Collections and Recollections Part 21

XXIX.

VERBAL INFELICITIES.

"_Se non e vero_," said a very great Lord Mayor, "_e ben traviata_." His lords.h.i.+p's linguistic slip served him right. Latin is fair play, though some of us are in the condition of the auctioneer in _The Mill on the Floss_, who had brought away with him from the Great Mudport Free School "a sense of understanding Latin generally, though his comprehension of any particular Latin was not ready." But to quote from any other language is to commit an outrage on your guests. The late Sir Robert Fowler was, I believe, the only Lord Mayor who ever ventured to quote Greek, but I have heard him do it, and have seen the turtle-fed company smile with alien lips in the painful attempt to look as if they understood it, and in abject terror lest their neighbour should ask them to translate. Mr. James Payn used to tell a pleasing tale of a learned clergyman who quoted Greek at dinner. The lady who was sitting by Mr.

Payn inquired in a whisper what one of these quotations meant. He gave her to understand, with a well-a.s.sumed blush, that it was scarcely fit for a lady's ear. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "you don't mean to say----" "Please don't ask any more," said Payn pleadingly; "I really could not tell you." Which was true to the ear, if not to the sense.

Munic.i.p.al eloquence has been time out of mind a storehouse of delight.

It was, according to tradition, a provincial mayor who, blessed with a numerous progeny, publicly expressed the pious hope that his sons might grow up to be better citizens than their father, and his daughters more virtuous women than their mother. There was a worthy alderman at Oxford in my time who was entertained at a public dinner on his retirement from civic office. In replying to the toast of his health, he said it had always been his anxious endeavour to administer justice without swerving to "partiality on the one hand or impartiality on the other." Surely he must have been near akin to the moralist who always tried to tread "the narrow path which lay between right and wrong;" or, perchance, to the newly-elected mayor who, in returning thanks for his elevation, said that during his year of office he should lay aside all his political prepossessions and be, "like Caesar's wife, all things to all men." A well-known dignitary, rebuking his housemaid for using his bath during his absence from the Deanery, said, "I am grieved to think that you should do behind my back what you wouldn't do before my face;" and it was related of my old friend Dean Burgon that once, in a sermon on the transcendent merits of the Anglican school of theology, he exclaimed, with a fervour which was all his own, "May I live the life of a Taylor, and die the death of a Bull!" The late Lord Coleridge, eulogizing Oxford, said in his most dulcet tone, "I speak not of this college or of that, but of the University as a whole; and, gentlemen, what a _whole_ Oxford is!"

The admirable Mr. Brooke, when he purposed to contest the Borough of Middlemarch, found Will Ladislaw extremely useful, because he "remembered what the right quotations are--_Omne tulit punctum_, and that sort of thing." And certainly an apt quotation is one of the most effective decorations of a public speech; but the dangers of inappositeness are correspondingly formidable. I have always heard that the most infelicitous quotation on record was made by the fourth Lord Fitzwilliam at a county meeting held at York to raise a fund for the repair of the Minster after the fire which so nearly destroyed it in 1829. Previous speakers had, naturally, appealed to the pious munificence of Churchmen. Lord Fitzwilliam, as the leading Whig of the county, thought that it would be an excellent move to enlist the sympathies of the rich Nonconformists, and that he was the man to do it.

So he perorated somewhat after the following fas.h.i.+on:--"And, if the liberality of Yorks.h.i.+re Churchmen proves insufficient to restore the chief glory of our native county, then, with all confidence, I turn to our excellent Dissenting brethren, and I exclaim, with the Latin poet,

'Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo.'"

Mr. Anstey Guthrie has some pleasant instances of texts misapplied. He was staying once in a Scotch country-house where, over his bed, hung an illuminated scroll with the inscription, "Occupy till I come," which, as Mr. Guthrie justly observes, is an unusually extended invitation, even for Scottish notions of hospitality. According to the same authority, the leading citizen of a seaside town erected some iron benches on the sea front, and, with the view of at once commemorating his own munificence and giving a profitable turn to the thoughts of the sitters, inscribed on the backs--

THESE SEATS WERE PRESENTED TO THIS TOWN OF s.h.i.+NGLETON BY JOSEPH BUGGINS, ESQ., J.P. FOR THE BOROUGH.

"THE SEA IS HIS, AND HE MADE IT."

Nothing is more deeply rooted in the mind of the average man than that certain well-known aphorisms of piety are to be found in the Bible--possibly in that lost book the Second Epistle to the Ephesians, which d.i.c.kens must have had in his mind when he wrote in _Dombey and Son_ of the First Epistle to that Church. "In the midst of life we are in death" is a favourite quotation from this imaginary Scripture. "His end was peace" holds its place on many a tomb in virtue of a similar belief. "He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is, I believe, commonly attributed to Solomon; and a charming song which was popular in my youth declared that, though the loss of friends was sad, it would have been much sadder,

"Had we ne'er heard that Scripture word, 'Not lost, but gone before.'"

Mrs. Gamp, with some hazy recollections of the New Testament floating in her mind, invented the admirable aphorism that "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye." And a lady of my acquaintance, soliloquizing on the afflictions of life and the serenity of her own temper, exclaimed, "How true it is what Solomon says, 'A contented spirit is like a perpetual dropping on a rainy day'!"

A Dissenting minister, winding up a week's mission, is reported to have said, "And if any spark of grace has been kindled by these exercises, oh, we pray Thee, water that spark." A watered spark is good, but what of a harnessed volcano? When that eminent Civil servant, Sir Hugh Owen, retired from the Local Government Board, a gentleman wrote to the _Daily Chronicle_ in favour of "harnessing this by no means extinct volcano to the great task" of codifying the Poor Law. An old peasant-woman in Buckinghams.h.i.+re, extolling the merits of her favourite curate, said to the rector, "I do say that Mr. Woods is quite an angel in sheep's clothing;" and Dr. Liddon told me of a Presbyterian minister who was called on at short notice to officiate at the parish church of Crathie in the presence of the Queen, and, transported by this tremendous experience, burst forth in rhetorical supplication--"Grant that as she grows to be an old woman she may be made a new man; and that in all righteous causes she may go forth before her people like a he-goat on the mountains."

Undergraduates, whose wretched existence for a week before each examination is spent in the hasty acquisition of much ill-a.s.sorted and indigestible knowledge, are not seldom the victims of similar confusions. At Oxford--and, for all I know, at Cambridge too--a hideous custom prevails of placing before the examinee a list of isolated texts, and requiring him to supply the name of the speaker, the occasion, and the context.

_Question_.--"'My punishment is greater than I can bear.' Who said this?

Under what circ.u.mstances?"

_Answer_.--"Agag, when he was hewn in pieces."

One wonders at what stage of the process he began to think it was going a little too far.

"What is faith?" inquired an examiner in "Pa.s.s-Divinity." "Faith is the faculty by which we are enabled to believe that which we know is not true," replied the undergraduate, who had learned his definition by heart, but imperfectly, from a popular cram-book. A superficial knowledge of literature may sometimes be a snare. "Can you give me any particulars of Oliver Cromwell's death?" asked an Examiner in History in 1874. "Oh yes, sir," eagerly replied the victim: "he exclaimed, 'Had I but served my G.o.d as I have served my King, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.'"

"Things one would rather have expressed differently" are, I believe, a discovery of Mr. Punch's. Of course he did not create them. They must be as old as human nature itself. The history of their discovery is not unlike that of another epoch-making achievement of the same great genius, as set forth in the preface to the _Book of Sn.o.bs_. First, the world was made; then, as a matter of course, sn.o.bs; they existed for years and years, and were no more known than America. But presently--_ingens patebat tellus_--people became darkly aware that there was such a race. Then in time a name arose to designate that race.

That name has spread over England like railroads. Sn.o.bs are known and recognised throughout an Empire on which the sun never sets. _Punch_ appeared at the ripe season to chronicle their history, and the individual came forth to write that history in _Punch_. We may apply this historical method to the origin and discovery of "Things one would rather have expressed differently." They must have existed as long as language; they must have flourished wherever men and women encountered one another in social intercourse. But the glory of having discovered them, recognized them, cla.s.sified them, and established them among the permanent sources of human enjoyment belongs to Mr. Punch alone.

"He was the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."

Let us humbly follow in his wake.

We shall see later on that no department of human speech is altogether free from "Things one would rather have expressed differently;" but, naturally, the great bulk of them belong to social conversation; and, just as the essential quality of a "bull" is that it expresses substantial sense in the guise of verbal nonsense, so the social "Thing one would rather have expressed differently" must, to be really precious, show a polite intention struggling with verbal infelicity. Mr.

Corney Grain, narrating his early experiences as a social entertainer, used to describe an evening party given by the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of S---- at which he was engaged to play and sing. Late in the evening the young Duke of S---- came in, and Mr. Grain heard his mother prompting him in an anxious undertone: "Pray go and say something civil to Mr. Grain. You know he's quite a gentleman--not a common professional person." Thus instructed, the young Duke strolled up to the piano and said, "Good-evening, Mr. Grain. I'm sorry I am so late, and have missed your performance. But I was at Lady ----'s. _We had a dancing-dog there._"

The married daughter of one of the most brilliant men of Queen Victoria's reign has an only child. An amiable matron of her acquaintance, anxious to be thoroughly kind, said, "O Mrs. W----, I hear that you have such a clever little boy." Mrs. W., beaming with a mother's pride, replied, "Well, yes, I think Roger is rather a sharp little fellow." "Yes," replied her friend. "How often one sees that--the talent skipping a generation!" A stately old rector in Buckinghams.h.i.+re--a younger son of a great family--whom I knew well in my youth, had, and was justly proud of, a remarkably pretty and well-appointed rectory. To him an acquaintance, coming for the first time to call, genially exclaimed, "What a delightful rectory! Really a stranger arriving in the village, and not knowing who lived here, would take it for a gentleman's house." One of our best-known novelists, the most sensitively courteous of men, arriving very late at a dinner-party, was overcome with confusion--"I am truly sorry to be so shockingly late." The genial hostess, only meaning to a.s.sure him that he was not the last, emphatically replied "O, Mr. ----, you can't come too late." A member of the present[33] Cabinet was engaged with his wife and daughter to dine at a friend's house in the height of the season. The daughter fell ill at the last moment, and her parents first telegraphed her excuses for dislocating the party, and then repeated them earnestly on arriving. The hostess, receiving them with the most cordial sympathy, exclaimed, "Oh, it doesn't matter in the least to us; we are only so sorry for your daughter." An eminent auth.o.r.ess, who lives not a hundred miles from Richmond Hill, was asked, in my hearing, if she had been to "write her name" at White Lodge, in Richmond Park (then occupied by the d.u.c.h.ess of Took), on the occasion of an important event in the d.u.c.h.ess's family. She replied that she had not, because she did not know the d.u.c.h.ess, and saw no use in adding another stranger's signature to the enormous list. "Oh, that's a pity," was the rejoinder; "the Royal Family think more of the quant.i.ty of names than the quality."

In all these cases the courtesy of the intention was manifest; but sometimes it is less easy to discover. Not long ago Sir Henry Trying most kindly went down to one of our great Public Schools to give some Shakespearean recitations. Talking over the arrangements with the Head Master, who was not a man of felicities and facilities, he said, "Each piece will take about an hour; and there must be fifteen minutes'

interval between the two." "Oh! certainly," replied the Head Master; "you couldn't expect the boys to stand two hours of it without a break."

The newly appointed rector of one of the chief parishes in London was entertained at dinner by a prominent member of the congregation.

Conversation turned on the use of stimulants as an aid to intellectual and physical effort, and Mr. Gladstone's historic egg-flip was cited.

"Well, for my own part," said the divine, "I am quite independent of that kind of help. The only occasion in my life when I used anything of the sort was when I was in for my tripos at Cambridge, and then, by the doctor's order, I took a strong dose of strychnine, in order to clear the brain." The hostess, in a tone of the deepest interest, inquired, "How soon did the effect pa.s.s off?" and the rector, a man of academical distinction, who had done his level best in his inaugural sermons on the previous Sunday, didn't half like the question.

Not long ago I was dining with one of the City Companies. On my right was another guest--a member of the Wors.h.i.+pful Company of Butchers. We had a long and genial conversation on topics relevant to Smithfield, when, in the midst of it, I was suddenly called on to return thanks for the visitors. The chairman, in proposing the toast, was good enough to speak of my belongings and myself in flattering terms, to which I hope that I suitably responded. When I resumed my seat my butcher friend exclaimed, with the most obvious sincerity, "I declare, sir, I'm quite ashamed of myself. To think that I have been sitting alongside of a gentleman all the evening, and never found it out!"

The doorkeepers and attendants at the House of Commons are all old servants, who generally have lived in great families, and have obtained their places through influential recommendations. One of these fine old men encountered, on the opening day of a new Parliament, a young sprig of a great family who had just been for the first time elected to the House of Commons, and thus accosted him, with tears in his eyes: "I am glad indeed, sir, to see you here; and when I think that I helped to put your n.o.ble grandfather and grandmother both into their coffins, it makes me feel quite at home with you." Never, surely, was a political career more impressively auspicated.

These Verbal Infelicities are by no means confined to social intercourse. Lord Cross, when the House laughed at his memorable speech in favour of Spiritual Peers, exclaimed in solemn remonstrance, "I hear a smile." When the Bishop of Southwell, preaching in the London Mission of 1885, began his sermon by saying, "I feel a feeling which I feel you all feel," it is only fair to a.s.sume that he said something which he would rather have expressed differently. Quite lately I heard an Irish rhetorician exclaim, "If the Liberal Party is to maintain its position, it must move forward." A clerical orator, fresh from a signal triumph at a Diocesan Conference, informed me, together with some hundreds of other hearers, that when his resolution was put "quite a shower of hands went up;" and at a missionary meeting I once heard that impressive personage, "the Deputation from the Parent Society," involve himself very delightfully in extemporaneous imagery. He had been explaining that here in England we hear so much of the rival systems and operations of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society that we are often led to regard them as hostile inst.i.tutions; whereas if, as he himself had done, his hearers would go out to the mission-field and observe the working of the societies at close quarters, they would find them to be in essential unison. "Even so," he exclaimed; "as I walked in the beautiful park which adjoins your town to-day, I noticed what appeared at a distance to be one gigantic tree.

It was only when I got close to it and sat down under its branches that I perceived that what I had thought was one tree was really two trees--as completely distinct in origin, growth, and nature as if they had stood a hundred miles apart." No one in the audience (besides myself) noticed the infelicity of the ill.u.s.tration; nor do I think that the worthy "Deputation," if he had perceived it, would have had the presence of mind to act as a famous preacher did in like circ.u.mstances, and, throwing up his hands, exclaim, "Oh, blessed contrast!"

But it does not always require verbal infelicity to produce a "Thing one would rather have expressed differently." The mere misplacement of a comma will do it. A distinguished graduate of Oxford determined to enter the Nonconformist ministry, and, quite unnecessarily, published a manifesto setting forth his reasons and his intentions. In his enumeration of the various methods by which he was going to mark his aloofness from the sacerdotalism of the Established Church, he wrote; "I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish me from my fellow-Christians."

Need I say that all the picture-shops of the University promptly displayed a fancy portrait of the newly fledged minister clad in what Artemus Ward called "the scandalous style of the Greek slave," and bearing the unkind inscription--"The Rev. X.Y.Z. distinguis.h.i.+ng himself from his fellow-Christians"? If a comma too much brought ruin into Mr.

Z.'s allocution, a comma too little was the undoing of a well-remembered advertis.e.m.e.nt. "A PIANO for sale by a lady about to leave England in an oak case with carved legs."

An imperfect sympathy with the prepossessions of one's environment may often lead the unwary talker to give a totally erroneous impression of his meaning. Thus the Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford once brought an Indian army chaplain to dine at the high table of Oriel, and in the common room after dinner the Fellows courteously turned the conversation to the subject of life and work in India, on which the chaplain held forth with fluency and zest. When he had made an end of speaking, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who was not only a very learned scholar but also a very devout clergyman, leaned forward and said, "I am a little hard of hearing, sir, but from what I could gather I rejoice to infer that you consider the position of an army chaplain in India a hopeful field." "Hopeful field indeed," replied the chaplain; "I should rather think so! You begin at 400 a year."

A too transparent honesty which reveals each transient emotion through the medium of suddenly chosen words is not without its perils. None that heard it could ever forget Norman Macleod's story of the Presbyterian minister who, when he noticed champagne-gla.s.ses on the dinner-table, began his grace, "Bountiful Jehovah!" but, when he saw only claret-gla.s.ses, subsided into, "We are not worthy of the least of Thy mercies." I deny the right of Bishop Wilberforce in narrating this story in his diary to stigmatize this good man as "gluttonous." He was simply honest, and his honesty led him into one of those "Things one would rather have expressed differently." But, however expressed, the meaning would have been the same, and equally sound.

Absence of mind, of course, conversationally slays its thousands, though perhaps more by the way of "Things one would rather have left unsaid"

than by "Things one would rather have expressed differently." The late Archbishop Trench, a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits, resigned the See of Dublin on account of advancing years, and settled in London.

He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket. Finding himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table, and gazing across it at his old wife, he lapsed in memory to the days when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, "I am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures."

Delight of Lord and Lady Plunket!

Medical men are sometimes led by carelessness of phrase into giving their patients shocks. The country doctor who, combining in his morning's round a visit to the Squire and another to the Vicar, said that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone, would probably have expressed himself differently if he had premeditated his remark; and a London physician who found his patient busy composing a book of Recollections, and asked, "Why have you put it off so long?" uttered a "Thing one would rather have left unsaid." The "donniest" of Oxford dons in an unexampled fit of good nature once undertook to discharge the duties of the chaplain of Oxford Jail during the Long Vacation.

Unluckily it so fell out that he had to perform the terrible office of preparing a criminal for execution, and it was felt that he said a "Thing one would rather have expressed differently," when, at the close of his final interview, he left the condemned cell, observing, "Well, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning, then."

The path of those who inhabit Courts is thickly beset with pitfalls.

There are so many things that must be left unsaid, and so many more that must be expressed differently. Who does not know the "Copper Horse" at Windsor--that equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk to which (and back again) the local flyman always offers to drive the tourist?

Queen Victoria was entertaining a great man, who, in the afternoon, walked from the Castle to c.u.mberland Lodge. At dinner her Majesty, full, as always, of gracious solicitude for the comfort of her guests, said, "I hope you were not tired by your long walk?" "Oh, not at all, thank you, ma'am. I got a lift back as far as the Copper Horse." "As far as what?" inquired her Majesty, in palpable astonishment. "Oh, the Copper Horse, at the end of the Long Walk!" "That's not a copper horse. That's my grandfather!"

A little learning is proverbially dangerous, and often lures vague people into unsuspected perils. One of the most charming ladies of my acquaintance, remonstrating with her mother for letting the fire go out on a rather chilly day, exclaimed, "O dear mamma, how could you be so careless? If you had been a Vestal Virgin you would have been bricked up." When the London County Council first came into existence, it used to a.s.semble in the Guildhall, and the following dialogue took place between a highly cultured councillor and one of his commercial colleagues.

_Cultured Councillor_. "The acoustics of this place seem very bad."

_Commercial Councillor (sniffing)_. "Indeed, sir? I haven't perceived anything unpleasant."

A well-known lady had lived for some years in a house in Harley Street which contained some fine ornamentation by Angelica Kauffmann, and, on moving to another quarter of the town, she loudly lamented the loss of her former drawing-room, "for it was so beautifully painted by Fra Angelico."

Mistakes of idiom are the prolific parents of error, or, as Mrs.

Lirriper said, with an admirable confusion of metaphors, breed fruitful hot water for all parties concerned. "The wines of this hotel leave one nothing to hope for," was the alluring advertis.e.m.e.nt of a Swiss innkeeper who thought that his vintages left nothing to be desired. Lady Dufferin, in her Reminiscences of Viceregal Life, has some excellent instances of the same sort. "Your Enormity" is a delightful variant on "Your Excellency;" and there is something really pathetic in the Baboo's benediction, "You have been very good to us, and may Almighty G.o.d give you t.i.t for tat." But to deride these errors of idiom scarcely lies in the mouth of an Englishman. A friend of mine, wis.h.i.+ng to express his opinion that a Frenchman was an idiot, told him that he was a "cretonne." Lord R----, preaching at the French Exhibition, implored his hearers to come and drink of the "eau de vie;" and a good-natured c.o.c.kney, complaining of the incivility of French drivers, said, "It is so uncalled for, because I always try to make things pleasant by beginning with 'Bon jour, Cochon.'" Even in our own tongue Englishmen sometimes come to grief over an idiomatic proverb. In a debate in Convocation at Oxford, Dr. Liddon, referring to a concession made by the opposite side, said, "It is proverbially ungracious to look a gift horse _in the face._" And, though the undergraduates in the gallery roared "Mouth, sir; mouth!" till they were hoa.r.s.e, the Angelic Doctor never perceived the unmeaningness of his proverb.

Some years ago a complaint of inefficiency was preferred against a workhouse-chaplain, and, when the Board of Guardians came to consider the case, one of the Guardians, defending the chaplain, observed that "Mr. P---- was only fifty-two, and had a mother running about."

Commenting on this line of defence, a newspaper, which took the view hostile to the chaplain, caustically remarked:--"On this principle, the more athletic or restless were a clergyman's relatives, the more valuable an acquisition would he himself be to the Church. Supposing that some Embertide a bishop were fortunate enough to secure among his candidates for ordination a man who, in addition to 'a mother running about,' had a brother who gained prizes at Lillie Bridge, and a cousin who pulled in the 'Varsity Eight, and a nephew who was in the School Eleven, to say nothing of a grandmother who had St. Vitus's Dance, and an aunt in the country whose mind wandered, then surely Dr. Liddon himself would have to look out for his laurels."