The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Incomplete) by J. R. R. Tolkien

Author:J. R. R. Tolkien [Tolkien, J. R. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-04T10:19:13+00:00

A SECRET VICE

Some of you may have heard that there was, a year or more ago, a Congress in Oxford, an Esperanto Congress; or you may not have heard. Personally I am a believer in an 'artificial' language, at any rate for Europe - a believer, that is, in its desirability, as the one thing antecedently necessary for uniting Europe, before it is swallowed by non-Europe; as well as for many other good reasons - a believer in its possibility because the history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as I know it, both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the uncontrollable, and a progressive widening of the range of more or less uniform languages. Also I particularly like Esperanto, not least because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is therefore something like a 'human language bereft of the inconveniences due to too many successive cooks' - which is as good a description of the ideal artificial language (in a particular sense) as I can give.87

No doubt the Esperantist propaganda touched on all these points. I cannot say. But it is not important, because my concern is not with that kind of artificial language at all. You must tolerate the stealthy approach. It is habitual. But in any case my real subject tonight is a stealthy subject. Indeed nothing less embarrassing than the unveiling in public of a secret vice. Had I boldly and brazenly begun right on my theme I might have called my paper a plea for a New Art, or a New Game, if occasional and painful confidences had not given me grave cause to suspect that the vice, though secret, is common; and the art (or game), if new at all, has at least been discovered by a good many other people independently.

The practitioners are all so bashful, however, that they hardly ever show their works to one another, so none of them know who are the geniuses at the game, or who are the splendid 'primitives' -whose neglected works, found in old drawers, may possibly be purchased at great price (not from the authors, or their heirs and assigns!) for American museums, in after days when the 'art' has become acknowledged. I won't say 'general'! - it is too arduous and slow: I doubt if any devotee could produce more than one real masterpiece, plus at most a few brilliant sketches and outlines, in a life-time.

I shall never forget a little man - smaller than myself - whose name I have forgotten, revealing himself by accident as a devotee, in a moment of extreme ennui, in a dirty wet marquee filled with trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and wet creatures. We were listening to somebody lecturing on map-reading, or camp-hygiene, or the art of sticking a fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling) bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English, and voice, is penetrating.

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