Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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2. "A Lot of Rules" |
 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
2. "A Lot of Rules"
For two fine accounts of the role of language theory and prescriptive
grammar in the history of American English, see Dennis E.
Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); and Edward Finegan, Attitudes
toward English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1980).
For White and Moon, see chapter 3. No titles by Whitney or
Müller appear in Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library. I know of only
one reference to the two grammarians in Twain's writing. Twain considered
inserting in A Tramp Abroad a mock correspondence with
several philologists concerning his theories on German grammar:
"Wrote to Max Müller & Prof Whitney & J H Trumbull o[n] Phi[l]ological
matters but only got offensive answers or silence" (Notebook
17, NJ2, 266). Trumbull was Twain's neighbor in Hartford; he contributed
obscure foreign-language epigraphs to The Gilded Age, and his
death in 1897 elicited a eulogistic essay from Twain. Twain probably
knew Müller and Whitney by reputation only.
H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. (New York:
N.Y.: Linguistica, 1950).
In 1909 Ambrose Bierce published Write It Right: A Little Blacklist
of Literary Faults, a reactionary usage manual that crusades against
"loose locutions of the ignorant" and "expressions ancestrally vulgar
or irreclaimably degenerate" ([New York: Neale, 1910], pp. 5-6).
We learn from Bierce that since leave is transitive, we cannot say "he
left yesterday" and that pants for trousers is "vulgar exceedingly."
Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 19.
The Mark Twain Papers owns a copy of an 1835 edition of
Kirkham that appears to have been signed by the young Clemens.
Alan Gribben hesitantly accepts it as authentic; he explains his
doubts in Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1980), 2:383-84. As Gribben notes, Twain twice refers in passing
to Kirkham, in A Tramp Abroad and in an autobiographical dictation
of 1907 (2:384). That Twain has schoolmaster Ferguson refer to
"about thirty" rules of grammar is good circumstantial evidence for
his remembering Kirkham's prominent list of thirty-five rules of syntax.
Rollo Lyman has documented that Kirkham's grammar was at
the height of its popularity in the early 1840s, just when Twain was
entering grammar school (English Grammar in American Schools before
1850 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922], p. 83).
Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, stereotype
ed. (New York: R. B. Collins, n.d. [1829]).
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, a Play, in HHT, p. 301; I have omitted
the italics that Twain used to indicate vocal emphasis. In an 1887
dinner speech, he would cast himself in the Ben Rogers role: "I remember
myself, and all of you old fellows probably remember the
same of yourselves, that when I went to school I was told that an adjective
is an adverb and it must be governed by the third person singular,
and all that sort of thing—and when I got out of school I
straightway forgot all about it" (MTS, 217).
Number Forty-Four knows the English grammar by heart because
he has "heard [the] grammar class recite the rules before entering
upon the rest of their lesson" (MSM, 178). Twain certainly believed
that memory alone was incapable of conferring linguistic
prowess. The prodigious memory of the pilot Brown, in Life on the
and ruins him as a storyteller.
Mark Twain, "An Excellent School," Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, 12 February 1864 (ETS1, 345).
Twain's evaluation of the purpose for grammar resembles serious
statements made by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians.
Robert Lowth, for instance, wrote in the preface to his
grammar of 1762 that a "principal design" of any grammatical
treatise should be "to teach us . . . to judge of every phrase and form
of construction, whether it be right or not" (A Short Introduction to
English Grammar [London, 1762], p. x). Kirkham defines English
grammar as "the art of speaking and writing with propriety" (English
Grammar, p. 18).
Mark Twain, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Trouble between
Mr. Mark Twain and Mr. John William Skae, of Virginia City,"
San Francisco Californian, 26 August 1865 (ETS2, 258).
Randolph Quirk suggests that speakers of English fall into
three categories: assured, anxious, and indifferent. Speakers at the
top of the social scale belong to the first group; their status is so secure
that they need not worry about criticism or correction. "Their
nonchalant attitude toward language was epitomised in the nineteenth
century in the words of Bulwer Lytton: 'I am free to confess
that I don't know grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar?'
" (The Use of English [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962],
pp. 69-70).
Writing to Bret Harte soon after the publication of The Celebrated
Jumping Frog, Twain takes pride in the "handsome" appearance
of his first book but complains of the "damnable errors of grammar
and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch" that
slipped in because he was not able to read proof (letter of 1 May 1867,
MTL 1:124). When he proposed turning his Quaker City excursion
letters to the Alta California into a book, he promised Elisha Bliss that
he "could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies
of expression" to make an acceptable volume (letter of 2 December
1867, MTL 1:141).
In 1878, while correcting a manuscript by his brother Orion,
Twain objected to an instance of this usage: " 'Next came 100 people
who looked like they had just been, &c' That wretched Missourianism
occurs in every chapter. You mean, 'as if' " (holograph MS, MTP,
DV 415) (s=d).
While on his Mississippi trip Twain identified the "error" as
peculiar to the region; in his notebook he records, "Here they say 'I
will do so & so, when they mean shall' " (NJ2, 470).
Mencken, The American Language, p. 46. Mencken quotes the
of "he don't": "Here in Virginia many men of the highest education
use the phrase habitually. Their ancestors have used it for many
generations, and it might be argued with some reason that when the
best blood and the best brains of Virginia use an expression for so
long a time it becomes correct." Twain must have heard the usage
often from his Virginia-born father.
Henry H. Breen, Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and
Defects (London: Longman, 1857), pp. v, 8. During the 1860s, Dean
Alford, George Washington Moon, and Edward Gould had engaged
in a noisy feud over linguistic judgments and grammatical errors in
one another's writing. Although there is no evidence that Twain
knew any of their works until he read Moon in the 1890s, the controversy
was covered widely in newspapers and periodicals on both
sides of the Atlantic, so he was probably aware of the epidemic of
mutual faultfinding among these critics.
The extracts are from A Tramp Abroad (WMT 9:203); Contributors'
Club, Atlantic Monthly 45 (1880): 850; Life on the Mississippi
(1883) (WMT 12:222); dinner speech, 27 April 1887 (MTS, 226);
"Comment on Tautology and Grammar," dated 1898 (MTA 1:173);
"Remarks" at Women's Press Club tea, 27 October 1900 (MTS, 34647);
Christian Science (WIM, 273).
Dennis Baron (Grammar and Good Taste, pp. 145-51) and
Edward Finegan (Attitudes toward English Usage, pp. 48, 57-59) both
comment on the moralistic tone of nineteenth-century grammar
texts. Lindley Murray, in his "Address to Young Students," says he
wrote his grammar out of "a desire to facilitate your progress in
learning, and, at the same time, to impress on your minds principles
of piety and virtue" (English Grammar [Bridgeport, Conn., 1824; facsimile
reprint, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1981],
p. 306).
Kenneth Lynn has observed that the "Clown" of Southwestern
humor "was unselfconsciously infantile even when he was technically
an adult. Whooping and hollering and jumping into the air,
he behaved with childlike unrestraint in no matter what company;
his vernacular speech—grotesque, drawling, ungrammatical—was a
sort of baby-talk" (Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor [Boston: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1959], p. 133).
Brander Matthews, "What Is Pure English?" in Essays on English
(New York: Scribner, 1922), p. 33.
On malapropism in American humor, see Walter Blair and
Hamlin Hill, America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 138.
James M. Cox writes that Brown is "clearly modeled upon
Pap" and "speaks in [his] tone if not [his] very accents" (Mark Twain:
The Fate of Humor [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966],
p. 162).
In his version of the fight, Albert Bigelow Paine records several
lines of dialogue between the two, but they seem to be merely a
fictional expansion of the indirect description in Life on the Mississippi
(Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. [New York: Harper, 1912],
1:136).
Quoted in Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 12. In his first chapter
Elliott discusses the ancient traditions of invective that precede the
development of modern satire.
Thomas Lounsbury, The Standard of Usage in English (New
York: Harper, 1908), p. 98. Twain owned a copy of this book; see
Gribben, Mark Twain's Library, 1:424.
Brander Matthews provides our best independent evidence
of the sway that linguistic respectability held over even a "liberal"
in Twain's day. Before Twain's death Matthews had celebrated "the
speech of the people," identifying Twain and Kipling as the two authors
with the best ear for it. In 1920, however, he would eulogize his
friend more cautiously by insisting that he did indeed speak and
write the "best English": "In his own person . . . he refrained from
[using slang], tempting as many of its vigorous vocables must have
been to him. . . . He knew better than to yield to the easy allurement;
and his English is as pure as it is direct and uncompromising.
. . . Mark spoke his native tongue in its utmost purity, which is why
every Englishman could understand him. He spoke pure English, as
free from obtruded Americanisms as from obsolete Briticisms, the
English current on both shores of 'the salt, unplumbed estranging
sea,' the English of Defoe and Bunyan, of Franklin and Lincoln"
("Mark Twain and the Art of Writing," in Essays on English, pp. 24445,
247). Matthews may have taken this line of defense in reaction to
Van Wyck Brooks's just-published Ordeal of Mark Twain.
Contributors' Club, Atlantic Monthly 45 (1880): 850. Twain
would long remain sensitive about his adverb usage: in an 1898 notebook
entry he carefully puts "only" in the formally required place
("a person who is present in your imagination only") and then adds
the irritated parenthetical remark, "I wish the word 'only' was in
hell" (MTN, 365).
The 1860s witnessed a battle of the books over just this issue
of adverb placement. Dean Alford, following the colloquial model,
championed relatively free placement of only; purist George Washington
Moon protested that this created ambiguity and "proved" that
one of Alford's sentences could be read in no less than 10,240 different
senses. "In contemplating the way in which our sentences will be
understood," replied Alford, "we are allowed to remember, that we
do not write for idiots" (The Queen's English: A Manual of Idiom and
Usage [1864; reprint, London: George Bell, 1895], p. 98).
Matthew Arnold, General Grant, with a rejoinder by Mark
Twain, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1966), p. 13.
James B. Fry, "Grant and Matthew Arnold: An Estimate,"
North American Review 144 (1887): 349-57.
"Use good grammar" is one of the "little" rules governing literary
art that Cooper "coldly and persistently violated," according to
Twain (WMT 22:63). While on his round-the-world voyage in 1896,
Twain recorded in his notebook: "Zangwill's 'Master' is done in good
English—what a rare thing good English is! and the grammar is
good, too—and what a very, very rare thing that is!" (MTN, 267).
See Chester L. Davis, "Mark Twain's Marginal Notes on 'The
Queen's English,' " Twainian 25 (1966): 1-4.
| Mark Twain's languages : | |