Magick Without Tears

440 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS even low cunning. It can be played by more than two players; but the more there are, the more the element of chance comes in; and this is hateful to really fine players and diminishes the excitement . The rapier-play of two experts, when a word changes from one line of formation to another, and then again, perhaps even a third time, is as exhilarating as a baseball-game or a bull-fight. And what the Tartarus-Tophet-lehanna has all this to do with Education, and the Great Work? This, child! H.G. Wells and others have pointed out with serene justice that a gap in your vocabulary implies a gap in your mind; you lack the corresponding idea. I put this in for you because an American officer, very dear to me, flitted from the Front for a few days to ask me a few questions-oh, "very much above your exalted grade" my dear-and I thought it might be useful to him to learn this game, needing, as it does, such very meagre apparatus, to wile away some of the long hours between attacks. He picked it up quickly enough; but, after a bit when I suggested that he should pass it on to his comrades-in-arms, he jeered at me openly! Their vocabulary to mine, he said, holds just about the same proportion as mine does to yours; 1 hypothesized modestly, "about five percent." (After all, I am forty-five years his senior.) He roared at me. "Not one in a hundred," he said, "know so much as the names of nine-tenths of the subjects that I discuss habitually and fluently. They gasp, they gape, they grunt, they gibber; it is almost always black bewilderment. 1 And some of them are college graduates-which I'm not." He was snatched from school, and given a commission on 1. They attach no meaning to these words: Palaeon tology Criterion Vector Synthesis (They know "synthetic" but can't connect it with the noun) Epitome Foreign Policy (To them a mere phrase; no idea of its connotation or principles) Demonology