Be you technical and all the other learning shall be added unto you.

This commandment is not one revealed to man; yet need it not be painfully learnt. It is so true that it is part of man's nature. The mind accepts it at once, instinctively. All men who would display learning, however really learned they may be, cannot but fall at once into the happy use of technicalities.

Now there is a good and solid reason for this. For a technical word takes the place of long explanation. If you do not use technical words you have to replace them by clumsy, roundabout phrases. You lose your direct effect. Technical words arise of themselves in any science or art, and there is no force, even of a god, that could keep them out. But that is only their genesis. Their true use is to bamboozle, and, my word! how well they do it!

The French people, who (as CÆsar pointed out) are very keen upon the military affair, first applied to the actions of armies the very simple words of every day. If men were walking all in a line and were then spread out the French said that the formation was "unfolded." The progress of soldiers upon their feet from one place to another was called "walking." When their formation was broken in defeat they were said to be "thrust off the road," that is, bereft of their principal method of progression and continuity; for it is by roads that armies are maintained. A force which lost its power was said to be "undone." The various positions of the sword were called "the first," "the second," "the third," "the fourth," "the fifth," "the sixth." You could not have it simpler! But the Technical Spirit was waiting for its prey, and very rapidly those simple words became in another language "deploy," "march," "rout," "tierce," "quarte," and the rest of it.

Quite lately, this necessary disease spread with peculiar exuberance into the untouched fields of painting and of music. Even those of my age can remember the advent of most of them. Time was when the critic of art said that a picture was very like the thing it was meant to represent, or that it was very unlike it. I can remember the older generation which talked like this. But to-day they might as well be teaching infants in words of one syllable. You have a whole army of words from "technique," which is very old, down to "square touch," which has not yet got a white beard but a long one, and you have "planes," and you have "values," and you have hundreds of others which, as it is not my trade, I shall not pretend to catalogue. But this I know, that no one can write art criticism at 1s. 6d. the inch until he has mastered the terms, and I know still better that having mastered the terms any one whatsoever, though he be colour-blind, cross-eyed, and quite indifferent to proportion, can write the very best art criticism in the world. For criticism is good in proportion to the awe which it excites. For the function of the critic (says Aristotle) is to criticise, that is, to pull the leg of the middle classes.

As for music, the victory of the thing is now insolent. It has triumphantly beaten out of the field all ordinary men. There is still a sturdy phalanx of purchasers who buy a picture because they like it, or who will tell you boldly that a picture is like or unlike the thing which it pretends to record. There is still a gallant remaining little force of merchants, most of them elderly, who think that a sky should be blue, and grass green, and bricks red, and all the rest of it, and who will not buy a picture to hang on the walls of the Detached House in its Own Grounds unless it is beautiful and true. But in the matter of music the miserable reactionaries, the old simpletons, have had the life beaten out of them. There is now no one left alive who dares say that he dislikes a complicated modern volume of noise. Music has become a thing altogether apart, like Sanscrit. On the one hand you have the huge mass of mankind still delighted with good tunes (I use the word "good" in fear and trembling. I mean, for instance, "Oh! Mr. Porter," the "Marseillaise," the "Dies IrÆ," and "AuprÈs de ma Blonde"), and on the other you have the Sacred Initiate, who commune only with one another; save when they stand at the door of the Temple and with great contempt drop some few phrases of an unintelligible language to the gaping crowd without.

But I think that neither the adepts of art-critic-technicalities, nor even those of music-technicalities, will fully learn their trade till they study the kings and masters of the whole profession, which kings and masters are the writers upon women's fashions. Any one, as I have said, can become an art critic, and a good one, by learning a hundred words or so by heart and knowing where to stick them in; and though not any one, yet a fair proportion of boys and girls can become music-critics by getting parrot-like in the enormous terms of their apparatus. But it is of public knowledge that the being who can write about women's dresses is one in a thousand.

Now why should this be? I do not know, but it is so. I am assured by those who have gone into the matter that most of these writers are men and not women, but there are, of course, women adepts too. Their occult vocabulary is twenty times more rich than the vocabularies of their concert-going and picture-gazing brothers, and it is not only rich, it is also accurate and determined. The terms used in booming a picture or a great complexity of noise have something floating about them. They can be applied contradictorily, one critic saying that a line is "amusing," and another saying that it "lacks touch." There is room apparently for licence, and, therefore (I hesitate to hint it), room for the charlatan. I do not mean of course that any art or music critic is a charlatan. No! Not for one moment! I only mean that he might be one; that it is possible to conceive of a charlatan using these solemn terms. But no charlatan could use technical terms about the fashions—women's fashions, at least—without being discovered at once. The Fashion-writers' Guild is a strict confraternity and an honourable one, demanding a severe and long apprenticeship and always certain of its instrument. If I read (of course I should never read anything of the sort—I am only giving it as an illustration) "the foundation is of chinchilla draped en Échelon and caught up with pompoms of crapeaumort," I am reading about some one quite definite kind of ornament which everybody who has learnt the language will at once realise. I could not apply it vaguely to a black silk skirt or a velvet Medici collar, and therein I think the technicians of fashion are wholly superior to all their parallels.

Respectful as I am, however, to every group of technical terms, there is one set of which I can never be certain. I mean the metaphysical set. I may be wrong. It is not my trade at all. But do what I can it is impossible for me to take quite seriously the technical words of the people who to-day call themselves philosophers. I read St. Thomas and I understand, I read Descartes and I understand, I read Spinoza and I understand, I read Locke and I understand, but when I read the Moderns, the tail of the Germans, I cannot take them seriously at all. And the reason I cannot take them seriously is this. When I ask anybody else what a particular technical term means he can always give me some kind of explanation. For instance, if a man says to me, "Political progress is an asymptote to ideal democracy," and I say to him, "Pray, Master, what do you mean by 'asymptote'?" the mathematician is quite able to take me kindly aside and explain to me, or to any other rational being, the nature of the hyperbola, and to show me how it is always getting closer to, but never touches, the lines called asymptotes, and then I understand exactly what he meant by his technical word. He meant that political progress is always getting nearer to an ideal democracy but can never quite reach it. Thereupon I am content, for I can size my man up. But the modern philosophers will never consent to this. They will never put what they have to say in plain language, and I am by this time half persuaded that the reason they do not do so is that they cannot. I very much doubt whether the words they use mean anything at all. Therefore, it is that when I would read philosophy (which is no bad pastime for a man fatigued with real work and with the considerations of real problems), I fall back upon the Summa because, though it does indeed contain technical terms, they all have a plain meaning, and can every one of them be understood with a little simple explanation.

So much for technical terms: the short cuts to authority and status.