That strange, that ever novel, that magical thing—the aspect of one's own land from the sea—is passing out of the literature of the English. I wonder why? I wondered at it the more last week when I went down the coast of Dorset and Devon in my boat under a brilliant sky with a happy north-east following wind and saw the splendid regiment of cliffs martialled in its vast curve eastward from Strait Point to that faint and doubtful wedge on the horizon which was Portland Bill.
Of landscape from within the land our modern literature has had far more than enough, a surfeit and a gorge of it. The theme came tumbling in with the French Revolution and fairly boiled over. But though our time has all in its favour for catching once again the marvel, the unique emotion, which fills a man when he sees his own land from the sea, for some reason the aspect is forgotten.
For one man that came into England from overseas and saw that sight in old days there are a hundred now. You may say that pretty well all the leisured class, which unhappily is the chief fabricator of verse and prose, has thus seen England. Yet in the verse and prose theyfabricate I recollect but very little mention of the thing—and again I wonder why?
If a man were to waste himself upon mere description he could get no better matter for his pen, and none that should more fill his page. The incessant change; the splendid emphasis, now of this and now of that, upon the distant shore; the odd particularity, on a clear day, of details one would never hope to match inland; the vision, equally removed from common experience, of a vague something not to be seized when the mist plays with the coastline or when a haze in a hot noon covers the land; the invitation of harbours; the curious, unexpected, opening of points; the revelation of new things perpetually—all this goes nearly unexpressed. Now and then you get it in the way that is the best way to express any profound emotion in literature—I mean elliptically. Notably have you it in the splendid:
Sweeping by shores where the names are the name of the victories of England,
Sweeping by shores where the names are the name of the victories of England,
Sweeping by shores where the names are the name of the victories of England,
Sweeping by shores where the names are the name of the victories of England,
in writing which Newbolt left his country his debtor. But it is very rare indeed to-day.
There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to think ofthe people inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of sand as some unknown and happy people; or, if you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And, again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly lessens the mere interest in one's fellows. Nowhere does England take on personality so strongly as from the sea.
Whether the cause be northern climate or some other thing, even height, the awfulness of land uplifted, which is so especially stirring to modern men and has produced the modern worship of mountains, seems to have a different and a greater quality when you adore it from the level of the seas. No inland effect of mountains that I have come across in my life (and I have come across many all over the world) can match that sight which so few have seen—the solemn amphitheatre of the Welsh giants standing in rank round the northern corner of Cardigan Bay. Yet, who has given us a picture of it? There may be such a picture somewhere, but at any rate it is not famous. The place is little visited by leisured sails for there is no harbour save Port Madoc, with a very difficult fairway, and shoal. The outer sea also is shoal, and there runs across it for miles, like a barrier, the causeway of St. Patrick, almost out of water, and having at itsend the mournful tolling of a great bell. None have occasion, I suppose, to visit that triangle of our seas except those who trade for slate into the little haven. It is upon no track, the great steamers never visit it. You lie there in some summer calm, and those hills which are (by mere measurement) so small compared with the great ranges of Europe, not a third of the Alps or the Pyrenees, stand out as tremendously, or more tremendously, than the awful cliffs of Araxas or than that dreadful Gulf of Air beyond which, from the Jura, loom the peaks beyond Lake Leman. You seem, as you look on that embayed rank of mightiness and gloom, to lie there at anchor in the presence of great individual and lasting powers, of sentient and watching, though eternally silent, things.
And there is another landscape of the sea, which is that where two countries stand upon either side from the midway of a passage; it is a sight which explains history for one better than most things of travel. Often enough one is told, for instance, how the Irish hills of Wicklow can be caught from the Snowdon range or those of Wexford from the lesser heights of the south, the line of Pembrokeshire near Fishguard and St. David's. But I remember something which makes one realise the separation and the neighbourhood of the two islands far better than such an inland view: I remember how on a certain November day, very clear and frosty, with atouch of snow upon the hillsides, the Wexford heights and the Welsh stood equidistant from the deck; each plain and neighbourly, yet with all that sea between. Nor shall I ever forget a certain late evening in summer, twenty years ago, when the sun set upon an even sea line, flooding the dark water with crimson, and how Grisnez and the Kentish cliffs to the left and to the right gave to the narrows of the Channel the aspect of a great river mouth, so that one thought, as one gazed, of those wide mountain estuaries of the West, along the coast of the Pacific, where such a river as the Columbia swells down into the sea.
But of all those sacramental sights the chief is the landfall from very far away. When a man after days at sea first hesitates whether some tenuous outline or level patch barely perceived, a vast way off, is land or cloud and then comes to the moment of certitude and knows it for land, all his mind changes; the ship becomes a different thing; the world, which has been formless and simple, takes on at once name and character. He is back among human things.
The other day as I was sailing down channel at dawn I contemplated a piece of rope (which was my only companion) and considered how many things attached to it, and of what sort these were.
I considered in the first place (as it has become my unhappy custom to do about most things) how mighty a theme this piece of rope would be for the modern rubbish, for the modern abandonment of common sense. I considered how many thousand people would, in connexion with that bit of rope, write that man had developed it through countless ages of upward striving from the first dim savage regions where some half-apelike creature first twisted grass, to the modern factory of Lord Ropemaker-in-chief, which adorns some Midland Hell to-day. I considered how people made up history of that kind entirely out of their heads and how it sold by the waggon-load. I considered how the other inventions which I had seen arise with my own eyes had always come suddenly, with a burst, unexpectedly, from the oddest quarters. I considered how not even this glaring experience was of the least use in preventing fools from talking folly.
Next I considered, as I watched that bit of rope, the curious historical fact of anonymity. Some one first thought out the bowline knot. Who was it? He never left a record. It seems that he desired to leave none. There would appear to be only two kinds of men who care about leaving a record of themselves: artists and soldiers. Innumerable other creators since the world began are content, it would seem, with creation and despise fame. I have often wondered, for instance, who invented forming fours. I very much doubt his being a soldier. Certainly he was not a poet. If he had been a soldier he would not have let you forget him in a hurry—and as for poets, they are good for nothing and could no more invent a useful thing than fly.
Note you, that forming fours is something which must have been invented at one go. There is no "Development" about it. It is a simple, immediate and revolutionary trick. It was not—and then it was. Note you also that until the trick of forming fours was discovered, no conversion from line into column was possible, and therefore no quick handling of men. So with knots and so with splicing. There are, indeed, one or two knots that have names of men attached to them. There is Walker's knot, for instance. But Walker (if Walker it was who invented it) made no great effort to perpetuate his fame, and all the common useful knotswithout which civilisation could not go on, and on which the State depends, were modestly given to mankind as a Christian man, now dead, used to give his charity! without advertisement.
And this consideration of knots led me to another, which was of those things which had been done with ropes and which without ropes would never have happened. The sailing of the sea, the execution of countless innocent men, and now and then, by accident, of somebody who really deserved death: The tying up of bundles, which is the solid foundation of all trade: The lasso for the catching of beasts: The hobbling of horses: The strengthening of man through pulleys: The casting of bridges over chasms: The sending of great messages to beleaguered cities: The escapes of kings and heroes. All these would not have been but for ropes.
As I looked at the rope I further considered how strange it was that ropes had never been worshipped. Men have worshipped the wall, and the post, and the sun, and the house. They have worshipped their food and their drink. They have, you may say, ceremonially worshipped their clothes; they have worshipped their headgear especially, crowns, mitres, ta-ra-ras; and they have worshipped the music which they have created. But I never heard of any one worshipping a rope. Nor have I ever heard of a rope being made a symbol. I can recollectbut one case in which it appears in a coat-of-arms, and that is, I think, in the case of the County or City of Chester, where, as I seem to remember, the Chester knot is emblazoned. But no one used it that I can remember in the Crusades, when all coats-of-arms were developing. And this is odd, for they used every other conceivable thing—windmills, spurs, boots, roses, staffs, waves of the sea, the crescent moon, lions and leopards and even the elephant, and black men's heads, birds, horses, unicorns, griffons, jolly little dogs, chess boards, eagles—every conceivable thing human or imaginary they pressed into service; but no ropes.
One would have thought that the rope would have been a basis of measurement, but there are only two ways in which it comes in for so obvious a purpose, and one of these is lost. There was the old Normanhrap, which was vague enough, and there is the cable, the tenth of a sea mile. But the rope does not come into any other measurement; for you cannot count the knots on a log line as a form of measurement with ropes. The measurement itself is not drawn from the rope but from geographical degrees.
Further, I considered the rope (as it lay there) on its literary side. No one has written verses to ropes. There is one verse about ropes, or mainly about ropes in a chaunty, but I do not think there is any poem dedicated to ropes anddealing mainly with ropes. They are about the only thing upon which verse has not been accumulated—bad verse—for centuries.
Yet the rope has one very important place in literature which is not recognised. It is this: that ropes more than any other subject are, I think, a test of a man's power of exposition in prose. If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English tongue. You are not only a master—you are a sign, a portent, a new discoverer, an exception among your fellow men, a unique fellow. For no one yet in this world surely has attained to lucidity in this most difficult branch of all expression. I find over and over again in the passages of those special books which talk of ropes, such language as—"This is a very useful knot and is made as follows:—a bight is taken in the standing apart and is then run over right handedly, that is with the sun or, again, the hands of a watch (only backward), and then under the running part and so through both times and hauled tight by the free end." But if any man should seek to save his life on a dark night in a sudden gust of wind by this description he would fail: he would drown.
Take the simplest of them. Take the Clove Hitch. Write a sentence in English which will explain (without a picture) how to cast a Clove Hitch. I do not think you will succeed.
Talking of this literary side of ropes, see how the rope has accumulated, like everything else, a vast army of technical terms, a whole regiment of words which are its family and of which it is very jealous. People who write of ropes are hardly able to keep off these words although they mean nothing to the reader and are but a darkening and a confusion. There is stranding and half-stranding and there is parcelling, serving and whipping, and crowning and all the rest of it. How came such words there? Who thought them to the point? On what possible metaphors were they founded? In nearly all other groups of technical words you can trace the origin, but here you cannot. Nor can you find the origin of the names for all the hundred things that are made of ropes. Why is a gasket called a gasket? Why is a grommet called a grommet? Why is a true lover's-knot called a true lover's-knot? or a tack a tack? Now and then there is a glimmering of sense. Halyard is obvious and sheet is explicable. Outhaul and downhaul might be Greek or German so plainly do they reveal their make-up. But what are you to make of bobstay, parrel, runner and shroud? Why are ratlines ratlines? What possible use could they be to a rat? They are no good forleavinga sinking ship, though excellent for running up out of the rising water. "Springs" I half understand, but whence in the name of Chelsea came "painter"? Reef points mightpass. That is if you admit reef—which, I suppose, is the same as "reave" and "rove"—but, great heavens, where did they get "earrings"—and why do you "mouse" hooks, and what have cats to do with anchors?
A ship is a little world, a little universe, and it has a language of its own, which disdains the land and its reasons.
I came out of the sea the other day into a little English harbour and landed there. After I had put away everything on board and left my boat in charge of the old man who looks after her in the tidal lock, I stood waiting outside the railway station till my train should come and take me home. And there it was that I saw a German gun.
They had put it up for a trophy. Never was a war with trophies so promiscuous! Never was a war with trophies so much of an anti-climax! The nearest thing to a real trophy which they have had since this war ended was the great pyramid of guns in the middle of the Champs Elysées, all heaped together pell-mell with the cock crowing on the top of them. But I never see a Bavarian or a Prussian gun stuck up mournfully in a little English town without thinking of the English and French guns which are knocking about somewhere among the German states. And what is more, I never see one without thinking how poor a trophy the modern gun makes; especially the German gun, the carriage of which always reminds me of rather heavy and bad agricultural machinery. I thinkof the trophies of old, of the fine bronze guns taken in the wars against the French, and of the flags in the churches, and especially that amazing ragged dusty double line of them in the Invalides in Paris, which looks down slantwise through a yellow window and sees, in its solemn gulf below, the huge marble sarcophagus of Napoleon.
However, there was the gun. And as the time of waiting for a train is the most empty time in the world (because you cannot limit it and you do not know whether it is long enough to start a geometrical problem or some other entertaining pastime), I filled it up by walking round that gun.
I guessed it to be a 150, say six inch, but I judge these things badly. At any rate it was a heavy piece, not a howitzer.
I know not what it is, it may be youth and its permanent memories, but when I see a gun firing at the moon cocked up at its utmost elevation, I feel that the weapon has suffered an indignity. It is as though it were an animal going through a performance. For the natural position of a gun is some slight elevation for a normal range, and not this isolated, head-in-the-air, barking attitude which the guns of captivity too often wear. They are noblest, these poor prisoners, when they stand level with the earth as though they were firing at close range in the hopeless effort to stop an advancing wave.
Well, anyhow, there it was, all lifted up, absurdly, like a dog baying.
Then, when I got nearer to the gun, and looked closely at it, I saw something which I have seen so often in a million German things that it has become a commonplace for them in my mind, but I know it is perilous to whisper it on this side of the Channel. The thing that has become a commonplace in my mind is the fact that Germans cannotmake, but can onlycopy. They have many negative virtues, very unsuited to their vast aberrations. They are fairly industrious, very simple, normally kind and domestic, and in their dreamy way, they half catch now and then what the older civilisation of Europe expresses in strong and positive beauty. But they copy. They are impressed. They are a soft metal and ancient Europe is the die. What made me think of this commonplace was the seeing on that gun—actually engraved upon a modern gun!—a poor little copy of Louis XIV. Think of it! After now much more than two hundred years! There it was before my astonished eyes, and I could hardly believe it; the motto of the great king copied upon a Hohenzollern gun! It was like reading the "Honi soit qui mal y pense" of the Plantagenets on the Menu of a Cosmopolitan Hotel....
For Louis XIV in his proudest moment had engraved upon his cannon, just above the middle point where cannons turn upon their trunnions,a great "L" written in a flourishing script, with a crown above it, and then along the breach, just above the touch-hole, he had had engraved upon a sort of scroll the phrase "Ultima ratio regum." It was a famous phrase in Europe then. The greatest of English writers made good fun of it when he said: "It seems that his arguments have been turned against himself."
That was Louis XIV's manner; and, I say, I thought everybody had forgotten it. I thought that no one remembered that motto except a few miserable people like myself who potter about doing useless things. But I was wrong. The last King of Prussia, the last of the Hohenzollerns, the man upon whom the famous oracle of the thirteenth century has fallen,heremembered it—William II, last and most grotesque German Emperor, was responsible for this silly thing.
For there on that gun in the wretched little, absurd little, squalid little station square of a little port, with no one to pay it the honour even of curiosity, I remarked graven things slavishly copied from Louis XIV. First, just above the trunnion, there was a crown and under it, in exactly the same flourishing script of the seventeenth century, the two letters "W. R." interlaced, and between them an eagle looking fiercely to its right.... So I take it that this gun was worked for the King of Prussia.
Then at the breach there was a scroll, and in the scroll was a similar script just like that ofLouis XIV. And the motto ran: "Ultima ratio regis"—"regis" mind you, not "regum."
We all have the defects of our qualities, and there does go with the German, even with the Prussian, simplicity, an astonishing lack of critical power. "Ultima ratio regum" is one thing: "Ultima ratio regis" is quite another. It reminded me of the famous quotation: "Frailty, thy name is lady."
Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument—his last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed flourishing initial, and there was the crown.
I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers—of those who do me the honour to read this rambling—will think me a fool for what I am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48—old bronze guns. And these the French had made with great art.They were beautiful things. What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name. One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another "Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a name.
And what sort of name should it have had? It could not have had a name for an abstract virtue or idea, like a French gun. It might have had the name of a great German man, but the names of such men are soon exhausted. It might have had the name of a jest, for jests are innumerable; but then the reader would have had to understand the jest which would probably have been local—like "Grandmamma" or "Archie" or the huge French gun I knew in my youth, which the men of my youth called "Silence in the Ranks"—an enormous piece on the top of a fort. Indeed, I cannot conceive what name could have been given to this one gun out of so many guns. Still I wish it had had a name.
If it had had a name I could look back on it, now that I have left it, and say to myself: "What fun I had in those few minutes beforethe train came in, examining the outward expression of ——, his character, his toilet, his elevation, and all the rest of it!"
But the gun had no name, and so I must still carry it in my mind anonymously as "the German gun."
Of all the hundreds of guns that I have seen lying about or being carried on trucks or drawn by horses, or standing in the great factories during these years, only one gun has touched me more, and this also was a German gun. I saw it in February, 1915. It lay derelict in a ditch close to the road near the river Ourcq, within an hour of Meaux, and Paris not forty miles away. It was perhaps the extreme gun of all the invasion; the mark of the high tide. It lay pitifully on one side, like the corpse in Beaudelaire's poem. One wheel it had not at all, but only the axle sticking up into the air, and the other wheel was rotted into the ground. And there lay the poor dead German gun like a fool.
I said to my companion: "Why does not some one of the peasants take it away and keep it for a relic?" To which my companion answered in the hard French fashion (which differs so much from the more human English way): "Why should he?"
There are a great number of trades in the world of which one does not hear, because men do not make a full living by them. Most of them are interesting trades.
There is the famous example of the man who gave his trade on the Inquisition Form as "Maker of smoked glasses through which to watch such total eclipses of the sun as may be visible from Greenwich." There is the less known but equally remarkable case of the worm-eater; and to this I can swear to, because I read it in print with my own eyes. It happened years ago in a police court in London. The magistrate said to the poor man who was (as is the fashion of the poor) in trouble, "What is your trade?" to which he answered, "I am a worm-eater." It turned out that he was not a person who ate little worms, nor, metaphorically, a man who made his living out of dejection and humility, but a person who simulated the action of worms upon old wood. He was employed by the furniture fakers to discharge a load of very fine shot from a great distance at wood which had already been scraped and treated with acid and chipped about so that it looked old. This very fine shot made very fine holes which made the wood lookas if it had been worm-eaten. Thus was he a worm-eater.
Then there are the men who do the hind legs of an animal in a pantomime, and there is the trade of the man who is not exactly a detective but, as it were, a detective's servant, and is not let into the secret but simply told to watch. There are great numbers of these honest folk. You may see them all up and down London, and you may mark them by two things. First of all, they always have something new about them, usually a new hat, because they are miserable men and their employers think that if they looked too poor they would be too conspicuous. It is a muddle-headed idea, but there it is. Therefore, they are always given something new in the way of clothing, and usually a hat. This done, they are apt to stay all day within a very narrow area, looking at a particular door and at the same time trying to look as though they were not looking at it. In this they fail. I had a long conversation with one of these innumerable London police-spies two years ago, and gave him great agony by going up to the house after he had spoken to me and warning the people inside.
But of all these hidden trades, the one I like most is that of Tag-Provider (as it used to be called in the old days of party politics). I believe the last of them is dead; at any rate, when I saw him ten years ago he was in a very anxiousstate, coughing, badly broken by age, and telling me he knew not which way to turn for a meal; yet he had had his prosperous days.
He lived in a little room, a lodging, at the top of an old house overlooking the river. I came across him quite by accident through my habit of writing rhymes—a pastime to which I have been given all my life. These rhymes I often print and sometimes sign; that is how he got hold of my name. He wrote to me and asked me whether I would go and look over some of his rhymes and see whether I thought they suited. When I got his letter I thought he was a poet who wanted advice, so I wrote my regular answer that I knew nothing about poetry and could not give advice. He wrote again imploringly, saying that he was not a poet in the ordinary sense but that in his profession it was necessary to introduce rhymes from time to time, and that my judgment really would be of great service to him, for he was good enough to say that I had quite a knack of rhyming, especially at rhyming words of three syllables, which is difficult. So I went round to see him, and being younger than I am now I was able to enjoy his conversation well enough for half an hour or more. He was very proud of his work, and had round his room autograph letters of congratulation which had been sent to him by the most famous politicians of his time. It was he who invented (it was one of the last of his actions)the tag "We want eight and we won't wait." When he asked me if this could be improved, I suggested "No fleet, no meat." He said this would not go down. I asked him why not. He said, "Because the public could not remember very short rhymes." They had to be rather long to have any effect, but not too long. He told me (and he was very proud of it) that he was also the inventor of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." "Here," said he proudly to me, "you have a very fine example of irregular rhyme with two balanced statements in opposition and contrast." "The first," he added, "is concrete, the second abstract: the first is purely historical without moral sequence, the second contains the deepest political and moral lesson."
I wish he had lived to the present day. He might have given us something really good and new, which we badly lack.
He also wrote "One tongue, one flag, one throne." He was not so proud of that, because, he said, that some fool had imported it into the United States, where it did not go down. The enthusiasts kept the "one tongue" part, but they did not know what to add, which spoiled the whole show. He did not make up the phrase "blood is thicker than water," but I suggested to him a very good way in which it could be turned into a poem during any one of those recurrent moments (they turn up every ten years or so) when our politicians are morally certainof wangling the American alliance. The rhyme I suggested was this:
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—
And so it oughter.
We had a great debate over this, and I fear it was his obstinacy which prevented this really fine rhyme from getting floated. It would have made a great difference, and we might, by this time, have acquired fame between us, had it not been for this silly old man's objections. So true is it that great events spring from small causes!
His objection, oddly enough, was not one of metre but one of grammar; and he added to this what I think another very silly objection, but one you constantly find in critics of good verse. He said "and so it oughter" made bad syntax with the first line. I said it did not: it must be read elliptically. The full sentence would be "And so it ought to be"; and I then pointed out to him that the very greatest poets had used the elliptical form and that it had appeared in a thousand interesting phrases. I cited to him from that splendid twenty-first sonnet:
... I have found a faceMore beautiful than gardens: More desiredThan boys in exile love their native place.
... I have found a faceMore beautiful than gardens: More desiredThan boys in exile love their native place.
... I have found a faceMore beautiful than gardens: More desiredThan boys in exile love their native place.
... I have found a face
More beautiful than gardens: More desired
Than boys in exile love their native place.
He read this several times and said that it did not parse either. I told him that the form hadbeen used by the poet Homer. This had no effect on him. He said it might be all very well in Asia Minor but it would not go down in England, and so, after quite a long dispute, he refused my version. But there it stands, and I am still proud of it:
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—And so it oughter.
Blood is thicker than water—
And so it oughter.
If ever the Anglo-American Allianceiswangled, remember that poem.
I asked him whether he had also produced political tags that did not rhyme, for I had heard a great number in my time, such as "Rome on the Rates." He said he had produced many such pieces of English prose, but that this was not one of them. He wished it had been, for he thought it a very telling phrase, and he could quote me one which had won no fewer than 117 votes. That was not bad in the old days when votes were less common than they are now, and when 117 was worth getting.
He was also very proud of his internal rhymes, particularly of those concerning the land:
Less of a pleasure place for the richAnd more of a treasure place for the people.
Less of a pleasure place for the richAnd more of a treasure place for the people.
Less of a pleasure place for the richAnd more of a treasure place for the people.
Less of a pleasure place for the rich
And more of a treasure place for the people.
It was the "pleasure and treasure" rhyme that made the success of that particular tag, he said, and I was quite willing to believe him. But evenas he spoke tears came into his eyes, and he added, "You will hardly believe me, sir, when I tell you the agony I have gone through in trying to find a rhyme for 'people.' It is one of the most difficult words in the English language to get a rhyme for. There are many rhymes for the abhorred rich, but none suitable for 'people.' There is 'steeple,' but I think that is about all; and it is dreadfully difficult to work in 'steeple.' I worked at it for three nights and then gave it up in despair. However, the thing in its final form did well enough, as I have told you."
I suggested to him that he might have turned the difficulty by using some other word for "people," as, for instance, hoipolloi, mob, populace, gutter-snipes, boors, dregs, dross, scum and other accurate and suitable words, but he at once stopped me. "None of these will do," he said, "because the People do not like being called those names." "Then," said I, "there is 'citizens,' 'the Britons,' 'Britishers,' and so forth"; but he still wagged his beard from side to side, saying that none of them would fit, "besides which," he added, "they are just as difficult to rhyme to as the other. It can't be done."
I asked him whether he had made Harmsworth's phrase "Rolling the French in mud and blood." He said yes, but he had originally written it with a blank—"Rolling the (blank) in mud and blood," and had hawked it all round London for years according as our foreign policychanged. The mud and the blood made a very good rhyme, and any old nation would do to fit into the blank. He had used the words "Russians" and "Spaniards," and even—I say it with horror—"Yankees," for he was at work as long ago as the Alabama claim, which I wasn't. He only wished he had lived long enough to put "Germans," but it happened just to fit in with the French at the moment he wrote it. He sold it to Harmsworth (he told me), and it came out in his papers, "We will roll the French in mud and blood." It did great service, for it frightened the French to death and kept them out of Morocco in 1899.
I next asked him if he had written the famous rhyme—
We don't want to fight,But by jingo if we do,
We don't want to fight,But by jingo if we do,
We don't want to fight,But by jingo if we do,
We don't want to fight,
But by jingo if we do,
—which is one of the happiest memories of my childhood. He was immensely flattered—but had to deny the authorship.
"I only wish I had written it, sir," he said (he called me "sir" the whole time, and it pleases me to remember the honour he paid me). "I only wish Ihadwritten it! That was a real corker! None of the others led to anything so big: this one very nearly made a war and moved a whole fleet at immense expense from one part of the Mediterranean to the other. No small feat! But what I did write, sir, if you willbelieve me—and I never got the credit for it—was a most excellent tag called 'Ninepence for fourpence.' It occurred to me in this way. I was sitting in one of Lockhart's cafés, which I patronised in those days, drinking a stir of brown with a slab of thick." I nodded, for the terms were familiar to me; and he continued: "As I did so a man came in with a shilling and said he would have a scone and a cup of tea and a pat of butter (in those days, sir, we had not the advantage of margarine. You young folks have a better time than ever we had!) The man came in, I say, with a shilling and put it down and said he would have a scone and a cup of tea and a pat of butter, and that was threepence. Then they gave him ninepence change. Then he put it back again and said he had changed his mind (the shilling was still lying on the counter), and asked what he could get for one-and-ninepence. The woman who was serving was very flurried with the crush of people, and she said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'One and ninepence. I have paid threepence—that is one and three and nine, makes ... no, I'll tell you what!'—putting down another shilling—'That makes two and ninepence together. Look here, that's too much.' Then he shifted the coins about a bit while she served other people in her hurry, and then she looked at him again all fussed and said, 'Now then! Make up your mind!' and he said, 'Well, I will tell you what,I think I can afford fourpence. Will you give me a sausage with some bread and a cup of tea?'; and she said, 'Oh, how you do pester!' Then he put down fourpence, picked up the ninepence change and the shillings, and in this way, after he had had his sausage and tea and bread and butter, he won ninepence by risking fourpence. He was a wizened-looking man with a cunning look and a fixed smile. I have always remembered him; and that is how I got my idea of ninepence for fourpence; but if you will believe me, sir, I sent that into the Central Office and they used it and never paid me!"
"What a shame!" said I. "What are you usually paid?" "Why, sir," he answered, "I used to work on a royalty basis, but it was so difficult to keep the accounts when millions and millions of people used the phrase and when it was printed in all sorts of pamphlets, that I changed my contracts and sold out and out. But now," he added sadly, "I cannot sell a thing. It is a terrible thing the way in which a change of custom takes the bread out of an old man's mouth." I said it was, indeed. "And yet," he continued eagerly, "it is an older trade than you think for. Believe me, sir, it has been in our family for generations." I was astonished to hear this, for I believed tags to be quite modern, but he assured me it was not so. "My own great-grandfather," he said, "was the author of 'No taxation without representation,' and thatwas a stunner. It rhymed and it took root, two things that often go together, and the old man on his death bed told my father, who has told me, how it was done, but you will excuse me if I do not tell you that because it is a secret of the trade; it used to be my livelihood and that livelihood may creep up again." He said these last words rather doubtfully, and was interrupted by a dreadful cough.
I asked him whether he used a rhyming dictionary, like Wordsworth, the great poet. He said, between the intervals of his coughing, "No, sir, no! I find it cramps the style! I ascribe a great deal of Wordsworth's failures to this deleterious habit. I walk the streets, keeping my mind as vacant as possible and then the things occur to me—or rather they did once occur to me," he added sadly. Then he sighed and said, "There is no market any more."
This was years ago. I have hoped against hope that the trick would return, but time has gone by and apparently the market for such things is dead and, as I said before, I think the old man is dead, too. But what a lot of good he did in his time, and how true it is of him, as of many other lesser men, that they achieved far more than they knew, and that their reward was not proportionate to their achievement.
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,Do promise Paradise—and yours are green.
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,Do promise Paradise—and yours are green.
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,Do promise Paradise—and yours are green.
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,
Do promise Paradise—and yours are green.
This little jewel—called "The Lover's Complaint"—is ascribed by some to Herrick. They are wrong. It proceeds from a younger but already faltering pen.
I introduce it only at the head of this to illustrate the singular depth, the weight, the value of the word "and." Even in the English tongue, the noblest vehicle of expression (but in this point weak), the word "and" plays its subtle parts.
We lack the double "and" of antiquity—that subtle repetitive effect in which the classics abound. We have no "que" to our "et"; we have no τε [Greek: te] to our και [Greek: kai] we have only our plain "and." But even so, our plain "and" has much diversity about it: a versatile, mercurial word: a knight in the chess play of prose.
"How is this?" you say. "'And' would seem to be but a redundant word to express some addition already apparent."
"'He was drunk, disorderly!' 'And' would seem to be stuck in between the two affirmations from a sort of laziness of the mind."
You are wrong. It is a great pleasure to me to tell you that you are wrong.
Even if "and" only pursued this function of letting the mind repose it might be welcomed as a bed; but it does much more. It introduces emphasis, as in the poignant sentence: "Their choice was turbot—and boiled." It also has an elevating effect, hooking up something to the level of the rest; as where it is written:
Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!—Andthe little brown bowl—We'll drink to the Barley Mow!
Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!—Andthe little brown bowl—We'll drink to the Barley Mow!
Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!—Andthe little brown bowl—We'll drink to the Barley Mow!
Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!—
Andthe little brown bowl—
We'll drink to the Barley Mow!
The little brown bowl would have come in absurdly: it would have jolted the mind like a bump in the road, were it not for that precious little "and," which catches it neatly up, putting upon one level that which goes before with that which comes after.
"And" is also indicative. Thus a man whom you meet talks glibly upon one subject after another, rapidly, yet more rapidly, tumbling over himself, desiring to avoid your eye. But he must take breath. You seize your moment and you say, "And what about that five pounds?" The "and" makes all the difference. It makes your remark part of the conversation. A gesture, not a blow.
In the same way you can recall an omitted name. When you have praised Tom, Dick, Harry, you add gently, "And Jack, what about Jack?" It is a pleasant, easy reproach or a reminder. Very much nicer than saying, "Whynot a word about Jack?"—which would be brutal.
"And" is also what the older grammarians have called stammerative—that is, it fills a chasm in the public speeches of public men, though here it is not so useful as certain other sounds. I have made a study of the sounds common to politicians in distress. I find that out of one hundred occasions "er—er" will come in eighty times; "I—I—I" eleven times; the less graceful "and ..., and ..., and" during periods of embarrassment only accounts for five. Moreover, the repeated "and" is hardly ever used in the absolute; by public speakers it is nearly always used with "er."
"And" also has the value of an affix. It comes before a lot of little phrases, where it acts like glue, sticking that little phrase on to the rest—"and" if, "and" even, "and" though; a humble use, but necessary enough, allowing the mind to work in a soft material.
"And" has various rhetorical uses which are to be admired—you can make long lists with it.
So attractive is "and" to the human mind that it will often expand itself, developing like a lot of soap bubbles—"and so," "and moreover," "and also." But the best of all these phrases—the king of them—is "and also, what is more." It is the most familiar of all phrases in the mouths of politicians. Do violence to yourself, force yourself to listen to a politicianmaking speeches in private conversation as is the politician's way. You will hear that phrase repeated. "And also, what is more." It is native to the tub-thumping fraternity. These things give a sentence the advantage of piling up wordy wealth, as it were, very satisfactory to the fatigued or the empty or the hesitant.
Those great men, our fathers, felt about "and" something reverend or peculiar, so that they hardly thought of it as a word, but as a sort of symbol. They put it at the end of the alphabet, calling it "ampersand." It is one of the worst things about our detestable time that this ancient national thing "ampersand" is forgotten. The old refrain used to be: a, b, c, ..., x, y, z,ampersand—that long word "ampersand," that fine ritual title, referred to the symbol "&" which "and" alone of words possesses. You find it in the old horn books. The children of England knew it by heart for centuries. But the modern flood came: it is gone.
The enemies of "and" will have it that a good style in English is to be obtained by cutting out "and." These are the same people who say that a good style is to be obtained by cutting out adjectives. There are no such short cuts. Also, to be an enemy of "and" is to be an enemy of all good things. It is to fear exuberance, which is the tide of life.
"And" has, again, rhythmical value, as in the ecclesiastical or liturgical line: