THE PREVALENCE OF PODSNAP.
“The question about everything was would it bring about a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was that according to Mr. Podsnap she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all.”
—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend.
There seems an alarming recrudescence of Podsnappery at the present moment. Perhaps in a measure it is a protest against things that are wrong. If some novel-writers exceed the limits of reasonable plain speech, and some dramatists seek publicly to exhibit the results of moral leprosy, they challenge the latent Podsnap, that is a valuable asset in our national character, to flourish its right arm and say, “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” With every proper contempt for Podsnap, there are some excesses about which he is right when he sweeps them away with the verdict, “Not English!” But having tasted too much success by reason of the excesses of his enemies, he is beginning not only to reform our morals, but has started upon our manners.
A “Town Vicar,” writing a letter to a Church paper, recently lifted up his voice in the following complaint: “It is not long ago that I heard a Dean declare that ‘we were not going to take it lying down,’ and more than one Bishop has in preaching lately had recourse to ‘the bottom dog.’ But these are mere details in the alarming spread of vulgarity where culture and right feeling used to be.”
What would Charles Kingsley have said or His Honour Judge Hughes to a parson who shrank from a simile drawn from the noble art of self-defence? Seeing, too, that the phrase has attained esoteric political value in respect of its use by the leader of Birmingham state-craft, the Podsnap in our good Vicar takes too much upon itself when it declares that the sporting Dean who used it was wanting in “culture and right feeling.”
The reference by more than one Bishop to the “bottom dog” is less easy to defend. The “Town Vicar” no doubt regards a Bishop as so far removed from the everyday affairs of the world that the phrase should never have polluted his ears, far less his lips, and that if he has indeed heard of the existence of “bottom dogs,” and he desires to express himself about them, he should allude to them on the platform as the “submerged tenth,” and in the pulpit as “our poorer brethren.”
To many of us it will come as a pleasant surprise to know that there is more than one Bishop whose courage is stronger than his culture. Not that one desires to see in Bishops or in anyone else a tendency towards the patronage of meaningless slang or dull expletive. I remember a story of the seventies that used to be told with equal inaccuracy of Canon Farrar and Bishop Fraser. The Bishop—let us say—travelling in a third-class carriage with some workmen, took occasion to reprove one on his constant and meaningless use of the adjective “bloody.”
The workman took the reproof in good part, and by way of excuse said: “You see, Mister, I can’t help it. I’m a plain man, and I call a spade a spade.”
“That is just what you don’t do,” retorted the Bishop quickly. “You call it ‘a bloody shovel.’” At which they all laughed in a friendly spirit, and the offender promised amendment.
Relating this anecdote at a dinner, a well-known pillar of the Church, noted for his pompous demeanour and the ignorant pleasure he took in the use of long words, expressed his horror that such language could be used in any form of society. “For myself,” he said, “I cannot believe it possible that, however I had been brought up, such words could pass my lips.” “I am sure of it,” replied the Bishop, “in whatever society you found yourself you would always refer to a spade as an agricultural implement for the trituration of soil.”
And, indeed, in this story lies the test of the matter. A spade is to be called a spade. And whilst even Podsnap is right in putting his veto on the mediæval adjective dear to the sons of toil, we are not going to be bullied by him into periphrastic descriptions of facts that are better stated in plain, simple, and even vulgar language.
The “Spectator” voiced a very general feeling among the Podsnap family in writing of Mr. Lloyd-George’s reference to the hereditary principle and his simile that a peer became a legislator by being “the first of the litter.” The word ‘litter’ quoted without its context may seem a little harsh, but the point of the allusion was that, although we chose our legislators in that way we did not choose our spaniels by this curious and, as he argued, obsolete method. The “Spectator” found this to be mere vulgarity. I have a great affection for the “Spectator,” having been brought up from earliest childhood to reverence her teachings. I say “her” because I always visualise the “Spectator” as some being like Charles Lamb’s aunt, who was “a dear and good one ... a stedfast friendly being, and a fine old Christian ... whose only secular employment was the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a china basin of fair water.” Much as I honour the “Spectator,” I cannot but think the prevailing Podsnap is warping her better judgment.
But there is an excuse for the “Spectator” that cannot be offered for the average man of the world who claims to be righteously offended at the vulgarity of Mr. Lloyd-George’s similes.
I met a friend upon the golf links who used language upon the last green, where he failed to hole out in three, that no Bishop could have sanctioned, even although he fully appreciated that my friend was for the moment a “bottom dog.” On the way to the Club-house he vented his wrath upon the offending Chancellor of the Exchequer for the language he used on the platform. I pleaded in mitigation that just as my friend had been endeavouring to hole out a lively “Helsby” on a tricky green, so the Chancellor was endeavouring to put the House of Lords in a hole, a process in which that rubber-cored institution refused to assist him. To express your feelings and beliefs at a moment like that required that some latitude should be allowed to you in the choice of simile and language.
But so far had the microbe of Podsnap entered into my friend’s understanding that he treated my poor pleasantry as an added insult and complained bitterly that such vituperation, as he called it, was “not English, and never used to be done.” Curiously enough, I had in my mind a passage in a political speech that created even greater pleasure and displeasure to Reds and Blues more than a quarter of a century ago. It was that famous passage in which Mr. Chamberlain scorned Lord Salisbury as constituting “himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which he himself belongs—‘who toil not neither do they spin,’ whose fortunes, as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such services as courtiers render kings, and have since grown and increased while their owners slept by the levy of an unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country of which they form a part.” There was not so much whining over a few hard words in those days, and Lord Salisbury himself could hit out with his “black man” allusion and the famous Hottentot simile, and, lost, as the ‘Town Vicar’ would think, to culture and right feeling, could talk of “having put our money on the wrong horse.”
Memory may be misleading after a gap of twenty-five years, and the wisest of us is apt to grow “difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti,” yet I cannot but think that there are signs in the air that our old friend Podsnap is having it too much his own way. He is a good fellow in the main, and some of the ideas he worked for are sound. His belief in the young person had its touching and beautiful side as it had its ridiculous side. The young person, however, has grown up since his day, and has her own movements which are but lightly clad with Podsnappery of any kind. And for grown-ups dealing with the everyday affairs of the world we must, in the old English way, stick to our fighting instincts, and give and take hearty blows in good part, and win pleasantly and lose ungrudgingly, as most of our fighters, fair play to them, still do. And we must not be afraid of the Town Vicar’s “mere vulgarity.” For, after all, our language is a vulgar tongue, and we are proud that our Bible is printed in it, and our speeches have to be made in it. As a vulgar tongue vulgarly used it brought forth the triumphs of Elizabethan literature, and was the medium of such varied writers as Fielding, Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. And when it is the duty of wisdom to cry without and utter her voice in the street, she must do it without fear of Podsnap and in the vulgar tongue.