Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 813
Now anthropologists tell us indeed that many aspects of our speech are parallel to the mode of communication, of the talk if we can call it so, of the ‘primates’ — a term which in this sense includes the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang-utan, etc but not, of course, the primates of the Church, archbishops and bishops. The great apes use vocal sounds. The gibbon ape seems to use a set of sound patterns which evoke corresponding answers, but with vocal sounds go also gestures and body movements. When we listen to a hard-luck story and keep saying, Dear me! Dear me! in a hollow voice, we are talking like a gibbon ape. Our quick responsive winks and smiles recall the wild chimpanzees who appear to have a crude system of communication by gestures and contacts. When the people (in the Old Testament) expressed their sorrow by beating their breasts they were a poor second to the gorilla, whose chest-thumping, it has been said, might qualify him for a position as sound producer in a radio broadcasting station.
We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication, which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus, if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not indeed understand it, but he would ‘get a good deal of it.’ This is all the students get anyway.
COLLEGE PUBLIC LECTURE ON EDWARD GIBBON
as reported by a Gibbon Ape
The chairman called the audience together with a couple of short barks, after which gave a series of whines to express his disapproval of the lateness of the audience in coming in. He then introduced the lecturer by rubbing his hands together as a sign of pleasure, giving a series of not unfriendly growls in his direction. The lecturer then stood up and rubbed his hands together towards the audience as a sign of goodwill, opened his lecture with a couple of short yelps which elicited corresponding yelps from the audience. After that he settled down for half an hour to a steady series of grunts which seemed to soothe the listeners. But after this first period the lecturer began to bark, to move up and down, but not threateningly, on the platform, while at times he gurgled in such a friendly manner that a great number of the audience gurgled with him. At times also he heightened the effect of the gurgle by an appealing whine, and closed the lecture with a prolonged howl followed by a final heavy bark. The audience broke into loud yelps and clapped their hands. The chairman then invited another man to give a few satisfied grunts as an expression of thanks — and the meeting broke up, all barking.
From all of which we begin to see that poetry is older than prose. Literature begins with poetry. Primitive mankind began its words and music together with singing poetry. The two at first are one, the human voice only the medium, the words only the sound. Then someone invents, or rather uncounted generations slowly contrive, mechanical means of music copied from Nature, from the wind whistling in the trees, the waves pounding on the shore. Hence arise wooden drums, clashing cymbals and whistling pipes. Music and words part company, or rather they change to being associates only. Later the breech widens when mankind learns the art of writing. It becomes a very gulf when the mechanics of printing spread the written word. Thus gradually songs changed to books. Literature, as it were, grew prosier and prosier. But poetry remained the senior partner. In classical Greek literature poetry, including the poetic drama, outweighs all the rest. With it appears history, grown from a record of kings’ names on a rock to a record of great events and a talk about them. The change is from the singing history of Homer, older than writing, to the written history of Thucydides which even Thucydides couldn’t sing. Before the art of writing history, history had to be sung, in rhythmical words, to the beating of feet, or else one couldn’t remember it. History thus became the business of ‘bards.’ Compare, since there is always a comparison to be made between the evolution of the race and the evolution of the individual, the rhyming and singing verses that used to be used to help children to be interested in and to remember history.
This is William the Conqueror known full well
By his Doomsday Book and his Curfew Bell, etc., and so on, and on.
The child of to-day, with his motion pictures and superb illustrations, has got past all that. Rhyme won’t help him, for his ideas go past at four to the second, and he forgets them even faster. To interest him, history must be made coloured or comic.
But turning back again to ancient times we find in Roman literature the proportion of poetry and prose turned the other way. Writing was so widespread that the bards passed out and their singing history was forgotten. Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome is an attempt to show what they must have been like if they were better than his were, and written in good English. The reconstruction was like that of the bones in Calaveras County, in Bret Harte’s society on the Stanislow, referred to above.
Then Brown he read a paper and he reconstructed there,
From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare.
But Virgil wrote, he didn’t sing, his story of Aeneas in poetry, for by this time a plain and simple metre had been devised — called technically iambic hexameter — as a sort of ‘business suit’ for literature. Indeed the Greeks has used it as far back as the Homeric bards. But it was only good for long, slow stuff that had to be remembered. For real song-talk all sorts of broken, attractive rhythms were used. Again we note that this is the same as with the children to-day. How instinctively they like the sound of:
Sing a song o’ sixpence a pocketful of rye....
Take that over to the nearest philologian for a laboratory analysis and he’ll tell you that that’s a saturnine metre. Try him also with ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill,’ and ‘Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, and you have shoved him back to A.D. 500.
But Virgil’s readers didn’t propose to sing as vigorously as that. They exchanged singing for sing-song, or, if you will, singing turned to what schoolmasters call ‘scansion.’
It’s queer to think of Mr. Chips, the schoolmaster, two thousand years later, still ‘scanning’ out to his junior boys:
Arma vir — urn que can — o tro — jae qui — primus ab — o ris.
To avoid any accusation of pedantry in quoting Latin let me say that this is the first line of the first book of Virgil, and there are people all over the world who know it — and nothing else in the way of Latin. They don’t need to. You can go round the world on that, recognized as a man of culture. But I was only saying that Mr. Chips is all that is left of the ancient Roman bard whose job had vanished after he had rocked Rome’s cradle.... With the Romans prose soon outweighed poetry. There appeared the histories of Tacitus and Livy, voluminous and ominous, and presently treatises in law that tipped the scale to the beam.
After the fall of Rome and the wreck of Europe the people in the dark of the Dark Ages couldn’t read. So the bards came back to the devastated Roman provinces, as the nightingales come with the darkness. Hence the troubadours and the jongleurs, who sang history as poetry, back at the old trade, fifteen centuries out of date. They straggled on down the centuries, turning up as Welsh bards and Scottish minstrels, till Walter Scott sang the lay of the last one, whose harp, his sole remaining joy, was carried, as we remember from our schooldays, by an awful boy.
CHAPTER TEN. HOW NOT TO WRITE MORE POETRY
VICTORIAN DAYS — Verse on Everything — Lines to A.. D. F. on receiving a walking-stick — Heavy going for half a league — Mr. Wordsworth, the dog and the skeleton — Case hushed up — Sweet Highland girl —
Oh, boy! — Miss Elisha Cook and monkey work with the red man’s daughter — Verse of to-day — Free verse to a daffodil remarking its six-lobe corolla — To a house fly as a member of the Diptera — Poets and affectation — Buffeting the wind (two lines to the buffet).
THUS came the poet down the centuries. But he failed to adjust himself to the march of time. He didn’t understand what writing and printing had done to him. He went on writing down in poetry — that is, in rhyme and rhythm, in feet and metre — all sorts of long-winded stuff that belonged elsewhere. Each advance in printing and book-making and each new wave of expanding education opened the opportunity wider and wider. It is amazing to think of the enormous quantity of narrative verse (long stories in poetry), occasional verse (meaning an event put into rhyme), that appeared in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The original ‘source’ of poetry, the ‘spring’ from which it sprang, became a rill, the rill a river, and the river a vast lake, part of it bright, with waves that sparkled in the sunshine, but a lot of it just water over mud flats....
This wave of ill-spread poetry reached its widest spread about a hundred years ago. Slowly the art of story-telling and the ability to read drained away its water... and finally, not slowly but very rapidly, the moving picture and the radio finally drained the mud flats like a bath with the plug out.
In other words it was the Victorian tradition, both in Great Britain and in America, that poetry could be written, indeed had to be written, about everything. If Queen Victoria had another child the Poet Laureate was expected to do something handsome on it. There were verses on the opening of a railway, on the construction of a barge canal, on opening the Crystal Palace and on closing it. With these went the ‘occasional’ poems addressed to single individuals. ‘To the Lady Fleming, on seeing the Foundation preparing for the erection of Rydal College”— ‘TothelnfantM —
M—’— ‘Lines to D. F. on receipt of the present of a walking- stick’— ‘Stanzas to Mr. Q. on his entering Harvard College’— ‘Invocation to Harvard College on its receipt of Mr.Q.’ Some of the above examples are actual and some imaginary, but no one could distinguish them. With these personal verses went abstract ones addressed to Happiness, Loveliness, Emptiness, to Solitude, Beatitude and any other abstraction.
Especially did it become a tradition, a fixed idea, that if something striking happened, some incident of courage, danger, horror or some curiosity or coincidence, the Victorian poet must needs write it up. This was all very well for great events — the loss of the Royal George, the sinking of the Birkenhead and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Even then by good rights the power of the verse ought to match the majesty of the occasion. Whether it does so or not, each of us must judge for himself, but to my mind many of our treasured poems depend as treasure on our pride in the event. Judged simply as poetry, what are we to think of ‘Half a league, half a league’... and all the blue-water verse, Ho! mariners of England... Ho! Tars .. Ho! England! — verses only preserved by the salt wind of the sea and glorious with the recollection of victory.
Still more is this the case with the hymns of the Church. Those long echoes and cadences go back through generations, some through centuries, of human joy and sorrow, of sabbath worship and evening song. Some people may recall the outbreak of popular anger — it must be forty years ago — over the statement of a Chicago Professor of English that many of the hymns of the Churches are doggerel. He was undoubtedly right. Devout people without logic wrote to the newspapers to ask — what about Head kindly light? — what about Nearer, my God, to thee? — and the majestic words and music of Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant? — a chant that reverberates from the days of the Christians in Rome. Such argument, of course, has nothing to do with the case. Some of the hymns, many of the hymns — can we say, the majority of the hymns — are certainly doggerel. They are saved only by the spirituality of the background. Taken as poetry, as language, they are filled with crude phrases, and especially with those mixed-up metaphors which seem, as we have said, the especial privilege of the Church and of clergymen. The clergy, as is natural to their calling, look to the reality of meaning and ignore the mere form of words.
We are thus willing to accept and condone the tribute applied in the past to great natural events, or written into hymns now sanctified by time. All of this because it is part of our heritage. But it does not follow that we need try still to appreciate narratives of minor bygone events done into verse after the fashion of the period, still less to imitate them now.
We take an example from Wordsworth.
Wordsworth hears of a pathetic incident, happening in his rugged Cumberland, concerning the fidelity of a dog. The dog’s master had fallen over a cliff and the faithful animal had watched beside his master’s body for several months, before the body was found — a skeleton. The incident is indeed striking and pathetic, and, of course, depends for its pathos on its truth. If it were a made-up story we could get little ‘kick’ out of it unless we said that the dog stayed for two years, or that there were several dogs, the first one and then friends who joined him, working in relays. But although the story is true it does not follow that the best way to convey its truth is to put it into rhyming verses. To me, the rhyming form lends it something false, something unnatural.
The poem begins:
‘A barking sound the shepherd hears,
A cry as of a dog or fox.
He halts and searches with his eye
Among the scattered rocks.’
There seems something so pit-pat, dead certain, about the fall of the syllables that they hide the reality under the adornment.
‘And presently a dog is seen
Glancing through that covert green.’
Naturally then the shepherd becomes curious and proceeds to look round to account for the dog’s actions.
But the poet refuses to dislose what happens till he gets the full scene set:
‘It was a cove, a huge recess,
That keeps, till June, December’s snow;
A lofty precipice in front,
A silent tarn below!
‘Thither the rainbow comes — the cloud —
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sunbeams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast.’
Now, then, be ready for the shepherd. Aha! he’s struck something:
‘Nor far has gone before he found A human skeleton on the ground.
The appalled discoverer with a sigh Looks round to learn its history.’
A ‘sigh’ for a skeleton is mild enough. It reminds us of our mention of Punch’s detective, Hector Trumper, who gazed at the spectacle of the mangled body and accustomed as he was to scenes of violence, could hardly ‘suppress a yawn.’ Not only is the sigh a short one, but it is followed by a hurried explanation that the spectator now instantly:
‘... Recalls the name
And who he was and whence he came,
Remembers, too, the very day
On which the stranger passed that way.’
All this in a hurry because the poet has used too much time on the poetic description of the scene of the tragedy. This is not to be a crime mystery. So the shepherd also instantly recalls ‘who he was and whence he came, etc etc.’ So that everything of that sort can be left to the police at the inquest.
Very naturally, the stranger had fallen over the cliff and had been killed. His body lay there till it became a wasted skeleton. The poem ends with an allusion to the dog, typical of the piety that was part of the poetry of the period.
‘How nourished there through that long time
He knows who gave that love sublime
And gave that sense of feeling great
Beyond all human estimate.’
Such was the method of narrative poetry, in its relation to minor incidents of a hundred years ago. I do not think there is room for such poetry now. There may, or may not, be room for vast epic narratives in verse of the history of the United States and such exalted topics. But for the minor stuff there is no place, except as comic poetry, intentional or accidental. Other methods of presentation — the radio, the moving picture — have replaced it. Indeed such events now naturally come to us as newspaper items. Here is Wordsworth’s Dog Story as it would read in the report of the inquest held on the unfortunate stranger. We take it from the files of the Cumberland Weekly Shepherd.
Fidelity of a Canine
Mr. W. Wordsworth in his evidence at the inquest arising from the recent Dog and Cliff Mystery gave his account of the gruesome discovery of a human skeleton at the base of Shaw Cliff. Mr. Wordsworth was led to the discovery by the strange behaviour of a dog which was darting in and out of the bracken at the foot of the cliff as if to attract attention. Investigation revealed the dead body of a man, reduced by exposure to little more than a skeleton, having evidently lain there for over two months.
Indeed Mr. Wordsworth himself remembers having met a stranger, now identified only by his clothes, walking with a dog along the dangerous brow of the cliff. He recalls indeed having uttered a warning to the effect that the place where the stranger was standing was really a cove, a huge recess, with a silent tarn below. Mr. Wordsworth says that he explained to the stranger the peculiar meteorological aspect of the spot, a gathering place for rainbows and cloud and mist, with occasional sunshine and the sounding blast that endeavoured in vain to hurry past, but was held fast, as Mr. Wordsworth explained, by the enormous barrier itself. Mr. Wordsworth was pained to notice that the stranger had moved off while he was still making his explanation, and that the attempt to follow him and repeat it was prevented by the ominous growling of the dog. He thought no more of the incident until his finding of the body, the man having apparently fallen, or plunged, over the cliff immediately after the conversation. Mr. W. is unable to account for the dog having found nourishment during his long vigil. ‘God knows how that dog got food,’ he said.
