Julian Sharman

“ We have spoken of the oath upon the sword—the oath of ancient Scythia, the oath of the Antigone of Euripedes. In the terrors of an isolated death, remote from all the outward appliances of his faith, the stricken warrior found consolation in raising before his vision the hilt of his scabbardless sword. The tapering metal-hafted blade threw the shadow of a cross upon the dying soldier, and to this rude emblem the poor fevered lips would stammer out their last words of petition. The sword had become a revered symbol conveying to the departing the hope of divine favour and intercession. ”

“ To begin with, the origin of all swearing was the same—the one intense dread of falsehood against which as yet no laws were sufficient to guard. Fancy the mortal distress of barbarian man when he first wakes to the belief that his enemies can, by smooth speech, wrest from his hands what his prowess or his labour has acquired. No art that he is aware of can pervert the action of tongues set falsely going. Seeing how illimitable is the crop of words, he may even imagine a plague of lies that will fall thick about him like locusts or caterpillars ”

“ But this same nature, when pinched and starved, becomes a perfect storehouse of enmity and ill-feeling. Among the denizens of these holes and crannies humanity has been driven very hard. It has been crushed and bruised to a point beyond endurance. The possibility of possessing is very faint, that of enjoying still more remote. No graceful thing—no pleasant thing, can readily come to its hand. Yet there is one chattel they can possess when every stick and stone is denied them. They can be tenacious of their swearing. ”

“ Whatever notion he may entertain of his own, or of other people’s morality, he has no opinion whatever of their professions of it. He refrains therefore from giving any warranty of the soundness of his wares.
Save but for this. He has often been vexed, and puzzled as well as vexed, at one great discord that has been sent upon the world. Yielding and kindly as it may have been to them, men have not scrupled to cast defiance and calumny upon this forbearing earth and to hurl hissing curses at its abundance and its pervading spirit of forgiveness. ”

“ Rather, it is to tramp mistily along from generation to generation in the long, forced march of human life. Rather, to probe to the depths of some one of the world’s stupendous follies, of some one of its golden vanities, that they have thus cast about them with measure and lead-line. And when they have completely searched out and written of the world’s stupendous follies, they will perhaps have written what alone would be worth calling its history. ”

“ A circumstance like this would seem to suggest some remarkable underlying motive as accounting for the wonderful omnipotence of swearing. It is possible that an occult virus congenial to its development is so insinuated into the composition of the human mind as to defy the power of ethics wholly to eradicate it. Can it be that the habit owes its existence and source of delight to some soothing and pleasureful qualities which, like the solace of the tobacco-leaf or the balm of the nightshade, the world will not willingly forego? ”

“ No language can be stronger than that of Sir John—“I cannot sufficiently lament,” he says “that shameful, inexcusable and almost universal practice of profane swearing in our streets; a crime so easy to be punished, and so seldom done, that mankind almost forget it to be an offence, and to our dishonour be it spoken, it is almost peculiar to the English nation.” ”

“ And yet to look back no further than to the youth of Shakespeare, the word had no application beyond such as was seemly, and its history was simple and spotless and without reproach. The one play of ‘Macbeth’ contains an unusual number of instances of its occurrence, all written without any suspicion of an équivoque and dwelt upon with an undoubting sincerity that has become barely possible in a modern work. Indeed into such ill company has fallen this true-minded adjective, that it is no longer competent to be admitted to its proper place in an ordinary publication. ”

“ Each is of an age when the world resembles only some May-day morning, and at the moment we are recalling them they have no other occupation than that of dreamily rambling through the fields and lanes, delighted with the breezy country-side, and luxuriating in their own boyish outpourings. They had conceived this mutual liking because each felt the other to be in true sympathy with nature, and to be capable of discerning the wonderful enchantments of poetry and cadence. They had found a warm and unselfish delight in ministering to the other’s appreciation. ”

“ Since the days when City madams and Fleet Street apprentices flocked round the dusty scaffold of the Blackfriars play-house, and laughed and rallied one another, or possibly took passing umbrage at the satire that was being levelled at this newly-nurtured word, what a remarkable, what an astounding ascendancy has it not enjoyed? No mint has ever issued its metal more swiftly than has this exchequer of bad language, or given it a more unmistakable impression. ”

“ In the copiousness of the ancient swearing the notion of an oath accommodated itself to all the varieties of monstrous gods. The divinities Isis and Osiris were invoked in witness of a sacred pledge no less than the garlic, the leek, and the onion, and indeed every other deity which, as was said by the Roman satirist, grew and flourished in the market-gardens of Alexandria. ”

“ In the matter of swearing you might have remained only an unwilling dabbler, only a mixer and meddler in the luxury, were it not that occasion came when you were solemnly arraigned for the offence, and straightway branded as a culprit. It is in this way that offences come. So you may have received your punishment and have revolted under it; and perhaps you may have had a right to revolt. For our spiritual pastors, in judging of our virtues, too often endowed us with the capacities of children, and in judging of our vices they endowed us with the capacities of men. ”

“ It is easier far, means not being wanting, to place in one’s cabinet some matchless group of Capo di Monti, some priceless specimen of the fabric of Sèvres or Dresden, than to tax one’s strength in extracting the lessons conveyed by form and colour. It is a simpler matter to be the possessor of Damascus sword-blades or Aleppo prayer-rugs than to burden one’s self with reflections upon oriental chivalry or mysticism. ”

“ It must have been a sorry spectacle to have beheld Socrates in the midst of an Athenian audience solemnly witnessing this masterpiece of buffoonery, and a still sadder one to those whose feeling was still enlisted upon the side of the moribund system of oath-taking.
One singular instance of whimsicality in the ancient practice of swearing must not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The Levantine merchants trading with the port of Rhodes had familiarized Athenian households with a most excellent description of cabbage. ”

“ Personally one may hold the art of swearing in perfect indifference, being neither among the number of swearers oneself nor having any very strong feeling of reprobation towards its more active adherents. But despite a certain inclination that we feel to apologise for what we hold to be the silliest of vices, we are forced to recollect that to many the offence will always appear in anything but a trivial light. ”

“ By-and-by, there followed the crowd of nabobs and parvenus, the blustering swearers of the days of East [Pg 107] Indian speculation, and finally came the truculent swabbers and commodores of Adelphi melodrama. The nouveau riche of the younger Colman, who fails to enrobe himself with dignity by the aid of all ordinary resources, is enjoined by his more practical helpmate to vent his “zounds” and “damme,” in emulation of the swearing of the great.
For this corps d’élite of which we have spoken have drawn to themselves men the most worthless, and men the most admirable. ”

“ No statistics, could any be collected, no known or imaginable facts, could be trusted to convey the faintest notion of the large place that is occupied in public morals by the presence of this solitary piece of imprecation. Those who have opportunities of judging, will be bound to admit that they see in it the plaything and fondling of whole sections of citizen society. ”

“ This careless, indulgent and pleasure-seeking portion of the world have derived even comfort and convenience from a recognition of the best regulated usages of swearing. Reputations for courage and audacity have thus been hourly established by the careful insinuation of hideous expletives. Friendships have been cemented by the force of this common bond of union; strangers set at their ease; the weak and hesitating have been galvanised into action. ”

“ Not since the labour of men’s hands began have they ceased to furrow it with menace and sow it with imprecation, cursing while their very corn ripens under midsummer skies, cursing as they gather in their store of wine and victual. ”

“ It would not be difficult to trace the relative connection between the luxuriance of oath-taking and the various forms of religion under which oath-taking has successively flourished. It could be shown that the swearing of most Catholic states is of greater fertility, and displays a readier fund of invention than that of countries brought under the reformed faith. The more religion appeals to the senses, the more fecund has been the vocabulary of oaths. The more it has been made the subject of illustration and imagery, the more finished and ornate have been the comminations in use. ”

“ It was taking the name of swearing itself in vain. It substituted for any closer argument the incisive logic of ridicule.
It occurs to us to notice that Shakespeare, who was certainly alive to the hidden springs of swearing, has conceived the notion of winging much the same folly with a precisely similar shaft. It had been the fashion among the gay Ephesians of Eastcheap, during Elizabeth’s reign, to swear by their honour. “Where learnt you that oath, fool?” ”

“ There are men remarkable for their stores of boisterous animalism, no less than delicate scholars remarkable only for the brightness of their fancy and the vividness of their dreams. They have ever been a composite and a cosmopolitan crew, some shouldering into the ranks by the weight of their purses or the length of their rent-rolls, others by skill evinced at high midnight, when taper-lights throw pale vertical rays upon a refreshing margent of green cloth. ”

“ Confidence had little place among a nation far too volatile and specious to be able to rely upon any system of reciprocal good faith. From this circumstance it was that the Greeks earned for themselves the repute of being the least trustworthy of all the untruthful nations of antiquity. In such a community the fragile safeguard of an oath is, from sheer helplessness, the more rigorously demanded. The Hellenic people may be said to have been eminently a swearing people. ”

“ So far as we have mastered the system of Dan Michael we are driven to the conclusion that the practice of swearing, as understood in the Cloister of Saint Austin, was, save for the outward distinction of dress, much the same as prevails in the later world. “For there are some,” says he of the cloister, “so evil taught that they are able to say nothing without swearing. Some swear as if smitten with sudden pain. Others swear by the sun, the moon, by the head, or by their father’s soul.” ”

“ Few other secular works have made so moderate and at once so eloquent a protest. Adapting the notion of Locke that the unaided realisation of the Deity is formed by observation of the qualities we should desire to find in ourselves, but sublimated by the notion of infinity attaching to each of them, Addison proceeds to argue a state of veneration being the normal condition of the mental frame. The horror that is conceived by a child, or, as it may be, by a grown man, at the jarring dissonance of an oath is nothing else than a sense of injury dealt out to this deeply-rooted conviction. ”

“ There is no orange-peel so perfumed as the Drury orange-peel that has been concentrating its fragrance round the boards of Thespis since the days when Mohun and Hart, and Shatterel and Betterton strutted on the bare planks of the Cockpit. No scent of printer’s ink is more refreshing than that which adheres to the yards of flimsy playbill still hawked about by itinerant vendors. ”

“ The neighbours tell one another good stories in church time, and inquire during the sermon where they can get the best ale. The monks have become so luxurious that they refuse to shave their heads and have commenced to array themselves in fine clothes. The king’s courts are crowded with supplicating suitors, craving for redress from the extortions of trustees and executors, and yielding themselves victims to the falsity of the men of law. Swearing, at that time, would seem to be no longer the prerogative of laymen, but even to have become the privilege of learned clerks. ”

“ In some sort men have been permitted the enjoyment of swearing, and that with impunity, provided they did not carry it beyond the prohibited pale. To turn again to ancient Athens for illustration, we find that even children were allowed to swear profanely by the name of Hercules, but with the single restriction that they should do so in the open air. The oath was for some singular reason deemed the especial privilege of young people, and was only thought offensive and visited with punishment when invoked within the curtilage of the dwelling. ”