“The question about everything was would it bring about a blush
into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of
the young person was that according to Mr. Podsnap she seemed
always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at
all.”
—_Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend._
There seems an alarming recrudescence of Podsnappery at the present
moment. Perhaps in a measure it is a protest against things that are
wrong. If some novel-writers exceed the limits of reasonable plain
speech, and some dramatists seek publicly to exhibit the results of moral
leprosy, they challenge the latent Podsnap, that is a valuable asset in
our national character, to flourish its right arm and say, “I don’t want
to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” With
every proper contempt for Podsnap, there are some excesses about which he
is right when he sweeps them away with the verdict, “Not English!” But
having tasted too much success by reason of the excesses of his enemies,
he is beginning not only to reform our morals, but has started upon our
manners.
A “Town Vicar,” writing a letter to a Church paper, recently lifted up
his voice in the following complaint: “It is not long ago that I heard
a Dean declare that ‘we were not going to take it lying down,’ and more
than one Bishop has in preaching lately had recourse to ‘the bottom dog.’
But these are mere details in the alarming spread of vulgarity where
culture and right feeling used to be.”
What would Charles Kingsley have said or His Honour Judge Hughes to a
parson who shrank from a simile drawn from the noble art of self-defence?
Seeing, too, that the phrase has attained esoteric political value in
respect of its use by the leader of Birmingham state-craft, the Podsnap
in our good Vicar takes too much upon itself when it declares that the
sporting Dean who used it was wanting in “culture and right feeling.”
The reference by more than one Bishop to the “bottom dog” is less easy
to defend. The “Town Vicar” no doubt regards a Bishop as so far removed
from the everyday affairs of the world that the phrase should never have
polluted his ears, far less his lips, and that if he has indeed heard of
the existence of “bottom dogs,” and he desires to express himself about
them, he should allude to them on the platform as the “submerged tenth,”
and in the pulpit as “our poorer brethren.”
To many of us it will come as a pleasant surprise to know that there is
more than one Bishop whose courage is stronger than his culture. Not that
one desires to see in Bishops or in anyone else a tendency towards the
patronage of meaningless slang or dull expletive. I remember a story of
the seventies that used to be told with equal inaccuracy of Canon Farrar
and Bishop Fraser. The Bishop—let us say—travelling in a third-class
carriage with some workmen, took occasion to reprove one on his constant
and meaningless use of the adjective “bloody.”
The workman took the reproof in good part, and by way of excuse said:
“You see, Mister, I can’t help it. I’m a plain man, and I call a spade a
spade.”
“That is just what you don’t do,” retorted the Bishop quickly. “You call
it ‘a bloody shovel.’” At which they all laughed in a friendly spirit,
and the offender promised amendment.
Relating this anecdote at a dinner, a well-known pillar of the Church,
noted for his pompous demeanour and the ignorant pleasure he took in
the use of long words, expressed his horror that such language could be
used in any form of society. “For myself,” he said, “I cannot believe
it possible that, however I had been brought up, such words could pass
my lips.” “I am sure of it,” replied the Bishop, “in whatever society
you found yourself you would always refer to a spade as an agricultural
implement for the trituration of soil.”
And, indeed, in this story lies the test of the matter. A spade is to be
called a spade. And whilst even Podsnap is right in putting his veto on
the mediæval adjective dear to the sons of toil, we are not going to be
bullied by him into periphrastic descriptions of facts that are better
stated in plain, simple, and even vulgar language.
The “Spectator” voiced a very general feeling among the Podsnap family
in writing of Mr. Lloyd-George’s reference to the hereditary principle
and his simile that a peer became a legislator by being “the first of the
litter.” The word ‘litter’ quoted without its context may seem a little
harsh, but the point of the allusion was that, although we chose our
legislators in that way we did not choose our spaniels by this curious
and, as he argued, obsolete method. The “Spectator” found this to be
mere vulgarity. I have a great affection for the “Spectator,” having
been brought up from earliest childhood to reverence her teachings. I
say “her” because I always visualise the “Spectator” as some being like
Charles Lamb’s aunt, who was “a dear and good one ... a stedfast friendly
being, and a fine old Christian ... whose only secular employment was
the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a china basin of
fair water.” Much as I honour the “Spectator,” I cannot but think the
prevailing Podsnap is warping her better judgment.
But there is an excuse for the “Spectator” that cannot be offered for the
average man of the world who claims to be righteously offended at the
vulgarity of Mr. Lloyd-George’s similes.
I met a friend upon the golf links who used language upon the last
green, where he failed to hole out in three, that no Bishop could have
sanctioned, even although he fully appreciated that my friend was for
the moment a “bottom dog.” On the way to the Club-house he vented his
wrath upon the offending Chancellor of the Exchequer for the language
he used on the platform. I pleaded in mitigation that just as my friend
had been endeavouring to hole out a lively “Helsby” on a tricky green,
so the Chancellor was endeavouring to put the House of Lords in a hole,
a process in which that rubber-cored institution refused to assist him.
To express your feelings and beliefs at a moment like that required
that some latitude should be allowed to you in the choice of simile and
language.
But so far had the microbe of Podsnap entered into my friend’s
understanding that he treated my poor pleasantry as an added insult and
complained bitterly that such vituperation, as he called it, was “not
English, and never used to be done.” Curiously enough, I had in my mind
a passage in a political speech that created even greater pleasure and
displeasure to Reds and Blues more than a quarter of a century ago. It
was that famous passage in which Mr. Chamberlain scorned Lord Salisbury
as constituting “himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which
he himself belongs—‘who toil not neither do they spin,’ whose fortunes,
as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such
services as courtiers render kings, and have since grown and increased
while their owners slept by the levy of an unearned share on all that
other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and
prosperity of the country of which they form a part.” There was not so
much whining over a few hard words in those days, and Lord Salisbury
himself could hit out with his “black man” allusion and the famous
Hottentot simile, and, lost, as the ‘Town Vicar’ would think, to culture
and right feeling, could talk of “having put our money on the wrong
horse.”
Memory may be misleading after a gap of twenty-five years, and the wisest
of us is apt to grow “_difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti_,”
yet I cannot but think that there are signs in the air that our old
friend Podsnap is having it too much his own way. He is a good fellow
in the main, and some of the ideas he worked for are sound. His belief
in the young person had its touching and beautiful side as it had its
ridiculous side. The young person, however, has grown up since his day,
and has her own movements which are but lightly clad with Podsnappery
of any kind. And for grown-ups dealing with the everyday affairs of the
world we must, in the old English way, stick to our fighting instincts,
and give and take hearty blows in good part, and win pleasantly and lose
ungrudgingly, as most of our fighters, fair play to them, still do.
And we must not be afraid of the Town Vicar’s “mere vulgarity.” For,
after all, our language is a vulgar tongue, and we are proud that our
Bible is printed in it, and our speeches have to be made in it. As a
vulgar tongue vulgarly used it brought forth the triumphs of Elizabethan
literature, and was the medium of such varied writers as Fielding,
Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. And when it is the duty of wisdom to cry
without and utter her voice in the street, she must do it without fear of
Podsnap and in the vulgar tongue.