Alec H. Chisholm, who made such a lively and worth-while job of C. J. Dennis's life in The Making of the Sentimental Bloke, has now edited the Selected Verse of C. J. Dennis (Angus and Robertson).

Dennis was a Bulletin poet; and it is interesting to turn him up around 1913, when his "Backblock Ballads" first appeared and were reviewed on "The Red Page" (21/8/'13). The book contained four pieces entitled "The Sentimental Bloke" - "Poetically," said the Red Page, "they are the finest things in the volume." "Doreen" had appeared at the head of the "Aboriginalities" page as early as September 30, 1909; and they were still coming out - "The Spring Song of a Bloke," which opens the sequence as completed, had appeared on March 13, 1913, on page 43, in two columns of reading-matter flanked by six columns of advertisements, signed, as usual, "Den. Victoria."

Years before, the only other Australian bloke of equal fame, "The Man from Snowy River," had been as quietly born. Paterson was by no means unappreciated; he seems to have been the main poetical drawcard of the early Bulletin, more so, even, than Lawson. "The Man from Ironbark" and "A Bush Christening" received full, front-page treatment, not only illustrated, but with the verse drawn on the block; yet "The Man from Snowy River" was as quietly strung down a back column as "The Spring Song."

There is more than casual interest in the comparison of Paterson and Dennis, because the first things Dennis thought worth saving from The Bulletin and putting in a book were ballads in Paterson's style:-

   He lived in Mundaloo, and Bill McClosky was his name, 
   But folks that knew him well had little knowledge of that same; 
   For he some'ow lost his surname, and he had so much to say - 
   He was called "The Silent Member" in a mild, sarcastic way. 

There is no very high place in the history of literature for the imitator; and, indeed, in 1913, Dennis was merely one of a tribe of Bulletin rhymsters - "Kodak," "O.C. Cabot," "Curse O'Moses," Harrison Owen, "Monty Peet," R.J. Cassidy, "Pat O'Maori," Grant Hervey, "Eddyson," Edmund Fisher, Arthur H. Adams - to give only a few of the names and pen-names that appeared again and again in the paper in those times. They were all, by present-day standards (which well may be ceded by default), extraordinarily competent, smooth, suave and facile; they liked, probably for fiscal reasons, to run to length; they wrote mostly topical verse - a snippet from a newspaper, and their song of praise or blame underneath it - and, of the topical verse, most was political.

Dennis appeared in The Bulletin about once a fortnight in 1913, but others appeared oftener; he had a slight advantage in length over most other contributors, running often over a column; and his verses appeared more often and at greater length on the main double-page editorial spread. He was a topical versifier among topical versifiers; and it should comfort any struggling rhymster to know that Dennis could write in the worst style of the worst influences of his period, as for instance when objecting to the slurs cast upon illegitimacy by the unco' guid:-

   Shall our good money got to succor that
   Unhappy woman and her nameless brat?
   When she some secret means might well have sought
   To save the insult that its birth had brought....

He could be as indignantly second-rate over flogging:-

   And what has Reason now to say,
      Chief of the modern gods?
   And Mercy?  "Keep the man apart,
      And harm not such poor clods"?
   "Nay," saith the Law, "we'll truss him up
      And scourge his back with rods."

Dennis had attracted some notice in 1908 with his slang national anthem, "The Austra-laise," but the full popularity of this piece waited upon the fame of "The Sentimental Bloke" and the 1914-18 war - the reader of 1913 might be pardoned for finding it hard to differentiate Dennis from his fellow contributors; they were as dexterous rhymers and as witty. But, wise after the event, we can see now that he had one thing the others lacked - a sense of character. Where others were content with flat statement, Dennis was never really happy unless he was setting a scene, putting people in it, staging monologues with caricatured accents, or conducting arguments as fugues for two or more voices. He was an excellent mimic of the upper-class accent of those days:-

   "Haw!  Good fellow I'm not doubting
      Your intentions are all right,
   And your general appearance
      Is intelligent and bright;
   But the question you're discussing
      Rarther flicks me on the raw,
   And it really doesn't matter:
      So we'll close the subject.  Haw!"   

But there are comparatively few examples of this; in fact, he liked to satirise the rich by making them speak in the accents of the poor, as in "Terrible Bill," inspired by an "Argus" leader saying that Mr. Hughes's anti-trust proposals were only window-dressing, but that he must not be given power for fear he might put them into effect:-

   Though you'd think be the look of this Hughes, Bill Hughes,
      That 'e'd eat the monopolist band,
   It's only 'is gammon; he's really a-shammin';
      'E'd let 'em eat out of 'is 'and;
   'E'd let 'em lie down be 'is side, though 'is frown
      When 'e torks is a terrible sight;
   But if they was slaughtered be Hughes, Bill Hughes,
      Why, 'e wouldn't have nothink to fight!


              *          *          *          *


   But still 'e's a puzzle is Hughes, Bill Hughes,
      To a Tory like me or like you.
   With 'is plottin' an' schemin' an' darin' and dreamin',
      You never know wot 'e might do.
   So it's plain that you must, if you cherish the Trust,
      Vote a "No" to all six of 'is schemes.
   For I ain't very certain of Hughes, Bill Hughes;
     An' he mightn't be quite wot 'e seems.

Side by side with this kind of thing (imitations and parodies for mainly politcal purposes of Kipling, W. S. Gilbert, Paterson, etc.; chanties, monologues, dialogues, patter-songs, mock-Grecian choruses - most of them done with verve and dexterity, but few or none of them ranking higher than as applied art) went "The Sentimental Bloke," a larrikin ballad of larrikin spelling and slang words, written not in the racy waltz rhythms of the day but in pentameter; the English grand style:-

   The world 'as got me snouted jist a treat;
      Crool Forchin's dirty left 'as smote me soul;
   An' all them joys o' life I 'eld so sweet
      Is up the pole.
   Fer, as the poit sez, me 'eart 'as got
   The pip wiv yearnin' fer - I dunno wot.

The remarkable thing to anyone who has studied the early Dennis is not the novelty of this slang style, but its purity - how everything he is capable of doing goes into it and seems in keeping:-

   Wot wus I slung 'ere for?  An' wot's the good
      Of yearnin' after any ideel tart?
   Ar, if a bloke wus only understood!
      'E's got a 'eart:
   'E's got a soul inside 'im, poor or rich.
   But wot's the use, when 'Eaven's crool'd 'is pitch?


   I tells meself some day I'll take a pull
      An' look around fer some good, stiddy job,
   An' cut the push fer good an' all; I'm full
      Of that crook mob!
   An', in some Spring the fucher 'olds in store,
   I'll cop me prize an' long in vain no more.

(Mr. Chisholm has dropped these two stanzas from the "Spring Song"; and in this selection, following the precedent of the first edition, a line is weakened to "'Eaven's crool'd 'is pitch" instead of "Gawd 'as crool'd 'is pitch" as it was in The Bulletin.)

Dennis wrote in many different styles; and it would not be right to say that he found himself in "Doreen" or the "Spring Song" and stayed found - the styles overlap; but it is true that he is never quite so much himself as when he is writing and thinking in the slang dialect he found or invented; it is as though he had to take off his coat and collar and tie to feel completely at ease. There is often more poise and certainty in a man's invented character that in his own twisting circumstances and shifting beliefs: "Give a man a mask," as Wilde says, "and he will tell you the truth."

This is true of Dennis's later word, as demonstrated by Mr. Chisholm's selections. The last pieces, in straightforward English, are hardly more than competent versifying; and when he modified his use of slang in "Jim of the Hills" he was only a weak imitation of himself.

In one's youth one was apt to pass over the slang and spelling of "The Sentimental Bloke" as meritricious, and "patronage of the poor," and hold up for commendation "The Glugs of Gosh." Nowadays one is more apt to find "The Glugs of Gosh" a brilliant but lightweight exercise in a style which has been done at least as well before; and to appreciate the strength and vividness of scene and characterisation in "The Bloke." Such things as "The Play" and "Mar" have a solid and comic realism far beyond their novelty of slang and spelling; they achieve something of the largeness of the style they set out to caricature; especially "Mar":-

   "'Er pore dear Par." she sez, "'e kept a store";
   An' then she weeps an' stares 'ard at the floor.
     "'Twas thro' 'is death," she sez, "we wus rejuiced
   To this," she sez . . . An' then she weeps some more.

It has been said, though no one seems to have pinned it down precisely, that Dennis's model was some similar kind of verse in London or America - not that this would take away from his peculiarly Australian achievement. The larrikin was getting considerable attention at the time from such as Louis Esson, Edward Dyson and Louis Stone. Probably nobody will ever be able to decide who first began the theme; larrikins, like voyagers and explorers today, were "in the air"; but the important thing is how well or ill each writer handled the theme.

Dennis, for instance, could not have done the scene in Stone's great novel where the old father thrust a few hard-earned pounds on the young couple, and still have kept it free of sentimentality; and, at any rate in Jonah, Stone was absolutely incapable of the flood of sloppy feeling which spoils so much of "The Bloke" for present-day readers. But Stone could never have created with such rich comic force as in "The Intro," or interested so large a public. It is a difference not so much of quality as of kind: Stone was an artist; Dennis was a poster-artist; and with his flowing sentimentality went propaganda - for marriage, as in "The Bloke"; for patriotism, as in "The Moods of Ginger Mick"; and for whatever "awareness of national danger" may be found in "The Glugs of Gosh."

To say that a man is a poster-artist in poetry is only another way of saying that he is a popular balladist - the scene done in broad, sweeping strokes; the individual merged in national characteristics. A hundred years hence some ardent researcher may well opine that the most perfect and well-equipped of all Australian poets up to the first half of the twentieth century was Kenneth Slessor; but that the most repesentative were the balladists Paterson and Dennis.

Ronald McCuaig
The Bulletin, 8 August 1951, red page