THE LANGUAGE
IN order to avoid too much observation, I got housed in an obscure
hostelry that often accommodated foreigners. But none of the occupants
knew my language, nor did I any of theirs. Gesture and mimicry supplied
the defect for a time, and a few weeks sufficed to give me command of
the vocabulary and syntax needed for the common intercourse of life, so
easy seemed the tongue and so clear the articulation.
But the difficulty came at a later stage. I found I could not advance
far without a teacher, and a man of the purer blood was procured to act
as my tutor. I put on the dress of the marble city, and went daily to
him for my lesson. What a revelation I had of the subtlety of language!
It was like learning to skate; everything seemed to contribute to make
me stumble or fall; and the effort to recover was more dangerous than
collapse. Every word and phrase and idiom had countless variations of
meaning dependent on the intonation of the voice and the peculiar
gesture or facial expression adopted. There was a grammar and vocabulary
of tone as well as of actual speech. And, besides this, gesture and
grimace contributed their own shadings to every expression. The
twitching of an eyebrow would turn “God bless you” into “God damn you.”
A peculiar curl of the upper lip would change an inquiry into the state
of a man’s health into a doubt as to the morality of his ancestors. A
shrug of the left shoulder would make out of a fervid “I love you” as
fervid an “I hate you”; whilst a shrug of the right shoulder would
change it into “I despise you.” The eye had to be on the alert as well
as the ear in finding out what a man meant; and every limb had to be
watched as well as every feature of the face.
The dropping of the lid of the eye, left or right, could impart to a
sentence, or even to a whole conversation, meanings so radically
different that I became nervously conscious of every involuntary
twitching as I talked; it might imply sinister intention, or confidence
partial or complete; it might convey compliment or insult. It depended
on the amount of the eye left uncovered, on the rapidity or slowness of
the motion, and on the eye in which it took place. But, most bewildering
of all, every depression of the optic shade varied in meaning according
to the sex of the person addressed and the person addressing, and the
presence of both sexes, or only one. The raising of the eyebrow had,
similarly, a whole grammar and dictionary to itself.
But perhaps the most difficult and dangerous of all the sections of
their language was the use of the nose in conversation. For both piety
and lewdness had seized upon this obtrusive organ as their own. If a
phrase or word was snuffled up through the nasal channel, it might
express either gathering devotion or rising passion; only a member of
the inner social circle could tell to a nicety which it meant, for the
former was not often accompanied with the elevation of the eye to
heaven, nor the latter with obscene gesture.
I would have abandoned the task of mastering the various grammars and
dictionaries but for the enthusiasm of my tutor. He believed that
nothing ever existed so much worth learning—except what were called the
rotten tongues. These were two languages that had been spoken centuries
before by a race now despised, if not extinct; it was a hotly discussed
question who were its descendants, and, in order to avoid the awkward
necessity of seeming to follow the lead of a now debased people, the
usual course was to deny their existence or their connection with the
sacred or rotten tongues—Thribbaty and Slapyak. The great books of their
religion were studied in these; for, although it was quite a different
language in which they were supposed to have been originally
communicated to men, the missionaries who had established the faith in
this country had spoken in either Thribbaty or Slapyak, and the ritual
had been for ages written in these. A great political revolution had
changed all this generations before, and the holy writings were read and
the prayers and public functions performed in the vernacular. But it had
become the custom for orators, wits, and men of the world to adorn their
speech with words and phrases and quotations from the rotten or interred
tongues, though all their best wisdom and thought had been incorporated
in the native literature, and the stage of civilisation and especially
ethics that they represented had long been antiquated. They had come to
be the most valued shibboleth of the privileged classes, the barrier
which none but the most nimble and daring wits of the mob could
overleap. On them, therefore, was based all education; to their
acquisition were attached all the great prizes of state. On an apt
quotation from them some of the greatest reputations had been founded.
By a dissertation on some obscure point of their grammar the ablest
statesmen had leapt into office. They were spoken of as the highroads to
greatness and power.
Recently doubt had arisen as to their sacredness, their supremacy, and
their monopoly of wisdom and thought, culture and education. For many of
the youth of the poor and unprivileged had begun to show great aptitude
for them, whilst the gilded youth groaned under the burden of their
acquisition. But the intellect of the nation was on their side, and
still more the conservatism of official life, hating, as it does, to
learn some new routine. So it was shown how noble they were, how fit
they alone were to be true instruments of education, and how a real
knowledge of the vernacular could be acquired only through them. As I
read the numerous philippics against the advocates of the new learning,
I felt that it would be well-nigh profanity to neglect these marvellous
rotten tongues.
Once I knew how much depended on them, I entered on their acquisition
with great zeal, and found it an easier task than learning the grammars
and dictionaries of tone, and gesture, and facial expression. I had been
bilingual in my youth, speaking in the dialect of my mother and writing
literary English; and thus new languages came easily to me. My teacher
swelled with pride over my progress, though I think he had little to do
with it. But my success in this lessened his labours in teaching me the
shadings of his own tongue, for it minimised my despair.
And something, indeed, was needed to overcome my aversion to the
subtleties of their overspeech. Cautious as my pedagogue was in
introducing me to new sections of it, I was almost daily stumbling into
them. One day, thinking to put him into good humour, I had referred to
him as a great scholar; I was startled to find him grow red as if at an
insult; and he had to show me that the attitude I had been in (I had
been leaning my forehead on my forefinger) had turned the word into
“addlehead.” Another day I spoke of him as “well-bred,” with the same
result; and he had to explain to me that, blowing my nose as I had been
at the time, I had made the word mean “nincompoop.” And he had to
initiate me into the whole by-play of the handkerchief; it took me days
to master the infinite variety of meaning conveyed by its varied
manipulation. By ladies it was not so frequently used; the scent-bottle
took its place. And by its aid the gentler sex could woo, propose, and
win with as great ease as the other and with far less indiscretion in
word.
There was not an ornament or free appendage about fashionable dress but
was brought to bear in the expression of shades of thought and
emotion—the eyeglass, the key-ring, the chatelaine, the fan, the
shoe-tie, the garter; the slightest motion of each of these was pregnant
with meaning, and a mistake in their use might lead to serious
consequences; for almost every word contained in germ senses that were
often contradictory. The word for “good” also meant “feeble” or “silly,”
that for “vice” also meant “pleasure.” The same word stood for “heaven”
and “the purgatory of fools,” another for “well-born” and “idiot,”
another for “gentlemanly” and “inconsiderate,” another for
“well-mannered” and “apish,” and still another for “genius” and
“lunatic.” So love and lust, fashion and gas, insult and courage,
fornication and marriage, harlot and messenger of the deity, deception
and artistic power, impudence and prayer, bankruptcy and good luck,
illegitimacy and the legal profession, beautiful woman and hag, sage and
pedant, murder and nobility, candour and credulity, sword and stigma,
infallible utterance and absurd error, wise saying and despicable thing,
universal religion and bigotry, worship and play the hypocrite, to
please and to conjure, to knock down and to co-operate, wit and vanity,
to prepare food and to embezzle, courtier and pimp, sacred rite and
vexation—each of these pairs had but one expression for both.
I characterised the language that could be so double in its meaning as
insincere and barbarous. My school-master argued that the two meanings
were in each case naturally connected and that nothing so subtle or
refined had ever existed; he hesitated and added, “except Thribbaty and
Slapyak. It is the highest stage of social development to have a
language so ambiguous and difficult that it takes the greatest wits to
manage it. Look at the common people; they have but one meaning, the
more concrete and physical, for each word; and the result is boorish and
superficial.” I called his attention to the simple and direct
signification of the words in the admired rotten tongues. He assured me
that I was mistaken; great scholars had shown how there were depths
beyond depths of reflected and refracted meaning in every word of the
great Thribs and Slaps. “And was it natural that two peoples such as
these, ignoring, as they did, nay despising, truthfulness as a virtue,
should leave their language so unrefined, superficial, and
straightforward as they seemed to untrained eyes? To tell the truth in
clear and unambiguous language is the mark of barbarity. It is their
very example that has led us to hide truth like a precious treasure in
wrappings of subtlety. We shrink from exhibiting her to vulgar eyes. It
would be but sacrilege. And our greatest investigators have shown _a
priori_ that nations like the Thribs and Slaps could not have existed
without overspeech like ours to express the subtle shades of emotion and
thought.”
There still lingered in me grave doubts whether, if this were the
contribution of the rotten tongues, they had been of any great service
to the nation. It had already puzzled me to think that a people who
glorified truth (calling their land Aleofane, as they often explained to
me, “the gem of truth”) should take as their model two ancient nations
that held this virtue but lightly, that it should almost deify purity of
life and modesty, and yet bring up its youth on two literatures that
laughed at these. The moral ideals of this people had been the scorn of
the Thribs and Slaps.
But I had not command enough of the language to express these thoughts,
and I had to accept his apology for the rotten tongues. I was soon able
to adorn my conversation with fragments of them and roll Thribbaty and
Slapyak words and phrases off with unctuous gusto, as if they settled
every question. It was a great satisfaction to feel that without
intellectual effort one could knock down his opponent in argument by a
quotation, however little one understood it. And it gave one a blessed
sense of superiority to rattle off a long word or phrase that others
could not understand.
After I had gained skill in the use of the speech and the overspeech and
the rotten tongues I thought my task was done. But I found there was
almost as much to learn before I could enter into their highest social
life. Assisted by a posture-master, he initiated me into all the
niceties of fashionable conduct. I had to learn the methods of address
to every caste in society and to every rank in official life. The most
reverential terms were employed very freely: “Your noblest highness in
the universe,” “Your most serene godship,” “Your most beautiful ladyship
upon earth,” “Your most reverent of all sages.” I protested against the
indiscriminate use of such fulsome flattery. But it was explained to me
that all this was neutralised in the next section of deportment. I was
taught to reverse or cancel every compliment I was paying by a peculiar
use of the facial features as I bowed. I could even turn the flattery
into a curse when I had become skilled enough in the practice of oaths
and oath-making gestures. I wondered how it was possible to conceal from
the person addressed such reversal of compliments paid to him. And here
the posture-master stepped in. He told me I must be ignorant of the
barest elements of deportment, when I did not know how to bear the body
in addressing high social functionaries. He laughed at my innocence in
thinking that we should turn face to face and bow or shake hands. That
had been the custom in ancient and barbarous times, before the great
period of King Kallipyges and his queen. But for generations the proper
method had been to turn back to back and bow gracefully; and if the two
wished to show special fervour, they then ran butt at each other. This
monarch had had a most repulsive face, whilst both he and his queen
looked magnificent from behind. Hence the change. I did not dare to
laugh. But it was a hard task to conceal my amusement when he explained
that one of the most delicate attentions a superior could pay to an
inferior was to face round after the preliminary posterior bow and raise
the point of the right shoe to his nether garments. It took me several
weeks to acquire ease in all these details of deportment.
And it was well that I had learned them and reduced them to commonplace
by familiarity. For when my old pedagogue and cicerone led me into
society, the sight of the posterior bowings and scrapings was almost too
much for me.
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