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Typos — p. 15: heydey [= heyday] - p. 11 - Introduction The Confusion of Language and its Relation to Revolution "Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last." Tennyson (Locksley Hall — Sixty Years After). Nothing on earth leads more certainly to disunion than a division of tongues. When it became necessary to disperse the iniquitous builders of the Tower of Babel, we know the expedient to which the Lord resorted, and how effective it proved to be. But whereas unity is a desirable condition, and a common tongue is one of the most potent means of realising it, people not infrequently forget that a common tongue presupposes a common uniform culture. It depends upon a common view of human life and the world. This common culture provides the frame, so to speak, to the design of life, in which every word of a language fits like a piece of mosaic. Remove the frame, disturb the arrangement, and the odd pieces of mosaic fall all about you and lose their significance and their necessary association. They can be used only as — missiles. - p. 12 -         Whatever weight the usual arguments against the Middle Ages may possess, at least this is plain, that in mediæval times a common culture prevailed among the leading nations of Europe. Indeed, if we wished to sum up the effect of the Middle Ages in one sentence, we could not express ourselves more clearly than by saying, that in those days the leaders of men attempted to convert Europe into a single nation. This effort, though only partially successful, at least led to the magnificent result that most men, of what nation soever, understood one another — understood one another particularly in their use of abstract or general terms. For that is the test. In the end the names of things remain. The words representing common objects are usually as permanent as those objects themselves. Fashion may destroy the object and thus render the word obsolete; but for hundreds of years none will dispute the proper connotation of the word "chair," "table," "basket," for instance; while in the realm of abstract and general terms such severe fluctuations may have taken place as to make the same word mean something different to each generation.         Now the supreme importance of abstract or general terms lies in the fact that they are the words with which we guide our lives, mark out our goals and direct our effort. It is therefore urgently necessary that they should stand for very precise ideas, and that as the current coinage of speech they should mean the same things to all men of the same group, body, or nation. - p. 13 -         As opposed to the effort of the Middle Ages, however, the effort of this Age, or the Muddle Age, seems to be directed towards turning every nation into a Europe — into a unit, that is to say, without unity. And this lack of unity is nowhere more acute and more apparent than in the realm of abstract or general terms. People of the same nation, nowadays, no longer speak the same language. They no longer mean the same things, or convey the same ideas, when they speak of Happiness, Beauty, Order, Right, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, etc. The frame has gone. The common culture has been replaced by a congeries of pseudo-cultures, all in active conflict. The consequence is that the all-important words of this class have fallen out of place in the design of life; they have no unifying whole in which they can find a stable position, they are at a loose end, so to speak, and they can be used not as intelligent missives, but only as missiles between isolated groups and parties that are doomed to eternal conflict.         A word at a loose end, however, is a word devoid of definite associations and therefore of meaning. Can a word devoid of meaning be used as a missile? Certainly it can, provided that it be given, despite its loss of an intellectual appeal, sufficient motive power to provoke an emotion. But of this anon.         There can be no doubt that we have reached a condition in modern Europe, in which each nation is, as it were, a complex of nations — a complex in which the majority of the most important words (the abstract - p. 14 - and general terms) not only mean different things to different groups and coteries, but also convey no precise meaning whatsoever to anybody. This, however, constitutes a state of complete confusion, and therefore a very grave danger. Just as one cannot help appearing stupid when one is trying and failing to understand a foreign tongue, one really is stupid when one cannot understand one's own tongue.         If stupidity seems to be increasing — and there surely cannot be much doubt concerning at least this form of "Progress," — it is due chiefly to men's growing incapacity to understand their mother tongue. Abstract and general terms are no longer comprehensible even to the most literate; to the illiterate they are simply fireworks, flags or flagstones.         Now this would be all very well if it ended in stupidity. But that is not the final bourne of the present confusion of language. The final bourne is something much more serious, much more disastrous. It is revolution.         All those who may be tempted to regard this conclusion as extreme, would do well to pause a moment here, in order to dwell upon the possible consequences of a confusion of language.         Is it not clear that at all times and in all climes where a confusion of language has existed, man has been doomed not only to be misleading and misled, but also to be incapable of leading? That is the worst danger. A lack of precision amounting almost to incomprehensibility is sure in any case to mislead; but what if it makes it no longer possible to lead? - p. 15 -         There will always be thousands of men prepared to mislead their fellows. Even in the heydey of every culture this has been so. Even with language at its brightest and best in precision and adequacy this is always so. But how about those who are prepared to lead their fellows, and who are admirably equipped for so doing? What are they to do if the only medium which lies to hand is so corrupt, so devoid of meaning, that they cannot use it without the tragic certainty of being misunderstood?         And yet who would undertake to stand up and speak to-day, even before an educated audience, without feeling certain beforehand that he would be misunderstood if he used the words Liberty, Freedom, Right, Democracy, Patriotism, etc.?         That is the danger. While there is a harvest prepared for those who would mislead in days like the present; for the rare individual who would lead, who is sufficiently gifted to lead, and whose leadership is needed, there can be but disappointment and barrenness.         This is the pass to which our present confusion of language has brought us. It makes revolution possible, because it makes the pursuit of false ideals inevitable, and conflict and misunderstanding a certainty.         The causes of our present condition are to be sought, first and chiefly, in the decline of a common and uniform culture, secondly in the cheap literature that has come into being since the Education Act of 1870, and thirdly in modern journalism.         In modern journalism the distortion and abuse of terms, the crippling of words has - p. 16 - become almost a habit. Catachresis, or the forcing and straining of words, is the rule; nowhere is the sacred duty of precision less observed than in the very quarter where its sway should be most uncontested. The journalist, intent only on sensation, is the first to debase words into missiles or empty symbols. He it is who sets the example to the crowd, by picking up these unfortunate fallen pieces of mosaic, in order to fling them about with the wantonness of a schoolboy. He it is who shakes the shoddy frame of modern culture in the hope of making even more of these sparkling fragments fall out of the design of life, until ultimately when some one does arise who would choose to construct rather than to destroy, he finds nothing to hand but shapeless and irrecognisable monstrosities, chipped into mere stones by the mad fury with which they have been hurled about.         Matters would not be so bad if it were possible to point to one class, one stratum of society in England, in which language was treated with more respect. Unfortunately this is no longer possible. Even among speakers Of good education this misuse of language is all too common. The present writer once heard the Bishop of London address a cultivated audience on the subject of Reconstruction, and was compelled to take exception at least a dozen times to that dignitary's illegitimate use of the word "Democracy." *         The reality of the danger, its imminence, will perhaps strike the most incredulous when it is pointed out to them that the         * He used the word in the sense of the "proletariat" or the "masses." - p. 17 - French Revolution itself was the outcome of a confusion of language; nor can there be any doubt that the Russian Revolution had a similar origin.         The French Revolution can be traced, and has been traced, even by writers quite friendly to "democracy," to the radical misunderstanding of three words — Nature, Freedom, and Man — by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This writer, as is well known, after having formed a totally fantastic and false concept of Nature, began to speculate upon the unhappy contrast that human civilisation. presented in comparison with this fairy like figment of his mind. He compared man in the state of Nature — Rousseau's "Nature" — with civilised man in the 18th century, and then proceeded to show how impure, immoral and corrupt, was the second kind of man as compared with the former. The fact that the whole comparison was vitiated by the absurd impossibility of this so-called "thinker's" arbitrary definition of Nature, was only discovered scores of years later, when the untold damage to which his insane misunderstanding led, had long been past repair.         For the "Nature" of Rousseau was the Nature of our most successful Victorian poets — all smiling meadows, babbling brooks, nodding flowers and innocence. He had neither the profundity nor the honesty to see Nature as she really is — immoral, hard, merciless and tasteless. * Like our Victorian         * Perhaps Tennyson should be honourably excepted here (see In Memoriam LVI., line 15); but while the realistic estimate of Nature is certainly hinted at in the lines referred to, it could not be claimed that Tennyson consistently upheld this attitude. - p. 18 - poets when Rousseau gazed upon a rustic scene, he thought neither of the stoat in the hedge quietly devouring its field mouse, nor of the starling in the coppice solemnly and methodically hammering a snail to a pulp before swallowing it. He gave no thought either to the pitiless and eternal conflict of all the vegetation at his feet, or to the struggle probably going on in the adjoining village between a beautiful child and the microbe of tuberculosis. He dwelt only on that something which was not Man and proceeded to endow that something, which was not Man, with all the qualities that his feverish imagination regarded as desirable.         When, therefore, he proceeded to plant his "natural man" down in this utterly fanciful scenario of Rousseau-esque "Nature," he perforce drew a picture even more distorted of humanity than he had already drawn of Nature, and thus proceeded to his ultimate fatuous conclusion that "Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains."         Absurd and meaningless as this phrase was, it succeeded, as Lord Morley has pointed out, in thrilling the generation to which it was uttered in two continents; and it was not until a hundred years later that someone appeared who demonstrated that Rousseau was not only a liar but a pernicious liar. Meanwhile, Napoleon had proved to the French people, in deeds if not in words, how ludicrously fantastic were the ravings of this Genevan firebrand; but the philosophic demonstration of his radical misunderstanding of the three words, "Free- - p. 19 - dom," "Nature," and "Man," had to be left to a later generation.         The fact that the French Revolution was the outcome of this radical misunderstanding is now no longer contested by any serious thinker.         A searching and forcible re-definition of "Nature," "Freedom," and "Man," in the light of history, biology, psychology, and a sound outlook on life and humanity, if it had been rapidly prepared and widely circulated in Rousseau's lifetime, might have defeated the efforts of this Arch-charlatan to poison his own country and the world; but, in those days, who dreamt that the misunderstanding, or the deliberate misinterpretation, of three such simple words as Freedom, Nature and Man, could lead to so much horror and bloodshed?         The world at that time was only faintly aware of the far-reaching practical effect even of sound ideas; how could it justly estimate the consequences of false or unsound ideas?         Now, however, we know. There is no longer any excuse for us; our lesson is before us. And, alas! to-day, we are confronted not by the mere misunderstanding of three simple words, we are confronted by the very much more formidable fact that there is scarcely one general or abstract term in the whole of our language that has any definite meaning. We are confronted by the imminent menace of no longer having any language at all with which to appeal either to the reason or the unreason of man.         All the words by which our life, our - p. 20 - aspirations and our energy can be directed, have long ago become so meaningless, as the result of repeated falsification, mutilation and counterfeiting, that we may soon be reduced to the expedients of animals and savages, in order to make ourselves clear, and drown our voices in the clash of arms.         And yet it can be shown that these abstract and general terms, which no longer have any definite meaning, or which have acquired an utterly misleading meaning, do provoke emotions and feelings which are none the less harmful for being indefinite and vague.         How is this possible? If it is claimed that a word has ceased to make any intellectual or rational appeal, owing to repeated catachresis or misunderstanding, how can it still provoke dangerous feelings and emotions? If it fails, owing to the variety of ways in which it is understood, from meeting with uniform interpretation, how can it provoke uniform action?         A word may have ceased from making any intellectual appeal, and yet be forcibly associated by word-counterfeiters and other agitators with certain vague desiderata which defy analysis. For instance, suppose a certain adult A. repeat again and again to a child B. that one day, if it is obedient and amenable, it will be taken to "Chekko's." The child may press for a description of "Chekko's"; but all A. does is to nod his head, smile with prophetical good humour, and say: "Ah, you'll see. It's wonderful! It's magic!         Here we have a case of a child to whom the word "Chekko's" means literally nothing. If is, however, associated vaguely - p. 21 - with something mysteriously desirable. "Chekko's" may have no real existence, but certain emotions are nevertheless suscitated in the child by the sound of the word, because it has been led to believe that something dimly pleasant is associated with the name. Ultimately even a flag inscribed with the word "Chekko's" will make the child shout with joy; a signpost with the direction: "To Chekko's" will make it leap with excitement, and a mere passing reference to the "Checko-Slovaks" will lead it to suspect that these people must be a very pleasant and happy nation.         A correct definition of "Chekko's" given by someone whom the child trusts, would suffice either to dispel the emotion provoked by the sound, or else to confirm it, according to whether it had or had not a real existence, and that existence corresponded with the child's fostered mental image of it. But in any case the process of dissuasion would take time, and the re-definition would have to be inculcated upon the child as assiduously as the false and hazy original association had been.         It is possible, therefore, to provoke dynamic emotions by means of an absolutely meaningless sound, even when the intellect of the listener receives no appeal whatsoever.         In view of this elementary fact in psychology, the extreme danger of having a very large number of both meaningless and inflammable words in our current speech will perhaps begin to be obvious.         The fact that the word "Freedom" has now become practically meaningless — even more meaningless than Rousseau made it, - p. 22 - because now it has not even a fictitious meaning — does not render it a whit less potent in provoking cheers and wild enthusiasm when it is shouted from the mystic eminence of a public platform.         Presumably when Rousseau spoke of "Freedom" he meant a certain lack of compulsion regarding actions which are peculiar to civilisation, a certain absence of constraint in regard to conventions that do not harass the savage. The savage does not require to wear clean linen, he does not require to wear a hat, he may if he choose eat with his fingers, or come to breakfast unshaven; he may have three or four wives, he may eat human flesh, he may live in the open and shoot down his prey without considering whether it belongs to the squire or to the lord of the manor. Rousseau cannot have meant anything but this by "Freedom." If Rousseau had been told that while it was true that the savage does not require to perform much that the civilised man has to perform, the civilised man, on the other hand, is "free" from many a duty that is incumbent on the savage, he would have perceived that to drop the constraints of civilisation for those of barbarism merely amounted to exchanging one form of bondage for another. For instance, the savage of certain climes has to tattoo his flesh, sometimes with great pain; he has to observe certain rigid taboos, he has to hunt for his food, he has to fight every day of his life against wild animals and the hostile tribe of his neighbourhood into the bargain; he has to work hard during boyhood and early - p. 23 - manhood to acquire efficiency in the arts of the chase and of war; he is obliged to recognise a chieftain, etc. In fact, it could be shown that Man in a "state of nature" is perhaps even more constrained by conventions and laws than civilised man. Only by deliberately falsifying the evidence — that is to say, by giving a thoroughly distorted notion of Nature, would it be possible to contend that man "in a state of nature" is more "free" than civilised man. Rousseau, as we have seen, however, did not hesitate to falsify the evidence. Hence he was able to say: "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains."         But if we turn to the modern idea of Freedom, we shall find that it is even more difficult to understand than Rousseau's. For at least Rousseau's "Freedom" can be traced to a romantic distortion of the true attributes of "Nature"; the modern idea of "Freedom" can be traced to nothing.         In its two forms, the alleged desideratum of modernity. Freedom and Liberty, means literally nothing.         If we put the questions — freedom and liberty from what? and freedom and liberty for what? — it will be seen immediately that there is no definite idea whatsoever behind the words. Freedom or liberty as an aim, presupposes emancipation from a yoke; What is the yoke from which modern man wishes to be free? Is it work? Is it timed work?         Freedom or liberty as an aim presupposes emancipation from a yoke for a definite purpose. What is this purpose? Is it a higher or a lower? Is it more entertain- - p. 24 - ment or more usefulness? Is it desirable or undesirable?         To none of these questions is there any answer, because the modern words Freedom and Liberty connote nothing. And the same applies to such words as Equality, Right, Justice. These mere sounds have ceased to be words. But they all imply some mysterious desideratum which it may be worth while fighting for. They are missiles, fireworks, unmusical chords — anything! All they have retained of their original nature, is the power of directing energy. They no longer call up any definite or expressible idea.         Now when the most hortatory and inspiriting words of a language have ceased to have any definite meaning, the nation using that language is in imminent danger of internal discord and rupture, and the beneficent influence of indolence and inertia alone can avert a catastrophe. The only question is, have we sufficient native indolence and inertia to tide over this crisis in our language?         Even if we have, the Continent has not, and ultimately by infection or contagion, our inertia and indolence, too, will be overcome.         What is the remedy? What is the corrective? What is the best means of resisting the influence of, the Continent and of the corrosive elements at home without relying too confidently upon our negative qualities alone?         Strange as it may sound, the present writer suggests, as one of the most direct roads to a recovery of political and national - p. 25 - health, in the first place, that the disease of language should be cured. Everywhere, in the whole of the civilised world, disease of language is rampant. That country alone will resist and survive the revolutionary epidemic, which first cures its disease of language.         But how is this to be done?         The grand method, the best method, would of course consist in re-creating a common and uniform culture, in which the spiritual words and phrases of the national language would find a new and definite place, a fresh and unmistakable association.         This, however, is perhaps a counsel of perfection. For where are the men to-day who would be prepared to embark on this gigantic undertaking, even if they were equipped for it? It is possible, and the material for its accomplishment lies close at hand. But where are the free spirits who have the courage, and who are capable of the solidarity, that would be required for such a task?         The second best method, and the one more compatible with the power of our best men of to-day, would consist in rescuing the meaningless terms of our language — and there are thousands of them — from their pointless, unattached and almost disreputable existence. It would consist in re-defining them in the realistic light of history, biology and psychology, and in the light of a sane and sound outlook on humanity and the world. It would consist, further, in creating a convention as rigorous as the existing convention regarding all reference to sexual questions and organs, according to which - p. 26 - it would be regarded as an act of gross immorality and indecency to commit the sin of catachresis or abuse against any of the words thus re-defined, and it should be incumbent upon the ordinary citizen to report to the nearest police station any such breach of decency which he might happen to discover while reading his daily paper, or a novel, or any treatise printed after the promulgation of the law.         How many false ideals, false aspirations, and pernicious creeds and doctrines would then be dispersed? How many agitators, tub-thumpers, self-seeking bell-wethers, would then be put to flight! How many politicians would then starve! But how fresh and crisp the air of every debating chamber would then become!         This is a possible and highly practical method of dealing with our present situation. There is no excuse for its not being adopted. When once it had achieved all it could achieve, the masses should be made to benefit from the results of the undertaking. Indeed, it would be more or less futile if they were not made to benefit in this way. They would then become the alert and merciless critics of people who now sway them as easily as if they were corn in the wind; and seven-eighths of our present-day literature would cease from being published.         It is the surest, the speediest, and the most fruitful method of saving what still remains of Order and Culture. But it is a stupendous undertaking and one that will exact a heavy toll from all those, who embark upon it.

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