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ORIGIN
Pigritia is a terrible word.
It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft,
and a hell, la pegrenne, for which read hunger.
Thus, idleness is the mother.
She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.
Where are we at this moment?
In the land of slang.
What is slang?
It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect; it
is theft in its two kinds; people and language.
When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave
and sombre history introduced into a work written with the same
aim as this[39] a thief who talked argot, there arose amazement
and clamor.--"What! How!
Argot!
Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,
convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!"
etc., etc.
[39] The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
We have never understood this sort of objections.
Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a
profound observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend
of the people, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their
ruffians as talking their natural language, as the author of The
Last Day of a Condemned Man did in 1828, the same objections have
been raised. People repeated:
"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang
is odious!
Slang makes one shudder!"
Who denies that?
Of course it does.
When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society,
since when has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to
the bottom?
We have always thought that it was sometimes a courageous
act, and, at least, a simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic
attention which duty accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should
one not explore everything, and study everything? Why should one
halt on the way?
The halt is a matter depending on the sounding-line, and not
on the leadsman.
Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task
to undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social
order, where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins,
to rummage in those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize
and to fling, still quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect
which is dripping with filth when thus brought to the light, that
pustulous vocabulary each word of which seems an unclean ring
from a monster of the mire and the shadows.
Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in
its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming
of slang.
It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for
the night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks
one beholds a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers,
rustles, wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One
word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye,
such and such a phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab.
All this is alive with the hideous vitality of things which have
been organized out of disorganization.
Now, when has horror ever excluded study?
Since when has malady banished medicine?
Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper,
the bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who
would cast them back into their darkness, saying:
"Oh! how ugly that is!"
The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble
a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He
would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language,
a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For,
it must be stated to those who are ignorant of the case, that
argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result. What
is slang, properly speaking?
It is the language of wretchedness.
We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms,
which is one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades,
professions, it may be added, all the accidents of the social
hierarchy and all forms of intelligence, have their own slang.
The merchant who says:
"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality,"
the broker on 'change who says:
"Assets at end of current month," the gambler who
says:
"Tiers et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff of
the Norman Isles who says:
The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim
the fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the
real estate by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The
piece was hissed," the comedian who says:
"I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:
"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says:
"Voileci allais, Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist
who says:
"Amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness," the
infantry soldier who says:
"My shooting-iron," the cavalry-man who says: "My
turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:
"Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says:
"My shooting-stick and galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master,
cavalry dragoon, infantry-man, phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher,
comedian, playwright, sheriff, gambler, stock-broker, and merchant,
speak slang.
The painter who says: "My grinder," the notary who
says:
"My Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser who says:
"My mealyback," the cobbler who says: "My cub,"
talks slang.
Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on the point,
all the different fashions of saying the right and the left, the
sailor's port and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and
garden-side, the beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang.
There is the slang of the affected lady as well as of the precieuses.
The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles.
There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase contained
in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty woman
of the Restoration: "You will find in this gossip a fultitude
of reasons why I should libertize."[40] Diplomatic ciphers
are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal
for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI.
for the Due de Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the
Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and turnip, said Opoponach,
perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum,
talked slang.
The sugar-manufacturer who says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps,
bastard, common, burnt,"--this honest manufacturer talks
slang.
A certain school of criticism twenty years ago, which used
to say:
"Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of plays upon
words and puns,"--talked slang.
The poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding,
would designate M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois,"
if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang.
The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora,"
fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love,
"fires," beauty, "charms," a horse, "a
courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose
of Bellona," the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that
classical Academician talks slang.
Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. The tongue
which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language of the
sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken
by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with
the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets,
the shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind,
the gale, the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which
is to the fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the
jackal.
[40] "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude
de raisons pour que je me libertise."
No doubt.
But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word
slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our
part, we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed
and determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang.
The veritable slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang,
if the two words can be coupled thus, the slang immemorial which
was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy,
crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound,
fatal tongue of wretchedness.
There exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes,
a last misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into
conflict with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights;
a fearful conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy
and ferocious at one and the same time, it attacks the social
order with pin-pricks through vice, and with club-blows through
crime.
To meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented
a language of combat, which is slang.
To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above
the gulf, were it but a fragment of some language which man has
spoken and which would, otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one
of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is composed,
or by which it is complicated, to extend the records of social
observation; is to serve civilization itself.
This service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously,
by making two Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service
Moliere rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine
and all sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh.
Phoenician, very good! Levantine, quite right!
Even dialect, let that pass!
They are tongues which have belonged to nations or provinces;
but slang! What is the use of preserving slang?
What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?
To this we reply in one word, only.
Assuredly, if the tongue which a nation or a province has
spoken is worthy of interest, the language which has been spoken
by a misery is still more worthy of attention and study.
It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example,
for more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every
possible human misery.
And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities
and infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view
to remedy, is not a business in which choice is permitted. The
historian of manners and ideas has no less austere a mission than
the historian of events.
The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts
of crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles,
assemblages, great public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything
on the exterior; the other historian has the interior, the depths,
the people who toil, suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing
child, the secret war between man and man, obscure ferocities,
prejudices, plotted iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct
tremors of multitudes, the die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of
the law, the secret evolution of souls, the go-bare-foot, the
bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, and the
infamous, all the forms which roam through the darkness.
He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity
at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable
casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who
deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast
and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict
it.
Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior
to the historians of external facts?
Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer things to
say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any less
important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and
more sombre?
Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted
with the cavern?
Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words
of what precedes a marked separation might be inferred between
the two classes of historians which does not exist in our mind.
No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and
public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain
measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one
is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how,
at need, to be the historian of the exterior also. The history
of manners and ideas permeates the history of events, and this
is true reciprocally.
They constitute two different orders of facts which correspond
to each other, which are always interlaced, and which often bring
forth results.
All the lineaments which providence traces on the surface
of a nation have their parallels, sombre but distinct, in their
depths, and all convulsions of the depths produce ebullitions
on the surface.
True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian
mingles in everything.
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse
with a double focus.
Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.
Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having
some bad action to perform, disguises itself.
There it clothes itself in word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In
this guise it becomes horrible.
One finds it difficult to recognize.
Is it really the French tongue, the great human tongue?
Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort upon
crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of
evil.
It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of
the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it
is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have
painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double gait of the
reptile.
Henceforth, it is apt at all roles, it is made suspicious
by the counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger, blacked
by the soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.
When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals
of society, one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the
outside. One distinguishes questions and replies.
One perceives, without understanding it, a hideous murmur,
sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling
a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable
and fantastic bestiality.
One thinks one hears hydras talking.
It is unintelligible in the dark.
It gnashes and whispers, completing the gloom with mystery.
It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still in crime; these
two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang.
Obscurity in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity
in voices.
Terrible, toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls,
slobbers, and stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray
fog composed of rain and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood,
of injustice, of nudity, of suffocation, and of winter, the high
noonday of the miserable.
Let us have compassion on the chastised.
Alas!
Who are we ourselves? Who am I who now address you?
Who are you who are listening to me? And are you very sure
that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth is not
devoid of resemblance to a jail.
Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against
divine justice? Look closely at life.
It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.
Are you what is called a happy man?
Well! you are sad every day. Each day has its own great grief
or its little care.
Yesterday you were trembling for a health that is dear to
you, to-day you fear for your own; to-morrow it will be anxiety
about money, the day after to-morrow the diatribe of a slanderer,
the day after that, the misfortune of some friend; then the prevailing
weather, then something that has been broken or lost, then a pleasure
with which your conscience and your vertebral column reproach
you; again, the course of public affairs.
This without reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it
goes on.
One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one
day out of a hundred which is wholly joyous and sunny.
And you belong to that small class who are happy! As for the
rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.
Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase:
the fortunate and the unfortunate.
In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are
no fortunate.
The real human division is this:
the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the
shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that is the object.
That is why we cry: Education! science!
To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable
spelled out sparkles.
However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy.
People suffer in the light; excess burns.
The flame is the enemy of the wing.
To burn without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of
genius.
When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will
still suffer.
The day is born in tears.
The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.
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