Some Limericks
9781465533036
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
He must be a quintessential fool who does not realize that the following fifty limericks are a document of enduring value. And I beg leave to say that the collection has been made not for such people, but for those who can appreciate its significance. I may be abused on the ground that the pieces are coarse, obscene, and so forth. Why, so they are; and whoever suffers from that trying form of degeneracy which is horrified at coarseness had better close at once and send it back to me, in the hope that I may be simple enough to refund him the money. As to abuse—I thrive on it. Abuse, hearty abuse, is a tonic to all save men of indifferent health. At the same time I am fully convinced that nobody under the age of ten should peruse these pages, since he would find them so obscure in places that he might be dis-couraged from taking up the subjedl later on, which would be a pity. Ten, and not before, is the right age to commence similar studies; a boy of ten is as sagacious and profound as one of eighteen, and often more intel-lectual. Ten was the precise age (see page 39) at which I began to take interest in this class of literature, and it has done me all the good in the world. There was a time when one collected butterflies, or flowers, or minerals. But the choicest specimen of (say) precious opal can be replaced, if lost. Now if these limericks are lost, they cannot be replaced; they are gone for good. You may invent new ones, as many as you please. Such new ones, however, will inevitably have anOther tone, anOther aroma, because they belong to anOther age. The discerning critic will dete5t a gulf both in technique and in feeling between most of the limericks of the Golden Period and those of today, and naturally enough, seeing that the poets, and not only the poets of the Vi&orian and the Georgian epochs have an entirely different outlook. Precious opal remains the same yesterday, today, and fifty thousand years hence. That is why lately, with increasing intelligence, I have taken to garnering what future collectors cannot hope to possess without my aid—perishable material such as the Street Games of London children, or the blas-phemies of Florentine coachmen. It would interest me to know what proportion of those thousand-odd Street Games are still played, and which of them have died out in the short interval since my little book on the subjed was written. In that book itself I predict their decline, and give reasons for it (page 119-121). And it is the same with the swear words. I caught the old ones in the nick of time. A good half of them have already grown obsolete and are unfamiliar to the new generation of such men. Why is this? Because these men, being no longer cab-drivers but chauffeurs, are affli&ed with the neurasthenia common to all such mechanical folk; they lack—their distemper makes them imagine they lack—the leisure which is essential to the creation of original works of art, however humble; they forget the ripe old blasphemies and have not the wit to invent a fresh supply. How shall good things be generated if, instead of sitting over your wine and cheese, you gulp down a thimbleful of black coffee and rush off again? Mechanics, not microbes, are the menace to civilization. A writer in the New Witness (Dec. 9, 1921) once suggested that this collection of swear words should be privately printed. That cannot be done; it will never see the light of day. But I shall now permit myself, for reasons which will be apparent later on, to reproduce the few words of introduction which I wrote for it in the year 1917: Nor is there much bad language to be found inRomola. Perhaps the Florentines did not swear so horribly in those days. Perhaps their present fondness for impious inveftice is likewise a reaction from Savo-narola’s teaching (I had been discussing Savonarola’s puritanism). For Tuscans of today are pretty good blasphemers. They have many oaths in common but, unlike Others, they pride themselves upon an individual tone in this department. A self-respe6ting Florentine would consider his life ill-spent had he not tried to add at least one blasphemy of his own personal composition to the city stock; it survives, or not, according to its merits. Of how many Other art-produ6ts can it be said that merit, and merit alone, decides their survival? Adventures are to be adventurous. I have begun to make a collection of these curses, imprecations, objurgations— abusive, vituperative or blasphemous expletives: swear words, in short. It already numbers thirty-eight specimens, all authentic, to the best of my knowledge. Most of them, I regret to say, are coupled with the name of the Deity. That cannot be helped. I propose to treat the subjeCt in a scien-tific spirit—from the kulturhistorischen Standpunkt, as the Germans say. I did not invent the swear words, and if the reader dislikes their tone he may blame not me but Savonarola for generating this pungent reaction from his bigotry. Violence always begets violence. Why not interest oneself in such things? Man cannot live without a hobby. And this is folklore, neither more nor less; an honorable hobby. Furthermore, unlike stamp or coin collecting, it costs practically nothing; a seasonable one. It has the additional advantage that the field is virgin soil and the supply of material very considerable—unlimited, I should say. Moreover, the research leads you into strange byways of thought and causes you to ponder deeply concerning human nature; some of these oaths require a deal of explanation; a philosopher’s hobby! Unexploited, unexplained, unexhaustible—what more can be asked? And, as aforesaid, absurdly economical. There is yet more to be said in its favour. For while these swear words are as genuine a flower of the soil as Dante or Donatello and every bit as character-istic, they happen to be up to date. A live hobby! They portray modern Tuscany with greater truthfulness than any Other local product. Indeed, it will not take you long to discover that they, and they alone, are still flourishing in this city. For the rest of Florence is dead or dying. The town decays, declines; it shrinks into a village; grows more provincial every day. Pol-itical life has yielded up the ghost; art and literature and science, music and the state—they gasp for breath. There is no onward movement perceptible. It either stands still, or moves actually backwards. The oaths alone are vital. In lightning flashes, and with terrible candour, they reveal the genius loci. Are not these words, most of them, applicable to a collection of English limericks? A curious parallel! A self-respe6ting Englishman would consider his life ill-spent had he not tried to add at least one limerick of his own personal composition to the national stock; it survives, or not, according to its merits—how true! And what shall we write instead of Savonarola? We can write puritanism; indeed, we must. This verse-form is a belated product of puritanical repression. That is why Latin races cannot appreciate such literature. If you tell a Frenchman: II y avait un jeune homme de Dijon, Qui n'avait que peu de religion. II dit: Quant a moi, Je deteste tous les trois, Le Pere, et le Fils, et le Pigeon— he will look at you in a dazed fashion, wondering whether he has heard aright, while Spaniards are pos-itively shocked when you translate for them a lyric such as: There was a young girl of Spitzbergen, Whose people all thought her a virgin, Till they found her in bed, With her quim very red, And the head of a kid just emergin'. They regard these things as dirty. Now tell them that all such dirt is the outcome of protestant theories of life, and that the poets of the Restoration expressed the same reactionary spirit in Other metres, and they will suggest that you become a convert to the R. C. Faith which, they declare, is based on notions that are both cleaner and saner. We don't require such ambiguous outlets, they say. It may be true. They may not require them. But they need them. For what have they not lost, these Latins, with their Catholicism! One limerick is worth all the musty old Saints in their Calendar. Saints are dead—they have died out from sheer inability to propagate their species; limericks are alive, and their procreative capacity is amazing. (One would like to know how many new ones are born every day.) The cult of Saints is mediaeval affedlation; the cult of limericks, as I shall presently show, is a Bond of Empire. No doubt malnutrition plays a part, and Southern races are apt to be underfed. Limericks are jovial things. An empty stomach is hostile to every form of joviality; it can produce nothing like the generous and full-blooded lines already quoted. Our own half-starved classes are a case in point: they know not these poems. The well-fed youngsters of the universities and the stock exchange, commercial travellers for good houses, together with a wise old scholar or two—these are the fountain-heads. It is gratifying, meanwhile, to have captured a few specimens of what, historically speaking, is a protest against protestantism, and strange to think that our little ones would never have learnt to babble about the old man of Kent, whose tool was remark-ably bent, or the young man of Fife, who couldn't get into his wife, but for Luther’s preaching and the victories of Naseby and Dunbar. Whatever may be thought of speculations such as these, there is no denying that limericks are a yea-saying to life in a world that has grown grey. That alone justifies their existence. They are also English—English to the core. Of how many things can that be said? Take only our Other poets: can it be said that Milton, or Keats, are English? They may have been born in England, and they certainly write the lan-guage of that country—quite readable stuff, some of it. But how full of classical allusions, what a surfeit of airs and graces! Open their pages where you will, and you find them permeated by a cloying academic flavour; one would think they were written for the delectation of college professors. The bodies of these men were English, but their souls lived abroad; and the worst of it is, they carry their readers' souls abroad with them—abroad, into old Greece and God knows where, into the company of Virgil and Ariosto and Plato and Other foreigners. There is none of that continental nonsense here. Limericks are as English as roast beef; they, and they alone, possess that harmonious homely ring which warms our hearts when we hear them repeated round the camp-fire. Wherever two or three of our countrymen are gathered together in rough parts of the world, there you will find these verses; it is limericks that keep the flag flying, that fill you with a breath of old England in strange lands, and constitute one of the strongest sentimental links binding our Colonies to the mOther-country. Indeed, I should say that their political value is hardly appreciated at home, and that the Colonial Office might do worse than install a special department for the production and export of ever-fresh material of this kind (I have reason to think that such a department is already in existence). These planters and Civil servants, the cream of our youth, might often suffer from the irritation produced by living lonely lives in lonely places; they might often be at loggerheads with each Other, but for the healing and convivial influence of limericks that remind them of common ties and com-mon duties and a common ancestry, and make them forget their separate little troubles. Or do you fancy they discuss art and politics in their leisure moments? If so, you have never lived among them. Can you hear one of them reciting cosmopolitan effusions like the Ode to a Nightingale or Paradise Regained? Let him try it on! When we consider the popularity of limericks wherever our tongue is spoken, it is surprising how few of them can be traced to a definite author. In no Other branch of literature do we find so great a num-ber of anonymous writers, writers of talent and industry, sometimes of genius, whose labours have received no adequate reward or even acknowledgment. We hear of the Unknown Soldier: what of the Unknown Poet? Is he never to have his memorial? I have done my little best in dedicating to him the following pages. AnOther appropriate inscription would have been to Queen Victoria, under whose reign these verses achiev-ed their highest development. Edward Lear has been fruitful and suggestive. Yet it is open to doubt whether he was the actual inventor of such poems, as Professor Saintsbury {History of Prosody, III, p. 389, note) seems to imply; the verse must have existed before his time, but he popularised it and fixed the epigrammatic form. We have now abandoned his tiresome canon by which the last word of the last line is identical with the last word of the first; the chief difference, however, is that ours have a deliberate meaning, while his are deliberate nonsense. Limericks alone would have made the Victorian epoch memorable. That was the Golden Period. We are now in the Silver Age, the sophisticated age, the age of laborious ornamentation, such as: There was a young girl of Aberystwith, Who went to the mill they grind grist with, etc. or There were three young ladies of Grimsby, Who asked: Of what use can our quims be, etc. or There was a young girl of Antigua, Whose mOther said: How very big you are, etc. or (a less familiar example of this exotic school) There was an old man at the Terminus, Whose bush and whose bum were all verminous. They said : You sale Boche! You really must wash Before you start planting your sperm in us. Some of these baroque things are not without charm, but one gladly returns to the Aeschylean simplicity of the earlier period. I said that limericks were English; I should have said, English and American. Whatever one may think of America’s achievements in Other fields, it must be admitted that in this one she is a worthy competitor with the old country and that her productions are all that could be desired in point of structural excellence and delicacy of imagination. Not for nothing did the Mayflower sail westwards. And thank Heaven the cabin-passengers were puritans and not catholics! If, later on, these good people in-dulged in a little amateurish witch-burning out there, they have now made amends by the non-amateurish quality of their limericks. This verse-form, as we all know, is of yesterday, but, once imported into the New World, it struck its deepest roots into the soil most congenial to such a growth—the soil of the Eastern States. The New England regions are by far the most productive, and such examples as are here given have been garnered one and all by an assiduous lady-colle6lor of Boston in the immediate vicinity of her home. Though dealing with different parts of America and of the world they are without exception a local product; so she assures me. I am sorry to have been able to include only a few samples from her richly varied store; sorrier still not to be able to thank her in this place for her kindness in allowing me the use of these specimens. She has made it a condition that her name shall not be mentioned in connexion with them. And this would bring me to the final and pleasant task of acknowledging my debt to a number of Other contributors, mostly of a still youthful age. I find my-self, however, in a serious dilemma; none of them— no, not a single one—will permit me to print his or her name. Never did I have so many ardent collabor-ators, and never such modest ones! Their unanimity in the matter is both rare and praiseworthy, and yet I must be allowed to say that even such a commendable trait as self-effacement can be pushed too far, when it leaves anOther man in the awkward position of being unable to perform what he considers his duty. Modesty is no doubt a charming characteristic of youth, but I never knew what that word really meant, till I embark-ed on this little undertaking
