WORDS, WORDS, AND EVERMORE WORDS

I

This speech of Satan's might lead you to imagine that I look upon my fellow-writers as a mischievous set of people, and perhaps even a dishonest one. As regards their occasional mischievousness my view cannot be brought under a simple is or is not, but involves considerable intricacies of explanation, with which the reader shall be duly puzzled. The question of dishonesty can be answered with a resolute denial.

The war, which has taught me so much, has confirmed an old suspicion of mine, viz., that so far from taking for granted that opinions diametrically opposed to one's own cannot be honestly held, the preposterousness of other people's views (or what strikes one as such) ought to be a warrant that these views are honestly held; are, in short, the natural, spontaneous, almost inevitable effects of certain circumstances upon certain minds, temperaments and educations. Delusion and Confusion do the trick; and nothing could be more honest than these ingenuous and ingenious ministers of Satan. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, opinions are what recent psychology calls "rationalizations," explanations to others, but first and foremost to one's own rational self, of impulses, attitudes and habits existing previously, and whose genetic reason (as distinguished from their excuse) must be sought in the great Reasonableness of Things which has made men into machines driven by instincts and passions but furnished with brakes, by no means automatic or always efficient, of rational thought. In other words, and save where intolerance has produced self-defensive hypocrisy, the psychological fact appears to be that we human creatures can be trusted to hold in all sincerity whatever opinions best conform to our own feelings and, in so far, our interests. And if you ask me how I can apply the word sincerity in such connexions, my answer is that the sincerity is proved by the difficulty which those who hold these views experience in believing that the opposite ones can be other than dishonest. The disbelief in our

opponents' intellectual honesty is the measure of our own infatuation. Thus the person who at this moment believes that "pacifists" must be sold to the Enemy is a person whose convictions cannot be other than sincere.

II

Autumn, 1918.

“'TIS AN AWKWARD THING TO PLAY WITH SOULS”

As regards the mischief done by us writers since what I am going to say applies equally to me, although, like my confrères I naturally do not know when or where it applies, any more than I know the precise when and where of my future demise, but only that since all humans must needs die, I also, being human, must die like the rest of us. ... Well! the thing I want to say about the mischievous nature of us people who write, applies not so much to writers as to writing. The danger, the actual and frequent mischief, is not in us as mere human beings, although the talent for expression may conceivably imply lack of reserve, lack of self-scrutiny and of responsibility-the mischief is in the art of words as such. And if, as I venture to suggest, we writers are an occasional danger to the community, this is, in my opinion, simply because we are working with dangerous materials and dangerous tools; and, what is worse, usually without an inkling of their dangers. Our intentions are honest. "But'tis an awkward thing to play with souls and matter enough to save one's own," for, like that hero of Browning's, our attempts at influencing others, or at least the methods at our disposal, are fraught with drawbacks. Simply because the writer's (or orator's) attempt to gain others to his views and to influence their choice and behaviour, is a tampering, not so much with souls, though that is part of our endeavour, but a tampering with truth.

III

THE ART OF PERSUASION

I shall often return to my belief that one of the uses of Art has been, not only to make up for the shortcomings of Reality,

but also, and in proportion to the boldness of its departure therefrom, to accustom us to the essential difference between what we like and what happens to exist. The arts appealing to the eye, and even more so architecture and music, have thus taken up their stand opposite to, independent and respectful of, Reality; enabling us as also to respect and turn aside from it. I am sorry to say that the art of words, and especially my own dear art of prose writing, has been less conducive to intellectual integrity. Owing to its origin in speech, which means explanation and persuasion, it has never ceased tampering with our recognition of Reality. Not in the sense of romancing, of presenting false pictures of life, as poor old M. Brunetière accused it of doing. Rather in the far graver sense of falsifying values while remaining in the ostensible service of truth. For all literary processes, all rhetoric, all syntax, nay, all words such as they stand in the dictionary, are fraught with emotional "values," taking the word "values" as it is done in regard to painting. In every act of speaking or writing, values of attraction and repulsion, of implicit judgment, praise and blame, are being insidiously, unwittingly employed (note how I have unintentionally prejudged the case by the mere word "insidiously "!) by the speaker or writer, who is believed, and oftenest believes himself, to be expounding and displaying realities. All literature is nothing but such a juggling with emotional values, such turning a statement into a pattern, into a piece of music, each with its emotional coercion, with its imperative appeal to preference and aversion. How could it be otherwise? Has not literature, poetry, rhetoric, originated in the Temple and the Law Court, the Commemoration Feast and the Forum? To exalt, to praise, to awaken contrition, to bias judgment; to "persuade, to convert to sway men's decisions-that has been its business. The art of words has done comparatively little, and that little has always been alloyed with emotional purpose, in the way of mere stating, of recording; still less in the way of bona fide explaining, as distinguished from explaining away. Of this, and by dint of doing it all day long, those who address the public in written or spoken words are scarcely aware. We do indeed know that, on special occasions, we are trying

to make our readers and audience feel, and prepare to act, in the manner desired by ourselves. What we do not guess is that we are never doing anything else. For the human soul is so made that it becomes aware of its own ceaseless play of feeling only when that results in preparation for action; we know, as it were, when we jump up and wish to embrace or attack, even more when we check our limbs from doing either; we do not usually know the constant minute alterations in circulation and respiration and nervous tension which accompany or constitute what is called feeling; still less are we aware of the mysterious changes in brain and nerves which give what we call our mental attitude towards this or that. Now, even when there is no intention of influencing men's choice, that is to say men's behaviour, there nevertheless is, on the part of all speech and all writing, an unceasing manipulation of all these unnoticed possibilities of feeling and attitude: they are the very material of all literary effect; and the essential rhythms, far deeper down and more potent than any perceived by the ear, which are the writer's or speaker's materials, are the rhythms of our affections. Such is the power of words; by the side of which all the vaunted powers of music, Orpheus, Saint Cecilia, Alexander's Feast and all, are coarse, intermittent, easily guarded against, and evanescent. For what matters is not the occasional and obvious stirring to madness or tears; but the constant unnoticed fingering and shaping of our judgments, our preferences and our prejudices.

This, however, is only half of the matter; the matter being the unconscious mendacity inherent in all verbal expression. Unlike music, words do not manipulate mere feeling, so to speak, in vacuo. Words summon up memory-images; they deal with qualities, with things existing outside us, towards which those preferences and attitudes are turned. And it is in virtue of this constant reference to things that literature's playing upon our feelings so often becomes a tampering with our sense of realities. Words tell us of a world outside ourselves; but in so doing turn that world's relations within itself into relations to our likings and dislikings. Hence words have been the chief instruments both of Confusion and of Delusion.

IV

This war, wherein words have played their part alongside high explosives and poison-gases-this war has made me think that since literature implies the readjustment (and consequent possible falsifying) of all emotional and imaginative values, it is a trade which can be decently plied only by people fully aware of these dangerous possibilities, and trained to recognize that, far from making them (as we writers all feel ourselves) priests of a God, it tends to turn us into the mouthpiece of our own and other folks' slovenly thought, inveterate prejudices and unrecognized semi-submerged passions.

To which I would add that, as so often happens, the old, primæval superstitions seem to have treated as material and mechanical realities what we are recognizing for subjective and spiritual ones. There really does exist indeed something like Mana and something like magic, in so far as every human being is streaming out suggestions to every other human being; and that, at every serious contingency of life, the world inside us, as savages believe the world outside, is filled with strange influences and evil powers, whereof words and shapes and images are the medium; so that, unless he whose special vocation it is to deal with these dangerous things learns to approach his work in a humble spirit and with a heart purified by selfscepticism, those rites of his, instead of fostering whatsoever forces for good may lie latent in our thoughts and emotions, will merely let loose the deceiving demons who hide in our own soul and in that of all other men and women; moreover, feeding them with fumes of obscure memories and frenzy of sacrifice, give over the outer world also and all its goodness to their destructive and defiling rage. Not the air and the waters and the earth's upturned soil, nor the grass and the forests, nor the moon and the stars, are, as our ancestors thought, full of unseen and malevolent spiritual dwellers; but a place more mysterious and perilous, namely, the spirit of man, where they lurk unsuspected, and issue forth working subtle or terrific havoc. The spells by which they are let loose are words. And the thoughtless magician's apprentice, the unhallowed hierophant, who plays with them, is the man or