Delphi complete works of.., p.814
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 814
So much for the tediousness of the bygone poetic narrative. Equally typical of the period is the overdone sentiment that runs to feeble sentimentality. Every epoch has the defects of its qualities. The days of Tennyson and Longfellow, of Hawthorne and Dickens were days of increasing ‘humanitarianism,’ the new sympathy with the oppressed and with the lowly and the new appreciation of the still beauty of lowly natural scenery, the dell secluded from the ruder world. But there was no need to get mawkish about it, and to allow sympathy to degenerate into drivel. An excellent example is found again in Wordsworth’s work, this time in his well-known poem addressed to a Highland Girl. The theme of the poem is that the poet comes suddenly upon a Highland girl among the beautiful scenery of a Highland glen. He proceeds after the fashion of poets of the time to do what was called ‘apostrophize her,’
‘Sweet Highland girl,’ he exclaims:
‘a very shower
Of beauty is thy earthly dower!
Twice seven consenting years have shed
Their utmost bounty on thy head.
And these grey rocks; that household lawn;
Those trees, a veil just half withdrawn;
This fall of water that doth make
A murmur near the silent lake;
This little hay; a quiet road
That holds in shelter thy Abode —
In truth together do ye seem
Like something fashioned in a dream.’
This is all very well and very charming, but the poet doesn’t let it go at that. He is carried on still further to the idea that he would like to come and live alongside of the girl.
‘Oh, happy pleasure,’ he cries, ‘here to dwell
Beside thee in some healthy dell,
Adopt your homely ways and dress,
A shepherd!
To get the full kick out of this, one would have to add the American exclamation, ‘Wow!’ One can imagine the poet changing into his Highland costume behind a bush and calling out, ‘Now, don’t look! Wait a minute!’
Nor is that enough. He feels that even with a kilt on he’d like to get nearer still, into some sort of family contact with the girl.
‘What joy to hear thee and to see!
Thy elder brother I would be!
Thy father — anything to thee.’
Here he ought to add, ‘Oh, Boy!’
I remember that when I was a master at school a pupil in the reading-aloud class brought to the poem an even higher pitch of sentiment, quite unconsciously, by reading it slowly and doggedly out, word by word.
‘What — joy — to — hear — thee — and — to — see — thy — elder — brother!’
This beat even Wordsworth, who failed to get anything as flat and final as that. Indeed the poet could find no other dinouement except what he said at the start.
Thee, neither know I, nor thy peers;
And yet my eyes are filled with tears.
In other words, to sit down and have a good cry.
Another form of false sentiment of the period was to create purely imaginary wrongs suffered by purely imaginary people... England — the mind of the people — was determined that all tyranny must end, all oppressed people be given freedom. The idea was mixed with other things, Manchester cotton, Sheffield cutlery, etc., but in the main it was a noble aspiration. It meant, however, that the poets must work overtime to find oppressed people, patriotic Greeks, noble Italians, etc. But these kept getting disqualified by diplomatic changes in British policy which shifted them to the wrong side. So a regular stand-by was found in the Red Indian. Ever since Alexander Pope had written his To! the poor Indian, the Red Man, understood to be vanishing, to be moving to the sunset, drew the tears of the English nursery, and kindled the indignation of the English heart and hearth.
This particular kind of tripe reaches its acme, or one of its acmes, in a poem by Eliza Cook called the Song of the Red Man. I wish that a Pottawattomic ‘brave’ or a Seneca cannibal could have read it. Miss Eliza Cook flourished 1818-89, and flourished exceedingly. Her collected works, at 40 lines to the page and inches to the line, represent a mile of poetry. It is all forgotten now except the verses in which she asks who shall dare to chide her for loving an old armchair — a challenge which got into the American school books and was never taken up. She had no further knowledge of Red Indians than what can be learned at Wimbledon. But she saw that a Red Indian was good medicine. Her Red Indian — exact location not specified — lives quietly in his ‘maize-covered grounds’ under a ‘date-shadowed roof.’ Presumably the dates are 1492 and that of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803, things that must have shadowed Indian life. He lives, as he says himself, content, simple fellow, with his ‘rifle and hounds.’ He had saved and befriended a wandering white man, and now it appears the white man is starting what has been called since Miss Cook’s time, ‘monkey work’ with the Indian’s daughter. In fact he says:
‘I saw you last night where the linden trees grow,
With my child in the leafy savanna below.’
The location is again puzzling. But the danger is obvious. He therefore suggests:
‘Go! leave me, false man, while my child is secure,’
.. and in order to establish the reasonableness of this proposition, he adds:
‘Should a lily-skinned daughter e’er cling to thy neck,
Then remember the father whose peace thou wouldst wreck.’
Tily-skinned is good but perhaps onion-skinned is even daintier.
But let us turn from pulling the mote out of the Victorian eye to removing the beam from our own. The poet is indeed incorrigible. Time and circumstance no sooner remove one set of faults than he develops new ones in a contrary direction. He is no sooner cured of the artificial regularity of rhymed verse than he degenerates in the pointless irregularity of verse that is called ‘free.’ He is no sooner taught to avoid long, prosy narrative poetry, than he substitutes short, prosy descriptive poetry. We no sooner persuade him to stop crying and not be sentimental than he gets dirty and objectionable.
The form of the verse, or its formlessness, is one thing, its content another, and the present content of a great deal of our contemporary poetry runs to the description of Nature, in minute detail with great exactitude, but with no particular merit in the detail. This nature poetry is the illegitimate child of our new natural science. In natural science detail is admirable. It is excellent to distinguish, as we do, the cephalopods from the infusoria and to classify, as we do, 50,000 species of flies, and to confer on them a scientific order as the Diptera, which makes them sound as old as the Italian nobility. But this is not poetry. It is not possible to make poetry by the mere cumulation of detail, by putting scenery together tree by tree and leaf by leaf. Nor does close observation of nature at work in and of itself make poetry.
It is, as I have dared to suggest above, I think, especially in Canada that this new nature poetry grows at its rankest. The really fine Canadian poets, both of the generation just gone by and of the generation now writing, are too well known and too well established to fear criticism of their method. The fact that most of them owe their success to nature-description poetry does not make any more tolerable the great mass of the description in verse, whether free or worth money, of the Canadian woods, trees, birds, beasts and waterfalls. Our country is rich in its extent. Granting a thousand poets as the maximum that we could raise they have 3000 square miles for each of them to work on.
Contrast the almost magical effects of description achieved by earlier poets without seeming to describe.... Compare, for we owe him one, Wordsworth:
‘Oh, then my heart with rapture fills
And dances with the daffodils.’
Or Herrick:
‘Fair daffodils we weep to see
You haste away so soon....’
With how few words, with how little of the intricacies of description, either poet calls up a picture of the yellow, dancing flowers.
Now compare the painful piece-work description as done by an up-to-date poet, and written in free verse, since we could hardly expect rhyme to be thrown in with anything so difficult as that....
You, oh daffodil! standing on
My table in a glass of water,
I recognise you with the help of the
Ency Clopaedia Britannica,
As the pseudo-narcissus, a member of the family
Amarillacece.
Your stem is about 18 in long.
I note the spathe, single flowered.
I observe your corolla, cleft into six lobes.
I see the central bell-shaped nectary.
O, you daffodil,
I’m on!
As with the life of the flowers and plants, so with the higher life of the birds. How easily the real poet calls them to the sky. We take Shelley, with his skylark, ‘singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest’... or we return a moment to Swinburne’s Forsaken Garden... where ‘rings but the note of the sea-birds’ song.’ Compare with these some of the latest animal life efforts in free verse, mere accuracy of description substituted for the open inspiration of the sky....
To a House Fly
Oh, you musca domestica, peeping at me in the morning sun from the foot of the bed,
I recognise in you one of the merry boys of the Diptera.
I know you by your single pair of membranous wings.
Have you an anterior pair? No, only in aberrant exceptions.
But I would know you anywhere by your proboscis,
And by your haunting eyes, compound eyes, with movable lenses.
Don’t tell me how you work them, no, please!
Don’t come nearer;
You might give me malaria or elephantiasis.
Come one step nearer, and,
Swot! I got you.
One decided step towards writing poetry, to the extent of one’s native talent, is to get rid of that certain affectation which surrounds the making of poetry. Round poetry and the poet clings a sort of atmosphere of superiority over work-a-day occupations and straightforward activities. But this superiority is only justified in as far as it holds true for all creative art, for art for art’s sake, as opposed to occupation for money’s sake. Even in this, though the activity is low, it may be, and mostly is, elevated by a decent motive such as earning one’s daily bread and that of other people. Moreover the principle of creative art may step in anywhere as a sort of inspiration, the fairyland compensation to those who have to work. Where this happens any craftsman becomes a ‘poet,’ in the original sense of one who makes something, whether he is a joiner making a table, or a tailor dreaming, with uplifted scissors, of a new daring in a spring overcoat. Even an honest day’s work, something attempted something done, as with Longfellow’s blacksmith, became a sort of art. Thus does necessity impose work on the human race, and imagination slip out of its fetters.
Yet the poet, odd fellow, must have his way, with his velvet coat and his loose tie and his long hair. Loose and easy is his motto. Nothing must impede his breath or choke his chest.
This affectation of the trade has affected not only mock poets but real ones, great ones. Alfred Tennyson especially, as he grew old and turned into Lord Tennyson, displayed just such a pose. He dressed the part. He loved to stride along the seashore of the Isle of Wight, a cloak thrown carelessly across his shoulder, thus buffeting the wind, or letting the wind buffet him — I forget which. But he needed someone there to see him buffet.
Some readers may recall a distinguished British poet of yesterday, lecturer to American audiences, who used to carry this pose to the platform. He had a way of passing his hand sideways across his forehead before beginning to read his piece and saying, ‘This came to me in the heart of the woods’... either there or in a place that he called ‘the crowded mart.’ But if a lecturer on economics said that he got his idea on wages in the bush, or down town, it wouldn’t make the same kind of hit. Yet the one is just as likely as the other. Anybody can be absorbed anywhere. An engineer can dream of a fly-wheel without calling himself a glow worm.
There is no need, therefore, for a man who wishes to be a poet to adopt the pose of a do-nothing dreamer. It may be those who do most, dream most.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. HOW TO WRITE HUMOUR
FUNNY STORIES — Perhaps you’ve heard this one? — Humour and kindliness — The Greek gods and their primitive idea of a joke — Fun with words — Bad spelling — Burlesque writing — Cannibalism in the cars —
A pension for life but not more than five years — Pure and impure limericks.
VERY few people undertake to write humour, or even aspire to do so. But a great many people undertake to tell funny stories, which is a branch of the same thing. A few people tell them well, but if they do, they are apt to get over-comic and over-conscious. A few tell them with the brevity and humility dictated by modesty. But most people tell them with a prolixity and an incompetence which are deplorable. This is all the more deplorable in as much as in many social circles funny stories, told in turn, and even out of turn, are part of the stock-in-trade. At the end of each story silence falls, everybody trying to think of another. ‘Nothing is heard,’ said Bill Nye, ‘but the dull rumble of a thinker.’
At the time when Bill Nye flourished there was more excuse for funny stories as the mainstay of a dinner- or supper-party than there is now. There was very little for everybody to talk about that everybody else knew about. The moving pictures have changed all that. Conversation can now be carried on along such familiar lines as:
‘Did you see “The Silver Dagger” last week?’
‘No, I didn’t see it. Did you see “The Golden Bullet” the week before?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You should have seen it.’
‘My sister saw it in Schenectady.’
‘Did she? My mother saw it in Troy.’
That kind of thing is as easy and as endless as exercises in French. If it is not conversation it is at least a good substitute. It can be varied at will by shifting to:
‘Did you hear Charlie Macarthy last week?’
‘Yes, we always do.’
‘He’s great!’
‘He is, isn’t he? What was it he said last Sunday — about a cow?’
‘About a cow?’
‘Yes, about a cow — Jane! what was it Charlie Macarthy said last Sunday about a cow?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Anyway, it was darned good.’
One would think that people with resources such as that available would not fall back on telling one another funny stories. But they do. A few stories are so short, so excellent, so fool-proof in the telling, that they are worth while in any case and they get over. The laughter that greets them is genuine and their repetition assured. But this is only true of the ideal funny story when given at least half a chance.
By a fool-proof story we mean one of such a simple outline, such a plain setting, without details of place, description and character, that there is no need to introduce extraneous matter, indeed little possibility of doing so. Of such nature are the little generalized ‘tags’ about ‘Scotsmen,’
‘old darkies,’
‘Jews,’
‘commercial travellers’ and other such people whose character supposedly is reduced to one word, and who live everywhere and always. Thus:
What is the difference between a Scotsman and a canoe? A canoe tips.
An Irish doctor’s bill to a lady: For curing your husband till he died.
Notice on a Jewish golf course: Members will please not pick up lost balls while still rolling.
Next in rank above these simple little tags come ‘stories’ — events told in two or three sentences, so simple in the sequence of ideas, and turning on some easily remembered phrase, that they practically tell themselves. Thus:
A London medical professor who had received a royal appointment put a notice up in his classroom:
Professor Smith begs to inform his students that he has been appointed physician to the King.
A student wrote underneath it:
God save the King.
Anyone can tell that story who will keep a firm grip on the key to it — God save the King.
Take a similar key-phrase story which went round the civilized world a few years ago tightly bound up to the phrase ‘a little stiff from polo.’ It was usually told by saying that a young man at a dance started an apology by saying, ‘I’m afraid I can’t dance very well; I’m just a little stiff from polo.’... And the girl said: ‘That’s all right; I don’t care where you come from; let’s try it anyhow.’
Such stories are so simple that they even are apt to carry a sort of appendix tagged to them of how an ‘Englishman’ tried to repeat the story and made it— ‘I’m just a little stiff from cricket.’... And added later, somewhat puzzled, ‘I’m not quite sure it was cricket; it may have been something else.’ An ‘Englishman’ in these cases means a man without humour.
But the moment you get beyond this simple range a funny story demands a few details and permits a lot. Take again the world-famous story, Put me off at Buffalo. Everybody knows how it ends with the porter’s rueful exclamation— ‘Well, if you’re not the gentleman I put off at Buffalo, who was?’
