Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  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.

  II

  One reads Mr. Hay’s earlier poems with a thrill of pride. They open glimpses of unselfish courage and sublime devotion compared with which the prancing pageantry of Homer afflicts us like the cheap tinsel of the melodrama.

  Such is the serious judgment of a reputable writer living in the capital of the nation. It has a particular reference to “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso,” which are not poems at all, but formless blobs of coarse, rank sentimentality in the speech of snuff-rubbers and clay-eaters — the so-called “dialect.” They are no better and could not be worse than the “Hoosier” horrors of Riley and the “barrack-room” afflictions of Kipling. I do not doubt that Hay’s dislike of them and his wish that they might be forgotten incited him to literary silence, whereby we are deprived of the poetry that he might have given us had he remained in the field. There is not a true poet in this country who has not experienced the deep disgust of observing the superior “popularity” of his own worst work. That here and there a few should give up in despair, taking to politics, to business, to any coarse pursuit “understanded of the people,” is natural and not to be condemned. These accept their dreadful fame as a punishment fitting the crime, and promise atonement by resolving to write no more “ dialect poetry” while stealing is more honorable and indigence more interesting.

  John Hay was a true poet; so is Riley; so is Kipling. In addition to their panderings to peasants all have written well. At their best they stir the blood and thrill the nerves of all who can be trusted to feel because taught to think. Yet the late Charles A. Dana, who for years successfully posed as a judge of poetry, had at last the indiscretion to disclose himself by a specific utterance of his taste: he pronounced Kipling’s “Gunga Din” one of the greatest of English poems! After that there was no more to say about Dana, but Dana had not the reticence to say it. Poetry, like any other art, is a matter of manner. If the manner is that of a clown the matter will not redeem it, but, as the dyer’s hand is “subdued to what it works in,” will itself be smirched by its environment. English of the cornfield and the slum is suited to certain kinds of humor and in moderation may itself be amusing, but it has no place in serious or sentimental composition, either verse or prose. Persons writing it confess their peasant understandings, and those who like t( dialect poems” like them because they do not know any better than to like them, and that’s all there is to it.

  The prose writer whom I have quoted probably does know better, but prefers to march with the procession. Since he mentions Homer and Tennyson (to affirm the greater glory of the author of “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso”), perhaps he will permit himself to be asked if he sees no “unselfish courage” in Hector? — no “sublime devotion” in Penelope? — none in Enid? — nothing magnanimous in Arthur’s tenderness to Guinevere? Does he think these noble qualities would shine with a diviner light in the character of a corn-fed lout of the stables, a whiskey-sodden riverman or a slattern of the slums?

  The higher virtues are not a discovery of yesterday; they were known as long ago as last week; and some of us who affect an acquaintance with antiquity profess to have found traces of them in the poetry of an even earlier period, before all men began to be born equal. In “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” there were singing pigs, as there are to-day, and doubtless they had their special wallows with mud of a particular brew; but they were not permitted to thrust their untidy muzzles into the sweet water of the Pierian Spring, turn it into slime and scatter plenty of it o’er a smiling land. It has remained for the “fierce democracies” of the Brand-New World to impose upon letters the law of the Dominion of Dirt.

  The leader of the New Movement is indubitably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and here is an example of his work. It is called “His Pa’s Romance,” and these two passages are quoted with effusion by one of the “critics:

  Elsie lisps so, she can’t say

  Her own name, ist any way

  She says ‘Elthy’ — like they wuz

  Feathers on her words, an’ they

  Ist stuck on her tongue like fuzz.

  How charming! — it affects the sensibilities like the ripple of a rill of buttermilk falling into a pig-trough. “Ist,” by the way, means (to an idiot) “just” — it is not easy to say why. Here followeth the other inspiring passage:

  One time

  Elsie start to say the rhyme

  “Thing a thong o’ thixpenth” — whee!

  I ist yell; an
’ ma say I’m Unpolite as I can be.

  If this is not poetry, what kind of an abysmal imbecility has it the characteristic distinction to be? Mr. Riley turns off this stuff by the linear mile, it is received with enthusiasm and reviewed with acclamation by nearly every “literary critic” in America, and the peasants whose taste they share and ignorance reflect are generous enough to give him a living. Think not, observer from another land, whose eye may chance to note these lines, that all these “dialect poets” wear smocks and toil in the fields; it is the peculiar glory of this great country that its peasants wear as good clothing, pursue as high vocations and talk as glibly about art and literature as anybody. Say not in your lack of light that the American gentleman has boorish taste; say, rather, that the American boor has visible signs of the prosperity of a gentleman, and to an alien eye is not readily distinguishable from his betters.

  III

  To put a good thought, a tender sentiment, a passionate emotion into faulty words is to defile it. Does a precious stone acquire an added value from a setting of brass? Is a rare and excellent wine better when drunk out of a gourd?

  In Herman Scheffauer’s first book, Of Both Worlds, are two little poems of such naturalness, simplicity and beauty that I hardly know of anything better in their kind. My purpose in quoting them here is, partly, to bring them to the attention of those who may be unfamiliar with Mr. Scheffauer’s work, but chiefly to suggest to the “dialect poets” that they undertake to give them an added charm by rewriting them in their own manner.

  THE SLEEPERS

  The winds lie hushed in the hill

  And the waves upon the seas;

  The birds are mute and still,

  Deep in their dreaming trees;

  The earth lies dumb in night,

  And the stars in their degrees

  Sleep with the suns in space,

  With angels, with seraphs bright,

  In the light of God His face.

  Softly lie the heads

  Of the sleepers in their beds;

  But the sleepers in the ground —

  They alone sleep sweet and sound,

  They alone know rest profound.

  Fear not — soon a rest as deep

  Comes to thee — thou, too, shalt sleep.

  MISERERE

  The last few prayers are done,

  The pall and shroud are spread;

  Seven tapers at thy feet And seven at thy head.

  Thy hands are crossed upon

  Thy bosom white where now

  Thy heart is stilled.

  O Death, How beautiful art thou!

  ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS — AN INSTANCE

  NO series of connected and consecutive military events has been so closely analyzed by military students as those marking the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. All expounders of the military art who have had the good fortune to live since its principles were so wonderfully illustrated by that campaign have delighted to use its incidents in exposition. Every student has early learned that he could not afford to neglect it. Even to the “general reader,” unacquainted with the mysteries of strategy and tactics, who in the darkness of his ignorance cherishes the error that war is fortuitous fighting loosely directed to results by physical courage and the will of God, the history of these brilliant operations can hardly fail, when lucidly related, to prove interesting and charming beyond the power of fiction. As related by the mere “historian,” with his port-fire and blood-fumes to emotionalize the situation, it is doubtless as dull reading as the literature of the heart generally. What, in brief, was this remarkable campaign?

  In the month of March, 1796, Bonaparte, a boy of twenty-six, untried in independent command, was intrusted with an army of some forty thousand badly clad and inadequately supplied men, with which to invade Italy. He was opposed by Beaulieu, with a well equipped force, Austrians and Sardinians, of fifty thousand. The Alps and Apennines were between. Bonaparte began active operations on the eleventh day of April, 1796. On the seventh day of April, 1797, at Leoben, near Vienna, he received the Austrian Emperor’s emissaries, who came to sue for peace, and the war was at an end. During this period of one year less four days, with forces averaging forty-six thousand opposed to forces averaging sixty-one thousand he had in fifteen pitched battles routed one Sardinian army and the six Austrian armies successively sent to drive him out of Italy, only to be driven out themselves. His losses during the campaign in killed, wounded and prisoners were about equal to the numbers of his army at the outset. The losses that he inflicted upon the enemy were no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand men and vast quantities of material.

  How were these astonishing feats of arms performed? Not by the superior courage of his soldiers, for the Austrians then, as they are now, were a brave and warlike people. Not by the “will of God,” whose agency is to the military eye nowhere discernible, and whose political predilections are still unknown. Nor were these admirable results due to “luck,” the “favors of fortune,” the “magic” of genius. They were brought about by the very commonplace method of knowing his business thoroughly and applying the knowledge. There is nothing miraculous in that. It is an open secret which Napoleon himself has explained:

  “In war nothing is accomplished but by calculation. During a campaign, whatever is not profoundly considered in all its details is without result. Every enterprise should be systematically conducted; chance alone can not bring success.”

  I should be sorry to be understood as affirming the possibility of such military success as Napoleon’s to the mere student of military art, devoid of Napoleon’s genius. On the other hand, Napoleon’s genius would have been futile without his mastery of the art. Military art is no exception to art in general; for eminent achievement is required great natural aptitude, plus a comprehensive and minute knowledge of the business in hand. Given these two requisites in the commander, and the army is multiplied by two. For many generations, doubtless, the French will boast of Montenotte, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram; but every intelligent soldier’s view is that on all these historic fields there was but one victor. To quote his words again:

  “It was not the Roman army that conquered Gaul, but Cæsar; it was not the Carthaginian army which, at the gates of Rome, made the Eternal City tremble, but Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army that marched as far as the Indus, but Alexander; it was not the Prussian army that defended Prussia for seven years against the three most powerful states of Europe, but Frederick.”

  The contrary view — the theory of the insignificance of the individual — so persistently urged a generation ago by Mill, and so eagerly accepted by the young philosophers of his period, derives no support from military history. Tolstoi, it is true, is in full, if somewhat belated, advocacy of it, and professes to find confirmation in the events that he relates in his military novels. And it must be confessed that, as he relates them, they indubitably do seem to justify his view that leaders do not truly lead. With the splendid irresponsibility of the Hedonist, he shows that the French people having incurred, somehow, a blind, reasonless impulse to go gadding about Europe, caught up Napoleon, as a stream bursting out of its banks might catch up a sheep or a log, and pushed him along before them. A careful study of the progress through Italy will, I think, show that at least he did something toward reducing the friction incident to the movement.

  Any one really believing in unimportance of the individual must be prepared to affirm that a chance bullet finding a lodgment in the brain of the commander of the Army of Italy at Montenotte would have made but little difference in the conduct of the campaign and the later history of Europe; and any one prepared to affirm this may justly boast himself impregnable to argument, through induration of the understanding.

  The history of the military operations that we have been considering has never been better told than in a book entitled Napoleon Bonaparte’s First Campaign — it should be remembered that he was then simply General Bonaparte. The
author of the book is Lieutenant Herbert H. Sargent, of the Army.

  ( After distinguished service as colonel of volunteers in the Cuban and Philippine wars, this great soldier is now retired as major in the regular army. Before retirement he published two other books, The Campaign of Marengo and The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba, both characterized by all the qualities so conspicuous in his first book — qualities that are themselves a fine result of “knowing one’s business.”

  1912.)

  Nothing could well exceed the clarity with which the author has told his story; and nothing that I have seen in military literature is more admirable than his professional but untechnical comments on its successive stages Everything is made so clear that the benighted civilian of the anti-West Point sort, the fearfully and wonderfully bepistoled swashbuckler of the frontier, the gilded whiskey-soldier of the National Guard and even the self-taught strategist of the press can comprehend it all without a special revelation from Heaven. Those conscious of a desire, however vague and formless, to acquire such a knowledge of military science and art as will give them a keener interest in “war news” that is not “bluggy” than they ever had in that which reeks with gore and “multiplies the slain” will find in Lieutenant Sargent a guide, philosopher and friend for whom they cannot be sufficiently thankful to the God that bestowed him.