How on earth did he know that? I was, however, very willing to believe in the vitality of this writer for all present purposes. Vitality was a thing in which she herself, her talk, her glance, her gestures, abounded. She and they had been, I remembered, rather too much for me. The first time I met her, she said something that I lightly and mildly disputed. On no future occasion did I stem any opinion of hers. Not that she had been rude. Far from it. She had but in a sisterly, brotherly way, and yet in a way that was filially eager too, asked me to explain my point. I did my best. She was all attention. But I was conscious that my best, under her eye, was not good. She was quick to help me: she said for me just what I had tried to say, and proceeded to show me just why it was wrong. I smiled the gallant smile of a man who regards women as all the more adorable because logic is not their strong point, bless them! She asked-not aggressively, but strenuously, as one who dearly loves a joke what I was smiling at. Altogether, a chastening encounter; and my memory of it was tinged with a feeble resentment. How she had scored! No man likes to be worsted in argument by a woman. And I fancy that to be vanquished by a feminine writer is the kind of defeat least of all agreeable to a man who writes. A 'sex war,' we are often told, is to be one of the features of the world's future- women demanding the right to do men's work, and men refusing, resisting, counter-attacking. It seems likely enough. One can believe anything of the world's future. Yet one conceives that not all men, if this particular evil come to pass, will stand packed shoulder to shoulder against all women. One does not feel that the dockers will be very bitter against such women as want to be miners, or the plumbers frown much upon the wouldbe steeple-jills. I myself have never had my sense of fitness jarred, nor a spark of animosity roused in me, by a woman practising any of the fine arts -except the art of writing. That she should write a few little poems or pensées, or some impressions of a trip in a dahabieh as far as (say) Biskra, or even a short story or two, seems to me not wholly amiss, even though she do such things for publication. But that she should be an habitual, professional author, with a passion for her art, and a fountain pen and an agent, and sums down in advance of royalties on sales in Canada and Australia, and a profound knowledge of human character, and an essentially sane outlook, is somehow incongruous with my notions - my mistaken notions, if you willof what she ought to be. 'Has a profound knowledge of human character, and an essentially sane outlook,' said one of the critics quoted at the end of the book that I had chosen. The wind and the rain in the chimney had not abated, but the fire was bearing up bravely. So would I. I would read cheerfully and without prejudice. I poked the fire and, pushing my chair slightly back, lest the heat should warp the book's cover, began Chapter I. a A woman sat writing in a summer house at the end of a small garden that overlooked a great valley in Surrey. The description of her was calculated to make her very admirable thorough woman, not strictly beautiful, but likely to be thought beautiful by those who knew her well; not dressed as though she gave much heed to her clothes, but dressed in a fashion that exactly harmonized with her special type. Her pen 'traveled' rapidly across the foolscap, and while it did so she was described in more and more detail. But at length she came to a 'knotty point' in what she was writing. She paused, she pushed back the hair from her temples, she looked forth at the valley; and now the landscape was described, but not at all exhaustively, it, for the writer soon overcame her difficulty, and her pen traveled faster than ever, till suddenly there was a cry of 'Mammy!' and in rushed a seven-year-old child, in conjunction with whom she was more than ever admirable; after which the narrative skipped back across eight years, and the woman became a girl, giving as yet no token of future eminence in literature, but I had an impulse which I obeyed almost before I was conscious of it. a Nobody could have been more surprised than I was at what I had done. -done so neatly, so quietly and gently. The book stood closed, upright, with its back to me, just as on a bookshelf, behind the bars of the grate. There it was. And it gave forth, as the flames crept up the blue cloth sides of it, pleasant though acrid smell. My astonishment had passed, giving place to an exquisite satisfaction. How pottering and fumbling a thing was even the best kind of written criticism! I understood the contempt felt by the man of action for the man of words. But what pleased me most was that at last, actually, I, at my age, I of all people, had committed a crime was guilty of a crime. I had power to revoke it. I might write to my bookseller for an unburnt copy, and place it on the shelf where this one had stood - this glorithis glori ously glowing one. I would do nothing of the sort. What I had done I had done. I would wear forever on my conscience the white rose of theft and the red rose of arson. If hereafter the owner of this cottage happened to miss that volume- let him! If he were fool enough to write to me about it, would I share my grand secret with him? No. Gently, with his poker, I prodded that volume further among the coal. The all-but-consumed binding shot forth little tongues of bright color - flamelets of sapphire, amethyst, emerald. Charming! Could even the author herself not admire them? Perhaps. Poor woman!- I had scored now, scored SO perfectly that I felt myself to be almost a brute while I poked off the loosened black outer pages and led the fire on to pages that were but pale brown. These were quickly devoured. But it seemed to me that whenever I left the fire to forage for itself it made little headway. I pushed the book over on its side. The flames closed on it, but presently, licking their lips, fell back, as though they had had enough. I took the tongs and put the book upright again, and raked it fore and aft. It seemed almost as thick as ever. With poker and tongs I carved it into two, three sections the inner flashpages ing white as when they were sent to the binders. Strange! Aforetime, a book was burned now and again in the market-place by the common hangman. Was he, I wondered, paid by the hour? I had always supposed the thing quite easy for him a bright little, brisk little conflagration, and so home. Perhaps other books were less resistant than this one? I began to feel that the critics were more right than they knew. Here was a book that had indeed an intense vitality, and an immense vitality. It was a book that would live what one might. I vowed it should not. I subdivided it, spread it, redistributed it. Ever and anon my eye would be caught by some sentence or fragment of a sentence in the midst of a charred page before the flames crept over it. 'lways loathed you, bu,' I remember; and 'ning. Tolstoi was right.' Who had always loathed whom? And what, what, had Tolstoi been right about? I had an absurd but genuine desire to do know. Too late! Confound the woman -she was scoring again. I furiously drove her pages into the yawning crimson jaws of the coals. Those jaws had lately been golden. Soon, to my horror, they seemed to be growing gray. They seemed to be closing on nothing. Flakes of black paper, full-sized layers of paper brown and white, began to hide them from me altogether. I sprinkled a boxful of wax matches. I resumed the bellows. I lunged with the poker. I held a newspaper over the whole grate. I did all that inspiration could suggest, or skill accomplish. Vainly. The fire went out darkly, dismally, gradually, quite out. a tear. But Smollett's Commodore Trunnion in Peregrine Pickle still holds the record for persistent execration. For, when he learned that he was in real danger of being married, he retired to his hammock, 'where he lay muttering, in a low, growling tone of voice, a repetition of oaths and imprecations for the space of four and twenty hours, without ceasing.' Trunnion had a few picturesque lines of nautical imagery, but not the range which an artist should require. The common talk of a 'vocabulary' in such cases is a misuse of language. The ordinary performer has no vocabulary, no range, no imagination, no natural gifts matured by art and How she had scored again! But she practice. For a varied, picturesque, did not know it. I felt no bitterness steady, and satisfactory flow we have against her as I lay back in my chair, to go to the miners of Nevada, or an inert, listening to the storm that was old Mississippi pilot, like Mark Twain, still raging. I blamed only myself. I who, when he had lost a collar-stud, had done wrong. The small room be- was inimitable. Even on the links, came very cold. Whose fault was that where profanity is supposed - with but my own? I had done wrong some justification to be at its best hastily, but had done it and been glad and brightest, twenty-five years of of it. I had not remembered the words listening have only brought this critic a wise king wrote long ago, that the within hearing of one player who had a lamp of the wicked shall be put out, vocabulary, and who, taking in things and that the way of trangressors is small and great from his ball and his bard. caddie to his ancestors and the immortal heavens, devised ever new images. Most players are only one cut above the Christadelphian who went round uttering "Toots! Toots!' for all occasions. [The New Statesman] THE ART AND PRACTICE OF BY VERNON RENDALL 'OUR armies swore terribly in Flanders.' That remark by Sterne concerning the eighteenth century is true of the twentieth, and the curious may find in Tristram Shandy a pretty accurate record of the trials of our soldiers in the late war. Sterne's Uncle Toby produced perhaps the most famous oath in literature, that which the recording angel blotted away with The Elizabethans had a wider choice of expletives than ourselves - they did most things in the great styleand going back to classic times, we find a variety of expression which puts our British damns to shame. Captain Bulsted, in Harry Richmond, explains that the Romans 'had a religion that encouraged them to swear.' 'Do not swear' was one of the obiter dicta of the Wise Men of Greece, but everybody did it in Greece and Rome, except the Flamen Dialis and the Vestal Virgins. Legislation did not, as in England, attempt to taboo profanity altogether, but Solon and other law givers restricted the people to three deities for the purpose of obtestation, and even this mild attempt at control seems to have failed. Men and women both swore women never by Hercules, men never by Castor. Juno and Venus were reserved for feminine use, and, if invoked by a man, indicated effeminacy. The Greeks had, in fact, a nicer sense of what was proper (or improper) for each special occasion than the English at any rate in Swift's day. In his Polite Conversation he gives the caution that the same oath or curse cannot, consistently with true politeness, be repeated above nine times in the same company with the same person. Our modern linguistic performers despise circumlocution, which plays a picturesque part in the wordy warfare of the demagogues of Aristophanes. The Sausage Seller, who is a parody of Cleon, prays that, if he does not dote on Demos tenderly, he may be stewed in a dish, sliced, minced, hashed, and the pieces left by the cook to be dragged out to the grave with his own flesh-hook. This hustling world has no time for such a display of imagination, and has even given up those mild conditional formulas, 'Blow me tight' or 'S'wlp me Bob.' The desire to swear, and yet to disguise a divine name or attribute is everywhere. It tends to corruptions such as 'God's sonties,' which keep commentators busy. Aristophanes and Plato both have 'By the with the name of the deity suppressed. Socrates swore by the dog and the goose instead of Zeus. English in the latter case is able to preserve the similarity of sound between the two Greek words. In this country, troop ers and bargees are traditionally supposed to be the most expert or frequent swearers; in the Rome of Nero, to judge from Petronius, the weavers held the same preeminence. The powers of the tinker, as reported by English folklore, are probably illusory, for as a gypsy moving about the country with a taste for portable property, he was naturally credited with all the vices in which the English peasant never, never indulged. Not only did the tinker swear even his dog got drunk. Mediæval blasphemy stands recorded in an odd place, the proper names of the day. The Battle Abbey deeds include a John God-me-fetch, and the surnames Godsall, Godbeer, and Pardewall concealed swearwords. A study of the Canterbury Tales will show the prevalence of oaths at the period. They were supposed to be a peculiar vice of the Anglo-Normans, who used the most violent imprecations (as they appear to us) with the same facility and want of ceremony with which the German lady raps out her 'Ach! Gott.' What is mild in one age and country may seem strong in another century and place. Like hosiery and philanthropy, swearing follows fashion, which dictates, as they say in the columns on feminine dress, some special forms, and ignores others as quite impossible. Part of the success of 'Dodo' in the nineties was due, perhaps, to her audacious habit of damning, which is pretty common now among the wearers of 'sport coats' and jumpers on the links. But a swearing lady was no novelty to readers of Shakespeare. For Hotspur, in the First Part of King Henry IV., will have no 'in good sooth' from his Kate. Her feeble language suggests that she had never walked farther than Finsbury: Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, A good mouth-filling oath, and leave 'in sooth,' A little later Hotspur actually antici- The sly and moral Addison, in the Spectator, No. 371, has no difficulty in showing that swearers are ridiculous with their 'sonorous, but unnecessary words. But, as the Scottish lady pleaded in Dean Ramsay's excellent Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, 'Our John swears awfu and we try to correct him; but nae doubt it is a great set-off to conversation.' Not in Ramsay is the story of one Highlander on a profusely hot day with nothing in the way of money and an air of great thirst addressing another just entering a place of refreshment. The conversation was brief, 'It's a fery hot day, Donald.' 'I'll see ye damned first.' The national instinct for hypocrisy seems pretty clearly indicated in the host of writers who would not print a swear-word in full for untold gold, yet by giving with a dash the first and last letter get, and mean to get, its full effect on the reader. To quote Thackeray's paraphrase 'the famous English monosyllable, by which things, persons, luck, even eyes, are devoted to the infernal gods,' is too common to be squeamish about, though Byron must have been in a paradoxical frame of mind when he declared 'damme!' to be rather Attic' and 'quite ethereal.' By 19 George II, cap. 21, every laborer, sailor, or soldier profanely cursing or swearing shall forfeit 1s.; every other person under the degree of a gentleman, 2s., and every gentleman, or person of superior rank, 5s., to the poor of the parish wherein such an offence is committed. Any Justice of the Peace may convict on his own hearing, or the testimony of a witness. It sounds an easy way of raising money, but, as a matter of fact, the highest personages in former years were among the most lurid offenders. In the early days of Whig reform the House of Commons was keen to revise church rates. Some prominent peers in the Lords determined to defeat the project, and the Duke of Cumberland was sent in hot haste to secure the vote of the mild Archbishop of Canterbury. Returning in triumph, he burst into the room where his fellow-conspirators awaited him, and exclaimed: 'It is all right, my Lords! The Archbishop says he will be damned to hell if he does n't throw the bill out.' The court of Vic |