescent vaporing or romantic nonsense; hence it is natural that when he comes to the consideration of language (as when he comes to religion or politics) he should respond not at all to the substance of his theme but only to those aspects of it which can be dealt with as a game, and without meaning except by indirection. Mr. Mencken is nothing if not of a piece, and the piece is frivolous.

Not because it is in itself an untenable or irrelevant view, but because, taken by itself, as it most often is, the frivolous view is blind and inadequate and inordinately fanatic, it is worth the labour of specifying a few of Mr. Mencken’s failures in response consequent upon his view. “The American Language” has a copious index of twenty-nine three-column pages which, so far as I have been able to check it, really covers the material in the book itself. Yet this excellent index lacks references to metaphor and to every other figure of speech; it has nothing under poetry or rhythm or cadence —has nothing under the leap, the pulse, or movement of meaning: though these are agents of the living speech of Mr. Mencken’s concern. There are no references to popular songs, ballads, Negro spirituals, chanteys, cowboy songs, or proverbs, though these, again, are the instinctive cries and provide the living milestone monuments of living speech. In the wide and fascinating realm of folk-etymology—a realm where the folk-imagination is incessantly and significantly at work remaking the meanings of words—there is, curiously, a single reference, though actually Mr. Mencken is playing in this realm again and again.

Still resorting to the index and reaching now the permanent monuments of speech which’ are literature, it turns out that despite the multiplicity of reference Mr. Mencken makes no direct use of any authors except Mark Twain and Ring Lardner in the exploration of metaphor and idiom; and in using Mark Twain he seems to be unaware that he is doing so. There are no references to William James, Emily Dickinson, or C. S. Peirce—all masters of idiom. There is no reference to Henry Adams, whose prose combined idiom and grandeur, the lightness of conversation and the fury of intense sobriety. The references to Melville are cursory and make nothing of the specifically American quality of Melville’s combination of poetic perception and Rabelaisian profusion. Though there are five references to Henry James there is nothing, for example, on James’ mastery and development of the prefixed adverb and the terminal preposition; and nothing, naturally—because I doubt Mr. Mencken would admit it—on the superlative speech-quality of all James’s later prose, which is precisely as alive on its own level as Ring Lardner’s prose on its level. Finally, on this score, there is Mr. Mencken’s statement that there was no “visible yielding to the sermo valgus in Emerson,” an extraordinary witness to the incapacity of Mr. Mencken’s ear. No American prose ever grew so ripely out of the manure of common speech as Emerson’s at its best. If there is a difference between the oak and the acorn the least sciolist should see it. I doubt if Emerson ever wrote a phrase as far from common speech as Mr. Mencken’s phrase about him.

Leaving Mr. Mencken’s failures in response by omission, there remains a major failure in response by commission, a failure for which the defence cannot be made that it was no part of Mr. Mencken’s intention to respond. I refer to the selections of the American language—both written and spoken—presented for praise and characterization. It is much as if Mr. Mencken should examine French in terms of Rabelais or English in terms of Nashe—forgetting, say, Pascal and Swift. The resort is to the picturesque, the neo-logical, and the rhetorical; and the emphasis that declares itself, though it is never underlined by Mr. Mencken, is on the extravagant but easy desperations of the inarticulate. Most of the idioms quoted are verbal extravagances, and most of the individual words shown, which are not slang or argot, are failures at precise expression. What is praised are the formularies wherein failures of expression are overcome in verbal exhilaration and not the excited forms of expression itself. I know, and Mr. Mencken knows, that such formularies cannot be the stigmata of a living tongue; and I know, too, the bottomless difficulty of appraising clean and rooted speech in words: it is an experience to be felt in a realm beneath words or above them, for the critic’s words can only indicate and outline what the living words provide. But Mr. Mencken ought to have made at least so much of the attempt as would have saved him from his false emphases. The living part of a language is not in its slang but what the slang modifies; it is not the circumlocutory, the euphemistic, the falsely elegant, but the remaining substance, of which these are the verbose detritus. I know, finally, no better way to illustrate what Mr. Mencken should have done than to point out that at least once he did do it: in his admirable account, both linguistic and critical, of Ring Lard-ner’s “The Busher’s Honeymoon,” where he accents emphatically the values of precision and imagination with the example in front of him. The examples are everywhere and multiform, and are the stakes for the most part lost sight of in the game.