of the nice meaning and distinction of the art
of dialect will be found in Charles Dudley Warner's
comment on George Cable's work, as far back as
1883, referring to the author's own rendition of it
from the platform. Mr. Warner says:

While the author was unfolding to his audience a life
and society unfamiliar to them and entrancing them with
pictures, the reality of which none doubted and the spell
of which none cared to escape, it occurred to me that here
was the solution of all the pother we have recently got into
about the realistic and the ideal schools in fiction. In
"Posson Jone," an awkward camp-meeting country preacher
is the victim of a vulgar confidence game; the scenes are
the street, a drinking-place, a gambling-saloon, a bull-ring,
and a calaboose; there is not a "respectable" character in
it. Where shall we look for a more faithful picture of low
life? Where shall we find another so vividly set forth in
all its sordid details? And yet see how art steps in, with
the wand of genius, to make literature! Over the whole the
author has cast an ideal light; over a picture that, in the
hands of a bungling realist, would have been repellent he
has thrown the idealizing grace that makes it one of the
most charming sketches in the world. Here is nature, as
nature only ought to be in literature, elevated but never
departed from.


So we find dialect, as a branch of literature,
worthy of the high attention and employment of