Alone

by Norman Douglas

A distinguished writer some years ago started a crusade in favour of pure English. He wished to counteract those influences which are forever at work debasing the standard of language; whether, as he seemed to think, that standard should be inalterably fixed, is yet another question. For in literature as in conversation there is a "pure English" for every moment of history; that of our childhood is different from to-day's; and to adopt the tongue of the Bible or Shakespeare, because it happens to be pure, looks like setting back the hands of the clock. Men would surely be dull dogs if their phraseology, whether written or spoken, were to remain stagnant and unchangeable. We think well of Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms; why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on! Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be it. Were there no bad ones, there would be no good ones, and I see no reason why men should desire to live in a Golden Age of literature, save in so far as that millennium might coincide with a Golden Age of living. I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their origin is academic laziness.

Certain it is that every language worthy of the name should be in a state of perennial flux, ready and avid to assimilate new elements and be battered about as we ourselves are--is there anything more charming than a thoroughly defective verb?--fresh particles creeping into its vocabulary from all quarters, while others are silently discarded. There is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth? Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things. Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or put on new faces!

I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.

What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back, with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad, or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.

My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....

Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.

Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion. Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect. Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of the skull--a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of the Crimea. [[26]] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.

One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair attached to contorted limbs--they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish. They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over----

Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare phenomenon--life, and individuality, after death. They are more noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the bodies of their dear friends and relatives....

Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who, during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm. Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.