Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (30 page)

I am expected in a few words to do justice to the merits of Professor Craigie and his coeditor and the staff, of 15,000 pages of literature, of 400,000 words, of 2,000,000 quotations, and 178 miles of type. Sir, not even Gladstone in the plenitude of his power and with the pomp of his polysyllables could have done justice to that subject in anything less than a rectorial address; my task is to put what I have to say on one of his postcards, and with all my well-known love of monosyllables I cannot do it. But perhaps before I begin I may make a confession about the Dictionary. I have not read it. But if ever a work was destined for eternity that is it, because no sooner have we, like myself, the second generation of subscribers, drawn our last check, had it cashed, and seen it honored, and had the last volume delivered, than we are told that supplements are about to begin; and Oxford, with that sure touch of the modern generation, is appealing to us to buy this new book because there is going to be a little article in it on appendicitis, and, by an obvious association of ideas, the panel doctor is not to be omitted. Indeed, we see here that all the words with a shady past are going to be added to the words of a more than doubtful future.

Professor Craigie has indeed stood by and helped to rock the cradle of our tongue, and has listened to the alliterative babbling of our ancestors in the nursery. He has watched that tongue through the ages, in its birth, its marriages, and its deaths, and in its associations with foreign countries, and he has brought it up to the time when it is, as we have known it for long, the most efficient instrument that has ever been used by man. I have not much acquaintance myself with tongues,… but those whose powers of comparison exceed mine—and they are many—assure me that English yields place to no tongue in its power of expressing human thought, except to the tongue of ancient Greece alone. Whoever told me that I think must have been a relation of the Greek scholar in
The Squirrel Inn
, who was so convinced that Greek would be the one surviving tongue in the days to come, outliving English, that he started by translating Dickens’s novels into Greek in the hope that future generations would be able to enjoy them even as he did, and you will also remember the results of the retranslations which caused him to abandon that effort still in its infancy.

What was the genesis of this great work? It was this: it was the desire
to record and to safeguard and to establish for all time the manifold riches of the English tongue. It was that desire that led a small group of men to lay the foundations of that structure whose completion we are celebrating tonight. It is half a century now since Dr. Murray had his first interview with the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. That year is not without interest to me, for it was just about that time that the words “Prime Minister” began to creep into regular official use….

When I ask myself in what mood we are gathered together tonight I do not think I can express it better than it was expressed by the young man of Christ Church who, if reported truly by Bolingbroke, was overheard in his prayers acknowledging the Divine goodness in furnishing the world with makers of dictionaries. In the self-denying, lifelong labors of a succession of great scholars from Dean Trench to the present day, we remember perhaps above all others, Dr. Murray, Henry Bradley, Professor Craigie, and Dr. Onions. We remember with them the subeditors, the voluntary readers, the assistants, the pressmen, and the compositors, and, under and above and around and behind all, the ancient and beneficent University of Oxford. These men whom we celebrate tonight, and for whom Professor Craigie will speak, have defined, they have pronounced, and they have illustrated all the words in our language. They have uncovered their origins; they have dissolved their metaphors; they have unwrapped and exposed mummies; and they have laid bare in their work the soul of England and the mind of our people for a score of generations—our great people in all aspects of life, in their labor, in their worship, in their play, in their pride, and in their prejudice; our people sublime and sometimes ridiculous; our people in their prose and in their poetry, and every aspiration and idea and feeling that has clothed the living word and made it into the written symbol. That is very nearly literally true. It is quite true if we include with the Oxford Dictionary those priceless six volumes of Wright’s Dialect Dictionary, which is also published by the Oxford University Press.

Long may it be before the rich gift of our people for vivid word-making is sterilized by what for the want of a better word—and if there be a better Professor Craigie will tell me—we call today, education. I wonder if you realize, living in a haunt of learning, how much secret curiosity in the work of dictionaries exists among those whom some would call our common people.

I had occasion to make some observations lately at a dinner of mariners, and I threw out the suggestion that, before the old sailing ships were forgotten, it would be well if someone would compile a dictionary
of such idiomatic phrases and turns of speech and language as were used before the mast in the old sailing-ship days. And driving down two days later from Baker Street to Downing Street—a fairly prosaic voyage—my taxi driver said to me when I dismounted: “Excuse me, sir, but when is that dictionary of—er—marine—er—slang coming out?” I realized for the first time that I had been broadcast, and I said: “Well I don’t know, but I don’t suppose it could teach you anything.” To which he replied: “Well, I’m not sure, but I should like to see it.” And there spoke the love of learning.

Your work, Sir, has been achieved by the highest form of cooperative private enterprise, and except for the gift which I am happy to think this great Company [of Goldsmiths] made to Oxford the whole of the great and necessary expense has been borne by Oxford. I wish I could think that the government had had something to do with it. We had a little, through the post office. We carried millions of slips, and only lost one packet. Give us credit at least for that.

Unrivaled in completeness and unapproachable in authority is the Oxford Dictionary; as near infallibility, indeed, as we can hope to get this side of Rome, and I have every respect for you in this, that no human frailty tempers your verdict; threats of libel have not haunted your staff as nearly always haunted earlier lexicographers; and above all, in your sacred pages, from the first to the last, is found no pun such as may be found in all of the earlier editions of the great Liddell and Scott….

Now I may make another confidence to you. You all remember how Betteridge in
The Moonstone
used Robinson Crusoe as his
Sors Virgiliana
. I have been using the Oxford Dictionary, and I began by trying potluck at the word “Cabinet,” and I read that “Cabinet councils are a remedy worse than the disease.” Then this morning—and you will see the appositeness of this in a moment—I held a cabinet from which some of my most prominent colleagues were absent, including, I may add, the Home Secretary. I opened my Oxford Dictionary, and what did I read? Under the head “Cabinet” this: “Today the Duke was forced to go to the races while the Cabinet was held.” Then, trying to frame the policy for that great party of which I happen to be the leader for the moment, I looked to see what Professor Craigie and his friends say on the word “Conservative.” I have here a perfect guide to my conduct through the years: “Like a great English statesman, he was constitutionally conservative, but he had the tact to perceive the conditions under which, in critical times, conservatism is possible.” Then I am going to use this at the next election: “Let no one presume to identify Conservatism with reaction.”
This I have kept from all my friends, but I will tell you tonight in confidence: “We find girls naturally timid, prone to dependence, but born conservatives.”
¹
I wish my critics would read this book! I confess that one glance at “Politician” was enough: “1592, the Devil was so famous a politician that hell, which at the beginning was but an obscure village, is now become a huge city.” That day, as Francesca said, “I read no farther.” I made a few observations some time ago at the Literary Fund dinner about a book, and in a few hours it was sold out and had to be reprinted. I hope to compensate for the rather lengthy speech I am making tonight by achieving a similar result for the Oxford Press.

Now I have only one or two more words to add. Lord Oxford once said that if he were cast on a desert island, and could only choose one author for company, he would have the forty volumes of Balzac. I choose the Dictionary every time. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, I should pray for the four winds to breathe upon those words, that they might emerge and stand upon their feet an exceeding great army. Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. I could live with your Dictionary, Professor Craigie. I choose it, and I think that my choice would be justified. It is a work of endless fascination. It is true that I have not read it—perhaps I never shall—but that does not mean that I do not often go to it.

Let me remind you of those words which Dr. Johnson used in his famous Preface about translators in his time which I think are apt today: “If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible… it remains that we retard what we cannot repel; that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated; tongues, like Governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution; let us make some struggle for our language.”

It is in that spirit of devotion to our language as the great and noble instrument of our national life and literature that the editors and the staff of the Oxford Dictionary have labored. They have labored so well that, so far from lowering the high standard with which the work began, they have sought to raise it as the work advanced. They have given us of their best. There can be no worldly recompense.

Dublin-born British Dramatist George Bernard Shaw admired upsetters of applecarts, an activity he engaged in both as socialist essayist and as author of
Pygmalion
and
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
. Shaw and Einstein met in 1921; Shaw looked on physicist Albert Einstein, twenty-six years his junior, as the man who annihilated the scientific establishment’s tidy Newtonian world.

“We ought to have declared war on Germany,” Shaw said, “the moment Hitler’s police stole Einstein’s violin.” At the Savoy Hotel in London on October 28, 1930, Shaw spoke at a dinner honoring the scientist and raising funds for indigent European Jews. In a brief toast, he gave other laymen an inkling of the meaning of Einstein’s work.

***

NAPOLEON AND OTHER
great men were makers of empires, but these eight men whom I am about to mention were makers of universes, and their hands were not stained with the blood of their fellow men. I go back twenty-five hundred years, and how many can I count in that period? I can count them on the fingers of my two hands.

Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—and I still have two fingers left vacant.

Even among those eight men I must make a distinction. I have called them makers of the universe, but some of them were only repairers. Newton made a universe which lasted for three hundred years. Einstein has made a universe, which I suppose you want me to say will never stop, but I don’t know how long it will last.

These great men, they have been the makers of one side of humanity, which has two sides. We call the one side religion, and we call the other
science. Religion is always right. Religion protects us against that great problem which we all must face. Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

What have all of those great men been doing? Each in turn claimed the other was wrong, and now you are expecting me to say that Einstein proved that Newton was wrong. But you forget that when science reached Newton, science came up against that extraordinary Englishman. That had never happened to it before.

Newton lent a power so extraordinary that if I was speaking fifteen years ago, as I am old enough to have done, I would have said that he had the greatest mind that ever man was endowed with. Combine the light of that wonderful mind with credulity, with superstition. He knew his people; he knew his language; he knew his own folk; he knew a lot of things; he knew that an honest bargain was a square deal and an honest man was one who gave a square deal.

He knew his universe; he knew that it consisted of heavenly bodies that were in motion, and he also knew the one thing you cannot do to anything whatsoever is to make it move in a straight line. In other words, motion will not go in a straight line.

Mere fact will never stop an Englishman. Newton invented a straight line, and that was the law of gravitation, and when he had invented this, he had created a universe which was wonderful in itself. When applying his wonderful genius, when he had completed a book of that universe, what sort of book was it? It was a book which told you the station of all the heavenly bodies. It showed the rate at which they were traveling; it showed the exact hour at which they would arrive at such and such a point to make an eclipse. It was not a magical marvelous thing; it was a matter-of-fact thing.

For three hundred years we believed in that Newtonian universe as I suppose no system has been believed in before. I know I was educated in it and was brought up to believe in it firmly. Then a young professor came along. He said a lot of things, and we called him a blasphemer. He claimed Newton’s theory of the apple was wrong.

He said, “Newton did not know what happened to the apple, and I can prove this when the next eclipse comes.”

We said, “The next thing you will be doing is questioning the law of gravitation.”