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Title: Cant
Author: Dora Marsden
Date: 1914
Language: en
Topics: cant, egoism, The Egoist
Source: Retrieved on 09/26/2021 from https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr521139/
Notes: Originally published in The Egoist Volume I Number 19 (October 1, 1914). Title is unofficial and derived from the text.

Dora Marsden

Cant

"Let us rid our mind of cant": in which sentiment witness the hustle of

the popular philosopher. Why rid ourselves of cant? Who knows anything

about its uses? May not cant be a necessary utility like clothing: why,

then, should we allow ourselves to be hustled into casting it off merely

to live up to the exigencies of dramatic oratory? Rather let us dissect:

the one safe course to follow in doubling popular heroics back upon

popular philosophy. To chant is to sing: to cant is to make—anything you

please—into a song. The difference between the two is that each directs

its emphasis towards a particular and different stage of the vocal

process. To chant, i.e., to sing, is to have regard to the actual

execution of the arranged harmony. To cant, i.e., the making of a song,

concerns itself with the process antecedent to the singing: it is

concerned with the construction of the song. Joy in the actual

performance is the main attraction of the chant, and the substance and

arrangement of the song subserves that. In canting the pleasure is in

the substance and arrangement (selective interpretation!) and it is this

which the pleasure of canting subserves. The difference between our

local "philharmonic" letting itself go on the Hallelujah chorus and Mr.

Lloyd George or any other statesman letting themselves go on the causes

of the war can be rendered down to this difference.

---

No one dreams of saying "let us rid ourselves of song!" Why then the

difference in acquiescence when one says, "let us rid ourselves of

song-making!" It is due to a recognition of the reversal in motive: it

is due to suspicion: in a song the words are intended to heighten and

increase the pleasure of the singing: in cant, the pleasure of singing

is to further and enforce the substance embodied in the words. In the

song the expression of emotion is the end. In cant the emotion embodied

in the expression is utilised to serve the interests embodied in the

words: with intent of making that interest paramount over all other

interests. To heighten the importance of a matter by emphasis and

reiteration is, in fact, just what the man in the street has always

meant when he observed that someone is "making a song" about a matter.

"Making a song" is a design to make one aspect of an affair

all-absorbing by means of repetition, lilt, rhyme, rhythm: but above all

by repetition. The song and cant (motives apart) are identical in this.

Consider the common church anthem as an instance: a tag is taken: it is

told once or twenty times over in the treble: it is told over again in

the bass, and again and yet again in the tenor and contralto: then in

twos, then the quartette, then the full chorus: a most pleasurable

diversion altogether! And one does not forget that tag in a hurry: it

"runs in the head" to the exclusion of all other tags, for days. Cant

does the same thing, and is intended to. Atrocities, German atrocities,

more atrocities, always atrocities, always German, bombs,

cathedral-fronts, stained glass, women, prisoners, and so on without

end. Cant! The journalists and mob-orators have considered it necessary

to "make a song" about these things in order to impress permanently on

the British mind the connection between atrocious deeds and a German.

Evidently they consider it necessary in order to keep English rage up to

the fighting point. Others may think it unnecessary, and only a very

poor compliment to boot, but that for the present is a matter of

opinion. One might, nevertheless, point out that with all songs at a

certain stage there arises such a phenomenon as surfeit, when revulsion

does the work of poetic justice and corrects the balance. We seem to be

nearing it! Journalists and orators might note.

---

But to rid ourselves of cant, how can we? And why should we? We can try

to be clever at canting and not to allow a possibly useful weapon to be

turned to our own disadvantage. Because cant is not the attribute of

anyone in particular: everybody cants. Any particular man's cant is his

emphasis of his own point of view, which inevitably he seeks to press

home by all the agencies within his power, and of which wards have

become the chief. Consequently, it is open to everyone to accuse any

rival of canting. The Kaiser with his deity cants like chanticler: but

he is lost besides our shrill roosters at home. The essence of cant is

to fill the bill so completely and continuously with the statement of

one's own case that the other side's case fails to reach the ear of the

populace. We English have no "case" in Germany and Germany has no "case"

here. In each country, however, there should be those in power who

recognise the scope of cant: that it is only a preliminary defence. They

assuredly should have heard to the last syllable the whole of their

opponent's case in order to gauge the force of egoistic temper behind

the force that will further it. It is essential to know the temper of

the opposition they will be called upon to meet. Cant is not out of

place with the multitude, if it were, it would not go down so well. In

truth, it keeps them in good temper with themselves: but it would be

fraught with the direst effects if it had influence with those who have

to take stock and make plans. For the "masses" of the stout-heart but

unbraced intelligence cant evolves a "battle-cry." It gives consistency

to a possibly doubtful faith in the efficacy of the sword: it warms and

expands the spirit like an intoxicant: those who fear to lose a point

for hocus-pocus by using plain English would say it strengthened the

morale. Undoubtedly the war-whoop is cant's primitive and undeveloped

ancestor, as the ear-splitting detonation of the big guns is its modern

offspring. The intent of both is to put the foe to confusion by bluster

to one's own advantage. There is no cause for alarm, therefore, in that

the parsonic hosts are placing their pulpits in the market-place, and

filling them with cantatists of all orders, exhorting us to mend any

small rent which we may have tolerated in our robes of thick British

cant. This vigorous species with the bell-like tones may continue to

assault the heavens, unique as ever in its lack of guile, too stupid and

unselfconscious to be insincere. It will serve if, in the prosecution of

their solid business, men are able to put cant in its proper place, and

if in national affairs those who are charged with responsibility know at

what point its good uses end: limited to fortify one's own spirits, to

depressing one's opponents, to winning the applause of the onlookers,

and—above all—furnishing our spiritless shibboleths with their natural

antidote. In the timid, if piping times of peace, men having created a

verbal "Wrong" which they hold to have an existence independent of the

weakening of Might, i.e., of Spirit, it behoves them that at times when

at all costs that error must be corrected they shall have at hand always

a verbal means of escape. Cant enables them to dodge the "Wrong" label

and holds it firmly affixed to the brows of their opponents. They cant

themselves into the right by making a song about it: incidentally

drowning for their own side the sound of their opponent's cant, which,

be assured, is engaged in the same heartening business in its own

behalf. So cant remains a thing of words always, an affair intended for

the gallery: useful in its sphere. Its baleful effects begin when it is

taken for something fundamental: when it convinces its victims that it

seriously affects the issue. When men get into the temper which can

sing:

"For Right is Right, since God is God,

And Right the day must win,"

cant looks likely to be dangerous. Men are so liable to overlook the

subtlety of such a sentiment. "Right" always, as the hymn says, wins the

day: that is, Might wins it, and having won it, is automatically

invested with its new title of Right. Cant tends to antedate the

birth-hour of Right: that is why it proves a snare if its influence

spreads into the quarters that matter: into the initiatory quarters.

Cant may not, with impunity, penetrate into serious business. There men

must look facts squarely in the face if they are to prevent being hit in

the face by them. The rough-and-ready effects of cant are out of order

here, where success and precise observation belong to each other. In

business as in affairs of state, of course, it is quite in the way to

attempt to confuse one's rival with cant, if one can safely; but in

reviewing one's own case for serious purposes, no.

---

How far, therefore, men who are seeking to direct affairs on a large

scale can manage to utilise the potentialities of cant, and yet keep

themselves unspotted from it, becomes a nice question. Certainly by a

sort of horse-sense even with the crowd, the man who has least to say

carries most weight: certainly with the weighty: but there appears to be

no end of good fun in exercising one's power to send thrills down the

spines of audiences of thousands by audacious tickling of their vanity:

in oratory that is, which orators a bit shamefacedly, it must be

confessed, have called the exercising of a sense of power. Yet there is

always a certain feeling of contempt for it: a feeling of the

second-rate, and should be left for those "on the climb." Probably it is

the uneasy realisation that out of an audience of ten thousand there

will be five men who are chuckling under their breath at the spectacle:

the five who stand for more than the remaining thousands. One cannot

help feeling that if the itinerant Ministers, now on the rant, had

decided to forgo the exhibition of their eloquence, British prestige

would have been none the worse, but better rather, and more meriting the

onlooker's respect.

---

Mr. Lloyd George's flamboyant rhetoric about "scraps of paper" (over

which effort, by the way," The Times" gurgled a gleeful half-column of

applause), would have come with undiminished dignity only from) parsons,

ecstatic novelists, and journalists. Coming from a responsible person it

flecks the brilliance of feats of arms with the dimness of

unintelligence. Yet from beginning to end it is a triumph in the art of

covering up one's opponent's point: it is first-rate cant in fact,

glowing with the speaking, forming, and colour of the picturesque. "Have

you any Bank-notes'? What are they? Scraps of paper! Made from rags!

Tear them up! Burn them!" subserves exquisitely the arranged anti-climax

that these have the "credit of the British Empire behind them!" It is in

the choice of the anti-climax that the full artistry of cant is

revealed: for does not the opponents' whole case turn upon the fact that

it is just the credit of the Empire that is being questioned? If the

Might of the British Empire failed to be reasserted on the spot the

"credit of the Empire" would be rapidly run down to the level of rags

and scraps of paper. Let a German government establish itself in London,

and Mr. George's enraptured audience will swiftly apprehend the

connection between "armed force" and "the credit of the Empire"—this or

any other.

---

"The Times," which on the eve of war was a valuable national asset, is

now disporting itself in ungainly fashion trying to win the favours of

the verbalist host whose influence it was mainly instrumental in

overcoming two months ago. One must see in it another of the

multitudinous uses of cant it is to be supposed! Having broken the

pacifist temper from its moorings in the first place, it seeks now by a

gentle impersonal chiding of pacifism subtly combined with encouragement

and judicious personal flattery of pacifists, to manoeuvre them past the

impending danger of making an outcry for an early peace. In keeping with

its present tactics, it has delivered itself afresh on the "meaning of

the war." The war is, it says, "when' reduced to its simplest

expression—a struggle between false and true standards of life." It

piously proceeds, "We stand for a principle that no might can, in the

long run, maintain itself, unless it be founded on some moral law." The

"some" is delicious: it is so safe: so safe that the leader-writer

concludes that here he can do no better than leave it. If he developed

his point he needs would require to enlarge on the "ethical law," and

doubtless he has a strong premonition that, when formulated, his ethical

law would bluntly run "Might is right." At least we gather as much when

a little further on he plaintively—or is it satirically—delivers himself

thus: "The people of this country have hitherto lived in the touching

faith that, sooner or later, it is truth that tells. They have not only

neglected," . . . etc., etc.—neglected, that is, to keep their powder

dry by matching German "News" agencies with similar British "News"

agencies, and out of his own text it is easy to double back on the pious

sentiment of his first paragraph, and adapt its phrases to fit the model

of "Ye perfect English." "Prussianised Germany," he says, "has staked

her existence upon the claim that might is right, with the corollary

that Prussian might gives the measure of others' right." Adapted, this

would run, "England has had, reluctantly, and in spite of mumbo-jumbo,

to confess that her ' right' to existence as foremost nation is staked

upon her ability to refurnish the 'might' to prove it. Having proved it,

the corollary follows that English might will give the measure of others

right." It is a curious historical phenomenon to find two paramount

nations with such completely identical characteristics. In their

ambitions, their cant, they are one. Only the difference in their Might

will define and divide them.

---

There are arguments used, however, which it would perhaps be paying too

great a compliment to describe as cant. They are too obviously just

erroneous observations. If one said that two and two made three, it

would not be cant: but just a silly mistake. Of such is the orators'

argument that we oppose "material force" with "spiritual might." All

directed forces are the outcome of the spiritual: that is, animated by

the living spirit. A gun, an airship, all the material appurtenances of

war are aggressive evidence that spirit has been previously at work. The

army of the veriest tyrant is all composed of the workings of mastering

spirit. It is not the material which has made and makes them formidable,

but spirit. Those who look contemptuously on the material forces of

armies, and call them material, have the eyes which see not. A big

dream, shared and toiled for by millions, is embodied in those devised

means of aggression. The Might of a force is indeed the measure of the

amount of spirit, just as submission and unwilling preparations are the

measure of the lack of it. If we are subdued by the German host it will

be because their spirit has been greater than our own. It is because of

the great spirit of the German that he animates material with which to

measure himself against the world. It is a great-souled thing to do: not

lightly to be undertaken because not lightly to be abandoned. The world

should see to that: as it will if it has the spirit. Which is why talk

of peace, before events have revealed unmistakably the victors and the

conquered is childish. To challenge the world to a test of might is not

a matter to be regarded airily, but a matter of life and death: as much

so to the nation as to the individual. To know that this is so, is to

hold the automatic check on irresponsibility and foolhardiness. Might is

not mocked: it is the one sphere where the genuine is winnowed from the

sham.

---

Nearer to the spirit of good cant is the surmise of the orator that the

struggle is to espouse the "ideals of freedom against the oppression of

the Iron Heel"—Iron Heel presumably meaning, "armed force." A

politician, or any professional deceiver can always count on doing good

cant-business if he flourishes the word "freedom" well enough. That is

because there is an utter lack of comprehension as to the meaning of the

word "free." The word "free," in fact, charming as to sound as it is,

for explicitness is a word too many: it is the redundancy responsible

for abortive attempts without number in social aspirations. The "free"

and the "powerful" are one. When one has the power to encompass a

certain end, one is "free" to do it: not before. To be free means no

more than that—to be powerful in any particular direction specified: but

the aspect which needs engraving on the human consciousness is that it

means no less: the spurious "freedoms"—"liberties" graciously allowed,

without the power to enforce them if withheld: all that long list of

"rights" held by powerless, enfranchised masses: these are the poor

things, the winning of which makes the history of centuries: they are

the liberties of sheep, of domestic beasts of burden: they have little

or nothing to do with free men—men of power—capable of self-defence,

forces to be reckoned with.

D. M.