CYNTHIA OZICK
759
dialect of a particular place and time. But in a newly roiling society
of immigrant speakers, James could not see ahead (and why should
we have seen ahead? Castle Garden was unprecedented in all of hu–
man history) to the idea that a national literature can create a na–
tional speech. The immigrants who learned to read learned to speak.
Those who only learned to speak did not, in effect, learn to speak.
In supposing the overriding opposite- that quality of speech
creates culture, rather than culture quality of speech-James in
"The Question of Our Speech" slighted the one formulation most
pertinent to his complaints: the uses of literature. Pressing for "civil–
ity of utterance," warning against "influences round about us that
make for ... the confused, the ugly, the flat, the thin, the mean, the
helpless, that reduce articulation to an easy and ignoble minimum,
and so keep it as little distinct as possible from the grunting, the
squealing, the barking or roaring of animals," James thought it over–
whelmingly an issue of the imitation of oral models, an issue of "the
influence of
observation,"
above all an issue of manners- "for that," he
insisted, "is indissolubly involved." "At first dimly, but then more
and more distinctively, you will find yourselves noting, comparing,
preferring, at last positively emulating and imitating." Bryn Mawr,
of course, was the knowing occasion, not the guilty ta.rget, of this
admonition- he was speaking of the young voices he had been hear–
ing in the street and in the parlors of friends, and he ended with a
sacred charge for the graduates themselves: "You may, sounding the
clearer note of intercourse as only women can, become yourselves
models and missionaries, perhaps even a little martyrs, of the good
cause."
But why did he address himself to this thesis exclusively in Amer–
ica? Could he not, even more emphatically, have made the same
declarations, uttered the same dooms, in his adopted England? No
doubt it would not have been seemly; no doubt he would have con–
demned any appearance of ingratitude toward his welcoming hosts.
All true, but this was hardly the reason the lecture at Bryn Mawr
would not have done for Girton College. In Britain, regionalisms are
the soul of ordinary English speech, and in James's time more than
in our own. Even now one can move from hamlet to hamlet and hear
the vowels chime charmingly with a different tone in each village.
Hull, England, is a city farther from London in speech- though in
distance only 140 miles to the north- than Hull, Massachusetts, is
from San Francisco, 3000 miles to the west. Of England, it is clear,
James had only the expectations of class, and a single class set the
