Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 340
First person: ‘Humble worm thinks humble worm likely put.’
Second person: ‘Listen to this! August gentleman mister thinks high presence likely put,’ etc., etc.
Can you wonder that the Japanese verbal form grows long! I have in front of me a Japanese textbook (Chamberlain, page 150) in which the author indignantly complains that foreigners mistake for verbal roots forms which are nothing but the ‘indefinite potential of the causative conjugation.’ Simple, isn’t it, once you’re on to it? And all this out of Chamberlain’s Colloquial Japanese — before you get to the real language.
Let it be observed that the colloquial introduction, and future literary adoption of such a form as ‘I sort-of-thought’ is entirely different from such a form as ‘I rather thought.’ The latter is grammatical as it stands with the adverb ‘rather’ to modify the verb ‘thought.’ But ‘I sort-of-thought’ breaks the mould. It is grammar in the making.
Nor can we smugly brush aside these changes by dismissing them as ‘colloquial.’ All language was so, originally. And even now only a small part of our language comes in by the front door of literary creation — such as ‘cinematograph’ and ‘automobile.’ Even these get beaten out by ‘cinema’ and ‘car.’ In fact there is no front door. Open it as you will it keeps banging to, and cutting off the half of a word as it comes in — leaving us ‘phone’ and ‘bike,’ and such. Meantime the crowd of new words, the real ones, squeeze in as best they can at the back door and brush up into respectability.
Verbal changes are being greatly helped by that insidious thing called the ‘split infinitive’: ‘insidious’ because it has a way of enlarging its consequences like a split in a hemlock log. Personally I am all for it. I would as soon split an infinitive as split an egg. But grammarians used to shudder — shuddering is their business — at such forms as ‘to fully understand,’ ‘to entirely agree,’ and to collapse at such extensions as ‘to more than half believe.’ But the split infinitive has made its way into our language by sheer merit. It can say what nothing else can. Even so distinguished a grammarian as Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, who knows more of our language than a Dane has any business to (see his Essentials of English Grammar), is willing to give it his parting blessing in his Final Remarks on Infinitives. But all grammarians warn us to be careful with split infinitives, as with petrol or live electric wires. The unthinking public — it is its business to unthink — never heeds the warning and into the gap of the split infinitive pour a host of new verbal forms, like soldiers into a breach. Hamlet could have solved his maddening doubts whether ‘to be or not to be,’ if he had made up his mind ‘to more or less be.’
Dr. Hubert Jagger in his Modern English cites the case of the Staffordshire County Council being brought up all standing (1924) by a split infinitive that held up the question of slaughtering cattle. They seem to have been perplexed as whether to ‘ask the ministry seriously to consider it’ or ‘to ask the ministry to seriously consider it,’ or ‘to seriously ask the ministry to consider it.’ Evidently the thing needed was a higher sense of fun in England.
Another wedge is being driven deep and always deeper into the grammatical structure of the English language by its prepositions. All foreigners realize that our prepositions are our chief glory. They can only admire without understanding them — like George III with the British Constitution. For example:— ‘to break out,’ ‘to break up,’ ‘to break off,’ ‘to break in.’ Thus if a riot ‘breaks out’ in a meeting, the speaker ‘breaks off,’ the police ‘break in’ and — what does the meeting do? — it ‘breaks up.’ After which there are arrests and the prosecution ‘breaks down.’ And just as the foreigner thinks he understands it, he finds Tennyson writing, Break, break, break, without telling him whether it was ‘up’ or ‘down,’ or ‘down and out.’
The prepositions once started loose on their evil course, instead of being tightly imprisoned as in Latin, have permeated into our verbal forms like a chemical solution.
‘What say the waves?’ is Latin. ‘What are the wild waves saying?’ is Victorian English. But, ‘What are the wild waves being said to?’ is something else. Or consider this:— ‘The patient was brought to, but did not know what he was brought to for, nor what he was brought to by.’ The Japanese for this (much superior) is ‘Honourable-sick-man-mister-as-for-much-better-cause-non-existent.’ Dr. Jagger quotes a still better example in the form, ‘Whatever did you choose that book to be read out of to for?’ He says it is comic: I think so too.
In other words, stated simply and softly, our prepositional compounds have broken out of any grammatical frame that existed when grammar ‘became fixed.’ True their vagaries had begun: but they hadn’t ended, and we don’t know yet what they will ‘pass on over into.’ As yet no one has fitted a logical grammar around them.
The revolt of the prepositions has been accompanied by an insurrection among the pronouns. It is not yet fully recognized by the grammarians, but has at least acquired belligerent rights. Who is there who still says, ‘It is I’? Or who would be ashamed of saying, ‘It is me’? Consider such a dialogue as this:— ‘I think you said you lost your gloves. Are these they?’ ‘Oh, thanks awfully, that’s them.’ One would almost prefer the Japanese form, ‘August-mister-gloves-as-for-humble-worm-offer-from-below.’
In short the time has come to bring all these revolted pronouns back under the aegis of grammar by giving them a name, as the French do, and calling them disjunctive forms and forgiving them. The French have used them for so long that in French the other forms, the ones we try to use, sound silly. Compare in the well-known play Ici On Parle Français the immortal dialogue, ‘Qui est la personne ici qui parle français?’— ‘Je’!
Oddly enough some few grammatical changes are reversions to old, old types, so old as to be long forgotten and hence not conscious reconstructions. Thus, professors (who know everything) know that ‘if’ meant ‘give.’ ‘If he comes here,’ was equal to saying— ‘Give this (let it be granted), he comes here.’ Compare ‘Gin a body meet a body coming through the rye’ — where ‘gin’ means ‘given’ — and ‘rye’ means only what it says.
Now our language, our colloquial language, in its effort to shake loose from the shackles of long sentences and subordinate clauses can reach back to the dim ages and revive the remote form. In the most colloquial of English, the English that is almost back-alley and gangsters’ English — instead of saying ‘If you stay here, the police will get you,’ the thought is expressed, ‘Look — you stay here, the cops get you — see?’
The underlying reason is, of course, the impulse we have to-day to break up speech so as to make it intelligible step by step as it goes along. This is intensified by the fact that our language is more than ever under the stress of the demand for brevity. We live in an era of traffic-signs, street directions, police radio calls, telegrams, and air mail. We have no time even for the old-fashioned politeness that would say, ‘Gentlemen are requested not to sit down on the wet paint.’ We just put a sign, ‘wet paint,’ and they can sit on it if they like. This pressure extends from the language of written signs to the language of written literature. Our writers begin to find that they need little but a noun and a verb. In fact, even the verb can be dropped. Thus Longfellow wrote, The shades of night were falling fast. A free verse poet of to-day would just say, ‘Night.’
And in the same poem, where Longfellow writes, ‘Oh stay!’ the maiden said, ‘and rest,’ the same idea can be admirably expressed now with the sign, ‘Tourists’ or ‘Fresh eggs.’ Incidentally, Longfellow’s young man in the poem was away ahead of his time, for instead of saying, ‘I’m so sorry but I really must be moving on,’ he says, ‘Excelsior.’ This was bad Latin, as it ought to be neuter, but was wonderful condensation. This single-word brevity, or rather our consciousness of it, can easily be reduced to parody, as in the familiar verse:
A little boy,
A pair of skates,
A hole in the ice,
The golden gates.
Nor is it only in this way that the isolated use of nouns, substituting images for abstractions, grows upon our language. Two nouns in juxtaposition can, by acting as adjective and noun, replace two nouns connected with verbs and prepositions. A ‘steam-boat’ means a ‘boat moved by steam.’ A ‘steamboat company’ means a ‘company operating boats moved by steam.’ This mode is as old as Anglo-Saxon, but has grown now to dimensions unrecognizable fifty years ago. We can say, and we do say— ‘Steamboat Company Dock Agents Life Insurance Department...’ and so on endlessly. If we ran out of new ideas to tack on to the end, we could begin again at the beginning and say, ‘Lake Shore Steamship Company...’ and so on. No Anglo-Saxon could have said that: he couldn’t hold it: a Roman would have taken a page to say it, and a Greek would be talking yet. Our minds have been trained to a new habit of suspended animation, so to speak, waiting for the end before we make an image. We do with these compounds what the Romans used to do, when they read a long sentence of Cicero’s intricate prose. They waited till they got it all. We find Cicero hard to follow because we have long since broken up our prose to make it intelligible as it goes along. The Romans would find our ‘Steamboat Agency Head Office’ stuff quite impossible.
But then what’s left of our ripe scholar? Nothing. What with new model verbs, and pronouns, split infinitives, interpolated prepositions, traffic-sign nouns, and buried verbs, our grammar seems to have about as much stability about it as a French franc, or a Japanese treaty, or an over-the-counter share in a gold mine, or any other up-to-date phenomenon. No, our ripe scholar has fallen off his stem.
HOW FAR CAN WE PLAN?
AN EXCURSION INTO ECONOMICS
I REMEMBER MANY years ago on a Sunday morning, meeting an old-time Presbyterian friend of mine, just emerging from his church and drawing on his gloves with an air of great satisfaction. ‘Our minister,’ he said, ‘preached a great sermon this morning.’ ‘What was it about?’ I asked. ‘About the poor.’ ‘And what did he say about them?’ ‘He gave them hell.’
That, I repeat, was many years ago. We can’t solve our social problems quite so simply now. The time has gone by when we can believe that the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and the rich enjoy their wealth because they created it themselves, or inherited it from those who did.
Yet this was, in the main, the simple creed that was good enough for George Washington and George III, for John Adams and Adam Smith. Leaving out a few uncomfortable people like Thomas Paine — and crazy people like the French — it was, a hundred years or more ago, the general theory of society entertained by a gentleman. It could be reduced to a few simple ideas. Here first was property — especially property in land — a thing so obviously admirable that no property-owner ever questioned it. With this was free contract in buying and selling, with a guardian government and law to keep it all straight and prevent fraud and violence. Labour, both in England and America, was equally free, that is, leaving out plantation slavery, a domestic institution, existing under both flags and concerning negroes not men. Labour had been emancipated from the old restrictions about moving from place to place. It had full liberty to go where it would, like the liberty granted to Mr. Pickwick by the Pickwick Club on the proviso that he paid his own expenses. This system was undoubtedly capitalism though they didn’t know it as such at the time, and called it common sense, natural law, or the workings of providence. In England there was supposed to be something not only moral about it, but peculiarly hearty and British. In America, with land free and opportunity wide open, it fitted like a glove. Who cared if George Washington owned 150,000 acres? There were lots more. In the old world the fit was better at the top: at the bottom the poor got badly squeezed. But they could be explained away, first on the ground that they were always with us, and secondly that theirs was the Kingdom of Heaven. With all that in sight they had no right to kick.
A few had qualms. Adam Smith, who owned no land, was not quite sure about landlords, and Bentham, who had no children, felt uncertain about inheritance; and John Stuart Mill was poor for so long that he grew doubtful about the rich. But mainly the social system of the earlier nineteenth century appeared to those who prospered under it as the natural and only order of society.
More than that, it had in it, in the form of its new and wonderful machinery, the prospect of continual betterment, increasing happiness. Hence even the misery of the slums seemed only a dark corner waiting for the light. People lived in the sunrise. It was always morning.
A hundred years has clouded it all over. The sky is darkening into night, and livid with hidden lightings. The air has fallen hot, stifling. Something is coming — we cannot tell what — and far off perhaps in the darkness our ears seem to catch the roaring of a great sea.
What is coming? Where can we stand! Is the old basis gone on which we build our foundation, and must we look for higher ground or perish in the gathering flood?...
Let us pace over again, in broad strides down a hundred years of history, the ground that has been traversed. This age of Hope, what happened to it?
Well, in the first place poverty, that should have disappeared, showed no signs of doing so. It seemed that the poor couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get rich, and they wouldn’t go to Heaven, all lit up and waiting for them. It isn’t true that the poor got poorer. It is only that the aspect of poverty grew worse. A slum is more appalling than a desert. The Hottentots were poor and never knew it. A Hottentot thought he was rich because he had two wives. We know better than that.
Of course, as long as there was America to go to, it wasn’t so bad. If the poor wouldn’t go to Heaven they could go to Pittsburgh. Then America filled up and the ‘free world’ was all finished.
At the same time ‘free competitions’ began to be all grown over with a web of monopoly. Machinery and company organization seemed to create monopolies, and monopoly prices were not the same as ‘free’ prices. It is not true that a monopolist can ‘ask what he likes’ — or rather he can ask it, but he can’t get it — but a monopoly price differs from a ‘free’ price in that it is based on the interest of the seller— ‘what the traffic will bear.’ ‘Leave the consumer to us,’ said a great monopoly-sugar magnate forty years ago. But the consumer said, ‘Please don’t.’
With monopoly prices came all kinds of queer prices of which Adam Smith, who slept well, never dreamed, and John Stuart Mill, a light sleeper, only caught a vision in a nightmare. These were prices specially made for competition’s sake, temporary prices of business strategy to kill the ‘little man’ (meaning perhaps a huge local butcher or a heavy drayman); prices as by-products, or prices under a cost so multiple and divided, that no one could measure it.
All of this simply overwhelmed John Stuart Mill’s world. All that he said about it was true, but there ceased to be any such place.
On the other hand, the only effective thing to raise wages and shorten hours turned out to be the thing that the economists of a hundred years ago called futile. Ricardo said that wage laws couldn’t possibly lift wages, neither could strikes. The economists approved of labour unions only in the form of burial societies, those for mutual improvement or recreation. ‘Oh, what a world of profit and delight is open to the studious artisan!’ So sang some dead jackass of the period. The workers could improve themselves (with such things as algebra), have a good time and then bury themselves.
But it turned out that Labour organization could and did raise wages: not by making the social cake bigger but by making other people’s slices smaller.
But there was worse than that. As the machine production system widened over national industry, it developed a habit of going alternately fast and slow, and every now and then coming nearly to a full stop. This was the familiar ‘cycle’ which the world tried to ignore and which is now the world’s bogey, the world’s ghost, the assassin behind the arras. The economists tried to pooh-pooh it. They said it always righted itself; so does human life — at the end. The famous economist Jevons said it came from periodical over-brightening of the spots on the sun, which affected the Indian rice crop, which affected English investment in India, which affected the London market, and so on. It was like the house that Jack built, whose causation got longer and longer. Perhaps it’s not the spots, exactly, but Jevons was right about the causation idea, and of the notion of one thing knocking down another and so on. We do live in a house that Jack built; it’s like a card house that’s fine as long as it stands up. When it falls then Brazil coffee knocks down cotton and cotton knocks down wheat and away it all goes.
What a place! What a world! After all the bright hopes that gave it birth.
So can we wonder that very early in the day a lot of people began to think that the only thing to do was to sweep it all away and build up another kind of society. They forgot that there’s only one kind of society that we can build, a society made up of men and women — as they are. Give me saints and angels — and I’ll build a fine one.... But even at that it would be dull. Women, as they are, are better for the purpose than angels; saints and women could be a fine combination but you couldn’t keep it. The women would corrupt the saints. What I mean is that we have got to deal with people as they are, not with people as they might be — the dream-people of the academic socialist.
Modern socialism came in with the middle of the nineteenth century. It had nothing to do with the earlier mediaeval socialisms of the inner light — the socialism of friars and monks, or of Rappites and Oneida Shakers. These, as economics, succeeded — because they aimed at renouncing the world. A man in a hair-shirt is easy to please. But new socialism aimed at achieving the world. That’s different.
