AN APOLOGY FOR "BUNKUM." T HE meaning of this word, or
at least the impression con- veyed by this word, has slowly altered, in this country at least, within the last forty years. It originally meant, according to all American dictionaries, talking for talking's sake, or, rather, talking to one audience for the benefit of another. The Congressional Member for a district of North Carolina named Buncombe, insisted on delivering a speech to an impatient House of Representatives, and when taxed with his conduct, defended himself by declaring that he was com- pelled to make a speech which his constituents could read, and that, in fact, he was "talking to Buncombe." This is certainly the sense in which Judge Haliburton, the author of "Sam Slick," used the expression ; and our recollection is that in 1840-50 it was so employed within quotation-marks in criticising Parliamentary speeches. The Americans, who catch any much-needed phrase of the kind with extraordinary quickness, speedily degraded " Buncombe " into "bunkum," and the vulgar spelling was slowly adopted in England, but with a significant change of meaning. The word being American, and all American oratory uttered for effect having one peculiar note in it, " bunkum " came to signify speech uttered solely to attract through its tone of patriotic exaggeration. The man who talks bunkum is not talking vague nonsense or stuff intended to occupy time, but is uttering " high-falutin' " flattery either of the people or of the country, or of the future which is before either. Nobody would say, for example, that when the late Mr. Biggar was reading excerpts from Blue-books he was talking bunkum, though, if he did, he would be close to the original meaning; while everybody would say that bunkum was the great defect of Mr. Sexton's often very eloquent oratory. The thing, in its modern sense, is almost exclusively American, Irish, or French, and differentiates oratory delivered for either of those peoples from oratory delivered for Englishmen, in a nearly inexplicable way. Why do we English not "bunk," when our kinsfolk and our rivals do P Some years ago, while discussing oratory, we endeavoured to explain the habit as resulting from an absence of the pride begotten of a great history ; and if it were confined to the Americans and the Irish, we should still consider that explana- tion sufficient. A people unsupported by history sustains its pride by self-praise, and in particular by magnificent disquisitions upon the glorious future which, it is satisfac- tory to assume, lies open before it. American history is too short for pride, except when the pride takes the form of statistics—which, no doubt, are startling in America, and are therefore quoted with frequency and pleasure—while Irish history is, to Irish minds, an endless narrative of failure, oppression, and continuous but baffled aspiration. The proud coldness of the Englishman, on the other hand, which induces him to regard self-praise as vulgar, and the utterance of grand aspirations as, at best, a weakly rhetorical form of appeal to sentiment, is based on a history of a thousand years, which he regards, in part erroneously, in part accurately, as a narrative of nearly unbroken success. (He has done great things, but he lost America ; he has never either con- quered or conciliated Ireland, and he is far from perfectly contented with his own civilisation.) Further reflection has, however, induced us to doubt the correctness, or, at least, the completeness, of this explanation. The French are almost as much given to bunkum as the Americans or the Irish, and the French have a long history behind them, which, in their own judgment, at all events, is one of unsurpassable grandeur. You rarely read a French speech, never a specially successful French speech, in which the people or the country are not de- scribed in terms of rhetorical flattery, which, though we seldom apply the description to French oratory, involves the very essence of bunkum,—that is, of words practically meaningless, but uttered to attract by rousing a sense of patriotic vanity. American descriptions of the greatness of their country, and of the flight of the eagle over the Alleghanies, hardly con- tain more bunkum than French descriptions of their place in the world as the civilising nation, the one which, in action as well as insight, is always in advance.
There must be other reasons for the peculiarity, and, as usual, when one thinks carefully, they are by no means all bad. A certain vanity, it is true, is in them all, sometimes laughable, sometimes provoking—it is a little provoking, for example, to hear Americans boasting of the size of their country, which is, after all, a small place compared with the British Empire, and only " vast " because it is not scattered— but there is a great deal of patriotism in the habit, too' The French and the Americans are conscious of their country to a most unusual degree—only the Chinese beating them in that respect—and being conscious of it, care about it ; and caring about it, like other lovers, attribute to it all the beauties and virtues under the sun, and burst like them into daring exaggerations. The English were similarly conscious once, and when they were so, talked nearly as much bunkum, —" one Englishman can lick three Frenchmen any day "—but they are not conscious now. They have temporarily for- gotten England, and, except when naval warfare is described, are impatient of self-praise to a degree which often makes them positively and most unreasonably depreciatory, and sometimes, as, for instance, in the struggle for Ireland, gravely affects their political action. The American toast, "Our country, right or wrong !" to which also every French- man and Irishman would respond, could not now be given at an English public dinner without looks, and perhaps expressions, of grave disapproval. Real bunkum, in the sense in which we are using the word, involves a certain indifference to morality, and the English have "gone moral." Then we must allow something, in America and Ireland certainly, and, we think, also in France, for an appreciation of the humour of exaggeration in which our countrymen are, in a very singular way, deficient. They understand it, and like it in other people. They enjoy and buy a thousand American jokes in which there is no other point, and are delighted with Irish stories, which are almost Hindoo in their magnificent exaggera- tions, both of beauty and size ; but they never use the oratorical weapon themselves without the thickest sheath. The orator, to be heard, must be loud, of course ; but to English ears, when at his loudest, he should seem to be using his ordinary voice, or he is set down, silently or openly, as a man with the defect of screaminess. The main reason for the enjoyment of bun- kum is, however, we are convinced, in America, France, and Ireland alike, precisely the same as the reason for its use, and presumably its enjoyment, throughout Asia,—a confusion in the popular mind between it and poetry. The people are longing to get out of the ordinary forms, to arrive at a region where the imagination has more play, to live among bigger and taller things than they do at home ; and their longing is gratified by a form of rhetoric which, the more it approaches rhetorical poetry, as it used to do in Lamar. tine's speeches and does in those of Mr. Chauncey Depew, the more it delights and satisfies their ears. They are pleased, like Asiatics, with words which convey a vague sense of grandeur and brightness and magnificent colour. The deeper their own sense of being units in a crowd, the more they exult in the qualities and powers and potentialities attributed to that crowd,—just as the Irishman who tells you that his land is full of squalor and misery, delights to hear it described as"Erin, first flower of the earth and first gem of the sea." The exaggeration, and it is nothing better, is to him the equivalent of poetry. There is probably no peculiarity, either of race or situation, in the matter, for the tendency is showing itself strongly in the English democracy also, and we rarely see a speech by an English Labour-leader,
particularly if he is a Socialist, in which there is not quite a quantity of bunkum, usually in the form of the wildest praise at once of the claims and the majesty of the people as present in that factory or dockyard. We shall have orators among us yet who will talk like Americans or Frenchmen or Irishmen, and who will be heard with enthusiastic delight, even if their big sentences have in them an element, as most American bunkum has, of self- ridicule, both conscious in the speaker and perceived by his audience. Both alike will be aware of rather wild exaggera- tion, and both alike will be delighted with it. It is not a pleasant prospect to men who, like ourselves, regard bunkum as a singularly childish method of boasting ; but it is coming, and we may as well endeavour to understand it. It depraves public taste abominably ; but we do not know that it affects public morals much, certainly not half so much as the new habit of publicity does ; and it is quite possible that a nation may outgrow it. The English middle-class has done so, and the English masses are nothing but the English middle- classes, half-grown and half-instructed. At all events, there iS one care which cannot in the end be avoided, and cannot Ultimately fail, Every nation must encounter misfortunes ; and in misfortune the habit of uttering bunkum, and the sense of enjoyment in hearing it, are both alike suspended. Even Western men, with a blizzard raging, like the words they hear to bear some faint relation to the facts.
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