Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 653
Moving still upwards, like the ‘excelsior boy,’ or the ‘high-boy,’ of Mr. Benchley, we pass to verse where the humorous element is used for a purpose, satire. The main aim is no longer to amuse, but to make amusement a vehicle of purpose. Satire may be of a dozen kinds and used for a dozen purposes. It may be personal, malicious, diabolical: or political and colorless, just a stick to beat a dog. But humor is the very life of it.
Those who know the history of poetic literature in England and America will not need to be reminded of such apposite examples as:
“Great praise the Duke of Marlbro’ won,
And our good prince Eugene.”
“Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!”
Said little Wilhelmine.
“Nay . . . nay . . . my little girl,” quoth he,
“It was a famous victory.”
Or to match James Russell Lowell with Southey:
We were gittin’ on nicely up here to our village,
With good old idees o’ wut’s right an’ wut ain’t,
We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage,
An’ that eppyletts worn’t the best mark of a saint;
But John P.
Robinson, he
Sez this kind o’ thing’s an exploded idee.
I have in other writings and in lecturing so often cited certain verses of G. K. Chesterton as a perfect embodiment of the effectiveness of humor in satire that I have no hesitation in citing them again. They are entitled Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode, and refer to the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill of a quarter of a century ago. Those who do not know what the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill was may be informed that it was a Bill to disestablish the Welsh Church. The outside world never heard of it. The major part of Christendom didn’t know where Wales is, didn’t know that it has a Church and had no idea what would happen to it if you disestablished it.
It was characteristic of F. E. Smith (the late Lord Birkenhead) that he denounced the Bill, with the grandiose invective he so well commanded (and which never deceived himself), as having “shocked the conscience of all Christendom!”
It was equally characteristic of G. K. Chesterton that he could prick the bubble of windy invective with the sharp point of humor. The opening verse is a model:
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith?
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning, “That’s the Second Reading!”
Hissing, “There is still Committee!”
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna’s point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?
An even stronger note is struck in the famous verses by Thomas Hood called The Song of the Shirt, published anonymously in the Christmas number of Punch, 1843. This was written in the days of the hopeless and submerged poverty, the sweated labor, and the ‘cry of the children,’ of the good old days when Queen Victoria was young. No race of savages ever touched a lower level, economically, than the lowest working-class of merry England a hundred years ago. To die of sudden want is nothing; to live in want and not to die is appalling in its very continuity.
The Song of the Shirt is not ‘comic’ poetry except in form. Deadlier earnestness was never penned. More scathing denunciation of social injustice was never written. Nor ever was greater effect produced on public opinion by private words. But the effect is heightened, the satire goes deeper, the pathos is more intense because the form is ‘comic,’ because the cry of distress is voiced to the happy lilt of merriment:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A Woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread —
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”
Before moving on to the final stage in which humor in verse is divested of mere comicality and becomes one with reflection and pathos, we turn aside for a moment to consider the verses that failed to come off, the poetry that missed its mark, and turned comic, as grape juice ferments into wine. This general division could be called Bad Poetry, but it also runs from lower to higher forms, culminating in the super-comic or poetry of inspired idiocy. We may begin with some simple and easy forms of bad poetry, comic from its very badness. Here, first, we take Deplorable Poetry. This, as already said, is found as free copy in any moral, well-conducted paper. It deals with spring, the early daffodils, the might of England, the New Year (including the death of the old year), the sea, and solitude in the woods. Its lines carry enough poetic licence to run a liquor store: its feet wobble, its metre is like the sound of coupling cars. But its tone is high. It has a moral quality which in the long run makes it necessary to newspapers, particularly to ones that have fireside editions and hearth-and-home circulation. Sometimes the poetry is signed “aged 10,” but that makes no difference: “aged 80” wouldn’t lift it up.
It seems hardly fair to give examples. I select a short one, à page ouverte, from a garden of such verses. It is evidently a gladsome poem of a wedding morn. The author is — and ought to be — unknown.
Oh never, never she’ll forget
The happy, happy day
When in the Church, before God’s priest,
She gave herself away.
The irresistible fit of composition which produces Deplorable Poetry is especially induced by the contemplation of nature. People of minds constitutionally feeble are unable to withstand the sudden shock of stupendous natural scenery. It is notorious that on the great scenic route of the Canadian Pacific System, passengers reach for pencils and start to scribble “So this is the St. Lawrence!” or, aghast at the Rocky Mountains, “So this is Banff!” Often it isn’t: it’s Sicamous, but that doesn’t matter.
From Deplorable we move on to Execrable Poetry, which, as already explained, is the term here adopted for bad poetry as written by Homer when he nods, by Tennyson when he tries to be Tennyson, or by any poet of talent encouraged till he gets silly. As already said, many examples of this kind of comic verse appear in the admirable compilation called The Stuffed Owl (1930). The industrious student might commit to memory Tennyson’s description of Enoch Arden selling fish, which Arden appears to have put into ‘ocean-smelling osier’ so that his customers mistook it for ‘ocean spoil.’ In the opinion of Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Mr. Charles Lee, who compiled the book, Longfellow’s Excelsior qualifies for a place, a judgment which they support with a scholarly discussion as to whether the young man should not rather have said ‘excelsius’ (adverb) rather than ‘excelsior’ (adjective). The nice point involved has since been indirectly settled by Mr. Robert C. Benchley in an extract already quoted when he introduces the term ‘haut-boy’ or ‘high-boy.’ This ‘excelsior’ boy was higher still. But we will all agree with the compiler that Longfellow’s suggestion “that village maidens in Switzerland are in the habit of inviting complete strangers to lay their heads upon their virgin breasts, is an unwarrantable slur on the morals of a British dependency.” Personally, I think that the trouble with Excelsior is that it moves on too high ground. The ‘youth’ is so heroic, flashing like a falchion and ringing like a clarion, the ‘homes’ are so happy, the ‘old man’ (obviously a Swiss professor) so very informative, the ‘maiden’ so ‘easy,’ the monks so pious that we just can’t hold it. Virtue thus unadorned grows sickly: if there had been even one in the lot against him — a speed cop or a tax collector — the boy might have got by. But, after all, he did.
Wordsworth, of course, fills a goodly proportion of space in this same delightful book and quite deservedly. Indeed, his own peculiar theory that poetry must be simple led him to walk right into it. Everyone recalls his famous lines, “A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman”; “A household tub like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes”; “She was eight years old, she said.” Yet even the text of Wordsworth can be improved upon if read, here and there, with a slight variant of emphasis. Everyone recalls the mawkish and sentimental Highland Girl; little better than an outbreak of amorous senility. Wordsworth gushes out in it —
What joy to hear thee, and to see!
Thy elder Brother I would be,
Thy Father — anything to thee!
But a schoolboy in one of my classes nearly fifty years ago brought it within the bounds of restraint by reading it as— “What joy to hear thee and to see thy elder brother! I would be thy father” . . .
If Wordsworth had stuck to that, he would have been a better, perhaps a cleaner man.
What Wordsworth did half on purpose, others did by carelessness or over-conceit. The poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) filled the rôle of what one might call the pride of Britain. He wrote Hohenlinden, and Ye Mariners of England, and the Battle of the Baltic. Yet he was also capable of writing —
Earl March looked on his dying child,
And, smit with grief to view her —
“The youth,” he cried, “whom I exiled
Shall be restored to woo her.”
The charming combination “to woo her” sounds wonderfully like an owl in the woods. Campbell not only was capable of writing this but Dr. Palgrave was capable of including it in his collection as a ‘golden treasure.’ It certainly is.
The interest in this particular kind of poetry is not only literary but psychological. Why does Homer nod? Can’t he keep awake? At times that is the reason, as when a writer of poetry writes so much that by sheer exhaustion some of it must be bad. And at times, of course, when writers write with both eyes on money instead of only one, some of their work is bound to turn foolish. Here prose enjoys the merits of its own defects: since it lives less on form it never gets as silly as silly poetry. But there is another reason still which I think accounts for a lot of ‘rotten’ poetry. People get spoiled, or at least damaged, by success. In point of companionship and amiability, people who succeed are not as a rule as easy and tolerant as people who have failed. They get opinionative and at times, in the case of genius, like Dickens, dictatorial and egotistical beyond words. So with their art. Too much praise overfeeds them as too much water does a plant. With overpraise a storyteller becomes a bore, a humorist grows tiresome, and a poet gets silly. Affectation takes the place of reality. Nothing but the wholesome corrective of other people’s laughter can effect a cure. To have made an ass of oneself, and know it, is the beginning of better things.
It is very probable that a great many of our best-known hymns belong in this class of Execrable Verse. But it is not for us to say so. I recall that many years ago a Chicago professor of English ventured to state in the press that many of the hymns of the Church are doggerel. The fat was in the fire at once. Illogical people at once asked whether Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom was doggerel and how anyone could dare to apply the word doggerel to such beautiful lines as Abide with me; fast falls the eventide. The professor was ‘in bad’: and if the fat was in the fire over such a topic in Chicago, what would it be elsewhere?
The real point is that there are certain things we don’t say, certain things we leave alone provided that neither duty nor truth nor interest compels us to consider them, certain reticences and reverences that are a part of our common inheritance. The law of blasphemy, in all nations and for all creeds, is based on this idea. The South Sea Islanders call it taboo and the North Sea Islanders call it ‘good form.’ If things are sacred we do not make fun of them: a ‘comic bible,’ such as the one published in France at the beginning of the anti-clericalism of the Third Republic, is an offence even to an unbeliever. There is a province marked off as ‘unjokable’: to intrude on it only brings humor into disrepute, especially with people inclined in any case to think it disreputable. If our hymns, therefore, in many instances are filled with mixed metaphors, weird figures of speech and sung to wheezing tunes as slow as a blacksmith’s bellows, let us make no capital out of the fact. Our hymns are sacred from their associations: they have been with us these long generations: the shouting unison of loyalty pardons the doggerel verses of God Save the King: the pride of stout hearts still swells over the feeble egotism of Rule, Britannia. Our hymns have been with us in the routine of immemorable Sundays, in the merriment of uncounted christenings and Christmases, on the decks of sinking ships, and in last whispered farewells of eternal parting.
The topic is not raised here for the fun of it, but only as means of emphasizing the limitations of the principles of true humor. In it malice has no place, nor the degradation of things sacred to others. It is a lesson to be learned and remembered. Nor can humor, even where it is meant to be merely comic and harmless, venture to associate itself with images or recollections of pain, cruelty and death. Just as we must not jest over sacred things, so we must not jest over death except in the mock bravery of hysteria in danger or in the challenge of defiance. In the well-known song composed and sung during a plague outbreak in India, the lines, “Here’s a health to the dead already and a hurrah for the next that dies!” are not a false attempt at humor but a brave attempt at defiance. It is hard to be commonplace in supreme moments.
We find, as usual, exceptions that ‘prove’ the rule, which means properly and originally test it, try it out. Revert again to the striking stanza:
Small Boy,
Pair of skates,
Hole in ice,
Heavenly Gates.
Here is death (including resurrection) and yet no offence whatsoever. It is so generalized that it doesn’t count. The actual drowning of a real child would be too heartbreaking for a jest. But this is a mere hypothesis. Let it be granted that a boy went skating. It’s no worse than when in Euclid a triangle falls on a parallelogram.
Unpardonable Verse is the name given to comic verse written by poets laureate, academicians and songsters ex officio to celebrate occasions. People whose memories can carry back to the Victorian Jubilee of 1887 may recall J. M. Barrie’s delightful account in My Lady Nicotine (a treasure of humor) of the writing of Jubilee Odes. But people whose memory only carries back in 1937 can find good examples, though no one need get spiteful about it. Official poetry, as of laureates, belonged to a different age, an age with no current press and telegraph: you needed a poet at a banquet just as you needed a man to play the harp and a jester to play the fool. And what the poet said, or sung, blew away as lightly as the smoke up the great chimney. There was no world press to print it and parody it. Here and there the string of words fell like a rosary of gems: they were not lost, except that no one remembered who it was first said them. Who wrote, for example, the old, old verses on the ivy and the holly?
Holly and his Merrie Men
They dancen and they sing,
Ivy and her Maidens
They weepen and they wring!
Nowadays the appointment to the laureateship should carry with it a sort of gentleman’s agreement not to write any more poetry.
At the topmost reach of comic bad poetry is found what may be very fittingly called Super-Comic Poetry, which is the production of inspired idiocy. It stands parallel in its aim and inspiration to the highest form of poetic effort. But it is written by people who never had the education to give them the power to express it. They have the thought but they can’t say it, or rather, worse still, they think they have said it when they haven’t. It is a case of high voltage passed through a small wire: and just as an electric current in such circumstances blows out a fuse, so super-comic poetry blows out the fuse of seriousness into the explosion of a laugh. The super-comic poet is an intensely serious person: he feels all the tragedy of life: he thrills at its emotions: he sorrows at its inevitable end. But all he can say is “Oh my!” The super-comic poet deals by preference with topics of a major class — death, accidents of all kind, steam preferred, bereavement, and great national celebrations. He likes to find a young man drowned and write a dirge on him: or to have a ‘maiden’ washed up by the sea (there are plenty if you look for them). But sometimes, more as an act of friendship than art, he’ll write off a piece on Mr. William Smith’s Prize Holstein Cow.
It is difficult to quote super-comic poetry and preserve good taste because so much of it deals with actual events of poignant suffering or with things such as an epitaph on a wife, or a wreath on the grave of a child, that are beyond the bounds of laughter. But here is a safe and universal topic, Napoleon. It is a pity that he didn’t live to see himself summarized so happily.
Napoleon hoped that all the world would fall beneath his sway;
He failed in his ambition; and where is he to-day?
Neither the Nations of the East nor the Nations of the West
Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest.
A Canadian super-comic poet broke out into grief at the loss of the Titanic with a sustained poem which began:
My! what an awful night they had,
The night that boat went down . . .
But one must not quote further. The effort was followed and eclipsed by an American poet who chronicled an appalling naval disaster with a lament containing the stanza:
Entrapped inside a submarine,
With death approaching on the scene,
The crew compose their minds to dice,
More for the Pleasure than the Vice.
Some super-comic poets have attained a wide celebrity. Their work being highly saleable, for reasons obvious to us and not to them, their names widely known, they find themselves persons of distinction and rate themselves very highly. After all, what other evidence had Lord Tennyson of his poetical merit than what they have. People bought his books and read them with rapture. Super-comic poets flourish better in the new English-speaking world than in England. The old country lacks latitude of thought, and a super-comic, or higher idiot, poet is apt to get ‘canned’ before he gets started. English super-comic poets never get above pure twaddle more or less orthodox in rhyme and structure, but as feeble as pulp compared with the vigorous growth under a newer sky. Just as Dickens (see Pickwick, Chapter VII) tells us that if Muggleton has its Dumkins and Dingley Dell its Luffey, so we can boast that Ontario has its McIntyre and Michigan its Julia Moore of the late nineteenth century. The latter was probably the greatest super-comic poet who has lived since Milton. Her success was great; her fame extensive; her estimate of herself was in accordance. One poem of hers dealt with the terrible railway accident at Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1878.
