fact, the opposing parties _were_ one and the same person. There was
a man who wrote years ago, during the Boer War, to a pro-Boer daily
paper which he disliked, complaining of the way in which the teeth of
animalculæ gnawed into the copper sheathing-plates of ships in the
South Seas, and ruined them. Then he wrote a letter from another place
in another false name to the same paper, saying that the first letter
was written by an ignoramus, and describing how the animalculæ should
be dealt with. There was a tremendous fight lasting for weeks, and
it ended, I remember, by a beautiful description of the great ships
built at Solothurn in Switzerland and there launched upon the mighty
deep. Even then the editor did not smell a rat. Why should he? Editors
cannot always know everything. And he thought (did this editor) that
Switzerland lay upon the sea. It was necessary, therefore, for the
public to break the ring and burst up the show: which they did, amidst
great laughter.
I know another case where a man, being the literary editor of a
great daily paper, reviewed one of his own books with the utmost
virulence--but anonymously. He showed in this review a very profound
knowledge of the tricks lying behind the production of the book and of
the charlatanism of it. Then did he, in his own name, write a dignified
reply, and there was quite a little commotion.
The reviewer wrote back adding further charges, which were demonstrably
true. The author wrote once more saying his dignity forbade his
continuing the quarrel, and the next day both of them counted as one in
a meaningless division of the House of Commons.
To this day I am never quite certain that the more violent leaders
I read in opposing papers are not often written by the same man; at
any rate, they are often written in exactly the same style, with the
notable exception of one daily paper which, as the atheist said of his
unbaptised child, "shall be nameless." All the others (except this
notable _one_) have their leaders written in precisely the same manner.
That is what makes me think that they are done for the most part by one
man--and what an output he must have! And what a lot of money he must
earn!--even at two guineas a thousand, the price of prose in these most
happy years of peace which have seen the birth of a new Europe and the
dawn of The Day of Justice final and secure.
ON INACCURACY
The other day I was writing in other fields than these, ploughing
another land (to which, for the honour I bear it, I again give no
name), and I had occasion to speak about the Nereids who swim about in
the sea. I very pompously announced their appearance in the Sixteenth
Book of the Iliad. I should have said the Eighteenth Book.
Why did I say the Sixteenth Book? I cannot tell. I have awaited, since
the appearance of that article, letters written to me privately,
written to the paper itself, written to other papers, all saying: "Why
do you talk about things you know nothing of? You call it the Sixteenth
Book; it is the Eighteenth Book."
So far no letters have come either to me or to the paper in question.
Nor has any one even written to any of the great daily papers on the
subject. So perhaps it will blow over. But my mind returns to the
matter. Why did I write "Sixteenth" when I meant "Eighteenth"? What is
inaccuracy? What are its sources? Whence does it spring? What makes one
man more inaccurate than another, or rather (and much more truly) why
is one man inaccurate in some things and another in others? What the
devil is it all due to, anyhow?
I know very well why accuracy is such an anxious matter with men. It
is because, alone of all the factors of learning, it is easily and
mechanically attainable. It is no good a man trying to be just in
judgment about a great and broad matter on which he is ignorant. It
would be no good, for instance, my trying to look learned through a
just judgment of Russian poetry--for I cannot read Russian. No man can
mechanically, and as a matter of course, set himself right in the major
factors of learning. But both he and others can get references right,
now that there are so many printed books of reference. And therefore
men study accuracy in published book-details, because they say to
themselves: "Fool I may be, and ignorant I may be; but anyhow, I can be
accurate--with the help of a public library." And at the same time they
say to themselves: "General ignorance it is easy to hide; but if I am
inaccurate, the biggest fool born can find me out: with the help of a
public library."
So far so good. I know well enough why one bothers so absurdly about
accuracy in such details; or, to put it otherwise, why mere slips
of the pen and misspellings frighten us so much. But what I do not
understand is how and why they take place in subjects which one knows
as well as one's own name.
I remember once writing a long book about Paris; a long, long book, to
pay my first quarter's rent as a young man. And in that book I found
myself perpetually saying "North" when I meant "South" in the matter
of the immortal hill--in the matter of the hill of the University. I
always talked of going up that hill as going "North," whereas if you go
up that hill you walk due South.
And I knew a man once who whenever he went into a shop to buy razor
blades for his patent razor always said "railway blades." Yet in other
respects he was an ordinary man.
I will not attempt to solve the problem. It is not fatigue that does
it, still less is it real ignorance; for you will notice that a man is
inaccurate about things he knows thoroughly well, and that the mistakes
he makes are always of an absurd kind which he would be the first to
spot in others; for instance, calling Nottingham Northampton, and the
other way about. All one can say is that it happens as variations
happen in the generation of animals, or as any other fluke happens.
Some God guides it.
Inaccuracy is a very fruitful and powerful creator of things. It not
only creates legends, it creates words. There are hosts and crowds
of words which have come in through the talent of men for inaccuracy
and through the inspiration of inaccuracy, which is blown into men by
this God of whom I speak. Hence what is called _metathesis_, the very
fruitful parent of many admirable words from Turmut to Hercules. Hence
also the naturalisation of French and other foreign words. It is a
pity, I think, that so much printing, and the foolish pride of those
who can read, checks the process nowadays. I live in hopes that it will
not check the process for long, and that our coming barbarism will
return to these popular words.
"Chauffeur" should be "shover," and "asparagus"--which I like to hear
called "grass"--has, I hope, taken root forever as "sparrow-grass"--a
very good name for it; for it is a grass and sparrows have no
particular bond with it. They well might have, if they only knew how
good it was; but they are stupid little beasts, and good for nothing.
And if you tell me that thus to branch off upon the matter of sparrows
is disturbing to the reader, and that one ought to keep the main thread
of one's discourse, I answer you with a book always well praised and in
parts quite on the highest level, called "The Book of Job." If you will
read "The Book of Job" you will find that, in the catalogue of strange
beasts which the writer brings forward in defence of the majesty of
God, he gets to the ostrich. But hardly has he mentioned the ostrich
when the inane habits of that enormous fowl prove too much for him.
He forgets all about God and creation and the rest of it, and allows
himself a little separate diatribe against the idiocy of the ostrich
before getting back to his theology. So I with sparrows.
And now that I have taught you this lesson from Job I will return to
the matter of inaccuracy.
Inaccuracy is also the breeder not only of good native phrases, but
of excellent tales, like the well-rubbed, polished, ancient, and now
immutable story of the boy in buttons who got nervous at the grandeur
of the bishop, and said, when the sleepy bishop asked who was knocking:
"It's the Lord, my boy."
And inaccuracy is the parent also of that still older and still more
immutable story about the Pyramids of Egypt and their builders, which I
cannot print here.
It was inaccuracy which made the guide-book man so angry at the phrase,
"Our Lord God, the Pope," his translation of "Divus Papa," put before
the title of some canonised pope of the past.
And it was inaccuracy that made the mediæval story-teller talk of the
"Emperor Pliny" and of Virgil's brazen tower. And what a picture I get
of the Emperor Pliny sending for the Magician Virgil who builds the
brazen tower! Inaccuracy is a mighty mother of works.
It pleases me also especially in this, that you cannot teach it; you
cannot make a man inaccurate. There is no way of becoming inaccurate
by industry, and if you deliberately try to be inaccurate you fail.
Inaccuracy is perhaps the most spontaneous and the freest of the gifts
offered by the Spirit to the wit of man. It is even more spontaneous
and more free than the gift of writing good verse, or that rarer gift
which I have also written of here--the gift of writing abominably bad
verse; exceptionally bad verse; criminally bad verse; execrable verse.
And inaccuracy is a great leveller--like Love and Death and other less
commonly quoted levellers--like Wine and War and Repentance.
For there is no one, whoever he may be, however learned or however
ignorant, who may not suddenly be found inaccurate. And, what is more,
the same man will be inaccurate in one period and accurate in another,
entirely as the Spirit chooses and not as _he_ chooses.
Lastly, inaccuracy has this great and noble quality attached to it,
that it breeds real tragedy; and that is a finer thing than breeding
mere stories or even noble words. Try shouting "port" down the decks
when you mean "starboard," in some narrow crowded fairway against a
racing tide, and you will find out what I mean. Or again, inaccuracy in
the setting of a range; repeating (as I heard a man do at Châlons) 113
millimetres for 13 millimetres--and they plugged a village church miles
and miles outside the camp.
In these matters, that which was but a trifle or a comic accident takes
on majesty. Inaccuracy becomes a solemn thing.
And of all the forms by which inaccuracy builds up tragedy the best I
know is that form whereby the God causes two letters to be put each
into the envelope meant for the other. Out of one such error as that
you might get another Trojan War!
ON TECHNICAL WORDS
Be you technical and all the other learning shall be added unto you.
This commandment is not one revealed to man; yet need it not be
painfully learnt. It is so true that it is part of man's nature. The
mind accepts it at once, instinctively. All men who would display
learning, however really learned they may be, cannot but fall at once
into the happy use of technicalities.
Now there is a good and solid reason for this. For a technical word
takes the place of long explanation. If you do not use technical words
you have to replace them by clumsy, roundabout phrases. You lose your
direct effect. Technical words arise of themselves in any science or
art, and there is no force, even of a god, that could keep them out.
But that is only their genesis. Their true use is to bamboozle, and, my
word! how well they do it!
The French people, who (as Cæsar pointed out) are very keen upon the
military affair, first applied to the actions of armies the very simple
words of every day. If men were walking all in a line and were then
spread out the French said that the formation was "unfolded." The
progress of soldiers upon their feet from one place to another was
called "walking." When their formation was broken in defeat they were
said to be "thrust off the road," that is, bereft of their principal
method of progression and continuity; for it is by roads that armies
are maintained. A force which lost its power was said to be "undone."
The various positions of the sword were called "the first," "the
second," "the third," "the fourth," "the fifth," "the sixth." You could
not have it simpler! But the Technical Spirit was waiting for its
prey, and very rapidly those simple words became in another language
"deploy," "march," "rout," "tierce," "quarte," and the rest of it.
Quite lately, this necessary disease spread with peculiar exuberance
into the untouched fields of painting and of music. Even those of my
age can remember the advent of most of them. Time was when the critic
of art said that a picture was very like the thing it was meant to
represent, or that it was very unlike it. I can remember the older
generation which talked like this. But to-day they might as well be
teaching infants in words of one syllable. You have a whole army of
words from "technique," which is very old, down to "square touch,"
which has not yet got a white beard but a long one, and you have
"planes," and you have "values," and you have hundreds of others which,
as it is not my trade, I shall not pretend to catalogue. But this I
know, that no one can write art criticism at 1s. 6d. the inch until he
has mastered the terms, and I know still better that having mastered
the terms any one whatsoever, though he be colour-blind, cross-eyed,
and quite indifferent to proportion, can write the very best art
criticism in the world. For criticism is good in proportion to the awe
which it excites. For the function of the critic (says Aristotle) is to
criticise, that is, to pull the leg of the middle classes.
As for music, the victory of the thing is now insolent. It has
triumphantly beaten out of the field all ordinary men. There is still
a sturdy phalanx of purchasers who buy a picture because they like it,
or who will tell you boldly that a picture is like or unlike the thing
which it pretends to record. There is still a gallant remaining little
force of merchants, most of them elderly, who think that a sky should
be blue, and grass green, and bricks red, and all the rest of it, and
who will _not_ buy a picture to hang on the walls of the Detached House
in its Own Grounds unless it is beautiful and true. But in the matter
of music the miserable reactionaries, the old simpletons, have had the
life beaten out of them. There is now no one left alive who dares say
that he dislikes a complicated modern volume of noise. Music has become
a thing altogether apart, like Sanscrit. On the one hand you have the
huge mass of mankind still delighted with good tunes (I use the word
"good" in fear and trembling. I mean, for instance, "Oh! Mr. Porter,"
the "Marseillaise," the "Dies Iræ," and "Auprès de ma Blonde"), and
on the other you have the Sacred Initiate, who commune only with one
another; save when they stand at the door of the Temple and with great
contempt drop some few phrases of an unintelligible language to the
gaping crowd without.
But I think that neither the adepts of art-critic-technicalities,
nor even those of music-technicalities, will fully learn their trade
till they study the kings and masters of the whole profession, which
kings and masters are the writers upon women's fashions. Any one, as
I have said, can become an art critic, and a good one, by learning a
hundred words or so by heart and knowing where to stick them in; and
though not any one, yet a fair proportion of boys and girls can become
music-critics by getting parrot-like in the enormous terms of their
apparatus. But it is of public knowledge that the being who can write
about women's dresses is one in a thousand.
Now why should this be? I do not know, but it is so. I am assured by
those who have gone into the matter that most of these writers are
men and not women, but there are, of course, women adepts too. Their
occult vocabulary is twenty times more rich than the vocabularies of
their concert-going and picture-gazing brothers, and it is not only
rich, it is also accurate and determined. The terms used in booming a
picture or a great complexity of noise have something floating about
them. They can be applied contradictorily, one critic saying that a
line is "amusing," and another saying that it "lacks touch." There is
room apparently for licence, and, therefore (I hesitate to hint it),
room for the charlatan. I do not mean of course that any art or music
critic _is_ a charlatan. No! Not for one moment! I only mean that he
might be one; that it is possible to conceive of a charlatan using
these solemn terms. But no charlatan could use technical terms about
the fashions--women's fashions, at least--without being discovered
at once. The Fashion-writers' Guild is a strict confraternity and an
honourable one, demanding a severe and long apprenticeship and always
certain of its instrument. If I read (of course I should never read
anything of the sort--I am only giving it as an illustration) "the
foundation is of chinchilla draped _en échelon_ and caught up with
pompoms of crapeaumort," I am reading about some one quite definite
kind of ornament which everybody who has learnt the language will at
once realise. I could not apply it vaguely to a black silk skirt or a
velvet Medici collar, and therein I think the technicians of fashion
are wholly superior to all their parallels.
Respectful as I am, however, to every group of technical terms, there
is one set of which I can never be certain. I mean the metaphysical
set. I may be wrong. It is not my trade at all. But do what I can it is
impossible for me to take quite seriously the technical words of the
people who to-day call themselves philosophers. I read St. Thomas and
I understand, I read Descartes and I understand, I read Spinoza and I
understand, I read Locke and I understand, but when I read the Moderns,
the tail of the Germans, I cannot take them seriously at all. And the
reason I cannot take them seriously is this. When I ask anybody else
what a particular technical term means he can always give me some kind
of explanation. For instance, if a man says to me, "Political progress
is an asymptote to ideal democracy," and I say to him, "Pray, Master,
what do you mean by 'asymptote'?" the mathematician is quite able to
take me kindly aside and explain to me, or to any other rational being,
the nature of the hyperbola, and to show me how it is always getting
closer to, but never touches, the lines called asymptotes, and then I
understand exactly what he meant by his technical word. He meant that
political progress is always getting nearer to an ideal democracy but
can never quite reach it. Thereupon I am content, for I can size my
man up. But the modern philosophers will never consent to this. They
will never put what they have to say in plain language, and I am by
this time half persuaded that the reason they do not do so is that they
cannot. I very much doubt whether the words they use mean anything
at all. Therefore, it is that when I would read philosophy (which
is no bad pastime for a man fatigued with real work and with the
considerations of real problems), I fall back upon the _Summa_ because,
though it does indeed contain technical terms, they all have a plain
meaning, and can every one of them be understood with a little simple
explanation.
So much for technical terms: the short cuts to authority and status.
ON THE ACCURSED CLIMATE
When you curse the weather (as I do now) summon to your aid a great
group of vapid Aurelian thoughts. It will do you no harm. Such thoughts
are a pleasant repose for the mind, a sort of croon.
If you doubt that word "Aurelian," either read the notes Marcus
Aurelius left, or, what is better, go to the British Museum and see the
statue of that booby upon his horse. The horse is more intelligent than
he.
What, then, are these which I call "Aurelian thoughts"? They are not
unlike, in motive (though far inferior in quality), to the contrasted
categories of Defoe in _Robinson Crusoe_, admirably parodied by Mr.
Barry Pain in _Robinson Crusoe's Return_, a book than which....
These categories you will remember consist in two columns: the first,
grouse; the second, ingenious gratitude. In the first column: "I find
myself upon a beach, shipwrecked, without any money, very damp and with
nothing to eat." In the opposite column: "On the other hand I might
have been born a chimpanzee in a place where chimpanzees are hunted."
It is one way of getting consolation, and a very epicurean way, in the
strictest sense of the term epicurean.
Do the same about the weather. "It rains. I have not seen the sun for
three months. But, on the other hand, I might be freezing to death
in the Arctic, or sitting up with a candle killing scorpions on some
damned barren island of the Levantine Seas."
The crab about this method is that it does not really satisfy the mind.
I have only to use these words "Levantine Seas," when at once the man
deprived of sun thinks of sunlight and the man deprived of warmth
thinks of warmth, and the scorpion seems a delightful beast, and if the
island is barren, so much the better; it means that there is not too
much rain, which is a curse.
I have noticed that men living in climates not human, never even try to
console themselves, as do people living in England, which has the best
climate in the world. They do not say: "Would that I were in a place of
clouds and water!" They sit down sullenly (though with bright eyes),
endure it, and die. It is only people just on the edge of perfection
who complain. It is so with social things. The loudest cry rises not
from the seller of papers in the streets, but from the man who finds
that there is something wrong with his big motor-car, or that he cannot
reserve a carriage to the Riviera, but has to travel in a train full of
Frenchmen.
And to go back to climate.
If one could exactly balance all the things which one desires in a
climate, I will tell you what would happen. One would lose three
things, each more important than the last--energy, decent morals and
happiness. I suppose that what one would exactly balance in a climate
would be a sufficiency of moisture without discomfort, a sufficiency
of light without loss of repose, and a sufficiency of heat without the
breeding of noxious things. I take it that the climate of the Balearics
in early March carried on throughout the year would fill the bill; or
rather the climate of the Balearics supplemented by large rivers which
had no mud upon their banks and never overflowed or ran dry, deep
forests which were never tangled or marshy, and sublime mountains which
never sent down tempest or any other disaster, and which were not, as
most mountains are, inhabited by demons.
Well, if one lived in such a climate, I say that one would lose energy
and morals and happiness. They say that the mind turns inward when
it suffers too much sorrow. That is true; but it remains alive. It
turns inward also, but in a permanent, _dead_ fashion, when it has
no stimulus at all. What people really mean when they say that they
would like a perfect climate (granted that they are human beings and
not immortals) is that they would like to preserve all the advantages
they have acquired from living in their own climate, and yet have them
in another and a more delightful climate. Another way of putting it
is that they would like all the advantages of contrast without the
disadvantages of tedium. Or, to put it more simply still, they would
like to go on assuaging their thirst for ever and yet never assuaging
it. It is a contradiction in terms; at least, for mortals.
The immortals, by the way, had very odd ideas upon climate. It was the
custom of the Gods of Hellas (who had an excellent climate offered them
on the slopes of the hills) to take their leisure above the snow-line,
and then at a moment's notice to go south of the first cataract of the
Nile into a fiendish heat and eat heavily for days with the Ethiopians,
just as our rich go to the Riviera. But with this difference: that
they went to Ethiopia not only for climate but for the morals of the
inhabitants--which is more than you can say of those who go to the
Riviera, my experience of which detestable belt is that no one can
decide who most despises the other, the aboriginal or his visitants.
The Gods of Hellas also (now dead, because the climate changed) rather
concerned themselves with controlling climate than with enjoying it.
And that, by the way, is a lesson for us. They were the masters of
their environment, and not its subjects. The same is true of very young
people, whom I, with these mine eyes, have seen deliberately taking a
walk in the rain, or picking up snow itself in their hands, or (what
may seem incredible) bathing in cold water and swimming about in it:
and when I say cold water I mean very cold water, as, for instance, the
English seas in April.