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.