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
Copyrights
The Defendant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
