Social Topics.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 360, 4 January 1879, Page 5

Social Topics.

FASHIONABLE SLANG.

There are several varieties of slang in the English as well a 3 in the French, German, and other European languages. Slang, or cantsometimes called pedlar's French— originally the speech of an alien race, the gipsies or Rommany folk. From the gipsies many of their peculiar words were borrowed by tramps, vagrants, vagabonds, beggars, and thieves ;. and from this class again the words ascended into that higher stratum of our complex civilisation composed of small traders and working mel1 — BT ich as costermengers, day laborers, navvies, and the servants and frequenters of the stable, grooms, jockeys, betting men, and others of that too numerous class. In our day slang has ascended several degrees higher, till it has reached at last the lips of the wealthy, the high-born, and the beautiful. The slang of the gipsies is genuine and real, and merits as such a cettun amount of respect. The slang of the educated classes is unreal and detestable. It is of this latter slang that I desire to speak, and to raise my voice on behalf of the purity of our noble English tongue—the most copious, the most energetic, and the most poetical at this time spoken on the globe, and that promises to be, in no very distant future, if it be not so already, the paramount speech of the civilised world. That the dirty cesspools of slang should empty themselves into the clear river of classical English i 3 a result of our modern manners, which is much to be deplored, and against which the leaders of society should set themselves as resolutely as they do against other -breaches of decorum and good manners. The vulgar among the middle and upper classes affect exaggeration in their expletives. " Very good" and " very bad" are phrases that are seldom heard, having been superseded by such wards as " awful" and " dreadful." A very pretty girl is an awfully pretty girl, or a .dreadfully fine woman. Our golden youth, male and female, as well as the lower grade of people who ape their manners and language, .are at some times " awfully jolly," at other ■ times " dreadfidly bored." " I was at an awfully nice dinner party last night," says one. •*' You should see the new farce," says another, "it is screamingly funny." lam going down to Brighton next week," says a third ; "it is so jolly to be by the briny." While a young lady accepting a bouquet from, an admirer graciously acknowledges the gift with the words, " Oh, thank you so much ! Ta! .-awfully ta /" It is another characteristic of the present time •that young people—at least in company or in the ordinary current of conversation—never talk of " friendship " or " love." These honest old words are antiquated, and it is almost as contrary to good manners to mention them •as it would be to speak of the commonest functions of nature. Fashion often disguises what it has to say in this respect under synonyms -derived from the gutter. " I am awfully bored in general society," said a lady of title, " but I enjoy myself immensely among my pals." •" He is a great ally of mine," said one member of Parliament to another, as if he were afraid of believing in friendship and loth to utter its name. Love fared still worse than friendship •in the year 1878. "Smith is awfully spoony upon Mis* Jone*," says one. " Well," replies ■lis companion, " she is an immensely fine girl, but she has no tin." "I cau't understand," :says Snob the first to Snob the second, "how a fellow can go spooning about a girl that hasn't got a penny to bless herself with ;" and Snob the second replies, "Nor I either. Neither can I understand how that awful ass" (Jones or Robinson as the case may be) " can spoon about his own wife as he does after being married two years !" It is not surprising that the Divorce Court should have an overflow of business if the word Love has lost not only the sanctity of its name "but its meaning, or if people who in their un•contaminated youth have felt the gentle passion are ashamed at a later time of having once been natural. If courtship be a thing for ridicule, it is no wonder that matrimony—which ought to be its Crown, its consummation, and its glory—should fall in the fruit, into the contempt which it in the blossom.

Two words derived from the stable are constantly heard from the mouths of men who may have studied at Oxford or Cambridge, who may hold commissions in the army or the navy, or be high in the Civil Service of the Crown, or who may otherwise rank honorably in the estimation of the world aud of society. These words are " groom " and " form." A fashionable newspaper, noted for its excellent caricatures of the notables of the day, writes of a lady, whose name shall not be repeated, " She is fair and splendid, and has a pro f usion of hair, which she grooms in the plainest way, without fringe." "Look at that little fdly" says a vulgar man in a ballroom, " how nicely she is groomed." "Form" in the stable signifies the state of health and general condition of a hor.se. The word is of such modern acceptance as to be unknown not only to Captain Grose in the last century, but to the compilers of Hotten'a Slang Dictionary, published so lately as 1864. It is no longer confined to the race-course, to Tattersall's, or to the stables where it originated, but is constantly employed to convey the idea of fashion, manners, customs, and polite observance. It is not good " form " to arrive too late to dinner, to dance with animation, or to applaud heartily at the opera, &c. It is good " form,"- however, to call a hat a tile, a child a hid, money dibs, a father a relieving officer, a mother or a wife an old woman, a cigar a weed, clothes togs, a pocket-handkerchief a wipe, a cravat a choicer, a shilling a bob, £25 &pony, &c. That men of superior culture, by frequenting low society, should pick up the words of their associates is intelligible ; but that when out of such society they should repeat and be proud 1 of the vulgarity which they have caught as they would catch scarlet fever, is no more to be understood than that a gentleman should like to be considered a costermonger or a chim-ney-sweep. Corruption of language, if it does not precede and produce, very certainly accompanies, the corruption of manners. If the upper classes abdicate a function which should belong to them, of preserving the purity of the mother tongue, all the more imperative should be the duty of the Forum, the Pulpit, and the Senate —imitating in this respect the example of all great writers and poets—to preserve it as it came down to them from the pa-<t, and to add to its wealth and beauty by all the means, as the great Chatham said on a different occasion, " which God and Nature have placed at their disposal."—By Charles Mack-w. THE WITHDRAWAL OP THE AMMERGATJ PLAY. Almost everybody, we suppose, even from the Agnostic and the Secularist to the Roman Catholic, will be relieved by the announcement that the Ammergau Passion Play, —if, indeed, it were ever seriously proposed,—is not to be produced at the Westminster Aquarium, for there is no section of English society which takes any pleasure now in seeing any religious theme irreverently treated, and it was universally felt that the Ammergau Play could by no possibility have been produced in such a place of resort as the Westminster Aquarium without giving rise to such irreverence. In that feeling we heartily concur, and are sincerely grateful to Cardinal Manning and every one else who used their influence to prevent so great a misfortune as the presentation of the Tyrolese Passion Play under conditions so fatal to its solemn and sublime associations. But it is not very easy, perhaps, to exhibit adequately the feelings in which this strong and almost passionate horror of the revival in London of what was so profoundly impressive when presented amid the wild scenery of the Bavarian highlands, is rooted —at least in relation to those who have themselves experienced its effect, and who. can testify that, so far from stirring an irreverent thought, the Ammergau peasants brought home to them the greatest ! scenes in the world's history with a vividness with which those scenes had never yet been brought home before. It is very true, of course, that it is quite one thing to see such a performance on ground to which tradition has rendered it familiar since the middle ages, amidst the green alps and under the blue sky of the Tyrol, and quite another to see it amidst the associations of the heated playhouse, where the love of mere amusement is the most innocent of the various motives that bring the spectators together, while every shade of positive evil between that motive and the deliberate design of vice, is pretty sure to be at work. But it might, perhaps, be said that in proportion as we believe in the reality and infinitude of the issues which are commemorated in the Passion Play, in that proportion we should welcome, even in the midst of a vulgar, and base, and corrupt atmosphere, the solemn and effective presentation of scenes which could not but move the hearts of some even of the worst spectators, and might possibly awaken a soul in the breast of mere frivolity itself; and that the presentation would really have been simple and solemn, it might be added, the engaging of the Ammergau actors of 1870 —if they were engaged—would have been a guarantee. On the last point we are by no means sure. Dragged away from their mountains and the simplicity of their traditions, and dragged away, too, by pecuniary temptations into the false excitements of a great capital, it 5s but too probable that even those simple actors would have become self-conscious, and absorbed more in the effect they were producing than in the event they were commemorating. But putting aside that consideration—and it is one of no slight importance, for the least failure in simplicity and earnestness would make the whole difference between sickly falsehood and overpowering truth—and supposing for a moment that the effect of the Passion Play at Ammergau could be absolutely reproduced, so far as the players were concerned, amid the London gaslights—an extravagant supposition which could only be true if they -were supernaturally inspired for the purIpose —is it really conceivable that the effect of it on London spectators should have been that | which it is upon the audience at Ammergau ? In the first place, the moral atmosphere at

Ammergau is an atmosphere of wonder and faich. If a few spectators be there who do not bring with them that attitude of mind, they nevertheless are very soon compelled t-> assume it. The universal feeling is not one of surprise, nor of criticism, nor of dismay, nor of indignation, or any mixture of these, but one of awe and placid conviction. Now, the moral atmosphere in the Westminster Aqu trium would have- been one of a very different kind indeed, one of vehement conflict between Protestant and Catholic as to the seemliness of such exhibitions, —one of ridicule on one side, and of wrath on another ; one of incredulity and suppressed contempt here, of passionate partisanship there. In a word, there would be no moral atmosphere in which it would be possible to realise the meaning of the play as it is realised at Ammergau. To do so requires an undisturbed tone of feeling in the lookera-on, no less than in the player*. If the audience cannot catch the inner feeling of the situation, —if they are disturbed by a tempest of crossing emotions and irritated sympathies,—-there would be literally no chance at all of the Pasßion Play appealing to the higher mind of the audience. In fact, there is a simplicity about the attempt to give a mere human rehearsal of the ciroumstances I of a divine life, which it takes a very peculiar imaginative world indeed to reader natural and solemn. And certainly that world could not be present where the audience would be certain to contain a set of people divi led between overpowering curiosity and a dread of blasphemy, another set who would be there to find freßh confirmation of thei'- disbelief, "and a third, perhaps, who would be far more absorbed in their expectation of irreverence, than in the faith, the origin of which was being set before their eyes. For a real imaginative effort, such a moral atmosphere as this would be simply fatal. The Passion Play was first acted in days when the faith of Christendom was quite unbroken, but when it was very difficult for simple men and women to realise the human side of a divine life, and its identity in physical and external circumstances with the life of ordinary men and wcmen. In such a condition of things such plays were extremely natural, and if reverently acted, very effective. But now, when the imagination even of Christendom is torn with controversy ; when nothing is so minutely, analysed as the outward life of Christ, and the whole strain of the dispute turns upon the guiding principle of that life ; when it is not the physical incidents which we want to see realised, but rather the interpretation to be put on them ; and when a host of lower associations have grown up with this ; particular mode of realising the incidents of a 1 career by rehearsing it upon the stage, it would have been certain to ensure a great shock to the highest feelings of the best men, and a triumph to the lowest feelings of the worst, to have transferred the Ammergau Play to London. On its own stage the conditions under which it was first conceived still in great 1 degree exist. The moral atmosphere is one of calm and tranquil faith, —only disturbed perhaps somewhat by the crowds of visitors and the expectation of gain. The open-air stage itself is not degraded by painful associations with the low comedy and vice of metropolitan theatres. In a word, the simplicity of heart and mind in which it was natural for such a performance to originate, still predominate, though no doubt they are greatly endangered. But you might as well, —were it ever possible for science to achieve Buch a feat, —transfer Mont Blanc to a London suburb, and expect it to create the same feelings as it creates when seen from the Col de Brevent, as transfer the Ammergau Play to the "Westminster Aquarium, and expect it to excite the feelings with which it is seen on that grand and rustic stage of primitive tradition. In such a society as our 3, mere imitation of a divine life has become impossible without irreverence. No doubt the imagination of Christendom is incessantly endeavoring to reproduce, in some fragmentary and piecemeal fashion, the spirit of that inimitable whole ; but in no circumstances would it be really more imposi .sible to reproduce even its spirit than in those I from which alone we have learnt its spirit, those in which Christ himself lived. And though, of course, it is easy enough for art to imitate what the actor could never reproduce in his own life, the effort of the artist is at once so very different from the attempt to embody the spirit of what he presents in his own actions, and yet so painfully like it, that it is impossible not to be jarred by the contrast between the two. The spirit of the divine life that you are trying in some faint way to reproduce, modern society at least would shrink from endeavoring merely to imitate. While aiming at what is so much higher, you shrink the more from the lower and totally different effort at mere artistic delineation. What is natural to those whose greatest difficulty has been to think of Christ as really human, is most unnatural to those whose whole lives have been passed in hearing all the doubts and difficulties in believing that he is really divine.