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EXERCISES IN TOPSY-TURVEYDOM
1. Invert the following commonplaces humorously:
Honesty is the best policy.
The cup that cheers but not inebriates.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Like a child in its mother's arms.
(Not so easy, you see!)
2. Invert the following motifs humorously:
(a) A parted husband and wife reconciled by their little child (Stock Poetry.)
(b) A patient marrying his nurse on recovery. (Stock Story.)
(c) A mother-in-law who comes to stay six months. (The Old Humour.)
Inversion may be applied, you see, both to ideas and to phrases. Let me contribute a specimen of either sort to the literary primer of the future:
THE ECONOMY OF SMOKING
I must really give up not smoking, at least till the American Copyright Act works smoothly, and I am in a position to afford luxuries. At present this habit of not smoking is a drain upon my resources which I can ill support. Whenever a man comes to my house, I have to give him cigars, or else gain the reputation of a churly and ill-mannered host. In the olden days, when I was economical and smoked all day long, I could go to that man's house and get those cigars back. Very often, too, I used to get the best of the bargain, and thus effect considerable economies in the purchase of good tobacco. Nowadays, not only have I got to give away cigars for nothing, but they must be good ones. Formerly if I gave my friends bad cigars, it was from a box I was obviously smoking myself, and therefore they had at least the consolation of knowing I was a companion in misfortune. But to give others "evils from which you are yourself exempt" (to quote Lucretius) would be a terrible blend of bad taste and inhospitality. Under such circumstances a man looks on a bad cigar as an insult, and the greater insult because it is a gratuitous one. But my losses from these sources are trivial compared with the item for theatres. In the pure, innocent days, when I could not bear to let my pipe out of my mouth even for a moment, I was unable to go to theatres; but now that I have taken to not smoking, I have fallen a victim to my other craving-the passion for the play. Three stalls a week tot up frightfully in a year. No, decidedly I must check this extravagant habit of not smoking before I am irretrievably ruined.
This is forced, but Truth often dwells the bottom of a paradox.
THE DANGER OF LEARNING TO SWIM
The danger of drowning arises mainly from being able to swim, Ihe ability to swim is of little use as a safeguard against drowning, for it is only in a minority of cases that the accident thoughtfully allows you every facility for displaying your powers of natation; you are not conceded calm stream, a calm mind, and a bathing-costume; usually you are disorganised, ab initio, by the unexpectedness of the thing, you are weighed down by your clothes and your purse, you are entangled with sails, or clutched at by fellow-passengers, or sucked into vortices. In a big steamer accident, what chance is there for those who can swim? Only an occasional Hercules can keep afloat in a heavy sea, and he not for long. The most that swimming can do for you is to enable you to save yourself in circumstances where you would very probably be saved by somebody else. On the other hand, the ability to swim exposes you to many risks you w|uld never have run had you been helpless in the water. You swim in perilous places, you go out too far and cannot get back, you expose yourself to the possibilities of cramp, you try to save other people's lives and lose your own. There is also the temptation to go to tho Bath Club in Piccadilly and die of a too luxurious Iunch. On the whole, I believe as many swimmers are drowned as non-swimmers when a general accident occurs, while the swimmers invite special accidents of their own. Do you deduce from this that I advise you not to learn to swim? Quite the contrary: it is a delightful and invigorating exercise. Only you must not imagine you are thereby armed against fate. Swimming for amusement is as different from swimming for life as yachting on the Thames is from crossing the Atlantic.
For my example of phrase-inversion I cannot do better than reprint the open letter addressed by me-in the height of his success, and in parody of his manner-to the great phraseur and farunix of his little day; especially as some have thought to see in it proof that prophecy has not yet died out of Israel.
MY DEAR SIR: I have never for one moment doubted that you are a thinker, a poet, an art critic, a dramatist, a novelist, a wit, an Athenian, and whatever else you say you are. You are all these things-I confess it to your shame. I have always looked down upon you with admiration. As an epigrammatist I consider you only second to myself, though I admit that in the sentiment, "to be intelligible is to be found out," I had the disadvantage of prior publication. When you point out that Art is infinitely superior to Nature, I feel that you are cribbing from my unpublished poems, and I am quite at one with you in regarding the sunset as a plagiarism. Nature is undoubtedly a trespasser, and should be warned off without the option of a fine. I say these things to make it quite clear that I speak to you more in anger than in sorrow. You are much too important to be discussed seriously, and if I take the trouble to give you advice, it is only because I am so much younger than you. I am certain you are ruining yourself by cigarette cynicism; far better the rough, clay-pipe cynicism of a Swift. There is no smoke without fire, but it requires very little fire to keep a cigarette going. The art of advertising oneself by playful puffs is not superior to Nature. But you are not really playful and innocent; it would be ungracious to deny that you have all the corruption which the Stage has so truly connected with the cigarette. Still, isn't it about time you got divorced and settled down? At present there are only two good plays in the world-"The Second Book of Samuel" and "Lady Windermere's Fan"; surely you have power to add to their number. Try a quiet life of artistic production, and don't talk so much about Art. We are tired of missionaries, whether they wear the white tie of the Church or of Society, and it is a great pity we have not the simple remedy of the savages, who eat theirs. These few words of admonition would be incomplete if I did not impress upon you that policy is the only honesty. Art is short and life is long, and a stitch in time debars one from having a new coat. You can take a drink to the horse, but you can't make him well; and nothing succeeds like failure. Vice is the only perfect form of virtue, and virtue-Easy there! Steady! Avast! Belay! Which!
The Boeotians are dull folk, no doubt, but life would be dull without them. Imagine a wilderness of Wildes! It would be like a sky all rainbows. Then what beautiful whetstones the Boeotians are! Abuse them, by all means, so long as they will pay for it. But what a blessing that the minds capable of taking the artistic view of life are rare enough to keep the race sane! The coarser forms of egotism seem less baneful to the brain-tissue. You claim to be an Athenian, but the Athenians did not smoke cigarettes. It is true that tobacco had not been invented, but this is a sordid detail If Athens stands for anything in the history of culture, it is for sanity, balance, strength. Aristotle, at least as much an Athenian as any native of Ireland, meditated about esthetics, but he meditated also about politics, logic, philosophy, political economy, ethics-everything. Socrates was a causeur, but he was also a martyr. No, after all the Beautiful is not so important as you imagine you are. No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel, and that humanity may sacrifice even your printed paradoxes to keep warmth a little longer in its decrepit bones. The fact is, you are too borne, too onesided, to be accepted as as a "king of men." You take such broad views that you grow narrow. What you want is a little knowledge of life, and twelve months' hard labour.