Part 5

If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes, as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete, I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing this, at random, a vagary of the mind.

But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain length.

There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For instance:

_Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me_ _Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus._

This is not only a beautiful phrase, it is also true--and I am grateful to the Delian. I will do my best never to put him out. I will keep by me a few flowers for such a patron.

By the way, talking of that lovely couplet, do you know (it is true, it is not a lie, I have the very words before me as I write)--do you know that a gentleman still living translated that couplet thus: "Phœbus loves me and I in my turn have gifts for Phœbus--laurels, and the sweet blush of the hyacinth."

But this is not so wrong a rendering after all as that for which a contemporary of mine was once responsible in the noblest and most learned of the Oxford Colleges. For this man said (viva voce, it is true) that certain Greek lines which really meant "at evening soft dew descends upon the earth," signified in English, "Towards nightfall the huge female sea monster crawls up upon the sand." Each a picture; the one sweet, the other strong--but how different one from the other!

And as I have begun quoting, why not go on?

_Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,_ _Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri._

You may, if you like, apply this to yourself just as I applied the first lines to myself. At any rate I will have nothing to do with them.

And really I can think of nothing more to say, and I must bring this to an end.... But as I write, but as I write, a stream comes down from the mountains, a girl escapes beyond the willow trees.

ON TITLES

In those long lists which the divine Rabelais delighted to string together, wherewith also he has inspired many diverse men, Charles Kingsley, Besant, and that remarkable historian York Powell to boot, there is one omitted which I sometimes think Rabelais meant to write and never did; and that is, the list of books which might well be produced for the advancement and entertainment of mankind.

He did indeed produce a most glorious library of books, collected, if you remember, for the education of the giant, every title in which is a delight; and much better fun, I think, when you do not know the allusions than when you do. Much better, that is, when you think it was entirely made up out of Rabelais' head than when you get to know that most of it was a parody on existing tomes. But he never gave us a list of books which might exist and do not, and such a list is always running in my head. From time to time I have jotted down a few names for such books, and the regiment of them is now formidable. My only hesitation in publishing it (or rather a fragment of it) is lest some reader should steal my thunder and himself begin writing one of these books. But I am charitable, and I also have sufficient knowledge of time and space and human conditions to be certain that I cannot in what is left of my life write them all myself, so I may as well throw out the suggestions.

(1.) BRITISH HONOURS. _Being a guide to Literary Gents and Lion Hunters, showing what Official Honours now exist in all States subject to the British Crown, with their Distinctions, Emoluments (if any), Order of Precedence and Method of Address in writing and in speech. As also an Appendix showing the consequences mediate and immediate following on the possession of each of such Honours by any man or woman, and the consequent privileges of rank or custom attaching to their relatives, children and dependents. The whole illustrated by a copious Index with a coloured Frontispiece showing an Earl in his Robes, and sundry diagrams._

Now, this would be a most useful book, and I do not think I will go on with my list because it is in itself a subject not for one poor essay but for a very pamphlet of examination and discussion.

There never was since the beginning of the world a system of honours 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.