Captain Brassbound's Conversion: Author's Notes:

Author's Notes:

NOTES TO CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION

SOURCES OF THE PLAY

I claim as a notable merit in the authorship of this play that I
have been intelligent enough to steal its scenery, its
surroundings, its atmosphere, its geography, its knowledge of the
east, its fascinating Cadis and Kearneys and Sheikhs and mud
castles from an excellent book of philosophic travel and vivid
adventure entitled Mogreb-el-Acksa (Morocco the Most Holy) by
Cunninghame Graham. My own first hand knowledge of Morocco is
based on a morning's walk through Tangier, and a cursory
observation of the coast through a binocular from the deck of an
Orient steamer, both later in date than the writing of the play.

Cunninghame Graham is the hero of his own book; but I have not
made him the hero of my play, because so incredible a personage
must have destroyed its likelihood--such as it is. There are
moments when I do not myself believe in his existence. And yet he
must be real; for I have seen him with these eyes; and I am one of
the few men living who can decipher the curious alphabet in which
he writes his private letters. The man is on public record too.
The battle of Trafalgar Square, in which he personally and bodily
assailed civilization as represented by the concentrated military
and constabular forces of the capital of the world, can scarcely
be forgotten by the more discreet spectators, of whom I was one.
On that occasion civilization, qualitatively his inferior, was
quantitatively so hugely in excess of him that it put him in
prison, but had not sense enough to keep him there. Yet his
getting out of prison was as nothing compared to his getting into
the House of Commons. How he did it I know not; but the thing
certainly happened, somehow. That he made pregnant utterances as a
legislator may be taken as proved by the keen philosophy of the
travels and tales he has since tossed to us; but the House, strong
in stupidity, did not understand him until in an inspired moment
he voiced a universal impulse by bluntly damning its hypocrisy. Of
all the eloquence of that silly parliament, there remains only one
single damn. It has survived the front bench speeches of the
eighties as the word of Cervantes survives the oraculations of the
Dons and Deys who put him, too, in prison. The shocked House
demanded that he should withdraw his cruel word. "I never
withdraw," said he; and I promptly stole the potent phrase for the
sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for the
Bulgarian hero of Arms and the Man. The theft prospered; and I
naturally take the first opportunity of repeating it. In what
other Lepantos besides Trafalgar Square Cunninghame Graham has
fought, I cannot tell. He is a fascinating mystery to a sedentary
person like myself. The horse, a dangerous animal whom, when I
cannot avoid, I propitiate with apples and sugar, he bestrides and
dominates fearlessly, yet with a true republican sense of the
rights of the fourlegged fellowcreature whose martyrdom, and man's
shame therein, he has told most powerfully in his Calvary, a tale
with an edge that will cut the soft cruel hearts and strike fire
from the hard kind ones. He handles the other lethal weapons as
familiarly as the pen: medieval sword and modern Mauser are to him
as umbrellas and kodaks are to me. His tales of adventure have the
true Cervantes touch of the man who has been there--so
refreshingly different from the scenes imagined by bloody-minded
clerks who escape from their servitude into literature to tell us
how men and cities are conceived in the counting house and the
volunteer corps. He is, I understand, a Spanish hidalgo: hence the
superbity of his portrait by Lavery (Velasquez being no longer
available). He is, I know, a Scotch laird. How he contrives to be
authentically the two things at the same time is no more
intelligible to me than the fact that everything that has ever
happened to him seems to have happened in Paraguay or Texas
instead of in Spain or Scotland. He is, I regret to add, an
impenitent and unashamed dandy: such boots, such a hat, would have
dazzled D'Orsay himself. With that hat he once saluted me in
Regent St. when I was walking with my mother. Her interest was
instantly kindled; and the following conversation ensued. "Who is
that?" "Cunninghame Graham." "Nonsense! Cunninghame Graham is one
of your Socialists: that man is a gentleman." This is the
punishment of vanity, a fault I have myself always avoided, as I
find conceit less troublesome and much less expensive. Later on
somebody told him of Tarudant, a city in Morocco in which no
Christian had ever set foot. Concluding at once that it must be an
exceptionally desirable place to live in, he took ship and horse:
changed the hat for a turban; and made straight for the sacred
city, via Mogador. How he fared, and how he fell into the hands of
the Cadi of Kintafi, who rightly held that there was more danger
to Islam in one Cunninghame Graham than in a thousand Christians,
may be learnt from his account of it in Mogreb-el-Acksa, without
which Captain Brassbound's Conversion would never have been
written.

I am equally guiltless of any exercise of invention concerning the
story of the West Indian estate which so very nearly serves as a
peg to hang Captain Brassbound. To Mr. Frederick Jackson of
Hindhead, who, against all his principles, encourages and abets me
in my career as a dramatist, I owe my knowledge of those main
facts of the case which became public through an attempt to make
the House of Commons act on them. This being so, I must add that
the character of Captain Brassbound's mother, like the recovery of
the estate by the next heir, is an interpolation of my own. It is
not, however, an invention. One of the evils of the pretence that
our institutions represent abstract principles of justice instead
of being mere social scaffolding is that persons of a certain
temperament take the pretence seriously, and when the law is on
the side of injustice, will not accept the situation, and are
driven mad by their vain struggle against it. Dickens has drawn
the type in his Man from Shropshire in Bleak House. Most public
men and all lawyers have been appealed to by victims of this sense
of injustice--the most unhelpable of afflictions in a society like
ours.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIALECTS

The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically
makes the art of recording speech almost impossible. What is more,
it places the modern dramatist, who writes for America as well as
England, in a most trying position. Take for example my American
captain and my English lady. I have spelt the word conduce, as
uttered by the American captain, as cawndooce, to suggest (very
roughly) the American pronunciation to English readers. Then why
not spell the same word, when uttered by Lady Cicely, as
kerndewce, to suggest the English pronunciation to American
readers? To this I have absolutely no defence: I can only plead
that an author who lives in England necessarily loses his
consciousness of the peculiarities of English speech, and sharpens
his consciousness of the points in which American speech differs
from it; so that it is more convenient to leave English
peculiarities to be recorded by American authors. I must, however,
most vehemently disclaim any intention of suggesting that English
pronunciation is authoritative and correct. My own tongue is
neither American English nor English English, but Irish English;
so I am as nearly impartial in the matter as it is in human nature
to be. Besides, there is no standard English pronunciation any
more than there is an American one: in England every county has
its catchwords, just as no doubt every state in the Union has. I
cannot believe that the pioneer American, for example, can spare
time to learn that last refinement of modern speech, the exquisite
diphthong, a farfetched combination of the French eu and the
English e, with which a New Yorker pronounces such words as world,
bird &c. I have spent months without success in trying to achieve
glibness with it.

To Felix Drinkwater also I owe some apology for implying that all
his vowel pronunciations are unfashionable. They are very far from
being so. As far as my social experience goes (and I have kept
very mixed company) there is no class in English society in which
a good deal of Drinkwater pronunciation does not pass unchallenged
save by the expert phonetician. This is no mere rash and ignorant
jibe of my own at the expense of my English neighbors. Academic
authority in the matter of English speech is represented at
present by Mr. Henry Sweet, of the University of Oxford, whose
Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Engliach, translated into his
native language for the use of British islanders as a Primer of
Spoken English, is the most accessible standard work on the
subject. In such words as plum, come, humbug, up, gum, etc., Mr.
Sweet's evidence is conclusive. Ladies and gentlemen in Southern
England pronounce them as plam, kam, hambag, ap, gan, etc.,
exactly as Felix Drinkwater does. I could not claim Mr. Sweet's
authority if I dared to whisper that such coster English as the
rather pretty dahn tahn for down town, or the decidedly ugly
cowcow for cocoa is current in very polite circles. The entire
nation, costers and all, would undoubtedly repudiate any such
pronunciation as vulgar. All the same, if I were to attempt to
represent current "smart" cockney speech as I have attempted to
represent Drinkwater's, without the niceties of Mr. Sweet's Romic
alphabets, I am afraid I should often have to write dahn tahn and
cowcow as being at least nearer to the actual sound than down town
and cocoa. And this would give such offence that I should have to
leave the country; for nothing annoys a native speaker of English
more than a faithful setting down in phonetic spelling of the
sounds he utters. He imagines that a departure from conventional
spelling indicates a departure from the correct standard English
of good society. Alas! this correct standard English of good
society is unknown to phoneticians. It is only one of the many
figments that bewilder our poor snobbish brains. No such thing
exists; but what does that matter to people trained from infancy
to make a point of honor of belief in abstractions and
incredibilities? And so I am compelled to hide Lady Cicely's
speech under the veil of conventional orthography.

I need not shield Drinkwater, because he will never read my book.
So I have taken the liberty of making a special example of him, as
far as that can be done without a phonetic alphabet, for the
benefit of the mass of readers outside London who still form their
notions of cockney dialect on Sam Weller. When I came to London in
1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I
should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not
discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it
from an Essex one. Some time in the eighties the late Andrew Tuer
called attention in the Pall Mall Gazette to several peculiarities
of modern cockney, and to the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect
that was still being copied from book to book by authors who never
dreamt of using their ears, much less of training them to listen.
Then came Mr. Anstey's cockney dialogues in Punch, a great
advance, and Mr. Chevalier's coster songs and patter. The Tompkins
verses contributed by Mr. Barry Pain to the London Daily Chronicle
have also done something to bring the literary convention for
cockney English up to date. But Tompkins sometimes perpetrates
horrible solecisms. He will pronounce face as fits, accurately
enough; but he will rhyme it quite impossibly to nice, which
Tompkins would pronounce as newts: for example Mawl Enn Rowd for
Mile End Road. This aw for i, which I have made Drinkwater use, is
the latest stage of the old diphthongal oi, which Mr. Chevalier
still uses. Irish, Scotch and north country readers must remember
that Drinkwater's rs are absolutely unpronounced when they follow
a vowel, though they modify the vowel very considerably. Thus,
luggage is pronounced by him as laggige, but turn is not
pronounced as tern, but as teun with the eu sounded as in French.
The London r seems thoroughly understood in America, with the
result, however, that the use of the r by Artemus Ward and other
American dialect writers causes Irish people to misread them
grotesquely. I once saw the pronunciation of malheureux
represented in a cockney handbook by mal-err-err: not at all a bad
makeshift to instruct a Londoner, but out of the question
elsewhere in the British Isles. In America, representations of
English speech dwell too derisively on the dropped or interpolated
h. American writers have apparently not noticed the fact that the
south English h is not the same as the never-dropped Irish and
American h, and that to ridicule an Englishman for dropping it is
as absurd as to ridicule the whole French and Italian nation for
doing the same. The American h, helped out by a general agreement
to pronounce wh as hw, is tempestuously audible, and cannot be
dropped without being immediately missed. The London h is so
comparatively quiet at all times, and so completely inaudible in
wh, that it probably fell out of use simply by escaping the ears
of children learning to speak. However that may be, it is kept
alive only by the literate classes who are reminded constantly of
its existence by seeing it on paper.

Roughly speaking, I should say that in England he who bothers
about his hs is a fool, and he who ridicules a dropped h a snob.
As to the interpolated h, my experience as a London vestryman has
convinced me that it is often effective as a means of emphasis,
and that the London language would be poorer without it. The
objection to it is no more respectable than the objection of a
street boy to a black man or to a lady in knickerbockers.

I have made only the most perfunctory attempt to represent the
dialect of the missionary. There is no literary notation for the
grave music of good Scotch.

BLACKDOWN, August 1900

Back to chapter list of: Captain Brassbound's Conversion