The turn of the screed

Quick! Who said this: "handed on the torch needs to be...."

a. Yoda
b. John McWhorter
c. Henry James

I would have picked Yoda for sure if I hadn't seen the quote in its original context:

"Flames, however, even the most sacred, do not go on burning of themselves; they require to be kept up; handed on the torch needs to be from one group of patient and competent watchers to another."

It's true that I've just finished reading What Language Is and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, two rollicking books in which our magnificent John McWhorter takes us on a wild ride through the fascinating ways that languages renew themselves despite the efforts of torch-bearers to fan the sacred flame of sameness, but McWhorter's prose is much less baroque and comma-heavy than the above passage.

Which leaves Henry James, who wrote the "handed on the torch needs to be" sentence in "The Question of Our Speech," the address James delivered to the 1905 graduating class at Bryn Mawr.

Now I am a fan of Henry James. I never get tired of teaching "Daisy Miller" and Portrait of a Lady, and I have willingly read The Golden Bowl even though it was never assigned in a class, but I pity those poor Bryn Mawr grads who had to listen to many many pages of sentences like this one:

These truths, you see, are incontestable; yet though you are daughters, fortunate in many respects, of great commonwealths that have been able to render you many attentions, to surround you with most of the advantages of peace and plenty, it is none the less definite that there will have been felt to reign among you, in general, no positive mark whatever, public or private, of an effective consciousness, namely--a sign of societies truly possessed of light--that no civilized body of men and women has ever left so vital an interest to run wild, to shift, as we say, all for itself, to stumble and flounder, through mere adventure and accident, in the common dust of life, to pick up a living, in fine, by the wayside and the ditch.

Ten dollars to the first person who can correctly diagram that sentence. It's heavy going even when you have the luxury of revisiting remote sectors of the sentence, but what those eager graduates made of it as a speech act I am unable to imagine. (See? Now he's got me writing like Yoda.)

And what is he all fired up about, our Henry? Just this: Americans don't talk so good.

Well, he states it more elegantly. There are evil forces hovering about just waiting for a Bryn Mawr grad to let down her guard and commit a solecism, forces so evil that they inspire our Henry to employ (gasp!) slang (albeit apologetically):

There are in every quarter, in our social order, impunities of aggression and corruption in plenty; but there are none, I think, showing so unperturbed a face--wearing, I should slangily say, if slang were permitted me here, so impudent a 'mug'--as the forces assembled to make you believe that no form of speech is provably better than another, and that just this matter of 'care' is an affront to the majesty of sovereign ignorance.

(It's interesting that he feels no similar need to apologize for using slang later when he refers to "the American Dago." But I digress.)

James speaks passionately about the dangers of language change, beginning with a not-so-gentle scolding on the topic of proper enunciation of vowels and consonants. He abhors the schwa, the intrusive r, the excess s that slides into "somewheres else," and he will not abide the lazy "yeah." Why harp on pronunciation? "I am asking you to take it from me, as the very moral of these remarks," he writes, "that the way we say a thing, or fail to say it, fail to learn to say it, has an importance in life that it is impossible to overstate--a far-reaching importance, as the very hinge of the relation of man to man." So, um, yeah, saying "yeah" can lead to The End of the World as We Know It.

Compared to their European counterparts, says James, Americans speak in a slovenly fashion. Imagine being one of those Bryn Mawr grads, the flower of American womanhood reaching an important educational milestone, only to have the commencement speaker characterize your language as "a mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises--the weakest and cheapest attempt at human expression that we shall easily encounter, I imagine, in any community pretending to the general instructed state." How many of them wished they'd smuggled a few rotten tomatoes into the ceremony?

James insists that there are "sounds of a mysterious intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness." His list of intrinsically mean or slovenly words includes "Amurrica," and if I could get a recording of Henry James saying "Amurrica" just like that, I'd market it as a ringtone and make a million dollars.

Who is at fault for this slovenly and mean degradation of the English language? James minces no words in that regard: lazy people who don't pronounce things the way Henry James pronounces them bear some of the blame, as do newspapers (no standards!) and public schools (ditto!). The bulk of the blame, though, belongs to (who would have guessed it) foreigners.

Now it's a bit specious to applaud Europeans' devotion to maintaining linguistic purity and then turn around and criticize Europeans for destroying English, but that's what he does. He complains that the Dutch, the Spanish, the Norse, the Finnish, and other immigrants "play, at their heart's content, with the English language, or, in other words, dump their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundations of the American."

If John McWhorter is to be believed, such playing with language keeps language alive and growing--but Henry James will have none of it. He poses the question, wouldn't a static language be downright dull? Except he says it in his own inimitable fashion:

The question is whether it be not either no language at all, or only a very poor one, if it have not in it to respond, from its core, to the constant appeal of time, perpetually demanding new tricks, new experiments, new amusements of it: so to respond without losing its characteristic balance.

That's 53 words and seven commas, for an average of 7.5 words per comma--and again, imagine trying to unravel the multiple negations while listening to a commencement speech!

Fortunately for those Bryn Mawr grads, James offers an answer, a Call to Arms, as it were. If handed on the torch needs to be, far be it from Henry James to stand in the way of that handing on. His answer: let the language change, so long as "the conservative interest" monitors and controls that change, remaining "an embodied, constituted, inexpugnable thing." ("Thing," if I recall correctly, came to us from the Vikings. Why can't those darn furriners leave the Amurrican language alone?!)

Yes, this "conservative interest" must protect language from the depredations of change just as it protects matrimony: "Abate a jot of the quantity, and much more, of the quality, of the consecration required, and we practically find ourselves emulating the beasts, who prosper as well without a vocabulary as without a marriage-service." So there you have it: let the flower of American womanhood start saying "yeah" and "Amurrica" and the next thing you know they'll be marrying their dogs.

Okay, Henry James didn't say that--not quite. His screed isn't all that unusual for 1905 and it could easily be updated to appeal to the Lynn Truss crowd today, but to me it sounds like the anguished cry of a man desperately in need of lightening up. Promiscuously playing with language is one of life's great joys, and as it so very rarely leads to one's marrying the dog, the danger seems rather remote.

Handed on the joy needs to be! And for that task, both Yoda and John McWhorter serve much better than Henry James.