We trust that we have travelled thus far on our journey without wounding the susceptibilities of any of our readers, and that thus it may continue to the not distant end. In all probability our remarks and illustrations will have been scanned by two totally diverse classes of patrons, those to whom the topics suggested present much that is worthy of attention, and those to whom this little treatise will appear to be written in almost an unknown tongue. All that we can do is to claim the indulgence of these latter. We hope that they at least will acquit us of any intention of blemishing the fair front of human nature, or of darkening any of the windows that administer to its requirements of light and air. In fine, we trust that what has been said, has been spoken fairly and frankly. Not, however, that we pretend that the views we may have advanced have anything but a local application. There is a swearing world, a place in which people habitually swear, but there is also a non-swearing world in which they are partially if not totally unacquainted with observances of swearing. To present a picture of the former to the dwellers in the more opposite locality is to expect approval of a marine painting from those who have never beheld the sea. The reflections therefore that we may have been called upon to make by the way, no less than the numerous instances we have found it as well to refer to, must be taken as pertaining only to those troubled waters that surge around the continent inhabited of swearers.

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. Judging from a purely worldly standpoint, it would be inconsistent not to admit that society has been under deep obligations to this especial form of wickedness. Swearing has in the main been rendered agreeable and popular in so far that it has been adopted to span over social distances and level social distinctions, to create in fact a code of easy sympathy between otherwise thoroughly unsympathetic men. The worst—and swearers are not necessarily the worst—no less than the best of mankind endeavour to generate some species of that “touch of nature” which we are told makes the whole world kin. We must not therefore be too severe on finding that this very creditable object is sometimes sought to be accomplished by somewhat discreditable means.

As a few of our readers may by this time have harboured a conviction that swearing is in some degree a social necessity, they will be able to give full scope to the views upon this point of the excellent Mr. Shandy.[53] The only compunction that seems to have been entertained by this gentleman resided in the danger of expending small curses upon totally inadequate occasions. He maintained, indeed, with the utmost Cervantic gravity, that he had the greatest veneration for that student of swearing who, in obvious mistrust of his own extempore powers, composed forms suitable to all degrees of provocation, and kept them framed over his chimney-piece for daily reference.“I never apprehended,” puts in Dr. Slop, “that such a thing was ever thought of—much less executed.”

“I beg your pardon,” replies Mr. Shandy, “I was reading—though not using—one of them to my brother Toby this morning, whilst he poured out the tea.”

The work of ingenuity in question turned out to be a decree of excommunication, certainly a very ponderous and damnatory one, compiled by Ernulphus, a learned bishop of Rochester. Mr. Shandy is understood to account for the comprehensiveness of this anathema by assuming it to have been designed as an institute or perfect digest of swearing. He conjectures that upon a decline of vituperation Ernulphus had with great learning collected all the known methods, for fear of their being dispersed and so lost to the world for ever. The worthy Shandy would even go so far as to maintain that there was no kind of oath that was not to be found in Ernulphus. “In short,” he would add, “I defy a man to swear out of it.”

This piece of quaintness, as we need hardly point out, only goes to the fact that wide as is the range of imprecation, it must always come back to that one monotonous symbol of despisal. The anathema of the good bishop is pitched in many keys and sounds, like the collected utterances of many throats. But even Ernulphus can scarcely have foreseen the Rabelaisian refinements that would suggest themselves to the minds of men as soon as literary demands were made upon the well-worn supply.

The genius of the French language seems more particularly to lend itself to the fabrication of burlesque forms and subterfuges. Thus to affirm by le sacrÉ froc d’Habacuc, or by la double-triple manche de serpe, are fair specimens of the ingenuity that has been lavished. Far less offending have been the ludicrous forms of asseveration popular in the lower ranks of French society, and one of which it is sufficient to mention as occurring in a curious rhyme of the last century,[54] where among other things is found characterised the pseudo-nuptials of a certain abbess and a dignitary of the Church—

“Mais, par la vertu d’un oignon,
Ils sont mariÉs environ,
Comme l’est l’ÉvÊque de Chartres
Avec l’abbesse de Montmartres.”

It is not improbable that a great deal of the aversion that is associated with the practice of swearing is due to the custom of those novelists who are in the habit of screening their oaths behind the most transparent of disguises. To denote an expletive by its initial letter followed with a dash is really to attract undue attention to that which the writer acknowledges himself ashamed of printing. The contrivance serves no useful purpose, and, if we are not mistaken, the more robust of modern novelists have eschewed it altogether. Very different in this respect is the device adopted by Dickens in one of the most entertaining of his romances. Readers of ‘Great Expectations’ will remember the description of Mr. William Barley. This presents us with a picture of a water-logged old ship’s captain, who, as he lay through the long hours of the day and night upon his uneasy mattress, never ceased to hold communion with himself in anything but a strain of piety—“Ahoy! bless your eyes, here’s old Bill Barley! Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord! Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder; here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you!” Of course the point of this monologue lies in the fact that the supposed blessings are really substituted by the novelist for desires of a very opposite description.

There are few pictures we would less willingly omit from the gallery of the author’s creations. We have here the portraiture of one among that godless but soft-hearted race of veterans who have alternately bullied and blustered, or cried and whimpered, throughout many ages of fiction and melodrama. And in depicting this type of character writers have invariably felt it their bounden duty to give full prominence to this fateful gift of swearing. With much discretion the novelist has in the present instance invented a subterfuge, which, while it does not rob Mr. Barley of his idiosyncrasies of speech, leaves an amused and not an offensive impression behind it. We are, in fact, called in to assist at a very quiet piece of human contradiction. We are presented to the prone Barley in his state of helplessness and suffering, and at the same time are given to understand that the sufferer derives comfort and consolation from nothing so much as a downright plunge into the torrent of bad language.

In these wandering musings of the complaining old sea-captain there is suggested one of the many spells that are exercised by the force of imprecation. There is no paucity of men, whether dejected, dissatisfied or penurious, who are wont to apostrophise some imagined effigy of themselves, or to construct some idealised fabric as a monument of their lives, and stalk it abroad for their own and for other men’s wonderment. And the means they employ to spirit up these creations are not dissimilar to those in use by Mr. Barley. By declaiming loudly against the ravages of a hard fate that lays them on their backs “like an old dead flounder,” the mind is assisted to form a notion of the victims in their prime. By deploring the hardships of fallen fortune the eye of the sympathiser is carried instinctively back to bygone days of supposititious enjoyment. Imprecation is seldom absent from these incursions, being, in fact, urgently needed to do duty for closer argumentation. Again, as there are men so genial that they swear as a challenge to discontent, so there are men so discontented that they swear as a challenge to geniality.

This more unsociable aspect of the subject brings us perforce to the consideration of a term of swearing that contains no element of geniality. Of itself it can be accounted nothing but a mere outcome of bombast and vulgarity, appealing as it does to no known passion of the human mind. And yet so widespread is its influence, and so powerful its dominion, that it has been rung out and has reverberated probably more than any other in the great “fisc and exchequer” of abuse.

The expletive that it now behoves us to consider is one which has never been adequately treated in a book. We cannot disguise to ourselves that there is much in its unfortunate associations to render its occurrence still exceedingly painful. Originating in a senseless freak of language, it has by dint of circumstances become so noisome and offensive, that were it not for the undue power and influence it has usurped, we should hardly be disposed to treat of it at all. But when we mention that it is the ungainly adjective “bloody” that will occupy our attention for the next few pages, we must be allowed to add that it is with the view of stripping the term of its infamous significance, and if possible of dispelling from it the cloud of ill favour and of ill fame, that we venture with less reluctance to grapple with it.

With the full knowledge of the abhorrence it has imparted in our day, it is difficult to imagine any unsullied spring-time in the history of so sordid a word. It is the single particle of objuration that has not dared assume, as others have so frequently done, a jaunty or a rollicking demeanour. Not in the wildest days of Eastcheap revelry did it resound in any one key of vinous harmony. While other epithets may from time to time have received the sanction of conviviality, here is a word that is nothing unless discordant and acrimonious. It is the apt accompaniment of a whining tongue, the fit complement of a verjuice countenance. Dirty drunkards hiccup it as they wallow on ale-house floors. Morose porters bandy it about on quays and landing-stages. From the low-lying quarters of the towns the word buzzes in your ear with the confusion of a Babel. In the cramped narrow streets you are deafened by its whirr and din, as it rises from the throats of the chaffering multitude, from besotted men defiant and vain-glorious in their drink, from shrewish women hissing out rancour and menace in their harsh querulous talk.

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. Now and again strong protest has been made against the hard sentence passed upon so well-meaning a term, and authors of taste have demanded its restitution to its former intellectual companionship. In one of her “Letters to the Author of Orion,” Mrs. E. B. Browning throws reserve upon the subject altogether to the winds, and insists upon embracing and cherishing this ill-starred word as a long lost acquaintance. But when Shakespeare wrote of

“The bloody house of life,”

there was no need for hesitation in shaping it. It was as unsullied and as transparent as any that might have been placed upon Imogen’s lips or thrown by Hamlet into Ophelia’s lap.

To account for the moral kidnapping that the word has undergone, it behoves us, strangely enough, to set face towards the Netherlands, and to hark back there to the campaigns of Flushing and Deventer, where Ben Jonson and others of his countrymen are shouldering their pikes under the generalship of Vere and Stanley. We shall then find it to have been one of the doubtful advantages that were gained by long years of Low Country soldiering. With the winds and tides that brought home the shoals of broken veterans, there was wafted to this country the flavour of foreign oaths, and among them the renown in speech of the German “blutig.” Now “blutig” happened to be an inconsequent sort of particle that was employed in all the dialects of Germany to denote a sense of the emphatic. It had been chosen throughout the German fatherland to minister to the wants of those defective degrees of comparison which are usually, however, found to be more or less admirably fitted to their purpose. It thus constituted itself a fourth degree, or extra-ultra-superlative. Like all verbal contrivances of this kind, it was more especially favoured among the less cultivated students of the forms of grammar, and seems at last to have become recognised as a convenient make-weight with which a reprobate soldiery were accustomed to balance their assertions.

It will be at once seen that this alien growth was capable of being readily transplanted to our soil in the shape of its literal counterpart. The circumstance of the words being so nearly identical is sufficient to account for the work of transposition being swiftly and effectually done. But beyond the mere accident of the respective tongues offering an exact literal equivalent, there was nothing in common between the German “blutig” and the English correlative term. As evidenced by the purity of its antecedents, the latter derives nothing of the opprobrium that has devolved upon it by reason of any hereditary defects, far less on account of any of its inherent properties.If Ben Jonson, who must have been brought face to face with this treasure in its natural home, does not seek to commend it to the keeping of his audiences, we may be sure that in his time at least it had attained no perceptible degree of literary currency. The comic dramatists were agreed at this period as to one canon of dramatic representation. They were accustomed to interlace the serious business of the comedy with mirth-moving interludes in which the more farcical characters of the piece were met together for the purpose, as it seemed, of besprinkling one another with the most aggravating and unpardonable abuse. The ingenuity of writers was ransacked to furnish material for this spirited by-play. Collections of all nationalities, and the reserves of all professions and handicrafts, were studiously drawn upon to furnish subject-matter for these wordy encounters. So far as they could help themselves, these shameless dramatists left no word unsaid that could increase the strife of tongues and raise a smile at the energy or possibly the grossness of the jargon. But as yet the epithet in question found no place in the prompt-book, and continued to be omitted from their vocabularies. Had Bohemian society even partially adopted it, it would be difficult to imagine the humours of the Artillery Garden, or the disorders of Ruffians’ Hall and Turnbull Street,[55] being glibly depicted by these outspoken playwrights without recourse being had to the services of this unconscionable adjective.

Shakespeare, himself probably the greatest exponent of the arts of scurrility, is totally exempt from any blameworthy intention in applying the word in the manner he so frequently uses it. But as years wore on the relish of foreign and far-travelled terms grew upon the public taste with surprising rapidity. A novelty must be extremely popular to enable it to become vulgar, and must even be liked before it can be thoroughly hated. “Bloody” was no exception to the rule, and enjoyed a brief day of estimation and patronage. Men of refinement and high culture adopted it rather as an article of scholarly adornment. Dryden uses it in this way, as does Swift. Play-writers heralded it on the stage, bestowing upon it the passport of literary sanction. In Sir George Etheredge’s comedy, ‘The Man of Mode,’ a play that was witnessed by society with unbounded approval, the final stage in the process of abduction is plainly indicated. Says one of the characters, referring to the importunities of a tipsy vagrant, “Give him half-a-crown!” to which the other replies, “Not without he will promise to be bloody drunk!”

In this way it would seem that the ball was set rolling. How the game has continued to be played we are most of us aware. It calls for no particular skill on the part of the players, neither does the sport appear to decline for want of appreciation. That it was received at its first incoming with a kind of Éclat is not so surprising as is the strange attachment that for upwards of two centuries has been manifested by some ranks of society towards this discreditable word. Its first flush of approval may have been due to a certain element of whimsicality. This at least is a sensation frequently conveyed by the occurrence of any meaningless affectation. But, however this may be, it certainly was not at the first outset the mere grovelling and unmitigated blackguardism which it was very shortly to be. Dean Swift, full of wit and penury, writing from his London lodging to Stella in her comfortable Irish home, breaks into frequent outbursts at the scantiness of his comforts. One October, when removed to Windsor, he is particularly tried by the severity of the autumnal weather, but the terms in which, addressing a well-bred woman, he expresses his discomfort are striking, as showing the strange vicissitudes that language may undergo. “It grows bloody cold,” he writes—and one may well imagine the chilled extremities of the reverend Dean—“it grows bloody cold, and I have no waistcoat.”

In support of the view that there is nothing in the inherent properties of the word, or even in the range and frequency of its use, to account for the degraded position it has occupied in modern times, we have only to inquire whether any similar treatment has been the fate of the equivalent word in the language of France. What do we find? The French sanglant has even a wider sphere of application, and in its legitimate sense is even a greater favourite than our own adjective, but no such evil days have overtaken it. It can be used literally, as in the case of viande sanglante, or metaphorically, as in un sanglant affront or the aphorism la sanglante raillerie blesse et ne corrige pas, but not at any time is it found to deviate from the paths of decency. Everything, we consider, favours the idea we have formed of our stately English word proceeding soberly and reputably upon its honest course only to become the victim of this species of subversive horse-play at the hands of professed word-corrupters. Appreciative of the objurgatory advantages of the German blutig, they were indifferent to any affront they might pass upon the English tongue. From that time forward the word was branded as infamous. The manly ring that of right belonged to it, as instanced in such widely different productions as ‘Piers Ploughman,’[56] or the ‘Philaster’ of Beaumont and Fletcher,[57] was becoming no longer possible. In recent days people have sometimes tried to reconcile these opposite tendencies and to endow the word with some amount of literary grace. The best attempt we have noticed in this direction is in a decree of the Government of Paraguay, which in August 1869 instructed its resident in this country that the presence of Francisco Lopez on Paraguayan soil was “a bloody sarcasm to civilisation.” The gentleman who penned this document may have been influenced by the example of Montaigne[58] who admitted that he was accustomed to swear “more by imitation than complexion.”

We have given what we believe to be the rational explanation of this most unwarrantable abduction of the word from its ancient uses. The English language, whose handmaid it was, has never put in a claim to the return of its services, and the professors of that language continue to be scared when they meet with the vulgar changeling at the corner of the street. The principal reason for abhorrence is probably founded upon misapprehension. It is assumed that the expression bears the savour of irreligion. The old Catholic oath of “blood and wounds” has been advanced as the origin. So far from this theory being well founded, we rather find the whole brood of Catholic oaths to have been swept away by the besom of the Reformation long before this expletive had raised its head. Neither are we able to support the contention that it takes its rise in the archaic “woundy,” which perished in the same fires. It is quite clear that in this instance there is a marked and deep interval between the outgoing of the old form of scurrility and the advent of the new.

Without being understood to array ourselves on the side of this baneful expression, we desire to acquit it at once of all suspicion of irreligion. The men who originated it had furthest from their minds any inroad upon Catholic fervour. It was simply an imported ware, smuggled over in a soldier’s knapsack. It was left to linger for a time upon the lips of sutlers and tapsters, and became the plaything of sergeants and backswordsmen, the broken companions who had smelt powder in the German wars. It took will and way from the mere caprices of imitation, that sufficed in time to render it palatable to the wiser and more sober of men. From the time of Dean Swift downwards, it has mostly suffered from being lamentably unfashionable. Association, which can do so much to influence and so little to regulate our dislikes, has insisted in linking this expletive with the classes that are taken to be the more sordid and malignant.

It may certainly come into play now and again among those people who are not averse to perpetrating a joke at the expense of a little casual loss of refinement. On these few occasions indeed it would even appear to be tinctured with some slight leaven of good-nature. Thus, the sailor appellation of Admiral Gambier—“old bloody Politeful”—must not be inveighed against too hardly. Neither need we be too squeamish over a once famous (or infamous) bon mot that passed current in a fashionable club where a certain learned and witty serjeant was wont to repair for his nightly rubber. One evening, after meeting with a stranger at the card-table who held a remarkable number of trumps, he had impatiently inquired who had been his antagonist. On being told that the player was Sir So-and-So, Bart., the serjeant is reported to have at once rejoined that “he might have known the fellow to have been a baronet by his bloody hand!”

But there is a deeper and more solemn aspect in all this than any that we have suggested or advanced. 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. In innumerable households, in countless families, if we may so designate those fetid accumulations of humanity that we must here be understood to indicate, there is not an hour of the day—not a moment of the day—in which this virulent and acrid malediction does not send out its empty challenge. How can this moral choke-damp, with all its fatal incrustations, fail to eat away the supports and very framework of the dwelling. It is hard perhaps to pass so heavy a sentence upon seemingly so slight an offence, but we are forced to believe that the very existence and presence of this evil, in its more rampant and impudent state, is of itself conclusive upon the point of good or evil government, upon the question of the predominance of human charity or of the blackest intensity of malice.

Neither is it the least regrettable circumstance that, considered as a piece of mingled vileness and effrontery, the word has been, and for the matter of that is still likely to be, a most telling and signal success. Those who have followed the writer at all closely will have already noticed the irresistible impulse of succeeding generations to secure to themselves the strongest possible anathema with which to carry on all manner of petty hostilities. But until the expletive that is now passing under our consideration was fairly launched upon society, no great measure of success can be said to have crowned their endeavours. The swearing of the pre-Reformation era may be adjudged the nearest approach to maledictory perfection, but even that system, admirable as it may have been from the point of view of an accomplished Boanerges of the time, was at best but an unstable and fluctuating one, and depended for its efficiency upon the swearer’s own powers of invocation. As a rule no two oaths were alike, and men gave you the idea of thinking before they swore. So various a code could hardly be expected to meet with general success, it being as impossible for an individual to invent a really new oath—a new “bloody,” for example—as it is said to be impossible to invent a new proverb or a new rhyme for the nursery. Imitations can of course be easily contrived, but the genuine product only arises through the seemingly spontaneous consent of approving multitudes. It was precisely in this way that the present abomination was generated. Not proceeding from any one man’s store of virulence, but resulting from a long process of evolution and development, it at last springs into sudden life, in obedience, it would almost seem, to a nation’s clamours. But no sooner was it called into this sphere of activity, than it became, we repeat, a gigantic success. It is the crown and apex of all bad language, the coping-stone of all systems of verbal aggression and abuse. By consent, as it were, of the general conscience it is allowed to have surpassed in vileness and intensity anything of the kind that has been intense or vile. That this stream of pollution should continue to flow, uninterruptedly and with increasing volume, through its inky channel, is one of the gloomiest and grimmest of the minor features of our social life.