Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 651
Have you heard of Philip Slingsby,
Slingsby of the manly chest;
How he slew the Snapping Turtle
In the regions of the West?
W. S. Gilbert of the generation that followed had an extraordinary gift of mock-heroic expression. One thinks of:
Strike the concertina’s melancholy string!
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!
Let the piano’s martial blast
Rouse the echoes of the past;
Of Aghib Prince of Tartary I sing!
Gilbert combined and heightened this gift with a wonderful trickery of words, as already analysed in the opening chapter of this book. We may refer to the lines in the same poem:
They played him a sonata — let me see —
“Medulla oblongata,” key of G —
etc.
Compare also the mock-heroic poem of Gilbert which tells that —
Oh, big was the bosom of brave Alum Bey,
And also the region that under it lay.
The charm and fun of the Savoy Operas draw constantly on the mock-heroic, if indeed one may not go further and say that the operas (as ideas, not music) are based on it. Let us recall the military exploits of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, a gem of verse, irrespective of setting or music:
In enterprise of martial kind,
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind —
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O —
That celebrated,
Cultivated,
Underrated
Nobleman
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!
But lest one should think that the art of mock-heroic verse has died out in our post-war days, we have only to turn to Hilaire Belloc’s Modern Traveller. Versification was never more ingenious nor heroism ever mocker. The adventures recorded are those of William Blood:
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”
He marked them in their rude advance,
He hushed their rebel cheers,
With one extremely vulgar glance
He broke the mutineers.
(I have a picture in my book
Of how he quelled them with a look.)
We shot and hanged a few, and then
The rest became devoted men.
Students who really want to learn to write verse that appeals by the very ingenuity of its rhymes, should read and reread this admirable model.
Following on the Mock-Heroic forms of Comic Verse, may be listed all the examples of comic and humorous verse that have the peculiar virtue of conscious, intentional brevity as their common factor. These one names Epigrammatic Verse. Such forms, of course, carry far back in the history of literature. We people of to-day are not the only ones who liked to hear a good thing said ‘snappily’; but we like it from being chronically in a hurry: the old writers from a sense of art. Leaving out the Greek witticisms, for translation is impossible, one may cite such well-known couplets and rhymes as Coleridge’s: —
Swans sing before they die— ‘twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
One may quote also the charming and ingenious stanza of the days when there was a ‘king over the water’:
God bless the King! I mean the faith’s Defender.
God bless — no harm in blessing — the Pretender!
But who Pretender is, or who is King —
God bless us all! — that’s quite another thing!
For obvious reasons Epigrammatic Verse has found its most distinctive historic use in epitaphs. Last words have got to be short, or at any rate there’s a limit to them. One recalls the delightful French cartoon by M. Abel Faivre in Le Rire, depicting a French Député (they certainly do talk a lot) sitting up in his coffin and making a speech. Beside him is an undertaker with the coffin-lid in his hands (a queer effect of drawing), evidently getting restless and saying, “Pardon me, Monsieur le Député, time is up.”
Since there is an end even in such a case, brevity becomes the chief virtue in last words and epitaphs. Most characteristically they seek much meaning and deep meaning in few words “si monumentum requiris circumspice”; “Hodie mihi cras tibi” — and such. The Latin language lends itself better to this than modern languages. The process of breaking speech up into analytical words instead of synthetical inflections gives modern languages their great superiority for general power of expression and shade of meaning — I say it openly and boldly — over Latin and Greek. But since not all excellencies can be enjoyed at once, Latin and Greek still keep the peculiar epigrammatic advantage of saying much in little. “Capax imperii nisi imperasset,” wrote Tacitus of a Roman Emperor who didn’t ‘come off.’ You can say it better in English with words enough, but you can’t pack it up so short.
But when it comes to turning epitaphs from solemnity to humor, then our flexible English comes into its own. Read in Westminster Abbey the epitaph of the poet Gay:
Life is a jest; and all things show it,
I thought so once; but now I know it.
Or let us recall from Dryden:
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest and so am I.
Used in a general way and as apart from epitaphs, epigrammatic comic poetry at times pleases by its sheer lack of meaning, the delight being in the thought that words can be so utterly without meaning. The most widely known example of this is Mr. Gelett Burgess’s stanza —
I never knew a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow
I’d rather see than be one.
Here is an epigrammatic effect of Artemus Ward. It is intended to convey by words alone the affectation of utter and hopeless simplicity with which he threw his cultivated audiences of London into convulsions of laughter (1865).
Uncle Simon he
Clumb up a tree
To see
What he could see,
When presentlee
Uncle Jim
Clumb up beside of him
And squatted down by he.
Or exactly the contrary effect by showing how very much, even of tragedy, can be packed into a few words:
Small Boy,
Pair of skates,
Hole in ice,
Heavenly Gates.
The familiar ‘Limerick’ is a form of epigrammatic poem belonging in this subclass of Epigrammatic Nonsense. Everybody knows how a limerick runs:
There was an old man of Apulia,
Whose conduct was very peculiar,
He fed twenty-one sons
Upon nothing but buns,
That whimsical man of Apulia.
The above is a sample of the ‘pure’ and original limerick in which the last line repeats the first, with the addition of an adjective reflecting the point of view arising from the information supplied by the limerick. Take another example and you’ll get it again:
There was an old man of Aosta,
Who possessed a large cow, but he lost her.
But they said, “Don’t you see
She has run up a tree,
You invidious old man of Aosta.”
A point of excellence of the pure limerick was to find rhymes for impossible places such as Aosta and Apulia. I have often wished that someone would write one on Bury St. Edmunds.
The purists, therefore, object to the departure made in the more up-to-date limerick in which the last line is used to cap the climax: indeed, the last line is everything, like the ‘conclusion’ of a syllogism.
There was a young man of Quebec
Who was frozen in snow to his neck,
When asked “Are you Friz?”
He replied, “Yes, I is,
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.”
This limerick is historic as Rudyard Kipling’s answer to people who objected to his talking of Quebec as Our Lady of the Snows. It preserves the pure type in repeating the word ‘Quebec’ as the end line, but otherwise not. This next illustration breaks entirely with the convention of the end line — and with others as well:
A wonderful bird is the pelican!
His mouth can hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak,
Enough food for a week —
I’m darned if I know how the helican.
But the critics will have it that this is not a ‘pure’ limerick: and their opponents answer that it is just as ‘pure’ as theirs, and that if it comes to impure ones they know plenty. It is strange how literary conventions arise and literary controversies rage. The odium theologicum of the Middle Ages is not yet dead, nor the angers of the Reformation cooled: the ground is merely shifted from Litanies to Limericks.
Comic verse may be at the same time parody, or it may be mock-heroic as already discussed. When parody is made with a deliberate aim at brevity and condensation as part of its merit, we have what may be called epigrammatic parody. This may often be very simply achieved by cutting off the head and tail of well-known poems and putting them together with the middle left out. The effect is often most felicitous, bringing a pleasant shock of surprise over the fact that apparently the middle wasn’t necessary:
1.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,
Then they rode back, but not, not the six hundred.
2.
It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea;
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,
A frozen corpse was he.
The ingenious student of effects will find plenty of other examples lying to hand. The method may be varied by mixing two poems together:
1.
Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,
His breast is bare, his matted hair lies buried in the sands.
Or compare Thomas Hood’s half-and-half of mixed Tennyson:
2.
Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
I hardly know what I must say.
But I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother,
I’m to be Queen of the May.
Effects that are dubious either as art or taste, but apt to be pleasing to the simple mind, can be got from epigrammatic poetry made of such mixtures of two parts of Milton with one of Dryden, etc. It is, however, rather the ingenuity of the exercise that pleases than the lasting value of the result; just as a crossword puzzle when solved gives nothing.
Epigrammatic verse is sometimes used to convey in a merry and inoffensive fashion what would otherwise sound either very dull or very offensive. Thus one might say, “The older and more aristocratic families of Boston are very exclusive.” That would sound as dull as a book of Travels in North America in 1840. One might say, “In Boston the Lowell family think themselves so important that they won’t talk to anybody but God Almighty.” That would sound vulgar and offensive and untrue. But try it in Dr. Bushnell’s happy stanza:
I come from good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells
And the Lowells speak only to God.
But the best use of Epigrammatic Comic Poetry, and its most typical use in our time, is for conveying real meaning with surprising and ingenious brevity. The ‘tabloid’ form suits the hurry of our life: either that or its opposite, refuge from hurry by forgetting time altogether. Thus we have pictures that flash the news of four continents in four minutes; and others that hold for three hours an audience transported to other worlds. We must have something impossibly long or unexpectedly short; a novel to take in the whole American Civil War, Negroes included, or an utterance so condensed that it can be said in what the Lady Mayoress of New York once called ‘a mouthful.’ Examples of these are seen in such conceits as Mr. Arthur Guiterman’s varied and bright little fancies in the current New York press, or in Mr. E. C. Bentley’s estimate of the mighty dead such as the following:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”
There could be a minor division put in here alongside of parody, mock-heroic and epigram and before coming to Comic Poetry Proper. This could be named after some such fashion as Verbal and Dialectic Comic Poetry. It would include various forms of comic verse which are based simply on funny verbal forms: for example,
There once were some people called Sioux
Who spent all their time making shioux
Which they coloured in various Hioux;
Don’t think that they made them to ioux
Oh! no, they just sold them for Bioux.
This is not the humor of bad spelling: indeed it involves a laugh at good spelling. Its point, as far as it has any, is in the sheer oddity of the similarity where we expect dissimilarity. Closely similar in its basis is the delightful Gallop of Analogies, in which, on the ground that as the fish called a chub is also called a chavender, Mr. St. Leger turns a ‘pub’ into a ‘pavender’ and turns lavender into ‘lub.’
Alongside of this one may place what Harry Graham called Poetical Economy, the use of beheaded words which convey the sense just as well with their heads off and save time and make rhyme:
When I’ve a syllable de trop,
I cut it off without apol:
This verbal sacrifice, I know,
May irritate the schol.
But all must praise my dev’lish cunn.
Who realize that Time is Mon.
Here belong all comic verses which get their fun out of the use of technical terms transferred to common use. In the Lawyer’s Lullaby we have a song beginning “Be still, my child, remain in statu quo, while father rocks the cradle to and fro.”
Among the Verbal Forms, but lying, as it were, crosswise of it and overlapping with other things, are all the various verses in which the use of dialect supplies all or some of the attempted humor. All language becomes ‘funny’ when it’s wrong: that it is so sets a sort of degradation and a laugh at language itself. Broken English is ‘funny’; not logically but just as a fact. A little playlet, The Two Milords or The Blow of Thunder, appearing in an American magazine in the current year, exploits this idea. The characters of the play presented, “in the order of their apparition, include first, Milord Sir Ross — Ancient Remnant of old High Scotch, sufficiently aged. He will never see again the quarantine, in effect, one would say well the sixantine. But he guards always the high and erect tail of the Scottish race. Sir Ross has adventured himself on the Finance of the French Purse at Paris.” And after him other dramatis personæ similarly introduced.
Now dialect, till it loses its force by custom, has a droll sound to an unaccustomed ear: as witness the everlasting vogue of comic Yiddish-American, comic Negro talk and Pennsylvania Dutch. Ever so much poetry, or rather verse, filtered through this medium, has come and gone. When dialect verse is used not so much to convey the humorous effect as to supply the setting, to make vivid and real the surroundings, that is something else again: it is the part of situation and character and not of words. The appropriateness and point of any particular verses would be a matter of taste. Here is a sample of one of the most celebrated pieces of dialect stuff ever written — the opening verse of Charles Godfrey Leland’s Hans Breitmann’s Barty, the dialect being Pennsylvania Dutch American, anno domini 1856, in which designation Dutch means Deutsch (German) and has nothing to do with Holland. The Pennsylvania Dutch came from the Palatinates:
Hans Breitmann gif a barty;
Dey had biano-blayin’
I fell’d in luf mit a ‘Merican frau,
Her name vas Madilda Yane.
She hat haar ash prown ash a pretzel,
Her eyes vas hinmel-plue,
Und ven dey looket indo mine,
Dey shplit mine heart in doo.
Personally, I should have no difficulty about how to classify Hans Breitmann if taken as an isolated fact. But we must remember that to people who live beside a broken form of their own language in friendly neighborship, the dialect takes on something familiar and homelike that attracts. Thus do we feel in Canada about French-Canadian habitant-English. Thus did the Americans no doubt feel towards Pennsylvania Dutch American, while it lasted, and the Southerns towards the accent that came out of Africa. The dialect becomes pleasant and humorous in itself: any kind of ‘damn foolishness’ in it seems funny.
But here is dialect stuff used as setting and character:
Say, there! P’r’aps
Some of you chaps
Might know Jim Wild?
Well, no offence,
There ain’t no sense
In getting riled.
Readers of this don’t need to be told that this must either be by John Hay in the Pike County Ballads, or Bret Harte talking of Calaveras County, or some such bard; and the locus must be in a Western bar-room. The dialect is fitted to the conversational character of the rough-but-kind miner. But contrast the technique of Bret Harte’s Truthful James in which the language is so elevated as to lift up the whole of Calaveras County with it.
Comic Verse Proper, or pure comic verse, is distinguished by the fact that it has sense to it, and is not a parody or parasite of anything else. It may, or may not, use puns or jingling rhymes or verbal effects, but it does not depend on them. It may in its form and metre suggest, and thus in part satirize, other and serious poems, but that is not the essential thing. Comic Verse Proper has its own story and its own point. A perfect example is found in W. S. Gilbert’s Etiquette, a poem that is included in the volume More Bab Ballads. It tells how the loss of a passenger ship at sea left two English gentlemen stranded upon a desert isle. Unfortunately they had not been introduced to one another on board ship and so, being gentlemen, they had no way to make one another’s acquaintance. By tacit consent each kept to his own end of the island. It was a fertile place with no trouble about food: but unfortunately Mr. Somers’s end abounded in turtle, which he didn’t like and couldn’t eat: while Mr. Peter Gray, who loved turtle, found himself with nothing but oysters, which he abominated, but on which Mr. Somers doted. Thus their life was strained and limited till by a happy chance one of them, soliloquizing, as solitary castaways must do, happened to mention ‘Robinson.’ This, as the name of a common friend of the two of them, allowed Mr. Somers, with great delicacy, to introduce himself. Acquaintance readily made blossomed into close friendship. Turtle was exchanged for oysters. Life was all happiness. Alas! how short! A convict ship put into the island to get water, and there in a convict suit was a rather decent-looking fellow ‘rowing stroke’ — Robinson! Somers and Gray each felt that he had been guilty of an over-ready eagerness to introduce himself to a man who was the friend of a convict. After the convict ship sailed away, the two gentlemen, again by consent, drew apart each to his own end of the island.
