From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose. When we can do this habitually (even though it never becomes easy) we shall find ourselves honoring the faculty that can do more toward this end than a mastery of prescriptive grammar, more than the study of etymology and semantics, more than an observance of idiom and the maxims of rhetoric. And what is this faculty? It is the blessing of an orderly mind.

Bernstein’s Second Law (From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer)

Until now Bernstein’s Law has designated a statement, known throughout the civilized world, of a property common to such articles as cuff links, dimes, table-tennis balls, and caps of toothpaste tubes. Stated in its simplest, nay its only, form, it affirms: “A falling body always rolls to the most inaccessible spot.” Practically, this means that if you drop a cuff link, it is useless to look at the open floor area near your feet. The only thing to do is to get down on all fours, preferably with a flashlight, and peer under the bed.

Henceforth this principle will have to be known as Bernstein’s First Law, for now there is a Second Law. The new one is a kind of Gresham’s Law applied to words. Gresham’s Law, it will be recalled (just as Sir Thomas Gresham recalled it from an earlier formulator), states that “bad money drives out good.” This is true of words, too, but the two laws differ in important respects.

When a bad currency drives out a good one, the good money at least retains its value and, indeed, sometimes gains in value, whereas the bad currency remains bad. When a bad word drives out a good one, however, different things may happen. First, the good word most often depreciates in value, although it may hold its own; it never, however, gains in value. Second, the bad word, like the bad currency, may remain bad, but often it appreciates to the level of the good word and sometimes even becomes more valuable than the word it displaced. Stated more succinctly but not more clearly, Bernstein’s Second Law holds: “Bad words tend to drive out good ones, and when they do, the good ones never appreciate in value, sometimes maintain their value, but most often lose in value, whereas the bad words may remain bad or get better.”

The term “bad words,” as used here, refers to secondary meanings that diverge from the true or primary meanings of words, and that come into use because of ignorance, confusion, faddishness, or the importunities of slang.

When such powerful words as awful, dreadful, fearful, or horrible are used as mere commonplace expressions of disapproval, the primary meanings of the words are displaced and depreciated. At the same time the new meanings remain debased, so that there is a gross loss all around. When enormity is widely used in contexts where enormousness is meant, the useful genuine meaning of the word tends to become lost and no one is the gainer. The same is true of such manhandled words as disinterested, glamour, publicist, and transpire. And, of course, there are countless more.

In another category are “bad words” with real utility that drive out “good words” with little or none. There is no need for fruition in the meaning of gratification in the use or possession of something, because the occasions for its use are rare and because pleasure or gratification will usually serve. But there is need for fruition meaning coming to fruit. Internecine in the sense of deadly – its original sense – is a redundant word in the language, but internecine referring to mutual destruction or fratricidal strife is useful. It is a rare occasion when a writer would wish to use shambles in its traditional meaning – a place of slaughter – but frequently he would have use for it in the more recent meaning of a scene of chaos. All these are instances of bad words that drive out good ones and then gain in value.

In another category are bad words that all but drive out good ones, but do not quite do it and so simply coexist with them. The noun alibi in the casual sense of an excuse is a prevalent word, but it also holds its own in its true meaning of a plea of having been elsewhere, undoubtedly because it is indispensable in jurisprudence. Connive as a casualism meaning to conspire or finagle is pressing hard the primary meaning of the word of shutting one’s eyes to wrongdoing, but the primary meaning survives and is likely to continue to do so.

It would be absurd to deplore without qualification the tendency of bad words to drive out good ones. This tendency is one of the ways in which the language grows and becomes more responsive to the writer’s and the speaker’s needs. Dip into the dictionary casually and you will find word after word – probably they add up to a majority – in which the present-day meaning is a derived or secondary one rather than a rigid rendering of the root of the word. Decide today does not mean to cut off; down does not mean off the hill; mass does not mean a barley cake or a kneading; piano does not mean something soft and smooth; secret does not mean something put apart. Words, like trees, grow from their roots.

What may well be deplored is the displacement of good words by bad ones to no purpose, or to the detriment of the good ones. It is in this field that the operation of Bernstein’s Second Law should be resisted. It is in this field that the language can lose precision and vitality.

Windyfoggery (From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer)

In nature wind and fog do not normally coexist. In language, however, they sometimes do, and the greater the wind the more impenetrable the fog. This linguistic condition may be thought of as windyfoggery. It embraces gobbledygook, that wordy, involved, and often unintelligible language usually associated with bureaucracy and big business. But it also includes the self-important circumlocution of ordinary orators, the pretentious pseudoscientific jargon of the pseudosciences, and the monumental unintelligibility of some criticism of those arts that do not readily accept the bridle of plain words.

There have been many translations into windyfoggery of well known pieces of simple writing – passages from the Bible, from Lincoln, from Shakespeare – and there have been many parodies in windyfoggery of ordinary thoughts. One illustration will bring out the point. Prof. Lionel Trilling of Columbia takes the statement “They fell in love and married” and translates it thus: “Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.” A contrived example, to be sure; but is it much different from writing, “improved financial support and less onerous work loads,” when one wishes to say, “more pay and less work”? Or is it much different from writing, “The supervision of driver and safety education at the state and local levels should be assigned to personnel qualified by virtue of their adequate personal characteristics and specialized training and experience in this field,” when all that is being said is that good teachers are needed?

Turn now, if you will, to art criticism. This is the kind of thing you sometimes find: “Motherwell seems to have several kinds of courage; one of them is the courage to monumentalize the polymorphous-perverse world of his inner quickenings; he is the architect of a lyrical anxiety where Gorky was its master scrivener; the liquefied tick of Gorky’s id-clock becomes in Motherwell the resonant Versaillean tock, the tall duration of a muralizing necessity that strains to leap its pendulum’s arc while carrying a full weight of iconographic potency.”

Pseudoscientific writing occasionally includes this sort of observation: “A factor analysis of the scale scores has yielded six attitude clusters that make sense intuitively and that resemble factors found in other job satisfaction studies.” Or this type of definition (this one is a definition of reading presented by a professor of educational psychology): “A processing skill of symbolic reasoning, sustained by the interfacilitation of an intricate hierarchy of substrata factors that have been mobilized as a psychological working system and pressed into service in accordance with the purpose of the reader.” Let us mobilize our substrata factors and proceed.

Dr. William B. Bean, who in the Archives of Internal Medicine often tilted a lancet at the writing operations of his fellow healers, has passed on the story of a New York plumber who had cleaned out some drains with hydrochloric acid and then wrote to a chemical research bureau, inquiring, “Was there any possibility of harm?” As told by Dr. Bean, the story continues:

“The first answer was, ‘The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputably established but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence.’ The plumber was proud to get this and thanked the people for approving of his method. The dismayed research bureau rushed another letter to him saying, ‘We cannot assume responsibility for the production of a toxic and noxious residue with hydrochloric acid. We beg leave to suggest to you the employment of an alternative procedure.’ The plumber was more delighted than ever and wrote to thank them for reiterating their approval. By this time the bureau got worried about what might be happening to New York’s sewers and called in a third man, an older scientist, who wrote simply, ‘Don’t use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of pipes.”

Windyfoggery may result from sheer pomposity. It may result from a kind of wistful desire to make learned sounds. It may result from an incapacity for direct, clear thinking. Or it may result from incomplete knowledge of one’s subject, which leads one to wrap a paucity of information in a plethora of words. Jargon may be useful for communication between members of the same profession. But windyfoggery, which often is jargon gone wrong and blanketed in blurriness, is not useful to any purpose.

Inside Talk (From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer)

Unfortunately, all the words that describe the kinds of specialized language that fall within this classification have connotations that range from faintly to strongly disparaging. That is why the neutral label inside talk has been affixed to them. The subclassifications are these:

Argot: the speech of thieves and rogues, and, by derived meaning, the speech of any particular class of persons.

Jargon: originally meaningless, unintelligible speech, but now also the language of a science, sect, trade, profession, or the like.

Lingo: in contemptuous reference, the speech of foreigners or of a special class of persons.

Slang: current language below the level of standard usage employing new words or old words in new ways; a language that may or may not be peculiar to a particular class.

The reason that all these words have disparaging connotations is that outsiders dislike being outsiders. They envy or resent those who can speak and understand inside talk. And in some instances the very desire to keep outsiders out accounts for these languages: it is certainly the reason behind argot, it is often the reason behind slang, and it is sometimes the reason behind jargon. There is a tendency in specialized groups, for reasons of either establishing a kind of mystic bond or asserting a kind of self-importance, to employ esoteric or pretentious words. It is difficult to see, for instance, what function is performed for the psychologist by instinctual that is not just as well performed by instinctive; what function is performed for the sociologist by target ends that is not just as well performed by goals; what function is performed for the pedagogue by subject area and classroom situation and classroom teacher that is not just as well performed by subject and classroom and teacher.

This is by no means to say that all inside talk, all jargon, is pretentious and useless. On the contrary, most of it is highly necessary. Those in specialized fields have need to communicate with one another in precise terms and with an economy of expression. A single word will often convey to a colleague what would require a sentence, a paragraph, or perhaps an even longer description to convey to a layman. The fact that the layman does not comprehend the single word does not indict it for use within its proper sphere.

With the onward march of education, however, the layman comes to comprehend more and more of the jargon of the specialties. In this way more and more useful words enter the language of the ordinary man and the language is enriched. But there is a danger here. It often happens that the layman does not exactly comprehend the specialized word or phrase he is taking over from the specialist, and the word comes into the language with an erroneous meaning so that thenceforth it becomes an ambiguous expression. In economics, for instance, the phrase economy of scarcity has a well defined meaning; it refers to a deliberate creation of scarcity to drive prices up. But during World War II one of our newspaper military analysts, who had heard but not understood the phrase, applied it as a description of mere shortages of ammunition or ships or blankets or what not. The terms of psychoanalysis have suffered the most at the hands of lay writers and lay conversationalists. The cause is undoubtedly twofold: first, there is such an abundance of those terms; second, psychoanalysis has become fashionable in literature and conversation. Thus, complex is often used as if it meant a mere psychological peculiarity, fixation as if it meant an obsession, exhibitionism as if it meant showing off. And there are a host of other Freudian terms that are habitually misused because they are only half understood

A pointed text for this particular sermon might be the following passage from Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Peer:

“What do you think of me?” asked Frid, striking an attitude. “Aren’t I quite lovely?”

“Don’t tell her she is,” said Colin. “The girl’s a nymphomaniac…

“My dear Colin,” said his father, “it really would be a good idea if you’d stick to the words you understand.”

A final caution may be of value in a discussion of inside talk. In writing intended for general reading the use, whether by a specialist or by a layman, of jargon terms that are not commonly understood smacks of pedantry. If the writer believes that it is imperative to use such a term, he should at least explain it when it is introduced. It must never be forgotten that the function of writing is communication.

The Prophet

Translated from the Russian of Pushkin by Maurice Baring

With fainting soul athirst for Grace,

I wandered in a desert place,

And at the crossing of the ways

I saw the sixfold Seraph blaze;

He touched mine eyes with fingers light

As sleep that cometh in the night:

And like a frighted eagle’s eyes,

They opened wide with prophecies.

He touched mine ears, and they were drowned

With tumult and a roaring sound:

I heard convulsion in the sky,

And flights of angel hosts on high,

And beasts that move beneath the sea,

And the sap creeping in the tree.

And bending to my mouth he wrung

From out of it my sinful tongue,

And all deceit and idle rust,

And ’twixt my lips a-perishing

A subtle serpent’s forked sting

With Right hand wet with blood he thrust.

And with his sword my breast he cleft,

My quaking heart thereout he reft,

And in the yawning of my breast

A coal of living fire he pressed.

Then in the desert I lay dead,

And God called unto me and said:

“Arise, and let My voice be heard,

Charged with My Will go forth and span

The land and sea, and let My Word

Lay waste with fire the heart of man.”

(Published in Life and Letters, 1931, vol. VII, no. 39.)

“Where the development of talent is concerned we are still in the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading from childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life as a migratory worker and the other half as a longshoreman. The Hitler decade started me thinking, but there is an enormous distance between thinking and the act of writing. I had to acquire a taste for a good sentence — taste it the way a child tastes candy — before I stumbled into writing. Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on my way to do some placer mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch that I would get snowbound. I had to get me something to read, something that would last me for a long time. So I stopped over in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book was about — history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything, so long as it was thick, had small print and, no pictures. There was at that time a large secondhand bookstore on Market Street called Lieberman’s and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to Sausalito. Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so whenever there was an argument about anything — women, money, animals, food, death—they would ask: ‘What does Montaigne say?’ Out came the book and I would find the right passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the John Florio translation. The spelling was modem, but the style seventeenth century — the style of the King James Bible and of Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them which stick in the-mind; they make platitudes sound as if they were new. Montaigne was not above anyone’s head. Once in a workers’ barrack near Stockton, the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an hour or so. When he returned it he said: ‘Anyone can write a book like this’.”(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)

Barzun, A Stroll with William James

Anyone brought up in the Alps and taking trips among them knows that “a mountain” is never twice the same — in shape, color, and “character.” It is “one thing” by a fiat helped by a name.

Bagehot, “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration”

Human character is a most complex thing, and the impressions which different people form of it are as various as the impressions which the inhabitants of an impassable mountain have of its shape and size. Each observer has an aggregate idea derived from certain actions and certain sayings, but the real man has always or almost always said a thousand sayings of a kind quite different and in a connection quite different; he has done a vast variety of actions among “other men” and “other minds”; a mobile person will often seem hardly the same if you meet him in very different societies. And how, except by discussion, is the true character of such a person to be decided? Each observer must bring his contingent to the list of data; those data must be arranged and made use of. The certain and positive facts as to which every one is agreed must have their due weight; they must be combined and compared with the various impressions as to which no two people exactly coincide. A rough summary must be made of the whole. In no other way is it possible to arrive at the truth of the matter. Without discussion each mind is dependent on its own partial observation. A great man is one image — one thing, so to speak — to his valet, another to his son, another to his wife, another to his greatest friend. None of these must be stereotyped; all must be compared. To prohibit discussion is to prohibit the corrective process.

Some of the authors at IWP Books:

• Walter Bagehot
• John Jay Chapman
• Erwin Chargaff
• G. Lowes Dickinson
• E. M. Forster
• Aldous Huxley
• Desmond MacCarthy
• Albert Jay Nock
• José Ortega y Gasset
• Agnes Repplier
• Alfred Sidgwick
• Anne Goodwin Winslow

New at IWP Books: Jacob Zeitlin, 1934, Montaigne. The book first appeared as the introduction to Jacob Zeitlin’s translation of the Essays, published in 1934–36. The translation itself is not available online, and a physical copy is a rare find. Donald Frame, who published his own translation in 1958, thought the introduction was “excellent.”

On Montaigne at IWP Articles:

• Jacques Barzun, 1957, The Man-Mountain
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1883, An Essayist of Three Hundred Years Ago
• André Gide, 1939, Montaigne
• F. L. Lucas, 1934, The Master Essayist

Elsewhere:

• Theodore Dalrymple, 2021, Montaigne’s Humanity
• Joseph Epstein, 1993, Reading Montaigne

A new collection of Horace translations, including 134 English translations of Exegi Monumentum (ode 30, book III), is available at the translations page. A few of the first lines of different translations:

I have reared a monument outlasting brass
I have reared a monument to outlive bronze
I have wrought out a monument more durable than bronze
I here have reared a monument
I now have rais’d a firmer monument
In princely state, by Egypt’s scorching sand
In vain the future snaps his fangs
I’ve a monument reared more enduring than brass
I’ve built a monument of brass
I’ve built a monument to outlast
I’ve built my monument outlasting brass
I’ve finished all constructive pains
I’ve made a monument to outlast bronze
I’ve made a monument to pass
I’ve rais’d a lasting Monument t’ out-vye
I’ve rais’d a Monument
I’ve rais’d a trophy firm o’er brass
I’ve rais’d a Work, that shall surpass
I’ve raised a monument outlasting bronze
I’ve raised a monument than brass more durable
I’ve raised a Monument which will endure
I’ve raised a pillar that shall last
I’ve rear’d a monument, my own
I’ve reared a fame outlasting brass
I’ve reared a goodly monument
I’ve reared a monument alone
I’ve reared a monument more strong than brass
I’ve wrought a Monument more strong then Brass
I’ve wrought a monument more tall

New at IWP Books: Albert Jay Nock (Editor), 1924, Selected Works of Artemus Ward.

Be sure and vote at leest once at all elecshuns. Buckle on yer Armer and go to the Poles. See two it that your naber is there. See that the kripples air provided with carriages. Go to the poles and stay all day. Bewair of the infamous lise whitch the Opposishun will be sartin to git up fur perlitical effek on the eve of eleckshun. To the poles! and when you git there vote jest as you darn please. This is a privilege we all possess, and it is 1 of the booties of this grate and free land.

At a special Congressional ’lection in my district the other day I delib’ritly voted for Henry Clay. I admit that Henry is dead, but inasmuch as we don’t seem to have a live statesman in our National Congress, let us by all means have a first-class corpse.

“My female frends,” sed I, “be4 you leeve, I’ve a few remarks to remark; wa them well. The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste. It’s onpossible to get along without her. Had there bin no female wimin in the world, I should scacely be here with my unparalleld show on this very occashun. She is good in sickness – good in wellness – good all the time. O, woman! woman!” I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitch, “you air a angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speaken) get into pantyloons – when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin’s rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seekin whom you may devour someboddy – in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance. My female friends,” I continnered, as they were indignantly departin, “wa well what A. Ward has sed!”

The Col. says it is fortnit we live in a intellectooal age which wouldn’t countenance such infamus things as occurd in this Tower. I’m aware that it is fashin’ble to compliment this age, but I ain’t so clear that the Col. is altogether right. This is a very respectable age, but it’s pretty easily riled; and considerin upon how slight a provycation we who live in it go to cuttin each other’s throats, it may perhaps be doubted whether our intellecks is so much massiver than our ancestors’ intellecks was, after all.

New at IWP Books: Herbert Spencer (Introduction by Albert Jay Nock), 1884, The Man Versus the State.

New at IWP Books: Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897, The Children of the Night.

New at IWP Books: Walter Bagehot, 1862, 1871, 1874, Metaphysical and Religious Essays.

New at IWP Articles: Walter Bagehot, 1871, “On the Emotion of Conviction.”

Aldous Huxley, on “the error of speaking about certain categories of persons as though they were mere embodied abstractions” (Words and Behavior):

Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as men and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any personality at all, it is the personality we mistakenly attribute to their class — a personality that is, by definition, intrinsically evil. We know that the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to be wrong. But when particular men and women are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously been defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt or murder disappears. Brown, Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of as Brown, Jones and Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids, niggers, barbarians, Huns, communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals — whichever the case may be. When they have been called such names and assimilated to the accursed class to which the names apply, Brown, Jones and Robinson cease to be conceived as what they really are — human persons — and become for the users of this fatally inappropriate language mere vermin or, worse, demons whom it is right and proper to destroy as thoroughly and as painfully as possible. Wherever persons are present, questions of morality arise. Rulers of nations and leaders of parties find morality embarrassing. That is why they take such pains to depersonalize their opponents. All propaganda directed against an opposing group has but one aim: to substitute diabolical abstractions for concrete persons. The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation. Mere symbols can have no rights — particularly when that of which they are symbolical is, by definition, evil.

Politics can become moral only on one condition: that its problems shall be spoken of and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of persons. To depersonify human beings and to personify abstractions are complementary errors which lead, by an inexorable logic, to war between nations and to idolatrous worship of the State, with consequent governmental oppression. All current political thought is a mixture, in varying proportions, between thought in terms of concrete realities and thought in terms of depersonified symbols and personified abstractions. In the democratic countries the problems of internal politics are thought about mainly in terms of concrete reality; those of external politics, mainly in terms of abstractions and symbols. In dictatorial countries the proportion of concrete to abstract and symbolic thought is lower than in democratic countries. Dictators talk little of persons, much of personified abstractions, such as the Nation, the State, the Party, and much of depersonified symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies, Capitalists. The stupidity of politicians who talk about a world of persons as though it were not a world of persons is due in the main to self-interest. In a fictitious world of symbols and personified abstractions, rulers find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demand that they should repress. To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable temptations.

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson, 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue. Books by GLD at IWP Books:

• 1901, The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue
• 1903, Letters from a Chinese Official
• 1905, A Modern Symposium
• 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue
• 1914, Appearances: Being Notes of Travel
• 1920, The Magic Flute
• 1930, After Two Thousand Years

And: E. M. Forster, 1934, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

E. M. Forster wrote that A Modern Symposium, might be called the “Bible of Tolerance.” The same might be said of Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue.

New at IWP Books: Thomas Raucat (1924) The Honorable Picnic. One of Jacques Barzun’s Favorite Books: “A novel of Japan that is hilarious through much of its span and turns beautifully tragic in a brief scene at the end. Expertly translated from the French.”

New at IWP Books: Hugh Edwards (1933) All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s. One of Jacques Barzun’s “Favorite Books”:

A strange, short novel that has been rediscovered more than once, been called a masterpiece by James Agate and Ian Fleming, and became popular as a BBC broadcast. In my experience it never fails to grip those to whom I recommend it, though its power, like its plot, is hard to explain.

Review at the Neglected Books Page.

New at IWP Books: Bernard Berenson (1952) Rumour and Reflection. On April 19, 1944:

London and New York send missionaries to China, to Africa, to the remotest and wildest parts of the earth, to inculcate the Gospel by the example of their own standard of life. Likewise we send expeditions to study the manners, customs, folkways of Trobriand, Easter Islands and other fashionable haunts of over-excited anthropological curiosity.

Many, myself included, question whether missionaries are not wasting our money, and their energies not doing the objects of their zeal more harm than good. We believe there are no end of Trobrianders, Easter Islanders and other neolithics, not to speak of palaeolithics, in our midst: in our slums as well as in every grade of society, the fashionable not least. We should prefer our missionaries to sacrifice themselves rather in humanizing these savages or barbarians, these fetish worshippers in our own ranks.

Anthropology should begin at home.

By anthropology I mean the study of usages, practices, manners, customs, beliefs, superstitions, etc., etc., that do not readily submit to rational treatment but remain as they are, mobile or fixed, and find brilliant defenders armed with all the learning that up-to-date research can apply.

I could wish that our anthropologists grew serious, and forgoing aquatic picnics among Pacific Islands would devote laborious years to the study of all that is naively taken for granted and no less tenaciously than irrationally held, by the average matron, the average business man, the average cleric, the average lawyer, the average soldier, sailor, administrator, butcher, baker, etc., etc., in our own societies, high and low, low and high.

Something of this kind must have been in the mind of the late Prof. Sumner of Yale with his sociological investigation and publications. Far from being a Philistine as Van Wyck Brooks designated him, we should honour him as the great scholar and pioneer that he was. What he meant to initiate was an inquiry as to what in our own people was too fixed, too immovable to yield to immediate philanthropic effort or legislative decree. What among “the heirs of all the ages in the foremost ranks of time” remains as little subject to persuasion and even to force as any other irrational energy, say a certain volume of water in motion or turning to steam.

You know enough about the nature of water not to argue with it, preach to it, or appeal to its better instincts. You let it alone; or if you must deal with it and want it to take a more convenient turn, you provide ample space for its career by canals, sluices, safety-valves and other devices.

Human nature in a given moment, at a given place is scarcely more subject to reason or persuasion.

From Jacques Barzun, “Berenson and the Boot” (The Griffin, 1952, @ IWP Articles).

The title, which appears perfect as one looks back on it, does not disclose ahead of time the character of the work. It is a diary kept in wartime, yet it is by no means a war diary. It is a journal in the grand manner of Gide — full of observations of men, art, and society; yet it is not simply a stream of thought accompanying work in progress. No life goes on in it but that of rumor and reflection, linked with the hope of survival. The sequence of intermittent jottings does show a dramatic shape, but this comes from the time and the events. We meet the author in January 1941 and he drops us in November 1944, immediately after we have endured with him the suspense of liberation under bombs and gunfire and the marauding acts of a retreating army. We pass, in short, from peace to war and reach as a climax the chaos that precedes the return of peace.

Except toward the end of the book, it is not our feelings that are harrowed but our minds that are engaged, for Mr. Berenson is a reflector in the active and the passive senses of the word, and the interlude in his career which the present pages record finds him fully and uncommonly equipped to sort out impressions and attach meanings to the madness around him.

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson, 1901, The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue.

From G. Lowes Dickinson’s Recollections (cited in E. M. Forster’s biography):

To me the worst kind of disillusionment was that connected with universities and historians. Hardly a voice was raised from those places and persons to maintain the light of truth. Like the rest, moved by passion, by fear, by the need to be in the swim, those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place. In a moment, as it were, I found myself isolated among my own people. When I say isolated, I do not mean in any sense persecuted. I suffered nothing in Cambridge except a complete want of sympathy. But I learned once for all that students, those whose business it would seem to be to keep the light of truth burning in a storm, are like other men, blindly patriotic, savagely vigilant, cowardly or false when public opinion once begins to run strong. The younger dons and even the older ones disappeared into war work. All discussion, all pursuit of truth ceased as in a moment. To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to truth.

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson (1914) Appearances: Being Notes of Travel (in India, China, Japan, America). From “In the Rockies”:

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent. “Click — click — click — Pick — pick — pick — Pock — pock — pockets.” So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.