"Lord Archibald I grieve to sayWas late for breakfast every day,And as he slunk upon the sceneHis kind papa—a Rural Dean—Would solemnly remark, 'My son,Our morning meal is nearly doneAnd grace will very soon be said.'Lord Archibald would hang his headAnd drop hot tears upon his plate:And yet next morning would be late."
"Lord Archibald I grieve to sayWas late for breakfast every day,And as he slunk upon the sceneHis kind papa—a Rural Dean—Would solemnly remark, 'My son,Our morning meal is nearly doneAnd grace will very soon be said.'Lord Archibald would hang his headAnd drop hot tears upon his plate:And yet next morning would be late."
"Lord Archibald I grieve to sayWas late for breakfast every day,And as he slunk upon the sceneHis kind papa—a Rural Dean—Would solemnly remark, 'My son,Our morning meal is nearly doneAnd grace will very soon be said.'Lord Archibald would hang his headAnd drop hot tears upon his plate:And yet next morning would be late."
"Lord Archibald I grieve to say
Was late for breakfast every day,
And as he slunk upon the scene
His kind papa—a Rural Dean—
Would solemnly remark, 'My son,
Our morning meal is nearly done
And grace will very soon be said.'
Lord Archibald would hang his head
And drop hot tears upon his plate:
And yet next morning would be late."
The poet has here taken poetic licence, for it is exceedingly improbable that the son of a Rural Dean would be called Lord Archibald.
But you never can tell! Titles jump sometimes over immense gulfs and land like some wild sea-bird upon the head of a most unexpected person, thereby conferring upon him a mysterious glamour from fairy worlds.
The poet of Lord Archibald has also, apart from poetic licence, been so bold as to point a moral. He shows how an ingrained habit will overcome a good resolution, and therein confirms the very wise remarks of Aquinas, to whosecompendium I refer you, for this digression is getting too long.
Still, as I was saying, side by side with the regular Nine Orders, there are the extras; for instance, military and ecclesiastical titles; and talking of military and ecclesiastical titles, these have bred a large swarm of bastard titles, about which I think something ought to be done. For it adds enormously to the worry of the Honours system to have, on top of the multitude of official honours, such unofficial stuff as "General This" and "The Rev. That," the first of whom turns out to be no soldier at all but a sort of Nonconformist parson, and the second no one in any orders, but merely a man who has put on a collar that fastens at the back and who talks at large upon divine affairs.
You may note, by the way, in connection with Bastard Honours, that one honour and one alone has really got degraded, burst its banks, and flooded the country, and that is the term "Esquire." "Esquire" meant a Shield Bearer, the man who carried the shield for the knight and served. He was less than a knight; but as he did most honourably carry the shield he might be confused with the armed gentry, so if you were not a knight, at any rate you were an "Esq." And not so very long ago the distinction was real. There remain still living, I believe (but I speak under correction), those who can remember writing their envelopes to a solicitorwith the word "Mr." in front, and to a barrister (who might be the solicitor's brother) with the letters "Esq." after the name. But even in our time the thing has broken loose, and is now all over the country. The Government Departments always put Esq. to save trouble, except when they are writing to convicts. They usually do it to women as well, which is saving trouble too much; but even Esq. in this, its last decrepitude, bears strongly the mark of an aristocratic state. For, note you, the unfortunate citizen (unfortunate only in the burden of his duty herein imposed, but fortunate, perhaps, in possessing so much variety in his social life) must try and remember the initial of every male he may write to. It is one of the things that foreigners, if they knew anything about England, would be most astonished at. The other day I wrote thirty-six letters with my own hand, every one of them to people of my own sex, and I suppose I wasted a good quarter of an hour looking up the initial to go before their ridiculous names. People hate to get a letter "Dash So-and-so, Esq." But I would here disclose a great and useful secret, second only to that which Prometheus stole from the gods, and this contribution of mine should merit me a civic crown. If you do not know the initial of the fellow you are writing to there is a sort of twiddle which looks like a "T," or an "F," or a "U," or might even be an imperfect "W," or a "J" overdone. I think, indeed, it is capable ofinterpretation as almost any letter in the alphabet; and if you will practise this twiddle you outflank their tiresome, baptismal names—for I suppose that even to-day most of them have been baptised.
Then there are the vast armies of honorific Orders, from the Garter downwards, with the famous newly-recruited myriads of O.B.E.'s, and there is J.P., and there is Rt. Hon., and there is M.P., and there is K.C., and (a thing to daunt the stoutest heart) there is a mass of letters giving pride to those who have no others, letters not conferred by any social authority, and yet the omission of which will make you an enemy for life. For instance, your correspondent may be F.R.G.S., or F.R.I.A. (I think it is), or F.R.C.S., or F.R.Z.S., or F.R.B.S., and even the whole lot of them combined, and not a day passes but a new one is sprung upon me.
Lastly, there are the transmarine titles; not those, indeed, of the Continent (for no one bothers about them here, nor could with so much of one's own to remember), but those that do come more or less into our lives from the general bond of one Crown.
There are the Honourables, who are Honourables because they have been professional politicians in the Colonies. And that has often made me think of what might happen to the younger son of an earl who should emigrate, become a professional politician in some colony and thenget into the Privy Council. Would he be "the Rt. Honourable The Honourable The Honourable," or what? And if, on the top of that, he became an Archdeacon, would you have to write on his envelope, "The Rt. Honourable The Honourable The Honourable The Venerable," or what? There are Rajahs and Maharajahs, and Akons and Khans, and there is the Oyo of Oya and a hundred others. Now, though we are not bound in strict duty to know them all, though nothing dreadful would happen to us (as it happens to those who wickedly neglect their duty to the rich, who mix up marquises with viscounts, or forget all about the Companionship of St. Patrick and the Bath), yet are we under some obligation to acquire a general elementary knowledge of these transmarine glories. But I say again that when it comes to the Continent of Europe, we put down our foot and will not be bothered. "His Holiness" attached to the Pope, "His Majesty" attached to a king, is as far as we care to go.
I often wonder what will happen to this huge house of cards. Will it collapse suddenly as Diocletian's did, or will it live on, a sort of ghastly life? Will its boundaries break down and will its stuff remain? Will some few of the dignitaries take on a vigorous life of centuries while others are forgotten, as "Dux," the Roman word for a General, has lived on and on and on for more than two thousand years, always withdignity attached to it, while "Illustrious" and "Most Dignified" and "Your Benignity" died and were forgotten? Will our posterity, say two hundred years hence, while calling pretty well everybody "Colonel" (as we now call pretty well everybody "Esq.") let "Lord" become a separate rank without distinctions? Will knights surreptitiously claim hereditary rights and establish them? What will happen? We do not know.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of that posterity, those who some centuries hence will read these immortal lines (in the surviving specimens of English prose for the schools of that date), I do put on record and solemnly confirm this: that to-day there are exactly two distinctions which all Englishmen whatsoever really would like to have, and only two. Though nearly all men would likeanhonour, yet there are two honours whichallmen desire. One is the double letter K.G., and the other is the double letter V.C. But they may go on wanting, for very few of them will get it. What we desire in this life and what we obtain are very different things.
To return to bad verse * * * * *
It is remarkable and true that bad verse, the nadir, has about it something of the poignant and removed from common experience which you get also in poetry. In the same way the demons are aweful—though in a different fashion from what the angels are. And so also great pits strike one with horror, as do the mountains with their sublimity.
That this is true of bad verse we not only feel on reading it, but also discover by the test that those men are rare indeed who can produce very,verybad verse; some of the worst—perhaps the worst of all—has been produced not only not unconsciously but quite deliberately by the great artificers of the craft. Good poets have sat down to see how badly they could write, and have produced stuff with a savour entirely its own and far below the level of your ordinary hymn or healthy public school song.
Very bad verse is the inverted copy or mirror of high poetry save in this, that it does not survive. The little tiny fragments of the bad verse of antiquity which have come down to us have only come down to us through the deliberate ridicule of great critics or great poets, which haspreserved them. But in later times—the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, for instance—bad verse has been preserved in another fashion which, as it has not been properly recognised, I propose to set forth here.
The great poets and the great writers of prose have now and again picked out, from what was clearly their own early or insufficient effort, examples to illustrate what bad verse might be. The immortal Martinus Scriblerus is an example. Pope and Swift certainly wrote many of those lines which, in that masterpiece, they quote as the worst conceivable. They either wrote them when they were young and brought them up for condemnation in their age, or else—less likely—they wrote them for the occasion as badly as they could. I am for my part convinced that the sonnet inThe Misanthropewhich Molière puts into the mouth of the fop was not only written by Molière himself, but was written by some young Molière who thought it good when he wrote it.
There is this to be noticed about the bad verse of the good poets (as, for instance, about that sonnet of Molière's)—they cannot (the Great Poets) quite avoid a good arrangement of words. And in this sonnet of Molière's I have discovered more than one line which pleases me: he makes his hero laugh at it, it is true, but it is not such a very bad sonnet after all, or, rather, it has some not at all bad lines in it.
Which leads me to another suggestion, a very unpopular one, but I appeal—like the granddaughter of Bechamel the sauce-maker—to impartial posterity.
I say (in fear and trembling) that a particular set of writers which was particularly revered in England—and especially revered during the Victorian period of England—was not essentially made up of great poets, although these writers published in all their lives perhaps three or four hundred good lines mixed up with twenty times as many thousand bad or indifferent ones.
It is an eternal discussion as to what makes a poet great; whether volume counts, and if so in what degree; whether proportion is necessary, and sanity—and so on, and so forth. But I think we have here a certain test: If a man cannot write, say, fourteen consecutive lines all of which are good poetry, then he is not a good poet. A good poet should, of necessity, have a certain wind. He may not be able to run a mile or even a quarter mile, but if he cannot run a hundred yards he is not an athlete.
Now the Victorian writers of whom I speak (and God forbid that I should mention the name of one of them!) had this particular characteristic about them, that though they often wrote three or four or even five lines that were good poetry, they could not keep it up at all. No one of them could write, for instance, a sonnet which had not in it some one absurd, even despicable, line. Now,in a short composition, your good poet is absolute. He is perfect. That is his test. If, in a short composition—for instance, a lyric of six quatrains—he has something quite absurd, then has he never taken the baths of Apollo. He may have got his feet wet, or even fallen in and scrambled out again quickly, but he has not taken the baths of Apollo; which you will remember are cold: in August a recommendation.... Was it not into the Mamertine that they lowered the unfortunate barbarian with ropes, and was it not then that he said: "How cold are thy baths, Apollo!"? He was quoting, I know. But as I do not know what he was quoting from, I will leave it at that and return to my original theme.
I say that those men who are too much admired, whereas they were not really good poets at all, betray themselves in this fashion. A man may be a great poet in youth and age with a period of bad poetry in between, or he may be a good poet and then lose his poetry. That is common enough. But for a man to be a bad poet and a good poet at the same time in the same verse is, I maintain, impossible.
What was it caused an excessive admiration of these men, particularly in the Victorian period?
The error extended to prose writers as well, and not only to prose writers, but to history. There was a whole mass of false judgment in letters and history between 1830 and 1890, which it is our business now to get rid of.
What was the common factor? I take it the common factor was confusion. Men confused the emotion of patriotism or of religion, or any very strong emotion, with the unmistakable quality which marks good written stuff in prose and verse. They similarly confused what was pleasant with what was true in history.
Cromwell made his country great and respected abroad. He was an admirable cavalry leader. He had a decisive way of putting things. Therefore might history legitimately say that he was of such and such a position and was built upon such and such a scale. But that was not enough for the Victorians. They had to make a hero of this very unheroic person, and therefore deliberately omitted much from his history that they chose not to repeat or, as their own phrase went, much that they had to "try to forget."
Now that is telling lies; for no man really deceives himself, though we say he does in extenuation of our own frailties. And so with letters. The Victorians emphasised in John Bunyan what their grandfathers would have called "enthusiasm," using the word in a bad sense: for their grandfathers disliked that tone of mind. The Victorians liked the orgiast—well, that was their affair. But liking that tone of mind they said, critically, things about John Bunyan's work which were simply not true. They remarked with justice the magnificence of certain of his passages of prose. The close of "The Pilgrim'sProgress" is as good a bit of prose as you can get. But the book has any amount of passages which are grotesque: any amount which are bad rhythm as well as bad sense: any amount which are boring. Bunyan was not a writer of even, regular, and always-to-be-praised prose in the sense in which the great Swift or Newman were such writers. He was an enthusiast, and had all the hot and the cold fits, the difficulties and the inspirations of the enthusiast—the complexities, the dulnesses, as well as the sudden fires.
I say this of Bunyan, knowing well that I challenge much surviving opinion, but, I repeat, I will not mention the name of one writer of modern bad verse, for if I did I should be torn to pieces by wild women and a kind of men.
The memory of these insufficient poets is still strong, like that of onions on a larder shelf after you have taken them away, and in offending that memory I should offend the onion-worshippers. Therefore, if you please, I will name no names.
But I do say that you can apply to those overpraised writers of verse a certain test beyond the test I have just quoted of their inability to write more than a very short number of good lines. It is the test of this question: "How would their reputation have fared if they had taken the other side in their theology? Their politics?" It is a question which one could put with a good deal of point to living writers as well. How would So-and-So have fared if instead of preaching thecommon and corrupted ethic of his time with its come-and-kick-me look, and its sly avarice, the ethic of the dead arrangement still called by the name of law, the ethic of the soaked-in-ease who want to be tickled, he had written exactly the same stuff on the other side—on the side of St. Alphonsus and of Bayard? How would So-and-So have fared if, instead of spicing all his stuff with an exaggerated and false patriotism—international at that—praising the strong and despising the momentarily weak, he had written in precisely the same fashion upon the unpopular side? If he had doomed the strong of the moment and extolled the suffering? That question is a fundamental one. When a man wishes to see whether he has drawn a line perpendicularly to another line and is in doubt, he does well to put his drawing before a looking-glass where any error there may be will be doubled and reversed and thus detected. The test I propose is of that same kind. Imagine anoppositemotive and see if the verse would still sound good. If not, it is not good.
But let us, in solace, remember this about bad verse; that there are all round us, yes, and writing for the papers and very popular, too, many worthy men who, if they wrote verse at all, would write bad verse, and yet have the wisdom not to write verse, or at any rate not to publish what they have written—an admirable thing to say of any man. For my part, I admire such menfor this very reticence of theirs more than I do for all else they have written in the modern fashion, whether to prove that there is no God, or that we should drink only water or that we should wear woollen boots or sleep with our windows open—or whatever else their gospel may be.
And, remembering that, being capable of writing execrable verse they have not written it, or at any rate not printed it, I forgive them all the rest.
Some years ago—long before the war—the startled Fauns first heard, then saw (as they peeped through the brushwood) a motor-lorry bumping and careering down the road. It had no hood; it was open. It was the more remarkable because in those days motor-lorries were rare. And it carried nor store nor sand nor any other merchandise, but all that were in those days the Poets of England—Swinburne being dead.
As motor-lorries, so Poets were in those days rare. The whole tale of these was eleven.
They had a Chief, or Master, or Mystagogue, who had gathered them together and was taking them on this perilous pilgrimage. I am not making this up. It is true.
So went they, so bumped they, with a prodigious clatter, and only one Prosator among them, the serf at the wheel; but they, all Poets, were clinging on for dear life in the wooden truck behind ... when—oh, my God!—a wheel struck something, and off the tumbril went into the ditch, and the Poets were flung far and wide. But Apollo stayed the hand of Death; they were the worse for nothing more than bruises. For Phœbus Apollo in his house of light saw Death going down through clouds upon England andhe said, "Death, where go you?" and Death answered, "I go to make an end of Eleven Poets." But the Far-Darter answered him again saying, "Oh! Death, tarry a moment while I pour you out the dark wine of Africa which the Massillians have brought over the cloud-shadowed sea to the ports of home."
So Death tarried, and when he had drunk that wine he slept; but while he slept, the Eleven Poets were saved. The lorry was, I know not how, set on its wheels again, and continued, in a chastened fashion, a less violent career, towards The Goal.
That Goal was a house where I had the good fortune to meet them; for in those days I was always in luck's way. I met them for one brief hour. I was not allowed to eat with them. I was sent for after the meal, as children are allowed to come in for dessert.... Yet was I older than most of these.
I did not waste the occasion, but almost immediately after my introduction to the Eleven Poets I challenged the Mystagogue, an Irishman, the Chief of the Band, and asked him the great question which has intrigued my mind from childhood.
"How," said I, "is poetry written?"
He put into his eyes a far-away look, like that of a fish which is dead, and he said in a mournful tone (did the Mystagogue):
"I cannot tell you.... I cannot communicate it to you.... It is a Muse."
I was naturally annoyed, for it was no answer at all; and I said (perhaps a little too sharply):
"I am afraid I cannot accept that answer! The truth is, you are keeping something back from me. You desire to prevent competition in your trade, and to keep its great emoluments for your limited guild. But Iwillfind means to learn, in spite of you all!"
He shook his head, and still more his hair, and smiled in the shape of a capital V. He said it could not be done.
I went home and consulted one of my many thousand books, and then another, and discovered the rules of Poetry, and read descriptions of Poetry in encyclopædias and critics' books, and also much poetry direct in Anthologies, hoping to find out how it was done. But to this day I have never discovered the way.
There is a story of Taine taking some of Renan's work to the window, looking closely at it through a large reading-glass, and saying: "One cannot see how it is constructed!" So I with poetry. I can see how verse is done, but I cannot see how poetry is done. How is a startling of the soul produced by the collocation of few, simple words? What essence is it in their sound and their order which opens the blinding doors of vision?
Chevauche Karle tout li port durant.
Chevauche Karle tout li port durant.
Chevauche Karle tout li port durant.
Chevauche Karle tout li port durant.
There, in one revelation, are the Passes of the Pyrenees! There are the solemn, menacing heights, the ceaseless waterfalls. There, in that line, are the gods of the unconquered hills. Yet it means in English exactly, word for word, "Charles rides up all the pass," and "Charles rides up all the pass" is not poetry.
I remember a leathery idiot giving, as an example to show that Homer was over-rated, the Catalogue of The Ships, and saying: "At any rate, you won't call that poetry!"—which showed he did not know what poetry was.
τω δ'ἁμα τεσσαρἁκοντα μἑλαιναι υἡεϛ ἑποντο"And forty dark ships followed him."
τω δ'ἁμα τεσσαρἁκοντα μἑλαιναι υἡεϛ ἑποντο"And forty dark ships followed him."
τω δ'ἁμα τεσσαρἁκοντα μἑλαιναι υἡεϛ ἑποντο"And forty dark ships followed him."
τω δ'ἁμα τεσσαρἁκοντα μἑλαιναι υἡεϛ ἑποντο
"And forty dark ships followed him."
If that is not poetry I will eat my hat.
I suppose what the man meant was that a catalogue could not be poetry. You might just as well say that the name of a man could not be poetry, or the listed names of many famous men.
The marvel is that this essence, Poetry, whatever it is, survives, like the human soul surviving death. It survives a complete breach in continuity. The way in which the language was pronounced may be lost; the shades of meaning may be lost; sometimes even the plain meaning of a word or two in a passage of true Poetry may be lost. And yet the poetic essence survives. It survives in full strength—again like the humansoul—and if there were a resurrection for languages, as there is for human beings, then the poetic soul meeting the poetic body would be quite at its ease, not enfeebled by so long a separation.
Thus when I hear it argued (with every probability behind it) that French poetry, on account of its extreme subtlety, will not—some centuries hence—survive that most lasting of our languages, I traverse. For men sometimes say that English poetry and Spanish poetry will survive the end of our civilisation, because they are dependent on lilt or stress. But how shall the glory of French verse remain which wholly reposes upon such tiny modulations of the tongue? The answer is that Greek undoubtedly reposed upon these same necessities; yet I take it that Greek poetry has survived.
Moreover, if you look at it, the English effects are a great deal more than lilt or stress, though lilt or stress is never absent from them. Some of the most desperately successful efforts in the English lyric are as slight in their nuance as the French. It is rare, no doubt; but you can find cases. For instance:
"Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away."
"Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away."
Here is in English what a French line is: a line with hardly any primary emphasis, a level linewholly dependent for its enormous effect upon the vowel sounds and the slightest modulations. And now for the miracle.
Imagine a time, a few generations hence, when the Britishthshall be blunted intodby Colonials of every blood and colour, when the shortoof "wash" has turned to the popular "worsh" and when the longoin "shore" had come to be pronounced like ouroo, when thesof the plural has in every position come to be pronounced likez, when the finaldin "and" has become silent, and also the finalgin "ing," and the characteristicaof the cultivated has become the popular "oi." "Whoilst dee de zhoores an zoundin zeas worsh far awoi." How could the line survive such changes? But it will survive; though I am damned if I understand how!
There is something very consoling for poor mortals in all this. We are here, in this world, all out of scale. We are hurried, we are grotesquely subject to change, though by our every appetite we protest against change, and hunger and thirst for victory over change. We are fast-rooted things, mocked by ceaseless fading; we are immemorial lovers carried on by a river of progressive forgetfulness; we are deathless within, and yet a death goes on about us (ah! andwithinus) all the time.
And there is in the midst of such a trial no temporal symbol of our real, our ultimate, security except Poetry. The intellect may convinceus (if it is strong enough) of our immortality. Faith will always accept the sensible doctrine of our not time-bound fate, and of the concurrent doctrine of Resurrection. But you do not find any stuff around you to confirm you—except Poetry. Religion assures: but nothing man-made supports the vision of heaven, save the completed line. That endures. That is outside time.
It is no answer to say that a poet may be lost, his writings forgotten. Of course they may—or they may be found again. The point is that the great poetic line is not subject to decay. So long as it is there at all, it is there in its fulness. And this is true of nothing else among the works of men.
On this account I envy those Eleven Poets from the lorry whom I met so long ago, and the Head Poet, or Mystagogue, their leader. I often wish I could meet them again.
These men were secure of something which no great soldier, no great painter, nor sculptor, nor architect—not even any great Secretary of State for Home Affairs or Master of the Buckhounds or Chief Whip—can boast. They had achieved the unique thing, the only deathless thing—that is, supposing they were Poets.
I suppose they must have been Poets, because they came labelled as Poets and were received as Poets; and, in fine, were by all external and social criteria, Poets. Just as a Lord is a Lord, or as a Judge is a Judge, so were they Poets. Ireally do not know what the definition is, but they were Poets. They were the possessors, the authors, the creators of that which no one could take from them and which will endure for ever—something that will never grow old. What a consolation for the memory of death! What a foretaste of immortality!
It is a fine thing to be able to say, and I can imagine one of these Eleven British Poets saying it:
"I have awkward manners and a foolish smile. I cannot earn more than a few hundreds a year, and my father left me nothing. I cut a poor figure among you all. But I have myselfmade: I am, therefore, a complete possessor. I am father andmasterof something entirely different from anything which you command: whether you command wealth, or lineage, or beauty, or any one of the talents which delight mankind in song or in instrument of music, or with the pencil, or even in building. I surpass you all, for I wrote this, that, or the other thing, and it will stand for ever."
Certainly of all boasts short of virtue it is the proudest boast a man can make.
I have just been working at the "Provincials" of Pascal. They are full of lies, and full of errors. They would not convince the stupidest of readers who should seriously compare them with the original documents which Pascal attacked. But no reader has ever done so. My object in reading Pascal's book was to expose it, and therefore my object on a small stage was to do what Pascal did on a large one, that is, to convince people: with this only difference. Pascal had only to convince those who agreed with him in believing something that was not true, to wit, that Casuistry was immoral. But I set out to convince, of something thatwastrue (to wit, that Casuistry was both moral and necessary) those who heartily, save Maynard and Derome, disagreed with me.
This amiable exercise has set me thinking about the art of convincing people; and I say "of convincing" and not "of persuading," for I think that the two arts stand for two different processes. You can persuade a man to do a thing though he still disapproves of it in conscience and intellect. But conviction is something higher.
It is an appeal to the intelligence and the love of truth. It relies upon the production of proof.Very interested am I in ferreting out the process whereby the thing is done, and in discovering why it will succeed when it is done in one way, and fail when it is done in another.
I must make clearer my distinction between the mere production of a mood, persuading, andconviction.
The mere production of a mood is effected (according to the weakness of your subject) by some form of suggestion. The modern popular press works that way. Its weapon is mere iteration, and its victim is the many-headed beast. For the persuasion of the higher sort the thing must be done by some seductive art, rhetoric, or flattery, or even music. But in either case the end of the process is not a certitude of the intelligence, and therefore your result is not final. Your intended victim may be jerked out of his mood by any shock—especially by a shock of reality.
There is between the mere persuasion and conviction an intermediate thing, very common. It is advocacy: the advancing of selected arguments towards a certain selected end. The victim knows he is being played upon, yet he often succumbs. A man does not want to visit a particular place. The method of suggestion would be merely to repeat the name of the place over and over again, and the command to go there. Such are those advertisements which you see upon the walls of great cities in flaming letters commanding you to enter a dull playhouse. Advocacy would putbefore the man all the real advantages of the place it wanted him to visit and hide all the real disadvantages. It would act through the intelligence, but also by cheating the intelligence.
Now, conviction is in a different world. When you convince a person you make him really certain. It does not follow that you make him certain of a truth, but you make him certain through the intelligence and not through a mere mood. Nor do you put him, as advocacy does, between two issues, one of which he chooses. You make him wholly at one with the doctrine you give. You implant certitude to the exclusion of every alternative. When you have done that you have created something much more solid and permanent than a mood or even an action; you have achieved a much greater thing than any advocacy or suggestion can. You have established a mind.
I know that in saying this I am going flat against the opinion of my time, for in these days we revere much more the man who can get a mob to think the moon is made of green cheese and then, to-morrow, that it is made of Sapolio, than we do the man who can convince. And the reason we revere the baser method is that for the moment there is more money in it. For the amount of money that a man may get out of his fellows by a trick is our measure of his excellence. Nevertheless, I will maintain that to convince is, even in practical affairs, much the bigger business. For though you convince but a few in a certain time,yet what you do is to plant something durable, and something filled with the power of propagating itself. Conviction breeds.
When it comes to the methods of conviction, however, I hesitate. The great rules are fairly well known: to present an argument fed with concrete example, and in doing so to interest—not to fatigue. If you combine those two things, interest and illustration, you should, according to the rules, succeed. The point about not fatiguing is that however perfect your reasoning, however strong your illustration, both are useless if the mind to which they are addressed cannot receive them. Fatigue interrupts reception. The points about concrete example are, first, that a concrete example alone is vivid (even in mathematics you must have visible symbols); the next, that in the application of any idea, concrete example is the only test of value to man. You will never convince a man, for instance, that protection necessarily impoverishes a nation if he has before his eyes the example of nations becoming suddenly very rich after adopting high tariffs.
It is quite clear that the citation of admirable examples, and even their citation without boredom, is not sufficient. There is something else, some trick of presentation, which lies, I fancy, in the sense of proportion, and which achieves success. In this, by the way, Pascal had genius. A wag rewrote one or two of the "Provincials," substituting Jansenists for Jesuits, and therebyshowed that they made just as good reading and were just as convincing in attacking friends as enemies.
Pascal had the art—which is most important in this matter—of leaving his readers under the impression that they had heard the whole case. It can be done honestly by actually stating the opposite case before giving the counter arguments. But it is more often done dishonestly (as Pascal did it) by making your reader think that he has heard all there is to hear, although he has, as a fact, heard hardly anything, or nothing, of the other side. Pascal was, of course, working on very favourable ground. He attacked what was at once powerful and unpopular, and what was not only powerful and unpopular, but sincere and therefore incapable of using poisoned weapons against himself. There is nothing more interesting in literature than to see how the honest men he attacked blundered in trying to refute him. They blundered because they weretoohonest for controversy. They saw that he was lying, and they took it for granted he was telling simple lies of a childish sort. They accused him of mechanical inaccuracy and misquotation, which was not the way to set to work at all.
Pascal's method was in part what may be called the suppressed alternative. It is a method which you often see used by demagogues also, and by any one of those who ridicule a superior to aninferior. Thus, on one occasion Pascal finds an author saying: "The obligation of a Christian to give alms out of his superfluity rarely arises." The man who wrote this used the technical theological word "obligation," but Pascal quotes him as though he used it in the loosest conversational sense. The man who wrote it decided (with obvious common-sense) that those cases were rare in which you could say that a Christian had done grievous wrong bynotgiving alms on a particular occasion. Pascal presented the matter so that his reader thought that the writer he was attacking discountenanced giving alms at all.
You very often see the same sort of thing done by people who ridicule the definitions of law. There is nothing easier. The law says, for instance, that a minor, a young giant of twenty years, can avoid payment by pleading "infancy."
It is quite easy to make that appear nonsense. It is not nonsense, but it is made to appear nonsense by using the word "infancy" in two senses. In the same way one could say by strict definition that the law does not forbid you to murder your grandmother. What the law does is to hang you if you murder your grandmother, which is, in strict definition, quite another proposition. Great play one could make before some one who had never heard of courts of justice, by saying: "Just think! The law in this country actually allows one to murder one's grandmother!"leaving discreetly aside the legal consequences of the act, and using the word "allow" positively and negatively in the same breath. The "Provincial letters" are crammed with this trick of presenting a word in two senses: as who should play on the word "take" and denounce the injunction "take your neighbour's money quietly" as meaning "steal it on the sly," when all the author meant was "don't play the fussy and generous refuser over small payments due to you."
There are those who tell you that not only Pascal and a hundred others, butevery onewho haseverconvinced has used dishonest methods, and that no one ever convinced by solid proof alone. There are those who will tell you that the admission of opposing arguments and their honest analysis would be either so dull or so damaging, or both, that those who adopt this, the only sincere method, will necessarily fail.
I do not agree. Thus only is it achieved once and for all. People who are too weak to follow out a close chain of reasoning are at first not affected by strict deduction and probity of evidence. But there is always a minority with brains enough and energy enough to follow an argument, and then at last lead the rest. The quality of such achievement is that it is final: it is never reversed. It is done once and for all. The few who have mastered the proof are fixed and have, henceforward, authority. To produce such finalconviction is a very great action indeed. It is the making of the public mind. It is the ultimate direction of the State.
But its first victory is exceedingly restricted. In matters where men have interest against truth, conviction is so rare as to work at first almost imperceptibly. An insignificant body receive a truth. Often they are dispersed. In a century there is a multitude. Soon, the world.
It is astonishing what a great part of energy goes in our civilised and lettered society to controversy.
This country is certainly as civilised as any in Europe and it is much more lettered than any other. That is, there are more people bothering about print than you will find anywhere else. It has something to do, I think, with living in great towns and depending upon newspapers, but, anyhow, there it is, and one of its effects is a continued occupation in controversy. It always astonishes the foreign visitor, and I think it usually irritates the foreign resident. It is a habit often attacked, but all this opposition to it is a foreign opposition at bottom. To the native controversy is food and drink, and no one would be without it.
Now there is much more in this habit of controversy than meets the eye. If you were to call it a passion for wrangling you would be exactly contradicting its nature. It is dearest to those who hate wrangling. It is carefully preserved from reality. It is a sort of game, and has in it much the same instinct as makes men play other games in a game-loving country. Its object is not conviction, but scoring under setconditions, and it is most interesting to watch how the rules grow up of themselves and how strict they become.
It would be the death of controversy to demand a real conquest. When people begin to get into that mood controversy ends and fighting begins. Nations which are intent on real results fall into civil wars. Nothing is more opposed to the spirit of controversy than this spirit of arms and a creed. Controversy is to the search after ultimate truth, or the desire for conviction, what fencing with foils is to slashing with cavalry swords, or what shooting for a challenge shield is to sniping from a tree at the other person in the mud.
Its weapon is advocacy. In pure, serene, absolute controversy the advocate will cheerfully take either side, but even in that less perfect controversy to which (alas!) our fallen nature condemns us, and in which there is some suspicion of real feeling, advocacy easily takes precedence over the statement of truth. And that is one of the delights of controversy, as no one knows better than they who have wasted and enjoyed their lives in this delicious pastime.
I always think that there is an ill done to controversy when the lists are unequally chosen. It demands for its proper exercise fairly equal chances for either side. For instance, one man gets up and says that England would be much better off if no foreign goods came into it,whereupon the other man, scenting a controversy from afar, says: "What about tea?" There at once—at the very issue of the bout—you have a knockout, and that spoils sport. Or again, a man says: "If you want to improve the communications of London you must have wider streets, and you cannot have wider streets without interfering with privileged pieces of property." The moment you begin to talk like that controversy is abominably offended. You might as well play chess with a loaded revolver, or come to the football field with a posse of bravoes.
No, the essence of this admirable exercise is a sort of "picking up sides" which balances the argument. You must give reasonable chances for advocacy to either party. Chalk the lists, face the champions square, and then let go.
I notice a very proper contempt for, and sometimes interference with, that party to a controversy who breaks even the less understood and more subtle rules: for instance, dropping the "Mr." in Politics. You may say of a parliamentarian, "Mr. Biggs was committing political murder when he poured his hidden poison into the sleeping ear of Mr. Higgs." That is all right. It means that old Biggs thought he could get more money by abandoning his leader Higgs. The use of the two "Misters" proves that in your heart you care not a dump which gets the salary, contracts, and perks. But if you say "Biggs won't take office under Higgs because he thinks there'sno money in it," that is blackguardly: for it spoils sport.
It is thus a breach of the rules to impute what are called "unworthy motives"; that is, serious motives. Both parties must, like the champions of the ring, shake hands; and there are a lot of little phrases (they are kept set up in most newspaper offices, and in some are stereotyped in ready-made bars) which come in most usefully for this purpose. Such are "No-one-can-dispute (Mr. Noggins's) scholarship-or-his-quite peculiar-knowledge-of (Samian ware)," after which you go on to argue that in point of fact Noggins is as ignorant as the beasts that perish, and you support your contention with special pleading.
So deep-rooted is this love of controversy that one of its favourite playing-fields is what one would imagine to be sacred ground, to wit, the security and happiness of one's own country. Jones has only to say that he wants his country to win in some war of life and death, for Brown, tempted by so admirable an occasion, to come up on the other side. But what does Brown do? Do you suppose he says, "I want my country to perish?" Not a bit of it; that would not be controversy at all, and, what is more, it would be an impossible position for Brown to take up, considering that Brown, by the very fact that he is conducting such a controversy, is stamping his chief national characteristic all over himself. So what Brown does is to show how defeat wouldultimately enhance the glory and increase the strength of the country. Both parties agree to this special limited area of operations, and within it they spar round and round and round. Meanwhile, the real war goes on, no harm is done at home, and the nation wins or loses without a link between that awful reality of war and the spillikin-match at home.
It is very difficult to define where victory in this game of controversy lies. It depends to some extent, like victory in any other game, upon fatigue, or lack of attention. I had a controversy in the "Times Literary Supplement" many years ago about the Battle of Evesham with another person who apparently knew less about it than I did. After the special pleading and nonsense had gone on through five or six moves I quoted Matthew Paris. My opponent (who wore a mask and a long cloak) came in with a heavy blow, showing that Matthew Paris was dead when the Battle of Evesham was fought. Now, the counter-blow to this was as easy as falling off a log. Your spectator (for whose benefit these newspaper duels are fought) would naturally say, "This is final!" What he did not know was that there is a continuation of Matthew Paris, commonly called under the same name, whichdoesdeal with the Battle of Evesham. All I had to do was to write another letter (which I am sure the courteous Editor would have printed, seeing that he got all this for nothing), pointing outwith the utmost good feeling, tact, etc., that my opponent was swindling, and, by using a false technical term, deceiving the populace. "Matthew Paris" (I should have said) "is a conventional term for the original chronicleand its continuationas a whole, and it is 'a poor trick of controversy'" (I love that phrase; it is one of the seasoned and rooted phrases) "to confuse the general reader with false references." Did I make such a reply? Did I write that letter to the "Times Literary Supplement"? Not I! I was smitten with an intense desire to go to Belgium (it was before the war) and study the battlefield of Ramillies, where is sold the worst liquor in the world; and off I went, leaving my opponent the proud and sole victor on that field. I wish to-day I knew who he was. To slay or to be slain by a hooded antagonist is poor fun: it ought to be part of the rules of the theatre for the man to pull off the hood at the end, either from his own glazing eyes or from those of his prostrate victim, whereupon the ladies would recognise to their amazement the features of Sir Guy de Beaurivage or Mr. Hulp, or whoever it might be, and the tourney would end with a feast to the hero after the sentimental burial of the dead.
Which reminds me of what a shame it is that so much controversyshouldbe anonymous. It was never meant to be so. After all, controversy is conducted for the amusement of the onlookersas well as for, and more than for, the exercise and moral health of the principals, and there is not much fun in an anonymous combat where, for all you know, the opposing parties may really be one and the same person.
Many a case have I known in London journalism where, as a matter of fact, the opposing partieswereone and the same person. There was a man who wrote years ago, during the Boer War, to a pro-Boer daily paper which he disliked, complaining of the way in which the teeth of animalculæ gnawed into the copper sheathing-plates of ships in the South Seas, and ruined them. Then he wrote a letter from another place in another false name to the same paper, saying that the first letter was written by an ignoramus, and describing how the animalculæ should be dealt with. There was a tremendous fight lasting for weeks, and it ended, I remember, by a beautiful description of the great ships built at Solothurn in Switzerland and there launched upon the mighty deep. Even then the editor did not smell a rat. Why should he? Editors cannot always know everything. And he thought (did this editor) that Switzerland lay upon the sea. It was necessary, therefore, for the public to break the ring and burst up the show: which they did, amidst great laughter.
I know another case where a man, being the literary editor of a great daily paper, reviewed one of his own books with the utmost virulence—but anonymously. He showed in this review a very profound knowledge of the tricks lying behind the production of the book and of the charlatanism of it. Then did he, in his own name, write a dignified reply, and there was quite a little commotion.
The reviewer wrote back adding further charges, which were demonstrably true. The author wrote once more saying his dignity forbade his continuing the quarrel, and the next day both of them counted as one in a meaningless division of the House of Commons.
To this day I am never quite certain that the more violent leaders I read in opposing papers are not often written by the same man; at any rate, they are often written in exactly the same style, with the notable exception of one daily paper which, as the atheist said of his unbaptised child, "shall be nameless." All the others (except this notableone) have their leaders written in precisely the same manner. That is what makes me think that they are done for the most part by one man—and what an output he must have! And what a lot of money he must earn!—even at two guineas a thousand, the price of prose in these most happy years of peace which have seen the birth of a new Europe and the dawn of The Day of Justice final and secure.
The other day I was writing in other fields than these, ploughing another land (to which, for the honour I bear it, I again give no name), and I had occasion to speak about the Nereids who swim about in the sea. I very pompously announced their appearance in the Sixteenth Book of the Iliad. I should have said the Eighteenth Book.
Why did I say the Sixteenth Book? I cannot tell. I have awaited, since the appearance of that article, letters written to me privately, written to the paper itself, written to other papers, all saying: "Why do you talk about things you know nothing of? You call it the Sixteenth Book; it is the Eighteenth Book."
So far no letters have come either to me or to the paper in question. Nor has any one even written to any of the great daily papers on the subject. So perhaps it will blow over. But my mind returns to the matter. Why did I write "Sixteenth" when I meant "Eighteenth"? What is inaccuracy? What are its sources? Whence does it spring? What makes one man more inaccurate than another, or rather (and much more truly) why is one man inaccurate in some things and another in others? What the devil is it all due to, anyhow?
I know very well why accuracy is such an anxious matter with men. It is because, alone of all the factors of learning, it is easily and mechanically attainable. It is no good a man trying to be just in judgment about a great and broad matter on which he is ignorant. It would be no good, for instance, my trying to look learned through a just judgment of Russian poetry—for I cannot read Russian. No man can mechanically, and as a matter of course, set himself right in the major factors of learning. But both he and others can get references right, now that there are so many printed books of reference. And therefore men study accuracy in published book-details, because they say to themselves: "Fool I may be, and ignorant I may be; but anyhow, I can be accurate—with the help of a public library." And at the same time they say to themselves: "General ignorance it is easy to hide; but if I am inaccurate, the biggest fool born can find me out: with the help of a public library."
So far so good. I know well enough why one bothers so absurdly about accuracy in such details; or, to put it otherwise, why mere slips of the pen and misspellings frighten us so much. But what I do not understand is how and why they take place in subjects which one knows as well as one's own name.
I remember once writing a long book about Paris; a long, long book, to pay my first quarter'srent as a young man. And in that book I found myself perpetually saying "North" when I meant "South" in the matter of the immortal hill—in the matter of the hill of the University. I always talked of going up that hill as going "North," whereas if you go up that hill you walk due South.
And I knew a man once who whenever he went into a shop to buy razor blades for his patent razor always said "railway blades." Yet in other respects he was an ordinary man.
I will not attempt to solve the problem. It is not fatigue that does it, still less is it real ignorance; for you will notice that a man is inaccurate about things he knows thoroughly well, and that the mistakes he makes are always of an absurd kind which he would be the first to spot in others; for instance, calling Nottingham Northampton, and the other way about. All one can say is that it happens as variations happen in the generation of animals, or as any other fluke happens. Some God guides it.
Inaccuracy is a very fruitful and powerful creator of things. It not only creates legends, it creates words. There are hosts and crowds of words which have come in through the talent of men for inaccuracy and through the inspiration of inaccuracy, which is blown into men by this God of whom I speak. Hence what is calledmetathesis, the very fruitful parent of many admirable words from Turmut to Hercules. Hencealso the naturalisation of French and other foreign words. It is a pity, I think, that so much printing, and the foolish pride of those who can read, checks the process nowadays. I live in hopes that it will not check the process for long, and that our coming barbarism will return to these popular words.
"Chauffeur" should be "shover," and "asparagus"—which I like to hear called "grass"—has, I hope, taken root forever as "sparrow-grass"—a very good name for it; for it is a grass and sparrows have no particular bond with it. They well might have, if they only knew how good it was; but they are stupid little beasts, and good for nothing. And if you tell me that thus to branch off upon the matter of sparrows is disturbing to the reader, and that one ought to keep the main thread of one's discourse, I answer you with a book always well praised and in parts quite on the highest level, called "The Book of Job." If you will read "The Book of Job" you will find that, in the catalogue of strange beasts which the writer brings forward in defence of the majesty of God, he gets to the ostrich. But hardly has he mentioned the ostrich when the inane habits of that enormous fowl prove too much for him. He forgets all about God and creation and the rest of it, and allows himself a little separate diatribe against the idiocy of the ostrich before getting back to his theology. So I with sparrows.
And now that I have taught you this lessonfrom Job I will return to the matter of inaccuracy.
Inaccuracy is also the breeder not only of good native phrases, but of excellent tales, like the well-rubbed, polished, ancient, and now immutable story of the boy in buttons who got nervous at the grandeur of the bishop, and said, when the sleepy bishop asked who was knocking: "It's the Lord, my boy."
And inaccuracy is the parent also of that still older and still more immutable story about the Pyramids of Egypt and their builders, which I cannot print here.
It was inaccuracy which made the guide-book man so angry at the phrase, "Our Lord God, the Pope," his translation of "Divus Papa," put before the title of some canonised pope of the past.
And it was inaccuracy that made the mediæval story-teller talk of the "Emperor Pliny" and of Virgil's brazen tower. And what a picture I get of the Emperor Pliny sending for the Magician Virgil who builds the brazen tower! Inaccuracy is a mighty mother of works.
It pleases me also especially in this, that you cannot teach it; you cannot make a man inaccurate. There is no way of becoming inaccurate by industry, and if you deliberately try to be inaccurate you fail. Inaccuracy is perhaps the most spontaneous and the freest of the gifts offered by the Spirit to the wit of man. It is even more spontaneous and more free than the gift of writing good verse, or that rarer gift which I have also written of here—the gift of writingabominably bad verse; exceptionally bad verse; criminally bad verse; execrable verse.
And inaccuracy is a great leveller—like Love and Death and other less commonly quoted levellers—like Wine and War and Repentance.
For there is no one, whoever he may be, however learned or however ignorant, who may not suddenly be found inaccurate. And, what is more, the same man will be inaccurate in one period and accurate in another, entirely as the Spirit chooses and not ashechooses.
Lastly, inaccuracy has this great and noble quality attached to it, that it breeds real tragedy; and that is a finer thing than breeding mere stories or even noble words. Try shouting "port" down the decks when you mean "starboard," in some narrow crowded fairway against a racing tide, and you will find out what I mean. Or again, inaccuracy in the setting of a range; repeating (as I heard a man do at Châlons) 113 millimetres for 13 millimetres—and they plugged a village church miles and miles outside the camp.
In these matters, that which was but a trifle or a comic accident takes on majesty. Inaccuracy becomes a solemn thing.
And of all the forms by which inaccuracy builds up tragedy the best I know is that form whereby the God causes two letters to be put each into the envelope meant for the other. Out of one such error as that you might get another Trojan War!
Be you technical and all the other learning shall be added unto you.
This commandment is not one revealed to man; yet need it not be painfully learnt. It is so true that it is part of man's nature. The mind accepts it at once, instinctively. All men who would display learning, however really learned they may be, cannot but fall at once into the happy use of technicalities.
Now there is a good and solid reason for this. For a technical word takes the place of long explanation. If you do not use technical words you have to replace them by clumsy, roundabout phrases. You lose your direct effect. Technical words arise of themselves in any science or art, and there is no force, even of a god, that could keep them out. But that is only their genesis. Their true use is to bamboozle, and, my word! how well they do it!
The French people, who (as Cæsar pointed out) are very keen upon the military affair, first applied to the actions of armies the very simple words of every day. If men were walking all in a line and were then spread out the French said that the formation was "unfolded." The progress of soldiers upon their feet from one place toanother was called "walking." When their formation was broken in defeat they were said to be "thrust off the road," that is, bereft of their principal method of progression and continuity; for it is by roads that armies are maintained. A force which lost its power was said to be "undone." The various positions of the sword were called "the first," "the second," "the third," "the fourth," "the fifth," "the sixth." You could not have it simpler! But the Technical Spirit was waiting for its prey, and very rapidly those simple words became in another language "deploy," "march," "rout," "tierce," "quarte," and the rest of it.
Quite lately, this necessary disease spread with peculiar exuberance into the untouched fields of painting and of music. Even those of my age can remember the advent of most of them. Time was when the critic of art said that a picture was very like the thing it was meant to represent, or that it was very unlike it. I can remember the older generation which talked like this. But to-day they might as well be teaching infants in words of one syllable. You have a whole army of words from "technique," which is very old, down to "square touch," which has not yet got a white beard but a long one, and you have "planes," and you have "values," and you have hundreds of others which, as it is not my trade, I shall not pretend to catalogue. But this I know, that no one can write art criticism at1s.6d.the inch until he has mastered the terms, and I know still better that having mastered the terms any one whatsoever, though he be colour-blind, cross-eyed, and quite indifferent to proportion, can write the very best art criticism in the world. For criticism is good in proportion to the awe which it excites. For the function of the critic (says Aristotle) is to criticise, that is, to pull the leg of the middle classes.
As for music, the victory of the thing is now insolent. It has triumphantly beaten out of the field all ordinary men. There is still a sturdy phalanx of purchasers who buy a picture because they like it, or who will tell you boldly that a picture is like or unlike the thing which it pretends to record. There is still a gallant remaining little force of merchants, most of them elderly, who think that a sky should be blue, and grass green, and bricks red, and all the rest of it, and who willnotbuy a picture to hang on the walls of the Detached House in its Own Grounds unless it is beautiful and true. But in the matter of music the miserable reactionaries, the old simpletons, have had the life beaten out of them. There is now no one left alive who dares say that he dislikes a complicated modern volume of noise. Music has become a thing altogether apart, like Sanscrit. On the one hand you have the huge mass of mankind still delighted with good tunes (I use the word "good" in fear and trembling. I mean, for instance, "Oh! Mr. Porter,"the "Marseillaise," the "Dies Iræ," and "Auprès de ma Blonde"), and on the other you have the Sacred Initiate, who commune only with one another; save when they stand at the door of the Temple and with great contempt drop some few phrases of an unintelligible language to the gaping crowd without.
But I think that neither the adepts of art-critic-technicalities, nor even those of music-technicalities, will fully learn their trade till they study the kings and masters of the whole profession, which kings and masters are the writers upon women's fashions. Any one, as I have said, can become an art critic, and a good one, by learning a hundred words or so by heart and knowing where to stick them in; and though not any one, yet a fair proportion of boys and girls can become music-critics by getting parrot-like in the enormous terms of their apparatus. But it is of public knowledge that the being who can write about women's dresses is one in a thousand.
Now why should this be? I do not know, but it is so. I am assured by those who have gone into the matter that most of these writers are men and not women, but there are, of course, women adepts too. Their occult vocabulary is twenty times more rich than the vocabularies of their concert-going and picture-gazing brothers, and it is not only rich, it is also accurate and determined. The terms used in booming a picture or a great complexity of noise havesomething floating about them. They can be applied contradictorily, one critic saying that a line is "amusing," and another saying that it "lacks touch." There is room apparently for licence, and, therefore (I hesitate to hint it), room for the charlatan. I do not mean of course that any art or music criticisa charlatan. No! Not for one moment! I only mean that he might be one; that it is possible to conceive of a charlatan using these solemn terms. But no charlatan could use technical terms about the fashions—women's fashions, at least—without being discovered at once. The Fashion-writers' Guild is a strict confraternity and an honourable one, demanding a severe and long apprenticeship and always certain of its instrument. If I read (of course I should never read anything of the sort—I am only giving it as an illustration) "the foundation is of chinchilla drapeden échelonand caught up with pompoms of crapeaumort," I am reading about some one quite definite kind of ornament which everybody who has learnt the language will at once realise. I could not apply it vaguely to a black silk skirt or a velvet Medici collar, and therein I think the technicians of fashion are wholly superior to all their parallels.
Respectful as I am, however, to every group of technical terms, there is one set of which I can never be certain. I mean the metaphysical set. I may be wrong. It is not my trade at all. But do what I can it is impossible for me to takequite seriously the technical words of the people who to-day call themselves philosophers. I read St. Thomas and I understand, I read Descartes and I understand, I read Spinoza and I understand, I read Locke and I understand, but when I read the Moderns, the tail of the Germans, I cannot take them seriously at all. And the reason I cannot take them seriously is this. When I ask anybody else what a particular technical term means he can always give me some kind of explanation. For instance, if a man says to me, "Political progress is an asymptote to ideal democracy," and I say to him, "Pray, Master, what do you mean by 'asymptote'?" the mathematician is quite able to take me kindly aside and explain to me, or to any other rational being, the nature of the hyperbola, and to show me how it is always getting closer to, but never touches, the lines called asymptotes, and then I understand exactly what he meant by his technical word. He meant that political progress is always getting nearer to an ideal democracy but can never quite reach it. Thereupon I am content, for I can size my man up. But the modern philosophers will never consent to this. They will never put what they have to say in plain language, and I am by this time half persuaded that the reason they do not do so is that they cannot. I very much doubt whether the words they use mean anything at all. Therefore, it is that when I would read philosophy (which is nobad pastime for a man fatigued with real work and with the considerations of real problems), I fall back upon theSummabecause, though it does indeed contain technical terms, they all have a plain meaning, and can every one of them be understood with a little simple explanation.
So much for technical terms: the short cuts to authority and status.