That uncertain feeling
John Sparrow
Spooner: A Biography William Hayter (W. H. Allen £4.95) Every one knows what is meant by a sDoonerism,' but most people know little or nothing about the man after whom the thing is named. 'Was he,' some may ask, 'a real Person? Or was he, like tVIrs Malaprop, a fictional character?' He was indeed a real Person, almost a contemporary person, well teMembered by people who are alive today --among them, the author of this biography (and, incidentally, the author of this review). „William Archibald Spooner was born in 1644; he became a scholar of New College, Oxford in 1862, a Fellow of the College in 1867, and its Warden in 1903; he retired from his Wardenship in 1924, and died six Years later. When Sir William Hayter (who has himself recently retired from the Wardenship of New College) came up as a scholar of the college in 1925, Dr Spooner was still living in retirement in North Oxford, a historic University figure, the survivor from an earlier epoch. Spooner was a typical Oxford don of the Victorian age. He was, of course, in Holy Orders, and his family was well stocked with ecclesiastics: his grandfather and his brother were archdeacons; his wife was the (arid of a bishop; his uncle by marriage ‘,_and godfather) was Archbishop of Canterbury. He himself rose no higher than to be an Honorary Canon of Christ Church. He Was, it must be said, not distinguished e. nher as a scholar or as a personality: he left behind him no literary or learned work (apart from a respectable edition of the Histories of Tacitus and a little book on Bishop Butler), and he played no part in University or Church politics, or on any wider stage. But he was a man of liberal and humane views, and as Head of his College, he won the affection and respect of generations of undergraduates and colleagues.
Sir William, making use of diaries and fragments of an unpublished autobiography that have recently come into the possession of New College, tells the story of Spooner's life and paints the portrait of the man. He does it admirably and economically, making no extravagant claims for his subject, but bringing him to life—a sweet, white-haired, pink-faced, modest, conscientious little person : 'I hope some day [he confided to his diary] to make up by diligence for my want of cleverness.' One wonders whether, at the end of his life, he would have thought that his modest hope had been realised. It is the fate of academic persons, as Sir William observes, that, unless they publish work of lasting value, their reputation dies with them, or survives only as long as their pupils. It is ironical that Spooner, who left no great work to be remembered by, should have secured for himself a sort of accidental immortality.
Nearly half a century before he died, Spooner's name was already on the way to becoming a household word: according to the Oxford Dictionary, 'spoonerism,' meaning 'an accidental transposition of the initial sounds, or other parts, of two or more words,' was 'known in colloquial use in Oxford from about 1885.' In succeeding years a crop of spoonerisms proliferated in
the University and beyond. Sir William quotes a number of the most amusing of them: for example, Spooner's supposed address to a delinquent undergraduate : 'You have tasted a whole worm ... You will leave by the town drain'; his rhetorical question from the pulpit: 'Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?'; and his observation in the field of political economy about 'the weight of rages pressing harder and harder upon the employer.' Most of these familiar spoonerisms are, as Sir William says, 'obviously apocryphal, invented by undergraduate wits . . and fathered upon him. . . But clearly he would not have been chosen as the putative father of such inventions unless he had at some time engendered something similar.' And he gives a number of well-attested examples of Spooner's `metaphasis': Professor H. H.
Price heard him say 'in a dark, glassly"; and in Sir Julian Huxley's presence he said to Mrs Spooner 'My dear, Mr Huxley assures me it is no further from the north coast of Spitsbergen to the North Pole than it is from Land's End to John of Gaunt.' As will be seen from these examples, the confusion was not simply of sounds, and the process was more complicated than a mere transposition.
I cannot help quoting one or two other examples of these more-than-verbal spoon erisms. Walking with a friend, Spooner met a lady dressed in black, to whom he lifted his hat; 'Poor soul,' he said when she had
passed, 'very sad ; her late husband, you•
know, a very sad death—eaten by missionaries—poor soul!' Again, he went up to a colleague, Stanley Casson, in the Quad, and said to him, `Do come to dinner tonight, to meet our new Fellow, Casson."But,
Warden, t am Casson.' Never mind,' said Spooner, 'come all the same.' What are we to make of that last remark—a sublime piece of unconscious nonsense? or a quick intelligent stroke of self-rescue?
Finally, there was the acted, the unspoken, spoonerism. The most famous ex ample of this type occurred at a dinner party in Oxford, when Spooner, having upset a salt cellar, reached for a decanter, from which (in the words of A. J. Toynbee, who had the story from an eye-witness) 'he poured claret on to the salt drop by drop, till he had produced the little purple mound which would have been the end-product if he had spilled claret on the table-cloth and had then cast a heap of salt on the pool to absorb it.'
What was the mental process exemplified in such behaviour? That is a problem for the psychologist and the neurologist. For the student of human nature the question is how far Spooner was himself conscious of his `metaphasis,' and whether he ever went so far as actually to exploit it. Plainly, he knew that he was liable at any moment to say what he himself called `one of those things'; it would have been out of character to utter one of them deliberately, but quite in keeping with his innocent shrewdness to enjoy the bafflement that they created.
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