Aldous Leonard Huxley 1894 – 1963
There are some people to whom the most difficult to obey of all the commandments is that which enjoins us to suffer fools gladly. The prevalence of folly, its monumental, unchanging permanence and its almost invariable triumph over intelligence are phenomena which they cannot contemplate without experiencing a passion of righteous indignation or, at the least, of ill-temper. Sages like Anatole France, who can probe and anatomize human stupidity and still remain serenely detached, are rare. These reflections were suggested by a book recently published in New York and entitled The American Credo. The authors of this work are those enfants terribles of American criticism, Messrs. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. They have compiled a list of four hundred and eighty eight articles of faith which form the fundamental Credo of the American people, prefacing them with a very entertaining essay on the national mind:
Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive moments. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos.
To look through the articles of the Credo is to realize that there is a good deal of truth in this statement. Such beliefs as the following - not by any means confined to America alone - are probably at least as old as the Great Pyramid:
That if a woman, about to become a mother, plays the piano every day, her baby will be born a Victor Herbert.
That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great unhappiness.
That it is bad luck to kill a spider.
That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness.
That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have a happy married life.
That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they are to-day.
And most of the others in the collection, albeit clothed in forms distinctively contemporary and American, are simply variations on notions as immemorial.
Inevitably, as one reads The American Credo, one is reminded of an abler, a more pitiless and ferocious onslaught on stupidity, I mean Swift’s “Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in the Best Companies of England. In three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff, Esq.” I was inspired after reading Messrs. Mencken and Nathan’s work to refresh my memories of this diabolic picture of the social amenities. And what a book it is! There is something almost appalling in the way it goes on and on, a continuous, never-ceasing stream of imbecility. Simon Wagstaff, it will be remembered, spent the best part of forty years in collecting and digesting these gems of polite conversation:
I can faithfully assure the reader that there is not one single witty phrase in the whole Collection which has not received the Stamp and Approbation of at least One Hundred Years, and how much longer it is hard to determine; he may therefore be secure to find them all genuine, sterling and authentic.
How genuine, sterling and authentic Mr. Wagstaff’s treasures of polite conversation are is proved by the great number of them which have withstood all the ravages of time, and still do as good service to-day as they did in the early seventeen-hundreds or in the days of Henry VIII.: “Go, you Girl, and warm some fresh Cream.” “Indeed, Madam, there’s none left; for the Cat has eaten it all.” “I doubt it was a Cat with Two Legs.”
“And, pray, What News, Mr. Neverout?” “Why, Madam, Queen Elizabeth’s dead.” (It would be interesting to discover at exactly what date Queen Anne took the place of Queen Elizabeth in this grand old repartee, or who was the monarch referred to when the Virgin Queen was still alive. Aspirants to the degree of B. or D.Litt. might do worse than to take this problem as a subject for their thesis.)
Some of the choicest phrases have come down in the world since Mr. Wagstaff’s day. Thus, Miss Notable’s retort to Mr. Neverout, “Go, teach your Grannam to suck Eggs,” could only be heard now in the dormitory of a preparatory school. Others have become slightly modified. Mr. Neverout says, “Well, all Things have an End, and a pudden has two.” I think we may flatter ourselves that the modern emendation, “except a roly-poly pudding, which has two,” is an improvement.
Mr. Wagstaff’s second dialogue, wherein he treats of Polite Conversation at meals, contains more phrases that testify to the unbroken continuity of tradition than either of the others. The conversation that centres on the sirloin of beef is worthy to be recorded in its entirety:
Lady Smart. Come, Colonel, handle your Arms. Shall I help you to some Beef?
Colonel. If your Ladyship please; and, pray, don’t cut like a Mother-in-law, but send me a large Slice; for I love to lay a good Foundation. I vow, ’tis a noble Sir-loyn.
Neverout. Ay; here’s cut and come again.
Miss. But, pray; why is it call’d a Sir-loyn?
Lord Smart. Why, you must know that our King James the First, who lov’d good Eating, being invited to Dinner by one of his Nobles, and seeing a large Loyn of Beef at his Table, he drew out his Sword, and, in a Frolic, knighted it. Few people know the Secret of this.
How delightful it is to find that we have Mr. Wagstaff’s warrant for such gems of wisdom as, “Cheese digests everything except itself,” and “If you eat till you’re cold, you’ll live to grow old”! If they were a hundred years old in his day they are fully three hundred now. Long may they survive! I was sorry, however, to notice that one of the best of Mr. Wagstaff’s phrases has been, in the revolution of time, completely lost. Indeed, before I had read Aubrey’s “Lives,” Lord Sparkish’s remark, “Come, box it about; ’twill come to my Father at last,” was quite incomprehensible to me. The phrase is taken from a story of Sir Walter Raleigh and his son.
Sir Walter Raleigh [says Aubrey] being invited to dinner to some great person where his son was to goe with him, he sayd to his son, “Thou art expected today at dinner to goe along with me, but thou art so quarrelsome and affronting that I am ashamed to have such a beare in my company.” Mr. Walter humbled himselfe to his father and promised he would behave himselfe mighty mannerly. So away they went. He sate next to his father and was very demure at least halfe dinner time. Then sayd he, “I this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies, but by the instigation of the devill, went....”
At this point Mr. Clark, in his edition, suppresses four lines of Aubrey’s text; but one can imagine the sort of thing Master Walter said.
Sir Walter, being strangely surprized and putt out of countenance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, “Box about: ’twill come to my father anon.” ’Tis now a common-used proverb.
And so it still deserves to be; how, when and why it became extinct, I have no idea. Here is another good subject for a thesis.
There are but few things in Mr. Wagstaff’s dialogue which appear definitely out of date and strange to us, and these super-annuations can easily be accounted for. Thus the repeal of the Criminal Laws has made almost incomprehensible the constant references to hanging made by Mr. Wagstaff’s personages. The oaths and the occasional mild grossnesses have gone out of fashion in mixed polite society. Otherwise their conversation is in all essentials exactly the same as the conversation of the present day. And this is not to be wondered at; for, as a wise man has said:
Speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition.... The function of conversation is ordinarily regarded as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers and are known to be so by each.... Conversation between persons unknown to one another is apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manoeuvres of the dog and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.
NATIONALITY IN LOVE
The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back and entitled Les Baisers.... The publisher says of it in one of those exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade: “Un volume de vers ? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is called Songs of Love and Life. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the theme of physical passion.
The author of Les Baisers approaches his amorous experiences with the detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation. Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to imagine that
every spirit as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form and doth the body make.
He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant - hours which strike for every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all parts of the world and at every moment.
This attitude towards volupté is sufficiently old in France to have made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius. It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English literature. It is impossible in English to describe volupté elegantly; it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with, we do not even possess a word equivalent to volupté. “Voluptuousness” is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate. From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject rapturously, passionately, philosophically almost in any way that is not the wittily matter-of-fact French way.
In our rich Australian Songs of Love and Life we see the rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,
looking through His hills on you and me,
Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.
Or again:
Our passions breathe their own wild harmony,
And pour out music at a clinging kiss.
Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire,
For God Himself is in the melody.
Meanwhile the author of Les Baisers, always elegantly terre-à-terre, formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine:
Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage.
The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined to the poetess of Songs of Love and Life. In certain cases we are all apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and harmony why the thing which we call beauty should move us at all goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England, where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and volupté. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered to it by experience, at their face value.
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