Ce n’est point ainsi que parle la nature
MOLIÈRE
Literary historians sometimes use the word Elizabethan qualitatively rather than chronologically and apply it to poems written after the accession of James I. I am going to take a similar liberty with the expression ‘four-letter words’, and make it mean what are called ‘obscene words’ in general. Some of my specimens contain more than four letters.
I believe—for I have not found the passage—that Lawrence somewhere says it is hard to know how four-letter words affected the mind of the Middle Ages.1 Whether he did or not, I think it worth a moment’s inquiry. We cannot arrive at an absolutely certain answer, but there are grounds for a good guess. If we want a clue to the way medieval people felt about any word we naturally look to see how they used it. We open, in fact, the glossary of Skeat’s Chaucer.
The following four-letter words (in my extended sense) are in alphabetical order.
Bele chase. Comic and roguish euphemism for muliebria pudenda. Skeat lists it twice. On both occasions it is used by the Wife of Bath (D 447, 510).
Coillons (testes). Used abusively by the Host to the Pardoner in bitter anger (C 952).
Ers (nates vel anus). This occurs twice in the Miller’s Tale (A 3734, 3755). The context is slapstick farce. It occurs also in the Summoner’s Tale (D 1690, 1694). There the context is farcical fantasy with a satirical implication; the teller is insulting friars as deeply as he knows how. It is just conceivable, though ars metrike is good Middle English for ‘arithmetic’, that the choice of this word in D 2222 contains a double entendre.
Fart. Always in slapstick farce. Miller’s Tale (A 3338, 3806); Summoner’s (D 2149).
Pisse (n). Either in slapstick (Miller’s Tale, A 3798) or in a pseudo-scientific context (Canon’s Yeoman, G 807).
Queynte (bele chose). In farce (Miller’s Tale, A 3276) and in the mouth of the Wife of Bath (D 332, 444).
Quoniam. Comic synonym for the preceding. Used once (but one MS here reads queynte) by the same speaker (D 608).
Swiven. Used in slapstick (Reeve’s Tale, A 4178, 4266, 4317; Cook’s Tale, a 4422). In Miller’s Tale, A 3850, there is a tone of malevolent triumph. There is malice also when it is used by the crow in the Manciple’s (H 256). In the Merchant’s (E 2378) it is said in furious anger.
I am anxious not to try to prove too much. Skeat’s entries are probably not exhaustive. Still, we may note for what it is worth that farce and abuse are the normal contexts of all these words. Any reader who finds the passages in which they occur inflammatory and in that sense ‘corrupting’ must be, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘more combustible than most’.
Set against these a passage that, I think, might possibly inflame: the consummation of the love between Troilus and Criseyde (III, 1142–1421). Here every word (though not, to be sure, the whole passage) could have been read aloud in a Victorian girls’ school.
None of the eight words I have extracted from Chaucer, so far as I can discover, occurs in Gower.
Having got thus far, and seeing at least the hint of principle, I decided to see whether it went further back. I turned to Latin.* Here are the five words which seem to me to have best claim to the four-letter character.
Cunnus. Martial appears to have worked this word hardest. It occurs in I, 90, a jeering lampoon on a woman suspected of Lesbianism; in III, 72, another abusive piece; and in III, 81, which taunts a man with (perhaps) the most unsavoury of all perversions. It occurs also in the Priapeia attached to some editions of Catullus. Horace uses it in contempt—cunnus taeterrima belli causa (Sat., I, iii, 107). Some take cunnus to be here used, as elsewhere it certainly is, by metonymy for ‘whore’. But we can make good sense, taking it literally. Either way the tone is the same.
Such are the contexts in which it is used. Notice where it is not. In a genuinely pornographic passage, by which I mean one clearly intended to act as an aphrodisiac on the reader, Ovid has occasion to mention the thing; but he knows his trade far too well to use the word. He prefers two very incendiary periphrases: partibus illis In quibus occulte spicula figit Amor and loca . . . quae tangi femina gaudet (Ars Am., II, 707, 719). Apuleius in his bedroom scene (Met., II, 16, 17) uses feminal. I am not sure of its status, but I should be surprised if it were as coarse as cunnus. The fact that the only two examples of it quoted by Lewis and Short both come from Apuleius, so far as it goes, confirms this. He never used a common word if he could find a rare one.
Penis. This can be used in tranquil and respectable writing if it means lust in general; as when we say a man has spent a fortune on his belly (by being a gourmet) or on his back (by overdressing). But when it is concrete and anatomical it appears chiefly, perhaps solely, in harsh satire: e.g. in Horace’s very malodorous twelfth epode, or the stomach-turning speech of the professional joy-boy in Juvenal (IX, 43). Ovid, the real pornographer, has again occasion to mention the thing. He will not use a four-letter word; it becomes inguinis pars (Amores, III, vii, 6), membra (13), latus (36), and once more pars (69).
For verpa the dictionary quotes only Catullus, Martial and (of course) the Priapeia. Try looking up the Catullus (XXVIII, Pisonis comites).
Vulva (or volva). This has two meanings. In its strict, anatomical sense (uterus), it turns up in scientific writers. In its vulgar sense, when it becomes a synonym for cunnus, it too comes chiefly in satire. Martial uses it in an attack on a male fellator (XI, 61); Juvenal, in his savage passage on Messalina—adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine volvae (VI, 129).
As for glubo, that grossest verb of all, few forget the one place where they have met it. Glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes is screamed at us by Catullus in the rage of a man so miserable that his only wish is to wound (LVIII).
The clue, however slender, still seemed to be leading me in the same direction. Encouraged by this I ventured further back into a literature where I am even less at home. I got out my Liddell and Scott and my Aristophanes.
It was surely significant that the great comedian gave one a four-letter word about once in every twenty lines, and even in those passages where my weak scholarship saw no indecency the commentators could usually unearth one. But I must confine myself to single words:
βδέω (Pax, 151; Acharn., 256) means to stink, in scientific texts. In Aristophanes it means to break wind. All the Lexicon’s examples of this sense are Aristophanic.
βινέω, to swive (Lys., 934; Thesm., 50; Acharn., 1052). All the examples are from Aristophanes and the comic poet Eupolis.
πέος, penis (Lys., 124, 928). Only Aristophanes is quoted.
πρωκτός, (nates vel anus). Only Aristophanes mentioned.
στύομαι, penem erigere. (Pax, 728; Lys., 869; Acharn., 1220). Quoted only from Aristophanes and the Anthology.
τιτθίον, papilla, but, I think, a much more roguish word (Pax, 863). Quoted only from Aristophanes and Cantharus (a comic poet).
χέЗω, to excrete. The examples are nearly all from comic writers.
Let me once more confess and even insist that such a tiny research as I have so far made does not warrant anything like a certain conclusion. The strength of my case, if it has any, lies not in the wealth of my evidence but in the fact that all the evidence, such as it is, points in one direction. And the way to refute it is not to expatiate on the scantiness of the evidence but to produce an instantia contraria. You must find passages—I have not yet found one myself—where four-letter words are used seriously, neither with belly-laughter nor snarls of hatred, in seriously erotic elegy or lyric; where they are used seductively or at least sympathetically. The nearest thing to such an instance within my own reading comes in Old French, and I believe that it makes for me rather than against me. In the Roman de la Rose (5537) Jean de Meung uses the word coilles. He puts it into the mouth of Reason herself. The Lover reproves Reason for her bad manners—
M’avez coilles nomees,
Que ne sunt pas bien renomees,
En bouche a cortaise pucele.
(6929)
Reason, quite unabashed, says that her Father made these things de ses propres mains in Paradise and she is determined to speak of them senz mettre gloses (6957–60). Here we admittedly have a four-letter word used seriously and with approval. But we notice two facts. First, such usage was not normal; that is why the Lover is shocked. And secondly, Jean de Meung in this passage is not writing love-poetry but philosophical poetry about love. He is indeed putting forward, or making Reason put forward, exactly the case so often argued by the defenders of Lawrence. He is saying that these things ought not to be a subject either of shame or of ridicule. Reason defies (and thus gives evidence for) traditional linguistic behaviour. When Jean de Meung ceases to be a doctrinaire and becomes once more an erotic poet we shall hear no more about coilles. The poem ends with the deflowering of the heroine (21583 et seq.). But it is all told allegorically and even a fairly intelligent reader might not know what was happening. We should have an exact parallel if a modern wrote a novel which used four-letter words in a reflective passage and omitted them from his descriptions of the concubitus.
The value which four-letter words have usually had in actual usage is well attested by two bits of evidence from a much later period. Our ancestors were sometimes shamelessly frank about the kind of pleasure they demanded from certain kinds of literature. As a result we find four-letter words condemned not on the ground that they are aphrodisiacs but precisely on the ground that they are not. Thus Sheffield complains of
Such nauseous Songs as the late Convert made,
Which justly call this censure on his Shade;
Not that warm thoughts of the transporting joy
Can shock the Chastest or the Nicest cloy,
But obscene words, too gross to move desire,
Like heaps of Fuel do but choak the Fire.
That Author’s Name has undeserved praise
Who pall’d the appetite he meant to raise.*
We see exactly how Sheffield read and how he took it for granted that poets wrote. When I first read this passage I hastily put it down as ‘Restoration nastiness’. But I have had to withdraw the chronological epithet. How of this from Montaigne?
Il y a certaines autres choses qu’on cache pour les montrer. Oyez cettuy-là plus ouvert: et nudam pressi corpus adusque meum. Il me semble qu’il me chapone. Que Martial retrousse Venus à sa poste, il n’arrive pas à la faire paroistre si entiere. Celuy qui dict tout, il nous saoule et nous desgouste; celuy qui craint à s’exprimer nous achemine à en penser plus qu’il n’en y a. Il y a de la trahison en cette sorte de modestie, et notamment nous entr’ouvrant, comme font ceux cy, une si belle route à l’imagination. Et l’action et la peinture doivent sentir le larrecin.*
There are, indeed, no four-letter words in the line Montaigne is discussing. But the point of view is the same. Immodesty is deprecated not as provoking but as impeding Sheffield’s ‘warm thoughts’ and Montaigne’s belle route à l’imagination.
Our knowledge will never cover all individual varieties of speech; but the evidence before me, though it cannot establish, suggests a probable generalisation. It looks as if no nation, age, or class has commonly used four-letter words to ‘move desire’. If that is so, those who thought Lawrence’s vocabulary—we are not discussing his over-all tendency—a grave moral danger were presumably mistaken. But still less does it appear that such words have been used for a reverential and (in the old sense) ‘enthusiastick’ treatment of sex. They are the vocabulary either of farce or of vituperation; either innocent, or loaded with the very opposite evil to that which prudes suspect—with a gnostic or Swiftian contempt for the body. Lawrence’s usage is not to be reckoned a return to nature from some local or recent inhibition. It is, for good or ill, as artificial, as remote from the linguistic soil, as Euphuism or, a closer comparison, the most desperate parts of Lyrical Ballads. Here, as in them, the words may be earthy; this use of them is not. It is a rebellion against language. Lady Chatterley has made short work of a prosecution by the Crown. It still has to face more formidable judges. Nine of them, and all goddesses.2