INK OF POPPIES

By DOROTHY L. SAYERS

THERE lies upon my table a document calling itself a. " personal letter." It is manifolded from a typescript made by a machine with a dirty lower case " e," and is signed with a .name qUite well 'known in the smaller and more self- conscious world of letters. At the beginning and again at the end it politely asks for a reply. I cannot reply to it, because I cannot discover what it is all about.

It appears to be an appeal to women to do something or other about the present parlous state of the world. It is written in words most of which may, I dare say, be found in the dictionary, and its syntax, though clumsy here and there, is not scandalously corrupt. But for all that it is not English ; it is not language at all ; it is abracadabra-2 hypnotic rumble of stupefying polysyllables. Its style is a high-falutin version of the kind of thing we are accustomed to get in political manifestos and deliberations of borough councils. Here, for example, is a passage which seems to contain the morrow of its matter :

" The outer instrumentalities of life have grown too big, too self- serious. The outer problems are not the serious ones. They are sportive diversifications of the inner problems ; the extensive; mechanical intercourse of peoples, not intensive communication between persons joined in local intimacy ; the remote, sporadic exchange of the commodities of physical well-being, not sustained participation in mutually educative thought."

It may mean something ; I should not like to say it does not. But who can keep awake long enough to find out ? It is drowsier than poppy or mandragora ; it lulls the brain more cosily than moan of doves in immemorial elms and murmur of innumerable bees. It is the kind of talk my parrot makes to himself when he is covered and snug ; a soft chuckling of indistinct syllables, with a crazy likeness to the rhythms of human speech, but never a clear-cut word.

One warning should be written up in letters of brass to be seen by every writer who wants to make an appeal, preach a crusade, or convict of sin : You cannot stir the soul with abstract nouns. These deadly enemies of eloquence fly their own danger-signals ; they may be known by their tails. Here, in this personal letter (my personal friends do not write so to me, or they would cease to be my friends) is a process;on of monsters ending in " -ation " : preoccupation, operation, externalisation, organisation, affiliation, de- humanisation, decharacterisation, translation, diversifica- tion, communication, participation, situation. And here come the demons in " -ty " : potentiality, clarity, brutality, responsibility, amenities, realities, sensibilities, instrumen- talities, commodities. Moping among them is a dreary little band in " -ion " : attention, distraction, solution, for- mation, contortion, opposition, intuition. Nor are we sur- prised to find them attended by a troop of sesquipedalian adjectives and adverbs : political, international, universal, personal, inimical, intellectual, emotional, rational, physical ; functionally, characteristically, intrinsically ; speculative, primitive, extensive, intensive, educative, significant, pre- dominant ; indiscriminate, intricate, appropriate ; psychic, diplomatic, sporadic, pseudo-rationalistic ; spontaneous, self- murderous, self-serious (do you see this, 0 God !).

There are, of course, polysyllables and polysyllables. No one (I hope) suggests that we should reduce the English language to terms of " the cat sat on the mat," or use Saxon words where Latin words are better, like those curious archaists of last century who Lied to make us say " again- bite " for " remorse," and call an omnibus a " folk-wain." Almost alone among nations, we• are privileged to speak with two tongues, amplifying the vigour of the short word with the magnificence of the long :

" This my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red."

But " to incarnadine the multitudinous seas " is a concretz image, which would lose something by being rephrased as : " to produce an extensive marine decharacterisation of a rubefacient tendency."

One of the chief objections, in fact, to the abstract poly- syllable is that it is a dangerous drug, which ends by destroying the addict's sense of imagery. What picture, for instance, can we form of this image perpetrated by my correspondent ?

" What is wrong, and what shall we do about it—we, the women, and the men of inside sensibilities and that part of every outside person which leans away from the outer realities toward the inner ones ? "

What action can indeed be taken by this odd alliance of women and men with the leaning parts of outside people ? The metaphor in " lean " is what H. W. Fowler called a " living " metaphor, and powerfully visual. A man may lean to the Left or Right in politics, or have a leaning towards the Church of Rome ; but when the parts of outside people begin to lean inwards, we at once feel insecure : " If they be two, they are two Sl

As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th'other do.

And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes h ann.?'

That is imagery ; exact and almost dry in every detail, except for the One word " hearkens " which gives a living personality to' the lifeless instrument. And that word again awakes a concrete image. For contrast, take this mixture of the abstract with the concrete :

" A confused outer brutality envelops the inner hearth of life where we cultivate all that we know to be precious and true."

Allowing that we may cultivate things on a hearth—though the agricultural metaphor is not quite easy in this company— how can we picture a hearth enveloped in a brutality ? We might envelop a hearth in dustsheets—but this muffled metaphor is torn to shreds by the image of abstract violence that follows. Or a hearth might be enveloped in flames, but this does not agree well with the picture of confused assault from without. The truth is that the writer's eye has never seen the image the pen is describing.

A further passage contains a warning by which the writer might properly profit :

" The professional woman politician tends to lose the peculiar inside virtue she has as a woman and to become commonplace and blank ; and a similar loss of virtue occurs in a poet or any other person of inside sensibilities when such a translation of employment is made."

The moral of that (said the Duchess) is that persons of inside sensibilities should not write political pamphlets, under penalty of losing their ear for a phrase. Yet Milton could do it : " I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks ; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us."

Areopagitica.

" . . . hath changed the blessing of Matrimony not seldom into a familiar and coinhabiting mischief ; at least into a drooping and dis- consolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption." Discipline of Divorce. " . . to attend to the office of good Pastors, knowing that he whose flock is least among them hath a dreadful charge, not performed by mounting twice into the chair with a formal preachment huddled up at the odd hours of a whole lazy week . . ." Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

"The Church that before by insensible degrees welked and impaired, now with large steps went down hill decaying."

Church Discipline in England.

Observe in the last of these, the bold and curious double metaphor of going down-hill and decaying ; and how ingeniously the metaphor latent in " by degrees " is plucked out and made patent in " now with large steps," so as to build up that final picture, striking and terrible in sense and rhythm alike.

Here, for comparison, is a little collection of my corre- spondent's metaphors, all (but one) reasonably exact and all (but one) fitly described by the words " commonplace and blank."

" At a time when inside problems have reached a high degree of clarity and solution [How well I recognise the form of that phrase ! It, or something like it, had to appear in all the advertisements I used to write for commercial chemical products]—when personal life and thought have developed to a high potentiality of happiness—we find ourselves continually gainsaid and agitated by the outside mechanism."

Agitated by mechanism we may be, and often are—but gainsaid?

One advantage, of course, this style of writing has : under its narcotic influence we grow too deeply bemused to question its statements. Is it true that we have today almost succeeded in clearing up and solving our personal problems ? or that the way we now live and think makes it easier for us to be happy ? Put it like that, and we may begin to argue the point ; but involve it in a long adverbial clause full of words like " high degree of solution " and " high potentiality," and the brain tumbles off to sleep like the Colchian serpent spell-bound by the incantations of Orpheus.

Now, when the narcotic style is used by borough councillors or the panegyrists of patent medicines, I can smile at it ; but not when it comes from a person who at other times writes literary criticism. If such a writer can use it, then the living waters of language must be poisoned through and through ; and that is an uncomfortable thing to think about. The best antidote to bad writing is good reading ; let me therefore offer a few refreshing draughts from a purer spring, or (if you prefer the medical metaphor) a stimulating injection of atropine to counteract this over-dose of opium.

" Every step of what is called progress for the last thousand years has been the work of some man or groups of men. We talk of the tendencies of an age. The tendency of an age, unless it be a ten- dency to mere death and rottenness, means the energy of superior men who guide and make it ; and of these superior men who have played their parts among us at successive periods, the hereditary families are the moauments. Trace them back to the founders, you generally fmd someone whose memory ought not to be allowed to die. And usually also in the successive generations of such a family you find more than an average of high qualities, as if there was some transmission of good blood, or as if the fear of discrediting an honour- able lineage was a check on folly and a stimulus to exertion."

J. A. Froude : On the Uses of a Landed Gentry.

[Exercise for Home-work : Compare the following passage from the " Personal Letter," and re-write it in the style of Froude :

" Women are those of us who are most characteristically, most natively, ' inside ' people. Our responsibility down the centuries has been the order of things inside the houses : the intricate well- being of personal life, its formation and maintenance. And with us, on the inside of things, we have had the poets and the painters and all those men who have been able to treat the outer mechanism of life as subsidiary to its inner realities—who have discovered the inside importances. We, too, the women, have been discoverers ; but we have also had to guard the inside importances, to keep them intact for discovery. We have grown increasingly articulate about these cherished things, but at the same time a strong female instinct of resistance to their externalisation has been at work."] "A study of the fundamental changes in the main body of a star suggests . . . an evolution from complex to simple . . . This is the opposite direction to biological evolution, which proceeds from simple to complex. If the inanimate universe moves in the direction we suppose, biological evolution moves like a sailor who runs up the rigging, in a sinking ship." Sir games Jeans : Eos.

[Note how the abstractions in " -ion " are kept in their proper place as scientific terms, and disappear at once when we come to the vivid, concrete image.] " For the charge, I value it not a rush. It is the liberties of the people of England that I stand for. For me to acknowledge a new court that I have never heard of before, I that am your King, that should be an example to all the people of England, to uphold justice and to maintain the laws—indeed I know not how to do it."

King Charles I : Speech at his Trial.

[Homework : Translate into hypnotics. Sample Phrase : " Self-sensible of the obligations associated with my regal responsibility." When you have done this, read the result aloud.]

" To burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime, seems no irrational ferity ; but to drink of the ashes of dead relations, a pas- sionate prodigality."

Sir Thomas Browne : Hydriotaphia.

[Here arc abstractions treated in the grand manner ; but consider what proportion they bear to the rest of the sentence.] Finally, two brief exhortations from Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch's Lectures " On the Art of Writing " :

" By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes ; but let us study them for our guidance ; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or Burke.

In asking you to practise the written word, I began with such lo.v but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy. But per- suasion—the highest form of persuasion at any rate—cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty."

The letter that lies upon my table sets out to persuade— but failing to achieve propriety, perspicuity, accuracy or beauty, it has persuaded me to nothing but a protest.