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.