Part 10

A confident and serene critic attacks Mr. Arnold very severely because the latter writer thinks that poets should be amenable to fair and honest social laws. If I understand the critic aright, we must all be so thankful for beautiful literary works that we must be ready to let the producers of such works play any pranks they please under high heaven. They are the children of genius, and we are to spoil them; "Childe Harold" and "Manfred" are such wondrous productions that we need never think of the author's orgies at Venice and the Abbey; "Epipsychidion" is lovely, so we should not think of poor Harriet Westbrook casting herself into the Serpentine. This is marvellous doctrine, and one hardly knows whither it might lead us if we carried it into thorough practice. Suppose that, in addition to indulging the spoiled children of genius, we were to approve all the proceedings of the clever children in any household. I fancy that the dwellers therein would have an unpleasant time. Noble charity towards human weakness is one thing; but blind adulation of clever and immoral men is another. We have great need to pity the poor souls who are the prey of their passions, but we need not worship them. A large and lofty charity will forgive the shortcomings of Robert Burns; we may even love that wild and misguided but essentially noble man. That is well; yet we must not put Burns forward and offer our adulation in such a way as to set him up for a model to young men. A man may read--

The pale moon is setting beyont the white wave, And Time is setting with me, oh!

The pathos will wring his heart; but he should not ask any youth to imitate the conduct of the great poet. Carlyle said very profoundly that new morality must be made before we can judge Mirabeau; but Carlyle never put his hero's excesses in the foreground of his history, nor did he try to apologize for them; he only said, "Here is a man whose stormy passions overcame him and drove him down the steep to ruin! Think of him at his best, pardon him, and imitate, in your weak human fashion, the infinite Divine Mercy." That is good; and it is certainly very different from the behaviour of writers who ask us to regard their heroes' evil-doing as not only pardonable, but as being almost admirable.

This Shelley controversy raises several weighty issues. We forgive Burns because he again and again offers us examples of splendid self-sacrifice in the course of his broken life, and we are able to do so because the balance is greatly on the good side; but we do not refrain from saying, "In some respects Burns was a scamp." The fact is that the claims of weak-headed adorers who worship men of genius would lead to endless mischief if they were allowed. Men who were skilled in poetry and music and art have often behaved like scoundrels; but their scoundrelism should be reprobated, and not excused. And my reason for this contention is very simple--once allow that a man of genius may override all salutary conventions, and the same conventions will be overridden by vain and foolish mediocrities. Take, for example, the conventions which guide us in the matter of dress. Most people grant that in many respects our modern dress is ugly in shape, ugly in material, and calculated to promote ill-health. The hard hat which makes the brow ache must affect the wearer's health, and therefore, when we see the greatest living poet going about in a comfortable soft felt, we call him a sensible man. Carlyle used to hobble about with soft shoes and soft slouch-hat, and he was right But it is possible to be as comfortable as Lord Tennyson or Carlyle without flying very outrageously in the face of modern conventions; and many everyday folk contrive to keep their bodies at ease without trying any fool's device. Charles Kingsley used to roam about in his guernsey--most comfortable of all dresses--when he was in the country; but when he visited the town he managed to dress easily and elegantly in the style of an average gentleman.

But some foolish creatures say in their hearts, "Men of genius wear strange clothing--Tennyson wears a vast Inverness cape, Carlyle wore a duffel jacket, Bismarck wears a flat white cap, Mortimer Collins wore a big Panama; artists in general like velvet and neckties of various gaudy hues. Let us adopt something startling in the way of costume, and we may be taken for men of genius." Thus it happened that very lately London was invested by a set of simpletons of small ability in art and letters; they let their hair grow down their backs; they drove about in the guise of Venetian senators of the fifteenth century; they appeared in slashed doublets and slouched hats; and one of them astonished the public--and the cabmen--by marching down a fashionable thoroughfare on a broiling day with a fur ulster on his back and a huge flower in his hand. Observe my point--these social nuisances obtained for themselves a certain contemptible notoriety by caricaturing the ways of able men. I can forgive young Disraeli's gaudy waistcoats and pink-lined coats, but I have no patience with his silly imitators. This is why I object to the praise which is bestowed on men of genius for qualities which do not deserve praise. The reckless literary admirer of Shelley or Byron goes into ecstasies and cries, "Perish the slave who would think of these great men's vices!"--whereupon raw and conceited youngsters say, "Vice and eccentricity are signs of genius. We will be vicious and eccentric;" and then they go and convert themselves into public nuisances.

That vice and folly are not always associated with genius scarcely needs demonstrating. I allow that many great men have been sensual fools, but we can by no means allow that folly and sensuality are inseparable from greatness. My point is to prove that littleness must be conquered before a man can be great or good. Macaulay lived a life of perfect and exemplary purity; he was good in all the relations of life; those nearest to him loved him most dearly, and his days were passed in thinking of the happiness of others. Perhaps he was vain--certainly he had something to be vain of--but, though he had such masterful talent, he never thought himself licensed, and he wore the white flower of a blameless life until his happy spirit passed easily away. Wordsworth was a poet who will be placed on a level with Byron when an estimate of our century's great men comes to be made. But Wordsworth lived his sweet and pious life without in any way offending against the moral law. We must have done with all talk about the privileges of irregular genius; a clever man must be made to see that, while he may be as independent as he likes, he cannot be left free to offend either the sense or the sensibility of his neighbours. The genius must learn to conduct himself in accordance with rational and seemly custom, or he must be brought to his senses. When a great man's ways are merely innocently different from those of ordinary people, by all means let him alone. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci used often to buy caged wild-birds from their captors and let them go free. What a lovely and lovable action! He hurt no one; he restored the joy of life to innocent creatures, and no one could find fault with his sweet fancy. In the same way, when Samuel Johnson chose to stalk ponderously along the streets, stepping on the edges of the paving-stones, or even when he happened to roar a little loudly in conversation, who could censure him seriously? His heart was as a little child's: his deeds were saintly; and we perhaps love him all the more for his droll little ways. But, when Shelley outrages decency and the healthy sense of manliness by his peculiar escapades, it is not easy to pardon him; the image of that drowned child rises before us, and we are apt to forget the pretty verses. Calm folk remember that many peculiarly wicked and selfish gentry have been able to make nice rhymes and paint charming pictures. The old poet Francois Villon, who has made men weep and sympathize for so many years, was a burglar, a murderer, and something baser, if possible, than either murderer or burglar. A more despicable being probably never existed; and yet he warbles with angelic sweetness, and his piercing sadness thrills us after the lapse of four centuries. Young men of unrestrained appetites and negative morality are often able to talk most charmingly, but the meanest and most unworthy persons whom I have met have been the wild and lofty-minded poets who perpetually express contempt of Philistines and cast the shaft of their scorn at what they call "dross." So far as money goes, I fancy that the oratorical, and grandiose poet is often the most greedy of individuals; and, when, in his infinite conceit, he sets himself up above common decency and morality, I find it difficult to confine myself to moderate language. A man of genius may very well be chaste, modest, unselfish, and retiring. Byron was at his worst when he was producing the works which made him immortal; I prefer to think of him as he was when he cast his baser self away, and nobly took up the cause of Greece. When once his matchless common sense asserted itself, and he ceased to contemplate his own woes and his own wrongs, he became a far greater man than he had ever been before. I should be delighted to know that the cant about the lowering restrictions imposed by stupidity on genius had been silenced for ever. A man of transcendent ability must never forget that he is a member of a community, and that he has no more right wantonly to offend the feelings or prejudices of that community than he has to go about buffeting individual members with a club. As soon as he offends the common feelings of his fellows he must take the consequences; and hard-headed persons should turn a deaf ear when any eloquent and sentimental person chooses to whine about his hero's wrongs.

_March, 1888._

_SLANG_.

Has any one ever yet considered the spiritual significance of slang? The dictionaries inform us that "slang is a conversational irregularity of a more or less vulgar type;" but that is not all. The prim definition refers merely to words, but I am rather more interested in considering the mental attitude which is indicated by the distortion and loose employment of words, and by the fresh coinages which seem to spring up every hour. I know of no age or nation that has been without its slang, and the study is amongst the most curious that a scholar can take up; but our own age, after all, must be reckoned as the palmy time of slang, for we have gone beyond mere words, and our vulgarizations of language are significant of degradation of soul. The Romans of the decadence had a hideous cant language which fairly matched the grossness of the people, and the Gauls, with their descendants, fairly matched the old conquerors. The frightful old Paris of Francois Villon, with all its bleak show of famine and death, had its constant changes of slang. "_Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant,"_ says the burglar-poet, and he means that the old buffoon is tiresome; the young man with the newest phases of city slang at his tongue's end is most acceptable in merry company. Very few people can read Villon's longer poems at all, for they are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be in constant requisition. The rascal is a really great writer in his abominable way, but his dialect was that of the lowest resorts, and he lets us see that the copious _argot_ which now puzzles the stranger by its kaleidoscopic changes was just as vivid and changeable in the miserable days of the eleventh Louis. In the Paris of our day the slang varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the boarding-house in Balzac's "Pere Goriot" is quite different from that of the novels done by the Goncourt brothers; and, though I have not yet mustered courage to finish one of M. Zola's outrages, I can see that the vulgarisms which he has learned are not at all like any that have been used in bygone days. The corruption of Paris seems to breed verbal distortions rather freely, and the ordinary babble of the city workman is as hard to any Englishman as are the colloquialisms of Burns to the average Cockney.

In England our slang has undergone one transformation after another ever since the time of Chaucer. Shakespeare certainly gives us plenty; then we have the slang of the Great War, and then the unutterable horrors of the Restoration--even the highly proper Mr. Joseph Addison does not disdain to talk of an "old put," and his wags are given to "smoking" strangers. The eighteenth century--the century of the gallows--gave us a whole crop of queer terms which were first used in thieves' cellars, and gradually filtered from the racecourse and the cockpit till they took their place in the vulgar tongue. The sweet idyll of "Life in London" is a perfect garden of slang; Tom the Corinthian and Bob Logic lard their phrases with the idiom of the prize-ring, and the author obligingly italicises the knowing words so that one has no chance of missing them. But nowadays we have passed beyond all that, and every social clique, every school of art and literature, every trade--nay, almost every religion--has its peculiar slang; and the results as regards morals, manners, and even conduct in general are too remarkable to be passed over by any one who desires to understand the complex society of our era. The mere patter of thieves or racing-men--the terms are nearly synonymous--counts for nothing. Those who know the byways of life know that there are two kinds of dark language used by our nomad classes and by our human predatory animals. A London thief can talk a dialect which no outsider can possibly understand; for, by common agreement, arbitrary names are applied to every object which the robbers at any time handle, and to every sort of underhand business which they transact. But this gibberish is not exactly an outcome of any moral obliquity; it is employed as a means of securing safety. The gipsy cant is the remnant of a pure and ancient language; we all occasionally use terms taken from this remarkable tongue, and, when we speak of a "cad," or "making a mull," or "bosh," or "shindy," or "cadger" or "bamboozling," or "mug," or "duffer," or "tool," or "queer," or "maunder," or "loafer," or "bung," we are using pure gipsy. No distinct mental process, no process of corruption, is made manifest by the use of these terms; we simply have picked them up unconsciously, and we continue to utter them in the course of familiar conversation.

I am concerned with a degradation of language which is of an importance far beyond the trifling corruption caused by the introduction of terms from the gipsy's caravan, the betting ring, or the thieves' kitchen; one cannot help being made angry and sad by observing a tendency to belittle all things that are great, to mock all earnestness, to vulgarize all beauty. There is not a quarter where the subtle taint has not crept in, and under its malign influence poetry has all but expired, good conversation has utterly ceased to exist, art is no longer serious, and the intercourse of men is not straightforward. The Englishman will always be emotional in spite of the rigid reserve which he imposes upon himself; he is an enthusiast, and he does truly love earnestness, veracity, and healthy vigour. Take him away from a corrupt and petty society and give him free scope, and he at once lets fall the film of shams from off him like a cast garment, and comes out as a reality. Shut the same Englishman up in an artificial, frivolous, unreal society, and he at once becomes afraid of himself; he fears to exhibit enthusiasm about anything, and he hides his genuine nature behind a cloud of slang. He belittles everything he touches, he is afraid to utter a word from his inner heart, and his talk becomes a mere dropping shower of verbal counters which ring hollow. The superlative degree is abhorrent to him unless he can misuse it for comic purposes; and, like the ridiculous dummy lord in "Nicholas Nickleby," he is quite capable of calling Shakespeare a "very clayver man." I have heard of the attitude taken by two flowers of our society in presence of Joachim. Think of it! The unmatched violinist had achieved one of those triumphs which seem to permeate the innermost being of a worthy listener; the soul is entranced, and the magician takes us into a fair world where there is nothing but loveliness and exalted feeling. "Vewy good fellow, that fiddle fellow," observed the British aristocrat. "Ya-as," answered his faithful friend. Let any man who is given to speaking words with a view of presenting the truth begin to speak in our faint, super-refined, orthodox society; he will be looked at as if he were some queer object brought from a museum of curiosities and pulled out for exhibition. The shallowest and most impudent being that ever talked fooleries will assume superior airs and treat the man of intellect as an amusing but inferior creature. More than that--earnestness and reality are classed together under the head of "bad form," the vital word grates on the emasculate brain of the society man, and he compensates himself for his inward consciousness of inferiority by assuming easy airs of insolence. A very brilliant man was once talking in a company which included several of the superfine division; he was witty, vivid, genial, full of knowledge and tact; but he had one dreadful habit--he always said what he thought. The brilliant man left the company, and one sham-languid person said to a sham-aristocratic person, "Who is that?" "Ah, he's a species of over-educated savage!" Now the gentleman who propounded this pleasant piece of criticism was, according to trustworthy history, the meanest, most useless, and most despicable man of his set; yet he could venture to assume haughty airs towards a man whose shoes he was not fit to black, and he could assume those airs on the strength of his slangy impassivity--his "good form." When we remember that this same fictitious indifference characterized the typical _grand seigneur_ of old France, and when we also remember that indifference may be rapidly transformed into insolence, and insolence into cruelty, we may well look grave at the symptoms which we can watch around us. The dreary _ennui_ of the heart, _ennui_ that revolts at truth, that is nauseated by earnestness, expresses itself in what we call slang, and slang is the sign of mental disease.

I have no fault to find with the broad, racy, slap-dash language of the American frontier, with its picturesque perversions and its droll exaggeration. The inspired person who chose to call a coffin an "eternity box" and whisky "blue ruin" was too innocent to sneer. The slang of Mark Twain's Mr. Scott when he goes to make arrangements for the funeral of the lamented Buck Fanshawe is excruciatingly funny and totally inoffensive. Then the story of Jim Baker and the jays in "A Tramp Abroad" is told almost entirely in frontier slang, yet it is one of the most exquisite, tender, lovable pieces of work ever set down in our tongue. The grace and fun of the story, the odd effects produced by bad grammar, the gentle humour, all combine to make this decidedly slangy chapter a literary masterpiece. A miner or rancheman will talk to you for an hour and delight you, because his slang somehow fits his peculiar thought accurately; an English sailor will tell a story, and he will use one slang word in every three that come out of his mouth, yet he is delightful, for the simple reason that his distorted dialect enables him to express and not to suppress truth. But the poison that has crept through the minds of our finer folk paralyses their utterance so far as truth is concerned; and society may be fairly caricatured by a figure of the Father of Lies blinking through an immense eyeglass upon God's universe.

Mr. George Meredith, with his usual magic insight, saw long ago whither our over-refined gentry were tending; and in one of his finest books he shows how a little dexterous slang may dwarf a noble deed. Nevil Beauchamp was under a tremendous fire with his men: he wanted to carry a wounded soldier out of action, but the soldier wished his adored officer to be saved. At the finish the two men arrived safely in their own lines amid the cheers of English, French, and even of the Russian enemy. This is how the votary of slang transfigures the episode; he wishes to make a little fun out of the hero, and he manages it by employing the tongue which it is good form to use. "A long-shanked trooper bearing the name of John Thomas Drew was crawling along under fire of the batteries. Out pops old Nevil, tries to get the man on his back. It won't do. Nevil insists that it's exactly one of the cases that ought to be, and they remain arguing about it like a pair of nine-pins while the Moscovites are at work with the bowls. Very well. Let me tell you my story. It's perfectly true, I give you my word. So Nevil tries to horse Drew, and Drew proposes to horse Nevil, as at school. Then Drew offers a compromise. He would much rather have crawled on, you know, and allowed the shot to pass over his head; but he's a Briton--old Nevil's the same; but old Nevil's peculiarity is that, as you are aware, he hates a compromise--won't have it--_retro Sathanas!_--and Drew's proposal to take his arm instead of being carried pick-a-or piggy-back--I am ignorant how Nevil spells it--disgusts old Nevil. Still it won't do to stop where they are, like the cocoanut and pincushion of our friends the gipsies on the downs; so they take arms and commence the journey home, resembling the best friends on the evening of a holiday in our native clime--two steps to the right, half a dozen to the left, &c. They were knocked down by the wind of a ball near the battery. 'Confound it!' cries Nevil. 'It's because I consented to a compromise!'"

Most people know that this passage refers to Rear-Admiral Maxse, yet, well as we may know our man, we have him presented like an awkward, silly, comic puppet from a show. The professor of slang could degrade the conduct of the soldiers on board the _Birkenhead_; he could make the choruses from _Samson Agonistes_ seem like the Cockney puerilities of a comic news-sheet. It is this high-sniffing, supercilious slang that I attack, for I can see that it is the impudent language of a people to whom nothing is great, nothing beautiful, nothing pure, and nothing worthy of faith.