It is the audacity, the sheer insensitivity of it that is shocking, even alarming. You insult the Prophet (peace be upon him) of a great religion — and the molehill of a foolish, thoughtless cartoon gets all the world’s mountains ranged against you. You spit in the face of history by denying one of its greatest tragedies — and you get a three-year jail sentence.
How times have changed! In the old days — the very old days — people in high positions insulted each other with impunity, to their tongues’ and pens’ content and got away with it. They indulged in insult, invective, imprecation and incivility, ranging from the venomous to the merely bitchy. A sampling of these barbs was published in a book titled “The Book of Insults,” compiled by Nancy McPhee, described by the publisher, Paddington Press, as “the rudest best-seller for years.” Which indeed it was, reprinted as many as six times.
Most shocking for me was the book’s revelation of how renowned and revered poets and authors stooped again and again to malign their peers. Some of the insults published in the book may already be familiar to the reading public, such as Dr. Samuel Johnson’s comment to an aspiring writer: “Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good”; or Oscar Wilde’s “Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up”; or the oft-quoted Churchillian retort to Lady Astor when the latter told Churchill that if he were her husband, she would flavor his coffee with poison, and Churchill’s retort that if she were his wife, he would drink it.
The book offers a welcome insight into the darker side of human nature — the pettiness of the very great; the tendency to sit in judgment while not possessing the ability to do so; perverted, inverted thinking; the overblown egos; the contrary inner selves. Malice and abuse come naturally to politicians in their pursuit of pelf and power, in spite of, or more likely because of the high positions they have captured. But does this hold true even of famous poets and writers, men of the caliber of Count Leo Tolstoy and William Shakespeare? Apart from the initial shock, this part of the book is in the nature of a revelation.
No nation has suffered more slings and arrows than England despite Sir Walter Scott’s paean of praise: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/This is mine own, my native land?” England has certainly not lagged behind any other country in political vitriol. “The Book of Insults” gives several examples — Harold Macmillan on a rival: “He is forever poised between a cliche and an indiscretion”; Winston Churchill on Clement Attlee: “A sheep in sheep’s clothing” and Neville Chamberlain: “He looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe”; Benjamin Disraeli, a sparkling wit, on Gladstone’s pomposity: “Mr. Gladstone speaks to me as if I were a public meeting...”
The master of homespun wit was no doubt Abraham Lincoln. Of a rival: “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met.” Ralph Waldo Emerson was more sophisticated. Of Daniel Webster: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” And George Clemenceau’s biting: “America is the only nation in history which has miraculously gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
The so-called “literary” insults are the most outrageous of all. How could a writer of Tolstoy’s stature declare: “The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer ... is like every other lie a great evil”? And how could Bernard Shaw, a renowned playwright himself, utter this diatribe against Shakespeare, who he despises: “The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity”? To think that we were taught as students that no man can consider himself fully educated who has not studied the works of Shakespeare! John Milton, too, was at the receiving end, with Voltaire referring to “Paradise Lost” as “this obscure, eccentric, and disgusting poem”. So also Alexander Pope, whose verses Lytton Strachey compared to “spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon passers-by.”
Prose writers too are quoted by Nancy McPhee as participating in the literary fray. William Makepeace Thackeray darting a quill at satirist Jonathan Swift: “A monster gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind ... filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.” The towering Dr. Samuel Johnson, gruff, bear-like, hitting out at all and sundry — Thomas Gray, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Hazlitt, and even his own biographer Boswell to whom he said: “Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Fittingly, on Johnson’s death, he was memorized by his contemporaries in epitaphs that were less than charitable: “Here lies Sam Johnson — Reader, have a care,/Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear...”
So on and so forth. Thomas Carlyle hitting out at Thomas Macaulay. Lord Byron attacking John Keats for his “piss-a-bed poetry” and being attacked in turn by Algernon Swinburne as “the most affected of sensualists and the most pretentious of profligates.” Shelley, Hazlitt, Browning, all come under attack. No one is spared. They were no doubt great men, but lacking as they did the virtue of humility, they can hardly be called honorable men.
All this took place in the 18th and 19th centuries. Times have now changed. The laws of defamation are stricter than ever before. The first lesson to be learned is that wit must always be tempered with wisdom. The second, and more important lesson, is that there is no absolute freedom of expression.
(The writer is a former editor of the Indian film magazines Filmfare and Screen, and a former chairman of the Film Finance Corporation of India and the National Film Development Corporation of India. His book, “Counting My Blessings,” was published last year by Penguin India. He is currently on a visit to the Eastern Province.)
