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How To Prove It
HOW TO PROVE IT

A Structured Approach
Third Edition

Daniel J. Velleman
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Amherst College
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Vermont
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning,
and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108424189
DOI: 10.1017/9781108539890
© Daniel J. Velleman 2019
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant
collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1994
Second edition 2006
Third edition 2019
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Velleman, Daniel J., author.
Title: How to prove it : a structured approach / Daniel J. Velleman (Amherst College, Massachusetts).
Description: Third edition. | Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2019] |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013488| ISBN 9781108424189 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781108439534 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Logic, Symbolic and mathematical–Textbooks. | Mathematics–Textbooks. | Proof
theory–Textbooks.
Classification: LCC QA9.V38 2019 | DDC 511.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013488
ISBN 978-1-108-42418-9 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-43953-4 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any
content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Shelley
 Contents

Preface to the Third Edition

Introduction

1 Sentential Logic
1.1 Deductive Reasoning and Logical Connectives
1.2 Truth Tables
1.3 Variables and Sets
1.4 Operations on Sets
1.5 The Conditional and Biconditional Connectives

2 Quantificational Logic
2.1 Quantifiers
2.2 Equivalences Involving Quantifiers
2.3 More Operations on Sets

3 Proofs
3.1 Proof Strategies
3.2 Proofs Involving Negations and Conditionals
3.3 Proofs Involving Quantifiers
3.4 Proofs Involving Conjunctions and Biconditionals
3.5 Proofs Involving Disjunctions
3.6 Existence and Uniqueness Proofs
3.7 More Examples of Proofs

4 Relations
4.1 Ordered Pairs and Cartesian Products
4.2 Relations
 4.3 More About Relations
4.4 Ordering Relations
4.5 Equivalence Relations

5 Functions
5.1 Functions
5.2 One-to-One and Onto
5.3 Inverses of Functions
5.4 Closures
5.5 Images and Inverse Images: A Research Project

6 Mathematical Induction
6.1 Proof by Mathematical Induction
6.2 More Examples
6.3 Recursion
6.4 Strong Induction
6.5 Closures Again

7 Number Theory
7.1 Greatest Common Divisors
7.2 Prime Factorization
7.3 Modular Arithmetic
7.4 Euler’s Theorem
7.5 Public-Key Cryptography

8 Infinite Sets
8.1 Equinumerous Sets
8.2 Countable and Uncountable Sets
8.3 The Cantor-Schrӧder-Bernstein Theorem

Appendix: Solutions to Selected Exercises

Suggestions for Further Reading
Summary of Proof Techniques
Index
 Preface to the Third Edition

Students of mathematics and computer science often have trouble the first
time they’re asked to work seriously with mathematical proofs, because
they don’t know the “rules of the game.” What is expected of you if you are
asked to prove something? What distinguishes a correct proof from an
incorrect one? This book is intended to help students learn the answers to
these questions by spelling out the underlying principles involved in the
construction of proofs.
Many students get their first exposure to mathematical proofs in a high
school course on geometry. Unfortunately, students in high school geometry
are usually taught to think of a proof as a numbered list of statements and
reasons, a view of proofs that is too restrictive to be very useful. There is a
parallel with computer science here that can be instructive. Early
programming languages encouraged a similar restrictive view of computer
programs as numbered lists of instructions. Now computer scientists have
moved away from such languages and teach programming by using
languages that encourage an approach called “structured programming.”
The discussion of proofs in this book is inspired by the belief that many of
the considerations that have led computer scientists to embrace the
structured approach to programming apply to proof writing as well. You
might say that this book teaches “structured proving.”
In structured programming, a computer program is constructed, not by
listing instructions one after another, but by combining certain basic
structures such as the if-else construct and do-while loop of the Java
programming language. These structures are combined, not only by listing
them one after another, but also by nesting one within another. For example,
a program constructed by nesting an if-else construct within a do-while loop
would look like this:
do
 if [condition]
[List of instructions goes here.]
else
[Alternative list of instructions goes here.]
while [condition]
The indenting in this program outline is not absolutely necessary, but it is a
convenient method often used in computer science to display the underlying
structure of a program.
Mathematical proofs are also constructed by combining certain basic
proof structures. For example, a proof of a statement of the form “if P then
Q” often uses what might be called the “suppose-until” structure: we
suppose that P is true until we are able to reach the conclusion that Q is
true, at which point we retract this supposition and conclude that the
statement “if P then Q” is true. Another example is the “for arbitrary x
prove” structure: to prove a statement of the form “for all x, P(x),” we
declare x to be an arbitrary object and then prove P (x). Once we reach the
conclusion that P(x) is true we retract the declaration of x as arbitrary and
conclude that the statement “for all x, P(x)” is true. Furthermore, to prove
more complex statements these structures are often combined, not only by
listing one after another, but also by nesting one within another. For
example, to prove a statement of the form “for all x, if P(x) then Q(x)” we
would probably nest a “suppose-until” structure within a “for arbitrary x
prove” structure, getting a proof of this form:
Let x be arbitrary.
Suppose P(x) is true.
[Proof of Q(x) goes here.]
Thus, if P(x) then Q(x).
Thus, for all x, if P(x) then Q(x).
As before, we have used indenting to make the underlying structure of the
proof clear.
Of course, mathematicians don’t ordinarily write their proofs in this
indented form. Our aim in this book is to teach students to write proofs in
ordinary paragraphs, just as mathematicians do, and not in the indented
form. Nevertheless, our approach is based on the belief that if students are
to succeed at writing such proofs, they must understand the underlying
structure that proofs have. They must learn, for example, that sentences like
“Let x be arbitrary” and “Suppose P” are not isolated steps in proofs, but
are used to introduce the “for arbitrary x prove” and “suppose-until” proof
structures. It is not uncommon for beginning students to use these sentences
inappropriately in other ways. Such mistakes are analogous to the
programming error of using a “do” with no matching “while.”
Note that in our examples, the choice of proof structure is guided by the
logical form of the statement being proven. For this reason, the book begins
with elementary logic to familiarize students with the various forms that
mathematical statements take. Chapter 1 discusses logical connectives, and
quantifiers are introduced in Chapter 2. These chapters also present the
basics of set theory, because it is an important subject that is used in the rest
of the book (and throughout mathematics), and also because it serves to
illustrate many of the points of logic discussed in these chapters.
Chapter 3 covers structured proving techniques in a systematic way,
running through the various forms that mathematical statements can take
and discussing the proof structures appropriate for each form. The examples
of proofs in this chapter are for the most part chosen, not for their
mathematical content, but for the proof structures they illustrate. This is
especially true early in the chapter, when only a few proof techniques have
been discussed, and as a result many of the proofs in this part of the chapter
are rather trivial. As the chapter progresses, the proofs get more
sophisticated and more interesting, mathematically.
Chapters 4 and 5, on relations and functions, serve two purposes. First,
they provide subject matter on which students can practice the proof-
writing techniques from Chapter 3. And second, they introduce students to
some fundamental concepts used in all branches of mathematics.
Chapter 6 is devoted to a method of proof that is very important in both
mathematics and computer science: mathematical induction. The
presentation builds on the techniques from Chapter 3, which students
should have mastered by this point in the book.
After completing Chapter 6, students should be ready to tackle more
substantial mathematical topics. Two such topics are presented in Chapters
7 and 8. Chapter 7, new in this third edition, gives an introduction to
number theory, and Chapter 8 discusses infinite cardinalities. These
chapters give students more practice with mathematical proofs, and they
also provide a glimpse of what more advanced mathematics is like.
Every section of every chapter ends with a list of exercises. Some
exercises are marked with an asterisk; solutions or hints for these exercises
are given in the appendix. Exercises marked with the symbol PD can be done
using Proof Designer software, which is available free on the internet.
The biggest changes in this third edition are the addition of a new chapter
on number theory and also more than 150 additional exercises. The section
on reflexive, symmetric, and transitive closures of relations has been
deleted from Chapter 4 (although these topics are now introduced in some
exercises in Section 4.4); it has been replaced with a new section in Chapter
5 on closures of sets under functions. There are also numerous small
changes throughout the text.
I would like to thank all those who sent me comments about earlier
editions of this book. In particular, John Corcoran and Raymond Boute
made several helpful suggestions. I am also grateful for advice from
Jonathan Sands and several anonymous reviewers.
 Introduction

What is mathematics? High school mathematics is concerned mostly with

solving equations and computing answers to numerical questions. College
mathematics deals with a wider variety of questions, involving not only
numbers, but also sets, functions, and other mathematical objects. What ties
them together is the use of deductive reasoning to find the answers to
questions. When you solve an equation for x you are using the information
given by the equation to deduce what the value of x must be. Similarly,
when mathematicians solve other kinds of mathematical problems, they
always justify their conclusions with deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning in mathematics is usually presented in the form of a
proof. One of the main purposes of this book is to help you develop your
mathematical reasoning ability in general, and in particular your ability to
read and write proofs. In later chapters we’ll study how proofs are
constructed in detail, but first let’s take a look at a few examples of proofs.
Don’t worry if you have trouble understanding these proofs. They’re just
intended to give you a taste of what mathematical proofs are like. In some
cases you may be able to follow many of the steps of the proof, but you
may be puzzled about why the steps are combined in the way they are, or
how anyone could have thought of the proof. If so, we ask you to be patient.
Many of these questions will be answered later in this book, particularly in
Chapter 3.
All of our examples of proofs in this introduction will involve prime
numbers. Recall that an integer larger than 1 is said to be prime if it cannot
be written as a product of two smaller positive integers. If it can be written
as a product of two smaller positive integers, then it is composite. For
example, 6 is a composite number, since 6 = 2 · 3, but 7 is a prime number.
Before we can give an example of a proof involving prime numbers, we
need to find something to prove – some fact about prime numbers whose
correctness can be verified with a proof. Sometimes you can find interesting
patterns in mathematics just by trying out a calculation on a few numbers.
For example, consider the table in Figure I.1. For each integer n from 2 to
10, the table shows whether or not both n and 2n − 1 are prime, and a
surprising pattern emerges. It appears that 2n − 1 is prime in precisely those
cases in which n is prime!

Figure I.1.

Will this pattern continue? It is tempting to guess that it will, but this is
only a guess. Mathematicians call such guesses conjectures. Thus, we have
the following two conjectures:

Conjecture 1. Suppose n is an integer larger than 1 and n is prime. Then 2n

− 1 is prime.
Conjecture 2. Suppose n is an integer larger than 1 and n is not prime.
Then 2n − 1 is not prime.
Unfortunately, if we continue the table in Figure I.1, we immediately find
that Conjecture 1 is incorrect. It is easy to check that 11 is prime, but 211 −
1 = 2047 = 23·89, so 211 − 1 is composite. Thus, 11 is a counterexample to
Conjecture 1. The existence of even one counterexample establishes that the
conjecture is incorrect, but it is interesting to note that in this case there are
many counterexamples. If we continue checking numbers up to 30, we find
two more counterexamples to Conjecture 1: both 23 and 29 are prime, but
223 − 1 = 8,388,607 = 47 · 178,481 and 229 − 1 = 536,870,911 = 2,089 ·
256,999. However, no number up to 30 is a counterexample to Conjecture
2.
 Do you think that Conjecture 2 is correct? Having found
counterexamples to Conjecture 1, we know that this conjecture is incorrect,
but our failure to find a counterexample to Conjecture 2 does not show that
it is correct. Perhaps there are counterexamples, but the smallest one is
larger than 30. Continuing to check examples might uncover a
counterexample, or, if it doesn’t, it might increase our confidence in the
conjecture. But we can never be sure that the conjecture is correct if we
only check examples. No matter how many examples we check, there is
always the possibility that the next one will be the first counterexample.
The only way we can be sure that Conjecture 2 is correct is to prove it.
In fact, Conjecture 2 is correct. Here is a proof of the conjecture:
Proof of Conjecture 2. Since n is not prime, there are positive integers a and
b such that a < n, b < n, and n = ab. Let x = 2b − 1 and y = 1 + 2b + 22b + · ·
· + 2(a − 1)b. Then

Since b < n, we can conclude that x = 2b − 1 < 2n − 1. Also, since ab = n

> a, it follows that b > 1. Therefore, x = 2b − 1 > 21 − 1 = 1, so y < xy = 2n
− 1. Thus, we have shown that 2n − 1 can be written as the product of two
positive integers x and y, both of which are smaller than 2n − 1, so 2n − 1 is
not prime.
□
Now that the conjecture has been proven, we can call it a theorem. Don’t
worry if you find the proof somewhat mysterious. We’ll return to it again at
the end of Chapter 3 to analyze how it was constructed. For the moment,
the most important point to understand is that if n is any integer larger than
1 that can be written as a product of two smaller positive integers a and b,
then the proof gives a method (admittedly, a somewhat mysterious one) of
writing 2n − 1 as a product of two smaller positive integers x and y. Thus, if
n is not prime, then 2n − 1 must also not be prime. For example, suppose n
= 12, so 2n − 1 = 4095. Since 12 = 3 · 4, we could take a = 3 and b = 4 in
the proof. Then according to the formulas for x and y given in the proof, we
b
would have x = 2b − 1 = 24 − 1 = 15 and y = 1 + 2b + 22 + · · · + 2(a − 1)b =
1 + 24 + 28 = 273. And, just as the formulas in the proof predict, we have xy
= 15 · 273 = 4095 = 2n − 1. Of course, there are other ways of factoring 12
into a product of two smaller integers, and these might lead to other ways of
factoring 4095. For example, since 12 = 2 · 6, we could use the values a = 2
and b = 6. Try computing the corresponding values of x and y and make
sure their product is 4095.
Although we already know that Conjecture 1 is incorrect, there are still
interesting questions we can ask about it. If we continue checking prime
numbers n to see if 2n − 1 is prime, will we continue to find
counterexamples to the conjecture – examples for which 2n − 1 is not
prime? Will we continue to find examples for which 2n − 1 is prime? If
there were only finitely many prime numbers, then we might be able to
investigate these questions by simply checking 2n − 1 for every prime
number n. But in fact there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid
(circa 300 BCE) gave a proof of this fact in Book IX of his Elements. His
proof is one of the most famous in all of mathematics:1

Theorem 3. There are infinitely many prime numbers.

Proof. Suppose there are only finitely many prime numbers. Let p1, p2, . . . ,
pn be a list of all prime numbers. Let m = p1p2 · · · pn + 1. Note that m is not
divisible by p1, since dividing m by p1 gives a quotient of p2p3 · · · pn and a
remainder of 1. Similarly, m is not divisible by any of p2, p3, . . . , pn.
We now use the fact that every integer larger than 1 is either prime or can
be written as a product of two or more primes. (We’ll see a proof of this fact
in Chapter 6 – see Theorem 6.4.2.) Clearly m is larger than 1, so m is either
prime or a product of primes. Suppose first that m is prime. Note that m is
larger than all of the numbers in the list p1, p2, . . . , pn, so we’ve found a
prime number not in this list. But this contradicts our assumption that this
was a list of all prime numbers.
Now suppose m is a product of primes. Let q be one of the primes in this
product. Then m is divisible by q. But we’ve already seen that m is not
divisible by any of the numbers in the list p1, p2, . . . , pn, so once again we
have a contradiction with the assumption that this list included all prime
numbers.
Since the assumption that there are finitely many prime numbers has led
to a contradiction, there must be infinitely many prime numbers.
□
Once again, you should not be concerned if some aspects of this proof
seem mysterious. After you’ve read Chapter 3 you’ll be better prepared to
understand the proof in detail. We’ll return to this proof then and analyze its
structure.
We have seen that if n is not prime then 2n − 1 cannot be prime, but if n is
prime then 2n − 1 can be either prime or composite. Because there are
infinitely many prime numbers, there are infinitely many numbers of the
form 2n − 1 that, based on what we know so far, might be prime. But how
many of them are prime?
Prime numbers of the form 2n − 1 are called Mersenne primes, after
Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a French monk and scholar who
studied these numbers. Although many Mersenne primes have been found,
it is still not known if there are infinitely many of them. Many of the largest
known prime numbers are Mersenne primes. As of this writing (February
2019), the largest known prime number is the Mersenne prime 282,589,933 −
1, a number with 24,862,048 digits.
Mersenne primes are related to perfect numbers, the subject of another
famous unsolved problem of mathematics. A positive integer n is said to be
perfect if n is equal to the sum of all positive integers smaller than n that
divide n. (For any two integers m and n, we say that m divides n if n is
divisible by m; in other words, if there is an integer q such that n = qm.) For
example, the only positive integers smaller than 6 that divide 6 are 1, 2, and
3, and 1+ 2+ 3 = 6. Thus, 6 is a perfect number. The next smallest perfect
number is 28. (You should check for yourself that 28 is perfect by finding
all the positive integers smaller than 28 that divide 28 and adding them up.)
Euclid proved that if 2n − 1 is prime, then 2n−1(2n − 1) is perfect. Thus,
every Mersenne prime gives rise to a perfect number. Furthermore, about
2000 years after Euclid’s proof, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler
(1707–1783), the most prolific mathematician in history, proved that every
even perfect number arises in this way. (For example, note that 6 = 21(22 −
1) and 28 = 22(23 − 1).) Because it is not known if there are infinitely many
Mersenne primes, it is also not known if there are infinitely many even
perfect numbers. It is also not known if there are any odd perfect numbers.
For proofs of the theorems of Euclid and Euler, see exercises 18 and 19 in
Section 7.4.
Although there are infinitely many prime numbers, the primes thin out as
we look at larger and larger numbers. For example, there are 25 primes
between 1 and 100, 16 primes between 1001 and 1100, and only six primes
between 1,000,001 and 1,000,100. As our last introductory example of a
proof, we show that there are long stretches of consecutive positive integers
containing no primes at all. In this proof, we’ll use the following
terminology: for any positive integer n, the product of all integers from 1 to
n is called n factorial and is denoted n!. Thus, n! = 1 · 2 · 3 · · · n. As with
our previous two proofs, we’ll return to this proof at the end of Chapter 3 to
analyze its structure.

Theorem 4. For every positive integer n, there is a sequence of n

consecutive positive integers containing no primes.
Proof. Suppose n is a positive integer. Let x = (n + 1)! +2. We will show
that none of the numbers x, x + 1, x + 2, . . . , x + (n − 1) is prime. Since this
is a sequence of n consecutive positive integers, this will prove the theorem.
To see that x is not prime, note that

Thus, x can be written as a product of two smaller positive integers, so x is

not prime.
Similarly, we have

so x + 1 is also not prime. In general, consider any number x + i, where 0 ≤ i

≤ n − 1. Then we have
so x + i is not prime.
□
Theorem 4 shows that there are sometimes long stretches between one
prime and the next prime. But primes also sometimes occur close together.
Since 2 is the only even prime number, the only pair of consecutive integers
that are both prime is 2 and 3. But there are lots of pairs of primes that
differ by only two, for example, 5 and 7, 29 and 31, and 7949 and 7951.
Such pairs of primes are called twin primes. It is not known whether there
are infinitely many twin primes.
Recently, significant progress has been made on the twin primes
question. In 2013, Yitang Zhang (1955–) proved that there is a positive
integer d ≤ 70,000,000 such that there are infinitely many pairs of prime
numbers that differ by d. Work of many other mathematicians in 2013–14
narrowed down the possibilities for d to d ≤ 246. Of course, if the statement
holds with d = 2 then there are infinitely many twin primes.

Exercises
Note: Solutions or hints for exercises marked with an asterisk (*) are given
in the appendix.

*1. (a) Factor 215 − 1 = 32,767 into a product of two smaller positive
integers.
(b) Find an integer x such that 1 < x < 232,767 − 1 and 232,767 − 1 is
divisible by x.
2. Make some conjectures about the values of n for which 3n − 1 is
prime or the values of n for which 3n − 2n is prime. (You might start
by making a table similar to Figure I.1.)
*3. The proof of Theorem 3 gives a method for finding a prime number
different from any in a given list of prime numbers.
(a) Use this method to find a prime different from 2, 3, 5, and 7.
(b) Use this method to find a prime different from 2, 5, and 11.
4. Find five consecutive integers that are not prime.
5. Use the table in Figure I.1 and the discussion on p. 5 to find two more
perfect numbers.
6. The sequence 3, 5, 7 is a list of three prime numbers such that each
pair of adjacent numbers in the list differ by two. Are there any more
such “triplet primes”?
7. A pair of distinct positive integers (m, n) is called amicable if the sum
of all positive integers smaller than n that divide n is m, and the sum
of all positive integers smaller than m that divide m is n. Show that
(220, 284) is amicable.
1
Euclid phrased the theorem and proof somewhat differently. We have chosen to take a more
modern approach in our presentation.
 1

Sentential Logic

1.1 Deductive Reasoning and Logical

Connectives
As we saw in the introduction, proofs play a central role in mathematics,
and deductive reasoning is the foundation on which proofs are based.
Therefore, we begin our study of mathematical reasoning and proofs by
examining how deductive reasoning works.

Example 1.1.1. Here are three examples of deductive reasoning:

1. It will either rain or snow tomorrow.
It’s too warm for snow.
Therefore, it will rain.
2. If today is Sunday, then I don’t have to go to work today.
Today is Sunday.
Therefore, I don’t have to go to work today.
3. I will go to work either tomorrow or today.
I’m going to stay home today.
Therefore, I will go to work tomorrow.
In each case, we have arrived at a conclusion from the assumption that
some other statements, called premises, are true. For example, the premises
in argument 3 are the statements “I will go to work either tomorrow or
today” and “I’m going to stay home today.” The conclusion is “I will go to
work tomorrow,” and it seems to be forced on us somehow by the premises.
But is this conclusion really correct? After all, isn’t it possible that I’ll
stay home today, and then wake up sick tomorrow and end up staying home
again? If that happened, the conclusion would turn out to be false. But
notice that in that case the first premise, which said that I would go to work
either tomorrow or today, would be false as well! Although we have no
guarantee that the conclusion is true, it can only be false if at least one of
the premises is also false. If both premises are true, we can be sure that the
conclusion is also true. This is the sense in which the conclusion is forced
on us by the premises, and this is the standard we will use to judge the
correctness of deductive reasoning. We will say that an argument is valid if
the premises cannot all be true without the conclusion being true as well.
All three of the arguments in our example are valid arguments.
Here’s an example of an invalid deductive argument:
Either the butler is guilty or the maid is guilty.
Either the maid is guilty or the cook is guilty.
Therefore, either the butler is guilty or the cook is guilty.
The argument is invalid because the conclusion could be false even if both
premises are true. For example, if the maid were guilty, but the butler and
the cook were both innocent, then both premises would be true and the
conclusion would be false.
We can learn something about what makes an argument valid by
comparing the three arguments in Example 1.1.1. On the surface it might
seem that arguments 2 and 3 have the most in common, because they’re
both about the same subject: attendance at work. But in terms of the
reasoning used, arguments 1 and 3 are the most similar. They both introduce
two possibilities in the first premise, rule out the second one with the
second premise, and then conclude that the first possibility must be the
case. In other words, both arguments have the form:
P or Q.
Not Q.
Therefore, P.
It is this form, and not the subject matter, that makes these arguments valid.
You can see that argument 1 has this form by thinking of the letter P as
standing for the statement “It will rain tomorrow,” and Q as standing for “It
will snow tomorrow.” For argument 3, P would be “I will go to work
tomorrow,” and Q would be “I will go to work today.”
 Replacing certain statements in each argument with letters, as we have in
stating the form of arguments 1 and 3, has two advantages. First, it keeps us
from being distracted by aspects of the arguments that don’t affect their
validity. You don’t need to know anything about weather forecasting or
work habits to recognize that arguments 1 and 3 are valid. That’s because
both arguments have the form shown earlier, and you can tell that this
argument form is valid without even knowing what P and Q stand for. If
you don’t believe this, consider the following argument:
Either the framger widget is misfiring, or the wrompal mechanism is out
of alignment.
I’ve checked the alignment of the wrompal mechanism, and it’s fine.
Therefore, the framger widget is misfiring.
If a mechanic gave this explanation after examining your car, you might
still be mystified about why the car won’t start, but you’d have no trouble
following his logic!
Perhaps more important, our analysis of the forms of arguments 1 and 3
makes clear what is important in determining their validity: the words or
and not. In most deductive reasoning, and in particular in mathematical
reasoning, the meanings of just a few words give us the key to
understanding what makes a piece of reasoning valid or invalid. (Which are
the important words in argument 2 in Example 1.1.1?) The first few
chapters of this book are devoted to studying those words and how they are
used in mathematical writing and reasoning.
In this chapter, we’ll concentrate on words used to combine statements to
form more complex statements. We’ll continue to use letters to stand for
statements, but only for unambiguous statements that are either true or
false. Questions, exclamations, and vague statements will not be allowed. It
will also be useful to use symbols, sometimes called connective symbols, to
stand for some of the words used to combine statements. Here are our first
three connective symbols and the words they stand for:
 Thus, if P and Q stand for two statements, then we’ll write P ∨ Q to
stand for the statement “P or Q,” P ∧ Q for “P and Q,” and ¬P for “not P
“or “P is false.” The statement P ∨ Q is sometimes called the disjunction of
P and Q, P ∧ Q is called the conjunction of P and Q, and ¬ P is called the
negation of P.

Example 1.1.2. Analyze the logical forms of the following statements:

1. Either John went to the store, or we’re out of eggs.
2. Joe is going to leave home and not come back.
3. Either Bill is at work and Jane isn’t, or Jane is at work and Bill isn’t.
Solutions
1. If we let P stand for the statement “John went to the store” and Q
stand for “We’re out of eggs,” then this statement could be
represented symbolically as P ∨ Q.
2. If we let P stand for the statement “Joe is going to leave home” and Q
stand for “Joe is not going to come back,” then we could represent
this statement symbolically as P ∧ Q. But this analysis misses an
important feature of the statement, because it doesn’t indicate that Q
is a negative statement. We could get a better analysis by letting R
stand for the statement “Joe is going to come back” and then writing
the statement Q as ¬R. Plugging this into our first analysis of the
original statement, we get the improved analysis P ∧ ¬R.
3. Let B stand for the statement “Bill is at work” and J for the statement
“Jane is at work.” Then the first half of the statement, “Bill is at work
and Jane isn’t,” can be represented as B ∧ ¬J. Similarly, the second
half is J ∧ ¬B. To represent the entire statement, we must combine
these two with or, forming their disjunction, so the solution is (B ∧
¬J) ∨ (J ∧ ¬B).
Notice that in analyzing the third statement in the preceding example, we
added parentheses when we formed the disjunction of B ∧ ¬J and J ∧ ¬B to
indicate unambiguously which statements were being combined. This is
like the use of parentheses in algebra, in which, for example, the product of
a + b and a − b would be written (a + b) · (a − b), with the parentheses
serving to indicate unambiguously which quantities are to be multiplied. As
in algebra, it is convenient in logic to omit some parentheses to make our
expressions shorter and easier to read. However, we must agree on some
conventions about how to read such expressions so that they are still
unambiguous. One convention is that the symbol ¬ always applies only to
the statement that comes immediately after it. For example, ¬P ∧ Q means
(¬P) ∧ Q rather than ¬(P ∧ Q). We’ll see some other conventions about
parentheses later.

Example 1.1.3. What English sentences are represented by the following

expressions?

1. (¬S ∧ L) ∨ S, where S stands for “John is smart” and L stands for

“John is lucky.”
2. ¬S ∧ (L ∨ S), where S and L have the same meanings as before.
3. ¬(S ∧ L) ∨ S, with S and L still as before.
Solutions
1. Either John isn’t smart and he is lucky, or he’s smart.
2. John isn’t smart, and either he’s lucky or he’s smart. Notice how the
placement of the word either in English changes according to where
the parentheses are.
3. Either John isn’t both smart and lucky, or John is smart. The word
both in English also helps distinguish the different possible positions
of parentheses.

It is important to keep in mind that the symbols ∧, ∨, and ¬ don’t really

correspond to all uses of the words and, or, and not in English. For
example, the symbol ∧ could not be used to represent the use of the word
and in the sentence “John and Bill are friends,” because in this sentence the
word and is not being used to combine two statements. The symbols ∧ and
∨ can only be used between two statements, to form their conjunction or
disjunction, and the symbol ¬ can only be used before a statement, to
negate it. This means that certain strings of letters and symbols are simply
meaningless. For example, P ¬ ∧ Q, P ∧ ∨ Q, and P ¬ Q are all
“ungrammatical” expressions in the language of logic. “Grammatical”
expressions, such as those in Examples 1.1.2 and 1.1.3, are sometimes
called well-formed formulas or just formulas. Once again, it may be helpful
to think of an analogy with algebra, in which the symbols +, −, ·, and ÷ can
be used between two numbers, as operators, and the symbol − can also be
used before a number, to negate it. These are the only ways that these
symbols can be used in algebra, so expressions such as x − ÷ y are
meaningless.
Sometimes, words other than and, or, and not are used to express the
meanings represented by ∧, ∨, and ¬. For example, consider the first
statement in Example 1.1.3. Although we gave the English translation
“Either John isn’t smart and he is lucky, or he’s smart,” an alternative way
of conveying the same information would be to say “Either John isn’t smart
but he is lucky, or he’s smart.” Often, the word but is used in English to
mean and, especially when there is some contrast or conflict between the
statements being combined. For a more striking example, imagine a
weather forecaster ending his forecast with the statement “Rain and snow
are the only two possibilities for tomorrow’s weather.” This is just a
roundabout way of saying that it will either rain or snow tomorrow. Thus,
even though the forecaster has used the word and, the meaning expressed
by his statement is a disjunction. The lesson of these examples is that to
determine the logical form of a statement you must think about what the
statement means, rather than just translating word by word into symbols.
Sometimes logical words are hidden within mathematical notation. For
example, consider the statement 3 ≤ π. Although it appears to be a simple
statement that contains no words of logic, if you read it out loud you will
hear the word or. If we let P stand for the statement 3 < π and Q for the
statement 3 = π, then the statement 3 ≤ π would be written P ∨ Q. In this
example the statements represented by the letters P and Q are so short that
it hardly seems worthwhile to abbreviate them with single letters. In cases
like this we will sometimes not bother to replace the statements with letters,
so we might also write this statement as (3 < π) ∨ (3 = π).
For a slightly more complicated example, consider the statement 3 ≤ π <
4. This statement means 3 ≤ π and π < 4, so once again a word of logic has
been hidden in mathematical notation. Filling in the meaning that we just
worked out for 3 ≤ π, we can write the whole statement as [(3 < π) ∨ (3 =
π)] ∧ (π < 4). Knowing that the statement has this logical form might be
important in understanding a piece of mathematical reasoning involving this
statement.

Exercises
*1. Analyze the logical forms of the following statements:
(a) We’ll have either a reading assignment or homework problems, but
we won’t have both homework problems and a test.
(b) You won’t go skiing, or you will and there won’t be any snow.
(c)
2. Analyze the logical forms of the following statements:
(a) Either John and Bill are both telling the truth, or neither of them is.
(b) I’ll have either fish or chicken, but I won’t have both fish and mashed
potatoes.
(c) 3 is a common divisor of 6, 9, and 15.
3. Analyze the logical forms of the following statements:
(a) Alice and Bob are not both in the room.
(b) Alice and Bob are both not in the room.
(c) Either Alice or Bob is not in the room.
(d) Neither Alice nor Bob is in the room.
4. Analyze the logical forms of the following statements:
(a) Either both Ralph and Ed are tall, or both of them are handsome.
(b) Both Ralph and Ed are either tall or handsome.
(c) Both Ralph and Ed are neither tall nor handsome.
(d) Neither Ralph nor Ed is both tall and handsome.
5. Which of the following expressions are well-formed formulas?
(a) ¬(¬P ∨ ¬¬R).
(b) ¬(P, Q, ∧ R).
(c) P ∧ ¬ P.
(d) (P ∧ Q)(P ∨ R).
*6. Let P stand for the statement “I will buy the pants” and S for the
statement “I will buy the shirt.” What English sentences are
represented by the following formulas?
(a) ¬(P ∧ ¬S).
(b) ¬P ∧ ¬S.
(c) ¬P ∨ ¬S.
7. Let S stand for the statement “Steve is happy” and G for “George is
happy.” What English sentences are represented by the following
formulas?
(a) (S ∨ G) ∧ (¬ S ∨ ¬G).
(b) [S ∨ (G ∧ ¬S)] ∨ ¬G.
(c) S ∨ [G ∧ (¬ S ∨ ¬G)].
8. Let T stand for the statement “Taxes will go up” and D for “The
deficit will go up.” What English sentences are represented by the
following formulas?
(a) T ∨ D.
(b) ¬(T ∧ D) ∧ ¬(¬T ∧ ¬D).
(c) (T ∧ ¬ D)∨ (D ∧ ¬T).
9. Identify the premises and conclusions of the following deductive
arguments and analyze their logical forms. Do you think the reasoning
is valid? (Although you will have only your intuition to guide you in
answering this last question, in the next section we will develop some
techniques for determining the validity of arguments.)
(a) Jane and Pete won’t both win the math prize. Pete will win either the
math prize or the chemistry prize. Jane will win the math prize.
Therefore, Pete will win the chemistry prize.
(b) The main course will be either beef or fish. The vegetable will be
either peas or corn. We will not have both fish as a main course and
corn as a vegetable. Therefore, we will not have both beef as a main
course and peas as a vegetable.
(c) Either John or Bill is telling the truth. Either Sam or Bill is lying.
Therefore, either John is telling the truth or Sam is lying.
(d) Either sales will go up and the boss will be happy, or expenses will go
up and the boss won’t be happy. Therefore, sales and expenses will
not both go up.

1.2 Truth Tables

We saw in Section 1.1 that an argument is valid if the premises cannot all be
true without the conclusion being true as well. Thus, to understand how
words such as and, or, and not affect the validity of arguments, we must see
how they contribute to the truth or falsity of statements containing them.
When we evaluate the truth or falsity of a statement, we assign to it one
of the labels true or false, and this label is called its truth value. It is clear
how the word and contributes to the truth value of a statement containing it.
A statement of the form P ∧ Q can be true only if both P and Q are true; if
either P or Q is false, then P ∧ Q will be false too. Because we have
assumed that P and Q both stand for statements that are either true or false,
we can summarize all the possibilities with the table shown in Figure 1.1.
This is called a truth table for the formula P ∧ Q. Each row in the truth
table represents one of the four possible combinations of truth values for the
statements P and Q. Although these four possibilities can appear in the table
in any order, it is best to list them systematically so we can be sure that no
possibilities have been skipped. The truth table for ¬P is also quite easy to
construct because for ¬P to be true, P must be false. The table is shown in
Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.2.

The truth table for P ∨ Q is a little trickier. The first three lines should
certainly be filled in as shown in Figure 1.3, but there may be some
question about the last line. Should P ∨ Q be true or false in the case in
which P and Q are both true? In other words, does P ∨ Q mean “P or Q, or
both” or does it mean “P or Q but not both”? The first way of interpreting
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emphasis, humour of anecdote, and at times with a charming
sentimental music of speech. They say what everyone present would
regard as the right thing to say, and they say it very much better than
anybody else on the platform could say it. He is a spokesman, not a
discoverer. His freshness is that of a man who furnishes what is
already known rather than of one who adds to the stock of
knowledge. That he has also the gifts of the writer who can add to
the stock of knowledge is shown by his humorous, fascinating and
amiable portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill. Here he speaks for
himself, not for the meeting. Lord Randolph is as real to him as a
character in fiction, with his spell, his impudence and his disaster. As
we read this story we feel that, if he cared, Lord Rosebery might
write a book of reminiscences, telling with detached frankness the
whole truth about himself and his great associates, which would
have an immortal place in English biographical literature. For the
present, however, we must be content that there should be someone
who can speak the general mind on Burns and Burke, on Oliver
Cromwell and Dr. Johnson, with a hint of majesty and a lulling
charm.
Certainly, he reveals no secrets that are not open secrets about
his heroes. He is continually asking “What is his secret?” and the
answer is usually a little disappointing, a little exiguous in surprise,
when it comes. Thus he tells us that the secret of Burns “lies in two
words—inspiration and sympathy.” That is true, but it leaves Burns
smooth as a statue. Burns appeals to us surely, not only through his
inspiration and sympathy, but as the spirit of man fluttering
rebelliously, songfully, satirically, against the bars of orthodoxy.
Scotsmen revere him as the champion of human nature against the
Levites. His errors, no doubt, were as gross as those of the Levites,
but human nature turns affectionately to those who protest on its
behalf against tyranny, and Burns with all his sins, was a liberator.
When he comes to Burke, Lord Rosebery again asks, “What is his
secret?” “The secret of Burke’s character,” he says, “is this, in my
judgment—that he loved reform and hated revolution.” This, again,
leaves Burke with the eyes of a statue. We shall understand the
secret of Burke much better if we see him as a man who had far
more passionate convictions about the duties than about the rights of
human beings. He believed in good government and in good
citizenship, but he was never even touched by the Utopian dream of
the perfectibility of man. Lord Rosebery, indeed, brings the figures of
the dead to life, not in his interpretation of their secrets, but usually in
some anecdote that reminds us of their profound humanity.
His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose
private lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he
has to speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he
devotes more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for
the most part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the
fashion nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray, and Lord Rosebery’s
extravagances on the other side would tempt even a moderate man
into disparagement. He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we
discuss to-day.” There could not be a more inappropriate word for
Thackeray than “giant.” One might almost as well call Jane Austen a
“giantess.” Charlotte Brontë, as a young author coming under
Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately feel that she was in the
presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan to his contemporaries
and yet be no Titan in the long line of great authors. Thackeray, I am
convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day, but he will come back
into his own only if we are prepared to welcome him on a level
considerably below that of the Titans—below Dickens and Tolstoy,
below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to censure
in Thackeray. Though he remarks that Vanity Fair “appears to many
of us the most full and various novel in the English language,” he has
no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At the same
time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The blemishes
of Vanity Fair exalt the book,” he declares; “for what must be the
merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is one of
the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of this kind.
They mean little or nothing, but they have the ring of amiability. On
the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to amiability in
his criticism of Esmond. “The plot to me,” he says, “is simply
repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother to a
wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray
himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only means
that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating the
story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one dislikes
what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind helps to
give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them the air of
being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but of a
detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr.
Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for
him apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.”
“Speaking as an individual and illiterate Briton”—so he makes his
confession. It is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with
all the more surprising volume.
One thing that must strike many readers with astonishment while
reading these speeches and studies is that an orator so famous for
his delicate wit should reveal so little delight in the wit of authors. His
enthusiasm is largely moral enthusiasm. We think of Lord Rosebery
as a dilettante, and yet the dilettanti of literature and public life make
only a feeble appeal to him. He is interested in few but men of strong
character and men of action. His heroes are such men as Cromwell
and Mr. Gladstone. Is it that he is an ethical dilettante, or is it that he
is seeking in these vehement natures a strength of which he feels
the lack in himself? Certainly, as we read him, he casts the shadow
of a man who has almost all the elements of greatness except this
strength. He has been Prime Minister, he has won the Derby, he has
achievements behind him sufficient (one would imagine) to fill three
lives with success, and yet somehow we picture him as a brilliant
failure as we picture the young man who had great possessions.
These very Miscellanies bear the stamp of failure. They are the
praises of famous men spoken from a balcony in the Castle of
Indolence. They are graceful and delightful. But they are haunted by
a curious pathos, for the eyes of the speaker gaze wistfully from
where he stands towards the path that leads to the Hill Difficulty and
the pilgrims who advance along it under heavy burdens to their perils
and rewards.
 VIII
MR. VACHEL LINDSAY

Mr. Lindsay objects to being called a “jazz poet”; and, if the name
implied that he did nothing in verse but make a loud, facetious, and
hysterical noise, his objection would be reasonable. It is possible to
call him a “jazz poet,” however, for the purpose not of belittling him,
but of defining one of his leading qualities. He is essentially the poet
of a worked-up audience. He relies on the company for the success
of his effects, like a Negro evangelist. The poet, as a rule, is a
solitary in his inspiration. He is more likely to address a star than a
crowded room. Mr. Lindsay is too sociable to write like that. He
invites his readers to a party, and the world for him is a round game.
To read “The Skylark” or the “Ode to a Nightingale” in the hunt-the-
slipper mood in which one enjoys “The Daniel Jazz” would be
disastrous. Shelley and Keats give us the ecstasy of a communion,
not the excitement of a party. The noise of the world, the glare, and
the jostling crowds fade as we read. The audience of Shelley or
Keats is as still as the audience in a cathedral. Mr. Lindsay, on the
other hand, calls for a chorus, like a singer at a smoking-concert.
That is the spirit in which he has written his best work. He is part
entertainer and part evangelist, but in either capacity he seems to
demand not an appreciative hush, but an appreciative noise.
It is clear that he is unusually susceptible to crowd excitement.
His two best poems, “Bryan, Bryan” and “The Congo,” are born of it.
“Bryan, Bryan” is an amazing attempt to recapture and communicate
a boy’s emotions as he mingled in the scrimmage of the Presidential
election of 1896. Mr. Lindsay becomes all but inarticulate as he
recalls the thrill and tumult of the marching West when Bryan called
on it to advance against the Plutocrats. He seems to be shouting like
a student when students hire a bus and go forth in masks and fancy
dress to make a noise in the streets. Luckily, he makes an original
noise. He knows that his excitement is more than he can express in
intelligible speech, and so he wisely and humorously calls in the aid
of nonsense, which he uses with such skill and vehemence that
everybody is forced to turn round and stare at him:

Oh, the long-horns from Texas,

The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog, and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on.
The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rakeboor, the hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat, and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West.
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long—
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah—sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo, and wampus gave tongue.

In such a passage as this Mr. Lindsay pours decorative nonsense

out of a horn of plenty. But his aim is not to talk nonsense: it is to use
nonsense as the language of reality. As paragraph follows
paragraph, we see with what sureness he is piling colour on colour
and crash on crash in order that we may respond almost physically
to the sensations of those magnificent and tumultuous days. He has
discovered a new sort of rhetoric which enables him to hurry us
through mood after mood of comic, pugnacious and sentimental
excitement. Addressed to a religious meeting, rhetoric of this kind
would be interrupted by cries of “Glory, Hallelujah!” and “Praise de
Lord!” Unless you are rhetoric-proof, you cannot escape its spell.
Isolated from its context, the passage I have quoted may be
subjected to cold criticism. It is only when it keeps its place in the
living body of the poem and becomes part of the general attack on
our nerves that it is irresistibly effective.
In “The Congo,” it is the excitement of Negroes—in their dances
and their religion—that Mr. Lindsay has set to words. As he watches
their revels, the picture suggests a companion-picture of Negroes
orgiastic in Africa, in the true Kingdom of Mumbo-Jumbo—a Negro’s
fairy-tale of a magic land:

Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,

Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats,
Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,
And tall silk hats that were red as wine.
And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,
Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair,
Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet,
And bells on their ankles and little black feet.

But it is the grotesque comedy of the American Negro, not the

fantasia on Africa, that makes “The Congo” so entertaining a poem.
The description of the “fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” has
often been quoted. There is the same feeling of “racket” in the
picture of a religious camp meeting:

A good old negro in the slums of the town

Preached at a sister for her velvet gown;
Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days;
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out
Starting the jubilee revival shout.
And some had visions as they stood on chairs,
 And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs.
And they all repented, a thousand strong,
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong,
And slammed on their hymn books till they shook the room
With “glory, glory, glory,”
And “Boom, boom, Boom.”

Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and

gusto. When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in
“Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible:
he is only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent
on his own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns.
Not that his work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects
to Burns’s in Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic
verse, the traditional themes of the poets—the aristocrats of the
spirit. Mr. Lindsay is a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially
a democrat of the spirit—one of the crowd.
And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the
humorist of things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the
playground of whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy
amid the clangour and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in
the exuberant and titanic life of California, where:

Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains.

and he boasts that:

There are ten gold suns in California,

When all other lands have one,
For the Golden Gate must have due light
And persimmons be well done.
And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash
And the fume of the hollow sea,
Rally and roam in the loblolly foam
 And whoop that their souls are free.

Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in

search of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them,
but he at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is
reminded at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting
against the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr.
Lindsay as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated
by the rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an
ethical poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why
his verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his
andante movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The
Santa Fé Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with
the still, small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He
undoubtedly moves us by the way in which he does this; but he
moves us much as a sentimental singer at a ballad concert can do. It
is not for passages of this kind that one reads him. His words at their
best do not minister at the altar: they dance to the music of the
syncopated orchestra. That is Mr. Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would
hardly be using too strong a word to say that it is his genius.
 IX
MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING

There are those who gibe at Punch. There are also those who gibe
at those who gibe at Punch. The match is a fairly even one. Punch is
undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so certain
that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people realise that
Punch was once a good paper—that it was a good paper, I mean in
the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in 1841, as Mr.
C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and vituperatively on
the side of the angels.” If Punch had kept pace with the times it
would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be suspected of Socialism.
Its championship of the poor against those who prospered on the
poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour speech at a street-
corner. One of the features of the early Punch was a “Pauper’s
Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent and touching
utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of Punch in 1843 that
Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon, the
editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were
opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same
indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The
Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause
of an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers
who underpaid their labourers. Punch also took up the cause of the
sweated labourers in verse:

I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,

Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,
 Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.

Nor did Punch shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine
Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a
Lloyd Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of
Norfolk with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they
should eke out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made
butts in turn of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham,
the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of
Atholl. He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old
Duke,” he declared, “should no longer block up the great
thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully
eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the Marquis of
Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner and an
enemy of the Queen’s English—“the most noble, but not the most
grammatical Marquis.” Punch’s view of the House of Lords is
expressed with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming
the Chamber, which begins:

It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing

as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there
may be a born ass.
But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office,
and command a seat in the house of legislators by
inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet
hides not the donkey’s ears.

This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in itself

as because it is the sort of thing with which Punch used regularly to
regale its readers. Punch in those days was a paper with a purpose.
Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a missionary
humour. Punch saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog, and, if
he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to do it
angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in the
face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not of
being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent
advocate of Toby, the top-dog.
Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit of Punch
is due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the
real reason, I fancy, is that, while Punch began under an editor
whose sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later
editors have been much more respectable. It is not that Punch has
lost the fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the
Victorian man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be
generous in those days. A Victorian could make himself the
champion of the ill-used poor without any feeling that he was
assisting in bringing about a new order in society. A middle-class
Georgian who attaches himself to the same cause cannot do so
without realising that it is not a question of patching an old suit of
clothes, but of making a new and a better one. The Victorian
committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit himself to
the cold-blooded charity of equality. Punch, indeed, seems to have
begun to take alarm as soon as the Chartist movement made it
appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not
sympathetic treatment, but something like self-determination. By
1873, according to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit
among the miners abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,”
we are shown a lady in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up
the pineapple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is
interrupted by a “successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put
’em up for me, then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere—
yer may keep the change if yer’ll only tell us ’ow to cook ’un.” Punch,
as we know it to-day, had been born.
It is interesting to trace the change in the temper of Punch, not
only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs. Punch appears to have given
up his pacifism—or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal, his
“pacificism”—as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent
Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having
once drawn the sword, Punch found it even more enjoyable than
drawing cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the
Crimean War. He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian
Mutiny. He drew it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro
outbreak in Jamaica. He drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil
War. Mr. Graves ought, for historical reasons, to have reprinted
Punch’s parody on one of Lincoln’s speeches. He is content,
however, to describe it as “a truly lamentable performance, in which
the President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the
rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism
of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr.
Graves, with an impartiality which cannot be too highly praised,
reminds the Punch of those days that “the magnanimous Lincoln
would never allow” the Southerners to be called rebels in his
presence—a significant reminder when we recall how Mr. Lloyd
George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his treatment of the
Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of all Punch’s blunders in
regard to foreign policy is the welcome he offered to the birth of the
German Navy in an article called “Bravo, Bismarck!” “Britannia
through her Punch,” he wrote, “rejoices to weave among her naval
azures a new shade—Prussian blue.” It is only fair to say that Punch
was not consistent in his attitude to Germany. But he has shown a
curious capacity for backing the wrong horse—the horse that
seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately disqualified
by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost causes and
took to championing causes that would be lost a generation later.
In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has
produced in Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England a book that is
pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes—the
offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more
often than he was funny. Punch, indeed, has been for the most part
a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on
its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant
contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who
dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has
undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the
world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a
result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet
the fact remains that other men have started rivals to Punch, and
that they have not only been not so successful as Punch but not so
comic. Punch always baits the hook of its odious politics with a
reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the
comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still
better, it has at least always been ahead of its rivals. There have
been men who have dreamed of a Punch that would bring the spirit
of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who have
dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right side.
One would not, perhaps, mind what side Punch was on if only it were
a little more generous—if only it purveyed the human comedy as a
comedy, and not, as in the case of working men, Irishmen, and non-
Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.
 X
MR. H. M. TOMLINSON

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers—

those who do what they are told and those who do what they please.
Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a
guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book
as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for
the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no
motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination
and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even
if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He
has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and
Devonshire, as readers of The Sea and the Jungle know. Even in his
more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short
stories—how is one to describe them?—he takes us with him to the
north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the
English sketches—the description of the crowd at a pit-mouth after
an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station
and a grocer’s boy in spectacles—almost equally give us the feeling
that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing
except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes.
To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s books are, in this
sense, books of discoveries.
As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great
gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in
the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a
windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves
“with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar
on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a
candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to
us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for

sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain,
their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud
tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque
inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly
through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but
had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny
pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret
of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never
seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more
to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in
bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does
must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and
demons. The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s
pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the
world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said
to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye
open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these
things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills
makes you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an
unadorned and simple sentence like——

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great

weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,

compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.

But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more
in them than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books,
personal, confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays
have egotism without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have
personality without egotism. He is economical of discussion of his
own tastes. When he does discuss them you know that here is no
make-believe of confession. Take, for instance, the comment on
place-names with which he prefaces his account of his
disappointment with Tripoli:

You probably know there are place-names, which, when

whispered privately, have the unreasonable power of
translating the spirit east of the sun and west of the moon.
They cannot be seen in print without a thrill. The names in the
atlas which do that for me are a motley lot, and you, who see
no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another
phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port
Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie
River, Tripoli of Barbary—they are some of mine. Rome
should be there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they
are not, and that is all I can say about it.

That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards
arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the
ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell
about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about—
he will scarcely even interest himself in—any world but that which he
has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience.
Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books,
animals, soldiers, workers—of all these things he will tell you with a
tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But
the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will
carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his
imagination.
I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.”
It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star
to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium.
One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among
the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city
at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the
lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s
boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some
such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on
a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless
and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean.
After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he
goes on:

There was something ironic in the indifference of her

defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this
white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity
that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now
do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door
flew open under the break of her poop; it surprised and
shocked us, for the dead might have signed to us then. She
went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran at her, as if it
had just spied her, and thought she was escaping. There was
a high white flash, and a concussion we heard. She had
gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit
in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her
bowsprit, the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.

We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just

evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a
key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:

House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road.

There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind.
Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are
without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw
serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or
the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the
ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute.

And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger

lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a
tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a
shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the
disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass
with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of
his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and
freshness of literature.
As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not
discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man
who likes to read The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms in bed. Heine and
Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors.
There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them
for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing
that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good
company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these
late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one
feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and
irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In
the result, the world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a
star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it
possible at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to
Coleridge’s Table-talk—that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical
cotton-wool.
 XI
THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV

A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows
but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of
destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an
accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer
who had a genius for consolation—a genius for stretching out a hand
to his floundering fellow-mortals—it was Tchehov. He was as active
in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of
men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a
passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door
either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing
praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He
who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no
disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude to
Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous
as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he
wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place in
my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a
believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin
to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the work
either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he
wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was because
he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in literature. In
a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of the Novoe Vremya, he wrote:

The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply
good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very
important characteristic—they are going towards something
 and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with
your mind but with your whole being, that they have some
object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come
and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more
immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of
their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis
Davgdov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the
grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of
them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through every
life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you
feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that
captivates you.

If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of

hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.
Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence
and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a
Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy
revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently
on Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,”
he declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not
to accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once
they have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There
are plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them,
and in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.”
He quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when
he is on his trial—that is unworthy of literature.”
We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the
whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for
building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-
rooms, a lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he
is off to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors
of the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of
his investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not
for the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not
for the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the