The Defendant

ever wont.' A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a
high-placed and notorious traitor, said: 'I will receive him in all
obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.' This is literature
without culture; it is the speech of men convinced that they have to
assert proudly the poetry of life.

Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of
a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It
is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of
life; it is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is
positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient
name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object
of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed, with rude feudal
rhetoric, that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a
lunatic; but if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of
Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be
expected from Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a
language; it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating
certain broad, well-understood states of mind. 'Bored,' 'cut up,'
'jolly,' 'rotten,' and so on, are like the words of some tribe of
savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion
wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion, his
utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string
of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor (being filled with the Muse)
would burst out into a solid literary effort: 'You're a gen'leman,
aren't yer ... yer boots is a lot brighter than yer 'ed...there's
precious little of yer, and that's clothes...that's right, put yer cigar
in yer mouth 'cos I can't see yer be'ind it...take it out again, do yer!
you're young for smokin', but I've sent for yer mother.... Goin'? oh,
don't run away: I won't 'arm yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'ave.... "Down
with croolty to animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this
mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and
almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote
metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long
allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.'

I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic
allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as
'Keep your hair on' is positively Meredithian in its perverse and
mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known
expression about 'swelled-head' as a description of self-approval, and
the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American
said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted 'to put on their
hats with a shoe-horn.' This is a monument of the true nature of slang,
which consists in getting further and further away from the original
conception, in treating it more and more as an assumption. It is rather
like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists.

The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower
orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier
times. The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words. Their
readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the
readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with
his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with
his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this
process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of
society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic
eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in
the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody
must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a
language.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a
moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every
day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many
sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social
relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we
should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of
everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature,
over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the
living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a
kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white
elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away
with them--a whole chaos of fairy tales.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP


The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,
first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in
consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is
possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools
and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of
a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the
universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a
transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this:
that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put
again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those
delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark
these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within
every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on
the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system
of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion
teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand
the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we