It has been over fifty years since the death of Hilaire Belloc, one of the most accomplished light versifiers of the last century. Belloc published seven books of light verse, conveniently gathered in an omnibus volume titled Cautionary Tales that has been in print since 1940.
And what amazingly good light verse it is! I cannot read Cautionary Tales without experiencing something all too rare today: total aesthetic satisfaction. Belloc never disappoints. He doesn’t miss a beat; he doesn’t fudge his rhymes; he doesn’t throw you off balance with something heterodox or out of genre. This is light verse as it should be—pleasing to the ear, witty, and wickedly funny. All of it is composed in a limpid, idiomatically precise English so fine-tuned that you cannot resist reading it aloud, preferably with an upper-class Oxbridge intonation.
Precision and clarity are the very essence of light verse. In Belloc there isn’t a hint of vagueness, uncertainty, ambiguity, or any of the other nebulous vapidities that some contemporary poets think necessary if one is to be taken seriously. Belloc is as clear as a bell. And that is one reason, I submit, why Cautionary Tales has remained in print for nearly seventy years.
Another reason is the wickedness to which I alluded. There is an insouciant streak of Schadenfreude in much of Belloc’s verse, a kind of playful nastiness that I associate with more than one writer of the Edwardian-Georgian era. Bernard Shaw specifically called some of his own dramatic works Unpleasant Plays, and H.H. Munro wrote comic short stories with horrific scenes of mayhem and animal violence. The strict social proprieties of that time ached for humorous deflation, and writers provided it with occasionally savage intensity.
In Belloc’s case, the violence is already suggested by the word “cautionary” in his book’s title. All of the poems are ostensibly addressed to children, warning them against disobedience, thoughtlessness, self-indulgence, and bad behavior in general. But the admonitions are embedded in frightening little narratives of death, mutilation, or misfortune. One child is eaten alive by a lion; another is burned to death; still another is reduced to poverty. A girl who slams doors is crushed by a falling marble bust. Others in turn have a face that is permanently distorted, or lose an inheritance, or bring their parents to financial ruin. In one particularly heinous contretemps, a boy’s carelessness with a balloon causes the utter destruction of his home, and the death of eight persons. It is all wildly improbable and shocking, but somehow hysterically funny at the same time.
Unfortunately, a good deal of light verse today—especially the sort that presumes to address children—has lost this edge. I am always amazed at how “child-friendly” so much light verse seems to be now, in the very worst sense of that phrase. No violence, no death, no horrible mutilations, not even sarcasm—all of that is banned by the self-appointed nannies of literary propriety. As a result, light verse for children seems saccharine and emasculated. If it were not so—according to current wisdom—the poor little darlings might be traumatized.
What pathetic nonsense. Genuine light verse of the sort that Belloc produced is decidedly not for kids, or at least not for them primarily. One trick of the genre is to pretend that you are writing for children while actually addressing a literarily sophisticated audience of adults. Belloc does this extremely well. In fact, the one poem in Cautionary Verses that would appear to be the straightforward praise of a well-behaved child is really a biting satire on time-serving conformism and venal social climbing (see “Charles Augustus Fortescue” on page 71 of the book). Stuff like this is not intended for children, but for those who long ago lost their childish innocence.
And that is the real point. Belloc never wrote anything that did not have the mark of his larger social and political concerns. His light verse was merely a whimsical sideline to his major literary achievement as an essayist, journalist, novelist, historical biographer, and purveyor of Catholic apologetics. Even today (along with his close friends Maurice Baring and G.K. Chesterton) Belloc remains an iconic figure in conservative Catholic circles, where there is more interest in his religious and cultural writings than in his poetry.
Will light verse ever recapture the edginess of Belloc? It’s possible, but not probable. We’re all too invested in a feminized and feelgood culture that prefers to think of light verse as a kind of mental chewing gum. But thank God that those seven books of Belloc are still available. They let us know what the genre really could do, if untrammeled by decorum.
