And so, directed by the hand of God,
They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.
The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a very humourless person could have used in such a connection. Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:
Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,
the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of poetry.
That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye. I like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:
They did not know what blench meant,
So they stayed in their entrenchment.
Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the illustration. It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an entrenchment that requires courage. Like the much greater Patmore, Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the simple and artless, as when he wrote:
The spring time, O, the spring time,
Who does not know it well—
When the little birds begin to sing
And the buds begin to swell.
Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom of the flowers:
Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu' o' care?