THE CROSS-WORDS MANIA
IKE the cocktail, the foxtrot and the horn-rimmed spectacle, the Cross-Word Puzzle has come to us from the United States of America ; and, again like its predecessors, it has arrived with such overwhelming impetus that any organized resistance has been impossible. At one moment we were all innocently employed in building walls and amassing Green or Red Dragons— ignorant, perhaps, that for all its celestial terminology, America was at the bottom of Mah-Jongg too ; at the next, our invisible dictators had forced us, willy-nilly, into the toils of this latest evolution of the Word-Square. To-day bishops and duchesses, government officials and play- wrights vie with each other in paying public honour to the new cult. Our Press is, as I write these words, one expansive rash of chequer-board patterns and misleading synonyms. Allied Debts, Housing and other more practical problems yield place to the intangible ecstasies of the Clue. Even the Morning Post has fallen.
There is an alleged distinction, though, between this fresh development of transatlantic ingenuity and the others which have been mentioned. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever argued that cocktails, foxtrots or horn-rimmed spectacles—however fascinating in them- selves—have really contributed to the intellectual growth of their devotees. It has been enough that they have satisfied some hitherto unsuspected craving for emotional expression or personal adornment. But the Cross-Word maniacs have discovered a deeper justification than this. According to them, the more wildly you indulge, the more swiftly will, your mind and soul add cubits to their stature. Your brain, stimulated by identifying three-letter words meaning " Domestic Animal " or "Large Body of Water," will run rings round the simpler problems of Bradshaw, or Schedule D. Your swollen vocabulary—which will now include the names of a number of rare fishes, Central African villages and obsolete abbreviations—will fit you for admission to the , pinnacles of society. If these en- thusiasts are to be believed, the Cross-Word Puzzle leaves Pelmanism absolutely at the post.
One suspects a flaw here. In the earlier stages of infection it is, indeed, abundantly clear that you are wasting an appalling amount of time for results of very doubtful value. You will say to yourself, " Two hours spent in tracing the correct description of a Mexican pack-saddle is no way for me, a reasonable being, to prepare myself for my old age and the possibility of further existence elsewhere." And for this point of view there is certainly something to be said. Yet in how many cases has the patient had the strength of mind to carry out his implied decision, and to forswear Cross-Words there and then ? As soon will he argue himself out of the corresponding stage in an attack of influenza. The dis- ease must run its full course.
In my own instance I am unable to say how this course will end. I had a very mild attack of Acrostics last year, but it was nothing to lead me to suppose that my health was at all undermined. I have never suffered from Magic Squares, and though I once suspected a slight tendency to Anagrams, it never proved to be anything serious. As for pictorial representations of the names of British Railway Stations, I have certainly toyed with thesc- as anyone may on a long journey—but never to the extent of detaching any coupon from the periodical in which it appeared. From competitive Limericks—perhaps through some inherited tendency to criticize the scansion of the other man's first four lines—I have been practically immune. With this record you would have thought that, like Mithridates, I was proof against any fresh poison which might be introduced into my system. Neither Mithridates nor I, however, had reckoned with America.
There was something extraordinarily flattering to one's intelligence about the simplicity of the earlier problems which appeared in the English newspapers. " Come, come," one said to oneself ; " this is mere child's-play. Give me something with a little kick to it. Something that will really put me on my mettle." Already, without one's realizing it, the virus was spreading through one's veins ; and the English newspapers were more than prepared to assist its passage. Anybody who can solve the puzzles which they, are publishing now without the help of Roget, Webster, the Times Atlas, Ruff's Guide and Mrs. Cowden-Clarke—a pretty cumbrous library to take away for a week-end—has my admiration and congratula- tions—qualified only by my profound disbelief that they have really done anything of the sort.
And here, perhaps, one sees the germ which will in the end bring about the Cross-Word Puzzle's decay. Just as the purity of Gothic architecture degenerated into the Flamboyant, and so passed for ever from our midst, thus— unless the lesson of history has been read in vain—will the over-elaboration of the Cross-Word Puzzle eventually prove its undoing. There are students, already, who have lost the wish to solve anyone else's problems ; who retire, with the above-mentioned works of reference, and any others on which they can lay their hands, and spend days on end in constructing fantastic masterpieces which are utterly insoluble by anybody at all. They excavate archaic and forgotten words only to bury them again in a pattern where they regain their original ob- livion. They discover that the " Kokama " is another name for the " Gemsbok "—but they keep this invaluable information to themselves. The days of the three-letter word meaning " Large Body of Water " are indeed, and rapidly, being relegated to the past.
Yes ; the Cross-Word Puzzle, which was hailed as yet another link between man and man, if not between nation and nation, is fast becoming one of the most anti- social influences at work among us. To-day you can still ask a complete stranger in a railway-carriage if he know a a five-letter word meaning " umbelliferous plant," with . every expectation that he will do his best to assist you.. But how long will this last ? I have had rebuffs already from travellers . who . were making puzzles .of their own, and in. a short time—if the thing continues at its present headlong pace—the Cross-Word world will consist entirely of scowling and solitary constructors, while the friendly guesser will have vanished altogether from our sight.
But there is one ray of comfort. Perhaps, before this happens, America will have sent us something else.
Doris MACKAIL.
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