Watch carefully, and you will note that in the area covered by the great official languages, most people are bilingual. They can speak the official language, but they also speak among themselves a dialect of their own, usually a dialect more or less cousin to the official language. That is certainly true of the working people of my own county of Sussex, and, indeed, of all rural England; but it is also true of the industrial districts, and, of course, it is true of the North. You find just the same thing through France, and Belgium, and the Valley of the Rhine, and I am told you find the same thing in Italy. The real spoken languages of Christendom are to be counted by the hundred, or the thousand; and though they fall into great groups, yet each has a life of its own. The official languages live a separate life above the mass, forming the idiom of a small body of wealthy people. And even that idiom has two forms, the written and the spoken form, which are very different. It is odd how unnatural spoken English looks, for instance, when it appears in a book; and I suppose the public are right to prefer the wholly unreal written English put into the mouths of the characters in novels.
I remember one good woman who made a very large income for many years by writing books about lords and ladies in London, which books she sold to an extensive and eager public in England, but to a much more extensive, and far more eager public in the United States. In these books, which were in their time very famous, the ladies and gentlemen—the toffs—talked in the most astonishing manner: all in linked phrases of some inches, and dependent clauses hanging on.
There was one character in one of her books which I was assured was a friend of mine: a young hereditary politician. I know the man’s conversation well enough: it is of the ordinary sort, chopped sentences, grunts, continual repetitions and, in general, brief scraps: such language as you and I and everybody talks. But in the book this authoress, who knew the original well enough and lived all her life among lords and ladies, made the poor fellow talk in his own house like Hansard. She would make him spout great speeches at his own mother and deliver sentences of prodigious length in the midst of them.
I myself once wrote a book about politicians, called A Change in the Cabinet. It was universally agreed in all that old world of professional politicians who were still educated men that my book, whether good or bad, was monstrously accurate to the way the people of that world talk and go on. But the book will never be held by any large public to be accurate; or, at any rate, will not satisfy the desire of the large public for a particular kind of pompous convention, such as never was by sea or land. And on the whole I think the large public are right. Literature has no business to be a mirror of life. We can see life for ourselves without literature. What literature ought to do, I take it, is to make a type or expression of life, which is quite a different thing from a mere reflection, and what is more, literature is there for fun and not for copying. Hence the greatest of human writings have very little relation to actual speech. The heroes of the poet Homer say things as satisfactory as have ever been said, yet they say them in a highly conventional and stilted way, using a very small vocabulary and (what is really extraordinary!) talking all the time in hexameters. Certainly no one ever did that in real life except an old don whom I used to know at Oxford.
This man spoke with a dactylic stammer, thus: “Wúggă-gă, zúggă-gă, úggĕr-gă Năggă-gă, Wúggă-ă, Húggĕr-gă. … In my … wúgga ga … d-dúgga-g—opinion.”
He was the only living person I have ever heard who gave the effect of speaking in ordinary life as the persons of the poets speak. It was well worth hearing; but, of course, one could not understand a word of it. Nor did he ever produce the great effects of the ancients.
One of the most delightful things about words is their habit of coming up out of nothing, like the little particles of ice which float to the surface of the Thames at the beginning of a frost, rising silently, floating up from the bottom of the river, or like the little oak trees that crop up everywhere like weeds in the fields of my home. “Boy” is a word of that kind; “girl” is another; “leg” is another; “donkey” is another; “plough,” though a little earlier, is another. No one can tell you where they came from; they are like our modern masters, they have no ancestry. But, unlike our modern masters, they remain. Someone in some clique started the expression and it spread. One can see examples of the process going on all round one today. One sometimes even knows the man who invented a new term and the medium through which it spread. There are one or two Eton words of this sort, and one or two Balliol words which are in the way of becoming regular English; for individual men of large acquaintance and fertile mind started these new words, some of which are beginning to take root.
But of all things that words do, what pleases me most is their habit of
