Our Language, Good and Bad
THIS genially erudite and extremely readable work is not likely to please everyone. It is honest, emphatic and occasionally too magis- terial. Mr. Partridge, that famous and entertaining philologist, certainly invites reproach, and even acrimonious disapproval, when he ,launches into criticism. How comes it (many -will ask) that Mr. Partridge, in reviewing the poetry of the last fifty years, does not mention a single Sitwell and has nothing to say of W. H. Davies, W. J. Turner, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Bridges and Edmund Blunden ? And why, even if he has little to say of them, why does he run so airily over the field of drama with only the briefest of references to Barrie, Maugham and Galsworthy ?
I always feel that Mr. Partridge, with all his wit and alacrity and his jauntily persuasive style, his playful erudition and enormous linguistic knowledge, is less at home in the region of sophisticated literature than he is among the stresses and energies of the colloquial manner. He lights up at once when he is with our Cockneys or Colonials ; he gleans with joy the rich and rolling vocables of the underworld. His preferences are for gusto, simple affirmation—no high-brow nonsense. Thus, in dealing with " general trends," he quotes approvingly the slam-bang tirades of Mr. F. A. Voigt and of Mr. Roy Campbell, neither of whom can be said to represent analytical thought or philosophical method of the highest order. I do not wish to imply for a moment that Mr. Partridge is inscnsi- • five to the subtleties and invocations of great literature, but I do feel that, as a philologist of distinction and wide renown, he is chiefly interested in the biology of speech—the curiosities that emerge in the parlance of ordinary people.
But I think few literary folk will disagree with Mr. Partridge when he deplores the flatness, the suave mediocrity of our typical literary forms today. This, no doubt, is due to many pressures, many deprivations and alarms ; the disquieting fact is that all these
combined influences are bringing about a decay of taste and a .menacing intensification of the commercial aim. Even so, the exclusions and inclusions of Mr. Partridge are often mysterious. I have mentioned some of the former, but the latter are no less astonishing. Where Mr. Partridge is unquestionably right is in ascribing a considerable part of our literary decay to the grim infiltration of anxiety neuroses, the sense of uncomfortable tremors below the foundations of our society.
Mr. Partridge will not quarrel with me when I say that the literary critic performs under the gravest of disadvantages. The critics of music and of painting do not have to prove their own skill in counterpoint or brushwork, but the literary critic has to express himself in the same medium as that of the person whose work he is endeavouring to assess. Too frequently our critics represent and encourage a lissom and limber mediocrity. I do not say that Mr. Partridge does this, but I think he sometimes lapses into mannerisms (e.g., exasperating parentheses) which are best avoided, and a not infrequent assumption of that depressing jocularity which is peculiar to scholars.
The American section of this book is very ably written by Pro- fessor John W. Clark of Minnesota. It is interesting to note that he ascribes to " a sort of nervous diffidence " one of the principal features of the American character—which, he says, produces some- thing which is " half envy and half contempt." He also says that the literary culture of the United States is represented by " the comic strip and the popular radio program." This will provide the student with a valuable clue to much that would otherwise be obscure if not unintelligible. Professor Clark's examination of the American vocabulary is indeed remarkable, though he, like Mr. Partridge, is more concerned with ordinary speech than with current literary forms, and is perhaps unfair to the high level of American scholar. ship. He finds in The New Yorker what he describes as " the most uniformly civilised English written today in America."
Five other writers have provided contributions to Dominions English, another writes on The Teaching of English, and there is an adequately esoteric article on Cockney by Julian Franklyn. This is not a book which can be read with indifference.
C. E. VULLIAMY.
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