Part 8
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 take quite 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 no bad pastime for a man fatigued with real work and with the considerations of real problems), I fall back upon the _Summa_ because, 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.
ON THE ACCURSED CLIMATE
When you curse the weather (as I do now) summon to your aid a great group of vapid Aurelian thoughts. It will do you no harm. Such thoughts are a pleasant repose for the mind, a sort of croon.
If you doubt that word "Aurelian," either read the notes Marcus Aurelius left, or, what is better, go to the British Museum and see the statue of that booby upon his horse. The horse is more intelligent than he.
What, then, are these which I call "Aurelian thoughts"? They are not unlike, in motive (though far inferior in quality), to the contrasted categories of Defoe in _Robinson Crusoe_, admirably parodied by Mr. Barry Pain in _Robinson Crusoe's Return_, a book than which....
These categories you will remember consist in two columns: the first, grouse; the second, ingenious gratitude. In the first column: "I find myself upon a beach, shipwrecked, without any money, very damp and with nothing to eat." In the opposite column: "On the other hand I might have been born a chimpanzee in a place where chimpanzees are hunted."
It is one way of getting consolation, and a very epicurean way, in the strictest sense of the term epicurean.
Do the same about the weather. "It rains. I have not seen the sun for three months. But, on the other hand, I might be freezing to death in the Arctic, or sitting up with a candle killing scorpions on some damned barren island of the Levantine Seas."
The crab about this method is that it does not really satisfy the mind. I have only to use these words "Levantine Seas," when at once the man deprived of sun thinks of sunlight and the man deprived of warmth thinks of warmth, and the scorpion seems a delightful beast, and if the island is barren, so much the better; it means that there is not too much rain, which is a curse.
I have noticed that men living in climates not human, never even try to console themselves, as do people living in England, which has the best climate in the world. They do not say: "Would that I were in a place of clouds and water!" They sit down sullenly (though with bright eyes), endure it, and die. It is only people just on the edge of perfection who complain. It is so with social things. The loudest cry rises not from the seller of papers in the streets, but from the man who finds that there is something wrong with his big motor-car, or that he cannot reserve a carriage to the Riviera, but has to travel in a train full of Frenchmen.
And to go back to climate.
If one could exactly balance all the things which one desires in a climate, I will tell you what would happen. One would lose three things, each more important than the last--energy, decent morals and happiness. I suppose that what one would exactly balance in a climate would be a sufficiency of moisture without discomfort, a sufficiency of light without loss of repose, and a sufficiency of heat without the breeding of noxious things. I take it that the climate of the Balearics in early March carried on throughout the year would fill the bill; or rather the climate of the Balearics supplemented by large rivers which had no mud upon their banks and never overflowed or ran dry, deep forests which were never tangled or marshy, and sublime mountains which never sent down tempest or any other disaster, and which were not, as most mountains are, inhabited by demons.
Well, if one lived in such a climate, I say that one would lose energy and morals and happiness. They say that the mind turns inward when it suffers too much sorrow. That is true; but it remains alive. It turns inward also, but in a permanent, _dead_ fashion, when it has no stimulus at all. What people really mean when they say that they would like a perfect climate (granted that they are human beings and not immortals) is that they would like to preserve all the advantages they have acquired from living in their own climate, and yet have them in another and a more delightful climate. Another way of putting it is that they would like all the advantages of contrast without the disadvantages of tedium. Or, to put it more simply still, they would like to go on assuaging their thirst for ever and yet never assuaging it. It is a contradiction in terms; at least, for mortals.
The immortals, by the way, had very odd ideas upon climate. It was the custom of the Gods of Hellas (who had an excellent climate offered them on the slopes of the hills) to take their leisure above the snow-line, and then at a moment's notice to go south of the first cataract of the Nile into a fiendish heat and eat heavily for days with the Ethiopians, just as our rich go to the Riviera. But with this difference: that they went to Ethiopia not only for climate but for the morals of the inhabitants--which is more than you can say of those who go to the Riviera, my experience of which detestable belt is that no one can decide who most despises the other, the aboriginal or his visitants. The Gods of Hellas also (now dead, because the climate changed) rather concerned themselves with controlling climate than with enjoying it. And that, by the way, is a lesson for us. They were the masters of their environment, and not its subjects. The same is true of very young people, whom I, with these mine eyes, have seen deliberately taking a walk in the rain, or picking up snow itself in their hands, or (what may seem incredible) bathing in cold water and swimming about in it: and when I say cold water I mean very cold water, as, for instance, the English seas in April.
There is not on earth a man more miserable than the man who wanders about following the climate. Before the war very wealthy men were able to do this in Western Europe, and they did it with damnable insistence. If the war should compel them to know their own country, it will have done a little good. But I notice also about these wealthy men (and women)--on the whole, it was truer of the wealthy women than of the wealthy men--that they did not even keep to the silly rules of their silly class. They did not know where the climate was to be found which they were seeking. Which of them knew the Rousillon? Or which of them the divine coast of the Peaks of Europe above Cavadonga and the hundred little bays of that more glorious Devonshire of the Asturias?
The truth is that the unexpected alone floods the mind--speaking, I say, of mortals. _In Hac Lachrymarum Valle._ Of how it may be on the other side I say nothing.
You are going by night, having missed your way, through an abominable Alpine mist, and you would willingly die if you could find some place to die in. Then comes a glimmering of light through the fog, a little whisper of warmer air, the wreathing of the cloud. You are in a chestnut grove, and it dawns. You get a little lower down through the fragrant forest, you are in its open glades. You hear the torrent, and just before it is day, things are so pleasant that you go to sleep upon the tufted and now dry grass. As you go to sleep you say: "I am in Paradise." So you are. But you would not be if you lived there more than three days.
I think it is the business of the sea which makes men get nearest to the truth in this matter of climate. I have noticed that men who sail the seas never speak of climate, but of weather, and talk of the Tropics and the Arctic, gale and calm and fog and drought and all the million colours and changes of this earthly vestibule of Heaven, as though they were a matter of course, like the furniture of one's house. I never yet heard a sailor say: "Would that I were in this or that climate!" and I never yet knew a sailor who did not settle down at home, here in England, when at last he could, often in a comfortable native slum. And this is especially true of pilots.
But in all this I have used the word "immortal," writing as though this acquiescence in climate, this restraint of desire, were suitable only for mortals. I will admit that, in some unchanging place where the soul also is unchanging, a permanent climate, permanently suited to the permanent soul, may do well enough and may be better even than a cold, rainy, sunless day in the deep mud of the Weald. Indeed, I know such a place, for I visited it once in company with immortal spirits for more than half an hour. It is in the Californian Sierras, where the trees are so high that they are part of the sky. It is in the Tuolumne valley, towards the upper waters of it. In that place men obtain a vision which corresponds to the word "Paradise."
And, talking of Paradise, what fortune is attached to a word! Here is a Persian word wandering about, hopping from tree to tree like a bird, flying to Greece, nesting in the Western liturgy, caged by the monks of the Dark Ages, making a good stay among the French, but settling down at last to be a supreme symbol in the language of the English. So that, to-day, there is no word in English to beat it. It can give the word "Heaven" great odds and come to the post with half a length to spare. That is a great lesson in the history of words.
But if I go on at this rate, there would be no end to my writing, for I should be led on from word to word, and that is the temptation of all writers, against which it is their duty to fight, as it is the duty of an honest man in a late, frosty, wet, diseased, green, sogging January in the clay of the Weald to fight against any disparagements of his climate: his climate of the mud, where falls not rain, nor hail, nor any snow, but only a perpetual drizzle day after day after day after day after day.
ON ACCENT
Strange accident in the history of men! What men most care for, what a particular society most cherishes, what is most vital to it, dies as the individual dies and can never be recovered by posterity. Would you understand a century in the past? You read of it and at once you are bewildered at finding a passionate attachment to things long since grown indifferent; at discovering standards taken for granted, and a scale of values taken for granted, which to-day have disappeared; what is more, at stumbling continually upon terms obviously fundamental _then_, and yet referring to things _now_ so dead that we cannot even translate them. And all this is true of the immediate past as well as of the remote past.
Among these astonishingly important things which disappear with the disappearance of living men, consider accent.
If there is one thing really important to-day, it is accent. After money, it most distinguishes the divisions of our society. And what do you think posterity will make of that?
There was a man who made a statement in Parliament a few years ago which seemed to his hearers so fantastic as to be hardly sane. He was talking of a certain religious minority, an obscure sect, and its peculiar form of education, and he said: "So strongly do we feel upon this matter" (meaning the right to pursue a separate form of education for the children of this sect) "that we would rather our children should drop their h's than lose the Faith." That sounded to a mixed public assembly of modern Englishmen something very nearly mad. The idea that a man would rather have his son drop his h's than lose his religion was something so thoroughly out of their accepted scale of values that it savoured of the unreal. It was like saying that rather than wear brown boots a man would wear no boots at all, or that rather than eat foreign food he would eat nothing. Yet this intensity of feeling upon particular modes of pronunciation is quite modern--at least, as distinguishing classes within the State. As distinguishing foreigners and enemies from natives, the value of accent is, of course, as old as the hills, but as distinguishing the superior social tradition from the inferior, it is brand-new.
It is interesting to note what accents are tolerated and what not; what this modern religion regards as heresy and what as no more than a "diocesan use."
The Irish accent in its various forms is universally admitted. People talking English with an Irish accent do not thereby declare any difference of rank--that is, of inherited wealth--but only a difference of nationality, which is respected. And the same thing is true--though very much modified--of the Scotch accent. I am not quite sure that it is true of the Welsh. Perhaps there is not a sufficiently large body of wealthy men boasting the Welsh accent to determine the matter.
But other accents, not national but local, are barred with a religious bar. They are profane. And that is the more remarkable when one considers their strength in the three elements of number, of intensity and of difference.
If people recognised real truths of experience instead of being led away by print they would admit that the northern speech is, in southern ears, almost a foreign tongue. A man brought up in the south and finding himself among the populace in a Lancashire town will at first not understand half of what he hears. It is true that the roots are so similar and the words in common so often repeated that the new dialect is mastered much more quickly than would be a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, if the speech of Lancashire belonged to a separate realm, and if the Kentish man, let us say, came into Lancashire as a foreign country, he would think of the Lancashire dialect as a foreign language. Had the two forms of speech developed in different Royal Courts and adopted each its own experiment in spelling (let alone each its alphabet) the one would be more foreign to the other than is Low German to Dutch.
The first of all words, the personal pronoun, is an example. The Kentish man says "I"; he translates the classic word "ego" by a sound which is a rapid diphthong of the pure A, "Ah," and the pure I, "EE." The Lancashire man expresses exactly the same idea by the open A, "AH"; a completely different sound. When he talks in his own name the personal pronoun rhymes with "BAH." When the Kentish man says exactly the same thing the personal pronoun rhymes with "PIE." And you could not get two vowel sounds more distinct. You may take any number of instances. The "o" of "OLD" in the south is "ow" in the north. Then there is the closed "e" of the south and the open "e" of the north--"Yes" and "Yaahs," and, on the contrary, the closed "a" of the north and the open "a" of the south--"păth" and "pahth."
There is another point about accent which is its curious variability within a short space of time. It varies so rapidly that within one human life a vulgarism or a jest becomes meaningless. What has happened to the "v" replacing the "w" in the Cockney speech, for instance? When the _Pickwick Papers_ came out it was universal; Dickens was as close an observer of the physical realities of his time as Mr. Bernard Shaw is to-day. Compare Dickens's Cockney with Mr. Bernard Shaw's admirable and exact transliteration of that noble tongue in its present phase. They are almost two different things! Some have explained this by saying that there has been a change in race, that London has been invaded from the north and from the Midlands; that it was the old Kentish accent which London spoke with in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and that a Mercian accent has displaced it. The late Professor Yorke Powell maintained this. It may be so; more probably the change is a change _in situ_. Mr. Weller's great grandson (who, I am sorry to say, is now driving a motor-bus instead of a stage coach) talks the modern tongue, and it is utterly different from his forbear's speech.
The imposition of a standard education upon the poorer people in the State Schools is having an effect, but we hardly know in what direction, although the agency has been at work for some fifty years. Its chief observable effect so far seems to be not in the modification of accent, but in the syllabic pronunciation of certain words, especially names of places.
I have heard--like a tale from a far country--the astonishing story that little innocent children were told to say CI-REN-CES-TER in the place of "Cisseter." And there is again with this change another change, which is the introduction of new and usually pedantic Græco-Latin terms in the place of the old native terms. This is not only the effect of the schools, it is also the effect of the Press and of the ubiquitous action of the modern English State official, who plays a far larger part in our society than do his colleagues in any other province of Europe, not excepting the Germanies. He impresses himself especially in medicine: but also in law, in the payment of State doles and insurances, in the gathering of State dues, in minute and continual inquisition upon every detail of daily life in the home and the factory and the field.
Would you believe that a stout peasant could use the word "circumference" (which is not quite accurate) for the outside headlands of a ploughed field? It was used to me only last week by a man on my farm. And as for "dilution," "percentage," "contributory" and "implement," they have become the tame kittens of cottage speech and roam about at large. With such have also come a great mass of legal and quasi-legal terms, and these are modifying the language as much as anything. There we have a most interesting parallel to a thing which changed all the speech of Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, for a great mass of our words which used to be called "Teutonic" have turned out, as Wiener shows in his revolutionary essay, to be no more "Teutonic" than the Æneid. They are corruptions of the technical terms used in the Roman Law Courts and Bureaus of Administration. Such, for instance, is all the group of words "Ritter, Rider, Road"--they come from the Posting system of the Roman Empire and its taxation.
But this is taking me very far from my original text of accents, and I return to it with a certain matter for conclusion--it is a matter really near my heart, and it has been haunting me ever since I began this article. It is the slight differences of pronunciation between people of my own social rank (which may be called the professional middle class) and the richer class above it. I mean (in so far as it still exists) the permanently rich class. Here I must say at once that I champion, not only without hesitation but with contempt for all other opinion, the pronunciation of my own class. Not only in accent but in every other thing it is the class which has made the civilisation of Europe, and when the people above us differ from us, they are just as wrong as the people below us. So much for them....
But it rankles all the same, that my superiors should put on airs, and I will take a test case: the word "PIANO." When I say "Curse the piano" (and it is a horrible instrument, is it not?) I make it rhyme with the name of the suffete "HANNO," but those above me make it rhyme with "AH NO." They make of it a more pathetic, and I a more downright word.
It is curious that these slight differences in accent should exist, for the two sets of people are brought up together in the same schools, they meet daily, and even (I am ashamed to say) inter-marry. Many would pretend that by this time of day there was no difference left. But there is; and if you watch half a dozen typical words closely I think you will agree with me. I am not speaking of locutions, you will note, but of accent. Now in our locutions we differ enormously from those above and below us, and when I say above and below I do not mean above and below in any scale except the ludicrous but powerful, constant scale of social vanity. Our locutions, I am afraid, we tend to submit to the judgment of those wealthier than ourselves. It is a pity, for our locutions are right and theirs are wrong. For instance, it is right to say "Riding in a carriage," and wrong to say "Driving in a carriage," but "Riding in a carriage" has been heavily defeated by "Driving in a carriage," and is now on the run. Personally, I regret it.
It is high time that a new etiquette book came out about these things. The last one I remember reviewing is now twelve years old, and it was not quite satisfactory, because it dealt largely with (_a_) the abuse of vulgarisms of which no one ever heard, and (_b_) the assertion of rules which were not sound rules at all. It came as a message from the rich to the middle class, and was therefore a very unnatural pronouncement. For it is our part to teach them and not their part to teach us. For instance, this book said: "Do not talk of people by their postal towns, do not say (if you are going to stop at a rich man's house) that you are going to stop at Puddiford, or whatever the name of the nearest market town may be, but give his palace its full title, and with due respect." But I, for my part, never heard any one allude to a rich man's house by the nearest postal town. On the contrary, my experience is that people tumble over each other to underline or shout the name of the palace in which they propose to find a brief and humiliating entertainment from Saturday to Monday.
Again, in this book we were told not to say "Port," but "Port Wine"--but that would lead me into the most bitter controversy of modern times, compared with which the old quarrel between [Greek: theotokos] and [Greek: theogonos] was but a lovers' tiff. So I end.... But talking of accents, have I got those Greek accents right? I doubt it, for I write this in Wolverhampton, a town divorced from Hellas and heavily blanketing the Alexandrians.
ON TRUTH AND THE ADMIRALTY
What a pleasure it will be--a minor pleasure, I admit, but life is complex and it is difficult to establish values--what a pleasure it will be when maps and statistics return!