Of "Singing masons building roofs of gold."
_King Henry V._ I. 11.
The following poems from 'Punch' are brought together to represent a
larger number which amid much delightful but, as is fitting,
ephemeral verse, serve the permanent interest of the Comic Spirit.
They cover the period between 1908, when the last collection of the
sort was published, and the end of 1920. The latter date I have
accepted as a terminus, because it seems to mark, as nearly as it can
be marked, the end of a period that is distinct from other periods,
and the commencement of a new one.
Odd happenings tell us that this new cycle has arrived--old names,
questions, and problems begin to turn up again: and not exactly as
they were. Just now, for instance, harsh news comes roaring out of
Printing House Square, pounding ragged holes in the gentle noise of
Fleet Street. The Australians have added more thorns to our cricket
laurel. Before the next 'bus bound prayerfully to Paul's wipes out
the horrid spot with its smooth low singing, rampant patriotism is at
work compelling indolent youth from "pat-ball" to the manly "willow."
In a little while there will be fresh ardours on the village
greens--and cartoons of the ardours: arduous as ever, even if
diminished somewhat of the pride of 1909. We have come from strike
to strike also. And sales-people, who were then growing to oily
perfection, whence they slipped and fell, are once more polite. The
war the messes hoped would come between the polo and the huntin'
proved strangely accommodating, and so came. The cause of
women--dear ever to the Comic Spirit--presses on to new supremacies.
Their goals of the decade are now matters of antiquarian interest.
But new illumine the future--and in their light the Comic Spirit, no
doubt, smiles her Mona Lisa smile as she wanders in the churches of
sainted women who converted wild Saxons or suchlike, and made them
sit down orderly in their thousands,--from St. Materiana's to St.
Editha's, and beyond. For there she reads firm protests of modern
incapacity for such spiritualities, and sees spaces provided for the
signatures of incapable, modest females; sees them--if she wanders
where I did--unfilled, unsigned!
The difficulties of this last decade, if they were different
difficulties from those of other decades, gave some individuality to
the comedy of the time: using 'comedy' in its broadest sense, as
indicating the behaviour of the Comic Spirit. For comedy as such is
for the most part the encounter of the Comic Spirit with
difficulties, and its triumph over them. Not the struggle, mark it;
for Struggle and Agonies, properties of the Tragic Spirit or whomever
else, are no belongings of the Comic. Neither is victory deferred,
or partial victory which suits the pathetic; or unworthy victory,
which may suit the burlesque. The Comic Spirit encounters, and it
overthrows. _Veni_, _vidi_, _vixi_, is its record--with 'vidi' and
all intervening delays left out. It does its seeing as it comes, and
when it arrives it is already victor--with laurels and a Triumph.
Also, it is a victor without expectation. It did not look like a
victor. You would not have picked it in the paddock--not even to
place. Its appearance at the start is, characteristically,
insignificant. The course set appears to be impossible for it. Yet
it romps in a winner, and its very life becomes the doing of the
impossible, the overturning of something big by something very
little. Put it tersely, high comedy is the immediate Triumph of a
seemingly minor over a seemingly major value.
To this end the Comic Spirit makes use of all sorts of properties,
simple and subtle, animate and inanimate. It could man a rush and
overcome Othello, if it had the mind, or in Mercutio overcome
battalions of Fates. It does actually begin even more simply and
terminate quite as high; and since the height is where we wish to
come, it may be useful to follow the progress, through some typical
situations.
At the start may come some simple slipperiness, tropical or arctic,
playful underneath the impressed dignity of a greatness of the flesh
or the church or the state; upsetting it completely, and winning a
laughter that would be incredible if the victim were less great or
the offence more so. Not much above would come some small folly--a
mole on Cyrano's nose, or, say, the spectacles that crown
Dostoievsky's Government official in _An Unfortunate Incident_. This
minor property, steadfast on the head of the official at the instant
of his complete disappearance down the throat of a very major
crocodile, draws, quite understandably, the uproarious laughter of
his friend and wife-widow. Next might come a spider, as in the
historical case of Miss Muffet. Solidly seated upon a tuffet,
fortified with curds and whey inside and outside, and embellished, no
doubt, with implements suiting her occupation, no one could have been
more formidable than that person. In comparison, the spider was the
most obvious minor. Yet no sooner did he arrive, having done his
seeing as he came, than his now well-known victory was allowed by the
most bigoted strategical-retirement war correspondents. And since
then he has retained his fame, without contest, as a veritable
instrument of comedy.
Of higher but parallel significance is a certain apple in Mr.
Augustus John's picture--"Down to the Sea": at least, I always feel
it so. An unquestionable procession of weird women and strange
children moves along a headland. They are of a world where there is
nothing that one knows. It might easily be intolerable. But one of
the women holds an apple in her hand. It gleams amongst the unknown,
an offering to the Intelligence; and propitiatory, so that the
bewildered deity, finding something so insignificant and familiar so
much more than holding its own against strangeness, shares in the
triumph, first in anticipation through sympathy, then actually using
the apple as a sort of _point-d'appui_ whence to search out the
unknown:--as Eve did.
Raise the level yet higher, and instead of simple meanings overcoming
strange people it is the microcosmic simple human who triumphs
against scarcely conceivable cosmic splendour. Remember Sirius
rising with Procyon attendant and the unlooseable glittering bands of
Orion--suns and suns and the white wonder of nebula. It is only
recalled, not seen, the time being day, but recalled so as to present
the true magnitude. Somewhere beneath it walk Dr. Middleton, of
Meredith's _The Egoist_, with his daughter Clara but this moment
self-withdrawn from immolation before the pattern of Patternes, and
with no reason to be grateful to her unshriven parent. "Clara linked
her arm with her father's and said, on a sudden brightness, 'Sirius,
papa!'
"He repeated it in the profoundest manner. 'Sirius! And is there,'
he asked, 'a feminine scintilla of sense in that?'
"It is the name of the star I was thinking of, dear papa.
"It was the star observed by King Agamemnon before the sacrifice in
Aulis. You were thinking of that? But, my love, my Iphigenia, you
have not a father who will insist on sacrificing you!
"Did I hear him tell you to humour me, papa?
"Dr. Middleton humphed.
"'Verily the dog star rages in many heads,' he responded."
That is all the apology Clara ever got or, indeed, ever needed.
Against cosmic brightness her microcosmic affair lifted itself, and
proved (as Hardy proved in another connection), "that of the two
contrasting magnitudes the latter was, for us, the more important":
proved it immediately, with an opulence of light against any doubtful
interpretation, like that of Sirius itself, preserved against "a
night of frost and strong moonlight."
The human triumph can be intenser also, as a last illustration will
show from Tchaikovski's "Trio in A minor"--To the memory of a great
artist. The second movement, as near as can be, presents the drama
of the artistic effort under stress of the imminence of death. _Ars
longa, vita brevis_ is the theme--the uncertainty of which is carried
on the strings, while the sombre certainty, the sombre sense of
mortality moves upon the muffled pianoforte, a sort of dead march:
Comes death on shadowy and resistless feet;
Death is the end, the end.
Against this opposition, and commentary, the theme of the artist's
life seems to develop: to strengthen. It heeds. Then it takes swift
possession. The actual theme from the piano is appropriated by the
strings, and in a glory of technical as well as moral triumph minor
absorbs major: and death, become not the foe but an actual material
of art, is swallowed up in victory.
All comedy--even high comedy--is not necessarily as intent as this
last: nor all--even low--so simple as the nursery rhyme. Yet all,
worth the name, has sympathy with both--from Menander to Shakespeare
or Molière or Meredith. The apparent major may be age and
tallow-dripping corpulence, as in the case of Falstaff, and the
triumph that of the mere suppressed voice of the Comic Spirit
breaking through in his shout on Gadshill,--"They hate us, youth."
More often it is no physical defeat, but a moral one. It is
convention without meaning, learning without significance, mode
without kindliness, show without reason: every sort of sham and
hardening of mind or heart against the unformulated fact of fluid
life. And comedy is, so, life's victory.
This victory, of course, is not confined to art. Living that is
worth the name must be a succession of such instances, becoming, as
culture ripens, of greater range, and surer.
In comparison with earlier times this larger embrace shows itself now
and then--a quality of our time or race: particularly in the front we
present to circumstances or events that people quite unmoved by the
Comic Spirit might find anything but attractive, except as an
occasion for martyrdom or some such hardening of mind quite opposed
to the immediately accessible Comic Spirit. We can enjoy the hidden
beauty, or the very fact of opposition, behind the forbiddingness of
things--even though the forbiddingness destroys body and body-comfort
at a stroke. Enjoy it, too, not in the negative way of _Non dolets_,
but actively and radiantly. To one so gifted, the forbiddingness of
forbidden cities becomes as nothing, and the shadow of their golden
watch-towers everything, as it falls, mingling with lotus blossom, in
the moat. The Antarctic, blowing its cheeks off with storm and
promise of immediate destruction, is of little account--and the
"splendid pirate" of Sir Ernest Shackleton's last expedition buys
matches in the face of it and pays for them in futures--a bottle of
champagne per match, to be handed over at a dream 'pub' in a most
improbable future. The war furnished other illustrations. This
spirit was one of its very few virtues, without which it could not
have carried on at all. Simple and daily life has them too, with the
same result. For the spirit of comedy is the hope within and the
light upon it, its shelter and its power to dare. It is the urge to
a radiant beauty in the house of life we build, and the metal by
which the roof, as it were, of that common house becomes a roof of
gold.
If our comedy is the golden roof we raise, the shining triumph of the
small matter of man's spirit over frowning great difficulties,
something must be exacted of the builders who, if it is reared at
all, must rear it. True comedy is essentially social. It reflects
truth, and its servants building it constantly and immaterially must
be servants of the truest social good. Satirists and cynics,
tragedians and farceurs, may be as remote from life as they please
and as individualistic. The servant of the Comic Spirit knows his
kind, moves with them and loves them. He could be strong without
this love no more than Antaeus without earth. It puts him in
possession of the strength of the whole. Allow for the necessary
semi-detachment of the artist, and it gives to all who serve the
Comic Spirit that sense of more than equalness to the task which
makes men sing as they work and of that work otherwise perhaps
uninspired, makes the true _domus aurea_.
Doubtless such love can be intense, and foster comedy, where there is
little to love. But it goes beyond intensity where there is much.
It becomes diverse, many-coloured, passionate yet urbane, robust yet
fanciful; and comedy, responsive to all its moods, becomes as various.
The pages of _Punch_, to apply what has been said, are an
illustration of such Comedy. In obvious and in subtler ways, of fine
jocoserie or of fine courage, they show the unrecorded minor besting
the plausible major. Sometimes, if not mountains, then sizable hills
are brought to labour, and the _ridiculus mus_ which ultimately
appears proves to be of quite different maternity, putting them to
the blush: as in Mr. Hilton Brown's "To an Early Daffodil," or Mr.
Chalmers's "To a Bank of England Pigeon," where the modern instance,
modest Scillies or drab Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, wins the
prize from the epic Cyclades or from Cypris-not-to-be-outdone. Mr.
Chalmers gives an even more natural example of it in "Little Cow
Hay." Here the good story of the wholesome doings of the Culpeppers,
fit and famous, is piled high--only to have an insignificant ribald
moment, regardless of them all, flutter with proud crowing to its
very crown:
But that must be nigh
Sixty seasons away,
When things was all different
D'ye see--an' to-day
There ain't no Culpeppers
At Little Cow Hay.
Sometimes the minor human makes the triumph. Opposed by a full-grown
if incomplete planet, he takes it up, without effort, as a very
little thing: Smith, M.A., Oxon., for instance, of Mr. Bretherton's
poem; or the hero of "The Desert Optimist," who, if history went so
far, would doubtless be Piccadillyish in Penang and urban in the Gobi.
Most often, however, it is no particular coup of the Comic Spirit
that these poems celebrate. It is the Comic Spirit preparing itself
for any, by making sure of the strong social life, in all its
disciplines or humours, from which its strength springs. It
contemplates the towers which whisper to Smith in Mesopotamy the
smooth, cool enchantments of the Middle Age. It regards
London--Fleet Street levying tribute from all romance, Charing Cross
Road and the ancient kingdom of books, people and zoo and parks--and
from all this it gathers the comfort "of no mean city," so that our
gentlemen adventurers at the end of things may possess that, and with
it give a genuinely comic overturn to alien unpleasantnesses at time
of need. Such help is precious, and Mr. Symns is not the first to
record it.
"Urbs errat ante oculos;"
Then Fortune, send me where you list,
I care not, London holds me close
An exile, yet an optimist.
The greatest of such times of need has (we hope) come and gone. And
not a little of the activity of the Comic Spirit while it lasted was
just such a gathering, on a larger scale, and such a distribution of
the gathered strength. The khaki flood covered up accounted
landmarks. Even among the priests of the Ideal, the Ideal was not
seldom lost. The Comic Spirit remembered both, and quietly recalled
some things that were continuous beneath all change. The resulting
poems as they appeared in _Punch_ dealt with traditional themes,
fairies and fancies and symbols of the spiritual ripening of the land
under generations of love; but with a new tenderness, accented by the
need, and also a new scope that included in the magic circle actual
work-a-day doings, especially those of ships and sea. Of these, Miss
Farjeon's "Nursery Rhymes of London Town" come first to thought, with
Miss Fyleman's fairy poems and Miss Fox Smith's marines, all three
represented here, and, fortunately, available complete in separate
volumes as well.
It is needless to speak of the strength which came from such
accounting of our spiritual possession. Col. McCrae's "In Flanders
Fields," and Mrs. Robertson Glasgow's "Dulce et Decorum," antiphonal
one to the other, are both included here. They answer for those who
...with the flame of their bright youth unspent
Went shouting up the pathway to the sun.
And history can take care of the rest. It is necessary to complete
the tale of possession, however, by noting, in addition to the
"Nimphidia" and poems of sentiment, those in memory of great servants
of the Social Good, and hence of the Comic Spirit, or of that spirit
itself most immediately, which _Punch_ admitting in its scheme from
the start, makes possible to include here. And finally, there are
the poems on sport. There is an obvious difference between the
tenderness and fancy of the 'Nimphidia' and the rollicking certainty
of the last. Yet the two are complementary as flowers and earth.
Oberon was first cousin to Robin Hood before Robin had become a myth,
and now may be half your fairy music is the echo of yesterday's or
yester-year's hunting horn. Half your fairy flowers grow on fields
that have known harsh ploughing--Flanders fields will bear them among
their poppies. So, if the noting of national sentiment contributes
to the Comic Spirit, this noting of national discipline (which has a
sentiment of its own now, as well as that it may help to create) does
so also. It may be war, or hunting, or cricket, or
When eight strong fellows are out to row
With a slip of a lad to guide them:
from it all comes to the individual the strength of the group--and a
knowledge too of those peculiar delights of comedy, a genuine
sincerity of technique and a constant opposition of the best laid
plans to a trifle--a ball or a fox or a rapid feather--with the
certainty that out of that situation laughter may spring.