girl, and many more. Modern poets often avoid using this poetic diction in the endeavor to make their style less traditionally poetic after the fashion of the older school of writers of verse. Even the most realistic of modern poets, however, is sure to employ certain words in associations which would occur only in literary expression. Manifestly there is nothing reprehensible in this cultivation of a literary vocabulary when the vocabulary is in the spirit of that literary tradition which gives its distinctive quality to all literary composition. Sins against good taste are as possible here, however, as elsewhere in the use of language. It is easy to overdo, easy to misapply the strong colors of the literary speech. And a cheap literary taste may be cultivated as well as a distinguished one, as in the newspaper exploitation of ban for forbid, pact for agreement, and in hosts of other instances of journalese.

The most important observation to be made with respect to these several levels of English speech is that no one of them implies a condemnation of the others. Each has its own right to existence, except perhaps the lowest level. As the distinctive speech of those who exhibit a brutal insensitiveness to the preferences, tastes, and feelings of others, little can be said in defense of Vulgar English. But life would certainly lose some of its charm if all forms of popular speech should pass out of existence. The conventions which prevail on the cultivated colloquial level are comfortable and save a great deal of trouble, yet are scarcely so authentic as to acquire the right to supersede all other customs of speech. Cultivated speech indeed continually restores and refreshes itself by imbibing some of the untroubled waters drawn from the well

of unsophisticated speech. That popular speech is a well of English pure and undefiled one might hesitate to say. Simple life and simple customs nevertheless often have a health-giving directness of a beneficent influence. In the matter of language, for example, they continually check the cultivated speech in its tendency to develop towards elaborate and bloodless refinement. These are justifications of popular English from the point of view of cultivated colloquial speech. But obviously from its own point of view, popular English calls for no justification. It meets adequately the needs in language of the speakers who employ it, and it provides in many ways a more perfect adaptation of speech to its environment than the English of any other level.

The justifications of English on the formal colloquial and on the literary level are self-evident. They are indeed easily exaggerated, owing to the common human tendency to lift rarified and impersonal aspirations to positions of exceptional authority. But just as the popular speech provides a corrective against excessive] refinement in cultivated colloquial speech, so this latter in turn, like a magnet imbedded in the life-giving earth, always draws back to it the eccentricities of the formal and literary speech when they wander too far from the center. The special occasion must have its appropriate language, but a limited language, since the occasion is special. It is a language perhaps too good for human nature's daily food. Its goodness or badness, however, as a speech for all needs is beside the point, since no speech can be that. The conclusion one must come to, therefore, when one looks at English from the point of view of levels is that the first requirement of all English is that it shall

be appropriate to the circumstances that attend it. A very large element in establishing the goodness of any use of English must lie in a sensitive realization of the tone one wishes to maintain. Anyone who is aware of the levels of English speech and begins to learn how to keep them has gone a long way towards the mastery of good English. The categories here described are by no means exhaustive, and to carry them further should prove a helpful exercise in the understanding of the many adaptabilities of English speech in its varied living moments.

VII

THE DRIFT TOWARD REGULARITY

SINCE regularity implies order and system, it would seem at first thought that here, if anywhere in language, the notion of drift would be inapplicable. When one beholds the grammatical system of a language spread out neatly on the printed page, even the system of a language like Modern English, which has relatively little grammar of the traditional formal kind, one is filled with amaze at the picture of order in complexity which it exhibits. Paradigms and conjugations, parts of speech, subjects, predicates, and objects, these and the various other terms of grammar designate not merely single actions in speech, but large groups, each repeating the other with remarkable uniformity. How could such things be unless someone had made an orderly plan for them? How can we have regularity in language without a system, and how can we have a system without systematizers? The theological argument based on the notion of a design in nature would seem to apply even more convincingly as proving the existence of conscious design in language. A few repetitions one might explain as coincidences, but whole sequences of regular repetitions cannot be disposed of so easily.

Nevertheless, in spite of what seem like overwhelming appearances of intentional system in language, many otherindications make it certain that for the most part the, system of a language is the result of unconscious drift,

only in relatively slight degree of directed purpose. For one thing, we note that the descriptions of languages that have been set forth in systematic accounts of them have、 always been made long after the event, long after the system had evolved itself in the living practice of the language. Systematic grammars of English were not attempted, so far as anyone knows, before the seventeenth century. Chaucer wrote English without any formulated rules of English grammar to direct him, probably with only vague realization of the possibility of writing an English grammar, and there is no record of any grammar for the Anglo-Saxon period of the language when English was certainly as elaborate in its structural system, and perhaps quite as regular as it has been at any later time. The conclusion is unavoidable that the grammatical facts of a language are made at a time when there are no grammarians. The grammarians come after the work of the day is over, after the language has acquired its system. The grammarians discover what others have done, and having discovered it, they begin to write about it, often with such enthusiasm that before long they convince themselves that they have had a hand in creating that which they have only stumbled upon.

What is true of English and other languages with a literary tradition, is also true of languages that have never developed out of their simple colloquial stages. Many languages of uncivilized peoples have an extraordinarily complicated structural form, maintained with almost mechanical regularity in the speech of the societies in which they occur. But the speakers of these languages do not themselves know that their language is structurally complicated and regular, nor do they wittingly make any