QUESTIONS OF
LANGUAGE
various kinds of knowledge as that of Pagan and Christian Latin
literature and that of public houses and brothels in Dublin must be
exceedingly rare. Hence Joyce was like a great artist working in ma–
terials which could not last more than a very short time. One is able
to see,
~
it were, what a great artist he would have been objectively
had his means been sufficient. But they were inevitably insufficient,
and though a few now living may be able with difficulty to appre–
ciate
his
private language and experience they are few and very
soon there will be none-not even "archaeologists."
There is another aspect of Joyce which strikes me as being
particularly interesting in relation to the points I have in mind.
Joyce was an Irishman and he was one of many writers who benefited
by knowing the Irish variant of English. I mean that the English of
Synge or of Yeats- or of a number of other writers-was a more
regenerate vehicle of expression than the English of, say, Francis
Thompson or H. G. Wells. Of course Synge's English was to some
degree artificial, and nobody ever spoke as the country people speak
in
The Playboy of the Western World
or
Deirdre of the Sorrows.
But it was a better artifice than anything possible in England at that
time; it was based on the awakening self-consciousness of a race, on
the national movement, and it was richer and more natural than the
English of Oxford.
As style is interrelated with sensibility, if one says that the style
of the English in England is in some way dead one also implies
that the sensibility and creativeness of the English in England is in
some way dead. At present, Ireland apart, the United States has
more interesting writers than England. The Americans too have in
some measure living variants of English-dialects-to use in literature.
There is in William Faulkner a poetic life which is lacking in the
sophistication of Aldous Huxley. Even the slang of New York has
a vividness which Cockney no longer has. Many an American dialect
is rich and expressive compared with the thin intellectual precision
(and deadness) of the correct English of the educated English office
girl and the B.B.C. A number of other observations of this kind have
been made recently, none of them conclusive, but all pointing in a
particular direction: for instance, that many or most of the ablest
American writers are not of English but of German or of some other
stock, or that (as the recent war has shown) a large mass of English
1001
