I am informed that the legal view of abusive swearing is that, unless calculated to cause a breach of the peace, it is no offence. So that it is just possible to call a man a blasted fool in public. On the other hand, there is an offence in calling him plain and unqualified fool: that constitutes a libel and a penalty can be exacted.
Of American swearing I am not qualified to write, but I understand that in vulgar life the convention there is somewhat different. “Bastard” and “son of a bitch” are friendly terms of reproach. This recalls the experience of an American tourist, Mrs. Beech, who was staying in Paris after the War. An elderly Frenchman who was introduced to her greeted her cordially: “Ah, Mrs. Beech, Mrs. Beech, you are one of ze noble muzzers who gave so many sons to ze War.”
Might not a useful addition be made to this To-day and To-morrow series, by some worthier, more energetic, and more scholarly hand than mine? To be called Lars Porsena; or The Future of Swearing. Lars Porsena, if we may trust Lord Macaulay, was more fortunate than ourselves: he had no less than nine gods to swear by, and every one of them in Tarquin’s time was taken absolutely seriously. How would the argument run? On the lines perhaps of the following synopsis:
The imaginative decline of popular swearing under industrial standardization and since the popular Education Acts of fifty years ago; the possibility that swearing under an anti-democratic rêgime will recover its lost prestige as a fine art; following the failure of the Saints and Prophets, and the breakdown of orthodox Heaven and Hell as supreme swearing-stocks, the rich compensation offered by newer semi-religious institutions, such as the “League of Nations” and “International Socialism”, and by superstitious objects such as pipes, primroses, black-shirts, and blood-stained banners; the chances of the eventual disappearance of the sex-taboo and of the slur on bastardy, but in the near future the intentional use of Freudian symbols as objurgatory material; the effect on swearing of the gradual spread of spiritistic belief, of new popular diseases such as botulism and sleepy-sickness, of new forms of chemical warfare, of the sanction which the Anglican Church is openly giving to contraception, thereby legitimizing the dissociation of the erotic and progenitive principles and of feminism challenging the view that hard swearing is a proof of virility. Research would be suggested on the variations of taboo in different English-speaking lands,[3] on the alliterative emphasis and rhythm of swearing, on the maximum nervous reaction that can be got from a normal subject by combinations and permutations of the oath, the results to be recorded on a highly sensitive kymograph. Finally, this valuable and carefully documented work might treat of the prospects of Pure Swearing; by which is not meant sterilized swearing or “Cliff Clawsonism”, but Swearing without a practical element, with only a musical relation between the images it employs. Swearing of universal application and eternal beauty, following the recent sentimental cult for Pure Poetry.
[3] A man charged recently at Hoxton with using language calculated to make a breach of the peace complained that at Bethnal Green, where he lived, he could have said all that and more with impunity. He suggested a swearing-directory for the London district which should indicate what you might say where.
“But how is this?” the reader asks. “Isn’t what I’m reading called Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing”. I apologize for a little joke, somewhat resembling those advertisements in Snappy Bits, which promise erotic delights to any schoolboy who will send five shillings and a statement that he is not a minor: only to job him off with badly printed photographs of classical paintings and statuary—for to send indecent matter by post is illegal. No doubt the Chic-Art Publishing Company would not object to dealing more faithfully with its clients if it could, and perhaps the delight of expectation is worth the ensuing disappointment of only getting the Venus of Milo and a Rubens or two to gloat over. But though a joke is a joke, this volume goes as far as it decently can in containing at least a few classically draped forecasts and an honest inquiry into the taboos which prevent publication of the real Lars Porsena. And, anyhow, this is the nearest to a Lars Porsena that will ever be published. For as soon as there is sufficient weakening of the taboos to permit an accurate and detailed account of swearing and obscenity, then, by that very token, swearing and obscenity can have no future worth prophesying about, but only a past more or less conjectural because undocumented.
Though Samuel Butler’s definition of “Nice People” as “people with dirty minds” can be misunderstood by critics who refuse to differentiate between the humourously obscene and the obscenely obscene, I like it. No nice person is uncritical; and yet we are all hedged round with an intricate system of taboos against “obscenity”. To consent uncritically to the taboos, which are often grotesque, is as foolish as to reject them uncritically. The nice person is one who good-humouredly criticizes the absurdities of the taboo in good-humoured conversation with intimates; but does not find it necessary to celebrate any black masses as a proof of his emancipation from it. This book is written for the Nice People. Then, though it is in its first intention a detached treatise on swearing and obscenity, it cannot claim a complete innocence of obscenity, while consenting to the publishers’ limitations of what is printable and what is not. Observe with what delicacy I have avoided and still avoid writing the words x—— and y——, and dance round a great many others of equally wide popular distribution. I have yielded to the society in which I move, which is an obscene society: that is, it acquiesces emotionally in the validity of the taboo, while intellectually objecting to it. I have let a learned counsel go through these pages with a blue pencil and strike through paragraph after paragraph of perfectly clean writing. My only self-justification is that the original manuscript is to be kept safe for a more enlightened posterity in the strong-room of one of our greater libraries.
Horace is my idea of a characteristically obscene man. An immoderate liking for his poems is, I believe, a sure proof of obscenity in any person. Catullus, on the other hand, was not obscene: he had greater self-respect. Witness his:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa