woe against those through whom they come. We are constantly inventing
or importing words to convey ideas or shades of feeling for which we
previously had no exact means of expression. We also necessarily acquire
new words for new objects, such as chemicals and machines. When men made
the telephone they had to call it something; and the same thing applied
to the omnibus. We can frequently trace new words to their inventors.
But we may safely say that successful new words are seldom “made up”
cold-bloodedly merely for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a
word half-accidentally, developing it usually from some word already
familiar; or a philosopher or scientist constructs one out of fragments
of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin mixed, because he has a new object
to describe. The process is going on continually. The rivals “airman” and
“aviator” (somebody once asked if you could call a miner a “talpiator”)
are at present[2] fighting it out in the Press and on men’s tongues; and
if some central authority is in the future established over the heads of
the sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word “supernational,” now
being bruited about, may come into use to describe it. We may get in
time, too, an inclusive word which will imply “citizen of the British
Empire,” covering both Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and
Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will result from a public
competition.
When it comes it will come because some one person starts using it and
others take to it. And when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new
word as a substitute for an old one in general use, I think it most
unlikely that a group of persons such as the Overseas Club could persuade
the race to abandon a universally used word like “Colonial” for some
£5 prize word merely because hypersensitive people think that the word
used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. “Colonial” is very strongly
entrenched. One can just understand how the Americans have come to use
the abominable word “Britisher” instead of the ancient “Briton”; for it
falls more trippingly off the tongue. But “Colonial” is a most liquid,
easy, and euphonious word. If it is ever superseded, it will be so
because some other word comes in with the larger connotation to which I
have referred, a word which is bound to come into being when we cease to
think of the Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on the one hand and
the Colonies on the other, but think of it as a federation of equal and
distinct units.
It is a pity that people take so seriously the fact that when the
words “Colonies” and “Colonial” were first used by us they had certain
associations. For it is evident that to the vast majority of our
countrymen they are entirely divested of them. Whatever one’s habits,
one automatically thinks when the word “Colonial” is mentioned, not of a
humble emigrant who wants shepherding, but of a person who is the very
quintessence of independence. Any one who has even the most superficial
acquaintance with the language knows that words can lose their old
associations utterly. If, for example, I were arrested and charged for
alleging, in a public speech, one of our Royal Princes to be “a silly
knave,” I should not find the magistrate very sympathetic if I said I
was using the words in a Shakespearean (which in this case would be
equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I merely meant to call him
“a simple boy.” Similarly, where an object changes its form its name
changes its connotation. If one could talk of a bottle to a mediæval
ancestor, he would think of something made of leather; to-day a bottle
is essentially something made of glass. If we always wanted a new term
directly a new association was created, there would be no end to the
process; we should have to have a Ministry of Constructive Philology
always at work. After all, Charleston was named after an English king
when the North American plantations were very subordinate indeed; and
Melbourne after a member of the British House of Lords, an institution
of which few modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, saving the
Overseas Club’s reverence, we may as well, for the time being, stick to
“Colonial.”
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won.—S. E.
Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore
Handling the Porcupine of Avon is always ticklish work. When Mr. George
Moore, after containing himself for years, at last wrote to explain that
it was he, and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who discovered the
fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were weak because they were
written for boy-actors, it was only natural that another correspondent
should show that Mr. Moore had been forestalled by an eighteenth-century
Frenchman. Mr. Moore’s remark about the boy-actors was, however, merely
a passing observation in a lecture in French (published in the _Revue
Bleue_ in 1910) which is an important document in the movement against
what Mr. Shaw calls Bardolatry.
“He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” Thus Emerson; and a
few generations of such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed by a
reaction. For a hundred years we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and
swallowed him whole; a man has even written a book on _The Messiahship
of Shakespeare_. And of all his powers, that of creating an infinite
variety of female character has been perhaps more enthusiastically
praised than any other. The professors have given us treatises on
Shakespeare’s Feminine Types; and the less erudite public has been
deluged with Posies from Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls. “O Nature! O
Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?” That is typical. Dr.
Lewes, one of the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels and
adores, and asks women to do the same. “This piece,” he says of _Henry
VIII_,
“this piece and its female characters should indeed inspire
women with profound gratitude towards a poet who represents
a queen and a heroine who is above all things an excellent
woman, displaying in the midst of frightful trials all the best
womanly qualities, thus proving that a noble, pure feminine
heart is the home of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and
purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been paid to the sex
than by Shakespeare in his presentation of Catherine of Aragon.”
And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best-known English book on these
women. Dare any one apply the epithet “clever” to Portia, “this heavenly
compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness”? As for Lady
Macbeth, with her “Gothic grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned
colours,” even she is not to be insulted by comparison with other
villainesses. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra had been mentioned, but
“would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel
murderess and unnatural mother with Lady Macbeth? _Lady Macbeth
herself would certainly shrink from the approximation._”
One _has_ sometimes felt that her ladyship was probably president of the
local branches of the G.F.S. and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families
Association.
There was nothing of this sort about Mr. George Moore’s lecture. It
opened with a strong protest against the “vast clamour” of Shakespeare’s
worshippers:
“One might take them for a gathering of negro Methodists in
a chapel, each one straining his lungs to out-bellow his
neighbour, in order to attract the Almighty’s attention. Is it
that the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to them?
At any rate, the madness increases daily, and, if the cult
of Jahveh should happen to decay in England, I should not be
surprised were they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant throne
in the heavens.”
After this engaging beginning he went on to the general contention that
neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a
real woman. The Renaissance was interested in women only as queens or
odalisques, and Shakespeare at most made a few delicious silhouettes
of women. His men were another matter. “Hamlet is the secret thought
of all men”; and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with Tolstoi, he
reaffirmed Tolstoi’s statement that “Falstaff is the most universal and
original thing in Shakespeare.” “Hamlet is the hieroglyphic and symbol
of the intellect; Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh.”
But Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned with “the eternal
masculine.”
But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare has no female Hamlet and
no female Falstaff; is it not arguable that then the case for the
superiority of Shakespeare’s males over his females is very much less
strong? It would be absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject; but
personally I doubt whether any one who cannot get inside the minds of
most (though many would exempt Heine’s “ancient Parisienne” Cleopatra,
and one or two more) of Shakespeare’s women will get inside the minds of
most of his men either. When Professor Dowden said that he had “edited
a whole play for love of Imogen” the remark (if he heard it) may have
sounded strange to Mr. Moore; but would he understand, either, any
one editing a whole play for love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the
Duke of _Twelfth Night_, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or Henry V?
It is possible to hold the view that Shakespeare “put himself” into
a few characters and observed the others “from the outside,” making
them most interesting when they are most markedly what are called
“character parts.” Personally, though I should certainly know Hamlet
or Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, I don’t think there are
many other of Shakespeare’s characters whom I should recognize if I
encountered them clothed in other than their traditional garments. But
I do not think it is easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, his
women are less carefully and sympathetically drawn than his men—Lady
Macbeth than Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than Anthony,
Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than Orlando—or, still more, that he
was not interested in women and regarded them in a casual lazy way as
decorations. Shakespeare’s politics were Heaven knows what; and he may
not necessarily have drawn Portia as an argument for the admission of
women to the Inns of Court. But one would have imagined that if ever
there were a writer who treated women and men on a footing of complete
equality, and even perhaps elevated women’s moral superiority to an
indefensible pitch, it was he. If his female characters are not living
human beings it is certainly not because he despised them. He gave them
plenty of virtue, wit, courage, and will, and an ample share of the
stage; it is, with all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest
that he thought of them merely as properties.
The recent correspondence sent me back to Mr. Moore’s paper, and I
read it with admiration for the fruits of what he called a month’s
rather exhausting liaison with the French language. But something about
it—perhaps it was the catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate
criticism—seemed familiar. I have tracked it; here also Mr. Moore has
been anticipated. It was the late Max O’Rell—it is almost like being
anticipated by Charley’s Aunt—who remarked that
“The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most part slaves or
fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a sort of submissive
odalisque, Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose.”
It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about Shakespeare.
Moving a Library
I do not remember that any of our meditative essayists has written on
the subject of Moving One’s Books. If such an essay exists I should be
glad to go to it for sympathy and consolation. For I have just moved from
one room to another, in which I devoutly hope that I shall end my days,
though (as Mr. Asquith would put it in his rounded way) “at a later,
rather than at an earlier, date.” Night after night I have spent carting
down two flights of stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed.
Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a
train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs
creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging
column of books wedged between my two hands and the indomitable point
of my chin. The job simply has to be done; once it is started there is
no escape from it; but at times during the process one hates books as
the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments.
A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious
to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s
sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish
where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled,
illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah! But that mood is, I am happy
to say, with me ephemeral. It is generated by the necessity for tedious
physical exertion and dies with the need. Nevertheless the actual
transport is about the briefest and least harassing of the operations
called for. Dusting (or “buffeting the books,” as Dr. Johnson called
it) is a matter of choice. One can easily say to oneself, “These books
were banged six months ago” (knowing full well that it was really twelve
months ago), and thus decide to postpone the ceremony until everything
else has been settled. But the complications of getting one’s library
straight are still appalling.
Of course, if your shelves are moved bodily it is all right. You can
take the books out, lay them on the floor in due order, and restore them
to their old places. But otherwise, if you have any sense of congruity
and proportion, you are in for a bad time. My own case could not be
worse than it is. The room from which I have been expelled was low and
square; the room into which I have been driven is high and L-shaped.
None of my old wall-shelves will fit my new walls; and I have had to
erect new ones, more numerous than the old and totally different in shape
and arrangement. It is quite impossible to preserve the old plan; but
the devisal of another one brings sweat to the brow. If one happened to
be a person who never desired to refer to his books the obvious thing
to do would be to put the large books into the large shelves and the
small ones into the small shelves and then go and smoke a self-satisfied
pipe against the nearest post. But to a man who prefers to know where
every book is, and who possesses, moreover, a sense of System and wishes
everything to be in surroundings proper to its own qualities, this is not
possible. Even an unsystematic man must choose to add a classification by
subject to the compulsory classification by size; and, in my case, there
is an added difficulty produced by a strong hankering for some sort of
chronological order. There is nothing like that for easy reference. If
you know that Beowulf will be at the left-hand end of the shelf that he
fits and Julia Ward, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, at the right-hand end,
you save yourself a good deal of time. But when your new compartments do
not fit your old sections, when the large books of Stodge are so numerous
as to insist upon intruding into the shelves reserved for large books of
Pure Literature, and the duodecimos of Foreign Verse surge in a tidal
wave over the preserves of the small books on Free Trade, Ethics, and
Palæontology, one is reduced to the verge of despair. That is where I
am at this moment; sitting in the midst of a large floor covered with
sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco-ash, burnt matches, and the
Greatest Works of the World’s Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in Ruskin’s
words, “I don’t suppose I shall do it again for months and months and
months.”
Table-Talk and Jest Books
Samuel Butler’s _Note-Books_ have now gone into another (popular)
edition, issued by Mr. Fifield. I don’t know how large these editions
are: if, as I fear, they run to less than fifty thousand copies apiece,
Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. There is no other volume in the
whole of his collected works to equal this selection from his note-books:
you have here the quintessence of his wisdom, his taste, and his superb
impudence. The book really belongs to the “table-talk” or “ana” class of
books. Butler, that is to say, recorded his own table-talk. His principle
was, he said, that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it
on the wing. If, therefore, he thought of or said anything especially
illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort,
down it went. And it always went down as colloquially and freshly as if
a Boswell had been present recording conversation with a faithful pen.
Butler Boswellized himself. For Boswell’s _Life_, as has been remarked
before, is the greatest collection of “ana” in the language. It consisted
of Johnson’s table-talk strung on a biographical thread.
Personally I find it hard to draw the line between general table-talk
and anecdotes told of certain persons: most collections include both.
But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of detached scraps of great
men’s wit, are an agreeable form of reading, and an old-established one.
The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts from people’s conversation,
and some Latin wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the piquant
title of _De Jocis Ciceronis_. The great age of such collections began,
however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected
his “facetiæ.” My own extracts from Poggio are included in a German
collection of 1603, all written in Latin, which gives also the “facetiæ”
of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin of Balingen. This man
was a German scholar of exceptional brilliance who finally, on being
incarcerated for the last of many escapades, broke his neck trying
to escape. We have no such University professors of classics now.
“Ana” so-called begin with the _Scaligerana_, which gave the drastic
conversation of the younger Scaliger as recorded by two of his disciples.
The success of this led to a rush in France. Every one who had known an
eminent man deceased rushed out with a volume of table-talk; _Thuana_,
_Perroniana_, etc. The _Sorberiana_ “sive excerpta ex ore Samuelis
Sorbiere” was famous in its day, but I find it very dull. Much the best
collection is _Menagiana_, “Bon Mots, Rencontres Agréables, Pensées
Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses de M. Ménage,” of which the
second edition (my copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, knew
everybody and had a sharp tongue: he is extremely good reading, though,
nowadays, very little read. The contents of both of these books are
arranged (as is Butler’s) under subject-headings, in alphabetical order.
The same order is observed in Selden’s _Table-Talk_, the next best book
of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It was published after Selden’s
death by his private secretary, and is full of extraordinarily sensible
and witty things. And, unlike many wits, Selden always possessed a sense
of responsibility. He remarked himself (under heading “Wit,” as he did
not realize) that
“He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may by chance be
satyrically witty. Honesty sometimes keeps a man from growing
rich, and civility from being witty.”
Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so scrupulous. Our other
classical example in the kind is Coleridge’s _Table-Talk_, which is full
of fine criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams.
These collections shade off into the ordinary jest book. After all, there
is no clear division between stories told by a dead man and stories
collected and published by a living one, between stories about one man
and stories about fifty different men. When the new learning was still
new, men had a mania for collecting pointed anecdotes about the eminent.
The fattest book of the kind I know is Casper Ens’s _Epidorpidum_,
published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century. It is full of the
remarks of Alexander to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and the
repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a recalcitrant phalanx. Right on
into the eighteenth century works with titles like _Elite de Bon-Mots_,
and full of such historical personages, were popular on the Continent.
English jest books were perhaps more local and contemporary in their
references. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were addicted to anecdotes
about Mr. Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of Wharton said to the
Bishop. In our own time the larger, if not the smaller, public still
shows some demand for collections of anecdotes of this sort: and popular
weeklies of the _Answers_ and _Tit-Bits_ type usually seem to find it
desirable to print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. Gladstone,
and such people. But it is a long way from _Tit-Bits_ to Samuel Butler:
which shows where one may land oneself if one does not know where to
draw a firm line when shading-off is apparently gradual. I cannot review
Butler at this time of day; but there are very few books existing which
contain more sense to the square inch than this. Though the worst of his
books is good reading, the _Note-Books_ is as certainly his finest book
as Boswell’s _Johnson_ is the finest of Johnson’s.
Stephen Phillips
The announcements of Stephen Phillips’s death must have carried many
people’s thoughts backward. Me personally it took back to a time, years
ago, when I was in the first flush of my youthful beauty and sitting out
at a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between boughs, trees gently
swished under a summer sky, the sound of violins and the glide of many
feet penetrated softly from a distance; and a partner, whose face was
shadowy pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, looking out into
the night, and talking in a deep ecstatic voice of _Marpessa_, _Herod_,
and _Paolo and Francesca_. It was not merely that she thought that I was
that sort of person: the same thing was happening in every county in
England. Phillips had the biggest boom that any English poet has had for
a generation. The extravagance of the eulogies seems very strange now.
There was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. I have just
been looking up some of these panegyrics, and the pitch of them makes
one feel a little sadly for a man who outlived so great and so early a
fame. The history of literature was ransacked for comparisons. Chapman,
Webster, Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought in: and almost
the most modest of the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who described
Phillips as “the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.” I
remember the _Daily Mail_ devoting its magazine page to a description of
the poet, in the course of which it explained, with characteristic love
of figures, that here was a man who had discovered how to make £1000 a
year out of poetry. But it did not last. The climax of Phillips’s success
came with _Paolo and Francesca_; the subsequent plays were received with
a diminuendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was comparatively
ignored.
The early adoration was absurd but not incomprehensible. It was due,
one might say, to the fact that Phillips was not an original writer.
Much used to be made of a certain trick he had of accenting occasional
lines of blank verse in a strange manner: on the strength of this he was
treated as a revolutionary innovator in English prosody. In reality, in
spite of this one peculiarity, he was anything but an innovator. He had
an ear for the magniloquent progress of Milton’s verse and the crooning
music of Tennyson’s; he had a great facility for reproducing them; and
to those who are susceptible only to artistic effects which (though they
are unconscious of it) remind them of effects previously experienced, he
seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. He gave them precisely what
they had learnt to desire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours
and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar
tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the old words with
their unmistakable associations, the brilliant single lines, with here
and there an alliteration and here and there an onomatopœia. His work
was not, of course, a _mere_ compost. He added something. His emotions,
though not deep, were genuine enough; he had a pretty fancy; and he had
a considerable knowledge of how to produce effects on the stage. _Paolo
and Francesca_ was certainly in every way superior to most of the other
attempts which have been made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse.
It was effective in the theatre. One remembers the excitement about the
skilful ending: the murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, the
murderer’s revulsion:
_I did not know the dead could have such hair._
_Hide them. They look like children fast asleep._
But those who did not shrink from comparing it with _Romeo and Juliet_
omitted to notice the same deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He
was largely derivative and there was very little hard brainwork behind
his verse.