The Dialect of Emotion

WHILE men and women are about the ordinary business or alive in the moderate excitements of daily life, their speech is for the most part commonplace in content, but in expression diverse and variously characteristic. Half a dozen men in the Grand Central, or on the golflinks, or at a dinner-table, will have much the same remarks to make; as many women at a charity fair, or a bridge-party or a ball, will show like unanimity in the substance of their conversation. Whereas their ways of saying these common things will differ infinitely, — expressive in style, in choice of word and phrase, nay, in look, gesture, and vocal undulation, of the individual personality. Mr. Pickwick and his friends return from a cricketers’ dinner at Muggleton. How characteristically dissimilar are their expressions of a single opportune idea! And as the circumstances approach the universal, the sentiment becomes fixed. All people say, “Good-morning; ” but no two of God’s various creatures say it alike, — their utterances range from the ventriloquial grunt of paterfamilias to the gushful exuberance of Mr. Veneering at a house-party. Moreover, the common impersonal forms of excitement, though intense, merely increase this tendency,— as may be observed at a riot, or a fire, or a football game. The speech fits the occasion; the manner of speaking reflects and is peculiar to the speaker. But in the personal crises of our lives — in those poignantly emotive moments which we realize to be our climaxes and our curtain-falls — the converse is true. When we are wrought up to the quintessence of ourselves, greatly aroused, not because there is a fire or a shipwreck, but because my heart is a conflagration or your soul is plunging upon the rocks, it is no longer the form but the substance of our saying that can denote us truly. Now and then, under the lash of joy or pain or conflict incredible but that we feel it and live, self-consciousness turns inward. We are rapt out of ourselves; manner and mannerism fall away; personality speaks nakedly. Our voices and our words sound strange to us. The calm man is astonished at his own fire; the mercurial at his own poise. Washington curses like a pirate; Falstaff babbles of green fields; and Sentimental Tommy does not know whether he is posing or not, but only that he feels what he says. At these times it is the substance of the speech that is characteristic. We say what we are; and we show a strong and curious tendency toward similarity of expression. Each of our half-dozen men in declaring war against an impossibility, in receiving sentence of death from a doctor or sentence of life from a woman, will say some different characteristic thing. Each of our halfdozen women will acknowledge her lover, or deny her God, or face the birth of her child with some individual saying: but one and all will speak the same language, wonderfully alike in diction and in style, even to details of voice and action. Socrates, Juliet, and Nathan Hale made various dying speeches. The idiomatic flavor of one dialect is in them all. The speech reflects and is peculiar to the speaker; the manner of speaking is universal and fits the occasion.

And this dialect of passion is much the same for all ages and all races, for all sorts and conditions of men. Poet and laborer, the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady, in their great moments find one form of speech, else unused, come naturally to their lips. It is not easy to describe or to define, because one hears it seldom and does not listen to it observantly unmoved. It has its own sound, — a certain tense, level intonation of the voice, with a curious effect of remoteness as if the speaker were at a distance, which one may neither mistake nor forget. It is the dialect of the memorable speeches of history: “England expects every man to do his duty.” It is the style of those memorable quotations from literature wherein metre alone distinguishes poetry from prose: “There must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well.” Strangely rhetorical, with a sense of big unusual words coming to their own; figurative (since all strong emotion is lyrical) but not creative of figures; snatching at the well-worn metaphors and using them meaningly, so that the trite phrases startle us like a familiar face in tears; simple in sentence-form and in the wedlock of word to thought, yet with a curiously bookish flavor, often inappropriate to the speaker. Where did Ignorance learn those words ? Or how can Culture forego her nicety to use them ? People talk like that in books; who would have thought to hear this language spoken here and now ? For it is more nearly than anything else the diction of the roman tic novel — the speech of heroes and heroines, which as we become momently heroic grows native to us.