CYNTHIA OZICK
things our now so profusely important and, as is claimed, quickly
assimilated foreign brothers and sisters may do at their ease in
this country, and at two minutes' notice, and without asking any
one else's leave or taking any circumstance whatever into account
-any save an infinite uplifting sense of freedom and facility; but
the thing they may best do is play, to their heart's content, with
the English language, or, in other words, dump their mountain
of promiscuous material into the foundation of the American.
757
"All the while we sleep," he continued, "the vast contingent of aliens
whom we make welcome, and whose main contention, as I say, is
that, from the moment of their arrival, they have just as much prop–
erty in our speech as we have, and just as good a right to do what
they choose with it ... all the while we sleep the innumerable aliens
are sitting up
(they
don't sleep!) to work their will on their new in–
heritance." And he compared the immigrants' use of English to oil–
cloth- "highly convenient ... durable, tough, cheap."
James's thesis in his address to his audience of young aristocrats
was not precisely focused. On the one hand, in describing the dep–
redations of the innumerable sleepless aliens, in protesting "the com–
mon schools and the 'daily paper,"' he appeared to admit defeat–
"the forces of looseness are in possession of the field." Yet in asking
the graduates to see to the perfection of their own speech, he had, he
confessed, no models to offer them. Imitate, he advised- but whom?
Parents and teachers were themselves not watchful. "I am at a loss to
name you particular and unmistakable, edifying and illuminating
groups or classes," he said, and recommended, in the most general
way, the hope of "encountering, blessedly, here and there, articulate
individuals, torch-bearers, as we may rightly describe them, guard–
ians of the sacred flame."
As it turned out, James not only had no solution; he had not
even put the right question. These young women of good family
whom he was exhorting to excellence were all situated in society to
do exactly what James had described the immigrants as doing:
speaking
"really
at their ease," playing, "to their heart'!! content, with
the English language" in "an infinite uplifting sense of freedom and
facility." Whereas the "aliens," hard-pressed by the scramblings of
poverty and cultural confusions, had no notion at all of linguistic
"freedom and facility," took no witting license with the English
tongue, and felt no remotest ownership in the
languag~
they hoped
merely to earn their wretched bread by.
If
they did not sleep, it was
