The Beauties of Badness
Reading edition
The collector of amusingly bad poetry has never had such splendid opportunities as to-day. The world is all before him where to choose. Modern cheap production has made it easy for any one who can raise £20 to get a volume of poems printed; and of recent years the field has been greatly enriched by the growing body of verse-writers in America and the Colonies. There have always, of course, been poets who have given unintentional rather than intentional pleasure. I have before me a volume published (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled Original Poems in the Moral, Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, by a Traveller, which contains poems in the following style—amongst others:
INGRATITUDE My Muse, who oft recites on Love, Or Heavenly Beatitude, Her strains more melancholy move Devoted to Ingratitude. With thee, Dark Demon—what can charm? Nor manners polish’d—chaste, or rude; Nor Friendship’s hand—nor Safety’s arm So vile art thou—Ingratitude! Tho’ dear a Female’s face, or form; Tho’ elegant her attitude; We fly, as from the winged storm— If she pours forth Ingratitude.
But it is seldom that the collector comes across one of these delightful relics from an older day. The greater part of any collection must be formed of books published within the last forty years. Our age may be—indeed, it is—deficient in some respects, but in the production of unintentionally amusing writers no age, not even the Renaissance or the great ages of Greece and Rome, can vie with it.
It might be possible for a man with the industry of a Herbert Spencer exhaustively to classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and to tabulate the qualities which give to their works their peculiar virtues—incongruity of image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I am no Spencer; indeed, the only things I have in common with that philosopher are a taste for billiards and the recollection of a single visit to the Derby. To me there is a single broad division which connoisseurs may find useful in arranging their collections: in one class we may put those poets who are specifically cranky; in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible people apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macaulay’s Robert Montgomery is the type) try to write poems like other people’s, but whose total lack of poetic perception leads them into strange aberrations of expression.
The first kind are comparatively rare, but there are some good examples still going strong. There is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a distinguished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself as “The Modern Homer,” and has written a number of epics, including The Human Epic, The Epic of London, The Epic of Charlemagne, and The Epic of God and the Devil. Preoccupation with his matter leads him to such phrases as:
When Murder is on the tapis Then the Devil is happy.
But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. William Nathan Stedman, who used to live in London, and now, I believe, is settled in Australia. This gentleman is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Gladstone, “this Dirty Old Devil,” “this sly old wizard, a protoplasm from the abyss of nowhere,” was the Beast of the Revelations, and he has an aversion from Mr. R. J. Campbell, whom he calls “moo-cow, kid-gloved Campbell.” It is well worth while buying his Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics. The poems themselves are not so amusing, though we sometimes came across such ambiguous phrases as:
And when upon your dainty breast I lay My wearied head—more soft than eiderdown.
But the illustrations—wood-blocks from eminent artists like Albert Dürer and Louis Wain—are charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages are unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship—“an office I refused after Tennyson’s death, though made with the offer of a premier’s daughter and £30,000”—and he is violently down on critics who have failed to see the merits of a certain novelist whom he calls “Queen Marie,” “a woman who did you no wrong, nor envied ye your bones and offal, but gave Most Interesting Books for your betterment and education. Are ye not dirty dogs and devils? Eh?” “Bull-browed bastards” is one of the mildest terms he applies to the critics.
Difficult to place in either class are the poets who have some technical faculty, who are not necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put such extraordinarily prosy things into verse that the result is as comic as though they were. I have, for example, a book containing “a lyrical romance in verse,” which tells a story, that might have gone quite well in prose, of a man who falls in love with a girl and has long discussions with her about politics. The author’s choice of a metrical form leads him to pages and pages of this sort of thing:
I ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked: “Then you would justify the Socialist, Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked As a reformer, him who has dismissed All scruples, and himself or others tasked To murder innocence? Can there exist A reason to excuse Luccheni’s action, Of life’s great rights most dastardly infraction?” “Excuse it, no!” I said; “nor justify it; But understand it yes!—I find confusion In both your questions; and, your words imply it, They have their base in popular illusion. In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it Who will, there’s no imperative inclusion Of violence. Each, aiming at reform, Would lay life’s ever-raging life and storm.”
The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist movements has led to a great increase in this kind of argumentative verse; but the bad poems in the Conservative or Militarist interests are generally very much worse, a type-specimen being this:
And so with foes about us Just waiting for their chance We must become a nation armed Like Germany and France.
Another example of Imperialist verse is:
I’m old John Bull of England, My triumphs are in song. I’ve fought and won great victories Which did not take me long. I’ve fought in many a battle By sea as well as land. I’ve fought in Russia, Belgium, Africa and India’s golden strand,
which occurs in a work appealing for better treatment for British Honduras.
But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. Amongst the classics of the kind the Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been published complete in one volume, but the best of them are to be found in a smaller book entitled The Captain of the Dolphin. Mr. Johnston-Smith had a great vocabulary and peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt conclusion. Here are some typical passages:
A balminess the darkened hours had brought from out the South, Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its blatant mouth. Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia, And lessen death and pain; “Strike,” “Fight” are but synonyma For misery to Spain. On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast— They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned, Who have for sailors, ships and ocean’s briny blast Dumb love which they are yearning to propound. O’er the sea’s edge the sun, a dazzling disc, In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge; Upon the heaven’s bright page he stamps an asterisk Of yellow beams which Western things expunge. Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes From the side of the maid of his choice, By whom he is held with a cord actuose Spun out of her beauty and voice.
“Actuose” is very characteristic of this poet, who uses enormous numbers of astonishing words of which he does not tell us the meaning, although he gives us a glossary containing such definitions as:
Derelict. An abandoned ship.
Outward-bound. Sailing from home.
Yo-heave-ho! A phrase used by sailors when two or more pull in concert at the same rope.
One of his nicest surprises is the ending of:
Where the sun circles round for the half of the year And is cold—like a yellow balloon.
The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected ending is, of course, common in verse. Some readers will be acquainted with the epitaph:
Here beneath this stone at rest Lies the dear dog who loved us best. Within his heart was nothing mean, He seemed just like a human being.
But a University poet’s anticlimax on Actæon may not be so generally known:
His hands were changed to feet, and he in short Became a stag....
Nor this affecting stanza from a woman’s book recently published:
What o’ the wind? It hisses through a vessel’s spars. What o’ the wind? It is in truth to mercy blind, It surely from all rest debars, And even frights the sturdy “tars.” What o’ the wind?
An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappropriate metaphor. The worst instance I know is found in the poems of quite a well-known writer who describes roses:
Aft before and fore behind Swung upon the summer wind.
But the author of a recent drama of the Near East came pretty near it with
... the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight From the lens of the crystal moon.
The chase after the unusual almost always means disaster. This is another recent example:
I have found thee, dear! on the edge of time, Just over the brink of the world of sense; In dream-life that’s ours, when with love intense We function above, in a fairer clime. I have found thee there, in a world of rest, In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss, Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest.
But nothing produced in this manner is so attractive as the merely commonplace can be when carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two ago a young American published a volume with a preface ending: “He was apprised of the death of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion of his grandfather’s legacy accruing to him facilitated the publication of this book.” The epilogue ran as follows:
Oh, the rain, rain, rain! All the day it doth complain. On the window-pane, just near me, How it sputters, oh, how dreary! One becomes so awful weary With the rain, rain, rain.
The difference between this and Verlaine’s Il pleut sur la ville would be hard to define, but there certainly is a marked difference.
Most of the poets quoted above have, at any rate, the gift of moving with some freedom within their metres. But some people who publish verse cannot even do that, however simple the forms they choose. They struggle through their poems like flies in treacle. A good example may be taken from a book (excellently produced) issued only a year ago by one of the foremost publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it shows a most extraordinarily revolutionary conception of the way in which lines may be ended:
A man’s home is a woman’s breast. There see Him in infancy, and later, seeks he Inspiration from the self-same source. ’Tis His home, t’wards which, from cradle to the grave, He doth gravitate, accomplishing his Greatest works by aid of it. Man on the Woman’s aid depends. Oft unconsciously ’Tis given, oft loyally the truth’s in Loving breast safeguarded—less often ’tis In cruelty withheld.
This supplies the only case I know of in which the article “the” has been used as a rhyme. But for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts of this other one, which was published in a recent anthology:
Along a marsh a hungry crane With patient steps, his way did take Each cranny of the rivage fain To ransack with his slender beak, When, suddenly, his watchful eye, At but four paces distance, saw A worm, that back, as suddenly, To his subterranean hole did draw. Nathless the crane did, straight, begin His beak, and claw, alike, to ply And hoping the retreat be, in The end, of the insect might destroy, The turf did tear up, and dispel The clods, and with such vigour strive That he, at last, perceives his bill At of the cave the depth arrive; But lo! just when of all his toil, The object he was nigh to get, Beneath his very nib, a mole, Without ado, devoured it! Thus often, lurchers, onward who Are prone by shady ways to creep May the reward to those that’s due Who, openly, have acted, reap.
This fable is called by the author A Surreptitious Catch; but it might equally fitly have been entitled The Apotheosis of the Comma.
I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to enter upon an analytic criticism of this kind of poetry; and in this brief discourse I have done little more than string quotations together. But that operation is all that is needed to serve my present object—viz. the propagation of the cult. Any one who has ever read the novel of Mrs. Amanda M’Kittrick Ros knows how much sustenance the human spirit may derive from the byways of literature; but it is very rarely that one meets, even amongst the best-read of men, one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic treasures that lie about in the publishers’ offices and on the second-hand bookstalls simply imploring to be collected.