about following the climate. Before the war very wealthy men were able
to do this in Western Europe, and they did it with damnable insistence.
If the war should compel them to know their own country, it will have
done a little good. But I notice also about these wealthy men (and
women)--on the whole, it was truer of the wealthy women than of the
wealthy men--that they did not even keep to the silly rules of their
silly class. They did not know where the climate was to be found which
they were seeking. Which of them knew the Rousillon? Or which of them
the divine coast of the Peaks of Europe above Cavadonga and the hundred
little bays of that more glorious Devonshire of the Asturias?
The truth is that the unexpected alone floods the mind--speaking, I
say, of mortals. _In Hac Lachrymarum Valle._ Of how it may be on the
other side I say nothing.
You are going by night, having missed your way, through an abominable
Alpine mist, and you would willingly die if you could find some place
to die in. Then comes a glimmering of light through the fog, a little
whisper of warmer air, the wreathing of the cloud. You are in a
chestnut grove, and it dawns. You get a little lower down through the
fragrant forest, you are in its open glades. You hear the torrent, and
just before it is day, things are so pleasant that you go to sleep
upon the tufted and now dry grass. As you go to sleep you say: "I am
in Paradise." So you are. But you would not be if you lived there more
than three days.
I think it is the business of the sea which makes men get nearest
to the truth in this matter of climate. I have noticed that men who
sail the seas never speak of climate, but of weather, and talk of the
Tropics and the Arctic, gale and calm and fog and drought and all the
million colours and changes of this earthly vestibule of Heaven, as
though they were a matter of course, like the furniture of one's house.
I never yet heard a sailor say: "Would that I were in this or that
climate!" and I never yet knew a sailor who did not settle down at
home, here in England, when at last he could, often in a comfortable
native slum. And this is especially true of pilots.
But in all this I have used the word "immortal," writing as though this
acquiescence in climate, this restraint of desire, were suitable only
for mortals. I will admit that, in some unchanging place where the
soul also is unchanging, a permanent climate, permanently suited to
the permanent soul, may do well enough and may be better even than a
cold, rainy, sunless day in the deep mud of the Weald. Indeed, I know
such a place, for I visited it once in company with immortal spirits
for more than half an hour. It is in the Californian Sierras, where the
trees are so high that they are part of the sky. It is in the Tuolumne
valley, towards the upper waters of it. In that place men obtain a
vision which corresponds to the word "Paradise."
And, talking of Paradise, what fortune is attached to a word! Here is
a Persian word wandering about, hopping from tree to tree like a bird,
flying to Greece, nesting in the Western liturgy, caged by the monks of
the Dark Ages, making a good stay among the French, but settling down
at last to be a supreme symbol in the language of the English. So that,
to-day, there is no word in English to beat it. It can give the word
"Heaven" great odds and come to the post with half a length to spare.
That is a great lesson in the history of words.
But if I go on at this rate, there would be no end to my writing, for I
should be led on from word to word, and that is the temptation of all
writers, against which it is their duty to fight, as it is the duty of
an honest man in a late, frosty, wet, diseased, green, sogging January
in the clay of the Weald to fight against any disparagements of his
climate: his climate of the mud, where falls not rain, nor hail, nor
any snow, but only a perpetual drizzle day after day after day after
day after day.
ON ACCENT
Strange accident in the history of men! What men most care for, what
a particular society most cherishes, what is most vital to it, dies
as the individual dies and can never be recovered by posterity. Would
you understand a century in the past? You read of it and at once you
are bewildered at finding a passionate attachment to things long since
grown indifferent; at discovering standards taken for granted, and a
scale of values taken for granted, which to-day have disappeared; what
is more, at stumbling continually upon terms obviously fundamental
_then_, and yet referring to things _now_ so dead that we cannot even
translate them. And all this is true of the immediate past as well as
of the remote past.
Among these astonishingly important things which disappear with the
disappearance of living men, consider accent.
If there is one thing really important to-day, it is accent. After
money, it most distinguishes the divisions of our society. And what do
you think posterity will make of that?
There was a man who made a statement in Parliament a few years ago
which seemed to his hearers so fantastic as to be hardly sane. He
was talking of a certain religious minority, an obscure sect, and its
peculiar form of education, and he said: "So strongly do we feel upon
this matter" (meaning the right to pursue a separate form of education
for the children of this sect) "that we would rather our children
should drop their h's than lose the Faith." That sounded to a mixed
public assembly of modern Englishmen something very nearly mad. The
idea that a man would rather have his son drop his h's than lose his
religion was something so thoroughly out of their accepted scale of
values that it savoured of the unreal. It was like saying that rather
than wear brown boots a man would wear no boots at all, or that rather
than eat foreign food he would eat nothing. Yet this intensity of
feeling upon particular modes of pronunciation is quite modern--at
least, as distinguishing classes within the State. As distinguishing
foreigners and enemies from natives, the value of accent is, of
course, as old as the hills, but as distinguishing the superior social
tradition from the inferior, it is brand-new.
It is interesting to note what accents are tolerated and what not;
what this modern religion regards as heresy and what as no more than a
"diocesan use."
The Irish accent in its various forms is universally admitted.
People talking English with an Irish accent do not thereby declare
any difference of rank--that is, of inherited wealth--but only a
difference of nationality, which is respected. And the same thing is
true--though very much modified--of the Scotch accent. I am not quite
sure that it is true of the Welsh. Perhaps there is not a sufficiently
large body of wealthy men boasting the Welsh accent to determine the
matter.
But other accents, not national but local, are barred with a religious
bar. They are profane. And that is the more remarkable when one
considers their strength in the three elements of number, of intensity
and of difference.
If people recognised real truths of experience instead of being
led away by print they would admit that the northern speech is, in
southern ears, almost a foreign tongue. A man brought up in the south
and finding himself among the populace in a Lancashire town will at
first not understand half of what he hears. It is true that the roots
are so similar and the words in common so often repeated that the new
dialect is mastered much more quickly than would be a foreign tongue.
Nevertheless, if the speech of Lancashire belonged to a separate
realm, and if the Kentish man, let us say, came into Lancashire as a
foreign country, he would think of the Lancashire dialect as a foreign
language. Had the two forms of speech developed in different Royal
Courts and adopted each its own experiment in spelling (let alone each
its alphabet) the one would be more foreign to the other than is Low
German to Dutch.
The first of all words, the personal pronoun, is an example. The
Kentish man says "I"; he translates the classic word "ego" by a sound
which is a rapid diphthong of the pure A, "Ah," and the pure I, "EE."
The Lancashire man expresses exactly the same idea by the open A,
"AH"; a completely different sound. When he talks in his own name
the personal pronoun rhymes with "BAH." When the Kentish man says
exactly the same thing the personal pronoun rhymes with "PIE." And you
could not get two vowel sounds more distinct. You may take any number
of instances. The "o" of "OLD" in the south is "ow" in the north.
Then there is the closed "e" of the south and the open "e" of the
north--"Yes" and "Yaahs," and, on the contrary, the closed "a" of the
north and the open "a" of the south--"păth" and "pahth."
There is another point about accent which is its curious variability
within a short space of time. It varies so rapidly that within one
human life a vulgarism or a jest becomes meaningless. What has happened
to the "v" replacing the "w" in the Cockney speech, for instance?
When the _Pickwick Papers_ came out it was universal; Dickens was
as close an observer of the physical realities of his time as Mr.
Bernard Shaw is to-day. Compare Dickens's Cockney with Mr. Bernard
Shaw's admirable and exact transliteration of that noble tongue in
its present phase. They are almost two different things! Some have
explained this by saying that there has been a change in race, that
London has been invaded from the north and from the Midlands; that it
was the old Kentish accent which London spoke with in the earlier part
of the nineteenth century, and that a Mercian accent has displaced it.
The late Professor Yorke Powell maintained this. It may be so; more
probably the change is a change _in situ_. Mr. Weller's great grandson
(who, I am sorry to say, is now driving a motor-bus instead of a stage
coach) talks the modern tongue, and it is utterly different from his
forbear's speech.
The imposition of a standard education upon the poorer people in
the State Schools is having an effect, but we hardly know in what
direction, although the agency has been at work for some fifty years.
Its chief observable effect so far seems to be not in the modification
of accent, but in the syllabic pronunciation of certain words,
especially names of places.
I have heard--like a tale from a far country--the astonishing story
that little innocent children were told to say CI-REN-CES-TER in the
place of "Cisseter." And there is again with this change another
change, which is the introduction of new and usually pedantic
Græco-Latin terms in the place of the old native terms. This is not
only the effect of the schools, it is also the effect of the Press
and of the ubiquitous action of the modern English State official, who
plays a far larger part in our society than do his colleagues in any
other province of Europe, not excepting the Germanies. He impresses
himself especially in medicine: but also in law, in the payment of
State doles and insurances, in the gathering of State dues, in minute
and continual inquisition upon every detail of daily life in the home
and the factory and the field.
Would you believe that a stout peasant could use the word
"circumference" (which is not quite accurate) for the outside headlands
of a ploughed field? It was used to me only last week by a man on
my farm. And as for "dilution," "percentage," "contributory" and
"implement," they have become the tame kittens of cottage speech and
roam about at large. With such have also come a great mass of legal
and quasi-legal terms, and these are modifying the language as much as
anything. There we have a most interesting parallel to a thing which
changed all the speech of Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, for
a great mass of our words which used to be called "Teutonic" have
turned out, as Wiener shows in his revolutionary essay, to be no more
"Teutonic" than the Æneid. They are corruptions of the technical terms
used in the Roman Law Courts and Bureaus of Administration. Such, for
instance, is all the group of words "Ritter, Rider, Road"--they come
from the Posting system of the Roman Empire and its taxation.
But this is taking me very far from my original text of accents, and
I return to it with a certain matter for conclusion--it is a matter
really near my heart, and it has been haunting me ever since I began
this article. It is the slight differences of pronunciation between
people of my own social rank (which may be called the professional
middle class) and the richer class above it. I mean (in so far as it
still exists) the permanently rich class. Here I must say at once that
I champion, not only without hesitation but with contempt for all other
opinion, the pronunciation of my own class. Not only in accent but in
every other thing it is the class which has made the civilisation of
Europe, and when the people above us differ from us, they are just as
wrong as the people below us. So much for them....
But it rankles all the same, that my superiors should put on airs, and
I will take a test case: the word "PIANO." When I say "Curse the piano"
(and it is a horrible instrument, is it not?) I make it rhyme with the
name of the suffete "HANNO," but those above me make it rhyme with "AH
NO." They make of it a more pathetic, and I a more downright word.
It is curious that these slight differences in accent should exist, for
the two sets of people are brought up together in the same schools,
they meet daily, and even (I am ashamed to say) inter-marry. Many
would pretend that by this time of day there was no difference left.
But there is; and if you watch half a dozen typical words closely I
think you will agree with me. I am not speaking of locutions, you will
note, but of accent. Now in our locutions we differ enormously from
those above and below us, and when I say above and below I do not
mean above and below in any scale except the ludicrous but powerful,
constant scale of social vanity. Our locutions, I am afraid, we tend
to submit to the judgment of those wealthier than ourselves. It is a
pity, for our locutions are right and theirs are wrong. For instance,
it is right to say "Riding in a carriage," and wrong to say "Driving in
a carriage," but "Riding in a carriage" has been heavily defeated by
"Driving in a carriage," and is now on the run. Personally, I regret it.
It is high time that a new etiquette book came out about these things.
The last one I remember reviewing is now twelve years old, and it was
not quite satisfactory, because it dealt largely with (_a_) the abuse
of vulgarisms of which no one ever heard, and (_b_) the assertion of
rules which were not sound rules at all. It came as a message from
the rich to the middle class, and was therefore a very unnatural
pronouncement. For it is our part to teach them and not their part to
teach us. For instance, this book said: "Do not talk of people by their
postal towns, do not say (if you are going to stop at a rich man's
house) that you are going to stop at Puddiford, or whatever the name
of the nearest market town may be, but give his palace its full title,
and with due respect." But I, for my part, never heard any one allude
to a rich man's house by the nearest postal town. On the contrary,
my experience is that people tumble over each other to underline or
shout the name of the palace in which they propose to find a brief and
humiliating entertainment from Saturday to Monday.
Again, in this book we were told not to say "Port," but "Port
Wine"--but that would lead me into the most bitter controversy of
modern times, compared with which the old quarrel between [Greek:
theotokos] and [Greek: theogonos] was but a lovers' tiff. So I end....
But talking of accents, have I got those Greek accents right? I doubt
it, for I write this in Wolverhampton, a town divorced from Hellas and
heavily blanketing the Alexandrians.
ON TRUTH AND THE ADMIRALTY
What a pleasure it will be--a minor pleasure, I admit, but life is
complex and it is difficult to establish values--what a pleasure it
will be when maps and statistics return!
To-day, in this delightful year of 1922, they are all at sixes and
sevens. So is everything else, you may say, especially currency--let
alone morals. But still, one regrets maps and statistics most because
to lose them is to lose one's moorings. We are all adrift without them.
What fun it used to be before the war to discuss the various "Powers"
(as they were called). There was a Power called "Germany," and there
was another called "Austria," or sometimes "Austria-Hungary," and there
was one called "Russia," and there was "the Anglo-Saxon Race," too, and
all sorts of things.
When I was a very little boy there was an enormous green blob over the
bottom right-hand corner of the map, marked "Turkey," and I remember a
learned man telling me that a bit called "Rumania" did not really count
as Turkey, and a bit called "Servia" was really quite separate: and
they were marked round with a dotted line. But I thought this man an
interfering hair-splitter. I was a human being, though so young, and
I liked to stand squarely upon my two feet and to know exactly where
I was. So I thought of a country called "Turkey," inhabited by people
called "Turks," and I used to see, wandering all over their country,
animals called "Turkeys," which, I had been told by some foolish older
person, took their name from this district. The young are not yet
broken-in to change.
So, on through my early and middle life there was a recognisable
Europe. One knew the debatable points (at least, on the map), but there
were frontiers. There were powerful centres also, and anomalies to
season the dish.
Where is all that to-day?
Thank God, this island at least has a frontier. It is the inviolate
sea. I remember a boy at school who used to read the passage "the
violet sea," so as to make sense, and I applaud him still. "Surrounded
by the violet sea," read this sturdy youth. We all knew what "violet"
meant: it was a sort of blue. But what the devil was "inviolate"!
Lucidity is the soul of style. Therefore, I say, I applaud that youth.
Anyhow, colour or no, brown, green, or grey, the sea sounds all round
England. Those who live in this island know where it begins and where
it ends, in spite of the bookish people who say that one frontier is
the enemy's coastline. (Heaven have mercy upon them, they are living
in the past. Some day I will show them an aeroplane!) North of the
Pyrenees nobody on the Continent can say as much to-day: since the war!
One country has a frontier expanding outwards, bulging, and another has
ceased to be a country; and a third, whilst still a country, has but a
theoretical frontier which feels like touchpaper, or like burnt rag;
and yet another is a new country, sprung up out of the effect of the
war, and with frontiers which are to the old strict frontiers what the
chopped-up prose of the new poets is to Pope or Dryden.
I do wish the maps would come back, but I fear they will not come back
in my time. I see that, in despair, the people who must sell maps or
perish are taking to printing merely physical maps, maps of mountains
and rivers and seas. They are returning to Pan and the original gods of
this ironic globe. They are (virtually) saying: "Mankind has abandoned
its job. Men are no longer political. We yield to you, spirits of the
stream and of the hill, the throne we once possessed."
I do not say that the advertisers, printers, company promoters, touts,
circularisers, boomsters, spell-binders, and all the rest of the happy
throng who are producing the new atlases use these very words; but that
is what they are at, all the same.
Only the other day a man showed me a superb map of Mexico and the
United States (as we used to call them in our dear old-fashioned
language) up to about the cañon of the Colorado. I said to him: "It
is very beautiful, and the contours stand out. The rivers are of a
bold blue: the swamps are green: the mountains brown. But I do not see
the division between the United States and Mexico." He said to me: "It
has not yet been put in because of the League of Nations"--a funny
reason....
Then there are statistics. Anything in the world can be proved by
statistics, and it was half the occupation of a serious man with a bee
in his bonnet (as most serious men have) to work statistics, to knead
them with the fists, and to tread them with the feet, and to juggle
them with the thumbs, and to smooth them down with the palm, and to pat
them into shape with the fingers, and to square them off with a trowel,
and to bake them very cunningly into a hard form. He, having done this,
would prove to you anything on earth--I mean before the year 1914. He
would prove to you that the French were going down and the Germans
going up: that everybody was going to talk English in fifty years:
that London (oh! joyful thought!) would stretch out beyond Dorking and
Reigate, beyond Hertford and Marlow, within the life of a man: that the
United States (I mean America) would easily grow to eat up Europe: that
most of the African deserts would be filled with cads, and that the
greatness of a nation depended not upon its religion, still less upon
its morals, hardly at all upon its courage or intelligence, but wholly
upon its hoicking out of coal.
I do wish those statistics would come back! We have had none of them
for so many years! We cannot talk of the birth-rate of Egypt or Persia.
We no longer know what is meant by export and import ... and with these
two dread words another suggestion works its way into my mind.
The war has produced propaganda. Truth took to its bed in the spring
of 1915 and died unregretted, with few attendants, about a year later.
Everything since then has been propaganda.
It is an imperative duty to serve one's country, and one's country in
danger of death had to be served by silence and by lies. But now the
root has struck, and all this lying and all this silence has become
a habit. So to-day, when you read this or that in a paper, you know
very well that you are not reading any cold truth at all, but an
advertisement. Time was, if a public document said: "The road from
Pekaboo to Chakanugga is under repair after the third mile-stone," you
believed it and went round by a side way. But to-day, when you read
such things, you know that it means, not that the road is under repair,
but that it is to the advantage of some man, corporation, policy or
State to suggest that it is under repair.... If it _is_ under repair,
well and good ... but it is a pure chance. They use the truth when it
suits them, but only because it suits them. Most of the time they lie.
And here, like a man discovering a diamond in blue clay, let me
admit the great exception. Through all this welter of falsehood the
Admiralty stands firm. I pick up my charts, I read my various "Pilots"
(especially my beloved "English Channel Pilot I"), and the truth comes
out, august, white-robed, with level brows, contemptuous of advocacy.
The documents of this great Department please me like the Creed. Their
level voice is the voice of doom. "_Halnacker Mill open of Bognor
Church Spire leads through the Swatchway._" It is true that the sweeps
have fallen from Halnacker Mill and you cannot see it as well from sea
as you used to do. If you will allow me (without offence, I hope) to
tell you the plain truth, not one man in fifty in one day out of ten
has ever seen Halnacker Mill from outside the Owers. All he sees, even
in fair weather, is a sort of blur, which he hopes to be Sussex, or
Paradise. Anyhow, the document, the record, is there. If you can see
Halnacker Mill, even with the sweeps gone down, and if you open it east
of Bognor Church Spire, you will get through the Swatchway: if you
don't you will strike the Owers, and I for one shall not care.
So it is with all these pronouncements of marble and of bronze.
"NOTE.--_The mariner will do well to avoid the passage of the Looe
Stream at the fall of night against an adverse tide, especially if
the wind is freshening from the south-west._" He will, by God! This is
not a statement to frighten Germans or to pacify Jugo-Slavs. It is the
thing itself. Stark Truth: Reality, the eldest-born Daughter of Heaven;
that Goddess whom some call Aletheia from her lovely face, and others
Ananke from her damnable muscles, the grip of whose hand when you ask
her to lead you through this tangled world is extraordinarily firm,
tactless and painful.