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Why has this slackening occurred? For several reasons, all of which pertain to the general corruption of life as well as to that of the insult. There is psychiatry, for one thing. Mothers can no longer be joked about; victims agree with the worst that is said about them. There is provincialism, for another. Oscar Wilde explained: "Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up." You could not get away with that today, even if you thought of it, because nations are as touchy as individuals. Then, too, no one wields real criticism any more. In 1905 Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession was hailed by the New York Sun as "a dramatized stench"; now it would be "fun for the entire family."
There is not much inventiveness of language these days either, no Menckenish words like "pecksniffian," no Rabelais around to rail against "slubberdegullion druggies, ninny lobcocks, or scurvy sneaksbies." Our social conscience interferes as well—the feeling that life offers enough abuse without adding insults to injuries. In short, we are simply too reverent, too reverent about the wrong things. In the past no one was safe. Macaulay said of Socrates: "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."
Of course, the main reason for the death of the insult is the death of confrontation in general. Time was when enemies would wholeheartedly enjoy squaring off, ram to ram. Not today, not in the world of cold war conversation, where it is judged safer and saner to say nothing and assume the worst than to say the worst and get on with it. Now the insult retreats behind a tinny smile and emerges lame from the mouths of wimps at cocktail parties, grasping soda water in both hands and leveling a whine: "I really don't think much of his work." No confrontations there. Face to face with their adversaries they assault them with flattery. Perhaps it's best. Maybe we could no longer endure a life made up of chaotic barkings and overwhelming wit.
Yet there is so much to be said for letting the fur fly, for openly acknowledging your enemy and allowing him to have at you with the full force of his puny, flaccid mind. It is even more pleasurable to give than receive, to hone one's words until they gleam, and watch them fly in lovely arcs toward one's fellow creatures. How happy Sir Edward Coke must have been when he told Sir Walter Raleigh: "There never lived a viler viper upon the face of the earth than thou." How empty Whistler must have felt at the end of his life when he lamented that he had "hardly a warm personal enemy left." Naturally, such violence is not for everyone. It takes a person of extremely bad temper, a truly unredeemable sourpuss, to feel comfortable with insults, to take deep pleasure in things like Mark Twain's observation that Wagner's music is better than it sounds, for example, or in Ben Franklin's letter to a new-found adversary:
You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am
Yours, Roger Rosenblatt