'His Bad Language That Is Always Good'

“The beauty of his incessant abuse is a matter of art for art’s sake. The pleasure which an educated taste would receive in hearing Cobbett call a duchess an old eat or a bishop a dirty dog is almost onomatopoeic, in its love of a melody all but detached from meaning.” 

Like William Cobbett (1763-1835), G.K. Chesterton came to literature through the servants’ entrance. He was a journalist, Cobbett a farmer and pamphleteer, and neither a litterateur. They work in the vigorous prose tradition in England that includes Nashe, Dekker, Swift and Defoe. We might call it applied prose rather than strictly literary. In William Cobbett (1925), Chesterton tells us he found “words that are like weapons rusting on the wall . . . the most choice terms of abuse becoming obsolete in face of rich and even bewildering opportunities in the way of public persons to apply them to.”

 

The only book by Cobbett I have read, and I’ve read it several times, is Rural Rides (1830). The Penguin copy I bought in 1983 is brown and brittle, and the cover is held in place with a rubber band. The book recounts the journeys by horseback Cobbett made through Southeast England and the Midlands between 1822 and 1826. Cobbett is difficult to pigeonhole politically. He was radical and reactionary, and doesn't fit into our contemporary categories. Rural Rides, likewise, eludes classification. Chesterton writes:

 

“[T]he Rural Rides are pure literature. Perhaps they are all the more literature because they might be counted loose and colloquial even for language. It would be a breathless experience even to hear a man talk in as slap-dash a style as Cobbett wrote; but the thing would be brilliant as well as breathless. Everything comes into this great soliloquy: details, dogmas, personalities, political debates, private memories, mere exclamations such as a man utters in really riding along a road.”

 

Chesterton makes a further point about Cobbett’s use of language:

 

“Many professors have in a merely literary sense recognised Cobbett as a model; but few have modelled themselves upon their model. They were always ready to hope that their pupils would write such good English. But they would have been mildly surprised if any pupil had written such plain English. . . [T]he strongest quality of Cobbett as a stylist is in the use he made of a certain kind of language; the sort of use commonly called abuse. It is especially his bad language that is always good. It is precisely the passages that have always been recognised as good style that would now be regarded as bad form.”