But I think that neither the adepts of art-critic-technicalities, nor even those of music-technicalities, will fully learn their trade till they study the kings and masters of the whole profession, which kings and masters are the writers upon women's fashions. Any one, as I have said, can become an art critic, and a good one, by learning a hundred words or so by heart and knowing where to stick them in; and though not any one, yet a fair proportion of boys and girls can become music-critics by getting parrot-like in the enormous terms of their apparatus. But it is of public knowledge that the being who can write about women's dresses is one in a thousand.
Now why should this be? I do not know, but it is so. I am assured by those who have gone into the matter that most of these writers are men and not women, but there are, of course, women adepts too. Their occult vocabulary is twenty times more rich than the vocabularies of their concert-going and picture-gazing brothers, and it is not only rich, it is also accurate and determined. The terms used in booming a picture or a great complexity of noise have something floating about them. They can be applied contradictorily, one critic saying that a line is "amusing," and another saying that it "lacks touch." There is room apparently for licence, and, therefore (I hesitate to hint it), room for the charlatan. I do not mean of course that any art or music critic is a charlatan. No! Not for one moment! I only mean that he might be one; that it is possible to conceive of a charlatan using these solemn terms. But no charlatan could use technical terms about the fashions—women's fashions, at least—without being discovered at once. The Fashion-writers' Guild is a strict confraternity and an honourable one, demanding a severe and long apprenticeship and always certain of its instrument. If I read (of course I should never read anything of the sort—I am only giving it as an illustration) "the foundation is of chinchilla draped en échelon and caught up with pompoms of crapeaumort," I am reading about some one quite definite kind of ornament which everybody who has learnt the language will at once realise. I could not apply it vaguely to a black silk skirt or a velvet Medici collar, and therein I think the technicians of fashion are wholly superior to all their parallels.
Respectful as I am, however, to every group of technical terms, there is one set of which I can never be certain. I mean the metaphysical set. I may be wrong. It is not my trade at all. But do what I can it is impossible for me to take quite seriously the technical words of the people who to-day call themselves philosophers. I read St. Thomas and I understand, I read Descartes and I understand, I read Spinoza and I understand, I read Locke and I understand, but when I read the Moderns, the tail of the Germans, I cannot take them seriously at all. And the reason I cannot take them seriously is this. When I ask anybody else what a particular technical term means he can always give me some kind of explanation. For instance, if a man says to me, "Political progress is an asymptote to ideal democracy," and I say to him, "Pray, Master, what do you mean by 'asymptote'?" the mathematician is quite able to take me kindly aside and explain to me, or to any other rational being, the nature of the hyperbola, and to show me how it is always getting closer to, but never touches, the lines called asymptotes, and then I understand exactly what he meant by his technical word. He meant that political progress is always getting nearer to an ideal democracy but can never quite reach it. Thereupon I am content, for I can size my man up. But the modern philosophers will never consent to this. They will never put what they have to say in plain language, and I am by this time half persuaded that the reason they do not do so is that they cannot. I very much doubt whether the words they use mean anything at all. Therefore, it is that when I would read philosophy (which is no bad pastime for a man fatigued with real work and with the considerations of real problems), I fall back upon the Summa because, though it does indeed contain technical terms, they all have a plain meaning, and can every one of them be understood with a little simple explanation.
So much for technical terms: the short cuts to authority and status.
ON THE ACCURSED CLIMATE
When you curse the weather (as I do now) summon to your aid a great group of vapid Aurelian thoughts. It will do you no harm. Such thoughts are a pleasant repose for the mind, a sort of croon.
If you doubt that word "Aurelian," either read the notes Marcus Aurelius left, or, what is better, go to the British Museum and see the statue of that booby upon his horse. The horse is more intelligent than he.
What, then, are these which I call "Aurelian thoughts"? They are not unlike, in motive (though far inferior in quality), to the contrasted categories of Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, admirably parodied by Mr. Barry Pain in Robinson Crusoe's Return, a book than which....