Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 2

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 26-34, 2,622 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

II

The fire was now burning brightly and would do so for another hour, and it seeming a shame to allow so beautiful a fire to burn in solitude, I laid myself out in my armchair and abandoned myself to its warmth and to the pleasant belief of having said many interesting things to Mr. Husband, who would carry them overseas, giving attention to them now and then in an article in a newspaper or a review, or by word of mouth, treating me as if I were a flower garden, going round the beds, watering-pot in hand, bringing sweet refreshment to all my flowers, my tulips, forget-me-nots, mignonette, and some London Pride, for a border, of course. He seemed to have understood everything and to have sympathised — but, good heavens! I forgot to speak to him of the English language, abundant in the dictionary, but tenuous in our speech. A sad spectacle indeed is the deathbed of a language, one that drove me out of England twenty years ago in search of a small, primitive language undefiled by journalism. Or was it hatred of the Boer War that drove me to Ireland to assist at the revival of the Irish language, which the Irish people bad been able to do nothing with when they had it, whether from lack of talent in the race or some defect in the language itself, I cannot tell, and looking beyond myself I am doubtful if anybody could be found to answer so recondite a question; nor can I tell what was my main motive in leaving my friends, everything I had known and felt and heard and seen, for the Gael, of whom I knew nothing.

I have often been told that I am the most impulsive of men, and I feel this to be true, yet I am a very patient man, as patient with my literature as a woman is with a child. To discover the ineptitude of the Gael in art took me about eighteen months, and I have told elsewhere, I think, how the writing of The Untilled Field (a book written for the purpose of supplying the Gael with some examples of short stories which he would imitate, which his children's children would imitate — for in about a hundred years, I thought, Ireland would be again a Gaelic-speaking country) robbed me of my faith in the Gael. It is not, however, uncommon to find a man practising a religion after he has lost faith in it, and I continued to cry for many years with ever-diminishing voice: Gaelic for the Gael! till one evening, returning home from a visit I had paid to John Eglinton's little house, one of the old coaching inns, now overlooking a convent garden, it occurred to me that Gaelic being dead beyond all hope of resurrection, it might be worth while to preach the revival of Elizabethan English to the Gael, who was without interest in language for its own sake, who desired the Gaelic language only because it would separate him from England. Said I to John Eglinton: The second person singular would be a great help. Even the Gaels could learn to thou and thee each other; thou and thee would become a Gaelic banner and afterwards would be adopted by English writers.

Yeats, whose business it is to set people on the wrong track, warned me against the second person singular, and during the first fifty pages of The Brook Kerith I tried to stint myself to the miserable you, which is not a word but a letter of the alphabet, at least in sound; but to weed out the yous means something more than grammatical changes; every sentence has to be recast; the rearrangement of the verbs is difficult sometimes, hut of very nearly the same disciplinary advantage as the use of metre. Moreover, I had but to remember the Sussex peasants, whom I knew well at the end of the 'sixties. There was plenty of thouing and theeing on the Downs in the 'seventies, and no other speech is valuable. Pace, the Editor of The Spectator, once wrote to me that he was glad the second person singular was no longer used, for its use betokened class differences. A strangely superficial opinion this seems to me, and I have often wondered if the Editor of The Spectator’s' transcendental world is a universal tribe, eating the same dinners, wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language. I prefer to think that his letter to me was written without thought, and that he has already come to understand that the pleasure of living, if there be any pleasure in living, exists in differences rather than in similarities.

To return to forms of speech that I heard on the Sussex Downs in my youth. Never did anybody on the Downs say over there; it was always over yonder, and it was a real sorrow to me when a man in the street in which I live, after taking a direction from me that he needed, replied: Yes, over yonder, and corrected himself to: over there, ashamed lest he had betrayed his country origin. To him I said: Sir, you began in excellent English, but on second thoughts you returned to the flat, worn-out idiom that is written in the newspapers and spoken in drawing-rooms. We are becoming too 'nice.' Sick means ailing, but to avoid the good old word puke we say sick. How much nobler to say: I puked all the way from Calais to Dover. So far as my small power permits me, I have striven hard to accustom the London drawing-room to the word belly, being convinced that there is no real morality in substituting stomach for belly; and invariably I interrupt her who speaks of her dog as a lady — Madam, I suppose you refer to your bitch. My authority is slight, but such as it is I have tried to use it. Ewe is an absurd word, and as shepherds always speak of the female sheep as a yoe, I have spelt the word throughout The Brook Kerith as y-o-e; mayhap it would be better spelt with a w. We write q-u-a-y-s; we say k-e-y-s. Why turn an a into an e? There's much too much e in modern English. And of all, why not say lilac? I say it whenever I get the chance. Before the word yaller I still hesitate, hoping that greater courage will be given to me next time. Hither and thither are only used in speech in the phrase: going hither and thither; yet how much prettier it is to say: Come hither; go thither. Why has the which fallen out of use? It is both an elegant and useful locution. Truly, we are losing our words and, worse still, all innocency of thought. A country woman does not say: I'II go upstairs and try to find it; she says: I'II go upstairs and have a look round. She does not say: I'II refrain from looking at so-and-so; she says: I'II keep myself from looking at so-and-so. False images prevail in modern London speech among the upper classes. Society is always being shaken to the roots, and it would be interesting and Instructive to keep an account of all the solecisms, pleonasms and French words that have crept into the language, over­laying, poisoning our homely English speech at its very spring head, in the market-places, villages and fields.

I wish I had told Mr. Husband how one day whilst partridge-shooting with a friend in the north of England I began to forget the shooting, and on my friend asking me for the reason of my inattention, I answered: I am thinking of the beautiful English your gamekeeper speaks. But is not your aim in writing, he asked, to write the language of good society? I cried out like a dog whose tail has been trodden on, and told him: Not at all! My object is to separate myself as far as possible from the language spoken in good society. And to explain to him what I meant, I searched among the money in my pocket for an old coin, and finding one almost defaced, I said: This sixpence represents the language that is spoken in society. And my friend, being a man of taste, was converted to the beautiful, idiomatic English spoken by his gamekeeper; and in the evening after dinner he told me of many beautiful locutions be had heard in the fields and woods and had laughed at, thinking them vulgar, but knowing at the bottom of his

heart that he was not thinking the truth.

And I might have told Mr. Husband of the many things I said to Mr. Fisher when returning with him after the opera through the Green Park. It is true that during the hustle of the Strand I wasted much of my opportunity, speaking to him of the women we had met in Lady Cunard's box, but under the moon in St. James’s Park the impulse was irresistible to tell Mr. Fisher that his scheme for unlimited education would bring about the destruction of the English language. The peasant is the source, I said, whence language comes. The country forms of speech are nearly always beautiful, whereas those that our streets beget are ugly. Mr. Fisher, visibly stirred by admonitions, did not deny that education might reduce manual labour, but he hoped those who were unfitted to apply the education they had received would return to the mine and the field, and I made show of interest in his defence of his schools, for it does not follow that because a man is a Minister he is a fool; personally he may think with Solon, but his acts are in accordance with public opinion. He is like Charles the Second, who when charged with never having said a foolish thing and never having done a wise one, replied: My words are my own; my acts are my Ministers'. Mr. Fisher knows that the intelligences we bring into the world are not the same; some can take education like certain steel which takes an edge, and these find the education they want instinctively; others are dipped into the pot in vain, and these are the many. Mr. Fisher knows this, but he has public opinion behind him, and being a Minister of Education he could not agree with me when I told him that I would prefer to see him as the Minister of War. For as Minister of War you would not want to set up a barrack in every village, and the Minister who would replace you at the Education Office would not strain your theory that education can develop the brain; he would be content with the old faith, we remain as God made us. After we had passed Buckingham Palace I told him that scholarships and literature did not overlap, that very often scholarships extinguished genius but that a lack of scholarships never stifled it, making good my case over the names of Theocritus and Burns. In the art of painting, too, I said, detaining him at the curb, the uneducated surpass the educated. The two best painters we have are self-taught, Mark Fisher and Wilson Steer. Would you, Mr. Fisher asked, suppress the schools­ — Kensington and Westminster? and I answered: It is impossible to prevent people from teaching, but I would not have any school of art placed upon the rates, for by doing so you retrograde the natural course of art and produce a serious shortage in the supply of domestic servants. All art asks for is to be let alone; every attempt to advance art is to discourage art. And I might have spoken with advantage to Mr. Fisher of his curriculum, which includes, I believe, some instruction in the French language.

Anything more useless than instruction in French I cannot imagine, for to learn a foreign language is the job of a lifetime, and only those possessed of the gift of a certain linguistic faculty can learn French even imperfectly. A few rare individuals can learn the grammar and apply it, and these are not infrequently without any command over idiom; others who can pick up idiom easily, neglect to study the grammar, and so both are deficient, and the rare man who has learnt French thoroughly can do anything with it; he just knows it and that is all, and we look upon him as we do upon a mummy; he is as useless; he is harmful, for as much knowledge of the French language, enough to enable a man to read a newspaper, is destructive to the English language. At certain seasons locusts fall upon a country and devour it, leaf by leaf', and in the same way French words have within the last few years fallen upon the English language and are eating up the English words. The grey squirrel eats the red, and résumé has not only eaten but digested summary. It is difficult to conjecture why résumé has replaced the English word, or why a lady should, in speaking of another lady, delight in the expression: Elle est si raffinée, or why the journalist writes petite instead of small, unless, indeed, he imagines that petite means dainty. I have often thought to collect the French words that are ousting their English equivalents: nuance instead of shade, naïveté instead of innocency, camouflage instead of disguise. Éclat and démarche can be translated by different English words. But everybody is in such a hurry, particularly those who have got nothing to do, that to save time social speech is no more than tags, English and French. Lord Askwith wrote a letter to The Daily Mail of not more than len lines, into which he introduced the words compagnon de voyage, and so pleased was he with his knowledge of French that he could not keep himself from using the phrase again in the same letter; nor could be stay his hand when camouflage came under the pen. Forty years ago, when I returned from France, I discovered that intrigue was not an English verb, and I never used it in that way again, but to-day nobody can speak for more than five minutes without using intrigue as a verb, and would look upon himself as dishonoured if he wrote to the newspapers and omitted to say: It intrigues me to learn.... It was not until I wrote in a mood of exasperation to the Editor, telling him that modiste was a milliner and not a dress­maker, that the word disappeared from my newspaper; and how many letters, anonymous and signed, did I not write beseeching him to inform his contributors that wanton did not mean wicked, and that to write: The wanton destruction of French property by the Germans, instead of: The systematic destruction, was very poor English. Wanion curls, wanton breezes — but it is all in vain. The newspapers have a language of their own, and it should be enough for me to be allowed to omit French words from my own writings. Why should I wish to keep them out of the newspapers? Because, like another, I am not reasonable; or is it because our language cannot assimilate any more French words without losing its character? Borrowings from the German would seem to me less reprehensible; I would Teutonise the English language.

The fire is sinking, and the French clock, amid its yellowing marbles and wedgwood plaques, strikes one. It is time for me to go to bed.