Compelling Reason Read online

  21

  XMAS AND CHRISTMAS (1954)

  A Lost Chapter from Herodotus

  And beyond this there lies in the ocean, turned towards the west and north, the island of Niatirb which Hecataeus indeed declares to be the same size and shape as Sicily, but it is larger, though in calling it triangular a man would not miss the mark. It is densely inhabited by men who wear clothes not very different from the other barbarians who occupy the north-western parts of Europe though they do not agree with them in language. These islanders, surpassing all the men of whom we know in patience and endurance, use the following customs.

  In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound they have a great festival which they call Exmas, and for fifty days they prepare for it in the fashion I shall describe. First of all, every citizen is obliged to send to each of his friends and relations a square piece of hard paper stamped with a picture, which in their speech is called an Exmas-card. But the pictures represent birds sitting on branches, or trees with a dark green prickly leaf, or else men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs. And the Niatirbians are unwilling to say what these pictures have to do with the festival, guarding (as I suppose) some sacred mystery. And because all men must send these cards the marketplace is filled with the crowd of those buying them, so that there is great labour and weariness.

  But having bought as many as they suppose to be sufficient, they return to their houses and find there the like cards which others have sent to them. And when they find cards from any to whom they also have sent cards, they throw them away and give thanks to the gods that this labour at least is over for another year. But when they find cards from any to whom they have not sent, then they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for him also. And let this account suffice about Exmas-cards.

  They also send gifts to one another, suffering the same things about the gifts as about the cards, or even worse. For every citizen has to guess the value of the gift which every friend will send to him so that he may send one of equal value, whether he can afford it or not. And they buy as gifts for one another such things as no man ever bought for himself. For the sellers, understanding the custom, put forth all kinds of trumpery, and whatever, being useless and ridiculous, they have been unable to sell throughout the year they now sell as an Exmas gift. And though the Niatirbians profess themselves to lack sufficient necessary things, such as metal, leather, wood and paper, yet an incredible quantity of these things is wasted every year, being made into the gifts.

  But during these fifty days the oldest, poorest and most miserable of the citizens put on false beards and red robes and walk about the market-place; being disguised (in my opinion) as Cronos. And the sellers of gifts no less than the purchasers become pale and weary, because of the crowds and the fog, so that any man who came into a Niatirbian city at this season would think some great public calamity had fallen on Niatirb. This fifty days of preparation is called in their barbarian speech the Exmas Rush.

  But when the day of the festival comes, then most of the citizens, being exhausted with the Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much supper as on other days and, crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated. And on the day after Exmas they are very grave, being internally disordered by the supper and the drinking and reckoning how much they have spent on gifts and on the wine. For wine is so dear among the Niatirbians that a man must swallow the worth of a talent before he is well intoxicated.

  Such, then, are their customs about the Exmas. But the few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas, which is on the same day as Exmas. And those who keep Crissmas, doing the opposite to the majority of the Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast. And in most of the temples they set out images of a fair woman with a new-born Child on her knees and certain animals and shepherds adoring the Child. (The reason of these images is given in a certain sacred story which I know but do not repeat.)

  But I myself conversed with a priest in one of these temples and asked him why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas; for it appeared to me inconvenient. But the priest replied, It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left. And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, It is, O Stranger, a racket; using (as I suppose) the words of some oracle and speaking unintelligibly to me (for a racket is an instrument which the barbarians use in a game called tennis).

  But what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, is not credible. For first, the pictures which are stamped on the Exmas-cards have nothing to do with the sacred story which the priests tell about Crissmas. And secondly, the most part of the Niatirbians, not believing the religion of the few, nevertheless send the gifts and cards and participate in the Rush and drink, wearing paper caps. But it is not likely that men, even being barbarians, should suffer so many and great things in honour of a god they do not believe in. And now, enough about Niatirb.

  22

  PRUDERY AND PHILOLOGY (1955)

  We have had a good deal of discussion lately about what is called obscenity in literature, and this discussion has (very naturally) dealt with it chiefly from a legal or moral point of view. But the subject also gives rise to a specifically literary problem.

  There have been very few societies, though there have been some, in which it was considered shameful to make a drawing of the naked human body: a detailed, unexpurgated drawing which omits nothing that the eye can see. On the other hand, there have been very few societies in which it would have been permis-sible to give an equally detailed description of the same subject in words. What is the cause of this seemingly arbitrary discrimination?

  Before attempting to answer that question, let us note that the mere existence of the discrimination disposes of one widely accepted error. It proves that the objection to much that is called ‘obscenity’ in literature is not exclusively moral. If it were, if the objectors were concerned merely to forbid what is likely to inflame appetite, the depicted nude should be as widely prohibited as the described nude. It might, indeed, be regarded as the more objectionable: segnius irritant, things seen move men more than things reported. No doubt, some books, and some pictures, have been censured on purely moral grounds, censured as ‘inflammatory’. But I am not speaking of such special cases: I am speaking of the quite general concession to the artist of that which is denied to the writer. Something other than a care for chastity seems to be involved.

  And fortunately there is a very easy way of finding out why the distinction exists. It is by experiment. Sit down and draw your nude. When you have finished it, take your pen and attempt the written description. Before you have finished you will be faced with a problem which simply did not exist while you were working at the picture. When you come to those parts of the body which are not usually mentioned, you will have to make a choice of vocabulary. And you will find that you have only four alternatives: a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word. You will not find any ordinary, neutral word, comparable to ‘hand’ or ‘nose’. And this is going to be very troublesome. Whichever of the four words you choose is going to give a particular tone to your composition: willy-nilly you must produce baby-talk, or Wardour Street, or coarseness, or technical jargon. And each of these will force you to imply a particular attitude (which is not what you intended to im
ply) towards your material. The words will force you to write as if you thought it either childish, or quaint, or contemptible, or of purely scientific interest. In fact, mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment. In the drawing you did not need to comment: you left the lines to speak for themselves. I am talking, of course, about mere draughtmanship at its simplest level. A completed work by a real artist will certainly contain a comment about something. The point is that, when we use words instead of lines, there is really nothing that corresponds to mere draughtsmanship. The pen always does both less and more than the pencil.

  This, by the by, is the most important of all facts about literature. There never was a falser maxim than ut pictura poesis. We are sometimes told that everything in the world can come into literature. This is perhaps true in some sense. But it is a dangerous truth unless we balance it with the statement that nothing can go into literature except words, or (if you prefer) that nothing can go in except by becoming words. And words, like every other medium, have their own proper powers and limitations. (They are, for instance, all but impotent when it comes to describing even the simplest machines. Who could, in words, explain what a screw, or a pair of scissors, is like?)

  One of these limitations is that the common names (as distinct from the childish, archaic, or scientific names) for certain things are ‘obscene’ words. It is the words, not the things, that are obscene. That is, they are words long consecrated (or desecrated) to insult, derision, and buffoonery. You cannot use them without bringing in the whole atmosphere of the slum, the barrack-room and the public school.

  It may of course be said that this state of affairs – this lack of any neutral and straightforward words for certain things – is itself the result of precious prudery. Not, to be sure, of ‘Victorian’ or ‘Puritan’ prudery, as the ignorant say, but of a prudery certainly pre-Christian and probably primeval. (Quintilian on the ‘indecencies’ which his contemporaries found in Virgil is an eye-opener; no Victorian was ever so pruriently proper.) The modern writer, if he wishes to introduce into serious writing (comic works are a different matter) a total liberty for the pen such as has nearly always been allowed to the pencil, is in fact taking on a much more formidable adversary than a local (and, we may hope, temporary) state of English law. He is attempting to rip up the whole fabric of the mind. I do not say that success is impossible, still less that the attempt is perverse. But before we commit ourselves to so gigantic an enterprise, two questions seem to be worth asking.

  First, is it worth it? Have good writers not better things to do? For of course the present state of the law, and (what is less easily utterable) of taste, cannot really prevent any writer worth his salt from saying, in effect, whatever he wants to say. I should insult the technical proficiency of our contemporaries if I supposed them so little masters of the medium as to be unable, whatever their theme, to evade the law. Many perhaps would feel such evasion to be disgraceful. Yet why? The contemporary state of sensibility is surely, like the language, part of the author’s raw material. Evasion (I admit the word has a shabby sound) need not really be less creditable than the ‘turning’ of any other difficulty which one’s medium presents. Great work can be done in a difficult metre; why not also under difficult restraints of another kind? When authors rail too much (we may allow them to rail a little) against public taste, do they perhaps betray some insufficiency? They denigrate what they ought rather to use and finally transform by first obeying.

  Secondly, do we not stand to lose more than we gain? For of course to remove all ‘prudery’ is to remove one area of vivid sensibility, to expunge a human feeling. There are quite enough etiolated, inert, neutral words knocking about already: do we want to increase their number? A strict moralist might possibly argue that the old human reticence about some of our bodily functions has bred such mystery and prurience (‘It is impossible,’ said the girl in Shaw, ‘to explain decency without being indecent’) that it cannot be abolished too soon. But would the strict moralist be right? Has nothing good come out of it? It is the parent of three-quarters of the world’s jokes. Remove the standard of decency in the written word, and one of two results must follow. Either you can never laugh again at most of Aristophanes, Chaucer or Rabelais, the joke having partly depended on the fact that what is mentioned is unmentionable, or, horrid thought, the oral fabliau as we have all heard it in taproom (not by any means always vile or prurient, but often full of true humour and traditional art) will be replaced and killed by written, professional fabliaux: just as the parlour games we played for ourselves fifty years ago are now played for us by professionals ‘on the air’. The smoking-room story is, I grant, the last and least of the folk-arts. But it is the only one we have left. Should not writers be willing to preserve it at the cost of a slight restraint on their own vocabulary?

  23

  IS HISTORY BUNK? (1957)

  The historical impulse – curiosity about what men thought, did, and suffered in the past – though not universal, seems to be permanent. Different justifications have been found for the works which gratify it. A very simple one is that offered in Barbour’s Bruce;1 exciting stories are in any case ‘delitabill’ and if they happen to be true as well then we shall get a ‘doubill pleasance’. More often graver motives are put forward. History is defended as instructive or exemplary: either ethically (the lasting fame or infamy which historians confer upon the dead will teach us to mind our morals) or politically (by seeing how national disasters were brought on in the past we may learn how to avoid them in the future).

  As the study of history develops and becomes more like a science these justifications are less confidently advanced. Modern historyians are not so ready to classify kings as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The lessons to be learned by statesmen from past errors becomes less obvious the more we know. The uniqueness of every historical situation stands out more clearly. In the end most of those who care about history find it safer and franker to admit that they are seeking knowledge of the past (as other men seek knowledge of the nebulae) for its own sake; that they are gratifying a ‘liberal’ curiosity.

  The conception of a ‘liberal’ curiosity and of the ‘liberal’ studies which exist to satisfy it is one we owe to Aristotle. ‘We call a man free whose life is lived for his own sake, not for that of others. In the same way philosophy is of all studies the only free one: because it alone exists for its own sake.’2 Of course philosophy does not here mean, as now, the rump or residuum left by the specialization of the various sciences. And perhaps Aristotle would not, in any case, have allowed the word to cover history.3 That hardly matters. In his conception of a study pursued not for some end beyond itself but for its own sake he has provided most of the activities we carry on at universities with their charter.

  Of course this conception (Aristotle meant it only for freemen) has always been baffling and repellent to certain minds. There will always be people who think that any more astronomy than a ship’s officer needs for navigation is a waste of time. There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.

  As the study of history progresses it is almost inevitable, and surely not unreasonable, that partial or departmental histories should arise. The whole past, even within a limited period, becomes too large. Thus we get histories of particular human activities – of law, of shipbuilding, of clothes, of cookery, architecture, or literature. Their justification is the same as that of history simpliciter (which, after all, usually meant in effect the history of war and politics). They exist to gratify a liberal curiosity. The knowledge of how men dressed or built or wrote in the past, and why, and why they liked doing it that way, and what it felt like to like that sort of thing, is being sought for its own sake.

  Clearly a Fordist view might be taken of these partial histories. It might be maintained that t
he history of law was legitimate in so far as it yielded practical results: that it studied, or ought to study, ‘the valuable’ and therefore should notice bad laws and unjust modes of trial only because, and in so far as, those taught us to appreciate more fully the practice of the nineteenth century and therefore to resist more obstinately what seems likely to come upon us in the latter part of the twentieth. This of course is a worthy object. But the claim that legal history depends for its whole right to exist on the performance of such a corvée will be granted only by a thorough-going Fordist. We others feel that we should like to know and understand the legal behaviour and legal thought of our ancestors even if no practical gains follow from it.

  The departmental history which seems most liable to such attack just at present is the history of literature. Mr Mason said recently in the Review, ‘it is the study of what is valuable; study of minor figures is only justified if it contributes to the understanding of what is meant by major’.4 Now of course, if we grant that the discipline of literary history is, or can be, or ought to be, merely ancillary to the art of literary criticism, we shall agree with Mr Mason. But why should we grant this?