In the mid-1960s Trevor-Roper wrote a long essay on the rampant persecution of witches, the witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which he subsequently published as a short book in 1970. At this time he befriended Alan Macfarlane (b. 1941, at Shillong in India), an Oxford graduate student analysing witchcraft prosecutions in Essex during the early modern period. Macfarlane was amazed to receive long letters from the Regius Professor, who encouraged him, gave him dinner, invited him to Chiefswood, corrected his prose, and helped him to find temporary teaching work. Macfarlane was interested in anthropology, in which he would eventually make his career. During their discussions of witchcraft, Trevor-Roper was slow to realize the gulf between their two approaches. At the heart of these was a radically different attitude towards witch-beliefs. As a rationalist, Trevor-Roper regarded them as nonsense; as an anthropologist, Macfarlane treated them with respect. Their relations soured after Trevor-Roper belittled Macfarlane’s criticisms of his witch-craze essay as ‘those pernickety little arrows of yours which come whizzing out of your piddling little county of Essex’, and dismissed the credulities of ‘your pig-bound peasants’. He subsequently explained that those remarks had been offered only in a humorous and genial spirit.
The following letter (which in passing teases Macfarlane about his birthplace under the Raj) is partly a response to Macfarlane’s request for guidance about the submission and examination of doctoral theses.
8 St Aldates Oxford
My dear Alan
Thank you very much for your letter. I am so glad that your thesis is finished. I agree with you and Francis Hutchinson about witchcraft—in fact I nearly used Francis Hutchinson’s phrase as an epigraph to my essay, which is also now in proof.1 It is a depressing subject; and yet if the ‘horror’ depresses, the ‘difficulty’ attracts. I am so glad to have tackled it. I hope I have said something new about it. I am sure you have, and I shall be interested to see whether your well-timed thesis has blown up my airy generalisations. I hope not. I assure you that it is no very admirable quality that takes me into these tangled thickets. As Dr Johnson retorted to Boswell, who credited him with ‘courage’ for going ‘sliding in Ch Ch meadow’ when he should have been waiting on his tutor in Pembroke College, ‘Courage? No sir: stark insensibility’.2
You ask how long examiners like to read a thesis. I think that a month is a fair allowance. They are seldom free to read it when it first arrives—theses tend to be presented in term—and so they have to wait and find time. Then they generally need to do some checking. Then they have to find a date for viva convenient to them both. However, they are usually reasonable people and if you have a particular time-table problem, say so in our submission to the Registry. The Board is thoroughly accustomed to applications, especially by Indians, for ‘late submission’ (so that they can scribble to the last minute) and ‘early viva’ (so that they can catch an available dhow or catamaran back to Bombay or Madras). This can be very inconvenient—especially when they time it, as they sometimes do, so that the examiners would have to do everything between Christmas and the New Year. However, the Board tries to co-operate, only insisting that its approval of such courses is subject to the convenience of the examiners, whom we never commit to an unreasonable time-table. It is always convenient to the Board if a supervisor suggests examiners. We don’t necessarily appoint the suggested examiners but we generally do, and suggestions are always a help; so you will probably discuss possible examiners with Keith Thomas.3
As for ‘jargon’ the rules—it seems to me—are very simple. First, one must distinguish between ‘terms of art’ and ‘jargon’. At least I make this artificial distinction. ‘Terms of art’ are agreed, exact definitions, necessary to the discussion of an esoteric subject. The terms you mention (‘agnatic’, ‘affinal’, ‘matrilinear’, ‘sibling’) are such terms and there is nothing wrong with them at all, or with any other such terms. I simply think (a) that the terms should be ‘agreed’ between writer and reader explicitly if they are unusual terms, and (b) that they should be respectable, properly constructed, euphonious terms, as simple as possible, not fanciful neologisms or grotesque hybrids. ‘Jargon’ is (to me) something quite different; the use of pompous clichés, or second-hand conglomerations of words stuck together in habitual postures, when it is perfectly possible to use a clean, simple word or phrase. Thus where you or I would naturally say ‘enter’ or ‘go’, your Jargonaut, when in full sail, would just as naturally say ‘effect an entry’ or ‘proceed’, as if it were better English, and raised his social or professional status to say so. I’m afraid that many writers really do seem to think that this kind of long-windedness is necessary to their status, just as ratcatchers now, in our status-bound society, call themselves ‘rodent operatives’ and dentists ‘dental surgeons’, etc. etc.—and graduates ‘postgraduates’: a revolting word which I refuse even to use, but which I have tried in vain to exclude from the vocabulary of the university.
In ‘jargon’ I also include metaphors which are not sensed as metaphors: i.e. metaphors which are so dulled by use that they create no vivid comparable image but only elongate the phrase. I make it a rule never to use a metaphor unless, with my mind’s eye, I see the action or object from which I draw the image. I have just seen the Jargonauts, sailing in the good ship Jargo, which however, for them, has a certain florid Hindu décor and tramples down the waves like its kindred vessel the Juggernaut, and uttering horrible, polysyllabical, prosy meaningless noises as they plough through the inky Black Sea towards the Gold Fleece of journalistic success. What is the point of a metaphor if it is not really a metaphor at all—if it creates no image in the mind of the reader (because there has been none in the mind of the writer), but is merely a means of taking longer to say something? It is for this reason that I hate mixed metaphors. A mixed metaphor is proof that the writer has not seen the images; for if he had, the two images would have cancelled each other out in absurdity. For instance, if I were to say that some scholar of whom my opinion was low (I fear there are some) was a poor fish, not worth powder and shot, it would be self-evident that I had not seen him as a fish at all: the phrase would have been, to me, mere jargon.
Why do I feel so strongly, indeed passionately about this? Even as I write, I feel myself to be somewhat absurd. But I have my reasons. It is not merely that the English language—all language—is to me something beautiful which deserves to be treated well: it is also a moral question. Clear language is the expression of clear thought and muddy language is the slime which obscures thought, concealing the slovenliness, the crookedness of slovenly, crooked minds and excusing the indolence of indolent minds. Indeed, it can be worse than that: it can excuse cruelty, vice, crime, anything. All the great crimes of our time have been palliated, perhaps made possible by jargon. The use of phrases like ‘liquidate’ by the Bolsheviks, or ‘pass on’, or ‘send to the East’ by the Nazis, instead of ‘kill’, ‘send to the gas chambers’, made it possible for a whole bureaucracy to organise and carry out mass murder without even admitting to themselves what they were doing. Slipshod language, opaque meaningless metaphors, not only excuse the mind from the rigours of thought, they protect the conscience from the sense of responsibility. I feel morally revolted by totalitarian (or other) double-talk—that is what really maddened me in China—and since double-talk is impossible if language is used exactly and clearly, this is to me a compelling reason for insisting on exact, clear language.
And yet, I do not want language to be purely dry, neuter, antiseptic. It is too noble a thing for that. It is capable of warmth, light, subtlety, power. I want it to realise these capacities. But even in realising them, it must not slip into jargon. Fortunately, the safeguards are already there. Thanks to metaphors, images, language can move in more than one dimension, and living metaphors, since they reinforce and vivify the intended meaning, cannot by definition obscure it. Only dead metaphors can do that. They are the unfailing resource of cant and hypocrisy.
Do you doubt my comforting equation? Then try reading some 17th century sermons, preferably Scotch. They never let one down. Try the letters of Samuel Rutherford.1 There is a metaphor in every sentence, and every one is stone-dead. He never draws his images from the peel-tower or the yew tree, the oatmeal or the salt beef, the gannet or the grouse: it is always from the fish-pools of Hebron, the cedar and the cypress, the gourd and the hyssop, the flamingo and the quail. And the whole work, of which edition after edition seemed edifying to generation after generation of your compatriots, is nothing but nauseating cant from beginning to end.
If, as an anthropologist, you are faced with ‘whole sentences which appear to mean nothing’, don’t despair; they probably do mean nothing and can therefore be ignored. Life is short, and those who will not take the trouble to write clearly cannot properly expect to be read.
Do please call on me. Tuesday is a bad day for entertaining you, as it is our servantless day, and Xandra hates cooking; also it is the day when we have a ‘business lunch’ at Oriel and guests aren’t allowed. But I would give you a very dull dinner in college to show you what you have escaped. Otherwise take a chance and telephone me: I am likely to be in Oxford on Tuesdays.
yours ever
Hugh Trevor-Roper
P.S. Have you ever read George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ which is published in his volume of essays Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays? It says everything that I believe on this subject.