这问题提得太广泛了，我们可以先来说明一下：所有一切职业，社会中人与人之间的关系，凡是有知识和道德的人的所有的形式，也都有它自己的方言。商人说：“蒙彼利埃货色不好，马赛货色好。”经纪人讲：“期票，付现款。”赌徒讲：“黑桃、梅花、讨点。”诺曼底群岛的法警讲：“在承继人要求继承遗产时，土地的所有人解除典押赀产的人，不能对地租受益人的赀产提出要求，这是因为土地的典押赀产是不能否认的，既经典押，便不能否认归抵押权人享有。”喜剧作家讲：“戏被喝倒彩了。”喜剧演员讲：“我吃了倒彩。”哲学家讲：“现象的三重性。”猎人讲：“伏莱，阿莱。”《骨相学家》：“爱憎心、好战心、秘密心。”步兵说：“我的铁家伙。”骑兵说：“我的小火鸡。”剑术师讲：“三度，四度，冲刺。”排字工人讲：“我的雪茄。”排字工人是讲“雪茄”的，但这并不能表示排字工人高人一等;而（印刷）工人则讲“我的磨坊”。画家说：“我的刷骨。”公证人说：“我的跳蚤。”理发师说：“我的助手。”鞋匠讲：“我的生皮。”等等。如果非这样说不可，那么，也就有正确的说法和错误的说法，有右的说法和左的说法，有庙的说法和江湖的说法，有去教堂做弥撒的人的说法和一般人的说法。所谓贵妇人、有学问的女人，也都各有她们的黑话语。朗布耶公馆几乎要接近奇迹庭了。有公爵夫人的黑话语，那伙在复辟时期写的最漂亮的爱情信的那位地位很高、容貌也很动人的贵妇人的下列语句可以作为证明：“你会在这些饶舌中看见许多理由，说明为什么我是这样自由。”外交电码也是一种黑话语，教廷的官厅用26代表罗马，grkztntgzyal代表信差，abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI.代表莫德纳公爵，这便是官方的黑话语。中世纪的医生称胡萝卜、小红萝卜和芜菁为opoponach、perfroschinum、reptitalmus、dracatholicum、angelorum、postmegorum，这便是医学家的黑话语。制造糖的商人说：“方糖，清糖，块糖，棒糖，浅黄，普通，烧焦”。这诚实的制造业主讲的是黑话语。二十年前的一个文学批评流派，说：“莎士比亚作品的二分之一是文字游戏，双关语”——这根本就是在讲黑话语。诗人、艺术家，他们有时也用优良的鉴赏力，把德·蒙莫朗西先生叫作“低于市民的人”，如果他对诗和雕像并不内行的话，那么，他也是在讲黑话语。古典的院士称花为“花神”，果子为“果神”，海为“海神”，爱情为“神火”，美貌为“仙女”，马叫“骏马”，白或三色帽徽叫“柏洛娜的玫瑰”，三角帽叫“玛尔斯的三角”，这班经典的院士也在讲黑话语。代数学、医学、植物学也各有它们的黑话语。船上使用的语言，让·巴尔、杜肯、絮弗朗和杜佩雷等人说的那种十分浩瀚、非常奇特、极其美妙的航海语言，随着凛冽的海风所发出的那种呼啸声、传声筒声、缆绳操作声、舷侧操纵器的碰撞声、船的颠簸声、风暴声、炮声，也完全是一种英勇豪迈的、光辉灿烂的黑话语，但是这种语言，假如和偷儿们说的那些狠恶的方言相比，便等于狮子见了豺狼，那简直是狮子的语言了。
It engenders a whole world, _la pègre_, for which read _theft_, and a
hell, _la pègrenne_, 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 this39 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.
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 Eugène 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 _précieuses_. 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 Duc 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 Duperré, 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.
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 Phœnician; that service Molière
rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all
sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phœnician, 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 rôles, 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.
