Part 11 (1/2)
He had seen the most _magnificent prawns_ he ever ate in his life.
And when I asked another young gentleman, who was speaking of ”_the most tremendous screw_ ever made in the world,” to which of our great ironclads he referred, he smiled upon me with a benign and courteous pity, as he said that he ”was alluding to a screw into the middle pocket, which he had recently seen during a game at billiards between Cook and the younger Roberts.”
When you hear one lady informing another that she had just seen simply the most _exquisite_, the most _lovely_, the most _perfect_ thing in existence, is she referring to something wonderful in nature, or to something beautiful in art, or can it be only a bonnet? Has she just come home from the glaciers of Switzerland, the lakes of Italy, the mountains of Connemara, or the castles of the Rhine, or can it be that she has been no farther than Marshall and Snelgrove's shop?
Then there's that awful ”_awful_!” Why, if a thousandth part of things which are commonly affirmed to be aweful were aweful, we should go about with our faces blanched, like his who drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, our teeth chattering, and our hair on end. Everything is _aweful_--awefully good or awefully bad.
Only last week I handed a plate to a young lady at luncheon, and, looking sweetly upon me, as though I had brought a reprieve from the gallows, she sighed, ”Oh thanks! how _awfully_ kind!”
And years ago, I went with John Leech to admire Robson in _The Porter's Knot_, and when that pathetic little drama was over, and the actor had stirred our souls with pity, an undergraduate in the stalls before us turned to his companion, as the curtain fell, and said, tremulously, with an emotion which did him honour, although his diction was queer, ”Awefully jolly! awefully jolly!”
Yes, it amuses, but it pains us more, this reckless abuse and confusion of words, because it tends to lower the dignity and to pervert the meaning of our language; it dishonours the best member that we have. If we use the most startling and impressive words which we can find, when we do not really require them, when the crisis comes in which they are appropriate, they seem feeble and commonplace. We are as persons who, wearing their best clothes daily, are but dingy guests at a feast.
Then comes retribution. They who cry ”Wolf!” whenever they see a leveret are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer ”excruciating agony”
whenever a thorn p.r.i.c.ks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have repelled so long. They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund neighbour, who was ever exaggerating his ailments, and who, upon his doleful declaration that ”between three and four o'clock that morning he had been at Death's door!” was abruptly but anxiously asked--”Oh, why didn't you go in?”
I protest, in the next place, against the use of long, large words for the gratification of that conceit or covetousness which seeks to obtain, from mere grandiloquence, reputations and rewards to which it is not ent.i.tled. Being a gardener, I like to call a spade as spelt; and if any one terms it an horticultural implement, or a mattock, I do not expect him to dig much. I have used the monosyllable ”shop,” and I will not recall it, though a thousand pairs of gleaming scissors were pointed at my breast, and I was told by an angry army of apprentices to talk shop no more--the word was vulgar, or rather obsolete, superseded by the more graceful terms of mart, emporium, warehouse, repository, bazaar, and lounge.
Plain folk, who sold drugs when I was a boy, were not ashamed to be called druggists, but now they are pharmaceutical chymists, and a.n.a.lytical h.o.m.oeopathists; and one is tempted to quote Canning's paraphrase, which he made when Dr. Addington had been complimenting the country party, ”I do remember an apothecary, gulling of simples.”
Persons who cut hair were known as hair-cutters, and they who attended to the feet were called corn-cutters; but now the former are artists in hair, and the latter are chiropodists.
No long time ago I consulted with an intelligent tradesman as to the best way of protecting from frost a long line of standard rose-trees, growing near a wall in my garden, and shortly afterwards I received from him the drawing of a clever design, with a letter informing me that he had now the pleasure of submitting to my inspection his idea of a _Cheimoboethus_. When I rallied from my swoon, and was staggering towards my lexicon, I remembered that, as [Greek: cheimon] was the Greek for winter, and [Greek: boaethos] for a friend in need, the word was not without appropriate meaning; but I never took heart to order the invention, because I felt convinced that, if I were to inform my gardener that we were going to have a Cheimoboethus, he would say that he would rather leave.
A bird-stuffer is now a pluma.s.sier and taxidermist; and when I asked a waiter the meaning of ”Phusitechnicon,” which I read over a shop opposite his hotel, he told me it meant old china. And he bowed respectfully, as one who knew how to treat a great scholar, when he met him, as I remarked gravely, ”Ah yes, I see: no doubt from _phusi_--the ancients, and _technicon_--cups and saucers.”
Nor can I leave these long Greek words without noticing another objectionable abuse of them, whereby, upon the principle that ”what in the captain's but a choleric word, is in the soldier flat blasphemy,” a distinction is made between vice in the rich and vice in the poor, and that which in the latter is obstinate depravity, to be handled only by the police, becomes in the former a pitiable weakness or an irresistible impulse to be gently nursed by the physician. If a poor man steals, he is a desperate thief; but if a rich man fancies that which does not belong to him he is a Kleptomaniac, and ”the spoons will be returned.”
If a poor man is addicted to alcohol he is a drunken sot; but if a rich man is oft intoxicated, he is afflicted with Dipsomania! Interesting patient! I should like to prescribe for him. I feel sure I could do him good with my medicines--the crank and water-gruel!
Leaving him at it, I pa.s.s on to another mania, which rather provokes amus.e.m.e.nt than anger--the mania to be called ”Esquire.” Forty years ago, the t.i.tle was restricted to those who carried arms. The armiger, no longer toiling after his knight with heavy helmet and s.h.i.+eld, bore his own arms, as he drove along, proudly and pleasantly upon his carriage door. People who became rich, and found themselves shut out from ”genteel society” because they had only letters upon their spoons, instead of birds and beasts, arms with daggers, and legs with spurs, were delighted to discover, on application at the Heralds' Office, that one of their ancestors had undoubtedly exercised the functions of a groom in the establishment of William the Conqueror, and that they were consequently ent.i.tled to bear upon their arms a stable-bucket _azure_, between two horses current, and to wear as their crest a curry-comb in base argent, between two wisps of hay proper, they and their descendants, according to the law of arms. But the luxury was expensive: a lump sum to the Heralds, and two pound two to the King's taxes; and so, as time went on, men of large ambition, but of limited means, began to crave for some more economical process by which they might become esquires. They met together, and they solved the difficulty. They conferred the t.i.tle upon each other, and they charged no fee. And now the postal authorities will tell you that the number of the ”esquires”
not carrying arms, not having so much as a leg to stand on (in the matter of legal claims), is something ”awful!” But the process is so charmingly cheap and easy that we may expect a further development. Why should we not all be baronets? Why should we not raise ourselves, every man of us, on his own private hoist, to the Peerage?
We have all been ladies and gentlemen so long that a little n.o.bility, with its attendant t.i.tles, cannot fail to make a pleasant change. Bessie Black, who cleans the fire-irons, has for some years been Miss Cinderella, with a chignon and a lover on Sundays; and Bill, who weeds in the garden, is Mr. Groundsell with a betting-book and a bad cigar. A quotation from the newspapers will exemplify the comprehensiveness of those terms ”ladies and gentlemen,” which had once such definite and narrow restrictions. A witness, giving evidence at a trial, says: ”When I see that gentleman in the hand-cuffs a-s.h.i.+nning and a-punching that lady with the black eye, I says to my missus, 'Them's ways,' I says, 'as I don't hold to'; and she makes answer to me, 'You better hadn't.'”
Let me not be misunderstood to mean that none are ladies and gentlemen who do not eat with silver forks, or that all persons that go about in carriages deserve those gracious names. I have met with persons calling themselves gentlemen, who evidently thought it manly and high-spirited to swear at their servants, and who were incapable of appreciating any anecdote which was not profane or coa.r.s.e; and I have met, as all who go amongst the poor have met, men who well deserved that n.o.ble epithet in cottages and corduroy. Who has not seen ill.u.s.trious sn.o.bs in satin, and sweet, modest gentlewomen in homely print and serge? A gentleman!
There's no t.i.tle shouted at a reception so grand in my idea as this; and yet, methinks, that any man may win and wear it who is brave, and truthful, and generous, and pure, and kind--who is, in one word, a Christian!
Some people think to make themselves gentlemen by tampering with their patronymics, and by altering their family name. Brown has added an _e_ to his; and greedy Green, though he had two already, has followed his example; and White spells his with a _y_; and Bob Smith calls his son and heir Augustus Charlemagne Sacheverel Smythe; and Tailor calls himself Tayleure. And one day Tailor went out a-hunting, and he worried a whipper-in, who had plenty of work on his hands, with a series of silly questions, until, upon his asking the name of a hound, he received an answer which put an end to the discourse: ”Well, sir,” said the Whip, ”we used to call him Towler; but things has got so fine and fas.h.i.+onable we calls him _Tow-leure.”_
Pa.s.sing from abuse to disuse, I would not refer to words which are gradually becoming obsolete, but which some of us, partly from admiration of the words themselves, and partly from old a.s.sociations, would not willingly let die. Beginning alphabetically, the adjective _ask_ is one of those grand old English monosyllables which convey the sense in the sound, It speaks to you of a day in March, when the wind is in the east, and all the clouds are of a dull slate colour, and the roads are white, and the hedges black, and the fallows are dry and hard as bricks, and a bitter, searching, piercing wind whistles at your sealskins and Ulsters, your Lindseys and Jerseys, your foot-warmers and m.u.f.fatees, and you feel, with Miggs, ”as though water were flowing aperiently down your back,” and sit shuddering--dithering (there's another word rarely used, but with a sufficient amount of chilliness in it to ice a bottle of champagne) ”dithering in the _ask_, ungenial day.”
Then I like _abear_ (the penultimate _a_ p.r.o.nounced as _e_)--”I can't abeer him”; _addled_--”Bill's addled noat a three week”; _agate_--”I see you've agate on't”; _among-hands_--”Tom schemed to do it among-hands”; _all along of_--”It was all along of them 'osses”; etc.
Of B's there is a swarm: _beleddy_ (a corruption, as most men know, of ”by our lady”), and I can only notice a few of the Queens. _Botch_ is a word which, though found in Shakespeare and Dryden, and other authors, is rarely used by us; and yet, methinks, in these days, when the great object seems to be to get quant.i.ty in place of quality, and to make as much display as we can at the price--when so much is done by contract, and there is, in consequence, strong temptation to daub with untempered mortar, to use green timber, to put in bad material where it will not be seen, the verb _to botch_ is only too appropriate to all such scampish proceedings.
And what do you think of _bofen-yed_? I once heard a farmer, shouting from the garden fence, with the vocal powers of a Boanerges, to a labourer at work about a quarter of a mile away, ”Yer gret bofen-yed, can ter ear noat?” (_Anglice_, ”You ox-headed lout, are you stone deaf?”); and more frequently the terms, _pudding-yed_ and _noggen-yed_ have been addressed in my hearing to obtuse and stupid folk. The former requires no comment, and an explanation of the latter--_noggen_, hard, rough, coa.r.s.e--may be found in Johnson. ”Nay, I did na say thee wor a noggen-yed; I said Lawyer said thee were a noggen-yed,” was a poor apology, once spoken in Lancas.h.i.+re. And there also, in time-honoured Lancaster, was made the following ill.u.s.trative speech. A conceited young barrister, with a _nez retrousse_ and a new wig, had been bullying for some time a rough, honest Lancas.h.i.+re lad, who was giving evidence in a trial, and at last the lawyer, thinking that he saw his opportunity, turned sharply upon the witness and said, ”Why, fellow, only a short time ago you stated so and so.” To which came the indignant answer, ”Why, yer powder-yedded monkey, I never said noat o' sort; I appeal to th' company!”
I have a loving faith in children. Mixing with them daily--in church, in school, and at their play--I think that I know something about them; and I maintain that a disagreeable child is a sorrowful exception to the rule, and the result of mismanagement and foolish indulgences on the part of parents and teachers. But when this abnormal nuisance is found, a peevish, fretful child--a child who is always wanting to taste, a child who ignores the admirable purposes for which pocket-handkerchiefs were designed, such an _enfant terrible_ as he who told the kindly mother, offering to bring her 'Gustus to join him in his play, that ”if you bring your 'Gustus here I shall make a slit in him with my new knife, and let out his sawdust”--when, I repeat, we come in contact with such an obnoxious precocity as this, what word can describe him so satisfactorily as the monosyllable--_brat_?
More detestable, because more powerful to do hurt, and with less excuse for doing it, is _the Blab_; the unctuous, tattling Blab, who creeps to your side with words softer than b.u.t.ter, but having war in his heart; he ”always thought that Sam Smith was such a friend of yours, and” (hardly waiting for your ”So he is”) ”was surprised and rather disgusted by his remarks at the Club last Thursday.” And then he tells you something which, for a moment, and until principle prevails over pa.s.sion, suggests the removal by violence of several of Sam's teeth, and he leaves you distressed and distrustful, until you discover, as you most probably will, that there has been cruel misrepresentation. Ah, if poor Jeannette's desire were realised, and they who make the quarrels were the only men to fight, how nice it would be to sit upon an eminence and watch the Battle of the Blabs!