Lauds and libels :: MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS

MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS

Charles L. Graves

PICCADILLY

Gay shops, stately palaces, bustle and breeze,

The whirring of wheels and the murmur of trees;

By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,

Whatever my mood is—I love Piccadilly.

Thus carolled Fred Locker, just sixty years back,

In a year (’57) when the outlook was black,

And even to-day the war-weariest Willie

Recovers his spirits in dear Piccadilly.

We haven’t the belles with their Gainsborough hats,

Or the Regency bucks with their wondrous cravats,

But now that the weather no longer is chilly

There’s much to enchant us in New Piccadilly.

As I sit in my club and partake of my “ration,”

No longer I’m vexed by the follies of fashion;

The dandified Johnnies so precious and silly—

You seek them in vain in the New Piccadilly.

The men are alert and upstanding and fit,

They’ve most of them done or they’re doing their bit;

With the eye of a hawk and the stride of a gillie

They add a new lustre to Old Piccadilly.

And the crippled but gay-hearted heroes in blue

Are a far finer product than wicked “old Q,”

Who ought to have lived in a prison on skilly

Instead of a palace in mid Piccadilly.

The women are splendid, so quiet and strong,

As with resolute purpose they hurry along—

Excepting the flappers, who chatter as shrilly

As parrots let loose to distract Piccadilly.

Thus I muse as I watch with a reverent eye

The New Generation sweep steadily by,

And judge him an ass or a born Silly Billy

Who’d barter the New for the Old Piccadilly.

TO “MARTIN ROSS”

(After reading “Irish Memories.”)

Two Irish cousins greet us here

From Bushe “the silver-tongued” descended,

Whose lives for close on thirty year

Were indistinguishably blended;

Scorning the rule that holds for cooks,

They pooled their brains and joined their forces,

And wrote a dozen gorgeous books

On men and women, hounds and horses.

They superseded Handley Cross;

They glorified the “hunting fever”;

They purged their pages of the dross,

While bettering the fun, of Lever;

With many a priceless turn of phrase

They stirred us to Homeric laughter,

When painting Ireland in the days

Before Sinn Fein bewitched and “strafed” her.

With them we watched good Major Yeates

Contending with litigious peasants,

With “hidden hands” within his gates,

With claims for foxes and for pheasants;

We saw Leigh Kelway drop his chin—

That precious English super-tripper—

In shocked amazement drinking in

The lurid narrative of Slipper.

Philippa’s piercing peacock squeals,

Uttered in moments of expansion;

The grime and splendour of the meals

Of Mrs. Knox and of her mansion;

The secrets of horse-coping lore,

The loves of Sally and of Flurry—

All these delights and hundreds more

Are not forgotten in a hurry.

Yet the same genial pens that freight

Our memories with joyous magic

Gave us the tale of Francie’s fate—

So vulgar, lovable and tragic;

Just to the land that gave them birth

They showed her smiling, sad and sullen,

And turning from the paths of mirth

Probed the dark soul of Charlotte Mullen.

Alas! the tie, so close, so dear,

Two years ago death rent asunder;

Hushed is the voice so gay and clear

Which moved us once to joy and wonder;

Yet, though they chronicle a loss

Whose pang no lapse of time assuages,

The spirit of brave “Martin Ross”

Shines like a star throughout these pages.

Here in her letters may one trace

The generous scorn, the gentle pity,

The easy unaffected grace,

The wisdom that was always witty;

Here, mirrored in a sister soul,

One sees the comrade, strong yet tender,

Who marched unfaltering to her goal

Through sacrifice and self-surrender.

TO STEPHEN LEACOCK

(Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal, and author of “Further Foolishness” and other notable works of humour.)

The life that is flagrantly double,

Conflicting in conduct and aim,

Is seldom untainted by trouble

And commonly closes in shame;

But no such anxieties pester

Your dual existence, which links

The functions of don and of jester—

High thoughts and high jinks.

Your earliest venture perhaps is

Unique in the rapture intense

Displayed in these riotous Lapses

From all that could savour of sense,

Recalling the “goaks” and the gladness

Of one whom we elders adored—

The methodical midsummer madness

Of Artemus Ward.

With you, O enchanting Canadian,

We laughed till you gave us a stitch

In our sides at the wondrous Arcadian

Exploits of the indolent rich;

We loved your satirical sniping,

And followed, far over “the pond,”

The lure of your whimsical piping

Behind the Beyond.

In place of the squalor that stretches

Unchanged o’er the realist’s page,

The sunshine that glows in your Sketches

Is potent our griefs to assuage;

And when, on your mettlesome charger,

Full tilt against reason you go,

Your Lunacy’s finer and Larger

Than any I know.

The faults of ephemeral fiction,

Exotic, erotic or smart,

The vice of delirious diction,

The latest excesses of Art—

You flay in felicitous fashion,

With dexterous choice of your tools,

A scourge for unsavoury passion,

A hammer for fools.

And yet, though so freakish and dashing,

You are not the slave of your fun,

For there’s nobody better at lashing

The crimes and the cant of the Hun;

Anyhow, I’d be proud as a peacock

To have it inscribed on my tomb:

“He followed the footsteps of Leacock

In banishing gloom.”

TO “BARTIMEUS”

(From a grateful Landsman.)

Although the movements of the sea

Have always been a grief to me

And still at times disastrously

Affect my corpus vile,

Sailors of high and low degree

I long have honoured highly.

But now we honour them far more

Than ever in the days of yore

For all they’re doing in the War

To guard and shield and free us;

And this is where the man on shore

Can learn from “Bartimeus.”

For lately, when I couldn’t stick

A “fearless” book which made me sick

And positively long to kick

The author to the ceiling,

By luck I chanced on your Long Trick

And found immediate healing.

Relentless realists protest

You only have one type—the best,

Drawn from the Islands of the Blest—

Of comrades, sons and mothers;

They’d rather see you foul your nest

Than praise the “band of brothers.”

No matter; leave their ink to flow;

It cannot work you weal or woe;

The verdict of the men who know

The truth in its essentials

Should make the armchair critic slow

To challenge your credentials.

The naval officer you paint

Is not at all a plaster saint;

He doesn’t always brook restraint;

He isn’t prim or stolid;

But still he’s void of any taint

That’s mean or low or squalid.

And then you write of wondrous things

That pluck our hearts’ most secret strings—

The tender grace that childhood flings

On scenes of stern endeavour;

The news that joy and comfort brings

Or chills the heart for ever.

So when young writers, void of ruth,

Portray the flower of England’s youth

As ill-conditioned and uncouth—

In short as Huns might see us—

I turn for solace and for truth

To you, good “Bartimeus.”

ON RE-READING “BARCHESTER TOWERS”

In days when Bellona less madly

The wheels of her chariot drave,

To you, Father Anthony, gladly

My doggerel homage I gave;

And again uncontrollably yearning

For solace in desolate hours

I find a brief respite in turning

To Barchester Towers.

How good are the women, how various,

As slowly their natures unfold!—

The feudal Miss Thorne; the gregarious

And amiable Eleanor Bold;

Mrs. Quiverful, dauntless though dowdy,

With fourteen young ravens to feed,

Who managed to melt Mrs. Proudie,

So great was her need.

Mrs. Proudie, of course, is prodigious,

A terror to friends and to foes,

Ambitious, correctly religious,

Yet leading her lord by the nose;

Very far from an angel or jewel,

Very near to a feminine Pope,

And priceless in waging the duel

That smashed Mr. Slope.

And who would not willingly linger

With you, O Signora, who twirled

Round the tip of your white little finger

Staid clerics and men of the world!

Commanding the spells of a Circe;

Bewitching, though crippled and lame;

Redeeming your malice with mercy

And playing the game.

The clergy—Tractarian, Erastian,

Low Churchmen—you faithfully paint

Reveal to our view no Sebastian,

No martyr, and hardly a saint;

Though perhaps, by so freely discarding

Preferment and riches and fame,

The guileless and good Mr. Harding

Is worthy the name.

You looked upon country and city

With kindly and tolerant eyes;

You never set out to be witty,

Though seldom you failed to be wise;

You were neither ornate nor elliptic,

But most unaffectedly shrewd,

For the art that is consciously cryptic

You strictly tabooed.

Your outlook is certainly narrowed

To lives that are never sublime;

Our hearts are not haunted or harrowed

With desperate anguish or crime;

But a mutual trust is for ever

’Twixt author and reader maintained,

And we know all along we shall never

Be wantonly pained.

“BLEAK HOUSE”

There was a time when, posing as a purist,

I thought it fine to criticize and crab

Charles Dickens as a crude caricaturist,

Who laid his colours on too thick and slab,

Who lacked the temper of a judge or jurist

And made life lurid when it should be drab;

In short I branded as a brilliant dauber

The man who gave us Pecksniff and Micawber.

True, there are blots—like spots upon the sun—

And genius, lavish of imagination,

In sheer profusion always has outrun

The bounds of strict artistic concentration;

But when detraction’s worst is said and done,

How much remains for fervent admiration,

How much that never palls or wounds or sickens

(Unlike some moderns) in great generous Dickens!

And in Bleak House, the culminating story

That marks the zenith of his swift career,

The sovereign qualities that won him glory,

As writer and reformer, all appear:

Righteous resentment of abuses hoary,

Of pomp and cant, self-centred, insincere;

And burning sympathy that glows unchecked

For those who sit in darkness and neglect.

Who, if his heart be not of steel or stone,

Can read unmoved of Charley or of Jo;

Of dear Miss Flite, who, though her wits be flown,

Has kept a soul as pure as driven snow;

Of the fierce “man from Shropshire” overthrown

By Law’s delays; of Caddy’s inky woe;

Or of the alternating fits and fluster

That harass the unhappy slavey, Guster?

And there are scores of characters so vivid

They make us friends or enemies for life:

Hortense, half-tamed she-wolf, with envy livid;

The patient Snagsby and his shrewish wife;

The amorous Guppy, who poor Esther chivvied;

Tempestuous Boythorn, revelling in strife;

Skimpole, the honey-tongued artistic cadger;

And that tremendous woman, Mrs. Badger.

No wonder then that, when we seek awhile

Relief and respite from War’s strident chorus,

Few books more swiftly charm us to a smile,

Few books more truly hearten and restore us

Than his, whose art was potent to beguile

Thousands of weary souls who came before us—

No wonder, when the Huns, who ban our fiction,

Were fain to free him from their malediction.

LINES ON A NEW HISTORY

Weary of Macaulay, never nodding,

Weary of the stodginess of Stubbs,

Weary of the scientific plodding

Of the school that only digs and grubs;

I salute, with grateful admiration

Foreign to the hireling eulogist,

Chesterton’s red hot self-revelation

In the guise of England’s annalist.

Here is no parade of erudition,

No pretence of calm judicial tone,

But the stimulating ebullition

Of a sort of humanized cyclone;

Unafraid of flagrant paradoxes,

Unashamed of often seeing red,

Here’s a thinker who the compass boxes

Standing most at ease upon his head.

Yet with all this acrobatic frolic

There’s a core of sanity behind

Madness that is never melancholic,

Passion never cruel or unkind;

And, although his wealth of purple patches

Some precisians may excessive deem,

Still the decoration always matches

Something rich and splendid in the theme.

Not a textbook—that may be admitted—

Full of dates and Treaties and of Pacts,

For our author cannot be acquitted

Of a liberal handling of his facts;

But a stirring proof of Britain’s title,

Less in Empire than in soul, of “Great,”

And a frank and generous recital

Of “the glories of our blood and State.”

TO MY GODSON

(Aged six weeks.)

Small bundle, enveloped in laces,

For whom I stood sponsor last week,

When you slept, with the pinkest of faces,

And never emitted a squeak;

Though vain is the task of illuming

The Future’s inscrutable scroll,

I cannot refrain from assuming

A semi-prophetical rÔle.

I predict that in paths Montessorian

Your infantile steps will be led,

And with modes which are Phrygian and Dorian

Your musical appetite fed;

You’ll be taught how to dance by a Russian,

“Eurhythmics” you’ll learn from a Swiss,

How not to behave like a Prussian—

No teaching is needed for this!

Will you learn Esperanto at Eton?

Or, if Eton by then is suppressed,

Be sent to grow apples or wheat on

A ranche in the ultimate West?

Will you aim at a modern diploma

In civics or commerce or stinks?

Inhale the Wisconsin aroma

Or think as the humanist thinks?

Will you learn to play tennis from Covey

Or model your stroke on Jay Gould?

Will you play the piano like Tovey

Or by gramophone records be schooled?

Will you golf, or will golfing be banished

To answer the needs of the plough,

And links from the landscape have vanished

To pasture the sheep and the cow?

Your taste in the region of letters

I only can dimly foresee,

But guess that from metrical fetters

The verse you’ll affect must be free;

And I shan’t be surprised or astounded

If your generation rebels

Against adulation unbounded

Of Shaw and of Bennett and Wells.

Upholding ancestral tradition

Your uncle has booked you at Lord’s,

But I doubt if you’ll sate your ambition

Athletic on well-levelled swards;

No, I rather opine that you’ll follow

The lead that we owe to the Wrights,

And soar like the eagle or swallow

On far and adventurous flights.

But no matter—in joy and affliction,

In seasons of failure or fame,

I cherish the certain conviction

You’ll never dishonour your name;

For the love of the mother that bore you,

The life and the death of your sire

Will shine as a lantern before you,

To guide and exalt and inspire.

THE HOUSE-MASTER

Four years I spent beneath his rule,

For three of which askance I scanned him,

And only after leaving school

Came thoroughly to understand him;

For he was brusque in various ways

That jarred upon the modern mother,

And scouted as a silly craze

The theory of the “elder brother.”

Renowned at Cambridge as an oar

And quite distinguished as a wrangler,

He felt incomparably more

Pride in his exploits as an angler;

He held his fishing on the Test

Above the riches of the Speyers,

And there he lured me, as his guest,

Into the ranks of the “dry-flyers.”

He made no fetish of the cane

As owning any special virtue,

But held the discipline of pain,

When rightly earned, would never hurt you;

With lapses of the normal brand

I think he dealt most mercifully,

But chastened with a heavy hand

The sneak, the liar and the bully.

We used to criticize his boots,

His simple tastes in food and fiction,

His everlasting homespun suits,

His leisurely old-fashioned diction;

And yet we had the saving nous

To recognize no worse disaster

Could possibly befall the House

Than the removal of its Master.

For though his voice was deep and gruff,

And rumbled like a motor-lorry,

He showed the true angelic stuff

If anyone was sick or sorry;

So when pneumonia, doubly dread,

Of breath had nearly quite bereft me,

He watched three nights beside my bed

Until the burning fever left me.

He served three Heads with equal zeal

And equal absence of ambition;

He knew his power, and did not feel

The least desire for recognition;

But shrewd observers, who could trace

Back to their source results far-reaching,

Saw the true spirit of the race

Embodied in his life and teaching.

The War’s deep waters o’er him rolled

As he beheld Young England giving

Life prodigally, while the old

Lived on without the cause for living;

And yet he never heaved a sigh

Although his heart was inly riven;

He only craved one boon—to die

In harness, and the boon was given.

THE OLD MATRON

A stone’s-throw from the College gate

There lives a very noble lady;

A cottage-lawn her whole estate,

Without a tree to keep it shady;

For thirty years she served the school

In quite a number of positions,

And by her character and rule

Upheld its very best traditions.

School generations came and went,

Head followed Head—but in this story

’Tis foreign to my main intent

To say which gained the greatest glory;

Enough that minds of every size,

Hustlers and scholars, bloods and boobies,

All came in time to recognize

Her price was far above all rubies.

For, though immersed in household cares

And such extremely mundane matters

As washing, packing and repairs

Of wardrobes normally in tatters,

She found with unobtrusive tact

A hundred ways of help and healing,

And never overlooked an act

Of cruelty or double-dealing.

Her office and her Spartan breed

Forbade her to be sentimental,

But in an hour of real need

She could be wonderfully gentle;

To fashion, to the swift or strong

She was incapable of truckling,

But helped the lonely soul along

And comforted the ugly duckling.

Robust in body and in mind,

Free from all feminine caprices,

Seeing the best in all her kind,

Though loving nephews more than nieces,

She made no pets; if haply one

Appealed to her beyond another,

It was the orphan or the son

Neglected by a selfish mother.

Too fond to quit a scene so dear,

Too wise to fancy she was slighted,

Loth to intrude or interfere,

Though always helpful when invited,

She is the first whom boys on leave

Greet when they seek their alma mater,

The last they part from on the eve

Of their return to trench and crater.

For in her strong and homely face,

Her life serene and self-forgetting,

They see the Genius of the Place

Incarnate in a human setting;

And, though they readily would own

Their debt to Founder, Saint and Patron,

Keep in their heart of hearts a throne

Of special glory for the Matron.

CONSTABLE JINKS

’TWAS FIFTY YEARS AGO

(Lines suggested by an old Magazine.)

Published the year I went to school—

The second of life’s seven ages—

How fragrant of Victorian rule

Are these forgotten pages!

When meat and fruit were still uncanned;

When good Charles Dickens still was writing;

And Swinburne’s poetry was banned

As rather too exciting.

No murmurs of impending strife

Were heard, no dark suggestions hinted;

Our novelists still looked on life

Through spectacles rose-tinted;

And Paris, in those giddy years,

Still laughed at Offenbach and Schneider,

Blind to the doom of blood and tears,

With none to warn or guide her.

The index and the authors’ names,

Their stories and their lucubrations,

Recall old literary aims

And faded reputations;

We wonder at the influence

That Sala’s florid periods had on

His fellows, and the vogue immense

Of versatile Miss Braddon.

And yet I read Aurora Floyd

In youth with rapture quite unholy—

Not in the way that I enjoyed

Mince-pies or roly-poly;

While “G. A. S.” appeared to me

Like a Leonid fresh from starland,

Not the young lion that we see

Portrayed in Friendship’s Garland.

And there are tinklings of the lute

In orthodox decorous fashion,

But altogether destitute

Of “elemental” passion;

And illustrations which refrain

From all that verges on the shady,

But glorify the whiskered swain,

The lachrymose young lady.

The sirens of the “sixties” showed

No inkling of our modern Circes,

And swells had not evolved the code

That guides our precious Percys;

Woman, in short, was grave or gay,

But not a problem or a riddle,

And maidens still were taught to play

The harp and not the fiddle.

And writers in the main eschewed

All topics tending to disquiet,

All efforts to reorganize

Our dogmas or our diet;

You could not carp at Mendelssohn

Without creating quite a scandal,

And rag-time on the gramophone

Had not supplanted Handel.

Blameless and wholesome in their way,

At times agreeably subacid,

I love these records of a day

Long dead, but calm and placid;

And with a sigh I now replace

This ancient volume of Belgravia

And turn the “latest news” to face

Mutans amaris suavia.

NEW MEN AND OLD STUDIES

[A volume has recently appeared under the title of The Value of the Classics, in which “three hundred competent observers, representing the leading interests of modern life” in America, and including three living Presidents of the United States—Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt—testify their conviction that classical studies are of essential value in the best type of liberal education.]

O ye Humanists half-hearted, now reluctantly resigned

To concede the claim of Science to control the youthful mind,

Once again cry Sursum corda—reinforcement comes at last

From an unexpected quarter in a wondrous counter-blast.

If there is a modern country which effete tradition hates,

Surely ’tis the Great Republic known as the United States,

Home of hustlers and of boosters, home of energy and “vim,”

Filled with innovating notions bubbling over at the brim.

Nowhere else can we discover, though we closely scan the map,

Such a readiness in scrapping anything there is to scrap;

Yet the pick of her progressives boldly swarm into the lists

As the most unflinching champions of the harried Humanists.

Wilson, Taft and Teddy Roosevelt figure in the foremost flight,

Followed by three hundred chosen men of leading and of light—

Men of great and proved achievement in diversified careers,

Statesmen, lawyers, doctors, bankers, railwaymen and engineers.

Dons of course may be discounted, also College Presidents,

But the most impressive statements come from scientific gents,

Who admit that education on a humanistic base

Gives their students vast advantage in the specializing race.

Botany relies on Latin ever since LinnÆus’ days;

Biologic nomenclature draws on Greek in countless ways;

While in medicine it is obvious you can never take your oath

What an ailment means exactly if you haven’t studied both.

Heads of business corporations, magnates in the world of trade,

’Neath the banner of the Classics formidably stand arrayed,

Holding with a firm conviction that their faithful study brings

Knowledge of the art of handling men and regulating things.

Courage, ye depressed upholders of the old curriculum,

Quit your mood apologetic, bang the loud scholastic drum,

For the verdict of the Yankees queers the scientific pitch

When the Humanists were struggling in their last defensive ditch.

Honour, then, the brave Three Hundred who, like those renowned of yore,

Strive to guard from rude barbarians Hellas and her precious lore;

And let all of us determine firmly never to forget

???s??, ?????, ????a, piget, pudet, poenitet.

REMUNERATIVE RHYMES

[In the new History of American Literature it is stated that Robert Treat Paine, the Boston poet (1773-1811), enjoyed such a reputation “that he could command five dollars a line for his verse, a price never before approached in America, and perhaps never since equalled.”]

Say, is it true, O priceless Ella Wheeler,

That you, the blameless Sappho of the West,

Stricken humanity’s most potent healer,

Consoler of the doubting and distressed,

Passion’s intense, impeccable revealer,

Of all best-sellers quite the very best,

Than Tupper’s self far sweeter and sublimer,

Were equalled by an early Boston rhymer?

It cannot be that such ecstatic yearning,

Such pure domestic raptures uncontrolled,

Such lavish use of old proverbial learning

Of ancient saws cast in a modern mould,

When measured by the crucial test of earning,

By market value, reckoned up in gold,

Never secured you, prophetess benign,

More than a bare five dollars to the line.

Tried by this test, I own, scant was the gleaning

Of Milton—just five “jingling tingling quid”

Paid for his Paradise; but then his meaning

Was wilfully from artless readers hid.

Besides, he wrote blank verse and from a leaning

To heresy was never wholly rid;

Your creed is crystal clear and orthodox,

Your rhymes salute us like a postman’s knocks.

Five dollars for a line! Oh, no, great Ella,

That clearly cannot mark your maximum;

The market-price of your celestia mella

Must far surpass that negligible sum.

Let some obscure American Apella

Believe it, I am sure it cannot come

To half the rate a high-browed journal pays

For one of your incomparable lays.

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