THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROFANE SWEARING.
WAR is so fruitful of imprecation, that a profound inquiry might be made respecting the question, which of the two combatants in the present war has sworn the more profusely, vigorously, with the greater originality and the chief effect? Thinkers, as Mr. Mill would say, have not done justice to the great subject of Profane Swearing. They have come to the discussion in what the Comtists would call a theological spirit, by acting on the dictate of the irrelevant plea, that because swearing is wicke:l, the instinctive grasp of oaths, the passion for•fitting them into the crevices of common speech, and the inability of any race to walk without the crutches of imprecation, lie, therefore, beneath the dignity of philosophic research. Yet, in reality, few subjects will more richly reward, as thinkers would say, the labours of deductive and inductive study. Swearing is as universal as sin. Just as every race and every individual makes use of some stimulant, whether it be tobacco or gossip, pugilism or sermon-hunting, dram- drinking or morning calls, so all of us, whether pious or wicked, habitually swear in some of the thousand fashions which lie open to the wit or the stupidity of man. And if, under the guidance of geology, we look first at the lower strata of curses, and then go up through the developing complexity of the fossils which have been left by the prodigious mass of dead execration, we shall see such oneness of type as Professor Huxley would reveal in the several remains of a reptile, a gorilla, and a President of the British Association. From that primitive type of oath which lacks a central organism, and might seem to have been created by chance, we ascend by slow and painful steps to oaths which are as highly organized as human life, and in which a reverential student would discern a subtle unity of design, an exquisite adaptation of means to ends, and a principle of development into higher forms of what Hood would have called cursery existence. On those specimens of imprecation, a psychologist might exhaust his subtlety by showing that it had needed ages to amass the elements of the soil in which they grow, and the Natural Selection of other ages to weed out from a whole family of kindred oaths the precise type which would best withstand the conditions of imprecatory life. And if, to use the language of philosophers, we look deep enough, we shall see that all oaths find a common root, not in any passion for profanity, or in any desperate wickedness of heart, but in the difficulty, common to all men, of saying what they mean by words at once new in form, and exact in scope and force of suggestion. Without a passion for profanity, it may doubtless be impossible to breed the higher types of swearing, and it is certainly true that on reaching the aesthetics of imprecation, we must seek the fertilizing elements iu subtle conditions of soul and culture ; but all oaths, we repeat, find a common genesis in the inability of men to express what they mean with precision, and with the requisite force. Men swear for the reason that children seream,—because they lack a command of words, and because an oath, like a loud cry, has often the force of a whole sentence. Essentially, therefore, the genesis of profane swearing belongs to the province of the psychologist or the rhetorician, and not to that of the theologian. Hence profane swearing must be put down, not by sermons, but by lessons in correct thinking and good writing.
If we approach the discussion in the scientific spirit for which we are indebted to the example of La Philosophic Posiliee, we shall find that oaths do not stand by themselves in the hierarchy of moral science, but are generically related to every form of un- scientific expression. When an illiterate Irishman answers a summons for the payment of his rent with the threat that, " by Saint Patrick," he will let daylight through his landlord's head, he means, of course, to use the most potent form of words within the compass of his vocabulary. But outside the range of impre- cation, his armoury of phrases is small and ill-furnished. The bald statement of the fact, that he means to shoot his landlord would, he feels, be as feeble and prosaic as the mandate of a bank
cheque, " Pay to John Smith, Esq., or bearer, the sum of one hundred pounds sterling ;" and, discerning the weakness of such
a phrase, an Irishman would like to make the cheque emphatic
by adding a threat and an oath ; so that the summons to the banker would run thus :—" If you don't pay the money, then by Saint Patrick, I will shoot you the next time I am in town." Now here, as Mr. Mill would say, the appeal to Saint Patrick " connotes " a profound store of inarticulate resolution. What the Irishman means to imply is something like this :—" Saint Patrick is the patron saint of the island that owns me. lie is the symbol, both of my own land and of that heavenly guardian- ship which, despite the base Saxon, has made the Green Isle the first country on earth, and her people the flower of the human race. Saint Patrick is my special saint, the only saint whom I can couple with the solemnities of the shillelagh or patheen.
Hence, when I call Saint Patrick to witness that I will shoot my landlord or my banker, I offer the attestation of all those elements of my nature which are religious and Irish ; I mean to say that I will keep my word, as surely as I believe in Saint Patrick and belong to the Green Isle."
Such, when analyzed, is the assurance conveyed by the Hiber- nian oath. A clever and cultivated Irishman might, indeed, con- dense the whole chain of threat into the compass of an epigram ; which should be novel in form, and should reveal the full force of the menacing resolution ; but, as such a feat of rhetoric lies beyond the powers of the ordinary Celt, he invokes the aid of an oath. The oath saves him from the trouble of thinking with clearness, and ex- pressing his meaning with precision. It is a symbol which vaguely gives emphasis. Oaths, therefore, have justly been called the italics of the vulgar. When a young lady wishes to make any part of a letter particularly emphatic, she feels that her command over the forms of rhetoric is too small to convey the requisite verbal force ; so she follows the example of the Irishman, and resorts to a mechanical device, by underscoring the words on which she means the reader to lay special stress. That is the fashion in which she swears. Hence, the quantity of imprecation in the epistles of pious and half-educated young ladies is appalling. And even professional men of letters often betray a like inability to say what they mean without resorting to such vague symbols as the " Saint Patrick" of the illiterate Hibernian, or the under- scoring of the boarding-school miss. A good writer shuns all hackneyed or loose verbal forms. Feeling that his thoughts cannot he fitted into the moulds left by the usage of the streets or the school, he strives after forms of phrase which shall strike the mind by freshness of lineament, and convey a precisely accurate impression by a nice adjustment of syllable and clause. Hence De Quincey has the warrant of justice for saying, that the masters of precise thought and rhetoric will be sparing of quotation from the writ- ings of other men, since they can seldom meet even with an ap- proximation towards a correct utterance of thought or feeling so individual and so sharply cut as their own. Bad writers, on the contrary, are never quite sure what they mean, and so they seem to choose their phrases at random, or to take the first word that comes to their pen. They lack that delicacy of eye for the subtle- ties of rhetoric which impels a master of style to cast aside a thousand types of expression, and choose a special phrase, at the bidding of an instinct as mysterious and infallible as that delicacy of ear which tells a violinist when his instrument is a thousandth part of a note out of tune. And when they seek to be emphatic, they are forced to make use of symbols at once vague and worn ; they appeal to their faith in St. Patrick ; that is, they swear. Thus, great part of the writing in which the poor British public must seek its thought is only the unconscious swearing of half- lettered men. A like infirmity of expression makes the French people habitually resort to what we may call oaths of gesticulation. Their distinctive mark as talkers is their inability to speak for five minutes without shrugging their shoulders. N one but a French- man, or rather a Frenchwoman, can raise the shoulders with that quick, graceful jerk, and lift the eyebrows with that air of bland bewilderment, and cover the face with that air of baffled wisdom, which constitute the shrug of good society. Some future Darwin, when tracing the genesis of national manners, will expend volumes to prove that, just as ages were needed for the transformation of monkeys into men, so it took ages of breeding to give that special pliancy of fibre, that litheness of muscle, that sensitiveness of nerve, which we find revealed in the capacity to condense a sen- tence or a page into an epigram of gesticulation. Yet the shrug belongs to the same family as the oath, since it substitutes a mechanical form of expression for that constantly changing and essentially individual device of phrase which demands precision of thought and style. When a Frenchman is asked why Bazaine has not gone away from Metz in a balloon to organize the Gardes Mobiles, why the Franc-tireurs do not cut to pieces the railway lines on the way from Paris to the Rhine, or why Victor Hugo fancies that he can save France by marks of exclamation, the puzzled listener shrugs his shoulders, and thus implies, "The thing is unaccountable, monsieur ; the plans of M. Gam- betta are as inscrutable as the functions of the east wind ; Fate seems to have cursed La Belle France, and the situation is execrable." An Englishman or an American would answer such a question by letting off a heavy oath, just as, when the safety- valve is lifted, an engine lets off steam. Yet the profane exclama- tion would mean no more than the shrug of the Frenchman. He swears with his shoulders, while his less refined neighbours swear with their mouths. Of course, he is also enriched with an armoury of verbal oaths, which he wields with much more effect than he has recently handled the Chassepot ; but that armoury is only an auxiliary force, and his inexhaustible store of shrugs gives him a command over the resources of imprecation, to which, as Macaulay would have said, the history of profane swearing presents no parallel.
If men swear at all, they ought to swear well. We mean, not that they should swear profusely, but that they should aim at originality and variety of style. In this respect, our own labouring classes, and especially our railway navigators, betray a
lack of ;originality and culture, which we beseech Mr. Forster to keep in view when he revises his great Elementary Edu- cation Act. A group of railway labourers will, on pay night, expend more oaths than any like number of men through- out the world, with the exception, perhaps, of those Americans in the Far West whose profuse execration has drawn forth the homage of Sir Charles Dilke. Nevertheless, the group of our swearing countrymen stands on the lowest step of the ladder of imprecation. Their stock in trade is so scanty that they are forced to use the same oath a thousand times in the course of an evening. They would be made bankrupt, dumb, and respectable if one could steal the beggarly array of profane ammunition which they themselves have stolen from the swearing generations of the past, and now discharge in monotonous volleys. They are like a gang of sham musicians whose only instrument is a big drum, and who beat it incessantly to make up by volume of sound for the want of variety. A cultivated man might be so moved to pity by the mental poverty of such swearers, that, instead of wasting his time in urging them not to swear, he would politely let them know how much richness and force and picturesque variety they might add to their style by studying the masters of imprecation. Nay, if he were filled with the spirit of charity, he might even supply the poor wretches with a few such oaths as any man of education or mental vigour should be able to invent on the spur of the moment. And, to use the language of the morning newspapers, we have reason to believe that the poverty of in- vention displayed by the railway labourers is a subject of grave anxiety to their employers. We have high authority for stating that the place of " gaffer," or superintendent of a gang, is given only to men with a large command of oaths ; nay, that the employers are so exacting as to require the " gaffer " to swear, not only with profusion, but with originality. He must not only keep in stock a large supply of old oaths, but be able to mint new ones. He must be gifted with the faculty of invention. He must, in his way, be a man of genius. Although that may seem a heavy condition to exact for 25s. a week, it has, neverthe- less, been framed with a nice regard for what thinkers would call the limitations of the navigator's perceptive faculty. The language of profanity is his mother tongue, and he learns to use the terms of decorous speech with as much difficulty as other men learn to speak Parisian French. He speaks, until the end of his days, S. patois of profanity ; so, if the people of the " Inferno " talk with undiluted purity of imprecation, the Bismarck of that region has as much right to annex the navigator as Germany has to annex Alsace and Lorraine. For the same reason, the words used by the mass of people bring no idea to his mind unless their latent meaning be illuminated by a blaze of blasphemy. Or, just as Professor Tyndall says that light is made visible by floating on the " rafts " of organic matter that fill the atmosphere, so the " drylight" of a command or a precept is revealed to the mind of the navigator only when it is held up by the rafts of profanation. And, just as Professor Tyndall has cast across a stream of light " the darkness of stellar space," by burning the organic particles in the heat of a spirit-lamp, so the oath-rafts of the " gaffer " are quickly consumed in the flame of hourly usage, and the navigator would be left in Egyptian gloom if his chief did not cast into the atmosphere a new flood of imprecatory organisms. Or, to come down from the heights of philosophical phraseology to the level of common speech, old oaths lose their force, and if the gaffer don't invent new ones, the men won't mind him a bit.
In England, there is little or no chance that swearing will im- prove in style, because the art has now been cast aside by men of eduiation, and has been left to the illiterate and the profane. In such countries as Italy, on the other hand, the art has been saved from decline by the past piety of the Italian people, and by the exceptionally rich deposits of theological or mythological tradition. An Italian peasant can swear by any one of the thousand saints with whom he has been made acquainted by the Church, and some of whom the Church has borrowed from Heathendom ; so that he blasphemes with a strength borrowed from the piety of all past ages. An English peasant, on the contrary, knows nothing about saints, those of England having all been killed three hundred years ago by Henry VIII. ; and thus the poor fellow is
thrown back on the resources of his own wit. So also, it is true, are the people of America, who left all saints and other relics of Popery behind them when they set sail in the Mayflower to make themselves subject to the Constitution of the United States, and who have subsequently discouraged the manufacture of Saints, lest such a branch of industry should menace Republican institutions. But for the lack of a hagiology America has more tban made up by the mental activity of her people, and by the culture of the men who lead her swearing popu- lation. While England has left the art of imprecation to cabmen, eoalheavers, and men who go to music-halls, America still com- snits•it to her lawyers, senators, and regular attendants at church. A citizen of the United States finds a command over the resources of profane speech compatible with a fervent profession of faith in Roman Catholicism or Unitarianism. And even when men have been educated at Harvard, when they have listened to the lectures of Mr. Lowell, and when their scholastic culture would escape reproach in England, they resort to the emphasis of imprecation. Thus the swearing of America, and especially that of the South and the Far West, displays an originality of conception and a variety of image for which we look in vain when the emphasis of oaths is merely the last refuge of ignorance. Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that if America would devote as much vigour of mind and skill of phrase to writing as to profane swearing, a single generation would suffice to take away the reproach that she is -destitute of a great literature. She wastes in vague curses the vocabulary of a Shakespeare. Preachers might also find fault with the habit on the ground that to blaspheme is as wicked as to steal ; but, obeying the dictate of Auguste Comte, we dispense with the guidance of the theological spirit, and we criticize the Trans- Atlantic habit of imprecation on the ground that it betrays a want of real culture and precision of mind, that it fosters looseness of thought, and that it proclaims a whole nation so to lack the faculty of exact expression as to be dependent for emphasis on the machi- nery of italics. The Americans obey one literary canon by swearing well ; but they sin against a greater literary canon by swearing at all. To America there will come a day in which the school of religion and the school of rhetoric will work so harmoniously that a senator or -a member of Mr. Beecher's church will deem it as degrading to use an oath as to make a slip in grammar. Imprecations will some day be as rare as inelegancies of style.
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