LARS PORSENA
LARS PORSENA
_or_
THE FUTURE OF SWEARING
AND IMPROPER LANGUAGE
BY
ROBERT GRAVES
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
LARS PORSENA, COPYRIGHT 1927,
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY. ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN U. S. A.
LARS PORSENA
LARS PORSENA
Of recent years in England there has been a noticeable decline of
swearing and foul language, and this, except at centres of industrial
depression, shows every sign of continuing until a new shock to our
national nervous system, a European war on a large scale or widespread
revolutionary disturbances at home, may (or may not) revive the habit
of swearing, simultaneously with that of praying. While, therefore,
obscene and blasphemous tongues are temporarily idle, it would be
well to inquire intelligently into the nature and necessity of their
employment: a ticklish theme and one seldom publicly treated except in
comminations from orthodox pulpits. It is to be hoped that this essay
will steer its difficult course without private offence to the reader
as without public offence to the Censor.
To begin with a few necessary common-places. The chief strength of
the oath in Christian countries, and indeed everywhere, is that it is
forbidden by authority, and the Mosaic injunction against taking the
name of Jehovah in vain must mark the beginning of our research. This
commandment seems to have had a double force, recording in the first
place a taboo against the mention, except on solemn occasions, of
the tribal god’s holy name (for so among certain savage tribes it is
still considered unlucky to use a man’s real name, often only known to
himself and the priest), and in the second place a taboo against the
misuse of even a decent periphrasis of the god’s name: for the act of
calling him to witness any feat or condition, or the summons to curse
or destroy an enemy, must involve elaborate purifications or penalties.
Any vain appeal to God to witness or punish a triviality was therefore
forbidden as lessening not only the prestige of religion but also the
legal dues of the priestly commissioners of oaths. Now, however, that
the economic interest has dwindled, and priesthood has been shorn of
temporal powers, the vain oath is no longer punishable with stoning or
with the stake――it is regarded merely as a breach of the peace. “Goddam
you, sir, for your interference,” spoken to a railway company official
is not liable to greater penalties than “To the pigs with dirty King
William” spoken in Belfast. Though the railwayman is given credit for
possible religious fanaticism, and though the goddam-er is formally
reminded of the solemn nature of the oath when he kisses the Book in
the witness box, the Almighty is left to avenge the spiritual fault
personally.
The taboo on vain mention of God or Gods is also extended to the divine
mysteries, to the sacraments and sacred writings, and to the human
representatives of Heaven where they are permitted direct communion
with the Absolute. In Catholic countries, Saints and Prophets are,
therefore, used for swearing in a low key, and it has meant a serious
lessening of the dignity of the Almighty in England that Protestantism
and Dissent have removed these valuable intermediaries from objurgation
as from adoration. In Catholic countries, too, the Bible is not vulgarly
broadcast, and an oath by the Great Chained Word of God is resonant and
effective; while in England the prolific output of six pennyworths and
even penn’orths of the Holy Scriptures from secular presses has further
weakened the vocabulary of the forceful blasphemer. The triumph of
Protestantism is, perhaps, best shown by the decline into vapidity of
“By George!”, the proudest oath an Englishman could once swear; for the
fact is we have lost all interest in our Patron Saint. It has been
stated with detail and persistence that in the late summer of 1918 an
Australian mounted unit sensationally rediscovered the actual bones of
St George――not George of Cappadocia but the other one who slew the
Dragon: they were brought to light by the explosion of a shell in the
vault of a ruined church. The officer in command sent a cable to the
Dean and Chapter of Westminster inviting them to house the holy relics.
After some delay, the Dean and Chapter formally regretted the serious
overcrowding of their columns; for, of course, though they could not
very well mention it, St George was a bloody German. So the Saint was
lost again by the disgusted Australians, this time beyond rescue. Or so
one version of the story has it. The other version, more attractive if
less authenticated, suggests that the Dean relented later and permitted
the relics to be smuggled into the Abbey under the thin disguise of _The
Unknown Warrior_, thereby avoiding offence to anti-Popish feeling.
Undistinguished as the oath by St George has become, he has at any
rate had the honour of outlasting all his peers. Where is there an
Englishman who, mislaying his purse or his pipe, will threaten it
in the name St Anthony? or blackguarding a cobbler for making a bad
repair to his boots will swear by the holy last of St Crispin that,
if that cobbler does not do the job again properly, he will have
half-a-pound of his own blunt brads forced down his lying throat? And
whom has England got to match the Pope as a swearing-stock? Once in a
public-house a young Italian and a middle-aged Londoner were arguing
politics. The Italian paid a warm tribute to the Vatican and its works.
“Oh, to hell with the Pope!” remarked the Englishman. “And to hell”,
replied the furious Italian, upsetting the glasses with a blow of his
fist, “and to hell with your Archbishop of Canterbury!” The Englishman
swallowed the insult agreeably, but expostulated on the waste of good
liquor.
Bound up with the taboo on the mention of God, of Heaven His throne,
and Earth His footstool, and of all His other charges and minions,
is the complementary taboo on the Devil, His ministers, and His
prison-house. At one time the vain invocation of the Devil was an even
more dangerous misdemeanour than the breach of the third Commandment.
God, though He would not hold him guiltless who took His Name in vain,
might forgive an occasional lapse; but the Devil, if ever called
in professionally, would not fail to charge heavily for His visit.
However, since the great Victorian day when an excited working-man
came rushing out of the City church where Dean Farrar was preaching
the gospel and shouted out to his friends at the public-house corner:
“Good news! old Farrar says there’s no ’ell”, the taboo has yearly
weakened. “That dreadful other place”, as Christina respectfully called
it in the death-bed scene of Butler’s _Way of all Flesh_, is now seldom
dwelt upon in the home pulpit, though the Law still formally insists
on it as true because deterrent. One regretfully hears that the threat
of hell’s quenchless flames and the satyro-morphic view of Satan are
now chiefly used for export purposes to Kenya and the Congo Basin, as a
cement to the bonds of Empire.
There is no surer way of testing the current of popular religious
opinion than by examining the breaches of the taboos in swearing.
At the present day the First Person of the Trinity is not taken too
seriously. “O God!” has become only a low-grade oath and has crept
into the legitimate vocabulary of the drawing-room and the stage. The
second Person, since the great evangelical campaigns of the last
century overturned a despotism and inaugurated a spiritual republic, is
far more firmly established. To swear by Jesus Christ is an oath with
weight behind it. The Third Person is seldom appealed to, and makes
a very serious oath, partly because of the Biblical warning that the
sin against the Holy Ghost is the one unforgivable offence, and partly
because the word _Ghost_ suggests a sinister spiritual haunting. “God”
to the crowd is a benevolent or a laughable abstraction; Jesus Christ
is a hero for whom it is possible to have a warm friendly feeling; but
the Holy Ghost is a puzzle and to be superstitiously avoided.
From blasphemy and semi-blasphemy it is only a short step to secular
irreverence. Many secular objects where they have become symbolic of
deep-seated loyalties are held in the highest reverence by naval,
military, and sporting society. The Crown and the Union Jack are for
the governing classes enthroned beside the Altar and the Communion-cup.
To call the smallest King’s ship a “boat”, let alone a “wretched tub”
or “lousy hencoop”, is to invite broken ribs; to mistake a pack of
hounds in full cry for a “whole lot of howling dogs” is social suicide.
The ingenious General G――――r, so remarkable an artist in swearing that
he must one day earn a paragraph in the revised _D.N.B._, used this
form of profanity with the happiest effect. Once, when inspecting the
famous “Z” Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, he was dissatisfied
with its response to his order “Dismount!” He bellowed out: “Now _climb
back again_, you pack of consumptive little Maltese monkeys!” “Z”
Battery complained to Headquarters of this affront, and General G――――r
was in due course asked for his explanation and apology. He gave it
briefly as follows:
Sir,
I have the honour to report that, on the occasion to which I
am referred, my order to dismount was obeyed in so slovenly a
fashion that for the moment I was deceived. I concluded that I
was actually assisting at a performance by a troop of little
Maltese monkeys, amusing enough but crippled by disease. I
tender my apologies to all ranks of “Z” Battery for my mistake.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
J. G――――r.
_Major-General._
Besides these religious and semi-religious taboos there is a whole
series forbidding the mention of any realistic danger or misfortune
that may be lurking round the corner. So it is a greater personal
offence to tell a taxi-man “May your gears seize up and your tyres
burst, and may you get pitched through your windscreen and break both
legs against a lamp-post” than merely to ejaculate “Blast your bleeding
neck!” or “Plague take you!” Instances of necks bleeding and divinely
blasted are rarely met in General Hospitals, and England has been
free from plague these two hundred years. To curse effectively one
must invoke a reality or, at the least, a possibility. Any swearing
that fails to wound the susceptibility of the person sworn at or of
the witness to the oath, is mere play. Few people enjoy being sworn
at, but there are no forms of humour more boring than guaranteed
non-alcoholic substitutes for the true wine of swearing. “Great Jumping
Beans!”, “Ye little fishes!”, “Snakes and ladders!”, and “Mind your
step, you irregular old Pentagon!” If Sinclair Lewis has done nothing
else in _Martin Arrowsmith_, he has at least nailed up as an abominable
type Cliff Clawson, the medical student, who indulged perpetually in
this form of heartiness.
Among the governed classes one of the unforgivable words of abuse is
“bastard.” Bastardy is always a possibility, and savagely tormented
whenever it appears; so that “You bastard!” must be regarded as a
definite allegation. Whereas in the governing classes there is far
greater tolerance towards bastards, who often have noble or even royal
blood in their veins, and who, under the courtesy title “natural sons
and daughters,” have contributed largely to our ancestral splendours.
On the other hand, the other common word in “b.,” which originally
meant a Bulgarian heretic, but later implied “one addicted to unnatural
vice”, is not a serious insult among the governed, who are more free
from the homosexual habit. Dr. Johnson rightly defined the word as “a
term of endearment among sailors”. Whereas in the governing classes
the case is reversed. When some thirty years ago the word was written
nakedly up on a club notice-board as a charge against one of its
members, there followed a terrific social explosion, from which the
dust has even now not yet settled. Had the accusation been “Mr. Wilde
is a bastard”, shoulders would merely have been shrugged at the noble
lord’s quixotic ill-temper. As it was....
And this brings us to the sex-taboo, from the violation of which
abusive swearing draws its chief strength; mention even of the privy
parts of the body is protected by a convention which has lost little
of its rigidity since mid-Victorian times. The soldier, shot through
the buttocks at Loos, who was asked by a visitor where he had been
wounded, could only reply “I’m so sorry, ma’am, I don’t know: I never
learned Latin.” Public reference to a man’s navel, thighs, or arm-pits,
even, is a serious affront; from which the size of the “breeches
of fig-leaves” tailored in Eden may be deduced. It is difficult to
determine how far this taboo is governed by the sense of reverence, and
how far the feeling is one of disgust and Puritanic self-hate. But in
any case the double function of the tabood organs, the progenitive and
excretory principles, has confused the grammatic mind of civilization.
The words “whore” and “harlot” are among the angriest properties
of swearing in any class: in the governed classes they are taken
realistically, the conditions of life being often so difficult under
industrialism that the temptation for a woman to embark on this career
is a serious one. In the governing classes the accusation is one of
aesthetic coarseness: to have a _liaison_ is excusable, and sometimes,
if the lover chosen is sufficiently distinguished, even admirable; but
the amateur status must be strictly maintained in love as in sport.
(It may be noticed in passing that the word “pro.” is a deadly insult
among Public School soccer players, and the greatest compliment in
village or waste-ground football.) In no class, it is to be regretted,
does the accusation against a man that he consorts with harlots rank
as a serious insult, though “pimp”, “ponce”, and “procurer” are
ugly enough. For some reason or other the hatred of cuckoldry has
abated: the very word is forgotten in popular talk; I would welcome
an explanation of this. But the prevalence of “unnatural vice” has
added to the unforgivable list the synonyms “Nancy-boy”, “fairy”,
and “poof.” The chastity of sister or daughter has become a far more
serious consideration than the faithfulness of a wife. When once the
master of a Thames tug, remonstrated with for fouling a pleasure-boat
and breaking an oar, leant over the rails and replied hoarsely: “Oh, I
did, did I, Charlie? And talking of oars, ’ow’s your sister?,” he did
so only in his detestation of the leisured classes and in confidence
of a clean get-away.[1]
[1] There is a great opportunity for ethnological research in
swearing of this sort. Why is it, for instance, that in India
the insult “brother-in-law”, carrying with it the implication
that a man has a liaison with his brother’s wife, is the one
unforgiveable insult (and the first word therefore that the
Imperialistic Englishman picks up thoughtlessly for general
conversational purposes)? Why in Egypt is a man insulted best,
paternally; “O you father of sixty dogs!” The answer will be
found in a comparison of religions, the Hindu laying most
stress on the decencies of family life in a large household,
the Mohammedan on the passing down of male perfection from
father to son.
Another serious abusive accusation in most classes is, fortunately
enough, of venereal infection. “Fortunately” because, though the stigma
may tend in some cases to concealment of the disease, there have
been times when infection has been considered a mark of manliness, a
fashionable martyrdom. It was so considered on its first introduction
into England, for Henry VIII was one of the first sufferers from the
Neapolitan sickness; and it has been so considered in Central European
military circles in quite recent times. This view was met even among
young line-officers during the War. But the lasting and painful results
of venereal disease are now generally realized, so “pox-ridden” and
“clap-stricken” are daily gaining in offensiveness as epithets.
It is only a minor taboo that prevents reference to human excrement,
but major swearing is strengthened by lavatory metaphors implying
worthlessness or noisome disgust. Again, it is only a minor taboo
that forbids mention of lice, fleas, and bugs. But the imputation of
lousiness (except in the trenches, where it was a joke) carries serious
implications with it; and the metaphorical “You louse!” is ripe with
hatred.
Now, the odd combinations that a witty and persistent mind could
contrive from the breach of several of these taboos at once are far
more numerous than appears at first sight. The lewd fellow who can go
on swearing, without repetition, for a mere hour or more should not
deserve the high popular esteem that he wins by the feat. Consider for
a moment. It takes nine hours or more to exhaust the combinations of a
full peal of church bells: then, while there are still so many taboos
major or minor that a daring mouth can find to outrage, with such an
ancient wealth of technical and associative matter to be excavated
within each of these taboos, and so constant an enrichment of this
ancient wealth by new pathological research, by religious sectarianism,
and by the advance of our imperial frontiers; and while the effect of
a discord played between the taboos which protect sacred objects and
those which repress disgust or terror can be so shattering――well, then
the recourse that most celebrated swearers take to foreign tongues or
dialects must be considered a confession of imaginative failure.
Add to this positive foulmouthedness the art of negative swearing, and
the thermodynamic entropy of the ingenious swearing-bout becomes even
more intense. The sequel to General G――――r’s inspection of “Z” Battery
is to the point here. He had been privately given to understand that
another instance of abusive or foul language on parade would cause him
to lose his command. Then the day came when he was not inspecting but
being inspected, by the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. His brigade
had assembled on the field of parade half-an-hour before the C.-in-C.
was expected, and General G――――r had posted a trumpeter at the gate
where the beflagged motor was expected to pull up. The lad had been
ordered to sound the call for “Steady!” as soon as he saw the car
approaching; but, even if it did not arrive sooner, the call was in
any case to be given three minutes before the hour. He was to watch
the church clock. Time passed, no car came, the call did not sound.
Then the hour chimed. Infuriated by this, the General set spurs to his
charger and thundered down to the gate. Passion choked him, his face
grew crimson. He reined up by the terrified trumpeter, and pointing
down at him with his finger, spoke in ogreish tones:
“Oh, you naughty, naughty, naughty little trumpeter!” And at that
moment, under cover of a hedge, for they had left their motor-cars on
the high road, up came the Commander-in-Chief and his staff on foot.
A physical training expert at Aldershot before the War knew the value
of this negative form, the sarcastic Balaam’s blessing where cursing is
expected, the triviality more impressive than the thunder and whirlwind
which went before it. Many of this staff-sergeant’s best extempores
have since been learned by rote and repeated by his pupils in season
and out. Failing once after repeated positive efforts in swearing to
induce in a squad the supple gymnastic style he expected, he moodily
gave the “Stand easy!” and beckoned the men up to hear a story. “When
I was a little nipper”, he began, “on my seventh birthday my dear old
granny gave me a little box of wooden soldiers. Oh dear, you wouldn’t
imagine how pleased I was with them! I drilled them up and I drilled
them down, and then one day I took them down to the seashore and lost
them. Oh, you wouldn’t believe how I cried! And when I came home to
tea that night, late and blubbering, my dear old granny――her hair
was white as snow and her soul whiter still――she says to me: ‘Little
Archie, cheer up!’ she says. ‘For God is good and one day you’ll find
your little wooden soldiers again.’ and Oh, good God, she was right, I
_have_. You wooden stiffs with the paint sucked off your faces!” And
at another time, more simply and despairingly: “Now, men, I’ve done my
best for you. I’ve sworn at you and sweated and coaxed you and it’s
all so much labour in vain. Now I say to you solemnly, solemnly, mind:
‘May the blessed Lord Jaycee take you into his merciful and perpetual
keeping’; for I’ve done with you. Class; Dismiss!”
* * * * *
Of the necessity for swearing there is more than one opinion: large
numbers both of the educated and the uneducated stand for the rigour of
the taboo and for self-control: for them yea must always be yea, and
nay, nay. Yet in practice they permit a few sterilized ejaculations,
such as “you silly beggar”, which is the drawing-room synonym for
the double b. of the street-corner; “bother”, “blow”, and “dash” do
service for “damn”, “curse”, and “blast”, which are just beyond the
old-fashioned limit. For oaths there are “By Jove!”, “By George!”, and
“By Goodness!”, and on comic occasions “Oddsboddikins!”, “Strike me!”,
“Swelp me Bob!”, and “By my halidom!” are dragged out, their blasphemy
purged by the lapse of time. It is one of the curiosities of English
that an oath by “God’s little bodies”――that is, by the Host――is a
Christmas-annual jest, while “Bloody”, still stringently disallowed,
does not mean more than “By Our Lady” as an oath, nor as an adjective
more than “worthy of the Bloods”, those aristocratic disturbers of
City peace in the eighteenth century. Another section of the community
swears luxuriously, from anti-institutional conviction; but a middle
course is, as usual, the most popular one: bad language is permitted
only under extreme provocation, and even then must stop short of
complicated invention.
* * * * *
Swearing as an art probably reached its highwater-mark in the late
eighteenth century. The aristocracy was as careful in its protection
of a corrupt Church as it was cynical about religion; and swearing as
an assault on a coffee-house rival and introductory to a duel demanded
a nice refinement of oratorical blasphemy; as the contemporary sermon
demanded a nice refinement of oratorical eulogy. The Elizabethan Age
may have been richer in far-fetched profanities and wild conceits than
the Augustan Age, but swearing is an art that cannot trust to mere
adventure for its success; it must have a controlled purpose, and
always flourishes most strongly in a pure aristocracy, particularly
a leisured town-dwelling aristocracy. The Elizabethan age swore, it
hardly knew how or why: and it was an excitable age with few settled
convictions. The Augustan age swore with deliberation and method, as
clearly appears in Sheridan’s _Rivals_:
_Acres_: “If I can find out this Ensign Beverley, odds triggers
and flints! I’ll make him know the difference o’t.”
_Absolute_: “Spoken like a man! But pray, Bob, I observe you
have got an odd kind of a new method of swearing.”
_Acres_: “Ha! ha! you’ve taken notice of it――’tis genteel,
isn’t it?――I didn’t invent it myself though; but a commander
in our militia, a great scholar I assure you, says that there
is no meaning in the common oaths, and that nothing but their
antiquity makes them respectable――because, he says, the
ancients would never stick to an oath or two, but would say,
by Jove! or by Bacchus! or by Mars! or by Venus! or by Pallas!
according to the sentiment; so that to swear with propriety,
says my little major, the oath should be an echo to the sense;
and this we call the _oath referential_ or _sentimental
swearing_――ha! ha! ’tis genteel, isn’t it?”
_Absolute_: “Very genteel and very new indeed!――and I daresay
will supplant all other figures of imprecation.”
_Acres_: “Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete――Damns have
had their day.”
There is no doubt that swearing has a definite physiological function;
for after childhood relief in tears and wailing is rightly discouraged,
and groans are also considered a signal of extreme weakness. Silence
under suffering is usually impossible. The nervous system demands some
expression that does not affect towards cowardice and feebleness,
and, as a nervous stimulant in a crisis, swearing is unequalled.
It is a Saturnalian defiance of Destiny. Where rhetorical appeals
to Fatherland, Duty, Honour, Self-respect, and similar idealistic
abstractions fail, the well-chosen oath will often save the situation.
At the beginning of the War, I was advised by peace-time soldiers
never to swear at my men; and I was hurt by the suggestion that I
could ever feel tempted to do so. But after putting the matter to a
practical test in trench-warfare I changed my opinion, and later used
to advise officer-cadets not to restrain their tongues altogether, for
swearing had become universal, but to suit their language carefully
to the occasion and to the type of men under their command, and to
hold the heavier stuff in reserve for intense bombardments and sudden
panics. For if, as may be questioned, it is a virtue to be a capable
military leader, this virtue is not compatible in modern war-fare with
the virtue of the unqualified yea and the unintensified nay. Tristram
Shandy’s father, and his uncle Toby whose opinions had been formed
some two hundred years before by trench warfare in the same district
and curiously enough with the same battalion as I served with had
anticipated me here:
“Small curses, Dr. Slop, upon great occasions,” quoth my
father, “are but so much waste of our strength and soul’s
health to no manner of purpose.”
“I own it”, replied Dr. Slop.
“They are like sparrow-shot”, quoth my Uncle Toby (suspending
his whistling), “fired against a bastion.”
* * * * *
“They serve”, continued my father, “to stir the humours but
carry off none of their acrimony; for my own part, I seldom
swear or curse at all――I hold it bad; but if I fall into it by
surprise I generally retain so much presence of mind (“Right”,
quoth my Uncle Toby) as to make it answer my purpose, that
is, I swear on till I find myself easy. A wise and just man,
however, would always endeavor to proportion the vent given to
these humours, not only to the degree of them stirring within
himself, but to the size and ill-intent of the offence upon
which they are to fall.”
“Injuries come only from the heart”, quoth my Uncle Toby.
But after this, Tristram Shandy, who was an Elizabethan born too late,
treats of contemporary swearing and protests against the connoisseurs
of swearing that they have pushed the formal critical control of
swearing too far. He speaks of a gentleman, “who sat down and composed,
that is, at his leisure, fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases
from the lowest to the highest provocation which could happen to him;
which forms being well considered by him and such moreover as he
could stand to, he kept them ever by him on the chimney-piece within
his reach, ready for use.” Tristram Shandy finds this practice far
too academic. He asks no more than a single stroke of native genius
and a single spark of Apollo’s fire with it, and Mercury may then be
sent to take the rules and compasses of correctness to the Devil.
He says furthermore that the oaths and imprecations which have been
lately “puffed upon the world as originals”, are all included by the
Roman Church in its form of excommunication: that Bishop Ernulphus
who formulated the exhaustive commination which he quotes (and which
later the Cardinal used with such success on the Jackdaw of Rheims)
has indeed brought categorical and encyclopaediac swearing to a point
beyond which there can be no competition. He asks what is our modern
“God damn him!” beside Ernulphus’
May the Father who created man curse him!
May the Son who suffered for us curse him!
May the Holy Ghost who was given to us in baptism curse him!
May the Holy Cross, which Christ for our salvation triumphing
over his enemies ascended, curse him!
May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him!
May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers
and all the heavenly armies curse him!
(“Our armies swore terribly in Flanders” cried my Uncle Toby, “but
nothing to this. For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my
dog so.”)
Tristram Shandy wrote at the beginning of the best period of English
profanity (1760–1820), which owes a great debt to Voltaire and his
fellow rationalists. The “Zounds!”, “Icod!”, “Zoodikers!”, and “Pox on
you!” of a Squire Western were discarded by men of fashion, and the
“oath referential” of Acres, facetiously and indecently blasphemous,
succeeded these: spreading their culture downwards and materially
helping the national _morale_ in the War years that began the new
century.
* * * * *
I do not think that Coleridge’s distinction between the violent swearer
who does not really mean what he says and the quiet swearer who swears
from real malignity is an essential one. He writes in his apologetic
preface to _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_: “The images, I mean, that a
vindictive man places before his imagination will most often be taken
from the realities of life: there will be images of pain and suffering
which he has himself seen inflicted on other men, and which he can
fancy himself as inflicting on the object of his hatred. I will suppose
that we heard at different times two common sailors, each speaking
of some one who had wronged or offended him, that the first with
apparent violence had devoted every part of his adversary’s body and
soul to all the horrid phantoms and fantastic places that even Quevedo
dreamed of, and this in a rapid flow of those outrageous and wildly
combined execrations which too often with our lower-classes serve for
escape-valves to carry off the excess of their passions, as so much
superfluous steam that would endanger the vessel if it were retained.
The other, on the contrary, with that sort of calmness of tone which
is to the ear what the paleness of anger is to the eye, shall simply
say ‘If I chance to be made boatswain, as I hope I soon shall, and can
but once get that fellow under my hand (and I shall be on the watch
for him), I’ll tickle his pretty skin. I won’t hurt him, oh, no! I’ll
only cut the ―――― to the liver.’ I dare appeal to all present which of
the two they would regard as the least deceptive symptom of deliberate
malignity――nay, whether it would surprise them to see the first fellow
an hour or two afterwards cordially shaking hands with the very man
the fractional parts of whose body and soul he had been so charitably
disposing of; or even perhaps risking his life for him.”
* * * * *
No general distinction of motive can be made between swearers who
adopt one or other of these methods. The art of one is that of the
whirlwind boxer who comes bustling into the ring and excites admiration
in the audience, and, he hopes, fear in his opponent by a great display
of unnecessary footwork and shoulder-shaking; the other is an old
hand, who saves his strength and misleads his opponent, if he can,
by pretended slowness and even by “boxing silly”, but after a few
ingenuous leads, such as “I’ll tickle his pretty skin! I won’t hurt
him, oh, no!” out comes the heavy right-to-jaw: “I’ll only cut the ――――
to the liver”; with telling effect. And Coleridge obscures the fact
that to refuse to shake hands with a man in public or, even more, to
refuse to risk one’s life for him, are breaches of social custom far
more serious in male society than an oath.
Frequent swearing, then, is often, no doubt, the accompaniment of
debauch, cruelty, and presumption, but, on the other hand, it is as
often merely what the psychologists call the “sublimation in fantasia
of a practical anti-social impulse”; and what others call “poor man’s
poetry”. But if the latter simile be permitted, it would seem that
original poets are as rare in modern non-literary as they are in
literary society. Occasionally in low life one hears a picturesque
ancestral oath or an imaginative modern one coined by some true
blasphemer and carefully stored by an admirer for his own use――“as in
wild earth a Grecian vase”. But for the most part the dreary repetition
of the two sexual mainstays of barrack-room swearing is the despair of
the artist. This is a mechanical age, and even our swearing has been
standardized.
The popular satire entitled simply _The Australian Poem_, and
satirizing the adjectival barrenness of the Australian Forces in the
War, will be recalled:
A sunburnt bloody stockman stood,
And in a dismal, bloody mood
Apostrophized his bloody cuddy:
“This bloody moke’s no bloody good,
He doesn’t earn his bloody food,
Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!”
He leapt upon his bloody horse
And galloped off, of bloody course.
The road was wet and bloody muddy:
It led him to the bloody creek;
The bloody horse was bloody weak,
“Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!”
He said “This bloody steed must swim,
The same for me as bloody him!”
The creek was deep and bloody floody.
So ere they reached the bloody bank
The bloody steed beneath him sank――
The stockman’s face a bloody study
Ejaculating Bloody! bloody! bloody!
Orderly-room charges of obscene and blasphemous language show a
distressing sameness:
“Sir, the accuser called me an x――ing y――” or “Sir, the accused called
me a y――ing x――”.
“And what have you to say for yourself, my man?”
“Well, sir, it was because the lance-corporal called me a double x――ing
y――, and I didn’t think it was right.”
The only novelty I remember in a long series of these charges was:
“Sir, the accused used threatening and obscene language; his words
were ‘Two men shall meet before two mountains’.”
_Omne ignotum pro obsceno_ is the rule among the uneducated. Mr. W.
H. Davies’ odd story will be recalled. An old hedge-schoolmaster one
day came as a stranger to the Inn in South Wales where the poet was
drinking, and sat down at a corner table. Presently he cried out twice
in a loud voice: “Aristotle was the pupil of Plato.” After a moment’s
silence the men at the bar protested: “Keep silence, you there!” Their
wives caught their skirts tightly to them: “We are respectable married
women and did not come here to be insulted.” The publican threatened
to throw the speaker out if he uttered any further obscenity. But the
old man apologized in the acceptable formula: “No offence intended; I
am a stranger here”; and was forgiven. After long pondering on this
story, I believe that I have got the clue. _Aristotle’s Works_ (with
illustrations) is sold in every rubber-shop in London and Cardiff,
in company with other more obviously erotic publications. I have
never had the courage to buy a copy and see what is wrong with the
philosopher; but I suspect the worst. And certainly “Aristotle” to the
public-house mind is known only in the rubber-shop context. But I can
testify to a man having been thrown out of the Empire Lounge some years
ago for calling a barmaid a “maisonette”. (“Indeed you’re wrong; I’m an
honest woman.”)
* * * * *
Of swearing-duels little is now heard. They used to be frequent,
tradition says, in the good old days when public-houses kept open
all night and beer was more strongly brewed: alas, I can find little
historical matter to indicate what was the technique and range of
this popular art at its Dickensian prime.[2] But at least the palm
of victory does not always seem to have gone to the most resonant or
strong-chested artist. Often, as in jujitsu, a man’s own strength is
turned against him. It is recorded that once in the City an Admiral’s
brougham was obstructed by a coster’s barrow and that the Admiral
improved the occasion by a very heavy and god-damnatory flow of abuse.
The coster let him have his say; but as he paused for breath remarked
cheerfully: “If you was better house-trained, Jackie, I’d take you home
for a pet.”
[2] Though swearing in fashionable society began to decline as
an art about the same time as the wig disappeared, it
flourished among the lower classes for fifty years longer.
* * * * *
I am informed that the legal view of abusive swearing is that, unless
calculated to cause a breach of the peace, it is no offence. So that it
is just possible to call a man a blasted fool in public. On the other
hand, there is an offence in calling him plain and unqualified fool:
that constitutes a libel and a penalty can be exacted.
* * * * *
Of American swearing I am not qualified to write, but I understand that
in vulgar life the convention there is somewhat different. “Bastard”
and “son of a bitch” are friendly terms of reproach. This recalls the
experience of an American tourist, Mrs. Beech, who was staying in
Paris after the War. An elderly Frenchman who was introduced to her
greeted her cordially: “Ah, Mrs. Beech, Mrs. Beech, you are one of ze
noble muzzers who gave so many sons to ze War.”
Might not a useful addition be made to this _To-day and To-morrow_
series, by some worthier, more energetic, and more scholarly hand
than mine? To be called _Lars Porsena_; or _The Future of Swearing_.
Lars Porsena, if we may trust Lord Macaulay, was more fortunate than
ourselves: he had no less than nine gods to swear by, and every one of
them in Tarquin’s time was taken absolutely seriously. How would the
argument run? On the lines perhaps of the following synopsis:
The imaginative decline of popular swearing under industrial
standardization and since the popular Education Acts of fifty years
ago; the possibility that swearing under an anti-democratic rêgime
will recover its lost prestige as a fine art; following the failure
of the Saints and Prophets, and the breakdown of orthodox Heaven and
Hell as supreme swearing-stocks, the rich compensation offered by
newer semi-religious institutions, such as the “League of Nations” and
“International Socialism”, and by superstitious objects such as pipes,
primroses, black-shirts, and blood-stained banners; the chances of the
eventual disappearance of the sex-taboo and of the slur on bastardy,
but in the near future the intentional use of Freudian symbols as
objurgatory material; the effect on swearing of the gradual spread
of spiritistic belief, of new popular diseases such as botulism and
sleepy-sickness, of new forms of chemical warfare, of the sanction
which the Anglican Church is openly giving to contraception, thereby
legitimizing the dissociation of the erotic and progenitive principles
and of feminism challenging the view that hard swearing is a proof of
virility. Research would be suggested on the variations of taboo in
different English-speaking lands,[3] on the alliterative emphasis and
rhythm of swearing, on the maximum nervous reaction that can be got
from a normal subject by combinations and permutations of the oath, the
results to be recorded on a highly sensitive kymograph. Finally, this
valuable and carefully documented work might treat of the prospects
of Pure Swearing; by which is not meant sterilized swearing or “Cliff
Clawsonism”, but _Swearing without a practical element, with only a
musical relation between the images it employs. Swearing of universal
application and eternal beauty_, following the recent sentimental cult
for Pure Poetry.
[3] A man charged recently at Hoxton with using language calculated
to make a breach of the peace complained that at Bethnal Green,
where he lived, he could have said all that and more with
impunity. He suggested a swearing-directory for the London
district which should indicate what you might say where.
“But how is this?” the reader asks. “Isn’t what I’m reading called
_Lars Porsena_, or _the Future of Swearing_”. I apologize for a little
joke, somewhat resembling those advertisements in _Snappy Bits_, which
promise erotic delights to any schoolboy who will send five shillings
and a statement that he is not a minor: only to job him off with badly
printed photographs of classical paintings and statuary――for to send
indecent matter by post is illegal. No doubt the Chic-Art Publishing
Company would not object to dealing more faithfully with its clients
if it could, and perhaps the delight of expectation is worth the
ensuing disappointment of only getting the Venus of Milo and a Rubens
or two to gloat over. But though a joke is a joke, this volume goes
as far as it decently can in containing at least a few classically
draped forecasts and an honest inquiry into the taboos which prevent
publication of the real _Lars Porsena_. And, anyhow, this is the
nearest to a _Lars Porsena_ that will ever be published. For as soon as
there is sufficient weakening of the taboos to permit an accurate and
detailed account of swearing and obscenity, then, by that very token,
swearing and obscenity can have no future worth prophesying about, but
only a past more or less conjectural because undocumented.
Though Samuel Butler’s definition of “Nice People” as “people
with dirty minds” can be misunderstood by critics who refuse to
differentiate between the humourously obscene and the obscenely
obscene, I like it. No nice person is uncritical; and yet we are all
hedged round with an intricate system of taboos against “obscenity”.
To consent uncritically to the taboos, which are often grotesque,
is as foolish as to reject them uncritically. The nice person is
one who good-humouredly criticizes the absurdities of the taboo in
good-humoured conversation with intimates; but does not find it
necessary to celebrate any black masses as a proof of his emancipation
from it. This book is written for the Nice People. Then, though it is
in its first intention a detached treatise on swearing and obscenity,
it cannot claim a complete innocence of obscenity, while consenting
to the publishers’ limitations of what is printable and what is not.
Observe with what delicacy I have avoided and still avoid writing the
words x―――― and y――――, and dance round a great many others of equally
wide popular distribution. I have yielded to the society in which I
move, which is an obscene society: that is, it acquiesces emotionally
in the validity of the taboo, while intellectually objecting to it. I
have let a learned counsel go through these pages with a blue pencil
and strike through paragraph after paragraph of perfectly clean
writing. My only self-justification is that the original manuscript is
to be kept safe for a more enlightened posterity in the strong-room of
one of our greater libraries.
Horace is my idea of a characteristically obscene man. An immoderate
liking for his poems is, I believe, a sure proof of obscenity in any
person. Catullus, on the other hand, was not obscene: he had greater
self-respect. Witness his:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa
Illa Lesbia quam Catullus unam
Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes.
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimos Remi nepotes.
Where “Glubit” by self-disgust and by the bitter irony of the
“magnanimos Remi nepotes” leaves obscenity looking foolish. The “Long
Man of Cerne” carved out in chalk on the Dorset Downs is not obscene
in the real sense that the modern Cinema is obscene with its sudden
blackings-out at the crisis of sexual excitement.
When a future historian comes to treat of the social-taboos of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a fourteen-volume life-work, his
theories of the existence of an enormous secret-language of bawdry and
an immense oral literature of obscene stories and rhymes known, in
various degrees of initiation, to every man and woman in the country,
yet never consigned to writing or openly admitted as existing, will
be treated as a chimerical notion by the enlightened age in which
he writes. As Sir James Frazer took, as the text for his inquiries,
the Golden Bough legend of Aricia and the primitive ceremonies there
surviving until Imperial times, so this new Sir James may take _The
Bottom Legend_ recorded by a contemporary historian Roberts as his
text. As follows:
‘Shortly before the “Great War for Civilization” (the indecisive
conflict, 1914–1918, between rival European confederations to decide
which was to have the right of defining Civilization) there was a
student at Oxford University famous for his “practical joking”. He is
said to have been one of the rare persons of the day to whom a peculiar
licence was given for such “practical joking” and for deriding the most
sacred taboos of the time. It was he who first defiled a local altar,
“The Martyr’s Memorial,” by climbing to the very summit at night-time
and planting a chamber-pot――a stringently tabood vessel――on the cross
which crowned it. The civic authorities had great difficulty in
removing this scandalous object, because climbing the Memorial was no
easy feat, and the chamber-pot, being made of enamel ware and not, as
was first thought, of porcelain, could not be dislodged by rifle fire.
On another occasion, this same student is said to have impersonated an
African potentate and, with a suite of disguised companions, to have
been officially welcomed with a Royal Salute aboard a battleship of the
English Navy, and to have aggravated this quasi-blasphemous performance
(for the Fleet was a religious institution of greater dignity and
efficiency than the Church itself) by the bestowal of medals on the
ship’s officers.
‘But the most interesting breach of taboo with which he is credited was
a dinner-party which he gave at a Cathedral town in the Midlands. He
spent over a year, and a great deal of money, in scraping acquaintance
under an assumed name with every person in the town whose surname
contained the syllable “bottom”; Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Sidebottom,
Winterbottom, Higginbottom, Whethambottom, Bottomwetham, Bottomwallop,
Bottomley, and plain Bottom; he insinuated himself into the friendship
of every one of these families, but separately, without allowing them
to meet in his presence, until finally he was able to invite them all
together to a huge dinner-party at his hotel. When each name in turn
had been announced by a particularly loud-voiced hotel-servant, he
withdrew, promising to return in a few minutes, and begging them to
begin dinner without him. The meal consisted merely of rump-steak, and
the host was already in a railway train, riding swiftly towards London,
and leaving no address.
‘This story is regarded by Roberts and others as a most amusing one,
though the point of the joke will need explaining to readers of this
thirtieth century.