typewriter. The machine was built by Remingtons; but commercially it has
not hitherto been much of a success, as there are no effective laws in
China for securing an inventor’s rights. As a rule, it takes two taps to
make a character complete, the left half coming with the first tap and
the right half with the second. By combining each of the left halves
with all the right halves in succession, it can produce a great variety
of characters. These, however, are not the characters employed in
classic Chinese writing, but more like modern characters evolved from
them for ordinary use. Chinese is written in upright lines that are read
from top to bottom and follow one another from right to left. Thus,
instead of having the characters upright, the typewriter has them lying
down. When the paper is taken out, the left edge is treated as the top,
and the lines and characters then come in proper order, only the right
halves are underneath the left halves instead of being beside them. And
this defect could not be cured without making the machine much larger
and more difficult to work.
The meaning of the characters varies with the tone in which they are
pronounced; and there are similar tones in English. At the tea-party the
little girl drawls out, “No, thanks”--tone 1: the hostess thereupon
exclaims, “What, none”--tone 2: a friend remonstrates, “Oh, really,
now”--tone 3; and the little girl then says what she has heard her
father say, “Take the damned thing away”--tone 4. The typewriter puts
down the number of the tone, and thus requires three taps in all, two
for the character itself and one for this.
This led me into planning a Cuneiform typewriter. I did not have one
built, but my plan was briefly this: I divided the wedges that are
upright or slope down from the wedges that are level or slope up, and
then picked out the commonest groups of each; and, instead of always
moving on from left to right, I had a catch to check the automatic
movement of the paper, so that one group could be printed on another
with the level wedges running across the uprights. The compound groups
are not exactly like the groups in printed books; but very often there
is just as great a difference between these printed groups and their
originals on the clay or stone. After studying Cuneiform in printed
books, people are annoyed at finding that they cannot read a word of the
real thing; and there are other kinds of print with that same fault.
Hebrew was written in letters that were practically the same as the
Phœnician letters from which our English capitals have come: yet it is
printed in letters that are not like ours nor like its own. In my
Cambridge days the Regius Professor of Hebrew (the late Dr Jarrett) was
trying hard to get this changed, and he brought out a Hebrew book in
what he called a modified Roman alphabet. I think he might have gone a
good deal further, and I do not know that anybody else has gone as far;
but, really, something should be done. Hebrew type is just about as bad
as any type can be, with half the letters so like others that they may
be confused. Greek type is not so bad; but it is quite unlike the Greek
of the inscriptions or the older manuscripts. And it expresses nothing
that Roman or Italic type would not express as well. If anybody says
Iota Subscript, I say iota was not subscript in good Greek, but kept its
dressing in the line.
We write English in the same style as Italic type, yet print it with the
Roman type that represents handwriting of four hundred years ago. If we
are going to copy other writing than our own, we might as well adopt the
Gothic type that still survives in Germany. Gothic and Italic both look
well, but nothing can be uglier than Roman. I consider it clear proof of
mania in a bibliomaniac, if he buys books in Roman type for anything but
common use. We ought to scrap the ugly thing, and print English (as we
write it) in Italic.
We should be merciful to children. There is quite enough for them to
learn, without their learning to read English in one lettering and write
it in another. And they might be spared some spelling. Why should they
have to ‘proceed’ with _e_ and _e_ together, and ‘recede’ with _e_ and
_e_ apart? Both words are based upon the Latin ‘cedere.’ Its participle
‘cessus’ is the base of ‘process’ and of ‘recess’ and also of ‘decease’:
yet they may not write ‘decess’ to match, though French has ‘décès’
matching ‘procès.’ Italian always treats the Greek _ph_ as _f_, and they
may do the same in ‘fancy’ and in ‘frenzy,’ but may not do it in
‘philosophy.’ We might at least abolish all anomalies, and also
downright blunders like the _h_ in anchor. There are difficulties enough
about our spelling without increasing them capriciously.
In early life the mind takes facts in and remembers them, but does not
judge them critically, whereas it afterwards becomes more critical and
less receptive. It would surely be good policy to feed the mind with
facts in the years when it retains them, and leave the reasoning for the
years when it can reason. But the policy has been to “make boys
think”--at least, that was my experience at Harrow--and that policy
defeats itself, as one cannot think effectively without a stock of facts
to think about.
Looking back on my eight years of Harrow and Cambridge and judging them
by results, I find that Classics have supplied me with a mass of
interesting and amusing facts to think about, whereas Mathematics only
taught me how to think on abstract things. Hardly any Mathematics linger
in my mind. Sometimes, when I am going to sleep, I think of Space and
wonder whether it is circumnavigated by the curves that go away to
Negative Infinity and come back again from Positive Infinity, as if the
two Infinities met. Sometimes I snap at people for saying Two and Two
make Four as if it were an axiom, instead of being a result attained by
rigid proof. And I sometimes lose my temper when they talk of what would
happen if there were a Fourth Dimension. I tell them they can get a
Fourth Dimension by putting Tetrahedrals for Cartesians, and it makes no
more difference than putting Centigrade for Fahrenheit and thereby
getting 15° of cold instead of 5° of heat.
Until I went to Harrow, I had a tutor at home, and he taught me to read
Virgil as anyone reads Dante, not stopping over every word to consider
it as grammar. But this did not assist me there. “Optative Future used
where Indicative Future would be required in Direct Oration.” That is my
note on Æschylos, _Persæ_, 360. I remember that my mind was far away at
Athens, watching the gusts of passion sweep across the audience when the
play recalled the battle they had fought at Salamis seven years before.
And my mind came back to Harrow with a jerk at hearing the suave voice
of Dr Butler addressing me by name, repeating this, and recommending me
to note it down.
In my Cambridge days the Mathematical Tripos and the Classical Tripos
were still in their primæval shape. It had gone on for half a century
with little change, and lasted until 1882. If you were going in for
either of these, you had no examinations (except Little Go) until the
middle of your fourth year there, and then came these two Triposes with
only four weeks interval between them. The system had worked well, but
subjects were enlarged till it became unworkable--Electricity and
Magnetism were reckoned as Mathematics, and so on with many other
things. Down to 1850 nobody could go into the Classical Tripos unless he
had already got honours in the Mathematical: in the next four years,
1851 to 1854, there were about thirty men each year who got honours in
both; but in the four years I was there, 1877 to 1880, this average of
thirty had fallen to an average of two, and in 1880 I was one of the
two. I was a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and got a bad
Third in the Classical--a result that always puzzles me, as I had a
considerable knowledge of the Classics even then.
I knew Greek enough at Harrow to get the prize there for Greek epigram,
but I did not go seriously into Greek until after I came down from
Cambridge. A few years later on, German reviewers were remarking that I
knew Greek inscriptions and Greek literature from Homer onwards to the
Fathers of the Church and the Byzantine authors, and that nothing
escaped me even in neglected writings like the Almagest. I was doing
other things as well, and cannot imagine now how I found time for all.
But my interest in the Byzantines was not quite keen enough to satisfy
Krumbacher. One day at Munich in 1896 he was advising me to read a book
in Russian instead of its translation into French, and I said I knew too
little of the language. He fired out--“You cannot read the Russian book?
You go to Patmos. Go to Patmos.” I told him I had been to Jericho--or
rather to its site--and had not found it very attractive; and Patmos had
looked just as unattractive when I had seen it from a ship. But he meant
it literally. I should learn good Russian from the monks, and could
collate Byzantine manuscripts as well. It really was a first-rate plan,
but somehow I did not go to Patmos.
He was remarkable to look at--his hair had turned snow-white when he was
only twenty, and he had eyes like coals of fire. In his own line he was
unquestionably the greatest man since Ducange; and there at Munich he
was a colleague of Furtwaengler, the greatest since Winckelmann in one
aspect of archæology. I knew Furtwaengler from 1885, when he was still
at Berlin, and Krumbacher from 1891. They both died far too young, at 53
or 54. With a further twenty years of life, they might have achieved far
greater things than they had yet attempted. They were unaffected men and
never posed, as Mommsen sometimes did when he thought of his resemblance
to Voltaire.
Once in Berlin I went to a sitting of the Archaeologische Gesellschaft,
3 March 1896. It was all plain living and high thinking there, and they
debated Pheidias and Plato amidst great bursts of Wagner that came in
from a concert-hall close by. I have a letter here that I wrote my
brother next day--“They manage their meetings in a much more formal way
than the people at the Institut at Paris; and they are more long-winded.
One of the men last night got his notes in such a muddle that he made
nearly all his statements three times over; but nobody seemed to mind.”
In my next letter, Dresden, 10 March 1896, I said that I had been to
call on Fleckeisen, and described him as “an old man with long white
hair, toddling about his study in a dressing-gown.” I regret to see that
in another letter I spoke of a society of learned men as “a cellar-ful
of beer-barrels.”
Amongst the learned Germans whom I used to meet, some few talked
politics quite freely; and I used to hear that everything that Bismarck
did was right, and everything that the young Emperor did was wrong. I
should like to hear what they are saying about the causes of this War.
I remember the abdication of the Emperor of the French in 1870; and now
in 1918, at the abdication of the German Emperor, the feeling of relief
is just the same. Both men had kept all Europe in alarm for years before
their fall. In turn they had the greatest army on the Continent and a
navy that was second to our own; and no one could foresee how they would
use their strength, as their foreign policy was all adventure and
sensation. There was very little sympathy with France at the disaster of
Sedan. It is the fashion now to talk as if we sympathised with France
all through. My recollection is that people were mostly against France
in 1870 until Paris was besieged: then they realized that Germany was
getting dangerous, and began to change their views.
After the war of 1870 the French did not get possession of their
Lorraine frontier till the indemnity was paid and the occupying army was
withdrawn. Then they fortified it so effectively from Belfort to Verdun
that everybody said the Germans would come round through Switzerland or
Belgium, if ever they came again. (I remember people saying this, about
1878 and onwards, quite as a matter of course.) Against Switzerland
there was the fortress of Besançon, and against Belgium there was
supposed to be a line from Verdun to Dunkirk through Lille. But this
line never was made effective, and gradually fell into decay. That
certainly was no affair of ours in the days of the Two Power standard,
when we were building ships to fight the French and Russians. But after
the Entente I thought we might request the French to pay attention to
their Swiss and Belgian frontiers. No doubt, they could not make as
strong a line from Dunkirk to Verdun as from Verdun to Belfort; but the
Germans were not likely to embroil themselves by going through Belgium,
if they had to face a line on the French frontier there of anything like
the same strength as the French line in Lorraine.
One of those learned Germans was making a tour in England
five-and-twenty years ago; and I met him at Portsmouth, and went over
the Victory with him. He showed much emotion at it all; and when we
reached the place where Nelson died, he quite broke down and burst out
into tears. And the quartermaster said, “I’m blowed.”
He may have pictured it more vividly than we did, for he was a veteran
of 1870, and knew what warfare meant. A great-uncle of mine was on the
Impregnable at the battle of Algiers in 1816, and I have heard him say
that it was really nauseous to have two hundred killed and wounded all
crowded up in such a narrow space.
Unless a naval battle has been fought close by the shore, no landsman
can well picture to himself what it was like. Looking down upon the
island and the straits of Salamis, I have seen the battle as vividly as
Trasimene or Waterloo; but I have never been able to conjure up
Trafalgar by thinking of the latitude and longitude that I was in. I
have tried it several times and always failed.
There have been many naval battles in the Dardanelles, in ancient times
and in the middle ages; but I did not think of these when I was there in
1880. Our fleet had gone up through the straits two years before; and
that seemed much more real. People criticised some things that Hornby
did, especially his sending ships right up the gulf of Xeros; but
everybody seemed quite sure that the strategic point was in the throat
of the peninsula, five miles north-east of Gallipoli, not in its toes at
Suvla bay and cape Helles, more than twenty and thirty miles south-west.
So, being out of date, I imagined that our Gallipoli expedition would
try to land near Yenikli-liman.
When people say that the Thermopylæ epitaph would suit Gallipoli, I
rather wonder if they see how very suitable it really is. It is not the
namby-pamby thing they think, “Go, tell the Spartans, thou that passest
by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” It really is a stinging
thing, and the sting is in the tail, the last word of the line. “Tell
the Spartans it was _here_--in an untenable position, with a flank that
could be turned--it was _here_ that, in compliance with their orders,
our lives were thrown away.”
In a list of the books here that were acquired before 1846, the German
books are the collected works of Goethe, Schiller, Richter (Jean Paul)
and Koerner, as well as separate works of theirs, a few things by
Niemeyer, Tieck, Werner and Wilmsen, and some translations into German
from the Danish and Swedish of Andersen and Bremer. All this, of course,
is what is known as literature; and there is nothing at all utilitarian
except a volume of travels in Surinam, published at Potsdam in 1782. The
later acquisitions show how Germany has changed since 1846. These books
are crammed with information, but devoid of literary merit.--No doubt,
the recent books were chosen by myself, and the others by departed
relatives whose tastes and interests were not the same as mine; but this
will not explain the change. There was not the same scope for choice:
there were few books then of such appalling industry as those that come
out now, and there has not been another Goethe.
It is fifty years since I first travelled in Germany, 1868, and I have
watched the later stages of the transformation that had been foretold.
“But the Ideal is passing slowly away from the German mind ... and the
memories that led their grandsires to contemplate, will urge the youth
of the next generation to dare and to act.” Old Bulwer Lytton wrote that
in 1834 in his _Pilgrims of the Rhine_. I remember my father reading it
out to me in very early years.
He had a very dexterous way of giving me glowing accounts of places on
the Continent, and making me long to go there. And then, whenever I said
that I should like to go, he said to me, “Of course, you shall; but it’s
no good your going till you can talk to people there.” I commend that
dodge to parents whose children are disinclined to learn.
When my brother was at Harrow, my father was dissatisfied at his
learning so little German there, but my grandfather took quite another
view, 8 February 1863, “I should say, Let him be a proficient in the
French language first, for that is spoken nearly all the world over,
while German is more a flash thing than useful: all very well, if time
permits after learning the more useful. So let him get on with
Mathematics and the Classics, for that is what he will gain Honours on
(if any) and not the German language: that is merely an
accomplishment.”
Foreign languages ought to be begun in nurseries, and not left for
schools: all good linguists have begun by learning words in different
languages as soon as they could speak. If children are only told that a
certain creature is a cat, they will afterwards learn the word ‘chat’ as
a translation of the word ‘cat.’ But if they are told that the creature
is called ‘cat’ by some people and ‘chat’ by others, they are prepared
to find that other people call it ‘katze,’ others ‘gatto,’ and so on.
And they connect the creature with its foreign names at once, instead of
indirectly through the English name.--However, these nursery lessons are
not always a success. I remember a Parisian who learnt her English from
an Irish nurse, and always spoke it with a brogue.
Good linguists sometimes get confused, when languages have words with
similar sounds but different meanings. Thus, the German ‘nehmen’ sounds
like the English ‘name’ and ‘dumm’ like ‘dumb’ and ‘bekommen’ like
‘become.’ A man once said to me at breakfast, “I shall name bacon”:
then, seeing that I did not grasp what he had said, he hurriedly
corrected it, “Ach, I am dumb. I shall become bacon.”
When I first went to Greece, they still spelled Byron’s name
phonetically, Mpairon. They pronounce _b_ like our _v_, but _mp_ like
our _b_--a fact unknown to many of the people who talk about the Mpret
of Albania. Similarly, the Spaniards spelled O’Donohue’s name O’Donojo.
He was Cuesta’s chief-of-staff in the Peninsula. The veterans of that
war picked up the foreign names by hearsay, and usually got them right;
but now our veterans can read, they see how foreign names are spelled
and mispronounce them sadly. Leekatoo suggests a cockatoo, but really is
Le Câteau.
There is always a temptation to turn foreign names into some English
words with which we are familiar: we still say Leg-horn for Livorno,
though we have dropped Lush-bone for Lisboa, and call it Lisbon now. I
was looking for a ship at Devonport, the Hecate, and thought I spotted
her; so I asked, “Is that the Hekaty?” and was answered, “She’s the He
Cat.” In the gardens here the Gloire de Lorraine begonia is always
called the Lower End. I hear people talk of the Cornice as the Cornish
road, and make Hague rhyme with ague.
After the Kruger telegram _Punch_ printed an imaginary letter to the
German Emperor (18 January 1896) signed Grandmamma, but attributed on
internal evidence to the Duke of York, there being a nautical breeziness
about it, e.g. “Solche eine confounded Impertinenz habe ich nie
gesehen.” I saw this in Vienna, reprinted in the February number of
_Progress_, the editor stating explicitly that it was “drollig.” In the
ensuing War people on the Continent felt certain that our troops were
using Dum-Dum bullets; and I saw a newspaper at Paris which said that we
were slaughtering the Boers with our murderous Dam-Dams. And in 1912 or
1913 I saw one there which said that we expressed our highest hopes in
singing “God shave the King.”
In looking through the obsolete music here I found the anthem in the
good old form which should have been revived in 1910--“God save great
George our King”--and also in a later form that seems to be
forgotten--“God save Britannia’s King, William, our noble King.” There
was also a good deal of dance-music, some “as performed at His Majesty’s
balls, Almack’s, and the Court of France,” and some “as danced at
Almack’s, the Nobility’s balls, and the Assembly Rooms, Ramsgate.”
Judging by the music, the dancing was very animated then: in _Beauties
of the Ball Room_ the first dance is the Sailor’s Hornpipe. Pop Goes The
Weasel is described as “now become so popular in fashionable circles,”
and directions are given for dancing it and exclaiming at the right
moments “Pop Goes The Weasel.”
Amongst the old pamphlets and sermons here (mostly presented by their
authors) there is _A Sermon preached in Trinity Church, Cambridge, on
Feb. 1, 1857, the Sunday before the Bachelors’ Ball_. The text seems
inappropriate--“neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creature.” The sermon is chiefly aimed at
candidates for ordination. They are to shun the Bachelors’ Ball, not
only for their own sake, but for the sake of others who might be led
astray by their example. And it gives an awful instance. “He received a
pressing invitation to a public ball.... In that ball-room he found, it
is stated, no fewer than six clergymen. To stifle the reproaches of
conscience, he went up to those six clergymen, and asked them, one by
one, if they thought there could be any harm in attending a public
ball.... To shelter their own inconsistency, they at once answered that
such amusements were perfectly harmless.... That night’s dissipation
removed all his former scruples.... He plunged into extravagance, had
recourse to gambling, became a bankrupt in his fortunes, perpetrated
forgery, administered poison, and at last expiated his crimes upon the
scaffold, the precincts of the prison receiving his strangled body, and
hell, it is to be feared, receiving his lost soul.”
There is also a volume of _Letters from Abroad_ by the man who preached
that sermon. After a brief residence in France, he knows all about the
French. “Like people in a fever, the French complain of everything
outside them, whereas the evil is within them. Had they in their
churches and schools sound Scriptural teaching, they would be contented.
But, being without the knowledge of the Bible,” etc.... “As I come from
our Protestant service on Sunday, I meet men and women carrying bundles
of firewood, which they have been gathering in the forest. It all arises
from their ignorance of God’s Word. Had they Bibles, I might refer them
to Num. XV. 36, where Moses asked God what was to be done to a man who
was found gathering sticks on the Sabbath; and God Himself answered, Let
the man be put to death.”
Then there is a sermon on _The Great Exhibition_, preached by a much
abler man, 4 May 1851. He also speaks of “our blessing of blessings, the
opened Bible,” but is not so sure of its effects. “There is too much
reason to apprehend that a vast increase of vice, and Sabbath-breaking,
and profaneness, may be added to the iniquity already abounding in our
demoralized metropolis ... and foreign visitors may leave our shores
worse than when they arrived.”
Writing from Exeter, 23 October 1838, my father says, “I went to hear
the Mayor preach on Sunday evening: he had an immense audience, and
spoke for about an hour and a half. He holds up the Bible alone as the
sole necessary book, condemns every creed and article framed by men,
calls every system of religion in the world a money-getting system,
etc., etc.” My father kept a copy of some verses on the Mayor, which
were very popular in Exeter just then, especially the lines, “on
Saturday sells gin to all, | preaches Sunday, | and on Monday, | sitting
in judgment in the Hall, | inflicts the fine for fight or fray | caused
by the gin of Saturday.”