A Secret Vice

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2024-11-25 0 0 91.96KB 15 页 5.9玖币

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A SECRET VICE

Some of you may have heard that there was, a year or more ago, a Congress in Oxford, an

Esperanto Congress; or you may not have heard. Personally I am a believer in an 'artificial'

language, at any rate for Europe - a believer, that is, in its desirability, as the one thing antecedently

necessary for uniting Europe, before it is swallowed by non-Europe; as well as for many other good

reasons - a believer in its possibility because the history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as I

know it, both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the uncontrollable, and a

progressive widening of the range of more or less uniform languages. Also I particularly like

Esperanto, not least because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is

therefore something like a 'human language bereft of the inconveniences due to too many

successive cooks' - which is as good a description of the ideal artificial language (in a particular

sense) as I can give.1

No doubt the Esperantist propaganda touched on all these points. I cannot say. But it is not

important, because my concern is not with that kind of artificial language at all. You must tolerate

the stealthy approach. It is habitual. But in any case my real subject tonight is a stealthy subject.

Indeed nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in public of a secret vice. Had I boldly and

brazenly begun right on my theme I might have called my paper a plea for a New Art, or a New

Game, if occasional and painful confidences had not given me grave cause to suspect that the vice,

though secret, is common; and the art (or game), if new at all, has at least been discovered by a

good many other people independently.

The practitioners are all so bashful, however, that they hardly ever show their works to one

another, so none of them know who are the geniuses at the game, or who are the splendid

'primitives' -whose neglected works, found in old drawers, may possibly be purchased at great price

(not from the authors, or their heirs and assigns!) for American museums, in after days when the

'art' has become acknowledged. I won't say 'general'! - it is too arduous and slow: I doubt if any

devotee could produce more than one real masterpiece, plus at most a few brilliant sketches and

outlines, in a life-time.

I shall never forget a little man - smaller than myself - whose name I have forgotten, revealing

himself by accident as a devotee, in a moment of extreme ennui, in a dirty wet marquee filled with

trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and wet creatures. We

were listening to somebody lecturing on map-reading, or camp-hygiene, or the art of sticking a

fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling) bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were

trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English, and voice, is penetrating. The man next to me

said suddenly in a dreamy voice: 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!'

A memorable remark! Of course by repeating it I have let the cat, so carefully hidden, out of its

bag, or at least revealed the whiskers. But we won't bother about that for a moment. Just consider

the splendour of the words! 'I shall express the accusative case.' Magnificent! Not 'it is expressed',

nor even the more shambling 'it is sometimes expressed', nor the grim 'you must learn how it is

expressed'. What a pondering of alternatives within one's choice before the final decision in favour

of the daring and unusual prefix, so personal, so attractive; the final solution of some element in a

design that had hitherto proved refractory. Here were no base considerations of the 'practical', the

easiest for the 'modern mind', or for the million - only a question of taste, a satisfaction of a personal

pleasure, a private sense of fitness.

As he said his words the little man's smile was full of a great delight, as of a poet or painter

seeing suddenly the solution of a hitherto clumsy passage. Yet he proved as close as an oyster. I

never gathered any further details of his secret grammar; and military arrangements soon separated

us never to meet again (up to now at any rate). But I gathered that this queer creature -ever

afterwards a little bashful after inadvertently revealing his secret - cheered and comforted himself in

the tedium and squalors of 'training under canvas' by composing a language, a personal system and

symphony that no else was to study or to hear. Whether he did this in his head (as only the great

masters can), or on paper, I never knew. It is incidentally one of the attractions of this hobby that it

needs so little apparatus! How far he ever proceeded in his composition, I never heard. Probably he

was blown to bits in the very moment of deciding upon some ravishing method of indicating the

subjunctive. Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures.

But he was not the only one of his kind. I would venture to assert that, even if I did not know it

from direct evidence. It is inevitable, if you 'educate' most people, many of them more or less

artistic or creative, not solely receptive, by teaching them languages. Few philologists even are

devoid of the making instinct - but they often know but one thing well; they must build with the

bricks they have. There must be a secret hierarchy of such folk. Where the little man stood in this, I

do not know. High, I should guess. What range of accomplishment there is among these hidden

craftsmen, I can only surmise – and I surmise the range runs, if one only knew, from the crude

chalk-scrawl of the village schoolboy to the heights of palaeolithic or bushman art (or beyond). Its

development to perfection must none the less certainly be prevented by its solitariness, the lack of

interchange, open rivalry, study or imitation of others' technique.

I have had some glimpses of the lower stages. I knew two people once - two is a rare

phenomenon - who constructed a language called Animalic almost entirely out of English animal,

bird, and fish names; and they conversed in it fluently to the dismay of bystanders. I was never fully

instructed in it, nor a proper Animalic-speaker; but I remember out of the rag-bag of memory that

dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant 'you are an ass'. Crude (in some ways) in the extreme.

There is here, again a rare phenomenon, a complete absence of phonematic invention which at least

in embryo is usually an element in all such constructions. Donkey was 40 in the numeral system,

whence forty acquired a converse meaning.

I had better say at once: 'Don't mistake the cat which is slowly emerging from the bag!' I am not

dealing with that curious phenomenon 'nursery-languages', as they are sometimes called - the

people I quote were of course young children and went on to more advanced forms later - some of

which languages are as individual and peculiar as this one, while some acquire a wide distribution

and pass from nursery to nursery and school to school, even country to country, in a mysterious way

without any adult assistance, though new learners usually believe themselves in possession of a

secret. Like the insertion type of 'language'. I can still remember my surprise after acquiring with

assiduous practice great fluency in one of these 'languages' my horror at overhearing two entirely

strange boys conversing in it. This is a very interesting matter - connected with cant, argot, jargon,

and all kinds of human undergrowth, and also with games and many other things. But I am not

concerned with it now, even though it has affinities with my topic A purely linguistic element,

which is my subject, is found sometimes even in this childish make-believe. The distinction - the

test by which one can discriminate between the species I am talking about, from the species I am

leaving aside - lies, I think, in this. The argot-group are not primarily concerned at all with relations

of sound and sense; they are not (except casually and accidentally like real languages) artistic - if it

is possible to be artistic inadvertently. They are 'practical', more severely so even than real

languages, actually or in pretence. They satisfy either the need for limiting one's intelligibility

within circles whose bounds you can more or less control or estimate, or the fun found in this

limitation. They serve the needs of a secret and persecuted society, or the queer instinct for

pretending you belong to one. The means being 'practical' are crude - they are usually grabbed

randomly by the young or by rude persons without apprenticeship in a difficult art, often with little

aptitude for it or interest in it.

That being so, I would not have quoted the 'animalic'-children, if I had not discovered that

secrecy was no part of their object. Anyone could learn the tongue who bothered. It was not used

deliberately to bewilder or to hoodwink the adult. A new element comes in. The fun must have been

found in something else than the secret-society or the initiation business. Where? I imagine in using

the linguistic faculty, strong in children and excited by lessons consisting largely of new tongues,

purely for amusement and pleasure. There is something attractive in the thought - indeed I think it

gives food for various thoughts, and I hope that, though I shall hardly indicate them, they will occur

to my hearers.

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