Part 7 (1/2)
CHAPTER IX.
”As I was finis.h.i.+ng this worke, an oyster-wife tooke exception against me and called me knave.”--'_Lamentable Effect of Two Dangerous Comets_,' 1591.
We trust that we have travelled thus far on our journey without wounding the susceptibilities of any of our readers, and that thus it may continue to the not distant end. In all probability our remarks and ill.u.s.trations will have been scanned by two totally diverse cla.s.ses of patrons, those to whom the topics suggested present much that is worthy of attention, and those to whom this little treatise will appear to be written in almost an unknown tongue. All that we can do is to claim the indulgence of these latter. We hope that they at least will acquit us of any intention of blemis.h.i.+ng the fair front of human nature, or of darkening any of the windows that administer to its requirements of light and air. In fine, we trust that what has been said, has been spoken fairly and frankly. Not, however, that we pretend that the views we may have advanced have anything but a local application. There is a swearing world, a place in which people habitually swear, but there is also a non-swearing world in which they are partially if not totally unacquainted with observances of swearing. To present a picture of the former to the dwellers in the more opposite locality is to expect approval of a marine painting from those who have never beheld the sea.
The reflections therefore that we may have been called upon to make by the way, no less than the numerous instances we have found it as well to refer to, must be taken as pertaining only to those troubled waters that surge around the continent inhabited of swearers.
This careless, indulgent and pleasure-seeking portion of the world have derived even comfort and convenience from a recognition of the best regulated usages of swearing. Reputations for courage and audacity have thus been hourly established by the careful insinuation of hideous expletives. Friends.h.i.+ps have been cemented by the force of this common bond of union; strangers set at their ease; the weak and hesitating have been galvanised into action. Judging from a purely worldly standpoint, it would be inconsistent not to admit that society has been under deep obligations to this especial form of wickedness. Swearing has in the main been rendered agreeable and popular in so far that it has been adopted to span over social distances and level social distinctions, to create in fact a code of easy sympathy between otherwise thoroughly unsympathetic men. The worst--and swearers are not necessarily the worst--no less than the best of mankind endeavour to generate some species of that ”touch of nature” which we are told makes the whole world kin. We must not therefore be too severe on finding that this very creditable object is sometimes sought to be accomplished by somewhat discreditable means.
As a few of our readers may by this time have harboured a conviction that swearing is in some degree a social necessity, they will be able to give full scope to the views upon this point of the excellent Mr.
Shandy.[53] The only compunction that seems to have been entertained by this gentleman resided in the danger of expending small curses upon totally inadequate occasions. He maintained, indeed, with the utmost Cervantic gravity, that he had the greatest veneration for that student of swearing who, in obvious mistrust of his own extempore powers, composed forms suitable to all degrees of provocation, and kept them framed over his chimney-piece for daily reference.
”I never apprehended,” puts in Dr. Slop, ”that such a thing was ever thought of--much less executed.”
”I beg your pardon,” replies Mr. Shandy, ”I was reading--though not using--one of them to my brother Toby this morning, whilst he poured out the tea.”
The work of ingenuity in question turned out to be a decree of excommunication, certainly a very ponderous and d.a.m.natory one, compiled by Ernulphus, a learned bishop of Rochester. Mr. Shandy is understood to account for the comprehensiveness of this anathema by a.s.suming it to have been designed as an inst.i.tute or perfect digest of swearing. He conjectures that upon a decline of vituperation Ernulphus had with great learning collected all the known methods, for fear of their being dispersed and so lost to the world for ever. The worthy Shandy would even go so far as to maintain that there was no kind of oath that was not to be found in Ernulphus. ”In short,” he would add, ”I defy a man to swear out of it.”
This piece of quaintness, as we need hardly point out, only goes to the fact that wide as is the range of imprecation, it must always come back to that one monotonous symbol of despisal. The anathema of the good bishop is pitched in many keys and sounds, like the collected utterances of many throats. But even Ernulphus can scarcely have foreseen the Rabelaisian refinements that would suggest themselves to the minds of men as soon as literary demands were made upon the well-worn supply.
The genius of the French language seems more particularly to lend itself to the fabrication of burlesque forms and subterfuges. Thus to affirm by _le sacre froc d'Habacuc_, or by _la double-triple manche de serpe_, are fair specimens of the ingenuity that has been lavished. Far less offending have been the ludicrous forms of a.s.severation popular in the lower ranks of French society, and one of which it is sufficient to mention as occurring in a curious rhyme of the last century,[54] where among other things is found characterised the pseudo-nuptials of a certain abbess and a dignitary of the Church--
”Mais, _par la vertu d'un oignon_, Ils sont maries environ, Comme l'est l'eveque de Chartres Avec l'abbesse de Montmartres.”
It is not improbable that a great deal of the aversion that is a.s.sociated with the practice of swearing is due to the custom of those novelists who are in the habit of screening their oaths behind the most transparent of disguises. To denote an expletive by its initial letter followed with a dash is really to attract undue attention to that which the writer acknowledges himself ashamed of printing. The contrivance serves no useful purpose, and, if we are not mistaken, the more robust of modern novelists have eschewed it altogether. Very different in this respect is the device adopted by d.i.c.kens in one of the most entertaining of his romances. Readers of 'Great Expectations' will remember the description of Mr. William Barley. This presents us with a picture of a water-logged old s.h.i.+p's captain, who, as he lay through the long hours of the day and night upon his uneasy mattress, never ceased to hold communion with himself in anything but a strain of piety--”Ahoy! bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley! Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord! Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder; here's old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you!” Of course the point of this monologue lies in the fact that the supposed blessings are really subst.i.tuted by the novelist for desires of a very opposite description.
There are few pictures we would less willingly omit from the gallery of the author's creations. We have here the portraiture of one among that G.o.dless but soft-hearted race of veterans who have alternately bullied and bl.u.s.tered, or cried and whimpered, throughout many ages of fiction and melodrama. And in depicting this type of character writers have invariably felt it their bounden duty to give full prominence to this fateful gift of swearing. With much discretion the novelist has in the present instance invented a subterfuge, which, while it does not rob Mr.
Barley of his idiosyncrasies of speech, leaves an amused and not an offensive impression behind it. We are, in fact, called in to a.s.sist at a very quiet piece of human contradiction. We are presented to the p.r.o.ne Barley in his state of helplessness and suffering, and at the same time are given to understand that the sufferer derives comfort and consolation from nothing so much as a downright plunge into the torrent of bad language.
In these wandering musings of the complaining old sea-captain there is suggested one of the many spells that are exercised by the force of imprecation. There is no paucity of men, whether dejected, dissatisfied or penurious, who are wont to apostrophise some imagined effigy of themselves, or to construct some idealised fabric as a monument of their lives, and stalk it abroad for their own and for other men's wonderment.
And the means they employ to spirit up these creations are not dissimilar to those in use by Mr. Barley. By declaiming loudly against the ravages of a hard fate that lays them on their backs ”like an old dead flounder,” the mind is a.s.sisted to form a notion of the victims in their prime. By deploring the hards.h.i.+ps of fallen fortune the eye of the sympathiser is carried instinctively back to bygone days of supposit.i.tious enjoyment. Imprecation is seldom absent from these incursions, being, in fact, urgently needed to do duty for closer argumentation. Again, as there are men so genial that they swear as a challenge to discontent, so there are men so discontented that they swear as a challenge to geniality.
This more unsociable aspect of the subject brings us perforce to the consideration of a term of swearing that contains no element of geniality. Of itself it can be accounted nothing but a mere outcome of bombast and vulgarity, appealing as it does to no known pa.s.sion of the human mind. And yet so widespread is its influence, and so powerful its dominion, that it has been rung out and has reverberated probably more than any other in the great ”fisc and exchequer” of abuse.
The expletive that it now behoves us to consider is one which has never been adequately treated in a book. We cannot disguise to ourselves that there is much in its unfortunate a.s.sociations to render its occurrence still exceedingly painful. Originating in a senseless freak of language, it has by dint of circ.u.mstances become so noisome and offensive, that were it not for the undue power and influence it has usurped, we should hardly be disposed to treat of it at all. But when we mention that it is the ungainly adjective ”b.l.o.o.d.y” that will occupy our attention for the next few pages, we must be allowed to add that it is with the view of stripping the term of its infamous significance, and if possible of dispelling from it the cloud of ill favour and of ill fame, that we venture with less reluctance to grapple with it.
With the full knowledge of the abhorrence it has imparted in our day, it is difficult to imagine any unsullied spring-time in the history of so sordid a word. It is the single particle of objuration that has not dared a.s.sume, as others have so frequently done, a jaunty or a rollicking demeanour. Not in the wildest days of Eastcheap revelry did it resound in any one key of vinous harmony. While other epithets may from time to time have received the sanction of conviviality, here is a word that is nothing unless discordant and acrimonious. It is the apt accompaniment of a whining tongue, the fit complement of a verjuice countenance. Dirty drunkards hiccup it as they wallow on ale-house floors. Morose porters bandy it about on quays and landing-stages. From the low-lying quarters of the towns the word buzzes in your ear with the confusion of a Babel. In the cramped narrow streets you are deafened by its whirr and din, as it rises from the throats of the chaffering mult.i.tude, from besotted men defiant and vain-glorious in their drink, from shrewish women hissing out rancour and menace in their harsh querulous talk.
And yet to look back no further than to the youth of Shakespeare, the word had no application beyond such as was seemly, and its history was simple and spotless and without reproach. The one play of 'Macbeth'
contains an unusual number of instances of its occurrence, all written without any suspicion of an _equivoque_ and dwelt upon with an undoubting sincerity that has become barely possible in a modern work.
Indeed into such ill company has fallen this true-minded adjective, that it is no longer competent to be admitted to its proper place in an ordinary publication. Now and again strong protest has been made against the hard sentence pa.s.sed upon so well-meaning a term, and authors of taste have demanded its rest.i.tution to its former intellectual companions.h.i.+p. In one of her ”Letters to the Author of Orion,” Mrs. E.
B. Browning throws reserve upon the subject altogether to the winds, and insists upon embracing and cheris.h.i.+ng this ill-starred word as a long lost acquaintance. But when Shakespeare wrote of
”The b.l.o.o.d.y house of life,”
there was no need for hesitation in shaping it. It was as unsullied and as transparent as any that might have been placed upon Imogen's lips or thrown by Hamlet into Ophelia's lap.
To account for the moral kidnapping that the word has undergone, it behoves us, strangely enough, to set face towards the Netherlands, and to hark back there to the campaigns of Flus.h.i.+ng and Deventer, where Ben Jonson and others of his countrymen are shouldering their pikes under the generals.h.i.+p of Vere and Stanley. We shall then find it to have been one of the doubtful advantages that were gained by long years of Low Country soldiering. With the winds and tides that brought home the shoals of broken veterans, there was wafted to this country the flavour of foreign oaths, and among them the renown in speech of the German ”blutig.” Now ”blutig” happened to be an inconsequent sort of particle that was employed in all the dialects of Germany to denote a sense of the emphatic. It had been chosen throughout the German fatherland to minister to the wants of those defective degrees of comparison which are usually, however, found to be more or less admirably fitted to their purpose. It thus const.i.tuted itself a fourth degree, or extra-ultra-superlative. Like all verbal contrivances of this kind, it was more especially favoured among the less cultivated students of the forms of grammar, and seems at last to have become recognised as a convenient make-weight with which a reprobate soldiery were accustomed to balance their a.s.sertions.