more complicated than ours! It is a veritable Chinese puzzle and,
like all complexities, it is running riot in its last stage. It is
now so thick that you cannot push your way through it. It is an old
and true saying that England is an aristocratic State, or, at any
rate, was an aristocratic State, i.e., that the historical nature of
modern England from the early seventeenth century is that of a polity
in which the citizens desire to be governed by a small class and in
which such a class exists, or rather has existed, suitable to the
demand calling it forth; and therein is seen the origin at least of the
game of "Honours." That is why you have, standing out boldly in the
arrangement of our society, the real objects (not phantasms) called
a Knight, a Baronet, a Baron, an Earl, a Viscount, a Duke, and their
various ladies; and that is why each grade has its own little bunch of
appurtenances.
Note how exactly these appurtenances distinguish one step from the
next. Your Knighthood and your Baronetcy are not to be confused; for
the first is confined to the passage of this poor mortal life, but
the second goes on from father to son, and is, as nearly as anything
can be in this sad world, imperishable so long as a male heir is to
be discovered. Your Baron is not like your Earl, for your Baron's
daughters are only Honourables, whereas your Earl's daughters are
Ladies. Your Duke is distinguishable by the title common to his
successive consorts, not Ladies, but Duchesses. There is not a rung on
this heavenward ladder which is not marked with its own stamp, and that
is as it should be.
But to this simple hierarchy (resembling, I always think, the Orders of
Angels, and like them nine in number--if you include Marquises, Princes
and Kings) the appetite of the race has added a vast collection--much
the most of it modern. You have the ecclesiastical people, each with
his little tag, one being Rev., the other Very Rev., the other Right
Rev. You have the distinction between the Vicar and the Rector, a
branch of knowledge confined to specialists. You have the Curate, the
Rural Dean; on which last the poem runs:
"Lord Archibald I grieve to say
Was late for breakfast every day,
And as he slunk upon the scene
His kind papa--a Rural Dean--
Would solemnly remark, 'My son,
Our morning meal is nearly done
And grace will very soon be said.'
Lord Archibald would hang his head
And drop hot tears upon his plate:
And yet next morning would be late."
The poet has here taken poetic licence, for it is exceedingly
improbable that the son of a Rural Dean would be called Lord Archibald.
But you never can tell! Titles jump sometimes over immense gulfs and
land like some wild sea-bird upon the head of a most unexpected person,
thereby conferring upon him a mysterious glamour from fairy worlds.
The poet of Lord Archibald has also, apart from poetic licence, been
so bold as to point a moral. He shows how an ingrained habit will
overcome a good resolution, and therein confirms the very wise remarks
of Aquinas, to whose compendium I refer you, for this digression is
getting too long.
Still, as I was saying, side by side with the regular Nine Orders,
there are the extras; for instance, military and ecclesiastical titles;
and talking of military and ecclesiastical titles, these have bred a
large swarm of bastard titles, about which I think something ought to
be done. For it adds enormously to the worry of the Honours system to
have, on top of the multitude of official honours, such unofficial
stuff as "General This" and "The Rev. That," the first of whom turns
out to be no soldier at all but a sort of Nonconformist parson, and the
second no one in any orders, but merely a man who has put on a collar
that fastens at the back and who talks at large upon divine affairs.
You may note, by the way, in connection with Bastard Honours, that one
honour and one alone has really got degraded, burst its banks, and
flooded the country, and that is the term "Esquire." "Esquire" meant
a Shield Bearer, the man who carried the shield for the knight and
served. He was less than a knight; but as he did most honourably carry
the shield he might be confused with the armed gentry, so if you were
not a knight, at any rate you were an "Esq." And not so very long ago
the distinction was real. There remain still living, I believe (but I
speak under correction), those who can remember writing their envelopes
to a solicitor with the word "Mr." in front, and to a barrister (who
might be the solicitor's brother) with the letters "Esq." after the
name. But even in our time the thing has broken loose, and is now all
over the country. The Government Departments always put Esq. to save
trouble, except when they are writing to convicts. They usually do it
to women as well, which is saving trouble too much; but even Esq. in
this, its last decrepitude, bears strongly the mark of an aristocratic
state. For, note you, the unfortunate citizen (unfortunate only in
the burden of his duty herein imposed, but fortunate, perhaps, in
possessing so much variety in his social life) must try and remember
the initial of every male he may write to. It is one of the things
that foreigners, if they knew anything about England, would be most
astonished at. The other day I wrote thirty-six letters with my own
hand, every one of them to people of my own sex, and I suppose I wasted
a good quarter of an hour looking up the initial to go before their
ridiculous names. People hate to get a letter "Dash So-and-so, Esq."
But I would here disclose a great and useful secret, second only to
that which Prometheus stole from the gods, and this contribution of
mine should merit me a civic crown. If you do not know the initial of
the fellow you are writing to there is a sort of twiddle which looks
like a "T," or an "F," or a "U," or might even be an imperfect "W,"
or a "J" overdone. I think, indeed, it is capable of interpretation
as almost any letter in the alphabet; and if you will practise this
twiddle you outflank their tiresome, baptismal names--for I suppose
that even to-day most of them have been baptised.
Then there are the vast armies of honorific Orders, from the Garter
downwards, with the famous newly-recruited myriads of O.B.E.'s, and
there is J.P., and there is Rt. Hon., and there is M.P., and there is
K.C., and (a thing to daunt the stoutest heart) there is a mass of
letters giving pride to those who have no others, letters not conferred
by any social authority, and yet the omission of which will make you an
enemy for life. For instance, your correspondent may be F.R.G.S., or
F.R.I.A. (I think it is), or F.R.C.S., or F.R.Z.S., or F.R.B.S., and
even the whole lot of them combined, and not a day passes but a new one
is sprung upon me.
Lastly, there are the transmarine titles; not those, indeed, of the
Continent (for no one bothers about them here, nor could with so much
of one's own to remember), but those that do come more or less into our
lives from the general bond of one Crown.
There are the Honourables, who are Honourables because they have
been professional politicians in the Colonies. And that has often
made me think of what might happen to the younger son of an earl who
should emigrate, become a professional politician in some colony and
then get into the Privy Council. Would he be "the Rt. Honourable The
Honourable The Honourable," or what? And if, on the top of that, he
became an Archdeacon, would you have to write on his envelope, "The Rt.
Honourable The Honourable The Honourable The Venerable," or what? There
are Rajahs and Maharajahs, and Akons and Khans, and there is the Oyo of
Oya and a hundred others. Now, though we are not bound in strict duty
to know them all, though nothing dreadful would happen to us (as it
happens to those who wickedly neglect their duty to the rich, who mix
up marquises with viscounts, or forget all about the Companionship of
St. Patrick and the Bath), yet are we under some obligation to acquire
a general elementary knowledge of these transmarine glories. But I say
again that when it comes to the Continent of Europe, we put down our
foot and will not be bothered. "His Holiness" attached to the Pope,
"His Majesty" attached to a king, is as far as we care to go.
I often wonder what will happen to this huge house of cards. Will it
collapse suddenly as Diocletian's did, or will it live on, a sort of
ghastly life? Will its boundaries break down and will its stuff remain?
Will some few of the dignitaries take on a vigorous life of centuries
while others are forgotten, as "Dux," the Roman word for a General,
has lived on and on and on for more than two thousand years, always
with dignity attached to it, while "Illustrious" and "Most Dignified"
and "Your Benignity" died and were forgotten? Will our posterity, say
two hundred years hence, while calling pretty well everybody "Colonel"
(as we now call pretty well everybody "Esq.") let "Lord" become a
separate rank without distinctions? Will knights surreptitiously claim
hereditary rights and establish them? What will happen? We do not know.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of that posterity, those who some centuries
hence will read these immortal lines (in the surviving specimens of
English prose for the schools of that date), I do put on record and
solemnly confirm this: that to-day there are exactly two distinctions
which all Englishmen whatsoever really would like to have, and only
two. Though nearly all men would like _an_ honour, yet there are two
honours which _all_ men desire. One is the double letter K.G., and the
other is the double letter V.C. But they may go on wanting, for very
few of them will get it. What we desire in this life and what we obtain
are very different things.
ON BAD VERSE
To return to bad verse * * * * *
It is remarkable and true that bad verse, the nadir, has about it
something of the poignant and removed from common experience which you
get also in poetry. In the same way the demons are aweful--though in
a different fashion from what the angels are. And so also great pits
strike one with horror, as do the mountains with their sublimity.
That this is true of bad verse we not only feel on reading it, but
also discover by the test that those men are rare indeed who can
produce very, _very_ bad verse; some of the worst--perhaps the worst
of all--has been produced not only not unconsciously but quite
deliberately by the great artificers of the craft. Good poets have sat
down to see how badly they could write, and have produced stuff with a
savour entirely its own and far below the level of your ordinary hymn
or healthy public school song.
Very bad verse is the inverted copy or mirror of high poetry save in
this, that it does not survive. The little tiny fragments of the bad
verse of antiquity which have come down to us have only come down to
us through the deliberate ridicule of great critics or great poets,
which has preserved them. But in later times--the seventeenth and
early eighteenth century, for instance--bad verse has been preserved
in another fashion which, as it has not been properly recognised, I
propose to set forth here.
The great poets and the great writers of prose have now and again
picked out, from what was clearly their own early or insufficient
effort, examples to illustrate what bad verse might be. The immortal
Martinus Scriblerus is an example. Pope and Swift certainly wrote many
of those lines which, in that masterpiece, they quote as the worst
conceivable. They either wrote them when they were young and brought
them up for condemnation in their age, or else--less likely--they
wrote them for the occasion as badly as they could. I am for my part
convinced that the sonnet in _The Misanthrope_ which Molière puts into
the mouth of the fop was not only written by Molière himself, but was
written by some young Molière who thought it good when he wrote it.
There is this to be noticed about the bad verse of the good poets (as,
for instance, about that sonnet of Molière's)--they cannot (the Great
Poets) quite avoid a good arrangement of words. And in this sonnet of
Molière's I have discovered more than one line which pleases me: he
makes his hero laugh at it, it is true, but it is not such a very bad
sonnet after all, or, rather, it has some not at all bad lines in it.
Which leads me to another suggestion, a very unpopular one, but
I appeal--like the granddaughter of Bechamel the sauce-maker--to
impartial posterity.
I say (in fear and trembling) that a particular set of writers which
was particularly revered in England--and especially revered during
the Victorian period of England--was not essentially made up of great
poets, although these writers published in all their lives perhaps
three or four hundred good lines mixed up with twenty times as many
thousand bad or indifferent ones.
It is an eternal discussion as to what makes a poet great; whether
volume counts, and if so in what degree; whether proportion is
necessary, and sanity--and so on, and so forth. But I think we have
here a certain test: If a man cannot write, say, fourteen consecutive
lines all of which are good poetry, then he is not a good poet. A good
poet should, of necessity, have a certain wind. He may not be able to
run a mile or even a quarter mile, but if he cannot run a hundred yards
he is not an athlete.
Now the Victorian writers of whom I speak (and God forbid that I should
mention the name of one of them!) had this particular characteristic
about them, that though they often wrote three or four or even five
lines that were good poetry, they could not keep it up at all. No one
of them could write, for instance, a sonnet which had not in it some
one absurd, even despicable, line. Now, in a short composition, your
good poet is absolute. He is perfect. That is his test. If, in a short
composition--for instance, a lyric of six quatrains--he has something
quite absurd, then has he never taken the baths of Apollo. He may have
got his feet wet, or even fallen in and scrambled out again quickly,
but he has not taken the baths of Apollo; which you will remember are
cold: in August a recommendation.... Was it not into the Mamertine that
they lowered the unfortunate barbarian with ropes, and was it not then
that he said: "_How cold are thy baths, Apollo!_"? He was quoting, I
know. But as I do not know what he was quoting from, I will leave it at
that and return to my original theme.
I say that those men who are too much admired, whereas they were not
really good poets at all, betray themselves in this fashion. A man
may be a great poet in youth and age with a period of bad poetry in
between, or he may be a good poet and then lose his poetry. That is
common enough. But for a man to be a bad poet and a good poet at the
same time in the same verse is, I maintain, impossible.
What was it caused an excessive admiration of these men, particularly
in the Victorian period?
The error extended to prose writers as well, and not only to prose
writers, but to history. There was a whole mass of false judgment in
letters and history between 1830 and 1890, which it is our business now
to get rid of.
What was the common factor? I take it the common factor was confusion.
Men confused the emotion of patriotism or of religion, or any very
strong emotion, with the unmistakable quality which marks good written
stuff in prose and verse. They similarly confused what was pleasant
with what was true in history.
Cromwell made his country great and respected abroad. He was an
admirable cavalry leader. He had a decisive way of putting things.
Therefore might history legitimately say that he was of such and such
a position and was built upon such and such a scale. But that was
not enough for the Victorians. They had to make a hero of this very
unheroic person, and therefore deliberately omitted much from his
history that they chose not to repeat or, as their own phrase went,
much that they had to "try to forget."
Now that is telling lies; for no man really deceives himself, though we
say he does in extenuation of our own frailties. And so with letters.
The Victorians emphasised in John Bunyan what their grandfathers would
have called "enthusiasm," using the word in a bad sense: for their
grandfathers disliked that tone of mind. The Victorians liked the
orgiast--well, that was their affair. But liking that tone of mind they
said, critically, things about John Bunyan's work which were simply not
true. They remarked with justice the magnificence of certain of his
passages of prose. The close of "The Pilgrim's Progress" is as good a
bit of prose as you can get. But the book has any amount of passages
which are grotesque: any amount which are bad rhythm as well as bad
sense: any amount which are boring. Bunyan was not a writer of even,
regular, and always-to-be-praised prose in the sense in which the great
Swift or Newman were such writers. He was an enthusiast, and had all
the hot and the cold fits, the difficulties and the inspirations of
the enthusiast--the complexities, the dulnesses, as well as the sudden
fires.
I say this of Bunyan, knowing well that I challenge much surviving
opinion, but, I repeat, I will not mention the name of one writer of
modern bad verse, for if I did I should be torn to pieces by wild women
and a kind of men.
The memory of these insufficient poets is still strong, like that
of onions on a larder shelf after you have taken them away, and in
offending that memory I should offend the onion-worshippers. Therefore,
if you please, I will name no names.
But I do say that you can apply to those overpraised writers of verse
a certain test beyond the test I have just quoted of their inability
to write more than a very short number of good lines. It is the test
of this question: "_How would their reputation have fared if they
had taken the other side in their theology? Their politics?_" It is
a question which one could put with a good deal of point to living
writers as well. How would So-and-So have fared if instead of preaching
the common and corrupted ethic of his time with its come-and-kick-me
look, and its sly avarice, the ethic of the dead arrangement still
called by the name of law, the ethic of the soaked-in-ease who want
to be tickled, he had written exactly the same stuff on the other
side--on the side of St. Alphonsus and of Bayard? How would So-and-So
have fared if, instead of spicing all his stuff with an exaggerated
and false patriotism--international at that--praising the strong and
despising the momentarily weak, he had written in precisely the same
fashion upon the unpopular side? If he had doomed the strong of the
moment and extolled the suffering? That question is a fundamental one.
When a man wishes to see whether he has drawn a line perpendicularly to
another line and is in doubt, he does well to put his drawing before a
looking-glass where any error there may be will be doubled and reversed
and thus detected. The test I propose is of that same kind. Imagine an
_opposite_ motive and see if the verse would still sound good. If not,
it is not good.
But let us, in solace, remember this about bad verse; that there are
all round us, yes, and writing for the papers and very popular, too,
many worthy men who, if they wrote verse at all, would write bad verse,
and yet have the wisdom not to write verse, or at any rate not to
publish what they have written--an admirable thing to say of any man.
For my part, I admire such men for this very reticence of theirs more
than I do for all else they have written in the modern fashion, whether
to prove that there is no God, or that we should drink only water or
that we should wear woollen boots or sleep with our windows open--or
whatever else their gospel may be.
And, remembering that, being capable of writing execrable verse they
have not written it, or at any rate not printed it, I forgive them all
the rest.
THE UNITED POETS
Some years ago--long before the war--the startled Fauns first heard,
then saw (as they peeped through the brushwood) a motor-lorry bumping
and careering down the road. It had no hood; it was open. It was the
more remarkable because in those days motor-lorries were rare. And it
carried nor store nor sand nor any other merchandise, but all that were
in those days the Poets of England--Swinburne being dead.
As motor-lorries, so Poets were in those days rare. The whole tale of
these was eleven.
They had a Chief, or Master, or Mystagogue, who had gathered them
together and was taking them on this perilous pilgrimage. I am not
making this up. It is true.
So went they, so bumped they, with a prodigious clatter, and only one
Prosator among them, the serf at the wheel; but they, all Poets, were
clinging on for dear life in the wooden truck behind ... when--oh,
my God!--a wheel struck something, and off the tumbril went into the
ditch, and the Poets were flung far and wide. But Apollo stayed the
hand of Death; they were the worse for nothing more than bruises. For
Phœbus Apollo in his house of light saw Death going down through clouds
upon England and he said, "Death, where go you?" and Death answered,
"I go to make an end of Eleven Poets." But the Far-Darter answered
him again saying, "Oh! Death, tarry a moment while I pour you out
the dark wine of Africa which the Massillians have brought over the
cloud-shadowed sea to the ports of home."
So Death tarried, and when he had drunk that wine he slept; but while
he slept, the Eleven Poets were saved. The lorry was, I know not how,
set on its wheels again, and continued, in a chastened fashion, a less
violent career, towards The Goal.
That Goal was a house where I had the good fortune to meet them; for in
those days I was always in luck's way. I met them for one brief hour.
I was not allowed to eat with them. I was sent for after the meal, as
children are allowed to come in for dessert.... Yet was I older than
most of these.
I did not waste the occasion, but almost immediately after my
introduction to the Eleven Poets I challenged the Mystagogue, an
Irishman, the Chief of the Band, and asked him the great question which
has intrigued my mind from childhood.
"How," said I, "is poetry written?"
He put into his eyes a far-away look, like that of a fish which is
dead, and he said in a mournful tone (did the Mystagogue):
"I cannot tell you.... I cannot communicate it to you.... It is a
Muse."
I was naturally annoyed, for it was no answer at all; and I said
(perhaps a little too sharply):
"I am afraid I cannot accept that answer! The truth is, you are keeping
something back from me. You desire to prevent competition in your
trade, and to keep its great emoluments for your limited guild. But I
_will_ find means to learn, in spite of you all!"
He shook his head, and still more his hair, and smiled in the shape of
a capital V. He said it could not be done.
I went home and consulted one of my many thousand books, and then
another, and discovered the rules of Poetry, and read descriptions of
Poetry in encyclopædias and critics' books, and also much poetry direct
in Anthologies, hoping to find out how it was done. But to this day I
have never discovered the way.
There is a story of Taine taking some of Renan's work to the window,
looking closely at it through a large reading-glass, and saying: "One
cannot see how it is constructed!" So I with poetry. I can see how
verse is done, but I cannot see how poetry is done. How is a startling
of the soul produced by the collocation of few, simple words? What
essence is it in their sound and their order which opens the blinding
doors of vision?
_Chevauche Karle tout li port durant._
There, in one revelation, are the Passes of the Pyrenees! There are the
solemn, menacing heights, the ceaseless waterfalls. There, in that
line, are the gods of the unconquered hills. Yet it means in English
exactly, word for word, "Charles rides up all the pass," and "Charles
rides up all the pass" is not poetry.
I remember a leathery idiot giving, as an example to show that Homer
was over-rated, the Catalogue of The Ships, and saying: "At any rate,
you won't call that poetry!"--which showed he did not know what poetry
was.
[Greek: to d'ama tessarakonta melainai uêes eponto]
"_And forty dark ships followed him._"
If that is not poetry I will eat my hat.
I suppose what the man meant was that a catalogue could not be poetry.
You might just as well say that the name of a man could not be poetry,
or the listed names of many famous men.