What's in a Name? - Stephen Leacock
The titles of books that have come down from the past as part of the world's literature carry with them a sort of inevitability, as if they could not have been anything else: the Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim's Progress, Alice in Wonderland. This is especially so of the titles of the works of the Greeks and Romans. Their idea of a title was to name a thing exactly what it was. When Cicero proposed to write on Friendship he called his Little treatise On Friendship. When Livy wrote down the history of Rome he called his volume The History of Rome--not Meet General Hannibal. Indeed, for many, many centuries the aim of the writer in giving a title to his work was to indicate what it was about, not to make a sensation over its appearance. This was the prevailing fashion which led Dante to call his poem on Hell, simply Hell, as it was, as plain and straight as Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. Hence the earlier vagaries of titles only consisted in an anxious attempt to indicate not only what it was about, but all about it. Thus arose the elaborate explanatory titles that began to come into vogue in the seventh century. These were much stimulated by the writing of religious tracts and controversies, since, notoriously, a preacher finds it hard to stop. Compare--'Meat out of the Larder, or Mediation concerning the necessity; End and Usefulness of Affliction with God's children.' Even the moderate and sagacious Adam Smith would have thought 'The Wealth of Nations' far too snappy a title and called his immortal treatise an 'Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of Nations'. Malthus who followed Adam Smith with his Essay on Population which became and remained one of the world's books, presented it to the world with the title, 'An essay on the principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, Mr, Condorcet and other writers'
It was perhaps in the realm of the drama that titles, at least in England, broke away from literalism to figurative and allusive forms. Henry IV is as plain a title as who should say George VI, but As You Like It is up-to-date as next week. Unlike Shakespeare, Moliere sticks to titles as self-evident as those of Caesar or Cicero--Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le Malade Imaginaire, Le Medecin Malgre Lui. From Shakespeare on we have a string of such play-titles, so familiar in their celebrity that their first peculiar novelty is forgotten, such as Every Man in His Humour or She Stoops to Conquer.
As the writing of fiction grew and stories multiplied it was inevitable that a lot of them would run to the form of The Story of John Smith, or The Adventures of John Smith--and hence simply John Smith, the familiar form of a proper name as a title: compare the long list that begins with Humphrey Clinker, Roderick Random, Masterman Ready, Harry Lorrequer, David Copperfield, When these have been sanctified by use and canonized by success we forget how purely neutral they are of themselves. At times the sound of the name carries aptness, either as a trifle comic (Peregrine Pickle) or as suited to the character, as Charles O'Malley for a dashing Irish soldier. Many such titles have originally something in front of them, that got dropped from common citation, forgotten and very often not now inserted on the title pages of reprinted books, as with Fielding's two novels The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, and History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. The book that we commonly call Gulliver's Travels had as its real title the legend, 'Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, first surgeon and then a captain of several ships.'
Very often, too, the neutral personal title of a book was pieced out with a sub-title, as with Fenimore Cooper's Lionel Lincoln, the Leaguer of Boston. But the use of sub-titles, or rather, second titles, is as fatal as the drink habit. They are apt to keep on and on till they get to comic forms, like: James O'Hooligan, or the Irish Patriot, or Dagger and Dog in Donegal. This example is imaginary but the real ones are just as good.
It remained for Mr. Robert Benchley, whose humour is one of the bright spots of a stricken world, to catch the full value to the humourist of these alternative and unconnected titles. With the simple direct vision of genius he christened one of his books of sketches, 'David Copperfield or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.' The point is that there is no way for anything to be both that at once. The reader was lost between indignation and curiosity, bought the book and therewith forgot all about the title. A similar trick of the ingenuity of inventive genius is seen in Mr. Benchley's latest title. After 1903--What? The reader is under the impression that we know what, and he can't see why Benchley doesn't. The humour of wilful imbecility lives for ever.
If a gold medal were awarded for the most idiotic of titles, Victor Hugo would have received it, by acclamation, were it not that the advice of his horrified friends saved him from it. Hugo, living in exile in the Channel Islands, had just completed the striking story which he proposed to call and later did call by the fine title The Toilers of the Sea ('Les Travailleurs de la Mer'). All readers recall in it the desperate struggle under water of the fisherman seized by an octopus. But it so happened that Hugo's bottle of ink, a large one, with which he had begun the opening page of the story, ran out just as he wrote the concluding pages. Nothing would do but he must re-name his book, 'A Bottle of Ink and Its Contents'. Hugo, with the egotism of authorship, could not see the trivial vanity of such a title.
Almost on a par with this idiocy are titles which are made out of some well-known phrase of familiar allusion, with which there is no real connection and which is merely dragged in because it is well known. Thus Frank Stockton, widely known as a novelist and humorist fifty years ago, used the title A Bicycle in Cathay. This was supposed to make a merry contrast with A Cycle in Cathay, a phrase taken out of Tennyson's poem ('Locksley Hall') and often quoted in those days: 'better fifty years in Europe than a cycle in Cathay.' But the story was not laid in China and the application is so forced as to be painful. Take any well-known phrase, or short quotation, and you may be sure that somebody has already used it, or that somebody presently will. We either have already, or will have soon, novels called To Be or Not to Be, What's in a Name, Coming Through the Rye, and so on endlessly.
But turning back a minute to the use of reinforced titles, with sub-titles and appendages, we may note that perhaps the most colossal example of this sort of thing is found in the original title of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The book is now, or was even in Dickens's lifetime, printed with just the name as a title. But when first written, in instalments, the title read. The life and adventures of Martin Chuzzlewig (not yet Chuzzlewit), his family, friends and enemies, comprising all his will and his ways with a historical record of what he did and what hi didn't, the whole forming a complete key to the house of Chuzzlewig.
Talking of Dickens, it may be recalled that no one gave more thought to titles and names, or attached more importance to them. He himself would have strenuously denied--and was fond of strenuous denials--that David Copperfield was a neutral name; he would have drawn our attention to the various trial and error titles that the book carried at its inception. He would have shown us that both David Copperfield and the story which embodied his life were first very differently christened: 'Mag's Diversions, being the personal history of Mr. Thomas Mag the Younger of Blunderstone Hall.'
Indeed Dickens--an artist in the phonetic significance of names--felt that sounds and syllables carried undercurrents of meaning. Vocal tones, the philologist tells us, antedate speech: names and sounds have queer buried values like the growls of dogs, the satisfied grunt of feeding hogs and the murmur of the turtle dove--lenis sussurrus sub nocte. Thus, when Dickens saw the word Pickwick on a coachmaker's sign, he felt it was just the name for the kind of man he had begun to think of. When he wanted a name for a young man round whose fate are to gather dark clouds of mystery and murder, he called him Edwin Drood. But he did not name him so until he had tried out and rejected an assorted list of names, fitted into a list of suggested titles (as shown on next page).
As a matter of fact Dickens presently adopted the rather mechanical method of writing out for himself a list (there are two hundred and thirty names in it) of Available Names from the Privy Council Education Lists--drawn up and headed Girls, then Boys, more Boys, and more Girls. Thus does genius itself fall back on artifice; but not, be it noted, till genius has first shown where artifice may operate. Some of the names are quite unbelievable, such as William Why and Sally Gimblet and Sophia Doomsday. Among the actual surnames is Sapsea, which was used in Edwin Drood and which no doubt many readers dismissed as impossible.
We spoke above of historical titles and how Mr. Woodward in his admirable biography invites us to Meet General Grant. No doubt if he had called it The History of Ulysses S. Grant we might have missed meeting him. Indeed it seems to be the case that readers nowadays won't take their history 'straight.' The 'History of England' is all right but Mr. Andre Maurois put a new slant to it and turned it into a best seller by calling it, 'The Miracle of England.' 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' did well enough for Gibbon, but a new history of the Byzantine Empire appearing this autumn is called, 'Emperors, Angels and Eunuchs' It sounds more exciting.
TITLES
Edwin Drood
The Loss of James Wakefield
James' Disappearance
Flight and Pursuit
Sworn to Avenge it
One Object in Life
The Kinsman's Devotion
The Two Kinsmen
The Love of Edwin Brood
The Loss of Edwin Brude
The Mystery in the Drood Family
The Loss of Edwin Drood
The Flight of Edwin Drood
Edwin Drood in Hiding
The Loss of Edwin Drude
The Disappearance of Edwin Drude
The Mystery of Edwin Drude
Naturally enough in the vast market for popular storybooks to-day there is a tremendous pressure put on writers to try to find titles which attract at sight--'Mysteries' so mysterious that the very name of them ties us in a knot; 'Horrors' so horrible that they can reach us through a bookstore window. In Wilkie Collins's day such a title as The Woman in White sent a chill down the Victorian spine: to-day we have to ring the changes on The Murder on the Links, The Murder on the Express, The Murder in the Sky--if there's any new place to 'lay' a murder, let's have it and get it over.
Such is the craze for novelty in titles that now-a-days when the reviewers of the magazines review a book they won't even write it up over its own title--they make up a new one. If the author calls his book. Six Months in Mexico, the reviewer heads up his talk on it as 'Down Under the Rio Grande.' 'Across Czechoslovakia' reappears as 'Checking Up on the Czechs' This is especially so when the reviewer and his magazine do not rind enough 'pep' in the original title; 'Notes on Insect 'Life' has to become 'Revelations of a Bug Man.'
Some time since I amused myself by reconstructing what would have been the effect if this method had been applied to some of the great masterpieces of the past. The results, as far as I recall them, converted Caesar's 'Bellum Britannicum' into 'An Old Campaigner's Log: new volume of Memoirs on Savage Life in the British Isles,' and changed Milton's Paradise Lost into Raising Hell, or Pen Pictures of Battles in the Sky.
But of course the reviewers too, like the authors, must keep up to date and be novel or get trampled under.
