THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2008 with funding from
IVIicrosoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/collectedparodieOOsqui
Collected Parodies
Collected Parodies
By J. C. Squire
a
New York
George H. Doran Company
Printed wholly in England for the Muston Company.
I.OWK cNc Bkydone, Printbrs. Ltd., Park Stkkkt, Camokn Town. Lokdon, N.W.I
Y'K
4^37
677o
CONTENTS
PAGE
I
Repertory Drama
3
II
How They Do It
31
III
How They Would Have Done It
75
IV
Imaginary Reviews
103
V
Imaginary Speeches
139
VI
The Aspirant's Manual
157
815349
PREFACE
THIS collection includes almost the whole of
three previous books : " Imaginary Speeches,"
" Steps to Parnassus" and "Tricks of the Trade,"
which contain all the parodies I have ever published
or, I imagine, ever shall publish. For permission to
reprint from the first two I am indebted to Messrs.
Allen and Unwin. Some of the parodies have been
re-grouped ; a few have been omitted. I was not
quite sure what to do about the " Imaginary
Speeches " in which I endeavoured to exhibit the
mannerisms of mind and language of a number of
politicians who were prominent in 1909, when they
were written. The speeches dealt with a hypothetical
future which will not now exist. They mentioned
persons no longer conspicuous. They treated prob-
lems which have been either shelved or partially
solved : one, for instance, visualized women's
suffrage coming under conditions very different from
those which saw its achievement. I have, therefore,
compromised by reprinting three only of them in
the hope that, as some readers, when they first
appeared, found them interesting as topical criticism,
so others may now find them interesting as recalling
" the world before the war."— J-C.S.
I
REPERTORY DRAMA
M. MAURICE MAETERLINCK
PELISSIER AND MARIANE
[Scene. A glade in an ancient forest. The trees
have vast trunks. Over and through them (l.) one can
dimly see the crown of a ruined tower. Its stones are
massive, and it has been inhabited, but is so no longer.
It is evening. Pelissier and Mariane stand by the
bole of a great tree, melancholy and silent, gazing at
the last light. He is of robust build, and she clings to
him for support. Both are pale with that mysterious
pallor that lives in moonbeams when a cloud half covers
the surface of the moon.
Mariane. Pelissier ! [A wind shakes the branches
and the leaves rustle.] Pelissier ! ... It is a little
wind 1 . . . Did you not hear it, Pelissier ?
Pelissier. Yes, Mariane, it is a little wind, a
child wind. Perhaps it has lost its way in the world.
We, have we lost our way, Mariane ?
Mariane. Pelissier ! . . .
Pelissier. Yes, I think we have lost our way. . . .
I dreamt last night that I was walking, walking amid
the meshes of an enormous net of bushes and plants
which sucked and throttled me so that I could
hardly breathe. . . . And you, you were there too,
Mariane. I could hear you somewhere making little
cries, the cries I have often heard you make when
you have found some wounded thing : some bird,
perhaps, that the cruel cat has been tormenting. . . .
3
COLLECTED PARODIES
Mariane. Prissier ! . . .
Pelissier. I think that in my dream we were
wandering there for ever.
Mariane. PeHssier ! . . .
[It has groum darker. The mooji has not yet risen,
hut the tower and the other objects are still faintly
visible in a diffused bluish lights like the light of in-
finity. For a space Pelissier and Mariane are silent.
Slowly, over the farthest trees, the moon rises. The
tower becomes a pillar of black and silver, and a pure
and brilliant ray strikes Pelissier and Mariane.
Pelissier. Hush, Mariane !
Mariane. PeHssier !
Pelissier. Do you not see them ?
Mariane. Who, Pelissier ? . . . Oh, I Sm afraid
. . . Oh, I am cold !
Pelissier [his voice is low and level and brooding,
and his eyes are fixed and sorrowful]. They are over
there, over behind that tree. They are coming this
way. Do you not see them ? It is the six old men
whom we saw yesterday by the place where the old
king lived.
Mariane. Oh, Pelissier ! Oh, I see them ! Oh,
they are horrible ! I think I must have known them
long ago. ... I think I must have known them
before I was born !
[From the forest on the left Six Old Men enter.
The five of them are blind and deaf and dumb, but the
sixth is not dumb. He is only blind and deaf. They
walk very slowly and stumblingly. The first feels his
way with his staff. The others also feel their ways with
their staffs, tripping over sticks and dead leaves as
they go.]
4
REPERTORY DRAMA
The First Old Man. Moo ! [He enters the wood
on the right.]
The Second Old Man. Moo ! [He enters the
wood on the right.]
The Third Old Man. Moo . [He enters the wood
on the right.]
The Fourth Old Man. Moo ! [He enters the
wood on the right.]
The Fifth Old Man. Moo! [He enters the wood
on the right.]
The Sixth Old Man. Ah ! . . . I think God
must be dead to-night. . . . [He stumbles.] Blast !
[He enters the wood on the right.]
Pelissier. Did you hear what the sixth old man
said, Mariane ?
Mariane [vaguely y as one in a dream]. Oh ! . . .
There is a child there . . . over where the old king
lived It is blue. ... It is blue like the
night ! ... I do not know why it is blue ! . . .
Oh, I am afraid !
Pelissier. He said that he thought God must be
dead to-night. ... I remember when the old
king died, the old king with the amber eyes and
the gentle voice, that there was an old knight there
who was in the old wars. He was so old that no
one knew when he was born or who was his father.
They said that he was born before the world
began. ... I think, perhaps, he was never
born. . . .
Mariane. Yes, I have heard of him, Pelissier. . . .
It was Aggravette who told me, your cousin Aggra-
vette. . . . We had been one day over the lake in a
great galley. The rowers rowed. They rowed hard.
5
COLLECTED PARODIES
They were great men, and their muscles gleamed
in the sun. . . .
Enter A Man
The Man. X22, what are you doing off your
beat ?
Curtain
REPERTORY DRAMA
II
SCHOOL OF WILDE
EPIGRAMMATIC COMEDY
[Tea-time at the Ashingtons'. Dora Ashington,
a pretty fair-haired girl of twenty-one^ pours tea. Her
brother Harold, Cyril Buck, and Ethelred Under-
wood are scattered in various careless attitudes toying
with Eclairs. Furniture as usual.
Dora. What a world it is !
Cyril. Yes, an oblate spheroid flattened at both
ends like an orange and simply covered with
scandals.
Ethelred. I think, you know, that what this age
really lacks is critics.
Cyril. Yes ; the critic's main function as now
interpreted is offering plausible explanations. Our
critics have no mental life. Mental life consists
chiefly in the discovery that the things our ancestors
said were true.
Dora. Oh, how can you say we have no critics !
What about Mr. Lumley ?
Cyril. Mr. Lumley rows with commendable
energy in the river of life, but he is always catching
crabs.
Dora. Well, Mr. Chumley then ?
Ethelred. He splits hairs the size of barge-poles.
Dora. But what about Mr. Dumley ?
Harold. Mr. Dumley has made a very big repu-
tation. No, I do not care to say he has made a big
7
COLLECTED PARODIES
reputation ; I prefer to say that he has made an
extensive, bad smell.
Dora. I'm afraid you're all very sarcastic just
because you know I'm not clever. I suppose you
will be saying that we have no artists next.
Cyril. We have no artists.
Dora [triumphantly]. Well, I've heard you say
yourself that Mr. Pumley was marvellous.
Cyril. How marvellous, but how unreadable.
Dora. And even Ethelred has admitted that there
are good passages in his poems.
Ethelred. Imitation pearls in a very genuine
dunghill.
Dora. You are all throwing me overboard. I
suppose, Harold, you will turn on your favourite,
Mr. Mumley, next,
Harold. I do not know what you mean by my
favourite, Dora. Mr. Mumley, as it appears to me,
spends most of his time in a laborious pursuit of the
obvious. He goes to the North Pole and finds it a
clichi !
Dora. Oh, how silly you are. You are all per-
fectly unreasonable.
Cyril. Reason is a dangerous weapon to play
with.
Ethelred. Oh, certainly, Cyril.
Cyril. A blunt razor may be sharper than a
sharp knife. We are all proud to belong to a Vam-
pire on which the sun never sets. If you take a horse
to the water you must expect him to drink. The
worst of young women is that they are so middle-
aged. They refuse to leap before they look. The
modern married woman should never forget she is
8
REPERTORY DRAMA
modern, should sometimes forget she is a woman,
but should always forget she is married. No, Dora,
you are not married. [Sighing.] I sometimes wish
you were.
Harold and Ethelred. I think we must be going
The worst of going is that it implies coming back.
Grood-bye.
[They go out
Dora. Did you really mean what you said . . .
Cyril?
Cyril. Yes ; I really meant what I said.
Dora. So there's no more to be said.
[They embrace
Cyril. The worst of engagements is that they
seldom end in marriage. The worst of marriage is
that it always begins with an engagement. When-
ever I am engaged I always feel as though even
marriage would be preferable. I have always felt
that except when I have been married. Only last
week I was married and I felt like it then. I married
one of my housemaids. I felt that it was time I in-
troduced economy into my household. I have always
been as poor as a church mouse- because I have had
to maintain so many servants. Being a man with a
stronger will-power than my friends suspect I came
to a determined resolution. I made up my mind
that I would diminish the number of my servants,
and I could only do that by marrying them one by
one and retaining their services without salary.
Dora. A wife in times saves nine.
Cyril [severely]. I suspect, Dora, that that means
nothing. Rolling stones always gather moss. I am
not a rolling stone and I have gathered no moss.
9
COLLECTED PARODIES
[Sadly.] No, I fear the moss has gathered me. That
is the worst of moss ; it is so avaricious. I am a prey
to every grasping moss whose path I cross. There is
old Moses Moss for example.
Dora. Oh, Cyril, you don't mean to say you have
fallen into the hands of those horrid moneylenders ?
Cyril. No, Dora ; would that it were so ; they
might have lent me some money. As it is I have only
been able to borrow from complete strangers. I do
it at night with the help of a kindly policeman who
was at college with me. He has risen in the world ;
I have come down. I think he got his job through
influence. That is the worst of influence ; it is so
influential.
Dora. I am really awfully sorry for you, Cyril ;
I would do anything for you except break our en-
gagement,
Cyril. No ; I do not ask you to do that, Dora.
As a man makes his bed so he must lie, even if he
makes it up a tree. That is the worst of trees ; they
are so up. I think that trees should have grown
horizontally ; they would have been more easy to
descend. I once knew a man who had a mustard-
tree. But the birds of the air did not build their
nests in it [sighing], so he cut it down.
Dora. I think I hear father coming.
Enter Mr. Ashington
Dora. Father, Cyril and I are going to be married.
Mr. Ashington [shaking hands with Cyril). My
dear fellow, there's nothing could have delighted me
more. A wife, as Solomon said, is better than rubies.
Cyril. Who was Solomon ?
Curtain
lO
REPERTORY DRAMA
III
SCHOOL OF REBELLION AND STAGE
DIRECTIONS
THE CAGED EAGLET
OR, HOW WE MAKE OUR PLAYS READABLE
[The scene is the morning-room at the Blenkinsops'.
Chairs, books, pictures, etc. Sofa R.c, doors r., r.c,
L., and L.c. ; French-window between centre doors if
there is sufficient space. Mrs. Blenkinsop is seated at
a large zvriting-desk against the Hght wall and her
daughter Euphrosyne is'-zoriting at a smaller desk
facing the opposite wall. Mrs. Blenkinsop is a lady
past middle age, portly, treble-chinned, large-bosomed,
hook-nosed, and pince-nez' d. She looks — as indeed -she
is — the type of prosperous philistinism. When Mr.
Blenkinsop was first engaged to her she was a plump
and stupid damsel in much request at tennis-parties.
Years have aged and rounded her ; she does not play
tennis nowadays ; in fact, her only exercise consists of
taking her dog out for a daily drive in a victoria. She
is engaged in writing a letter to a Mrs. Pott-Wither
asking her whether she is willing to go halves in a
garden-party on behalf of the local branch of the
Degenerate Tinkers' Aid Society. It is not easy to
guess how Euphrosyne has put up with her so long.
At last, after several minutes busy scratching, she turns
her head towards her daughter.
Mrs. Blenkinsop. Euphrosyne !
II
COLLECTED PARODIES
[EuPHROSYNE turfis with an impatient look. She
has for some time been secretly a member of the Syn-
dicalist Party of Great Britain and Ireland. Her
smooth hair, parted in the middle, her grey, direct eyes,
and her square jaw, all betray resolution and original-
ity. Only her strong sense of duty has kept her at home
so long. She has no more sympathy with her asinine
parents than you or I would have ; but she knows that
in their way they are fund of their only child. Lately,
however, domestic bonds have irked her more and more,
and an explosion tnay be expected at any moment.
She frowns slightly and bites her lower lip. Still, she
answers.
EuPHROSYNE. Yes, mother.
[Mrs. Blenkinsop is blissfully unaware of her
daughter s irritation, and she smiles fatly as she half-
turns and surveys the neatly dressed figure. Probably
she wonders as she looks at her whether or not she will
marry Albert Pott-Wither, brother-in-law of Mrs.
Pott-Wither, a bald-headed, nut-faced stockbroker of
forty-five. But she puts such thoughts temporarily out
of her head and resumes the conversation.
Mrs. Blenkinsop. Do you remember the num-
ber of Mrs. Pott-Wither 's house ?
[EuPHROSYNE is naturally annoyed at the triviality
of the interruption, but succeeds in stemming the tide
of anger. Nevertheless her breast heaves rather quickly
as she replies.
EuPHROSYNE. Oh, 1 think it is 24 Hazelville Road,
but I am not quite sure.
[Both resume their writing, but after a couple of
minutes Mrs. Blenkinsop looks up again, patting her
hair lightly with her hand. She gives a little cough.
12
REPERTORY DRAMA
Mrs. Blenkinsop. Do you know whether the
Pott-Withers have changed their telephone num-
ber ?
EuPHROSYNE. No ; 664 Bracton.
Mrs. Blenkinsop. I thought it was 663.
EuPHROSYNE. No ; 664.
[They continue writing until the elder woman rises
to go to the telephone. She goes out door r.c. Euph-
ROSYNE springs from her chair and begins kicking the
ground. She paces hurriedly up stage and then returns
to her chair.
EuPHROSYNE. Oh, damn !
[Mrs. Blenkinsop re-enters from the door by
which she has emerged. She stands for a moment near
the door scrutinising her daughter's bent back with a
puzzled look. Then she gives a little sigh of non-com-
prehension and returns to her loork. After a quarter of
an hour's silence the door r.c. is suddenly flung open
and Mr. Blenkinsop appears framed in the darkness
behind it. He is very short, very stout, very shiny, very
bald. His frock-coat flows back from an ample white-
and-striped waistcoat whereon glitters a gold watch-
chain with many seals. He wears spats. That is the
kind of man he is. Once for a short time he sat on the
local Board of Guardians ; but finding that there was
very little to be made out of it, owing to the nature of
his business, he retired after one term of service. Since
then he has taken no part whatever in public life. He
regards his daughter as a pretty young fool and sneers
at her attempts to get in touch with modern movements.
He hems loudly ; then slowly rolls up to the sofa, on
which, with great care and effort, he deposits himself
at full length.
13
COLLECTED PARODIES
Mr. Blenkinsop. Well, Euphrosyne, haven't
you got a word for me ?
[Euphrosyne leaps up, her fist clenched, her cheeks
aflame. She is looking splendid and knows it ; but
after all, she can't help that. She remembers her child-
hood, but puts the thought out of mind. The climax has
come.
Euphrosyne. I won't. By God, I won't.
[Her father quivering tvith rage looks at her lithe,
erect form. He contemplates for a moment the notion
of knocking her dozvn and flogging her with his umbrella;
on second thoughts he doubts his capacity for an enter-
prise so perilous. After all, he is not, he remembers, so
young as he was.
Mr. Blenkinsop. Come along ; none o' your
nonsense.
[Euphrosyne takes up an inkpot and brandishes it
in a minatory manner. This is the last straw. As she
begins her harangue she speaks in a low, tense, level
voice ; but as she proceeds her voice rises until to her
quailing parents it seems as though all the elements
had been let loose.
Euphrosyne. None of my nonsense. No ; you
sha'n't have any more of my nonsense. Oh yes ;
I've borne with you night and day, year after year,
and I can tell you both I'm sick of it ; yes, sick of
it. You wallowing beasts, you can think of nothing
but eating and drinking. Do you think that I am
cast in your own mould ? What right have you over
me ? Yes, what right ? Year after year I have kept
silence for your sakes. I have stifled and suffocated
in the air of this house ; but now I am going away.
Yes, I am going away. I am going away into the
14
REPERTORY DRAMA
world. It is not food I want and rich clothes and
dresses and flowers. I want life. You, you hogs, you
do not know what life is. The sun does not shine for
you, nor the winds blow, nor the mighty sea of
heaven breathe its fragrance. You have never list-
ened to the call of the moon and the chanting of
the stars ; all the birds of the forest have sung in
vain for you. But I want life. Yes, life. I have hung-
ered and thirsted for Ufe. I want to be free. I want
to drink the clouds and take the planets to my arms.
Faugh, you are no better than the beasts. You wake
and sleep and to-morrow you die and perish utterly
away. ... By heaven, this is the end.
[She picks up a large plant-pot and flings it through
the French-window ; subsequently climbing through
the hole she has made. Mrs. Blenkinsop sits at her
desk weeping noisily into a large and vulgar handker-
chief. Mr. Blenkinsop sits up dazed on his sofa.
Now and then he whimpers like a hurt animal.
Mr. Blenkinsop. Well. . . .'Drat the little ....
hussy.
Curtain
IS
COLLECTED PARODIES
IV
MR. GILBERT MURRAY
EURIPIDES UP-TO-DATE
[Terrace of the palace at Myccnce. Agapemone,
deserted by Noeus, paces distractedly up and dozen
half- listening to the consoling zvords of her Nurse.
The Chorus of handmaidens are ranged at the back^
washing their dirty linen in public.
Aga. O light that blew from Colchis o'er the sea
Dost thou not dim and darken ? But for me
Blossoms a greater light, and all my breath
Pales ; and the dusty avenues of death
Call with a haven for tulfilled feet
And violet grass and trees and waters sweet.
O in the untrodden pastures no man knows,
Cypris, thy hands have raised a lovelier rose
Than all of Argos or the Bactrian land
Ever man gathered.
Nurse. Daughter, stay thy hand,
Wag not the tongue of steel. 'Twere deadlier sin
To bare thy bird-bright throat and thrust therein,
Than hers of Pomphalos who, on a day,
Slew both her aged parents as men say
Cold as the mountains. . . .
Aga. Hold thy counsel, crone !
Far off from dark Cythera faintlier blown
A cry comes through the dawn that throbs the dawn
Swifter than goats' feet on the dewless lawn,
Death, death.
i6
REPERTORY DRAMA
Cho. Who has encountered Death,
Death and the nets of Fate,
Who knows the step and the breath
The hntel and the gate ?
Lo ! even now have her eyes beholden
The ashes of love and the gateway golden
Foreseen long since in Argos olden
And the marble house long desecrate.
A cry from the great sea rings
Desolate, alien.
Of gods and ancient things
And war and the slaying of men ;
She hears the echo on roof and rafter
Of scorn and weeping and hollow laughter.
And tumults and storms and silence after
And feet that pass and come not again.
Nurse. Hear now the speech of these who see
thy grief.
Aga. a broken petal and a transient leaf.
Nurse. Time has a potent salve for every smart.
Aga. Who has contrived a medicine for the
heart .''
Nurse. Nathless our sires were wiser men than
we.
Aga. Our dams, I hope, less garrulous ....
Let be !
Cho. Who may withstand thee. Love, who may
frustrate desire ?
Thy hands are the hands of Fate and thine eyes
more fierce than fire,
Thy wings are plumed with mirth, with joy thy
feet are shod,
17
COLLECTED PARODIES
But the darkling wind that bears thee blows from
the throne of God.*
Aga. Mine eyes quiver and shake, my lips are
mute.
Nurse. Rash queens ere now have gathered bitter
fruit.
Aga. Nathless I think that you will shortly see
The very last of Agapemone.
Nurse. What folly's this ?
Aga. O but to tread once more
My father's halls and find again the Shore
Of Tenedos. Ah> there from dawn to dusk
In happy fields of amaranth and musk
My little sister Emmeline and I
Have, ah ! so often, chased the butterfly ;
White was the sunlight there, and bright the grass
Or ever between my maiden hps did pass
The bane of bitter bread. O could I roam
Thee, Tenedos, and the floors of the old home,
Thoughtless and free in the place where I was
bom. ...
But see, with a piercing flame I am parched and
torn.
This is the end ; O ye who now remain
Weep for a thing forsaken, a queen self-slain.
Nurse. WTiat, wouldst thou slay thyself ? What,
is this the end ?
Stay now thy hand, for Death's a treacherous friend!
Aga. I go, O halls of Tenedos, I go
Into the dark, the dark I do not know.
Nurse. What meanest thou thus gabbling of the
dark?
* Emendations ; as also passim.
i8
REPERTORY DRAMA
Methinks thy statements overshoot the mark.
Aga. No wind blows always, ever one wind blows
Whither and why and wherefore no man knows*
And the Fates are blind and deaf and the gods are
dumb
As woman's life. . . . See now, I come, I come.
[Stabs herself
Nurse. Woe ! Woe ! Whoever would have
thought it.
Cursed be the deed and cursed be him who brought
it.
Cho. I heard a sound by the city wall
As of children weeping and men sighing,
A sound of waters and stones that fall.
And maidens wounded and old men dying.
A mighty shouting and ululation
Of death, disaster and damnation.
For truth is hidden and knowledge vain,
And the gods indulge in frightful crimes.
As also, in fairness I add, do men.
And, to cut a long story short, till Time's
Vintage last-grown fulfils the cup
We never can tell what may turn up.
Emendations ; as also passim.
19
COLLECTED PARODIES
V
SOCIAL STUDY SCHOOL
THE STRIFE OF THE BLATHERSKITES;
OR, THE STRONG-MINDED MANUFACTURER
[The scene is the dining-room in Mr. Blatherskite^ s
house. It is the fifty-third week of the strike. The chim-
ofthe works, which can he seen through the window,
are smokeless. Occasionally there are borne on the wind
through the open window the moans of starving people
and the angry hoots of strikers who are listening to an
incendiary speech by one of their leaders. Old Mr.
Blatherskite, who, by a curious and convenient coin-
cidence, has a face exactly like Mr. Norman M'Kin-
nelVs, sits on a hard chair l.c. facing the audience.
His lips are pursed grimly, his grey rock-like head is
supported by a strong hand. He does not move, but
meditates. There is two minutes^ silence, which at last
he breaks zvith a monosyllable.
Mr. Blatherskite. Pah !
[He is silent again. Enter from door r. Gerald
Blatherskite, his son, a fair-haired youth with a
small diaphanous moustache. He hesitates as he watches
his motionless sire, but at last plucks up courage to
walk up to him though not to look him in the face.
Gerald. Father !
Mr. Blatherskite. Well ?
Gerald. Father. . . . Two hundred strikers'
children have died of starvation since yesterday.
20
REPERTORY DRAMA
Mr. Blatherskite. Well ?
Gerald [After uneasy hesitation]. Oh, father, can't
ypu do anything for them ?
Mr. Blatherskite. I am not responsible for
them.
Gerald. Oh, for God's sake, father, give them
some food.
Mr. Bl.\therskite, Let them return to work.
Gerald. They would, father, if you would meet
them half-way.
Mr. Blatherskite. They have had my views on
that subject.
Gerald. But if you don't they will all starve to
death.
Mr. Blatherskite. Let them starve.
Gerald. But . , .
Mr. Blatherskite [Picking up a newspaper and
reading with an indifferent air]. You may go.
[Gerald walks a yard up stage ; then turns and
looks at his father, makes as if to speak, thinks better
of it, and sile?itly goes out, shutting the door quietly
behind him.
Mr. Blatherskite. Pah !
[Enter from door l. Helen Blatherskite, deter-
mined-looking and artily dressed. She means to take a
firm stand, so begins by pulling ov^r a chair to her
father's vicinity and taking a firm seat. Mr. Blather-
skite does not look up.
Helen. Father !
Mr. Blatherskite. Well ?
Helen. This dispute has simply got to stop.
Mr. Blatherskite. The men can stop it when
they like.
21
COLLECTED PARODIES
Helen. You don't realise how awful the suffer-
ing in the village is.
Mr. Blatherskite. How the devil do you know
what I realise ?
Helen. Oh, but you can't or you would agree to
anything,
Mr. Blatherskite. You seem to be as great a
fool as your mother and almost as great a fool as your
brother. You may leave the roon.
Helen [standing up with crimson cheeks and quiv-
ering hands]. I will not leave the room. You must
hear me. Your barbarity is the talk of the county.
If you resist much longer I am certain the men will
murder us all.
Mr. Blatherskite. They are too cowardly for that.
[He goes to the bell; rings it, and returns to his chair
and his impassive attitude. Enter Parlourmaid.
Mr. Blatherskite. Willi, you may show Miss
Helen out of the room.
[Helen, after a passionate gesture, leaves the room,
the domestic following her.
Mr. Blatherskite. Pah !
[The domestic returns
Parlourmaid. There is a woman with a baby to
see you, sir. She says her name is Parker.
Mr. Blatherskite. Bring her in.
[Parlourmaid goes out and returns with a pale,
haggard woman in a ragged shawl, carrying a dirty
bundle. The woman stands trembling, and then rush-
ing forward flings herself on her knees in front of the
manufacturer.
Mr. Blatherskite [Slightly raising his eyebrows
but not turning his head]. Well ?
22
REPERTORY DRAMA
Mrs. Parker. Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo. Five of my
babies are dead and this is the last.
Mr. Blatherskite. Interesting, but irrelevant.
Mrs. Parker. Oh, sir, my Jim was such a good
husband. He has worked for you for twenty- five
years, and he has never said a word against you,
even since they came out on strike.
Mr. Blatherskite. He is on strike. He broke
his agreement.
Mrs. Parker. Oh, sir, he didn't want to, sir.
But he didn't want to be a blackleg.
Mr. Blatherskite. He can work if he comes back.
Mrs. Parker. Oh, sir, he can't come back until
the others do. Not until you meet the leaders.
Mr. Blatherskite. Then he will not come back.
Mrs. Parker [holding out infant]. My baby is
nearly dead, sir . . . it is my last one.
Mr. Blatherskite [adjusting his pince-nez and
cursorily examining the baby]. Yes. So it appears.
[He goes to the bell and rings it ; then returns to his
seat and his attitude. Enter Parlourmaid.
Mr. Blatherskite. Show this woman to the door.
[Eocit Parlourmaid and Mrs. Parker, sobbing
hysterically.
Mr. Blatherskite. Hum. Pah !
[Enter A Striker through the vnndow. Looking
stealthily around him he sees the motionless figure. Be-
lieving it to be asleep he steals on tip-toe into the room
and draws a knife.
Mr. Blatherskite. I see you. You are a thief
like the rest.
The Striker [dropping his knife in terror]. I am
not a thief. ... I came to kill you.
23
COLLECTED PARODIES
Mr. Blatherskite [still immobile]. Ah ! you
came to kill me. Do you still feel like it ? You had
better come when I am asleep. It might require less
courage then.
Striker [passionately]. You swine I You are not
worth killing. ... By God ! it is you that are the
murderer. My wife died last night.
Mr. Blatherskite. Ah ! She was doubtless a
fool like other women. You may go.
[The Striker, in trembling revulsion, retreats
through the zvindotv, leaving his knife where it fell.
Mr. Blatherskite rises, walks to it, picks it up, tries
the edge along his thumb, and then flings it contemptu-
ously into the waste-paper basket. He returns to his
chair and lights a pipe.
Mr. Blatherskite. Pah !
Curtain
24
REPERTORY DRAMA
VI
COTTAGE INTERIOR SCHOOL
OUR VIVID RUSTICS
[Interior of a cottage ; door r. leading out, door l.
leading upstairs, fireplace with log fire, oak settle, and
coloured prints on the wall, including images of the
King and Queen in tlieir coronation robes. Table in
middle, at zvhich Ethel Boffin stands peeling potatoes.
Ethel [sings].
O flaming poppies, cornflowers blue,
Beyond the utmost hill.
The edge o' the world is fair to view
And all the woods are still.
'Alf past vour and 'im not in yet. 'E was alius like
that, late fer every mortal thing. I 'member when
I was a-waitin' fer 'im at the altar, and me so fine
and vitty in my magenter dress an' all, and him there
a-tumin' up two hours late and passen a-cussin'
'im like a good 'un. Ah* deary me, deary me.
[The door slowly opens and Algernon Tupp, the
postman, cautiously peers in. Observing that she is
alone he steps boldly over the threshold. His step startles
her and she springs round.
Ethel. Oh, Algy, you did give me a turn like. I
thought it was me 'usbink.
Algy [chuckling]. He-he. Don't you wish as 'ow
it was, eh ? [Coming nearer.] 'Aven't you got a little
kiss for I ?
25
COLLECTED PARODIES
Ethel [pushing him away]. Go on now, Mr
Tupp, doan't 'ee be so silly now.
Algy. Oo be you a-callin' silly ? If I keared I
might say you was silly, too ; yes, and prove it too.
An' what's more, there's more nor me knows it.
Ethel [clutching the table and gasping]. What's
that you'm a-sayin' of ?
Algy [getting bolder]. You know very well what
I'm a-sayin', an' 'is name begins with G., in my
opinion.
Ethel [making a show of indifference]. Well, you
can keep your silly fancies to yourself. George
Tibbits is v^^th twenty of the likes of you, and if
you say a word more about it I'll give yer some-
think in the ear'ole wot you won't forgit.
Algy. Eh wot ? That's 'ow it is, is it.
[Sidles towards her to kiss her.
Ethel [taking up the peeling- knife she has
dropped]. Take that, you swine !
[Stabs him in the carotid artery ; he drops, bleed-
ing freely and obviously dead. She looks around dis-
tractedly and, hearing a step at the door, hastily stows
the body into the oven and stands over the spilt blood.
Enter her husband,ToM Boffin, a hulking, drink-sodden
fellow 7vhose flabby features are the loreck of a once
handsome face. He lurches forward with a dazed look.
Tom [hiccoughing]. Oop Got any beer,
you . . . oop . . . little sow ?
Ethel. Not for you, you drunken beast. You've
'ad beer and enough these five years. And me never
'ad a baby.
Tom [striking her]. 'Ere . . . oop . . . you get
me some beer.
26
REPERTORY DRAMA
Ethel [stabbing him in the left breast]. There's
yer beer, you boozy 'og.
Tom drops dead, and his wife drags him along by
the hair and puts him into the left oven. Whilst she is
in the act the door leading from the house opens and
her Grandfather comes in. He is abstracted, and
notices nothing. He hobbles to the settle and with
rheumatic groaning sits down on it.
Granfer. Well, Ethel, my vlower ? 'Specs Tom '11
be in zoon. Ees, Tom 'If be in zoon. Ees, Tom '11 be
in zoon. Ees, Tom '11 be in zoon, Ees, Tom
Ethel [impatiently interrupting him]. Shut up,
you ole warmint.
Gpanfer [whining]. Ees, the childer is all like
that in these days. She called me an ole warmint,
she did. Ees, an ole warmint. Ees, an ole warmint.
Ees, an ole warmint. Ees, an ole
Ethel [springing at him with the knife]. Gr-r-r-r.
[Stabs him in the eye, the end of the knife protrud-
ing through the back of his head. The body falls to the
ground and she leaves it there. The door opens and
George Tibbits appears. He looks at her with eager
expectancy.
George. Well, 'ave you bin an* done it .''
Ethel [triumphantly]. Yes, I bin and done it. I
done 'im in, an' I done granfer in an' I done Algy
Tupp in. They was all fules every one of 'em. Two
of 'em be in the oven and the other [kicking Gran-
fer under the table] is een 'ere.
George. All right, my angel of heaven. They'm
a good ole damn good riddance, all on 'em. We'll
put 'em all down the well, my pearl. 'Ave you got
a kiss for I }
27
COLLECTED PARODIES
Ethel [falling into his arms]. 'Ave I ? [Kisses him
on both cheeks and then on the nape of the neck]. Oh,
George, I've dreamed of you night and day. In the
corn fields I have let my hair down and bound it
with fillets of poppies and garlands of cornflowers,
and I have said " These are for my George, for the
man with eyes like stars and a neck like a pillar of
carven ivory." Oh, George, you don't know what
it's been like waitin' all these years. I thought this
time would never come. If I'd had a child I think I
should have been able to stand it, a child who would
have tugged at my hair with his pretty hands and
called me mother. Oh, I've been so lonely . . .
the stars . . . the night . . . the hills . . . the
waves of the great sea.
[Wanderingly singing.
The edge o' the world is fair to view
And all the woods are still.
[She faints in his arms.
George. Yes, my sweeting, it has been a bit of
a strain on you, I dare say. O my woman of all
women, we will walk together, we two, in the sun-
light and the moonlight, and all the past will fall
away like a dark cloak.
Ethel [waking]. Where am I ?
George [patting her head]. Here, my darling.
Have you got any beer ?
Curtain.
28
II
HOW THEY DO IT
No, I. MR. H. BELLOC
At Martinmas, when I was bom,
Hey diddle^ Ho diddle^ Do,
There came a cow with a crumpled horn,
Hey diddle, Ho diddle. Do.
She stood agape and said, " My dear.
You're a very fine child for this time of year,
And I think you'll have a taste in beer,"
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Ho, do, do, do.
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do.
A taste in beer I've certainly got,
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do,
A very fine taste that the Jews have not.
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do.
And though I travel on the hills of Spain,
And Val-Pont-Cote and Belle Fontaine,
With lusty lungs I shall still maintain
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Ho, do, do, do.
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do.
So Sussex men, wherever you be.
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do,
I pray you sing this song with me,
Hey diddle. Ho diddle. Do ;
That of all the shires she is the queen.
And they sell at the " Chequers " at Chancton-
bury Green
31
COLLECTED PARODIES
The very best beer that ever was seen.
Hey Domtnus, Domine, Dominum, Domini^ DominOy
Domino.
II
Lord Globule was a backward lad,
Round leaden eyes Lord Globule had,
And shambling legs and shoulders stooped.
And lower lip that dripped and drooped.
At ten years old he could not get
The hang of half the alphabet ;
At twelve he learnt to read his name,
At seventeen to write the same,
At twenty-one, his boyhood done,
He reached the age of twenty-one,
Which was sufficient reason why
His father's sturdy tenantry
Should gather in a large white tent,
Engulf some tons of nutriment,
And, freely primed with free potations,
Emit profuse congratulations.
Sweet twenty-one 1 O magic age !
The opulent youth surveys the stage
Where soon he'll walk 'mid loud applause.
He only hesitates because
His family all have different views
Which role, which entrance he should choose.
Lord Globule's father thought him made
To dominate the world of Trade ;
" Finance, finance is more his line,"
Exclaimed his Uncle Rubinstein ;
" Oh, no," Aunt Araminta cried,
32
HOW THEY DO IT
" Diplomacy should first be tried " ;
But in the end with one accord
They thought the chances of a hoard
That British politics afford
Would suit Lord Globule's pocket best.
They all employed their interest
With Uncle Tom, and Moses Kant,
And Strauss, who married Globule's aunt,
And Johnny Burke, and Stoke and Shere,
And the old Duke and Humphrey Bere ;
So that in January next year
A vacancy in Hertfordshire
Offered itself, and Globule's parts
Enraptured the electors' hearts.
The next five Sessions saw him slip
Through Private Secretaryship,
Under- Secretaryship ,
Financial Secretaryship,
To Secretaryship of State,
With absolute power to regulate
The rural and the urban rate
Of birth among the pauper classes,
His duty 'twas to scan the masses
And carefully eliminate
What seemed to him degenerate,
To say what kinds they'd mutilate
And which ones merely isolate
In " homes from home " where they should be
Looked after tender-heartedly
By men selected by a Board
(No fewer than twenty to each ward).
33
COLLECTED PARODIES
A heavy task, as you'll agree,
For which they paid him liberally.
Globule the office still would grace,
And still would draw the emolument,
Had not a wretched accident
Unfortunately taken place.
His chief subordinate being away
(The man who wrote Lord Globule's speeches),
Lord Globule took a hohday,
Going by train to Burnham Beeches,
A secretary, tall and prim,
As usual, escorting him.
This tall young gentleman, when taxed
Later, denied he had relaxed
His customary watchfulness ;
But be that as it may, 'tis certain
That late that night at Shoeburyness
Lord Globule was discovered bare
Of all except a muslin curtain
And some few feathers in his hair
And that the constable, when he
Was quite unable to explain
His actions or identity,
Concluded that he was insane.
Next day before the magistrate
The poor young pillar of the State
(His curtain bore no laundry marks !)
Was still quite unidentified,
And, catechized once more, replied
Only with sundry mews and barks.
And ultimately (to cut short
The day's proceedings in the court)
34
HOW THEY DO IT
Two doctors and the police advised
That Globule should be sterilized
(A thing I need not further mention),
And sent to permanent detention.
For days the public did not hear
Of Globule's disappearance ; near
And far, inquiries set on foot
Quite privately, produced no fruit.
Until at last the rumour spread
(Not in the papers) and some one said
That such a man in such a dress
Had been detained at Shoeburyness.
His relatives pursued the clue ;
Alas, "alas, the thing was true,
'Twas poor young Globule . . .
But the worst
Was this : that when they'd brought him out
They found the thing had got about
Among the unenlightened mob,
Which stultified beyond all doubt
The hopes they'd entertained at first
That Globule might preserve bis job.
Fate was too strong ; they had to bow ;
Globule at home had been a failure ;
And they could only give him now
The Governorship of South Australia.
35
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 2. MR. W. H. DAVIES
I
I'm sure that you would never guess
The tales I hear from birds and flowers,
Without them sure 'twould be a mess
I'd make of all the summer hours ;
But these fair things they make for me
A lovely life of joy and glee.
I saw some sheep upon some grass,
The sheep were fat, the grass was green,
The sheep were white as clouds that pass,
And greener grass was never seen ;
I thought, " Oh, how my bliss is deep,
With such green grass and such fat sheep ! "
And as I watch bees in a hive,
Or gentle cows that rub 'gainst trees,
I do not envy men who live,
No field?, no books upon their knees.
I'd rather lie beneath small stars
Than with rough men who drink in bars.
36
\ HOW THEY DO IT
II
A poor old man
Who has no bread,
He nothing can
To get a bed.
He has a cough,
Bad boots he has ;
He takes them off
Upon the grass.
He does not eat
In cosy inns
But keeps his meat
In salmon tins.
No oven hot.
No frying-pan ;
Thank God I'm not
That poor old man.
37
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 3. SIR HENRY NEWBOLT
It was eight bells in the forenoon and hammocks
running sleek
{It's a fair sea flovnng from the West)y
When the little Commodore came a-sailing up the
Creek
{Heave Ho ! I think you'll know the rest),
Thunder in the halyards and horses leaping high,
Blake and Drake and Nelson are listenin' where
they lie,
Four and twenty blackbirds a-bakin' in a pie,
And the Pegasus came waltzing from the West.
Now the little Commodore sat steady on his keel
{It's a fair sea flowing from the West),
A heart as stout as concrete reinforced with steel
{Heave Ho ! I think you'll know the rest).
Swinging are the scuppers, hark, the rudder snores,
Plugging at the Frenchmen, downing 'em by scores.
Porto Rico, Vera Cruz, and also the Azores,
And the Pegasus came waltzing from the West.
So three cheers more for the little Commodore
{It's a fair sea flowing from the West),
I teil you so again as I've told you so before
{Heigh Ho ! I think you know the rest).
Aged is the Motherland, old but she is young
(Easy with the tackle there — don't release the bung),
And I sang a song like all the songs that I have ever
sung
When the Pegasus came sailing from the West.
38
HOW THEY DO IT
No. 4. MR. JOHN MASEFIELD
I. THE POET IN THE BACK STREETS
[Author's Note. — The following poem has been
considerably compressed owing to the exigencies
of space, which must sometimes be respected.
I
Down Lupus Street there is a little pub,
And there there worked a little bright-haired
maiden,
Mornings the furniture she had to scrub,
Evenings she'd walk about with pewters laden ;
But still she sang as did the birds in Eden ;
In fact you would have said that there was no
More cheerful barmaid in all Pimlico.
She had eleven brothers and a sister,
A mother who had rheumatism bad,
And when she left o' mornings how they missed her,
And when she stayed o' Sundays weren't they
glad ;
No other help or maintenance they had,
So that their mother often said, " God pink 'em,
Lucky for them Flo makes a decent income.
39
COLLECTED PARODIES
" If 'twasn't for Flo's fifteen bob a week,
Me and them brats would not know where to
turn,
For some of 'em ain't old enough to speak.
And none of 'em ain't old enough to earn,
And as for 'er bright merry japes, why, dum
My bleedin' eyes, if we'd no Flo to quirk us,
I'm sure we'd soon be droopin' in the workus.
" It's only Flo's 'igh spirits keeps me goin'
The way she sings ' My Pansy,' it's a treat,
And also ' All a-blowin' and a-growin','
Our Flo is fair top-'ole, she can't be beat.
So give three cheers for Flo, its' time to eat ;
Mary, you just run out and fetch some jam.
And Bill, take down the pickles and the ham."
So the years passed, so Florence earned the money,
And all the throng were happy as could be,
No air could blench or stain her cheeks so bonny.
No labour weigh upon her heart so free.
She was, in short, as chirpy as could be ;
Until at last came Fate in Fate's own time.
And ravelled her in the dark nets of crime.
Crime is the foulest blot on our escutcheon,
Crime draws mankind as the moon draws the
tides.
Crime is a thing I'm rather prone to touch on,
Crime is a clanking chain that grins and grides,
A lure, a snare, and other things besides ;
If crime should cease, I should not then be able
To furnish England with my monthly fa ble.
40
HOW THEY DO IT
One foggy night it happened there were drinking,
Within the bar a crowd of all the boys,
'Erb Gupps and Nixey Snell and Snouty Jinkin,
And Noakes with several friends from Theydon
Bois
Visiting Pimlico ; they made a noise
With call for booze and anecdote and curse,
And as the night wore on the row got worse.
" Wot sher," " Wot ho," " I don't fink," " Blast
yer eyes,"
" That was a good 'un," " Cheese it," " 'Arf a
mo,"
" Ten pints of 'arf an' 'arf," " There ain't no flies
On Nixey," " You're a welsher, Joe,"
" A quartern more, miss," " lie," and so
They kept it up with rapid thrust and answer,
In phrases neatly measured for a stanza.
Even when they yelled and fought, Flo did not
mind.
She did not mind, for she was used to this.
Even when to sottish amourousness inclined
They called her " Floss," or "Flo," instead of
• " Miss " ;
But when at last drunk Snouty snatched a kiss,
She felt her cheek flame with a flaming flame,
She felt her heart scorch with a hell of shame.
All the air howls when storms scourge the Atlantic,
All the wide forest shakes when falls the boar,
A wounded whale is often very frantic,
And jealous lions have been known to roar
41
COLLECTED PARODIES
Almost as loud as breakers on the shore ;
But all these are tranquility and rest
Compared with what went on in Florrie's breast.
Red in her soul shame set its blazing seal,
Black in her heart strong hate swirled round in
torrents,
Blue in her eyes the lightning shone Uke steel.
White on her lips rage mingled with abhorrence ;
Against a barrel's back leaned Barmaid Florence,
Watching with grinding teeth and eyeballs rolling,
Drunk Snouty who was belching forth "Tom Bowl-
mg.
There while the boozers rocked in song obscene,
She stood like a tall statue marble-still,
And first she moaned, " I am smirched, I am no
more clean,"
And then she rasped, " By God, but I will kill
That lousy stinkard, yes, by God I will."
Fate flung the dice of Doom, her buckler buckled ;
Life shrank, grew pale ; Death rubbed his chin and
chuckled.
So it draws on to closing-time ; men go
By twos and threes ; Flo washes pots and glasses.
Ranging them on the shelves in their degrees,
Wipes the wet counter dry, turns down the
gasses ;
And, locking up the doors, the portal passes.
Grasping with fervour of a frenzied bigot
Inside her muff^ a mallet and a spigot.
42
HOW THEY DO IT
There Snouty was, fumbling his way along
Towards the bridge, blind-tight, alone and grunt-
ing,
And as he lurched he sang a maudlin song,
A foolish song beginning, " Baby Bunting,
For rabbit-skins your father's gone a-hunting,"
And as Flo heard the melody undroughty.
She whispered, " Cripes, Fll bunt you, Mr.
Snotity ! "
So they went on, he foremost, she behind.
Until they got to the Embankment wall ;
He leant against it ; swifter than the wind
She smashed her wedge into his head, and all
His brains spattered the stones in pieces small.
" My kiss," she hissed ; then with a sudden shiver
Fled, tipping tools and Snouty in the river.
And like a fleet slim panther she did fly
Through the webbed streets of silent Pimlico,
Faithful the white stars glimmered in the sky.
Over the Lambeth bank the moon hung low,
A great round golden moon as white as snow.
Death cursed ; Life smiled and murmured, " She
will live,
The police will fail to track the fugitive."
And the high stars looked down and saw her enter
The doorway of her home in the dark street,
Happy to think the cops would never scent her.
Proud for the godlike swiftness of her feet.
Cheek to her pillow cried she : " Yes, 'twas
sweet."
43
COLLECTED PARODIES
But God behind God's curtain cogitated
About another end, and all things waited.
II
Six months rolled by ; Flo earned her wonted wages,
The family consumed its usual food.
Had nothing changed I'd not have penned these
pages ;
But evil generally brings forth good ;
Briefly I'd have it to be understood
One day a pavement-preacher's casual sentence
Hurled Flo into abysses of repentance.
So the sky fell ; there came a hand of fire
That seared her soul with consciousness of sin,
Her soul was all one yearning of desire
For God ; she felt like jumping from her skin ;
Like Hell in a through-draught she burnt within.
" Mother," she said, " here is my this week's sub.,
I cannot go on working at the pub."
The mother swooned ; the children joined in prayer
That Flo should not decide in such a fast time ;
But the fierce heavens cried beer was a snare
And skittles was a most immoral pastime ;
So that that evening for the very last time
She washed the pots and locked the " Fountain "
door.
As she had done so many nights before.
Next day she went out early without warning,
Down the wan street ; and later in the day,
44
HOW THEY DO IT
That is to say well on into the morning,
She sent a District Messenger to say
That she had definitely gone away
To join the Battersea Salvation Army.
" Swipe me," her mother moaned, " the gal's gone
barmy."
Barmy or not, she certainly had gone.
In her low attic poor old mother wept,
" She kep the home up, little Florence done,
We was so happy in the home she kept ;
*Twas mean of her to hook it while we slept ;
I'll larn her yet to take me by surprise,
I'll do her in, 'er eyes ! "
But Flo was meanwhile getting fur and furder.
Safe in the barracks in the Bilsey Road,
Aching to make atonement for her murder,
She said she wished to take up her abode
There permanently ; stabbed by her inner goad.
She very quickly rose to the direction
Of her new comrades' Social Effort Section.
She visited the mothers in the slums,
And daily rescued suicidal wretches.
She helped the young with their addition sums,
And washed the infants' clothes and mended
breeches ;
And when she broke a plate or dropped some
stitches,
None ever heard a hasty word from Flo,
The most she ever said was, " Here's a go ! '
45
COLLECTED PARODIES
Work or no work, her heart was always merry,
Heaven had washed her heart and cleansed her
eyes,
Adjutant Flo, the Barmaid Missionary,
Was the adored of every sex and size,
They said that she had strayed from Paradise,
And every week her saintly reputation
Led many sinning souls to seek salvation.
Death laughed ; Life winced ; for in the neigh-
bouring borough
Old mother dwelt and bided her own hour,
Whetting a carving-knife with motions thorough,
Practising stabs of accuracy and power.
The scythe must fall, and then must fall the flower,
The day must die and then must sink the sun.
And all things end that ever have begun.
Ill
All the crowds crowd in Battersea's Green Park ;
The deer are fed, the ducks quack on the water ;
On the trim paths the Sabbath-resting clerk
Walks slowly with his wife and son and daughter.
Or seeks the grass where orators breathe slaugh-
ter.
Some singing hymns to variegate their turns.
Or waving flags with portraits of John Bums.
Middle the plot there brays a brazen band.
Peaked caps, red jerseys, other things of blue ;
And when they cease behold a figure stand,
46
HOW THEY DO IT
A bright-haired wench who wears <^hose garments
too.
She preaches truth as few but she can do
Concerning drink and cigarettes and betting
So that the mob must listen though they're sweat-
ing.
" S'welp me, it's hot." " Yes, s'welp me, so it is."
" Ain't it a shame the pubs ain't open Sundays,
Just as they be Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Liz,
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays,
To close the up on just this one day's
'Bout the worst thing the law has done."
" Yus, so it is." " Gorblimey, wot a sun ! "
iBut though the high sun spilled a raging heat,
They could not go, they had to stay and hear.
So tense her accents were, her voice so sweet.
'* Crikey," says Bill, " she's a 'ard egg, no fear."
Says Sam, " by Gosh, I'll drop the beer."
" You won't." " I will." " You won't." " What
will you bet ? "
" A ... no, by gum, 'ere comes a Suffragette ! "
It was a Suffragette with purple banner,
Handbell and bag of many-coloured bills.
At once in her inimitable manner
She draws the crowd ; the space around her fills,
While Flo's grows empty ; soon her pitch is still's
The solitudes of the Antarctic Ocean,
For even the band had shared the crowd's emotion.
47
COLLECTED PARODIES
Not a man trod her corner of the Park,
A quarter-mile around the place was void,
Only her voice to one lost mongrel's bark
Rang on, and still, as vi^ith sound texts she toyed.
She did not seem the slightest bit annoyed.
But Life shrank low, and greedy Death did dance.
For here at last had come old mother's chance !
Old mother had been hiding 'hind a tree,
Old mother who had sworn the end of Flo,
Weapon in hand she stole up stealthily
Towards the daughter who had grieved her so.
" Aha ! " she cried, " you little bitch, Ho, ho,
I'll pay you out now for your vile desertion ..."
In Flo's plain blouse she made a neat insertion !
Flo fell, she fell, did Barmaid Flo, she fell ;
The carving-knife was sticking in her back,
And as she fell she cried out, " Well, well, well,
What is the motive of this base attack ? "
But her old mother shrieked aloud, " Alack,
This was my child, this was my little child,
O, I must cover her with blossoms wild."
So sought she underneath the elms and oaks.
Garlic and dandeHons, peonies
And cabbage-wort and sprole and old-man 's-mokes,
And lillikens and dinks and bitter-ease.
And mortmains that the hind in autumn sees
In places where the mist lies on the hay
And all the land is frozen with the May.
48
HOW THEY DO IT
And wi.th her arms full, poor old mother staggered
To her poor child there dead upon the grass,
" My little Flo," she whimpered, " I'll be jaggered,
I don't know how it ever come to pass,
I don't know how I done it, little lass ;
Whyever did I sharp that carvin' knife
And let out all my lovely darHn's life ?
" She wor a merry grig, wor little Flo,
She kep the family goin' nicely, she did.
There never was a wheeze she didn't know.
She always pinched us anything we needed ;
Gripes, but I cannot tell why I proceeded.
Just 'cos she left the family to starve.
My pretty Flo's sweet darlin' back to carve."
And so she brought the flowers to her dead,
And piled them on her feet and face and breast,
Flo lay there still as down the blossoms shed,
A heavenly angel lying down to rest,
A downy bird at evening on its nest,
A cloud, a moth, a wave, a steamer, or
Almost any other metaphor.
" Good-bye, my little Flo," said poor old mother
" You had your faults, 1 willingly admit,
Yet I am, taking one thing with another,
Sorry for my rash act more than a bit,
But still, I do not want to swing for it.
Mum is the word, least said is soonest mended."
So mother left the Park, and all was ended.
49
COLLECTED PARODIES
II THE MERCIFUL WIDOW
Inside a cottage by a common
There lived an aged widow woman
She had twelve children (quite a lot),
And often wished that she had not.
" S'welp me," she often sighed, "I'd rather
You'd had a less prolific father ;
Better than raise this surging mob
That God had bowled me for a blob."
Amongst her seven strapping sons
There were some interesting ones.
Even the baby James, for instance,
Had killed a man without assistance ;
And several more in divers ways
Had striven to sing their Maker's praise.
Henry, quite small, had tried to smother
His somnolent recumbent mother ;
Which failing, when she hollered fearful,
He looked upon her quite untearful,
With something of Don Juan's calm,
Proceeding thus without a qualm : —
" O mother in our hours of ease,
As irritating as ten fleas.
When pain and anguish wring the brow
A fatuously lethargic sow.
This time I haven't put you through it,
But if you wait a day or two, it
Will be quite clear I mean to do it."
Whereat the mother murmured " Law !
I'll gi'e yer a wipe acrost the jaw ! "
50
HOW THEY DO IT
Another son, Ezekiel,
Was well upon the road to hell,
Once every fortnight he betrayed
An unsuspecting village maid.
And now and then he went much furder
By rounding off the job with murder.
Sometimes they took him to the 'sizes,
But there he told outrageous lieses,
His loving family, unblushing.
Always unanimously rushing
To help him with false alibises.
Richard was just another such,
But William, Sam and John were much
More evil and debauched than these.
The account of their atrocities
Might make a smelting furnace freeze.
Without a scintilla of shame
They bragged of things I cannot name.
I represent them here by blanks.
(Reader : " For this relief much thanks ! ")
Hedda Lucrezia Esther Waters,
The eldest of the widow's daughters.
In early infancy absorbed
A dreadful liking for the morbid.
She much preferred the works of Ibsen
To those of Mr, Dana Gibson,
And when she went to bed at night
She prayed by yellow candle-light :
" Six angels for my bed.
Three at foot and three at head,
Beardsley, Strauss, Augustus John,
51
COLLECTED PARODIES
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Matisse,
Fold my sleep in holy peace."
The vices to which she inclined
Were peccadilloes of the mind.
Her sisters were much less refined.
And often when they sallied out.
With knife and pistol, kriss and knout,
And other weapons of tfie sort
Adapted to bucolic sport
And rural raptures in the dark.
They took occasion to remark :
" Why, wot the 'ell's the use
O' 'Edda, she ain't got no juice,
She'll gas and jabber till all's blue
She'll talk but she will never do.
Upon my oath, it is fair sickenin'."
And so at last they gave her strychnine,
A thing efficient though not gory.
And Hedda drops from out the story.
Four daughters, seven sons were left,
But still the v/idow felt bereft,
She was distressed at Hedda's loss.
And found it hard to bear her cross.
She tried to find a salve for it
By studying in Holy Writ.
She read the exciting episode
Of how good Moses made a road
Across the rubicundish ocean,
But could not stifle her emotion.
She read of Jews and Jebusites,
52
HOW THEY DO IT
And Hittites and Amakelites,
And Joash, Job and Jeroboam,
And Rachel, Ruth and Rehoboam,
And Moloch, Moab and Megiddo,
But still no respite had the widow.
Nothing could charm her grief away,
It grew more bitter every day.
Often she'd sit when evening fell,
And moan : " Ah, Lawkamussy, well,
'Edda was better than the rest.
My 'Edda alius was the best.
Many's the time she's washed the crocks,
And scrubbed the floors and darned the socks.
When all them selfish gals an' blokes
Was out, the selfish things they are,
A-murderin' and a-rapin' folks,
'Edda would stay 'ome with 'er ma.
Yes, 'Edda was a lovely chile,
I do remember 'er sweet smile,
'Er little 'ands wot lammed and lugged me,
An' scratched an' tore an' pinched an' tugged me.
I mind me 'ow so long ago,
I set 'er little cheeks aglow.
When I 'ad bin to Ledbury fair
An' bought a ribbon for 'er 'air,
A ribbon for 'er pretty 'ead ;
But now my little 'Edda's dead !
Now while spring pulses through the blood
And jonquils carpet every wood,
And God's small fowls sing in the dawn,
I wish to Gawd I'd naver bin born ! "
53
COLLECTED PARODIES
And so at last the widow thought
Things were not going as they ought.
She'd never grumbled in the past :
She'd let them all do things at which
Most parents would have stood aghast —
She'd seen it all without a twitch.
Indeed, religiously she'd tried
To share the joy and fun they'd had ;
But really, this sororicide
Was coming it a bit too bad.
She made her mind up : " It's high time
They stopped their silly vice and crime ! "
She mustered the domestic throng
And gave it to them hot and strong.
" Look here," she said, " this flux
'Ad best come to a crux !
1 long regarded as diversions
Your profligacies and perversions ;
I helped you v/hile you swam in sin,
And backed you up through thick and thin ;
But now you've gone a step too far ;
I mean to show you I'm your ma.
Yes, it's you I'm talkin' to, Kate and John :
You'll have to stop these goings-on.
Murders must stop from this day on ! "
Sons and daughters 3tood amazed,
Bunkered, flummuxed, moonstruck, dazed,
Grunted with appropriate swear,
** What's come over the old mare ? "
" Stop the murders, stop the drink,
Stop the lechery ? I don't fink ! "
54
HOW THEY DO IT
" If she's had enough of sin,
I guess we'd better do 'er in ! "
Thus said Henry, savagely
Whetting his knife upon his knee.
" No," said James, " go easy, brother ;
After all, she is our mother.
Just you wait for 'arf a mo' —
Give me 'arf a mo' to show
'Er the thing in a new light,
And mother '11 come round all right ! "
Love is and was our king and lord,
The tongue is mightier than the sword,
Words may shine at break of day
Like a palace of Cathay,
Words may shine when evening falls
Like the sign of three brass balls.
All the crowd cried, " Righto, Jim !
Jim's a plucked 'un, 'ark to 'im ! "
Chewing half-a-pound of twist.
Smiting the table with his fist,
Jim went on : " Just 'ark to me,
Mother, jest you 'ark to me,"
(He spat with vigour on his hands)
" This is 'ow the matter stands.
" I'll agree we've done enough
Stabbin's, drunks and such-like stuff,
We, unlike our fellow-men,
Have fractured the commandments ten
With others of our own invention
That the scripture doesn't mention.
We have done to heart's content,
55
COLLECTED PARODIES
And speaking for myself, I've had
Quite enough of being bad ;
And to cut the matter short,
Should find uprightness quite good sport.
But, mother, mother, strike me bUnd,
This must aye be borne in mind,-
Mother, mother, strike me rotten,
This must never be forgotten,
We must not think of self alone.
If no one's interests but our own
Were here involved we'd all turn pi.
And put our past transgressions by.
We'd gladly cease our evil-doings.
Promiscuous assaults and wooings,
And end the too-familiar scenes
Which you indignantly have eyed ;
Only, alas, our hands are tied.
Another factor intervenes.
For there's a poet up in London
Who, if we stop, will be quite undone.
We do evil for his good.
He inks his paper with our blood ;
Every crime that we commit
He makes a poem out of it,
And were we so unkind 's to stop, he
Would famish for congenial copy.
My Hfe begins to give my guts hell.
But there's the matter in a nutshell."
" Ay, ay," said Dick, in accents cold,
" Brother Jim the truth has told."
56
HOW THEY DO IT
" Ay, ay," the girls said, " do not doubt it,
That's the truth, that's all about it."
" Well," said the mother, " I am human,
Though only a poor widow woman.
Jim's remarks have cleared my sight,
I understand your motives quite,
And when you shed pore 'Edda's blood
Your purpose was distinctly good.
I still must make it understood
I do not like your goings-on,
Espeshly yours, Bill, Sam and John.
But contraventions of the laws
Committed in such worthy cause,
Habits, however atavistic
Prompted by feelings altruistic,
I can't view with disapprobation
Entirely without qualification.
Thought of your evil deeds must pain me,
Thoughts of your motives must restrain me,
I'm proud to find such virtue in you.
As far as I'm concerned, continue."
57
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 5. MR. G. K. CHESTERTON
When I leapt over Tower Bridge
There were three that watched below,
A bald man and a hairy man,
And a man like Ikey Mo.
When I leapt over London Bridge
They quailed to see my tears,
As terrible as a shaken sword
And many shining spears.
But when I leapt over Blackfriars
The pigeons on St. Paul's
Grew ghastly white as they saw the sight
Like an awful sun that falls ;
And all along from I -udgate
To the wonder of Charing Cross,
The devil flew through a host of hearts —
A messenger of loss.
With a rumour of ghostly things that pass
With a thunderous pennon of pain,
To a land where the sky is as red as the grass
And the sun as green as the rain.
58
HOW THEY DO IT
n
It is a curious thing about most modern people —
it is possible that the ancients sometimes exhibited
the same trait — that they will insist on making con-
fusions. Sometimes they even make confusions
worse confounded, but that particular species of
the genus need not now detain us. More curious still
— as Alice should have said but did not — their
habit is not to confuse similar things but dissimilar
things. They do not confuse Miss Marie Corelli
with Mr. Hall Caine ; they do not confuse six of
one with half-a-dozen of the other ; they do not
even commit the very pardonable error of failing to
distinguish between Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour.
The case, indeed, is quite the reverse. They have a
strange and almost horrible, a magical and most
tragical power of differentiating at a glance between
things that to the otdinary human eye would seem
to be identical in every feature. They can draw a
confident line between the Hegelians and the Prag-
matists (of whom I am not one) ; they can call the
Primitive Methodists, the Swedenborgians and the
Socialists by their names ; confront them with a
flock of sheep and you will find them as expert ovine
onomatologists as any wild and wonderful shepherd
who ever brooded in the sunsets on the remote and
inacessible hills of Dartmoor. But put before them
two or three things that are really and fundament-
ally different, and they will be almost pitifully at a
loss to detect the slightest diversity . They will know
one octopus from another, but they will not know
59
COLLECTED PARODIES
either from a lobster. They will know the average
Tory from the average Socialist, but they will not
know one kind of Socialist from another kind of
Socialist.
This profound and far-reaching truth has fre-
quently struck me ; and, as you doubtless know, I
have as frequently expressed it. Our ancestors (who
were much less foolish than some of their descend-
ants) never hit the nail on the head with more stu-
pendous and earth-shaking force than when they
laid it down as a rigid and unquestionable axiom
that the truth cannot be too often restated. It is that
inexpugnable fact that plunges our modern pessi-
mists into the nethermost abysses of suicidal
despair ; it is that saline and saltating fact that
raises in the breasts of our optimists a fierce and
holy joy. The essence of a great truth is that it is
stale. Sometimes it is merely musty, sometimes it
is almost terribly mouldy. But mouldiness is not
merely a sign of vitality — which is truncated im-
mortality ; it is the sole and single, the one and only
sign of vitality. Truth has gathered the wrinkles of
age on her brows and the dust of ages on the skirts
of her garment. A thing can no more be true and
fresh than it can be new and mouldy. If a man told
me he had discovered a new truth I should politely
but firmly reprimand him precisely as I should a
man who informed me, with however candid and
engaging an air, that he had just seen moss growing
on the back of a new-born child.
Meditating thus, I was walking last Tuesday
night down the splendid and awful solitudes of the
Old Kent Road. Diabolic shapes grinned and moved
60
HOW THEY DO IT
in the secret and sorrowful shadows of the shop
doorways, and every looming warehouse seemed a
monstrous sibyl writhing gnarled and boding fingers
at the hurrying clouds. Suddenly as I turned a
comer I saw, low in the sky where the houses were
broken, a solitary star, a huge red star glowing and
flickering with all the flames of hell, a star that in a
more religious and less purblind age men would
have whispered to be prophetic of awful and con-
vulsive things. It held my feet as with gyves of iron.
I gazed at its scarlet lamp, quaking and shivering
like a man in a palsy. And then, full in my back, I
felt a strange and horrible blow, and there rang in
my ears a voice sepulchral and thunderously muffled
as the voice of one come from the dead.
There were words, human articulate words, and
they were addressed to me. There is something
peculiarly mystic and terrible about words that
proceed from an unknown mouth through impene-
trable darkness. It is that, I think, that must have
been the first principle grasped by the hairy and
horrible men of the primeval forests. They went to
some cave for a refuge and found a religion. They
went there for a gorge and found a god. They went
there for a repast and found a ritual. They entered
the cave expecting to have a snooze, and when they
left it they found they had a sacerdotalism. As I
heard the loathsome voice hailing me through the
darkness as some evil minion of Beelzebub might
hail a lost and errant soul through the pierceless
and intangible grottoes of the outer void, it sud-
denly, I say, flashed across my consciousness that the
impalpable stranger was addressing me in articulate,
6i
COLLECTED PARODIES
not to say terse, syllables of the English tongue.
If there is one thing more than another that accounts
for the widespread use of the English language it is
its incomparable and almost murderous terseness.
A man once told me that Bulgarian was still more
terse ; another man (presuming, I fear, on an old
friendship) assured me a few months later that
Bantu was terser than either ; but as Bulgarian and
Bantu are studies of my youth that I have long left
behind me, I am afraid I am not quite competent
to express a final opinion on the matter. Suffice it
that you would no more attempt to increase the
terseness of the English tongue than you would
attempt to augment the flexibility of an elephant's
trunk by the insertion of an arrangement, however
delicate and dexterous, of cogwheels.
His words were terse, but at first I did not alto-
gether fathom their meaning. " How," I pondered,
" surely there can be nothing sanguinary about me.
I have not shaved myself for days, and I have not
to my knowledge committed a murder for at least
three weeks. And if there is anything markedly
mural about my eyes I confess I was unaware of
the fact. Indeed, it is not altogether plain to me how
any eye can be mural. My friend, you must be mis-
taken."
Summoning up the courage that is often a strong
characteristic of really brave men, I spoke to him.
There was, in that dreadful and desolate place,
under the fiery blaze of that lurid and lecherous
planet, something hollow and awful even about the
tones of my own voice. It echoed along the walls
and wailed round the corners like the foggy clarion
62
HOW THEY DO IT
of a marshland ghost. But my heart was set like
steel, and unquailing I cried, " I think, my friend,
you have made a mistake."
And an error that was a type and a symbol be-
came also a text.
When I had spoken he fled. Which showed that
he was neither a man nor a democrat, but a puny
and pessimistic modern — in all probability a Nietz-
schean. Under the sky, now cloudless and sprinkled
with silver stars, I pursued my way, watching for
the banners of the dawn, and listening for her trum-
pets that knew the youth of the world.
63
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 6. NUMEROUS CELTS
There's a grey wind wails on the clover,
And grey hills, and mist around the hills,
And a far voice sighing a song that is over,
And my grey heart that a strange longing fills.
A sheen of dead swords that shake upon the wind,
And a harp that sleeps though the wind is blow-
ing
Over the hills and the seas and the great hills behind,
The great hills of Kerry, where my heart would
be going.
For I would be in Kerry now where quiet is the
grass,
And the birds are crying in the low light.
And over the stone hedges the shadows pass.
And a fiddle weeps at the shadow of the night.
With Pat Doogan
Father Murphy
Brown maidens
King Cuchullain
The Kine
The Sheep
Some old women
Some old men
And Uncle White Sea-gull and all.
(Chorus) And Uncle White Sea-gull and all.
64
HOW THEY DO IT
No. 7. THE PEOPLE WHO WRITE IN SECRET
WHAT IN PUBLIC THEY ALLEGE TO BE
FOLK-SONGS
The night it was so cold, and the moon it was so
clear,
When I stood at the churchyard gate a-parting from
my dear,
A-parting from my dear, for to bid my dear good-
bye !
And I parted from my dear when the moon was in
th^ sky.
" I never shall forget," said he, " wherever I may
roam,
The day that I parted from my own true love at
home,
My own true love at home that was always true to
me,
I never shall forget my love wherever I may be.
" But I must off to Barbary for good King George
to fight.
And it's farewell to Bayswater and to the Isle of
Wight,
And it's farewell to my true love, it's farewell to you,
It's farewell to my own dear love, so faithful and so
true."
65
COLLECTED PARODIES
He kissed me good-bye, and he gave me a ring,
And he rode away to Lunnon for to fight for the
King;
Oh ! lonely am I now, and sair, sair cold my pillow,
And I must bind my head with O the green willow.
For last night there came a white angel to my bed.
And he told to me that my own dear love was dead ;
My own dear love is dead, and I am all alone
(So it's surely rather obtuse of you to ask me why I
moan).
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HOW THEY DO IT
No. 8. MR. H. G. WELLS
I
I do not quite know how to begin. . . . Ever
since I left England and settled here in this quiet
Putumayo valley I have been wondering and won-
dering. ... I want to put everything down quite
frankly so that you who come after me shall under-
stand. It is very peaceful here in the forest, and as
my mind goes back to that roaring old England,
with its strange welter of aspirations and basenesses,
that little old England, so far away now, a small
green jewel in the great sea, I break into a smile of
tender tolerance. Here, as the immemorial pro-
cession of day and night, of summer and winter,
sweeps over the earth, amid the vast serenities of
primeval nature, it all seems so very far away, so
small, so queerly inconsequent. . . .The men who
made me, the men who broke me, the women I
loved, the sprawling tow^ns, the confused effort,
and that ungainly lop-sided structure of our twen-
tieth-century civilization, with its strange welter
of sex. . . .
n
And then it was that the Hon. Astarte Cholmond-
eley came into my life. I remember as clearly as
though it were yesterday — and it is now over thirty
years ago— the moment of our meeting. It was at
one of those enormous futile receptions that political
hostesses give at the beginning of tlie Session,
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COLLECTED PARODIES
assemblies of two or three thousand men and women,
minor pohticians, organizers, journalists, all clam-
orous for champagne and burning for nods of
recognition from the great men of the Party. It was
a fine night, almost oppressively warm, and I had
walked across the Park from Hill Street, carrying
my opera-hat in my hand. There was a dull uniform
roar from the distant traffic ; the tops of the trees
faintly swished in the hght wind, the lights along
the lake shone very quietly, and above were the vast
serenities of the sky, powdered with stars. On benches
in the shadows lurked pairs of quiet lovers, and the
stars looked down upon them as they had upon
lovers in Nineveh and Babylon. As I stepped out
into the rush of Pall Mall, with its stream of swift
motors, I thought, I remember, of my career, . . .
Ill
The crush was vulgar and intolerable.
I had spent an hour passing dejected remarks to
the other young men, also there out of duty and as
bored as I was myself. Then suddenly she entered
... a slender slip of a thing, brown-haired and
brown-eyed, leaning flower-like on the arm of her
elephantine mother, the Dowager. . . .
IV
" Dearest," she wrote me next day, " did you
sleep last night ? I did not sleep a wink. All night
long I lay dazzled and overwhelmed by this wonder-
ful thing that has come to us. And then this morn-
ing, when God's great dawn slowly lifted over the
68
HOW THEY DO IT
westward hills, I got up, did my hair (oh my beau-
tiful, beautiful hair, now all yours, my own Man,
all yours), and sat down to write this, my first letter,
to you, I am sitting at the little window of my room
in the Lion Tower. The breath of the roses rises in
the fresh morning air ; and out beyond the park,
where the deer are placidly grazing, the slanting
sun glints exquisitely on spacious woodland and
rolling down, mile after mile. . . . Far away,
against the blue of the horizon, there is a little point-
ing church spire, and somehow it reminds me of
you. . . . Oh, my lover, I am going to lay bare to
you the inmost shrine of my heart. You must be
patient with me, very patient ; for do we not belong
to each other ? We must live openly we tw-o, we who
are the apostles of new freedoms, of new realizations,
of a second birth for this dear, fooHsh old world of
ours." Thus she wrote, and there was more, much
more, too sacredly intimate to be set down here,
but breathing in every line the essence of her ador-
able self. . . .
V
And then it was that Mary Browne came into my
life. I had known her years ago when I was at
college ; I had thought her a meek and rather dull
little girl, as insignificant as the rest of her family.
But now there was about her a certain quaUty of
graciousness, very difficult to define, but very un-
escapable when it is present, that gave to her mouse-
grey hair and rather weak blue eyes a beauty very
rare and very subtle. She had spent, she told me,
tu'o years in the East End at some social work or
other. . . .
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COLLECTED PARODIES
VI
And then I met Cecilia Scroop. . . .
VII
And so the end came. In those last days I worked
more feverishly than ever, writing my book, attend-
ing committees, speaking on platforms throughout
the country. I was the chief speaker during that by-
election of Brooks's at Manchester, which I still
believe might have been the germ of a new social
order, of coherences and approximations, of differ-
entiations and realizations beyond the imagining
of the men of our time, but to be very clearly and
very palpably apprehended by that future race for
whom we, in a blind and groping way, are living
and building. . . .And then the blow fell. . . .
It was a Friday afternoon. The House had risen
early after throwing out some absurd Bill that that
ass Biffin had brought in ; I think it was something
about Bee Disease. I had been one of the tellers for
the Noes, and at three o'clock I walked out into
Palace Yard and along the chalky stone cloister that
leads to the private tunnel through which members
enter the Underground Railway station. I had
promised to meet Astarte at four at the foot of the
Scenic Railway (this was before the time when little
Higgins revolutionized the amusement business
with his actino-gyroscopes) in the Earl's Court
Exhibition. Since her marriage with Binger com-
munication had been increasingly difficult for us.
All her letters were opened, and Binger had eaves-
droppers at work in the telephone exchanges. Her
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HOW THEY DO IT
chauffeur, happily, played his master false, and she
was usually able to keep appointments when she
had made them ; and for some months we had
arranged our meetings by little cryptic notices in
the agony column of the Morning Post. We had
thought ourselves safe. But she must have dropped
a casual word to somebody ; some fool had given
us away ; and when I got to Earl's Court I found
that Astarte was there, but that Mary and Cecilia
were there as well. . . .
vni
I remonstrated with them. I knew it was hope-
less, and my heart sank ; but I did my best. Greatest
agony of all it was to know that these women in
whom I had trusted, whom I had looked to as pion-
eers, as auguries of what was to be and what still
will be, were, when the crisis came, still shackled
and bound by the little petty jealousies of the old
system. With set, white faces they glowered upon
me (it was raining a little, I remember, and the
ground at our feet was muddy and covered with
stained and trampled paper) as I spoke, softly and
passionately, of muddle and waste, of the sordid
and furtive shames and reticences that man has
brought with him from the ancestral past, that he
must shed before we build for our gods the diviner
temples that might be. . . Night came over. . . .
and then, as my voice failed, a tall man stepped out
from behind a hoarding. It was Montacute, the
Prime Minister. " I am very sorry for you," he said
simply, " but I am afraid, Mr. Bilgewater, we shall
have to ask you to resign." He seemed to hesitate a
COLLECTED PARODIES
moment ; then, as though half ashamed, he held
out his hand and looked me in the eyes. . . I had
known him since I was a boy at school and he a
young man, a fastidious and kindly young man who
had seemed almost too delicate for the rough work
of politics. He had always taken a friendly interest
in me even when I was bitterly fighting him. . .
" Good-bye," he said. My voice was husky as I
returned his farewell.
IX
I went back to my chambers and told my man to
pack a single portmanteau. There were just three
hours before the boat-train. Before I left I wrote ten
letters. . . .
72
Ill
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. I. IF WORDSWORTH HAD WRITTEN
" THE EVERLASTING MERCY "
Ever since boyhood it has been my joy
To rove the hills and vales, the woods and streams,
To commune with the flowers, the beasts, the birds,
And all the humble messengers of God.
And so not seldom liave my footsteps strayed
To that bare farm where Thomas Haythornthwaite
(Alas ! 'tis now ten years the good old man
Is dead !) wrung turnips from the barren soil,
To keep himself and his good wife, Maria,
Whom I remember well, although 'tis now
Full twenty years since she deceased ; and I
Have often visited her quiet grave
In summer and in winter, that I might
Place some few flowers upon it, and returned
In solemn meditation from the spot,
In the employment of this honest man
There was a hind, Saul Kane, I knew him well,
And oft-times 'twas my fortune to lament
The blackness of the youth's depravity.
For when I came to visit Haythornthwaite
The good old man, leaning upon this spade,
Would say to me, " Saul Kane is wicked, sir ;
A wicked lad. Before he cut his teeth
He broke his poor old mother's heart in two.
For at the beer-house he is often seen
With ill companions, and at dead of night
We hear him loud blaspheming at the owls
That fly about the house. I oft have blushed
75
COLLECTED PARODIES
At deeds of his I could not speak about."
But yet so wondrous is the heart of man
That even Saul Kane repented of his sins —
A little maid, a little Quaker maid,
Converted him one day. " Saul Kane," she said,
" Dear Saul, I pray you will get drunk no more."
Nor did he ; but embraced a sober life,
And married Mary Thorpe ; and yesterday
I met him on my walk, and with him went
Up to the house where he and his do dwell.
And there I long in serious converse stayed.
Speaking of Nature and of politics,
And then turned homeward meditating much
About the single transferable vote.
76
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. 2. IF SWINBURNE HAD WRITTEN
" THE LAY OF HORATIUS "
N.B. — Read this aloud^ with resonance, nor examine
too closely the meaning.
May the sword burn bright, may the old sword
smite, that a myriad years have worn and rusted?
May an old wind blow where the young winds go
immaculate over the eager land ?
May faded blossoms on ripening bosoms flame with
lust as of old they lusted,
Or the might of a night take flight with the white
sweet arms of a dead Dionysian band ?
Ah, nay ! for the rods of the high pale gods the power
of the past have spilled and broken
And over the fields the amaranth yields her guer-
don of gossamer, bitter as rue.
And the desolate blind sad ghost of the wind falters
and fails as a word that was spoken
Long since of a fire and a blazing pyre of per-
jured monarchs and kings untrue.*
The sword may smite and the keen sword bite
though the clouds in the sky be clouds of peril,
Though the Teuton glance at the flanks of France
and the hand of Fate be a hand unseen,
For the brave man'sf arm was swift to charm and
the coward's arm was weak and sterile
* Possible mention of Tarquin.
t Conceivably Horatius.
77
COLLECTED PARODIES
Or ever the Saxon galleons swam to England*
over the waters green
And over the high Thessalian hills the feet of the
maidens fail and falter,
Samian waters and Lemnian valleys, Ithacan
rivers and Lesbian seas,
And the god returning with frenzy burning foams
at the foot of a roseless altar.
And dumb with the kiss of Artemis and the berries
of death the virgin flees.
With persistence and luck the reader, after eighty verses
or so, would have come to something as specific as
this :
For the triumph of the trampling of the nations
And the laughter of the loud Etrurianf gates
And the thunder of a host of desolations
And the lightning of an avalanche of hates
Never daunted thee or made thy cheek the paler
On the bridge which thou didst hold as held the
fleet
Drake, our own superb Elizabethan sailor,
Yea, and drove the bloody tyrant from his seat.
Our mother, inviolate ever since, save for one only occasion.
t Lars Porsena in poet's mind.
78
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
. 3. IF MR. MASEFIELD HAD WRITTEN
" CASABIANCA "
" You dirty hog," " You snouty snipe,"
" You lump of muck," " You bag of tripe,"
Such, as their latest breaths they drew,
The objurgations of ♦'he crew.
they roared
As they went tumbUng overboard,
Or frizzled like so many suppers
All along the halyard scuppers.
" You " . . . the last was gone.
And Cassy yelled there all alone.
(He thought the old man was on the ship.)
" Father ! this gives me the fair pip ! "
" My God, you old vagabond," he cried,
" If only I ..." No voice replied ;
Only the tall flames higher sprang,
Amid the spars, and soared and sang.
Only along the rigging came
God's great unfolding flower of flame,
And Love's divine dim planet shed
Her radiance on the many dead ;
And past the battUng fleets the sea
Stretched to the world's edge tranquilly,
Breathing with slow, contented breath
As though it were in love with Death,
As it has breathed since first began
Man's inhumanity to man,
79
COLLECTED PARODIES
As it will do when like a scroll
All the heavens together roll.
There's that purple passage done
And I have one less lap to run.
Dogs barked, owls hooted, cockerels crew,
As in my works they often do
When, flagging with my main design,
I pad with a descriptive line.
Young Cassy cried again : " Oh, damn !
What an unhappy put I am !
Will nobody go out and search
For dad, who's left me in the lurch ?
For dad, who's left me on the poop,
For dad, who's left me in the soup,
For dad, who's left me on the deck.
Perhaps it's what I should expeck
Considerin' 'ow he treated me
Before I came away to sea.
" Often at home he used to beat
My head for talking in the street.
Often for things I didden do,
He brushed my breeches with a shoe.
O ! but I wish that I was home now,
Treading the soft old Breton loam now
In that old Breton country where
Mellows the golden autumn air,
And all the tender champaign fills
With hyacinths and daffodils,
And on God's azure uplands now
They plough the ploughed fields with a plough,
And earth-worms feel avers? from laughter.
80
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
With hungry white birds following after.
And maids at evening walk with men
Through the meadows and up the glen
To hear the old sweet tale again."
The deck was getting hot and hotter,
" Father ! " he screamed, " you rotter 1 "
The deck was getting red and redder,
And now he thought he'd take a header,
Now he advanced and now he funked it . . .
It had been better had he bunked it,
For as he wavered thus, and swore.
There came a slow tremendous roar.
Lord Nelson suddenly woke up.
" Where is Old Cassy and his pup ?
' Don't know,' you say ? Why, strike me blind,
I s'pose I'd better ask the wind."
He asked the wind ; the brooding sky
At once gave back the wind's reply :
" Wotto, Nelson ! "
" Wotto, sonny ? "
" Do you think you're being funny ?
Can't you look around, confound you.
At all these fragments that surround you,
Thick as thieves upon the sea.
Instead of coming bothering me ? "
Or, alternatively, if you prefer his other method, it
would run like this :
And the flames rose, and leaping flames of fire
Leapt round the masts and made the spars a
crown,
A golden crown, as ravenous as desire.
8i
COLLECTED PARODIES
" Father ! " he cried, " my feet are getting
brown."
" Father ! " he cried. The quiet stars looked
down,
The flames rose up like flowers overhead.
He was alone and all the crew were dead.
82
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. 4. IF ALMOST ANY ELIZABETHAN
HAD WRITTEN " SHE DWELT AMONG
THE UNTRODDEN WAYS "
Ask me not for the semblance of my loue.
Amidst the fountains of the christal Doue
Like to that fayre Aurora did she runne,
Who treads the beams of the sweete morning sunne.
Forth from her head her hayres Uke golden wyre
Did spring ; her amorous eyes were lamps of fire,
Bright as that torch their heauenly raies did mount
Wherewith fayre Hero lit the Hellespont,
Or as that flame which on the desert lies
When new-borne Phenix soareth to the skies.
Like wanton darts her eye-beames she did throw
From out her noble forehead's iuorie bow
Whose Beauties great perfection would withstand
The skill of the most cunning painter's hand.
Her virgin nose like Dian's self did raigne
Amidst her vermeil cheekes' ambrosiall plaine ;
Her busie lips twinne Rubies did appeare
From which her Voyce did come as Diamonds
cleare ;
Venus' owne sonne would sigh to look beneath
At the straight pearlie pleasaunce of her teethe.
Like to fayre starres, or rather, like the sunne
Was her smooth Marble chinne's pavilion,
Wherefrom her slender necke the eye did lead
83
COLLECTED PARODIES
To shoulders like twinne Lilies on a mead,
Whiter than Ledae's f ethers or white milke,
As sweete as nectar and as softe as silke.
O, and her tender brests, they were as white
As snowie hills which Phebus' beames doe smite
Engirt with azure and with Saphire veines. . . .
{Cetera desunt)
84
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. 5. IF POPE HAD WRITTEN " BREAK,
BREAK, BREAK "
Fly, Muse, tby wonted themes, nor longer seek
The consolations of a powder'd cheek ;
Forsake the busy purlieus of the Court
For calmer meads where finny tribes resort.
So may th' Almighty's natural antidote
Abate the worldly tenour of thy note,
The various beauties of the liquid main
Refine thy reed and elevate thy strain.
See how the labour of the urgent oar
Propels the barks and draws them to the shore.
Hark ! from the margin of the azure bay
The joyful cries of infants at their play.
(The offspring of a piscatorial swain,
His home the sands, his pasturage the main.)
Yet none of these may soothe the mourning heart,
Nor fond alleviation's sweets impart ;
Nor may the pow'rs of infants that rejoice
Restore the accents of a former voice.
Nor the bright smiles of ocean's nymphs command
The pleasing contact of a vanished hand.
So let me still in meditation move,
Muse in the vale and ponder in the grove,
And scan the skies where sinking Phoebus glows
With hues more rubicund than Gibber's nose. . . ,
{After which the poet gets into his proper stride).
85
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 6. IF GRAY HAD HAD TO WRITE HIS
ELEGY LN THE CEMETERY OF SPOON
RIVER INSTEAD OF IN THAT OF
STOKE POGES
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The whippoorwill salutes the rising moon,
And wanly glimmer in her gentle ray,
The sinuous windings of the turbid Spoon.
Here where the flattering and mendacious swarm
Of lying epitaphs their secrets keep,
At last incapable of further harm
The lewd forefathers of the village sleep.
The earliest drug of half- awakened morn,
Cocaine or hashish, strychnine; poppy-seeds
Or fiery produce of fermented com
No more shall start them on the day's misdeeds.
For them no more the whetstone's cheerful noise,
No more the sun upon his daily course
Shall watch them savouring the genial joys,
Of murder, bigamy, arson and divorce.
Here they all lie ; and, as the hour is late,
O stranger, o'er their tombstones cease to stoop.
But bow thine ear to me and contemplate
The unexpurgated annals of the group.
86
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
There are two hundred only : yet of these
Some thirty died of drowning in the river,
Sixteen went mad, ten others had D. T's.
And twenty-eight cirrhosis of the liver.
Several by absent-minded friends were shot,
Still more blew out their own exhausted brains,
One died of a mysterious inward rot,
Three fell off roofs, and five were hit by trains.
One was harpooned, one gored by a bull-moose,
Four on the Fourth fell victims to lock-jaw.
Ten in electric chair or hempen noose
Suffered the last exaction of the law.
Stranger, you quail, and seem inclined to/un ;
But, timid stranger, do not be unnerved ;
I can assure you that there was not one
Who got a tithe of what he had deserved.
Full many a vice is born to thrive unseen,
Full many a crime the world does not discuss,
Full many a pervert lives to reach a green
Replete old age, and so it was with us.
Here lies a parson who would often make
Clandestine rendezvous with Claflin's Moll,
And 'neath the druggist's counter creep to take
A sip of surreptitious alcohol.
87
COLLECTED PARODIES
And here a doctor, who had seven wives,
And, fearing this mdnage might seem grotesque,
Persuaded six of them to spend their Uves
Locked in a drawer of his private desk.
And others here there sleep who, given scope,
Had writ their names large on the Scrolls of Crime,
Men who, with half a chance, might haply cope.
With the first miscreants of recorded time.
Doubtless in this neglected spot is laid
Some village Nero who has missed his due,
Some Bluebeard who dissected many a maid,
And all for naught, since no one ever knew.
Some poor bucolic Borgia here may rest
Whose poisons sent whole families to their doom,
Some hayseed Herod who, within his breast.
Concealed the sites of many an infant's tomb.
Types that the Muse of Masefield might have stirred,
Or waked to ecstasy Gaboriau,
Each in his narrow cell at last interred,
All, all are sleeping peacefully below.
Enough, enough ! But, stranger, ere we part.
Glancing farewell to each nefarious bier.
This warning I would beg you take to heart,
" There is an end to even the worst career !."
88
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. 7. IF A VERY NEW POET HAD WRITTEN
" THE LOTUS-EATERS "
I
Ah!
Ough !
Umph !
It was a sweat !
Thank God, that's over !
No more navigating for me.
I am on to
Something
Softer. . . .
Conductor,
Give us a tune
II
Work!
Did I used to work ?
I seem to remember it
Out there.
Millions of fools are still at
It,
Jumping about
All over the place. . . .
And what's the good of it all ? . . .
Buzz,
Hustle,
Pop,
And then . . .
Dump
In the grave.
89
COLLECTED PARODIES
III
Bring me six cushions
A yellow one, a green one, a purple one, an orange
one, an ultramarine one, and a vermilion one,
Colours of which the combination
Pleases my eye.
Bring me
Also
Six lemon squashes
And
A straw. . . .
IV
I have taken off my coat.
I shall now
Loosen
My braces.
Now I am
All right . . .
My God. . . .
I do feel lazy !
90
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
No. 8. IF HENRY JAMES HAD WRITTEN
THE CHURCH CATECHISM
Q. What is your name ?
A. It may possibly be conceived as standing in a
relation of contiguity to a certain — shall we say ?
— somewhat complicatedly rectilinear design — to
put it colloquially, a symbol — employed by such of
the races of mankind as follow the Roman usage to
denote a sort of suppressed explosion, or rather, a
confused hum " produced " when the upper and
the nether lip are brought with some firmness — or
even, as one might phrase it, " snap " — together,
and a continuous sound is compelled for egress to
flow through a less harmonious though undeniably
more prominent organ. Or, on the other hand, its
relation to that so interesting figure may be some-
thing even closer than one of mere contiguity, how-
ever proximate, something in the nature of coin-
cidence, of body and soul identity even : in a word,
it may be, or, more exactly, may be represented oy,
that symbol itself.
Q. Who gave you that name ?
A. Which ?
Q. Oh, no, not the other one, the quite inevitably
discursive family " label."
A. You mean my . . .
Q. Well yes, not that all so shared, and as it were
almost — if one may forgivably say it — may one ? —
" vulgarized " — your, as they call it, " surname."
A. Oh, not that one ?
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COLLECTED PARODIES
Q. No . . .
A. The other ?
Q. Yes — that other — that more exquisitely per-
sonal, the more (dare one ?) appropriated, the one
of which, I had thought, we touched, even grasped,
the skirts when our interlocution, or to put it quite
brutally, when we began our conversation.
A. You refer . . .
Q. I am, dear lady, all ears.
A. To, in 'fact, my — since we are both to be so
frank — Christian name ?
Q. Oh, but you are great !
A. Not great, not, I mean, really, in the sense
that you mean. . . .
Q. / mean }
A. The other sense, you know.
Q. Yes, I apprehend you, but it wasn't that one
I meant.
A. Then what in the world was it ?
Q. Take it from another point of view, wasn't
frankness to be, always, our splendid object ?
A. Explicitly.
Q. Wasn't it ?
A. Oh no, I wouldn't doubt it ; I wouldn't, really
wouldn't, let you down.
Q. Not even gently ?
A. The other way, I meant.
Q. Divine clarity ! And who gave it you ?
A. The Deluge !
Q. He was it, or she ?
A. Oh, never he, as he would himself say, never
on your life.
92
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
Q. And she ?
A. She would, as she always will, bet her boots
not !
Q. Not, surely it wasn't, they ?
A. They !
Q. They !
A. Oh, certainly they ! Who could have stopped
them. Not miserable I, so pitifully, so hopelessly, so
microscopically, futilely small ! They were all there,
and there was I. And they did it, oh, quite finally
did it.
Q. Who }
(Etc.)
93
COLLECTED PARODIES
No. 9. IF LORD BYRON HAD WRITTEN
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the western sea,
Till, when the bell for evening service tolled,
Each side had swiped the other utterly ;
And, looking round, Sir Bedivere the bold
Said, " Sire, there's no one left but you and me ;
I'm game to lay a million to a fiver
That, save for us, there is not one survivor."
" Quite likely," answered Arthur, " and I'm sure
That I have been so hammered by these swine
To-morrow's sun will find us yet one fewer.
I prithee take me to yon lonely shrine
Where I may rest and die. There is no cure
For men with sixty-seven wounds like mine."
So Bedivere did very firmly grapple
His arm, and led him to the Baptist Chapel.
There he lay down, and by him burned like flame
His sword Excalibur : its massy hilt
Crusted with blazing gems that never came
From mortal mines ; its blade, inlaid and gilt
And graved with many a necromantic name,
Still dabbled with the blood the king had spilt.
Which touching, Arthur said, " Sir Bedivere,
Please take this brand and throw him in the mere."
94
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
Bold Bedivere sprang back like one distraught,
Or like a snail when tapped upon the shell,
Was this the peerless prince for whom he'd fought,
A man who'd drop his cheque-book down a well ?
Surely he must have dreamt the words, he thought.
Had the king spoken ? Was it possible
To give so lunatic a proposal credit ? . . .
And yet the king undoubtedly had said it.
He said it again in accents full serene :
" Go to the lake and throw this weapon in it,
And then come back and tell me what you've seen.
The business should not take you half a minute.
Off now. I say precisely what I mean."
" Right, sire ! " But, sotto voce, " What a sin it
Would be, what criminal improvidence
To waste an arme blanche of such excellence ! "
But Arthur's voice broke through his meditation,
" Why this delay ? I thought I said * at once ' ?"
" Yes, sire," said he, and, with a salutation
Walked off reflecting, " How this fighting blunts
One's wits. In any other situation
I should have guessed — 'twere obvious to a dunce
That this all comes from Merlin's precious offices,
Why could he not confine himself to prophecies ? "
Bearing the brand, across the rocks he went
And now and then a hot impatient word
Witnessed the stress of inner argument.
" Curse it," he mused, " a really sumptuous
sword
95
COLLECTED PARODIES
Is just the very one accoutrement
I never have been able to afford ;
This beautiful, this incomparable Excalibur
Would nicely suit a warrior of my calibre.
" Could anything be madder than to hurl in
This stupid lake a sword as good as new,
Merely because that hoary humbug Merlin
Suggested that would be the thing to do ?
A bigger liar never came from Berlin,
I won^t be baulked by guff and bugaboo ;
The old impostor's lake may call in vain for it
I'll stick it in a hole and come again for it."
So, having safely stowed away the sword
And marked the place with several large stones
Sir Bedivere returned to his liege lord
And, with a studious frankness in his tones,
Stated that he had dropped it overboard ;
But Arthur only greeted him with groans :
" My Bedivere," he said, " I may be dying.
But even dead I'd spot such barefaced lying.
" It's rather rough upon a dying man
That his last dying orders should be flouted.
Time was when if you'd thus deranged my plan
I should have said, ' Regard yourself as outed,
I'll find some other gentleman who can.'
Now I must take what comes, that's all about it . . .
My strength is failing fast, it's very cold here.
Come, pull yourself together, be a soldier.
96
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
" Once more I must insist you are to lift
Excalibur and hurl him in the mere.
Don't hang about now. You had better shift
For all you're worth, or when you come back here
The chances are you'll find your master stiffed."
Whereat the agonized Sir Bedivere,
His " Yes, Sire," broken by a noisy sob,
Went off once more on his distasteful job.
But as he walked the inner voice did say :
" I quite agree witn ' Render unto Caesar,'
But nothing's said of throwing things away
When a man's king's an old delirious geezer,
You don't meet swords like this one every day.
Jewels and filigree as fine as these are
Should surely be preserved in a museum
That our posterity may come and see 'em.
" A work of Art's a thing one holds in trust,
One has no right to throw it in a lake.
Such Vandalism would arouse disgust
In every Englishman who claims to take
An interest in Art. Oh, no, I must
Delude my monarch for my country's sake ;
Obedience in such a case, in fact,
Were patently an anti-social act.
" It is not pleasant to deceive my king,
I had much rather humour his caprice.
But, if I tell him I have thrown the thing.
And, thinking that the truth, he dies in peace.
Surely the poets of our race will sing
(Unless they are the most pedantic geese)
97
COLLECTED PARODIES
The praises of the knight who lied to save
This precious weapon from a watery grave."
He reached the margin of the lake and there
Until a decent interval had passed
Lingered, the sword once more safe in its lair.
Then to his anxious monarch hurried fast.
And, putting on a still more candid air,
Assured the king the brand had gone at last.
But Arthur, not deceived by any means,
Icily said : " Tell that to the marines.
" Sir Bedivere, this conduct won't enhance
Your reputation as a man of honour.
If you had dared to lead me such a dance
A week ago you would have been a goner.
Listen to me ! I give you one more chance ;
And, if you fail again, I swear upon our
Old oath of fealty to the Table Round
I shall jump up and fell you to the ground."
So that sad soul went off alone once more.
Rebellion frowned no longer on his face ;
His spirit was broken ; when he reached the shore
He wormed the sword out of its hiding-place,
Excalibur, that man's eye should see no more,
And, fearing still a further lapse from grace.
Shut his eyes tight against that matchless jewel
And, desperately hissing, " This is cruel,"
Swung it far back ; and then, with mighty sweep.
Hove it to southward as he had been bade.
And, as it fell, an arm did suddenly leap
Out of the moonlit wave, in samite clad,
98
HOW THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT
And grasped the sword and drew it to the deep.
And all was still ; and Bedivere, who had
No nerve at all left now, exclaimed, " My Hat !
I'll never want another job like that ! "
Thus Bedivere at last performed his vow.
And Arthur, when the warrior bore in sight,
Read his success upon his gloomy brow.
" Done it at last," he murmured, " that's all right.
Well, Bedivere, and what has happened now ? "
Demanded he ; and the disconsolate knight
In a harsh bitter voice replied, " Oh, damn it all,
I saw a mystic arm, clothed in white samite all."
" Quite right," said Arthur, " better late than never;
Now, if you please, you'll take me for a ride,
Put me upon your back and then endeavour
To run top-speed unto the waterside.
Come, stir your stumps, you must be pretty clever,
Or otherwise I fear I shall have died
Before you've landed me upon the jetty,
And then the programme's spoilt : which were a
pity."
What followed after this (although my trade is
Romantic verse) is quite beyond my lay.
For automobile barges, full of ladies
Singing and weeping, never came my way.
Though, for that matter, I was once in Cadiz —
But never mind. It will suffice to say
That in his final act our old friend Malory
Was obviously playing to the gallery.
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No. lo. IF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE
HAD WRITTEN " LITTLE DROPS OF
WATER "
Child, I am wondering.
Last night I was watching the silver moon rising
over the sea,
And in her light the colour of the sea was pale, and
the colour of the grasses was dark and sweet as
the champak.
I heard the ducks crying over the waters by the shore.
I heard from the khitmatgar, threading Uke pearls
on the darkness, the soft notes of the cummer-
bund.
Child, I am wondering.
Child, I smelt the flowers.
The golden flowers . . . hiding in crowds like
fairies at my feet,
And as I smelt them the endless smile of the infinite
broke over me, and I knew that they and you
and I were one.
They and you and I, the cowherds and the cows,
the jewels and the potter's wheel, the mothers
and the light in baby's eyes.
For the sempstress when she takes one stitch may
make nine unnecessary ;
And the smooth and shining stone that rolls and
rolls like the great river may gain no moss,
And it is extraordinary what a lot you can do with a
platitude when you dress it up in Blank Prose.
Child, I smelt the flowers.
ICO
IV
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" Prolegomena for a System of Intuitive Reason-
ing." By F. W. Wiertz. Translated from the third
German edition by Julia Elson. (The Channer-Wehh
Co., New York).
It speaks ill for the enterprise of our publishing
firms that it should have been left to an American
firm to bring out the first English translation of
Friedrich Wiertz's magnum opus. It was as long ago
as 1894 that the late David Andrews — a man who,
owing possibly to his lack of an academic connect-
ion, never won the philosophic reputation that was
his due — first drew the attention of English students
to Wiertz by his excellent rendering of the " Torso
of Apollo." Since then the remainder of Wiertz's
Esthetic has also been translated, although remark-
ably badly. But the theory of aesthetics was to him
little more than a side show. He threw great Ught
on some most obscure problems. Unlike many phil-
osophers who have written on the subject, he had
some appreciation of beauty ; and there are passages
in the " Torso " which, from the general reader's
point of view, are as amusing, as well- written and
at least as sane as the best critical and polemic pass-
ages of Nietzsche in his anti- Wagner period. Never-
theless, Wiertz himself attached small importance
to these works, and his chief interest lay elsewhere.
He believed, and he believed rightly, that there was
more permanent value in the " Prolegomena "
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than in all his other writings put together ; and it
seems preposterous that we should have had to wait
until he has been in the grave ten years, before getting
an English version of a book which will continue
to mould European thought when most of his con-
temporaries are forgotten. It is characteristic of
this country. Wiertz is ignored and they bombard
us with Eucken.
The first sentence of the book is an earnest of
what follows. " When doctors disagree," says
Wiertz, " honest men come by their own " ; com-
bining two proverbs which exist both in German
and in English. There follows a rapid but most
brilliant sketch of the history of philosophy from
Herachtus and Pythagoras to Hoffding, Herbert
Spencer and T. H. Green, in whom he seems to
have taken a special delight. Briefly analysing their
systems, or the systems that have been foisted on
them by their followers, he shows that almost all of
them have been subject to primary delusions that
have vitiated the whole of their work. They have
made assumptions that they have comfortably
stowed out of sight when they thought the reader
was not looking. They have drugged themselves
into a belief in the all-potency of logic and of analysis.
They have been mastered by their own metaphors.
They have allowed themselves to think that what
cannot be solved in any other way can be solved by
a manipulation of words. They have " built long
thin ladders into the air, some with many rungs,
but all no more capable of containing, or, rather, of
comprehending, the universe than my hair is of
comprehending the atmosphere." With delightful
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wit he demolishes " the ancient, modern, and medi-
aeval scholastic philosophies." He quotes RubinofF '•
" The philosophers of all sects have spent three
thousand years burying the fair form of Truth
under a mass of verbal sewage." This unsavoury
accumulation Wiertz, with a grace that leads one
to suspect him of non-Teuton blood, shovels aside
with great sweeps of the pen and drops on the be-
nighted heads of its original depositors.
" Down with Words," " Down with Philos-
ophers," " Down with Systems " ; these are three
of his next chapter headings. The uninitiated might
well wonder why he proceeded to imitate those
whom he denounced. The reader has taken re-
spectfully his descriptions of his predecessors :
Plato, *' a bad artist with a depraved taste for social
reform " ; Hegel, " a windbag who was bom
burst " ; Schopenhauer, " a dyspeptic mushroom
on half-pay " ; Spinoza, " a wandering Jew " ;
Kant, " a corpulent cypher " ; Zeno, " a lamp-post
without a lamp " ; Fichte, " the echo of a bad
smell " ; Aristotle, " an industrious publisher's
hack," and so on. What had he to do with words
and systems ? How did he hope. to escape the lot of
all the others who have attempted to " draw maps
of the dark side of the moon " } It is bare justice
to him to say that he realised the inconsistency ; it
is also bare justice to add that he never constructed
a system, though he had the temerity to provide
materials for a system that a more foolish successor
might construct. But, still he did not confine himself
to destructive criticism, to negation. He was not a
philosopher of the study. He had had a training in
10 s ..
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positive science, and for some time he even took
part in the politics of Saxony, his state. Never losing
sight of his limitations, he achieved by experiment
and speculation results which, whatever their re-
lation to the Eternal Sphinx, may be of the greatest
practical value.
It is impossible here to detail the way in which
Wiertz arrived at his method, or the manner in
which he, with unexampled lucidity, defended its
use. Roughly speaking, his process was this : " What
he asked, " is the usual concept of a concept ? "
After examining and rejecting a number of
illustrations for it he chose that of the unfolding
mirror that is being continually breathed upon. By
induction he concluded that if the breath could be
removed the mirror would become clearer. Both
experience and common-sense (which, though he
could not defend it, he deemed important) tell us
that the operation of stopping the breath cannot be
performed by a phenomenal agency. We have to
look, then (and even Hegel could not have rejected
this conclusioii), for a non-phenomenal, or, rather,
a super-phenomenal agency. But this super-pheno-
menal agency can only be grasped by super-pheno-
menal means ; and here Wiertz 's years in the labor-
atories came to his rescue. He had noticed, when
weighing sections of an amoeba, that the weight of
the sections was always less than that of the whole,
and that the discrepancy varied with the temper-
ature, being greatest when the temperature was
high and least when it was low. For this Residuum,
to which he chose to give the name Supraliminal
Intuition, he discovered the formula : Cos 65
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log 2 = 23 sin 45 + ^2^''. On this formula which
can convey but little to anyone who is not a mathe-
matician, he built, by a long and careful process of
argument, his theory or, rather, his working hypo-
thesis of the Intuitive Reason. It is this process that
fills the greater part of the " Prolegomena." To the
average reader these chapters must of necessity be
difficult and rather dull. But it is well worth while
making the eiTort to master them in view of the
bearing that they have on the concluding chapter,
the chapter that is being made the basis of a whole
political theory in Germany and Italy and that some
of the French Syndicalists have appropriated to
their own use.
The Wiertzians have gone to the most extreme
lengths in the affirmations they have made with the
" Prolegomena " as justification. When one says this
one does not imply that they advocate or assert
much that is shocking to bourgeois sentiment in
the sense that Nietzsche, Stirner, Marinetti and
Tolstoi are shocking. Where they run to excess is
in the meticulousness with which they apply the
Wiertzian instrument. Hirsch-MenkendorfF, the
latest of them, gravely informs the world not merely
thit women's suffrage is bad, that beer is good, that
the government should be run by commercial men,
that Sabbatarianism and cruelty to ^animals go hand
in hand, but announces with all the air of a solemn
prophet : " God objects to compulsory insurance."
Wiertz never went into such detail as this himself.
But it may at least be said that there is little that the
average middle-class man says or does or thinks that
he cannot find defended and justified in his pages.
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" I am," said he, " the Apotheosis of the Ordinary."
It is absurd that he should not have been translated
into English before.
Miss Elson's rendering is scholarly and her
language clear and idiomatic. But here and there,
unfortunately, there are Americanisms that a British
audience will scarcely stomach. English people do
not allude to a " bunch of philosophers, ' and for
" hand-grip," on page 164, " portmanteau " or
" hand-bag " might have been substituted.
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II
" The Collected Poetical Works of William Scotton."
Edited with notes by Bernard L. Easterbrook. {zs.
bd. net.)
Those who know their Boswell intimately may
remember a certain conversation which the bio-
grapher chronicles under date of 15th November
1774. It runs as follows :
" I dined with him at General Williamson's,
where were also Mr. Langton, Mr. Beauclerk, Dr.
James of St. Albans, and a gentleman from Bristol
whose name I do not now recollect. Poetry being
mentioned, the Bristol gentleman praised with
much warmth, the poetical compositions of Mr.
Scotton, more especially the ' Country Wooing,'
which had then lately appeared. Johnson : * No,
sir ; Scotton is well enough for a man of no learn-
ing. It is true that he is well acquainted with the
forms of trees, brooks, clouds and other natural
objects, but that does not make him a poet. Scotton
writes of Nature as an intelligent cow might write
of her, presuming the cow to have some suitable
contrivance for transcribing her cogitations. In
Parnassus he shall be our horned poet, our poeta
corniitus.' Boswell ; ' But, sir, Mr. Edwards hath a
very great opinion of Scotton.' Johnson : ' Mr.
Edwards, sir, is a doltish fellow ; and you, sir, are
another.' "
Scotton at this time was enjoying a brief fame.
We find favourable references to him in The Gentle-
man s Magazine, and Horace Walpole speaks of
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him in such a way as to give the impression that,
for a while at all events, every person who desired a
reputation for taste affected to praise the poet. But
his little " boom " was soon over, like those of Dyer,
Boyce and Blacklock, and since Boswell's day he
has fallen into an abyss of oblivion far more com-
plete than that which shrouds those writers. From
1779, when the third edition of his poems appeared,
he has never been reprinted until the present day.
And it may be said that just as his early repute was
adventitious, so his later neglect has been unde-
served.
Scotton, Hke Clare and Bloomfield, came of rural
labouring stock. He was one of a family of nine
children of Thomas Scotton, who worked under a
farmer at Leiston, Suffolk, a tenant of Sir William
Bolton. At an early age he learnt to read and write,
and before he was fifteen he composed verses and
was shown as a prodigy at the houses of the neigh-
bouring gentry. The Duchess of Devonshire, seeing
his juvenile work, sent him to have his education
completed under a clergyman at Wimbledon, who
seems to have taught him nothing. At nineteen he
came to town with a small allowance from her
Grace. After his two volumes of poems, both of
which were published before he was twenty-eight,
he wrote nothing of any merit. Society lost its in-
terest in him ; his allowance stopped with the death
of his patron ; he lingered in Fleet Street for a few
years as a bookseller's hack, and at thirty-seven he
died. So completely had he dropped out of sight
that, were it not for an entry in the register of St.
Mary Axe which has been disinterred by the energy
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IMAGINARY REVIEWS
of the present editor, we should not know the date
or place of his death.
His poems consist of the " Country Wooing,"
which is in blank verse, a long poem in rhymed
couplets entitled " Doris and Philemon," and about
fifty lyrics, mostly quite short. Nobody could deny,
and Mr. Easterbrook makes no attempt to deny,
that a great deal of this is very commonplace.
Scotton, like Burns, had a native style and a culti-
vated style. Most of his time he was attempting to
write like the other poets of his day, and a great deal
of his work is little more than an accumulation of
artificial sentiments, dead epithets and deader meta-
phors. The following, from " Doris and Philemon,"
is a characteristic passage :
Now the declining fulgent orb of day
Tinged all the landskip with his latest ray ;
Philemon came to seek the blooming fair,
Rending with gloomy moans the conscious air.
" Doris," he cried, " my Doris I would find —
Doris, my Doris, beauteous and kind,
Doris the queen of all our rural train,
Doris a nymph admir'd by ev'ry swain."
No pleasing answer pierc'd his list'ning ear ;
In vain his eyelids shed each sparkling tear ;
No virgin accents came, no step of love
Trod the soft verdure of the silent grove.
No lovely face to beam upon his heart,
To calm his breast and ease his painful smart.
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With tortured breath for Phcebus' aid he wails,
Shrieks to the trees and murmurs to the gales :
" Me wretched ; bring me Doris or I die."
But only scornful Echo made reply.
This, it must be admitted, is feeble and derivative.
Stuff undistinguishable from it, no more flat and
dull and no more hackneyed in expression, was
written by scores of men of Scotton's day, now
deservedly forgotten. The whole of this long past-
oral is in this vein, and a good many of the lyrics
are as bad. Some, again, whilst neatly and tunefully
put together, are vitiated by the commonplaceness
and conventionality that the Suffolk youth found it
so hard to resist and that swamped his own genuine
freshness- and personality. There are dozens of
verses in the fashion of these addressed " To Miss
L. F. on the Occasion of her Departure for the Con-
tinent " :
Wherefore, Lucinda, dost aspire
To leave thy native plain.
Forsaking thine adoring quire
To brave the raging main ?
Are domiciliar dells so dark.
So dull our English vales.
That thou must trust thy slender bark
To inauspicious gales ?
If thou wouldst fain console the Muse,
In explanation speak !
See now the tender blush suffuse
Lucinda 's lovely cheek ;
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A pitying word vouchsafes the fair :
" I seek a foreign plain
That I with more delight may share
My native meads again."
If all Scotton's work were like this it would not
be worth reprinting. But in some of it, and especi-
ally in the " Country Wooing," about which Dr.
Johnson was so contemptuous, another note is
Struck. This country boy really, when free from
contemporary Uterary influences, wrote about
Nature as one who can look at her with his own
eyes and who was moved by her in a manner familiar
to but few verse-writeri of that artificial and urban
age. It is a remarkable thing that when his thought
is at its best and his feeling most direct, his language
becomes least stilted and dated. Here and there he
reaches a freshness of vision and a moving simplicity
of speech that give him a claim to be considered
with Cowper and Collins amongst the forerunners
of the renascence which came with Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Blake. His blank verse in places has
a vigour and tone and freedom of movement almost
unknown to an age when that species of verse usually
moved on feet of lead and was employed mainly for
didactic and expository purposes. Here is a passage
to the point. It is from the " Country Wooing." If
any influence is perceptible it is that of Milton :
So lay the youth with Mary in his arms,
Pale with excess of bliss. But when the maid
Perforce must leave to seek her mother's cot
He clomb the higher slopes of Haldon Hill
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And looked against the sunset. Low and red,
Calmly suspended 'bove the horizon's rim,
Burned the great globe, and far and far away
The meadows coruscated with his light.
There sat the boy an hour, his thoughtful chin
Supported by his hand, and over all
The universe his eager thought took flight.
He saw lone vessels straining on far seas,
Spread continents of dusky peoples, woods
Where lurked vast she-lions with stealthy eyes,
And icy deserts round about the Pole.
He flung the earth behind his voyaging feet,
And flew amid the stars beyond the moon,
Across the threshold of the Milky Way
And on into the darkness of the void
Impenetrable. So an hour he journeyed.
Then, with a sudden start, regained the world.
And, weary-eyed, stared over sunless fields
And shades that hastened over Haldon Hill.
It were superfluous to point out that there are
defects in this. There is not much continuity ; the
thing is rather a hotch-potch ; nevertheless, a native
strength and a certain intensity of imagination are
observable that are lacking in the works of many
better-known eighteenth-century writers. Here is
another extract a page or two farther on :
'Twas night. High in the heavens rode the moon,
With her great shining host of starry guards.
Pale lay the fields i' th' light, so that they seemed
Almost celestial to Richard's eyes.
There where the river wandered stole he down
And heard the owler screaming to her mate
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And the bat twittering. Anon some downy moth
Would flutter like a phantom 'gainst his face,
Anon he'd hear, as by a hedge he passed,
Some good old hermit of a horse that fed
With loud bite in his dark and tranquil field.
Here again, though some might detect in one
place a reminiscence of the Countess of Winchilsea,
there is something which, although rather shapeless,
is far more exhilarating than the endless verses the
century produced concerning Diana regent of the
skies shedding lucent affluence on nocturnal pros-
pects. And Scotton produces similar pleasant effects
in some of his shorter poems. Here is a stanza from
" The Swallow " :
Birds, trees and flow'rs they bring to me,
A boon as precious as 'tis free,
That cities cannot give.
0 glossy breast and rapid wing,
If thou shouldst e'er forsake the spring
I should not wish to live.
And here is one from " My Father's Cot " :
1 left thee with a courage high,
The gleam of boyhood in my eye,
And undefil^d soul.
And now what have I ? Shreds of art,
A craven spirit and a heart
That never will be whole.
There is sincerity in those lines, and there is tragedy.
Mr. Easterbrook has done his work excellently.
In his introduction and notes he gives us what
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scanty material he has been able to collect concern-
ing Scotton's life. He has not overburdened the
book with superfluous comment, but what critical
remarks he does make are admirably to the point.
He has done a great service to letters, and is fully
justified in his assertion that " In the future no
anthology of eighteenth-century verse will be com-
plete without some extracts from Scotton and no
histdry of English poetry adequate without some
reference to him."
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III
" The Recovery of the Picturesque.'' By Professor
William Pigott-Jones . {Chad-wick & Hopkins, los.
6d. net.)
It looks as though the propaganda of WilHam
Morris were beginning to have some genuine prac-
tical effect. One cannot class as such the so-called
" revolution " in designs for stuffs and furniture that
has been witnessed during the last generation. In
the first place these changes in design have had a
bearing only upon the lives of the prosperous minor-
ity, and none whatever upon those of the masses or
the general social life of the nation ; and, in the
second place, change in this respect has not gener-
ally meant improvement. Morris's ideas — as com-
monly happens — have been degraded in adaptation
and, save in regard to a very narrow sphere, we have
merely seen a change from one kind of bad and
stupid design to another. But Morris's artistic
gospel had a far wider scope than mere suggestions
for improving the appearance of our domestic con-
veniences. If he revived tapestry weaving, he also
wrote " News from Nowhere." Over and above
everything else he stands for the transformation
and development of our public amenities. Here, in
' fact, we have the key to his Mediaevalism. It was
not so much the handicraft of the Middle Ages or
their Chivalry or their Faith that attracted him, as
the variety, colour and energy of their social life.
His objection to modern conditions took its rise
not so much from ethical or economic theory
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(though with these he was incidentally concerned)
as from his objection to ugliness, gloom and uni-
formity. " Merry England " to him was more than
a Christmas-card phrase ; the words embodied a
contrast and a protest. He detested " six counties
overhung by smoke," and the appalling sameness
of modern dress, the absence of green from our
cities, of colour from our streets, and of sports from
our countryside. He dreamed of an England pastoral
and agricultural, sprinkled with small towns where
the traveller could find things curious and beautiful
and new, instead of things noisily monotonous and
aggressively tedious. Others, of course, have shared
his views on the matter, but no one has voiced them
so eloquently as he. And, thanks chiefly to him, the
Revolt against Uniformity has begun.
We have never entirely succumbed to it. We
have never quite let Merrie England go out of mind.
She has been kept, as it were, like a beautiful lady
in the cupboard whilst all the skeletons are at the
feast. Occasionally when we have felt it our solemn
duty to be festive we have shown that we still have
a half-idea of what we really ought to do. I do not
suggest that we ever entertain the idea of pulling
down London, of seriously modifying the big re-
sults of laissez-faire politics ; and Professor Pigott-
Jones believes that we have most to gain just now
by keeping off" the largest problems. But whenever
we have a ceremonial holiday, we furtively draw
out some of the symbols of an earlier and better
civilisation. For example, during the recent Coro-
nation festivities, the occupants of offices in Lom-
bard Street revived the ancient sign-boards. Bankers
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and wholesale merchants disported themselves
with brand-new and cheerfully coloured Eagles
and Leopards and Three Old Cocks, and so forth.
But as though ashamed of our temporary lapse into
sense we remove these delightful ornaments directly
the immediate cause of their fabrication has been
removed. Coronation over, Lombard Street became
its old and dull self again.
It is with apparently small matters like this of the
sign-boards that Professor Pigott- Jones busies him-
self. He believes that here and now he can do most
good — ^whilst never losing sight of his ultimate
Utopianism — by studying how in small ways he can
improve things as they are. " Granted," he says,
" that London, as we know it, must in its essentials
remain ; granted that commercialism continue
and that the arrangement and design of houses and
streets remain what it is. How, whilst ignoring
fundamentals, can we touch up, or, as it were, trim
the superficies of our modern bustling city life in
such a way as to invest it with some of those qual-
ities, the absence of which was so rightly and justly
deplored by the great poet-craftsman who was so
recently in our midst ? " He proceeds in a most
fascinating book of five hundred pages to outline
his own suggestions for amelioration.
Now, it must be frankly admitted that some of
his suggestions are quite unlikely to be adopted ;
some, in fact, might, by a cold-blooded person, be
called fantastical and fanatical. Occasionally his
exuberance and enthusiasm run away with him,
and he advocates things that could no more be
grafted on our present-day civilisation than an
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elephant's tusks could be grafted on a mollusc of
the slime. But, generally speaking, he is as practical
as he is inspiring. He urges changes in small detail
so numerous and excellent in their cumulative effect
that, were they all achieved, they would certainly
do a great deal to render modern London tolerable
to a sane human being.
The signs above referred to are one of the ancient
novelties he would re-introduce. Englishmen never,
to do them justice, abandoned these things volun-
tarily, or because they had ceased to appreciate
them. The reason why they disappeared is that one
day a certain too venerable and decrepit sign fell
upon the head of a passer-by and killed him. The
small clique of busybodies who at that time ruled
England forthwith introduced an Act making pro-
jecting street signs illegal. Even to-day there are
rigid restrictions as to the size, height and con-
struction of such sign-boards. Whether on the whole
it is not advantageous to retain such excellent things,
even though they may be a little dangerous, does
not seem to occur to any of our rulers. Lives, they
think, may be wasted in the making of wealth but
not in the making of beauty. It is right and proper
that coal-mining and the running of railways should
go on, even though thousands of men should each
year lose their lives in those occupations. But not
one arm or leg should be sacrificed for the sake of
what are called " non-economic goods." Should a
stray water-wagtail by chance peck a baby's eyes
out, they would at once start a campaign for the
extirpation of water- wagtails. " Let us," says the
Professor, " see every business street in London
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gay with bright signs which will restore to us in
large measure both our colour and our symbolism.
Let the Pig and Whistle and the Goat and Com-
passes be something more than mere names. Let
them be a tonic to our adults and an inspiration to
our young folk."
Separate chapters are devoted to various special
departments, such as Paint, Bunting, and Uniforms.
Whilst reluctantly admitting that the stage has not
been reached at which we can expect the ordinary
private citizen to alter his costume, he points out
that it would be easy to begin with public servants
and other persons upon whom some " regulation "
attire is enforced by orders from above. It only needs
to get the sympathy of, say, the Postmaster- General
or the City Corporation or the Chairman of Direct-
ors of some important railway to transform at once
the appearance of a large body of men who, speak-
ing visually, may be termed prominent men. He
disclaims any idea of going to the Morrisian Ex-
treme of Golden Dustmen. He sees that all that we
can hope for just now is the adoption of official
costumes which may be more aesthetically pleasing
than those now in vogue and at the same time
equally suitable for working purposes. Why, he
asks, should postmen, policemen and railway serv-
ants wear three of the most hideous forms of costume
that ever defaced the form of man } If policemen
must have helmets, he inquires, why should they
not have gracefully modelled shining helmets of
brass or white metal, instead of " melancholy blue
tumuli with poker-knobs on the top .'' " Without,
he argues, going to the extreme of equipping
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postmen with the cap and rod of winged Mercury,
cannot we supply them with something which will
bring a Uttle brightness and joy into our dingy
streets, and which may even counteract the de-
pressing influence of the unpaid tradesmen's bills
that they are delivering ? As for the railwaymen, he
frankly suggests that the men at the different under-
ground stations should bear on their persons some
emblem representing the plates to which they are
attached. " I do not go to what would seem the
grotesque length of saying that at Blackfriars the
ticket-collectors should be garbed with rope, rosary
and friar's gown, or that the men at the Temple
should wear the robes of Greek hierophants. But I
do say that, whilst retaining the form of garment in
general use to-day (I refer to the coat, the waistcoat
and the trousers), a great improvement in colour
might be wrought and the colours varied for the
different stations ; and that at each station some
little badge or token might be worn which would
remind one of its particular associations and greatly
relieve the tedium of our journeys."
It is perhaps in the chapter on nomenclature that
Professor Pigott-Jones gets most interesting. He
inveighs with earnest eloquence against the naming
of our streets, our churches and our theatres, our
modern public-houses and our shops. He points
out with great force the viciousness of the custom
of calling our public-houses after the streets in
which they are situated (as the " Albert "), or by
some supposedly patrician name lifted out of a
cheap novelette (as the " Beaumont Arms "). " Let
the names of our public-houseb grow once more,"
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IMAGINARY REVIEWS
says he, " out of the soil of the human heart." He
gives specimens, including the " Man Laden with
Mischief," at Madingley, and the " Live and Let
Live," which graces the crest of a Somersetshire
hill. In olden days, he observes, it was the custom
to name streets after some genuine local association.
** If a street was small and ran by the Thames, men
called it Little Thames Street ; if the builder of an
alley had his attention attracted by a limping cur,
we got a Lame Dog Alley, and the neighbourhood
of a vixen could procure for a thoroughfare the name
of Scolding Mary Lane. To-day it is nothing but
John Street and George Street and Westminster
Road and Ladysmith Avenue. The imagination
that used to go to the making of local names is no
longer present. We have banished the natural man.
Fancy, caprice and spontaneity are no more with
us ; or, if they are with us, we keep them well locked
up under our hats." He gets most lyrical when he
throws out the quite original suggestion of a plan
which might invest even our motor buses with some-
thing of romance. The passage is, I think, worth
quoting at length :
" W^ith good will and a few buckets of paint our
very motor buses could be turned to good use. At
present I feel an angry aching at the heart whenever
I see one. For why ? They are all exactly the same !
With few exceptions, their colour is red, and the
word ' General ' is splashed across them in large
letters. I walk along the Strand and there they pass
in endless, irritating iteration — red General .after
red General— never a change for the eye, never a
variety for the mind. Surely, now that almost the
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whole of our omnibus traffic has passed into the
hands of one great company, the motives (adver-
tisement, distinction from the buses of other com-
panies, etc.) which may have prompted the same-
ness of name and colour in earlier days aie no longer
vaUd. Generally speaking, if we see a bus we know
it is a General, and there's an end on't. It would
cost the company scarcely any trouble or loss, whilst
at the same time adding immensely to the amenities
of our streets, were the buses on each route given
a distinctive colour and name. We had something
of the sort in the old days of the horse buses ; the
* Monster ' bus and the ' Favorite ' bus were with
us quite lately. It might, perhaps, be confusing to
call each individual omnibus by a special name as
we do each ship in the Navy — though that would
be a very desirable consummation were it attainable.
But there could certainly be no inconvenience in
giving one name to all the buses on a particular
route. I conceive that such names might be at once
picturesque, and symbolic ; they might be at once
classical in their flavour and peculiarly modern in
their implications. Why, for instance, should we
not have the Vulcan or the Thor running to Ham-
mersmith ? I hope I shall live to see the day when I
may go to Battersea by the Xerxes and by the Pan-
dora to Canning Town. What more suitable name
than that of the fair metamorphosed Daphne, god-
pursued, could be bestowed upon the bus which
should take us to Turnham Green } And how in-
timate might not be the association of goat-foot
Pan with Tooting ? For the buses on the Ealing
route I choose as by impulse the name of .^sculapius;
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IMAGINARY REVIEWS
for those which go to Peckham that of Leda, mother
of beautiful children. The Styx should run to Mort-
lake, the Polyphemus to Wapping, the Amazon to
Holloway, the Dionysus to Fulham, the Sisyphus
to Crouch Hill, the Actaeon to Hornsey, the Perse-
phone to Bloomsbury, the Vitellius to Eaton Square,
the Cleopatra to Purley, the Cerberus to Barking,
the Trojan Horse to Walworth, the Prometheus to
Liverpool Street, the Bucephalus to Hackney, the
Rhadamanthus to Chancery Lane, the Croesus to
Westminster, and the Tantalus to Whitechapel ?
Think of it — a London ablaze with moving symbols
and ringing day-long with the names of the gods
and heroes of old time ! "
It is impossible in the short space at my disposal
to do justice to this fascinating and stimulating
book. It is a book that may well initiate a great
movement that will leave permanent marks upon
the face of our country. Once one has taken it up it
is exceedingly difficult to lay it down. It cuts through
shams and deep into the flesh of humanity. It has
the stuff of life in it. And it possesses that rare thing,
that elusive quality, charm.
125
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IV
" The Seventeenth Canto of Byron's Don Juan.'*
Now first edited and published by David M'Kie.
{The Scots Reviewers' Society. Two guineas net.)
The discovery last year of a lost canto of Byron's
Don Juan is one of the greatest literary " finds " of
recent times. In itself, perhaps, the thing is not
particularly valuable ; far greater treasures lie be-
neath the lava of Herculaneum and the sand of
Aphroditopolis. The new canto is in style and con-
tent rather inferior to the sixteen old ones ; and the
poem in its old state was quite long enough for most
people. But the excitement of a discovery like this
depends not so much upon the quality of the new
matter as upon the greatness of the author ; were a
new book of Wordsworth's " Excursion " found —
even were it as dull as it could be — all literary Eng-
land (which never looks into " The Excursion ")
would read it and talk about it.
It has always been suspected that this canto might
turn up. There are letters from Byron extant written
to Moore and to John Murray in which he mentions
the seventeenth canto as having been completed
and sent to one or two of his friends to look at.
Why he did not publish it is uncertain, but it may
be presumed that he meant to write a further con-
tinuation and to publish several cantos at once. And
a complete mystery overhangs its progress to the
Ubrary in which it was found — that of Mr. Ellis of
Newton Grange. Byron had the manuscript by him
just before his last journey to Greece ; we know
126
IMAGINARY REVIEWS
that from a flippant letter to the Countess Guiccioll
which appears in Mr. Harker's collection. Mr.
Ellis, as it happens, is a great-nephew of Mrs.
Chaworth-Musters, the poet's first love. Conceiv-
ably this may give a clue. " Might not," says Mr.
M'Kie, " Byron have had this canto with him at
Missolonghi and might he not have sent it home
by his servant, Fletcher ? It is well known that he
entrusted Fletcher with messages to the wife and
daughter from whom he had so long been parted.
Is it not conceivable that the same faithful attend-
ant may have been told to deliver this manuscript
as a parting gift to the lady who had been Byron's
first love, and whose image he had cherished un-
sullied through all those stormy years. And might
it not, either through accident, or as a consequence
of some testamentary disposition which may yet be
traced, have passed into the Ellis branch of the
lady's family ? " Failing any better hypothesis, this
one is sufficiently tenable, though one may be per-
mitted to observe that this canto was a curious
memento to bestow in such a quarter. The main
thing is that the canto has been recovered.
The sixteenth canto ends with Juan's discovery
of the Duchess of Fitzfulke masquerading at night
in the corridor as the Friar's Ghost. The new canto
takes up the story at that point :
As Shakespeare states, we frequently discover
A goodly apple rotten at the core,
Maidens ere now have entertained as lover
A vampire with a gout for virgin gore,
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And, sailors know, a welcome light may hover
Above a treacherous and greedy shore.
And if you touch a duchess you may prod a sty —
But I was always noted for my modesty.
The lady, judging by her laughing eyes,
Thought lightly of this midnight misdemeanour,
The youth had penetrated her disguise,
But he of course would never say he'd seen her.
But being (as you know) averse from lies,
Our hero felt extremely loath to screen her.
Juan, in fact, was most extremely shocked :
" Friar," he said, " you ought to be unfrocked ! "
Juan, with his familiar softness of heart, forgives
her Grace for her deceitfulness and the fright she
had given him, and the episode ends in the custom-
ary manner of the poem. This takes us up to the
fifteenth stanza. The sixteenth sees Juan one of a
house-party in Lincolnshire, where he retails his
adventures and is lionised in consequence. He is,
for the time, free from amorous entanglements, but
very nearly ruins himself by shooting a fox. The
coolness bred by this exploit leads to his migration
to London, where he stays at his country's Embassy
and in due course goes to Court. George Ill's son
is here treated as badly as was George III in the
" Vision of Judgment." Juan, young prude, reflects
gravely on the royal morals and facetiously on the
royal appearance, comparing him to all the other
bloated persons and bulging things that he had
seen in his life : balloons, hogs, the Rock of Gib-
raltar and the poetical works of Robert Southey.
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IMAGINARY REVIEWS
He goes to Parliament in the fifty- fifth stanza, and
goes to sleep in the fifty-sixth, the sonority of his
snores interrupting a speech by the Duke of Welling-
ton. The Duke, however, restrains officious per-
sons who would have the distinguished visitor
removed :
The noble warrior
Having a fellow-feeling for a nose
Refrained from interrupting his repose.
He mingles in literary society, which he finds com-
posed of pretentious strutters who feed on garbage
from the gutters and spend their time looking for a
genuine poet in order that they may stone him. In
the eightieth stanza he goes to Coleridge's after
dinner. Coleridge talks for thirty stanzas :
Juan could not determine
Why in a land so rich in mental ordure
Supplies should be imported from the German
Again he goes to sleep ; to wake up in the morning
with the sun shining and his oblivious host still
talking. Juan has taken in nothing of it ; he " de-
parted thus, his mind in puris naturalibus." But he
has had enough of England and, without taking
leave of his acquaintance, ships from Wapping to
Spain, which by this time will be cool enough to
hold him. The hundred and thirtieth stanza is the
last.
The new canto is certainly not very interesting
either as poetry or as satire. The pinions of Pegasus
are flagging. There are none of those fine flights of
129
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COLLECTED PARODIES
rhetoric that adorn the earlier cantos ; the invective
is cheap, and Byron's scores off his bugbears are
not so terse and pointed as of yore. But such as it is,
it is the end of a great work. The lost toe of the
statue has been recovered, and even though it is a
dull toe it does fill up a lacuna in the statue. Mr.
M'Kie's editing leaves little to be desired, but one
or two errors have found their way into his usually
informative notes. 1832 is not the year of J. W.
Croker's death, nor of the death of Wordsworth ;
whilst it was the Whigs and not the Tories who
were primarily responsible for the passage of the
Reform Bill of that year. The present reviewer shares
Mr. M'Kie's curiosity as to what Byron would have
thought of that Bill. There can be little doubt that
it would not have satisfied him and that Earl Grey
and Lord John Russell would have lent themselves
(particularly Lord John) to his sarcasm. Take him
for all in all we shall not look upon his like again.
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IMAGINARY REVIEWS
V
" The Poetical Works {in English) of Robert Hos-
kyns." Edited with Introduction and Notes by Archi-
bald Thorne. (The Laurel Library. 3^. dd. net)
Some time or other we shall, I suppose, get a
respectably complete series of reprints of the Eliza-
bethan poets. The greater of them are accessible in
many editions, but many of respectable accomplish-
ment and fame, such as Anthony Munday and
Nicholas Breton, have not yet been issued in a
cheap, worthy and complete form. With the ap-
pearance of the present volume we see justice — or
more than justice — done to a metrical luminary
decidedly inferior to those mentioned, but never-
theless interesting and well deserving resurrection.
Save that Gillespie reprinted some dozen of Hos-
kyns' poems in his " Tudor Songs " nothing of
Hoskyns' has been pubUshed in the last century.
Mr. Thorne has not merely restored to the reading
public much meritorious poetry, but, what is far
more important, he has at last given scholars (who
have hitherto found the rare copies of Hoskyns
diffic.lt of access) an opportunity of estimating
accurately Hoskyns' place in the development of
English poetry and of placing him in his proper
niche in the great Elizabethan hierarchy.
Mr. Thorne has performed at least one great
service to research. He has added one important fact
to our scanty knowledge of the poet. Hitherto we
have known the date of his birth (1552), that of his
entry at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1567), and that of
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COLLECTED PARODIES
his death (1591), which latter was ascertained some
twenty years ago by Dr. Boddington in the course
of an examination of the parish registers of the Isle
of Ely. The register at Stationers' Hall also records
the date of entry of Hoskyns'one volume, " A Garden
of Daintie Delites " — 1582. What we have not pre-
viously known, and what Mr. Thorne has dis-
covered in a stray leaf of the Admittances in the
liarleian MS. 2016, is that in 1576 a " Rob. Hos-
kynes " was admitted to Gray's Inn. Whether or
not he was ever called to the bar, and whether or
not he practised, we do not yet know, and it is
possible that we never shall know ; but so genuine
is the modern revival of interest in literature, and
so widespread the net of research, that it is by no
means inconceivable that this information may
some time come to light.
Contemporary references to the poet are very few
indeed. There are at the utmost three of them ; and
in none of these cases is his name actually men-
tioned. Mr. Thorne believes (and adduces good
reason for the belief) that it is to Hoskyns that
William Webbe refers in that pungent passage of
the " Discourse of EngUsh Poetry " in which he
speaks of " pottical poetical heads " whose " wor-
shipful commencements might, instead of laurel,
be gorgeously garnished with fair green barley, in
token of their good affection to our English malt. . . ,
I scorn and spue out the rakehelly rout of our ragged
Rhymers (for so themselves use to hunt the Letter)
which without learning boast, without judgment
jangle, without reason rage and fume, as if some
instinct of poetical spirit had newly ravished them,
132
IMAGINARY REVIEWS
above the meanness of common capacity." There
is a similar reference in Gierke's Polimanteia (pub-
lished a year or two after the poet's death) in which
dissolute habits are also alluded to ; whilst the third
passage (much later in date and much less certain
in its allusion) consists of some lines of Drayton's
" Of Poets and Poesie," in which occurs the pass-
age :
. . . He came likewise who did faile
At making, but at duppling of good ale
Accompted was the best.
It is, of course, not quite certain that any of these
passages refers to Hoskyns, and we have no other
reason for believing that he was a roysterer or an
intemperate drinker ; but a careful consideration
of the internal evidence makes it highly probable
that in each case he was the poet alluded to.
Beyond this all is the merest speculation. Mr.
Thorne considers and rebuts at length Dr. Bodd-
ington's contention that Hoskyns was an adherent
of the older faith, a contention which is apparently
based entirely on the fact that there is record of a
person of that name having studied medicine and
theology at Douay after Hoskyns' death, a person
who may possibly have been a relation of the poet's
but whose relationship has not to date been proved.
Men of the name, as far as that goes, may be found
not merely among the CathoUcs but among the
adherents of the Ghurch of England and even
amongst the most fanatical Brownists ; and, in the
present reviewer's opinion, it is stretching the point
rather too far to take one isolated instance of the
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COLLECTED PARODIES
occurrence of the name and to jump from that to
the conclusion that Hoskyns was a CathoUc who (as
Dr. Boddington has half insinuated) was probably
involved in one of the many plots against Queen
Elizabeth.
There is no documentary evidence of Hoskyns
receiving patronage either from the Court or from
individual noblemen. It is possible that in his
later years he may have known the young Shake-
speare ; and in that case he may have shared with
him the encouragement and, possibly, the bene-
factions of the Earl of Southampton. Philip Sidney
again (whose brilliant career was, alas, so soon to
be untimely cut short on the stricken field of Zut-
phen) may have sought and valued his acquaint-
ance. There was much in common between the two
men : the love of foreign literature, the keen in-
terest in metrical experiment and in the old ballads,
the chivalrousness and warm interest in human
nature. Surely it is not an excessive indulgence of
the fancy if we assume that two men so much alike
in character and tastes should have met in the liter-
ary coteries of the time, and, that having met, they
should have become fast friends } Is it not possible
that here at last we have the solution of that old
riddle as to the person alluded to in the " Apology
for Poetry ": — " Now doth the peerless Poet per-
form both. For whatsoever the Philosopher saith
should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in
someone by whom he presupposeth it was done " ?
Space forbids quotation here from the many
dehghtful songs in the " Garden of Daintie Delites."
Some of them, as Mr. Thome says, " are not un-
IMAGINARY REVIEWS
worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as those
of Barnabe Barnes, of Whetstone, and Gabriel
Harvey." They have about them that spontaneity
and charm that is the peculiar fascination of the
Elizabethan lyric at its best. We have to thank Mr.
Thorne for his labours. Anything more shrewd than
some of his emendations has not been witnessed
for some time in this particular region of know-
ledge. The format is good, print, paper and cover
alike tasteful and pleasant. This is just the book
(publishers please note for purposes of quotation)
for the train, for the bedside, or for a cosy winter
evening in front of the fire, when the winds are
howling outside and the logs are crackling within.
It is years since we have read a book that has given
us at once so much instruction and so much enter-
tainment. It is a book to be read and re-read.
»3S
V
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
I
By lord ROSEBERY
style : the judicious-consistent
The next Liberal Government has sent to the Lords
a Finance Bill, the only "feature " of which is the
repeal of the licence duty on dogs.
I have no party ties, my lords. I am but an ordin-
ary private, and I hope not altogether useless —
(cheers) — member of your lordships' House. I
speak with no glamour of ministerial authority
about me. I have long dwelt in isolation, I will not
say splendid but certainly complete — (laughter) —
and I am not so vain or so shallow as to think that
any halting sentences of mine will have the merest
modicum of influence upon your lordships. Yet I
cannot but deem it my duty to say my feeble word
— the tremulous mouthing it may seem, maybe, of
an old superannuated, even doting, actor who has
long dofFed the buskin — ^against this measure, a
measure which from the bottom of my heart I be-
lieve to be fraught with the gravest consequences
to the welfare of this Empire and these ancient
realms. (Loud cheers.) What is this Bill ? It is, as
far as my poor intellect can determine, an enabling
Bill to permit, nay to compel — (loud cheers) — this
country to take the first downward step towards
Avernus. Nothing more, nothing less. " But,"
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observe its suave and genial progenitors — (laugh-
ter)— " nothing Is further from our thoughts."
(Laughter.) " We haven't the slightest wish to ruin
the country." My lords, their intentions are the very
last things that matter. Your deeds may be crimson
though your desires be whiter than snow. (Laughter
and cheers.) What, I may ask, have we to do with
the intentions of the Government ? They may be
excellent. I don't deny it, (Laughter.) They may be
immaculate. They may be illuminate with a virgin
whiteness, untainted with the blemishes of greed or
jealousy, or hate, or the lust for strife. They may be
all that. But with all the meagre solemnity at my
command I ask you to weigh them, to consider
whither they lead.
This, it is said, is a money Bill. It is, so far as it is
new, a Bill to relieve the owners of dogs of the neces-
sity of paying the trifling tax which has been hitherto
imposed. The money can be spared, and an auspic-
ious opportunity offers for relieving those who
possess canine quadrupeds of a tax which, though
small, like the mosquito, is unquestionably irritating.
The Bill is a pure money Bill, and your lordships
have to sit with folded hands while it passes, im-
potent to reject it. It is an inconsiderable Bill, and
there is slight need to trouble about it. A very simple
matter ! But is it, my lords, is it ? I say with intense
sincerity that it is far, far more than that. It is not
primarily a Finance Bill, and I would that I could
honestly describe it as an inconsiderable Bill. I
maintain, my lords, that it is not a Bill for the diminu-
tion of taxes ; it is a Bill for the multiplication of
dogs. (Loud cheers.) There lies the rotten core of
140
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
this fruit with the blushfully innocent exterior.
Every competent and experienced statesman knows
that the dog-Ucence duty is not a tax at all. No one,
as far as my poor observation goes — not even the
present Chancellor of the Exchequer— holds the
matured opinion that a man is a fit subject for penal-
isation merely because he is so unfortunate as to
find pleasure in having his footsteps dogged — (laugh-
ter)— by the humble hound, or his fireside decor-
ated— (laughter) — by the comfortable cur. Such
cravings have not in the past — I know not what
may happen in the future — been characterised as
testifications to hopeless and abysmal depravity —
(laughter) — the desire to keep a dog has not even
been regarded as a possibly pardonable peccadillo.
Rather, my lords, has this nameless longing
for the society of dumb and faithful beasts been
regarded as something worthy in a man, something
to be reverently cherished, something reminiscent
of that infinitude from which trailing clouds of glory
do we come. Many a man has been better for the
companionship of a dog. (Cheers.) Many a sombre
and tenebrous deed has been killed before it was
born by the naive and half-divine appeal in the eyes
of some devoted mastiff or bloodhound. (Cheers.)
I have not a word to say aginst the dog. I have not
a word to say against the dog keeper. In my own
small way I have kept dogs myself. (Laughter and
prolonged cheers.) But, my lords, it is possible to
have too much of a good thing. The great ministers
of the past knew that only by keeping the canine
population within rigid limits would that popula-
tion remain a blessing and not a curse. Enough dogs
141
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are as good as a feast. If we have more than enough
I gravely fear we shall be as good as a feast for them.
(Laughter and cheers.) Enough dogs eat our rats.
More would eat us. Once remove this tax and the
sole restriction upon the wholesale breeding of dogs,
the sole inducement to the wholesale submersion
of young dogs — (laughter) — will have been swept
away. I have no desire to exaggerate, my lords.
Obscure though I may be, my only thought is to
give the plain opinion of a plain man who wishes
in his humble manner to do his countrymen ser-
vice. But the terms of this Bill bring inevitably
before my eyes the vision of an England covered
with litters next year, covered with packs of grown
and voracious hounds next year. We cannot feed
them. The thin veneer of civilisation will slip from
them, and they will become again as the wild wolves
of the woods. I see -the infinite thousands of dogs
sweeping the counties from South to Noith . London
will be devastated. The horror will rush over our
great midland metropolis, over the thriving cotton
looms of Lancashire, over the immense and flour-
ishing iron districts of the North, a vast and por-
tentous pestilence, growing daily blacker and more
foul. The land will be oppressed as by the shadow
of death itself ; no moving thing will be seen save lean
and insatiate shapes, which will pad along with fiery
eyes and lolling tongues, exhausted with the absorption
of human blood. Europe is arming. England is beset
by enemies, grim, intent, armipotent. The day will
come. They will spring. And when they come they will
find an England, lonely, desolate, depopulated. Eng-
land like Jezebel will have been devoured by the dogs.
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My lords, 1 say nothing of the enormous con-
stitutional importance of this Bill. (Loud cheers.)
The dog-licence duty has from time immemorial
been an integral part of our constitution. I need not
remind you of the immortal words used by the
younger Pitt on the introduction of the Merchand-
ise Bill of 1802 : " Our Constitution is a delicate
and complex fabric. Tamper with one insignificant
thread or joist of it and you bring the whole to the
ground in ruin, irretrievable, irreparable." (I^ud
cheers.) I can only add that I most bitterly regret
that some of your lordships should have seen fit to
advocate the rejection of this Bill, and that I have
no option but to back my opinion by emphatically
abstaining from voting. (Dead silence.)
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II
BY THE RIGHT HON. DAVID LLOYD
GEORGE
19 — ; he, as Premier, having introduced a Women's
Suffrage Bill. The reports ore taken from " The
Times."
I. INSIDE THE HOUSE. STYLE : — ^THE SUCKING DOVE
Mr. Lloyd George (Carnarvon Boroughs) : Well,
now, Mr. Speaker, I really didn't think it of the
right honourable gentleman (Mr. Balfour). I thought
this was a matter upon which we had all agreed
years and years ago. When I introduced this Bill I
thought we should during this debate have a sort
of little Hague Conference. Here, said I to myself,
are the Liberals ; they all want to give votes to
women. Here are the Socialists ; they've been like
a regiment of human megaphones demanding votes
for women. And here are the right honourable
gentleman and his friends who, at any rate during
the general election — (laughter) — almost worried
themselves into a rapid decline in their anxiety to
prove their devotion to the cause of women's suff-
rage. (Opposition dissent.) Well, perhaps, they
weren t quite as fanatical as dervishes about it, but
seriously, Mr. Speaker, nine out of ten of the right
honourable gentleman's supporters, at least nine
out of ten, I should say, said, either in their election
addresses, or in platform speeches, or in replies to
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IMAGINARY SPEECHES
deputations, that they were in favour of the prin-
ciple of this reform. So, of course, I thought in my
childish ignorance that they meant to vote for it.
(Ministerial cheers and laughter.) I didn't knovir
the way their ingenious minds worked. (Ministerial
cheers and laughter.) I thought that my Bill would
go down like — what shall I say ? — like butter down
a cat's throat. And now I find the right honourable
gentleman turning and rending my unfortunate
little non-controversial measure with the savage
ferocity of a rattlesnake with a red-hot poker on its
tail. (Loud laughter, in which Mr. Balfour heartily
joined.)
Well, really, I don't know what to make of it. I
didn't hear any arguments from the right honour-
able gentleman. (Derisive Opposition laughter and
cries of " Oh ! Oh ! ") No, seriously, I didn't recog-
nise any genuine arguments. I know the right hon-
ourable gentleman has as kind a heart as any man
in the House. (General cheers.) He wouldn't, if I
may say so, hurt a hair on the head of a gnat. (Laugh-
ter.) I've promised to consider every hard case,
every objection on points of detail that members on
either side of the House may bring forward. If you've
any fault to find with any clause or any sub-section
in this Bill, you've only to bring it before me, and I
promise faithfully that I will give it my most earnest
consideration. I'll do that. I'll meet you half way.
I'll meet you more than half way I'll run to meet
you with open arms. (Laughter.) So, come, come ;
just let's see if we can't agree about this business. I
don't believe the right honourable gentleman is
mean. I don't believe he likes to be thought mean. I
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don't think he'd like people in the country to say
that he and his friends were mean. In many and
many a humble cottage to-night, where the rain is
pouring through holes in the thatch, where the only
light comes from a candle stuck in a broken bottle,
where there isn't a crust left in the cupboard, and
there isn't even a little bit of coal in the grate, poor
old women are sitting waiting for what this House
can give them without harming anybody the least
little bit in the world. Some of you have had sisters
and mothers. (Ministerial cheers.) Surely you aren't
going to let it be said that the Opposition was so
niggardly, so callous, so hard-hearted as to refuse a
poor miserable old vote to a poor old woman, to
block up the little ray of sunshine which would
light up with its flickering gleam
Earl Winterton (Sussex, Horsham) : Garn !
Stow that slime !
The Speaker : I must remind the noble earl that
the language of everyday life is not permissible
within the walls of this House.
Earl Winterton : Of course, Mr. Speaker, I sub-
mit to your ruling and withdraw.
II. OUTSIDE THE HOUSE. STYLE : — THE FORTITER IN
MODO
These Tories ! Look at 'em ! What a mingy,
sting) lot they are. (Loud cheers.) What a greedy,
miserable crew. (Loud cheers.) The more you give
'em, the more they want. These Lansdownes and
Rothschilds, and dukes, and lord-knows-whats,
why, they've got stomachs like the Bottomless Pit.
(Laughter.) You can't fill 'em. Here's this Woman's
146
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
Suffrage Bill, the People's Bill. (Loud cheers.) 1
came to 'em, and offered 'em concessions. I said to
'em, " I'll give you anything within reason ; ask
me anything within reason, and you shall have it."
(Loud cheers.) I offered 'em concessions by the
bushel — hogsheads, perhaps, are more in their line.
(Laughter.) I raised the age limit for 'em ; I told
'em the Tory agents could stand outside the polling
booths as the women came in and examine their
teeth to see there was no cheating about age. (Loud
laughter.) I increased the property limit. (Cheers
and dissent.) I told 'em I'd exempt mothers-in-law
if they liked. (Roars of laughter.) What did they do ?
They took up my concessions in their bloated, blue-
blooded fingers, and flung 'em back in my face with
a curse. (Cries of exasperation.) Faugh ! It makes
one almost bilious to think of it ! These waddling
old Tory members, these dilapidated, doddering,
drivelling old dukes — (laughter) — they're plural
voters, every man of 'em. They've got two votes
apiece. (Shame !) They've got four votes apiece.
(Shame ! and hisses.) Some of 'em have got six,
eight, twenty, a hundred votes apiece. (Hisses.)
Why, you'll hardly believe me, but there's one old
monkey-faced idiot, who gets all his income from
liquor, and spends it on the same, who has no less
than six hundred and seventy votes. (Loud hisses.)
Think of it ! One for every constituency in the
country. You're all retail voters. These superior,
fine gentlemen are wholesale voters. They're worth
their weight in votes. They've got more votes than
they can carry. They take 'em about in carts. (Loud
laughter.) They've got bundles of 'em, faggots of
H7
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'em, stacks of 'em. (A voice : " Give it to 'em, sir ! "
and cheers.) Isn't it mean ? Aren't they a lot of skin-
flints ? Why, they'd sneak a marrow bone from a
dog, or a penny from a blind man's tin. I ask 'em
not to give up any of their innumerable votes — oh
dear, no — but just to grant one poor little vote to
every poor old woman in the country ; just one
poor old vote to one poor old woman ; just a vote
for a poor old woman who is sitting desolate, child-
less, hungry, cold, beside her empty fireside. [Here
the right honourable gentleman resumed his seat,
displaying marked emotion.]
148
BY THE RT. HON. A. J. BALFOUR
STYLE : THE ENLIGHTENING
It is 1919, and the Unionist Government in power
has introduced a Budget providing for the 50 per cent,
taxation of land values. Much to Mr. Balfour's sur-
prise the Liberals have impugned his attitude, and he
rises a little flushed or — as the Liberal Parliamentary
sketch-tvriters would say — " purple with rage."
Mr, Speaker, I really find myself totally unable
to comprehend the most extraordmary objections
which have been lodged against myself and my
friends by honourable gentlemen opposite. One
might have imagined that an Opposition which was
confronted with a measure embodying principles
which they themselves had, in however crude and
incomplete a manner, first formulated and developed
in legislative form, a measure which by what
appears to be common consent they do not at this
moment assign to the category of Bills the sub-
stance of which encounters criticism from them on
fundamental grounds, but into that other category
of Bills which are based upon tenets which find
general acceptance not merely upon one side, but
upon both sides of the House, one would have sup-
posed that an Opposition confronted with such a
measure, providing for the financial necessities of
the year, might well have found it both dignified
149
COLLECTED PARODIES
and convenieni to confine their attention, or, at all
events, their hostile attention, to points of detail in
the measure which, in their judgment, call for
proper comment, and might have refrained from
indulging in those more general observations to
which the House is accustomed when matters are
under discussion regarding which there is a wide
and deep cleavage of opinion. That is what one
would have supposed. That is the gross error —
(Ministerial cheersj — into which one would have
fallen. Apparently our view of what is right and
proper procedure is not shared by gentlemen oppo-
site. Unable, apparently, to vent their political
spleen upon our present, they have vented it upon
our past. (Loud Ministerial cheers and Opposition
laughter.)
If I be correct, and I think I am correct — (Minis-
terial cheers) — the gravamen of the accusation
against us is that we opposed the land taxes of
1909, and that we have introduced the land taxes of
1919. (Mr. Lloyd George : " Hear, hear.") I
understand the right honourable gentleman to give
his assent to that proposition. He and his colleagues
have done me the honour of quoting some hoary
and venerable observations — (laughter) — of mine
that I confess I had myself forgotten, from speeches
I made during the debafes upon the right honour-
able gentleman's first and — if I may venture to
make such distinctions between things which to all
save the most fastidiously discriminating of eyes
must seem equally bad — (prolonged Ministerial
cheers) — his most mischievous Budget. I acknow-
ledge I was rejoiced to hear these old acquaintances
150
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
again. If I may say so without traversing the fron-
tiers of a due modesty, I never until now fully real-
ised how great a degree of justice and force there
was in the contentions I then advanced. (Cheers
and laughter.) But for the life of me I cannot un<.ler-
stand why these passages should have been exhumed
from the nether profundities of Hansard, least of all
by honourable gentlemen opposite. What do they
prove ? They prove that I and my friends behind
me oflFered a very solid and a very strenuous resist-
ance to proposals that we thought then and think
now to have been preposterous proposals, that we
opposed the land taxes of ten years ago. Well, what
of that ? What if we did oppose them ? I don't deny
that I did. (Ironical Opposition laughter.) I don't
think that any of my friends will deny that they did.
If anybody does deny that we did I shall be prepared
most emphatically to contradict him. But even
allowing — ^which I am far from allowing, I shall
come to that presently — that we have been super-
ficially inconsistent, are honourable gentlemen
opposite so ignorant of the most elementary forms
of our constitutional practice, of that Parliamentary
custom which in the opinion of many of us has a
higher sanction even than the law of the land, as to
think that the speeches of an Opposition ten years
ago either are, or should be, or should be expected
to be, vaUd criteria of the actions of a Government
to-day, or to maintain that a party which has once
dissented from the policy underlying a Bill ought,
when in power, steadfastly and for all eternity
to refrain from adapting itself to changed con-
ditions when that Bill has become an Act ? Have
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honourable and right honourable gentlemen opposite,
political Miltons and Savonarolas — (laughter) —
ever held that verbal consistency should be the
primary objective of men of affairs ? I do not think,
sir, that the most rabid doctrinaire, I do not think
that even the right honourable gentleman who
represents Dundee — (loud laughter) — would sup-
port that position in his calmer moments.
But, quite apart from this matter of literal con-
sistency, upon which such great and, as I think, such
undue stress has been laid, there is a question of
fact. If honourable gentlemen had really honoured
my old speeches as wholes with the careful scrutiny
they have bestowed upon isolated and detached
sentences from them — (cheers) — they would have
discovered that we have not been even inconsistent.
What did we attack ? We did not attack taxes.
(Cheers.). We did not attack land taxes. (Cheers
and ironical cheers.) What we attacked and all that
we attacked was the land taxes of 1909. In our
speeches we specifically made this clear. We dis-
tinctly and in terms repudiated any objection to
the principle that the State should, if its financial
needs should be justifiably pressing, absorb a fair
portion of unearned increment in land. In my
speech upon the Second Reading of the 1909 Bud-
get I plainly characterised that doctrine as a legiti-
mate doctrine. (Ministerial cheers.) I repeated my
statement in slightly difi^erent words at Manchester,
and many of my friends pursued a similar course.
Not merely that, but, if I rightly remember, we
actually pressed for the insertion of the specific
word, " unearned," before " increment " in the
152
IMAGINARY SPEECHES
text of the Finance Bill, and our request was — In-
credible though it may seem — flatly refused by the
Government of the day on the ostensible ground
that if it were granted legal complications would
follow. Did that action on our part connote any
deep-rooted reluctance to secure for the commun-
ity wealth the community had created ? (Cheers.)
Was there anything selfish and sinister in that ?
(Loud cheers.) Still, we fought the taxes. Agreed ;
but why ? We fought them for the very simple and
sufficient reason that they were not what their
authors professed them to be. (Cheers.) We objected
to an impost so small — two per cent., or five or ten
per cent., I forget the exact figure — that it pro-
duced a gross revenue absolutely insignificant. We
objected, moreover, to a tax which carried with it a
scheme of valuation which entailed upon the State
an expenditure infinitely greater than the revenue
which was to accrue to the State. (Cheers.) Our
objections were not academic ; they were business
objections. They were founded not upon a creed of
economics, but upon a creed of economy. (Cheers.)
Can anyone say that there is even the remotest
affinity, save the bare terminological one, between
the tax we are proposing now and the tax they pro-
posed then ? Out tax is a fifty per cent. It will bring
in twenty millions this year. (Cheers.) The additional
cost of valuation will be nothing. (Cheers.) The
great increase which we have fortunately been able
to promote in the number of owners of land will
make it a far less invidious and undemocratic tax
than was that of 1909. As far as I can deduce, sir,
what the argument of the Opposition comes to is
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this : " You refused to waste money ten years ago;
therefore you have no moral right to raise money
now." (Loud and continued Ministerial cheers,
during which the right honourable gentleman
resumed his seat.)
'54
VI
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
PART ONE
STEPS TO PARNASSUS
I
THOROUGHNESS IN PLAGIARISING
Doubtless the fault arises rather from lack of
vigorous training and sound precept ; but no in-
telligent reader of the bulk of our contemporary
poets can have failed to observe that their plagiar-
isms, though frequent, are not quite whole-hearted.
Occasionally the weakness of the flesh asserts itself,
and the poet will put in a line which has been some-
what altered, or even (for such is the hardihood of
some) a line which expresses in his own language a
thought which is to a markedly perceptible extent
his own. Naturally these flaws do not escape the
notice of our ever-vigilant critics. Their ears are
well attuned to echoes, and they have scant mercy
for a sound which has in it nothing of reflection or
ricochet. Many young poets, well-intentioned
enough, must have been caused piteous heart-burn-
ing by the severe reprimands dealt out to them
merely because they have from time to time
forgotten their " sources." We know that their
treatment has been unjust. We know that they
have been dealt with hardly when they have con-
scientiously done their best. They have striven
might and main never to let roses and lilies out of
their sight ; never to forget the silence that is among
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the lonely hills ; and always to remember that elms
are immemorial and most other things immeasur-
able, infinite, immortal, deathless, eternal or ever-
lasting. But they have failed ; and they have failed
because they have paid no respect to the old motto,
" Be thorough ! " The masters of old time were
greater than we ; we can only get near to them by
imitating them ; and surely the most perfect form
of imitation is literal transcription. There is no need
to copy out whole poems as they stand. The corpus
of English poetry is very large. With time and con-
centration any number of lines can be found to fit
each other metrically and with respect to rhyme.
To quote once more from our rich national treasury
of proverbial wisdom, " An ounce of example is
worth a pound of argument." Perhaps — such at
least is the devout hope of the present writer — the
following little lines, hastily strung together in the
spare moments of a busy life, may be of help to
many who need but a little judicious counsel to set
their feet on the high road which leads to Success
and Fame :
A VISION OF TRUTH
As it fell upon a day
I made another garden, yea,
I got me flowers to strew the way
Like to the summer's rain ;
And the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
" Poor moralist, and what art thou ?
But blessings on thy frosty pow.
And she shall rise again ! "
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Lord Ullin reached that fatal shore,
A highly respectable Chancellor,
A military casque he wore
Half-hidden from the eye ;
The robin redbreast and the wren.
The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley pen,
Heckety-peckety my black hen,
He took her with a sigh.
The fight is o'er, the battle won,
And furious Frank and fiery Hun,
Stole a pig and away he run
And drew my snickersnee,
A gulf divides the best and worst
" Ho ! bring us wine to quench our thirst 1 "
We were the first who ever burst
Under the greenwood tree.
Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep
(She is a shepherdess of sheep),
Bid me to weep and I will weep.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Then up and spake Sir Patrick Spens
Who bought a fiddle for eighteenpence
And reverently departed thence,
His wife could eat no lean.
If an epilogue be desired, the following may per-
haps serve as a useful model :
'Twas roses, roses all the way
Nor any drop to drink ;
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Or again :
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Whose goodness faileth never,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
Some readers may — indeed, very likely will — con-
tend that in one or two places the thread of the
narrative in the above lines is a little tangled, or
even that many of the lines have no obvious con-
nection with one another.
But that' really does not matter. Speaking as one
who would not willingly mislead a fly, I tell my
brother-poets, with the most whole-hearted con-
cern for their welfare, that obscurity and apparent
discontinuity of parts will be all to their advantage.
For if the critics cannot understand your argument
or detect the junction of your images they will call
you a symbolist. And that will be so nice for you.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
II
THE DIFFICULTY OF RHYME
The use of the rhyming dictionary has been
general for many years, and bouts-rimes (or poems
constructed after the rhymes have been set down
in order) have been known ever since the Middle
Ages. Both these methods are clumsy, in so far as
they do not give the writer any indication as to what
rhymes he shall choose in the first instance. They
are clumsy and they are haphazard ; a young and
inexperienced poet attempting to write bouts-rimes
(even with the assistance of a rhyming dictionary)
must be constantly baffled and disheartened by
finding that he has chosen groups of rhymes that
do not go well together, and that convey images
which cannot easily be collocated. He might, for
example, select the rhymes " mullet " and " pullet"
and the rhymes " chant" and " hierophant." If he
does this he will find it exceedingly difficult to link
his poem together. Undoubtedly, with luck he
might hit upon a pair of rhymes that would fit easily
in with " mullet " and " pullet " ; as, for instance,
" surf " and " turf " :
I would rather be a pullet
On the tirrf
Than a red or grey mullet
In the surf,
makes very good sense, even though it be not per-
haps one of the more ethereal flights of poetry. But
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left to dhoose his own pairs of rhymes from a dictionary
and to arrange them himself for bouts-rim6s, the poet
may still find his material very stubborn.
The solution is this. If a man have not the good
memory to retain rhymes in his brain and the knack
of arranging them when he has them, the safest and
easiest thing for him to do is to profit by the ex-
perience of past generations. We do not scorn to
use the accumulations that have been handed down
to us in other departments of science and art ; why
should we neglect those which have been piled up
by our bards. Painter derives from painter know-
ledge of design, of the mixing of paints, and of the
harmonising of colours. Rhyme is merely the shell,
or part of the shell, of a poem, and even those who
are purists on the subject of general plagiarism can
surely have no objection to a poet making use of a
rhyme-scheme that has been found convenient and
shapely by another poet who has gone before him.
Let poets who are troubled by rhyme, in fact, borrow
and adapt arrangements of rhyme from works already
in existence.
An ounce of example, as one has often observed
before, is worth many ounces of precept. Let us
take, for instance, so well-known and deservedly
popular a nursery rhyme as :
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Detaching the rhymes from their context we get
the following arrangement :
Jill,
Hill,
Water,
Down,
Crown,
After.
These rhymes are not particularly convenient
ones, and a restriction is introduced by the occurr-
ence of the proper name " Jill " at the end of the
line. This necessitates the mention in our own poem
of a lady name Jill. But, after all, it is a pretty name.
Given these rhymes, we can without a moment's
hesitation turn out a graceful little lyric like this :
I would I were with gentle Jill
From dawn till eve on Bloxham Hill
High above Severn water ;
All day we'd gaze entranced down
Upon the river's silver crown.
Nor look before or after.
Should a whimsical touch be desired, the last line
might be made to run :
And home to supper after.
We see here that not only have we been saved the
trouble of finding and co-ordinating rhymes, but
that the rhymes really provided have given us a clue
to our subject-matter. Yet our resultant poem is not
in the least like the original. Something new has
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been added to the rich treasury of English verse.
Let us take another example :
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children she didn't know what to
do,
So she gave them some broth without any bread,
And whipped them all soundly and put them to
bed.
Our rhyme scheme here will run as follows :
Shoe,
Do,
Bread,
Bed.
Little or no cogitation will give us a result Uke this,
fully up to the standard of most contemporary
verse :
Lo ! I am poor and pincheth sore the shoe,
I cannot go it as I used to do,
Natheless I'll be content so that I've bread,
A roof above, a pallet for my bed.
That is in the dignified facetious style. But the
rhymes given are equally suited to the note of pas-
sion and solemn reverence :
I am not worthy to unlace thy shoe ;
Surely thou dost not breathe as others do,
Nectared ambrosia sure must be thy bread,
And doves thy messengers, and clouds thy bed !
Or, yet again, if our rhymes be taken from the chorus
of a song recently popular in our lighter places of
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
entertainment, a poem like the following may easily
be constructed :
Hail, holy Liberty ! When thou dost speak
A glory all glory out-shining all men see,
Thy glance, the thunderous perfume of thy tresses,
Bear dreams that trample base reality !
O, should'st thou open once again thy hand
And tell abroad the splendour of thy name.
The whole great universe should be thy picture
And bliss make bright the universal frame.
Enough has, it is hoped, been said to indicate the
nature and use of the method proposed. With this
key a new Shakespeare may (who knows ?) unlock
his heart.
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III
THE HUMOROUS VERSE WRITER'S
EQUIPMENT
There must be many a man who has a strong
desire to write humorous verse for our weekly
periodicals but whose efforts are constantly thwarted
by his inability to think of anything funny. All
around him he sees men who are apparently quite
devoid of a sense of humour but who seem able to
write any quantity of fluent humorous verse that
fetches good prices. Such men may be grateful for
a few hints on the technique of humorous verse
construction. Knowledge is power, and it is the
duty of those who possess knowledge to communi-
cate it to their less fortunate fellows who stand in
need of it.
The plain truth of the matter is this. There is no
need whatever for our young entertainer to have
any funny or original notions of his own. If a few
simple rules are followed the humour will make
ITSELF ! These indispensable rules are few in num-
ber, easy to memorise, and easy to observe.
The first rule is that normal phraseology should
as much as possible be avoided. Use either slang or
stilted circumlocutions. A judicious admixture of
the two is best. Surprise is the essence of humour,
and there is no surer way of producing it than this.
Long words and periphrastic sentences have, when
employed in avowedly humorous verse, an irresist-
ibly facetious air. There is no necessity for the writer
i66
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
himself to see anything amusing in them ; he is
sure of that effect upon the reader that it is his
desire to achieve.
Take an example. Suppose you have chosen as
your subject the death of a favourite Pomeranian
dog. The rough draft of your conception runs as
follows : "He was a nice dog. I had him a long
time. He was given me by an uncle. I am very sorry
he is dead." That in itself is not very funny. But it
may very easily be developed into a second prose
draft which will run as follows : " He was a hound
of benevolent and kindly disposition. Long ere the
days of Lloyd Georges and Churchills he was estab-
lished, a household deity, upon my hearth. He was
bestowed upon me by an avuncular relative, a good
old cove. I weep bitterly because he has kicked the
bucket."
The second rule is that you should, whenever
possible, illustrate your text with any illustrations
save the ones that naturally occur to you. Let us
suppose that the dog was a nice dog. The first thing
that occurs to you as an illustration of this quality
is that he licked your hand. It would be permissible
to mention this in a roundabout form, such as " he
deposited lingual moisture on my digits " ; but it
would be better to keep clear of it altogether. Your
plan is to think of some species of benevolent and
pleasant act that could not be performed by a dog
and to attribute that to the deceased. Say, for in-
stance, " He often mixed my drinks (liquid bever-
ages) for me when I was tired," or, " He could
always be relied upon to make a fourth for me at
bridge."
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These two rules will be quite sufficient to ensure
the proper management of your subject-matter,
with the proviso that you always speak of small or
common things with great veneration and of vener-
able and solemn and great things with familiarity.
With regard to form there are several small things
to remember. Your metre and the length of the line
should be determined by the first two lines that
occur to you. The key to success in these matters
lies in the management of rhyme. Jn the first place
you should select unusual words and insist on find-
ing rhymes for them ; this process will lead to many
very amusing results. In the second place you should
when possible, put proper names at the end of lines
and find rhymes for them. And, as a matter of
general practice, you should have a preference for
bi- and tri-syllabled rhymes over those of one
syllable. Better than sacrifice an unusual tri-syll-
abled rhyme, wander from your train of thought
and let the rhyme suggest any divagation or paren-
thesis it will. All such things will contribute to the
desired element of surprise. The following lines
have been constructed on these principles without
the help of any peculiar individual skill or knack :
Hail and farewell, hail and farewell, my Fido,
Most charitable of the canine race.
Surely none ever mourned a hound as I do.
That peerless miracle of strength and grace ;
Never was hunter fleeter in the chase,
Never was friend more jovial at the table ;
I choke with sobs, the tears run down my face,
I mean to weep as long as I am able.
1 68
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Long, long ago he came from Pomerania,
Long ere the days of Churchill and such refuse,
Brought by a relative who had a mania
For buying dogs and giving them to nephews ;
A good old cove, albeit of rather stiff views
About the rights of relatives avuncular.
Who had one of those trumpet things the deaf use,
Also a nasal ornament carbuncular.
Never didst fail to make a fourth at auction.
To gossip when I felt like conversation,
Or hold thy canine peace when I would talk shun.
Or join me in convivial relaxation.
O noblest of thy tikey generation,
I am so sick that you have kicked the bucket
That I shall go on mourning your prostration
Until my friends petition me to chuck it.
It is possible that you do not think this poem
funny. Nor do I ; in fact, I think it is repulsively
silly. But you must admit that it is like many others
that are classified as humorous, and that with the
aid of the above hints you could have written it
yourself. It would be certain of acceptance by most
journals.
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IV
SOME ESSENTIALS OF CRITICISM
It would be ridiculous to pretend to instruct any
young man in re&pect of judgment. It is impossible
to inculcate by maxim, rule or example, a faculty
for the proper discrimination of good or bad in
literature. In that sense criticism is either born in a
man or not born in him, and little more can be said
of it. But there is another kind of critic than the
born judge of letters ; there is the practising critic,
whose duty it is to fill a certain amount of space in
our daily and weekly newspapers with what are
called " reviews " of books, and with articles on
authors, dead and alive. In the absence of a good
manual of their craft these men, at present, have to
acquire a mastery of it very painfully and slowly
th-Tough practice. It is not the intention of the present
writer to supply that lack, but he may be doing young
critics some slight service if he gives a few hints on
the subject. Such hints the young are not likely to
obtain from older brethren in the profession, as
frank speech about their technique is not common
among them.
For convenience one may make here a division
between the preparatory work necessarily precedent
to the critical career, and the actual practice of criti-
cism. What is the minimum of equipment which a
man should possess if he is to make a really con-
siderable figure as a critic .'* We are, be it under-
stood, leaving taste out of the question ; on the one
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
hand, it cannot, as we have said, be taught, and, -on
the other hand, tastes differ ; and, whatever a critic's
tastes may be, he is in a safe enough position if he
possesses the requisite amount of learning. And
this learning is not a difficuh thing to acquire.
A critic must have a good memory ; if he have
that all things are made much easier for him. And
he must have a good memory for this reason : it is
necessary that he should remember what he reads.
He need not read many literary works — poems,
essays and what not. If he reads them — the thing
can be done very rapidly, since the motive is rather
a business motive than a desire for spiritual or
aesthetic sensations — so much the better ; but it is
rather a work of supererogation. One or two works
by each author will in any case be sufficient ; but
what is essential is that the critic should know what
may be called the " plots " of a great number of
works by a great number of authors. These plots
and their atmospheres may be obtained from pre-
faces, from biographies, and, most of all, from other
reviews. It is a prime necessity that the critic should
read a very great deal of contemporary criticism.
From this he will discover what various authors
stand for (as Ibsen for revolt and emancipation and
protest against the " compact majority "), what are
these authors' leading literary characteristics (as the
" subtle irony " of Anatole France and the " bar-
baric yawp " of Walt Whitman) and, above all, who
are the proper authors with which to deal at any
particular moment.
This latter consideration, save for those few
critics who specialise in one author and acquire an
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COLLECTED PARODIES
encyclopaedic knowledge of his writings, is a matter
of prime importance. You must not hunt about for
authors whom you yourself prefer, nor must you
write about unknown men, or great men to whom
at the moment no one else is devoting any attention.
Very often the way is quite clear for you. The cen-
tenary of the birth or death of any writer calls im-
peratively for an estimate of his place in literature
and an epitome of that all-important thing his
** message." The appearance, again, of a new col-
lected edition will call for similar studies. But
beyond all this there are always certain authors who
are, so to speak, in the air. How exactly this comes
about it is difficult to say. In part it is due to a
" boom " in some modern author who, after a num-
ber of years' obscurity during which but a few
people have appreciated him (not including your-
self), attains a sudden hold over the public or a
sudden vogue amongst intellectual folk which impels
continual articles about him and invariable mention
of him in articles about other men. And sometimes
it is traceable to natural exhaustion and reaction.
Man is an animal fond of variety. A continual sur-
feit of one dish cloys his appetite. If he reads about
Shelley all one year he wishes to read all about Keats
the next year ; if one year you have written about
nobody save Gorki and Borrow, next year may find
you hard at work on Tolstoi and Sir Thomas Browne.
Whoever it be, you will always be safe enough if
you keep your eyes and ears open ; that soul-of-the-
crowd of which modern psychologists write would
almost seem to work amongst reviewers in some
special manner ; so swiftly and imperceptibly does
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
there spread from one to another what may be called
the " consciousness of vogue."
You know whom to write about ; your mind is a
calendar of the names, dates, characteristics and
love affairs of all the greater writers of all ages and
climes, and you have well-stocked libraries at hand
where you may look up facts about any lesser person
whom you may find it desirable to mention ; in
what style shall your articles be written ?
Firstly, keep your imagination and your sense of
humour (if you are endowed with such) in check ;
as also your independent judgment. It will disturb
your readers if you make jokes ; the exercise of
imagination will demand from them a mental effort
which they do not desire to make (or they would be
reading books) ; and the exercise of independent
judgment is both insolent and an act of treachery to
the whole body of critics.
Secondly, your work will gain much in impres-
siveness and weight if you decorate it with a maxi-
mum number of references to authors, living and
dead. Remember that almost any author may be
mentioned in connection with almost any other. If
he cannot be brought in for comparison he can be
brought in for contrast ; and, failing these, he can
be brought in by way of parenthesis. Perhaps an
illustration or two may make this more clear.
(i) " Mr. Timmins is a great satirist. He is in the
true line of descent from Aristophanes and Lucian,
Rabelais and Cervantes, Swift and Byron. It is true
that each of these great masters had qualities of
which he is devoid and that he has qualities which
none of them possessed. For a parallel, for example,
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COLLECTED PARODIES
to his subtle artistry of phrase we should have to go
to Walter Pater, and we can remember no one since
Catullus (except perhaps Heine) who could so sud-
denly etch intense passion in six flaming words."
(2) " Mr, Peakyblinder's verse has not the medi-
tative calmness of Wordsworth's, nor the lyrical
enthusiasm of Shelley's, but in its way it is unique."
(3) " The late Mark Twain in one of his books
evidenced as proof of the stupidity of the ant that
instead of walking round a blade of grass which
stood in its way it would go up one side and down
the other. We are far from imputing stupidity to
Miss Chaffers, but we confess that the laboriousness
of her methods puts us strongly in mind of S. L.
Clemens' ant."
Thirdly, as to phraseology. Individual phrases,
if you read sufficient current criticism, will come
ready enough to your pen. Do not forget to use the
word " stuff^ " at least once in every article, as :
" This is no ordinary book, it is compact of the very
stuff" of man's existence." Other useful phrases are
legion in number, and a few specimens, chosen at
random, must suffice. " The root of the matter,"
" divine discontent," " lambent humour," " beau-
tiful but ineffectual angel," " slim volume," " tears
away shams and illusions," " haunting and elusive
beauty," " that subtle sympathy which is the secret
of his spell," " rare tenacity and singleness of pur-
pose," " that vein of cynicism that mars so much
of his best work," " a veritable mine of quaint lore,"
" decked in the shreds and tatters of an outworn
philosophy " : these are but a causal string which
might be lengthened indefinitely. With respect to
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
more sustained passages, there are two chief ways of
making them effective. One is to take a phrase and
repeat it several times in different forms. The second
is to fasten on any metaphorical expression which
comes uppermost as you write, and to elaborate the
metaphor in all its details. As, for instance :
" Professor Chubb says that Hawkins grafted
the French variety of lyric drama on to the native
English stem. That in a sense is true, but it needs
qualification. Hawkins did so graft the foreign growth
on our English tree. But in doing so he stripped
that foreign growth of its dead and diseased leaves,
roughened its effeminately smooth bark, multiplied
its blossoms and gave a new vitality and a new activity
to its sap."
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COLLECTED PARODIES
PART TWO
MODELS FOR THE VERSE WRITERS
I
THE EXQUISITE SONNET
No purple mars the chalice ; not a bird
Shrills o'er the solemn silence of thy fame.
No echo of the mist that knows no name
Dims the fierce darkness of the odorous word.
The shadowy sails of all the world are stirred,
The pomps of hell go down in utter flame,
And never a magic master stands to shame
The hollow of the hill the Titans heard.
O move not, cease not, heart ! Time's acolyte
Frustrates forlorn the windows of the west
And beats the blinding of our bitter tears,
Immune in isolation ; whilst the night
Smites with her^tark immortal palimpsest
The green arcades of immemorial years !
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
II
THE HELL-FOR-LEATHER BALLAD
('Tis a mile and a mile as a man may march
With Hope and his sins for load
Or ever he win from the Marble y\rch
To the end of the Tottenham Road !)
The wind was cold and the sky was black
And the lights were ranged for a feast
When w" turned our steps from the Edgware track
And faced the yearning East.
O fair is the rose and fair the vine
And sweet the sound of the lute !
But Self ridge's towered like a Sphinx's shrine
And mocked us, massive and mute !
Dark on our path lay the w reaking wrath
Of a thousand nights and days ;
But there like the fangs that a boarhound hath
Stood the challenging gates of Jay's !
And we steeled our breasts and we clashed our teeth
Though our limbs were numb with pain,
Though the jaws of the pavement clung beneath
As each tortuous yard was slain.
Great blood-gouts fell where the Circus yawned
And a drop and a drop (O Christ !)
Where Lewis and Evans and Marshall and Snell-
grove
Did keep their tongueless tryst !
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COLLECTED PARODIES
The white lamp flared and the windows stared
(Each pane was a jeering face I)
And ghosts that lurked in the doorways glared
At the murderers of space.
But our feet were deep in the furrow set
Our hands were firm on the plough,
And there rang in ears that could not forget
The voiceless cry of the Now.
And the last mile died and the last hour sped,
And as stars to the aching Soul
When the ashes of dawn gasped rapid and red
Glowed the portals of the goal.
(So we found a fane for our weary feet
And a pen and a pipe and a pot
And we made us a Ballad of Oxford Street. . .
And why the Devil not ?)
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
III
THE CONTEMPT - FOR - CIVILISATION
AND - GEOGRAPHY - FRATERNAL - WITH
THE - ELEMENTS - PLEIN - AIR PIECE
We have had our fill, my heart,
Of the haunts of men,
We will tread the stones of these cities
Not ever again.
So I take the road to the sunset
My staff in my hand
To make my peace ere I die
With the sea and the land.
For the deeps are caUing, calling,
And the clouds sail slow,
And the wild in my breast has wakened
And I rise and go.
Over the great wide spaces
To the fields of morn
To the hills and silent places
Where the clouds are born.
Where the curlew wheels o'er the heather
That never man trod
In the shine and the windy weather
On the uplands of God.
Over the seas and the mountains
To the great world's end
With the sun and the rain for my brothers
And the wind for my friend.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
IV
THE POETRY OF BROKEN SHACKLES
The sun sets.
Not a breath of wind stirs the surface of the sea,
Not a ripple breaks tlie sheen of its placid mirror,
And the fields,
Weary of the heat and labour of the day,
Lie motionless and green-brown as the day dies
Immobile in the perfection of rest well- won.
Never a sound threads the air save the distant croon-
ing song
Of a herdsman.
And the voices of grazing sheep
Bleating
Quietly.
And the faint murmur, far, far out over the waters
of the plash of oars
From a brown-sailed fisherman's boat whose canvas
idly hangs
From the masts.
High in the west
The battlemented clouds are piled
Red and purple and dark blue, all girdled and glow-
ing
With the golden effulgence nf the orb of Apollo
now half below the horizon.
In the east with great strides
Night comes on
Inviolable, indomitable, immense,
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Brushing wide heaven with the stridence of her
rustHng wings,
Enacting once again the old old tragedy with her
pitiless wings,
Striking fear into the heart of man
And death into the heart of the day ;
Proclaiming, exultant triumphant, with steely clar-
ion the victory of her titanic wings. . . .
The whole air is filled full with the clamour of in-
numerable wings.
The sun goes down
Pop!
i8i
COLLECTED PARODIES
■ V
THE NEWSPAPER PASTORAL
(N.B. — Every other line must be in italics).
The summer is a-coming and the bumble bee's
a-humming,
(An' it's O to be with you, dear, by the shining Devon
sea !)
And the finches in the coppice know the golden
whin's a-blooming,
{An' it's O to be in Devon when the bloom is on the
bee !)
Last year with thoughtless rapture we trod the
springy turf.
{An' it's O to be in Devon when the bloom is on the
bee !)
Whilst we watched the light-foot breakers rolling
on the mighty surf,
{An' it's sweet it was with you, dear, by the shining
Devon sea !)
And we saw the ringdoves cooing in the little vale
below,
(// was Youth and Life and Love, dear, by the
shining Devon sea !)
Whilst the East was all a-gloom and the West was
all aglow.
(O / lost my heart in Devon when the bloom was on
the bee !)
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But now my footsteps wander through the city's
toil and bustle,
{An' I long to be in Devon where the bloom is on the
beej)
An' the rushes are a-rustle and the tushes are a-
tustle,
{An' I eat my heart for you, dear, and the shining
Devon sea).
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COLLECTED PARODIES
VI
THE POEM OF STARTLING CONFESSION
I crossed the outer gates of fire ;
I scaled the purple towers of sin
And brake the doors, and walked within
The midnight chamber of desire.
I burnt my brows with frankincense,
My cheeks with nard and myrrh I smeared ;
I bathed in crimson blood, nor feared
To slake the slakeless thirsts of sense.
Dead women lay about my feet ;
I trod on them, I did not reck,
I bound their hair about my neck,
And ate their breasts, for they were sweet.
Strange beasts did lurk about my ways
That round my throat their folds did twist ;
I drank their saffron breath and kissed
Their snouts of pearl and chrysoprase.
And things I did I may not tell
With men whose names may not be told,
Strange men whose breasts were tipped with
gold,
Whose eyes did gleam with sparks of hell.
I cursed the saints, yea, with a curse
I flung God from the pedestal. . .
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THI': ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
VII
THE SIMPLE PROSE-POEM
I sat in my chair.
I gazed into the fire, the fire with its caverns of light,
with its luminous recesses the jnilses of which
undulate, rise and fall, heave and subside, like
the bosom of some beloved woman.
The fire w^ith its wavering rainbow tongues.
I sat in my chair, gazing.
On a sudden I heard a step, soft a's a snowflake,
There behind my chair, standing yet not standing,
suspended as it were yet not suspended, stood
the form of a man, which was neither of earth
nor of heaven. Pale was his brow. Mis eyes of a
profundity and Hquidity like the liquidity and
profundity of pools in the utter depths of some
remote sea where keel never swam nor lead
sounded, shone with a light that was neither of
heaven nor of earth. His cheeks were faintly
hollowed as with the last loving touch of a
sculptor's thumb, and his white tremulous lips,
beardless as a boy's, spoke yet did not speak.
" I have come," was the message.
The stranger turned towards the door with a slight
beckoning gesture.
I knew him and I followed.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
VIII
THE BACK - TO - THE - LAND - AND-
FEDERATED-DIALECTS MORCEAU
The yellow leaves from yonder tree
Is vallin' wan by wan,,
Jist like they vailed on 'er and me
This vourty year agone.
The saft and wistful drop of them
Oi nivir cud abide
Syne angels tuk awa' ma gem
The year that Mary died.
Gor dal 'ee zur, woy, stroike me pink
'Er wuz my ownly j'y ;
*Er bore me fust an' lawst, I think,
Ten maidens an' a b'y.
Ten maidens an' a b'y, Ochone !
But now they've wandered wide,
The youngest left me 'ere alone
The year that Mary died.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
IX
THE CELTIC LYRIC
Seven dead men, Brigit,
Came from the sea,
(Mist on the waters
And sorrow in the tree).
Seven pallid men, Brigit,
Cold from the sea.
And each with his strange eyes
Whispered to me :
" O, sad voyagers,
Whither are ye faring ?
Do ye bring a tale of grief
For desolate Eirinn ? "
" Oisinn and Dubb we be,
And Cucutullitore,
And Fish and Fash and Fingall,
They spoke never more.
But each wove a warp, a warp,
And each wove a weft
Of lost stars and suns forlorn
And moons bereft.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
X
THE EPIGRAMMATIC EPIGRAM
You say, my friend, thai Gladstone always bid
The Hght be darkness and the night be Hght,
I quite agree ; doubtless you may be right ;
All I can say is — Gladstone never did.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
XI
THE HANDS-ACROSS-THE-SEA POEM
Sons of the Empire, boiul and free,
Yellow imd black and brown,
I greet you all where'er you be,
Here ere the sun goes down ;
Here, while the sunset flushes red
The waves of England's main,
I breathe the prayer our fathers said,
And sing the song again.
The ancient song that struck the sky
When Roman standards flew.
The song that smote the bastions high
Of Philip's recreant crew ;
The song that Drake and Nelson sang
When Heaven flared with war,
And echoed with the shots that rang
O'er baflled Trafalgar.
Sons of the Empire, Britain's sons,
Here, as the darkness falls.
Over your grey Sea-AIother's guns
The warning clarion calls ;
O, and I bid you now " God speed.
Quit you like men, be true " ;
Stand by us in the hour of need
And we shall stand bv vou.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
XII (and last)
THE IN-MEMORIAM ODE
Lay on him laurel, rosemary, and rue,
Roses and trailers of the sweet wood-bine,
Gentle forget-me-not (was he not true ?)
And sunflowers (did not his verses shine ?)
O, pilfer all the sweets of all the wood,
And all the musky blossoms of the vale
(For was he not the brother of our blood ?)
And strew them where he lies so still, so pale.
A light, a Ught has gone, a star has fled,
A sun is dimmed that lit the whole wide sky,
The flame that burned a hemisphere is dead
(O, and our stricken spirits murmur, " Why ? "
Vain murmuring, vain sorrow, vain regret !)
Is there no hope for us, no hope, not one ?
Night thunders, " None ! " but we may not forget
The wondrous glory of him who was our sun.
There should he twenty- four verses more (" not
counting the women and little children,'" as Rabelais
would have said), hut these are enough.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
PART THREE
MODELS FOR THE PROSE-WRITER
I
THE DESCRIPTIVE-PEREGRINATORY
The sun, a ruddy and coruscating globe, was
sinking over the low blue hills to the westward as
I mounted the long white road that leads up to the
ancient village of Molineaux-des-Sept-Vierges.
Down in the valley to my left some cows were
quietly grazing. They munched stolidly, imper-
turbably, at the lush green grass of that rich Nor-
mandy bottom just as they had munched any time
these twenty centuries past. So the Visigoths saw
them as they swept southward on their irresistible
way to the doomed and waiting valleys of Spain. So
the Franks, emerging, blue of eye and flaxen of
hair, from the recesses of their German forests. So
Charlemagne the Emperor, master of half Europe,
as he rode quietly one day, maybe, with his swart
and invulnerable train of warriors up the valley of
the rapid Yolle, along the skirts of the Rocher Du
Grand Boulanger, and thuswise up the little road
trodden now by feet that Charlemagne never knew.
They are all gone over, and the glory of them has
departed. The Emperor lies — he has lain these many
centuries — in his great tomb at Aix. And the
munching kine remain, and the long white road,
and the Uttle town on the hill-top.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
The trees by the roadside nistled as a little wind
from over the distant sea breathed across hill and
plain, bearing with it a savour of salt that smote
sweetly and soothingly on the heated brow of the
dusty and weary traveller. Somewhere a sheep
bleated. Somewhere an unseen shepherd whistled
softly to himself a fragment of some forgotten air.
It \vas a plaintive air, wistful, sad, and a little melan-
choly. He was out of sight.
As I passed under a little archaic gate that guards
the entrance to the village it was already dark. Here
and there along the cobble-paved street, with its
nests of low stone houses shrouded in the gathering
gloom, the lights began to twinkle out in the leaded
windows. First one, then two, then three, then four.
They were yellow, that warm and consoling yellow
that one sometimes sees in Southern countries when
darkness falls and the lights are lit one by one. In a
small cottage to my left a woman's shadow passed
across the blind. She was feeding her baby. The
stones rang beneath my tread. The world was very
peaceful. . . .
The landlord was a jovial old fellow, with hard
features tanned by exposure, a bald pate, and little
beady black eyes that twinkled when he laughed.
He had fought, so he told me, at Sedan. He had
taken part in that disastrous retreat from Poppot-
Le-Boom when De Lozay (brother of that De
Lozay whose heroism during the siege of the Pekin
Legations was afterwards to be blazoned in letters
of gold upon the scroll of history) had made his oft-
quoted remark, " Mcs braves, hier j'etais qu'est-
ce que c'est que 9a, demain je serais je ne sais quoi.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Mais qu'importe ? " Twice he had been wounded,
once seriously ; and on that occasion he had been
nursed back to Ufe by the woman who afterwards
became his wife. " Elle est mort, monsieur," said
he, with the nearest approach to sadness that I saw
him display ; and as for one fleeting instant he gazed
into the great wood fire, the romance of this weather
beaten child of the French earth suddenly unrolled
before me. Strong in spirit, grey and steadfast of
eye, she had been frail of body as a flower. Care-
fully— very carefully — he had tended her, watching
in agony as those sweet and wan and uncomplaining
features grew tenser and whiter under the cruel hand
of death. And at last she had gone and left him alone.
Som.ewhere, I knew, in this old, rambling house
with its low ceilings and its heavy furniture of oak,
was a room consecrated to her memory, a room
where the yellow blinds were always drawn, where
a four-poster bed slept under a quiet old counter-
pane of silk, where an old dress or two, maybe,
hung undisturbed on the hooks on which their
wearer long ago had placed them, where a faint
scent of dead rose-leaves and lavender vaguely
pervaded the air.
I went to bed and slept the sleep of the just. No
dreams broke in on the sleep that the kindly god
shed like a dew upon my tired body. The first thing
of which I was conscious was the little maid-serv-
ant's charming pipe, " Voici d'eau chaud de m'sieu.."
Somewhat leisurely I dressed, content with myself
and the world. Was it a mean thing to have traversed
all France from the Val du Piou-Piou over the
broad plains of the Bobais and the Pimpaigne, to
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COLLECTED PARODIES
have forded deep rivers and scaled high mountains,
until here I was at last at the head of the YoUe Valley
and with my face set towards the Sarche estuary
and the He d'O ?
I ate an enormous breakfast, settled my bill,
strapped my knapsack to my back, and emerged
through the cool porch into the steep street already
hot from the steady smiting of the morning sun. It
had been empty at night ; it was little more populous
in the full blaze of day. A group of idle, sunburnt
women stood placidly gossiping in a doorway ; three
scraggy fowls scratched the ground and pecked
after the manner of their kind ; a mongrel puppy,
very concentrated on his work, nosed about in a
small but evil-smelling heap of rubbish outside the
old church that had been built by a pious twelfth-
century crusader home from the wars around the
Sepulchre of Christ.
Out of the higher gate, a low arch in the crumb-
ling and lizard-haunted wall, a magnificent prospect
met my eyes. The slope had been very abrupt, and
by mounting a little rock at the side of the road I
could look right down over the village and along the
valley to the plains from which I had come. There
in the foreground was the church tower. Beyond it
was the declivity up which the, road climbed. And
then, with the Yolle a silver ribbon in the nearer
distance, miles beyond miles of wooded pastures,
mottled with grazing flocks and stretching away
into the bluish haze of the southern provinces. There
was no one on the road. The world was very quiet.
Somewhere out of sight a shepherd whistled a
fragment from some long-forgotten song.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
II
THE CENTENARY-ESTIMATORY
It is a hundred years to-day since Estcourt Peaky-
blinder, one of the most puzzling and at the same
time most fascinating figures in nineteenth-century
literary history, was born, and almost fifty since he
died. During that period what storms have raged
around his personality and his work, what lava-
streams of savage denunciation, what glittering
floods of unrestrained panegyric have been provoked
by them ! Old men still living remember the fierce
controversy that broke out when he published " The
Tragedy of Ghenghis Khan." England was rent in
twain by it, and for months it was scarcely safe for
a known friend of Peakyblinder's to show himself
in the street. Another tumult, hardly less violent,
burst forth in the early eighties when Mrs. Pipkin
Pooke published her collection of letters. Those
letters, which threw a blaze of light upon the hither-
to obscure question of the poet's relations with
Sophonisba Sock, his first love, with the famous
Mrs. Perkinson, and with the infamous Aurelia
Mumpson, were for a whole year the subject of a
Uterary war of unprecedented ferocity, with Blair
of The Weekly Periodical on one side and the
doughty Limpetter and the brilliant staff he had
gathered around him on The Sempiternal Review
on the other. The echoes of that battle have not yet
died down. It is possible that they will never entirely
die down. But we have got perhaps far enough away
from the pristine heats of the fray to survey the
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COLLECTED PARODIES
subject calmly and dispassionately. As Professor
Algernon Jones so penetratingly says in his recent
informative study, " We do not at this time of day
think with Blair that Peakyblinder was a monster,
nor, on the other hand, can we entirely counten-
ance the view of Limpetter that he was a saint.
Would it not be truer to say that he was just an
ordinary man, not all bad and not all good, common
clay illuminated with something of the divine fire,
wilful yet lovable (perhaps for the very reason that
he was wilful), son of our ancient mother earth,
erring, assoiled with dross, yet ' traiUng clouds of
glory ' from that ineffable beyond which was his
spirit's home ? " And after all, what do the details
of such a man's daily life matter to us ? Were it not
savouring of ingratitude if we should prolong wordy
warfare over the dead deeds of one who has left us
so much that is priceless and immortal ?
For regarding the permanent value of the bulk
of his work there can now be no dispute. The con-
sensus of modern opinion is at one with Peaky-
blinder's contemporaries in condemning as dull
and lacking in the true flame of inspiration
" Herodotus at Halicarnassus," the " Hebdomadal
Hemistiches," and the majority of the sonnets of
the middle period. Most of these works were written
(though in some c ises only in rough draft) during
the poet's two visits to Dongola, when, as is well
known, a strange lassitude oppressed him, and he
usually had to use physical force to compel himself
to take up the pen. For a diff"erent reason we could
most of us do A\ithout certain of the lyrics and some
passages in " The Tragedy of Ghenghis Khan." The
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
outcry against this latter play at the timeot its publi-
cation was certainly an exaggerated one. In some
of the verses to which most exception was taken at
the time the modem eye finds it hard indeed to
detect the causes of offence. What reader to-day,
for instance, can understand how our mid- Victorian
predecessors found flagrant indecency in such lines
as :
" The moon
Unveils her argent bosom to the sky " ;
or religious heterodoxy in Sigismund's despairing
cry :
" Yea, natheless, but I will
Tear down the towering heavens from their seat."
But in many instances the accusations were all
too true. No one can read such things as the second
and fourth stanzas (one forbears from quoting them)
of " Pan to Aphrodite," or the middle section of
" Campaspe," or (disgusting in a different way) the
terrible " Threnody of Tumours " without ex-
periencing a blush of shame that such loathsome
excrescences should have blotched the matchless
fame of a Peakyblinder. He might well have left
such work to lesser men.
Yet think of the treasures, serene and undefiled,
that we have to set over against all this ! Peaky-
blinder possessed in supreme, in unparalleled,
measure two great gifts. No other English poet —
saving always Shakespeare — has had his power of
rending, as it were, the veil from the human soul at
its moments of greatest intensity. He considered
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(as the old Latin tag one used to learn at school had
it) nothing alien to him that was human ; but the
great, gripping crises of the emotions and the spirit
were his own peculiar province. Scene after scene
from the crucial acts of his dramas has already
passed into the region where it is above and beyond
criticism. Such scenes as that in which Mercia,
maddened with blood, nails the dead Cicero's tongue
to the rostrum which but a few years before had
rung witli his glowing perorations, are already classics.
" Red tongue, talk through thy blood," she says.
Even at the hundredth time of repeating, the terse,
blazingly savage and significant words never fail to
produce their thrill. The same gift is illustrated
again and again in the lyrics. Little scarlet cameos
they are, each one impregnated with some essential
aspect of the tortured human soul. Quotations were
superfluous. Why quote what all must be familiar
with ?
And the second great gift with which the gods at
his birth endowed Estcourt Peakyblinder was the
gift of music. Mr. T.Le Page Jiggins, in his " Remin-
iscensesof a Busy Life," states (and the statement has
gained wide currency) that Gollock, the novelist,
who at one time was among Peakyblinder's most
intimate associates, told him on more than one
occasion that the poet was entirely unsusceptible to
vocal and instrumental music. He repeats, more-
over, an anecdote (which in my opinion is of at least
doubtful authenticity) to the effect that Henry Bell,
the critic, and Theophilus Boo, the Dutch Liberal
statesman (at that time on a visit to this country, of
which his mother was a native, though born of
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
Dutch parents), once took Peakyblinder to a People's
Concert at the Crystal Palace (then newly opened),
and that at the close of the evening the author of
"Genghis Khan" quite innocently asked the astonish-
ed Boo whether an oboe was the same thing as an
organ. This is scarcely credible ; but it seems
established beyond possibility of denial that Peaky-
blinder had not what is commonly called an " ear
for music." Nevertheless, paradoxical though the
assertion may seem, he was perhaps the most illus-
trious musician that England has ever produced.
He was master of the whole range of harmony and
melody. He knew how to sweep men off their feet
with a resistless paean of gladness pouring along
with great clashes and crashes of cunningly orches-
trated sound. Now he throbs forth some rolling
funeral march, thunderous with the footsteps of the
timeless dead ; now he sighs some sad and intang-
ible melody in a minor key ; and anon he is making
us move our feet to the lilt of some merry dance
tune that Rameau or Strauss might have written.
Truly he was one of the greatest musicians that ever
lived. But his materials were not sharps and flats
but consonants and vowels, not triplets and tied
minims but anapaests and spondees. It is well that
on this his hundredth anniversary England should
lay a chaplet of laurel on his grave.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
III
THE SOUL-OF-A-FOREIGN-CAPITAL
SPECIES
Bangkok is the city of a dream. She dreams her
timeless dream at the gate of the desert. The cen-
turies have rolled over her, the legions of conqueror
after conqueror have trampled her underfoot, but
the old city remains as she was, clad in the shadowy
and iridescent hues of the twilight and the dawn,
wearing her old inscrutable smile. Her tall towers
have been hurled to the ground, her streets have
run with blood, fire has blackened and scarred her ;
but always she has risen again from her ashes, un-
changed, yet the same. Her body has been ravished
and defiled, but her soul, after two thousand years,
is still yirginal and unspotted. Veiled in the im-
penetrable yet impalpable wrappings of her sphinx-
like mystery, lonely, mournful, all-wise, all-sorrow-
ful, she rises a spiritual thing between the ilUmitable
sands and that sacred, softly flowing river the source
of which no man knows, a city apart, a being not of
time but of eternity.
One reaches Bangkok by Penoccident line from
Marseilles. The overland route is difficult, danger-
ous, infested with brigands, and expensive, and
takes forty-two days longer to traverse than that by
sea. For practical purposes, therefore, it is out of
the question. The boats, though small, are comfort-
able and fast. Twenty-three days after eating your
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
breakfast in Paris you enter the estuary of the Ho-
Hum, and six hours more, steaming with the tide,
finds the vessel slowly heaving to at the great stone
quay under the shadow of the principal mosque.
The scene as one disembarks is one of incredible
confusion. Bells clang, cannon boom, a horde of
dusky porters rush about with one's luggage, shout-
ing in a babel of discordant tongues, excited vendors
of shawls, sweetmeats, metalwork, and the thousand
and one other trifles that appeal to the heart of the
traveller, scurry hither and thither, gesticulating
wildly and chattering like an army of monkeys.
Here and there is a woman veiled from head to foot,
gazing at one with great black eyes through the
holes in the tarboosh that the Sufi religion ordains
for every woman when she is outside the kraal of
her lord and master ; and at the back of the crowd
stand, pensive and gloomy, a group of beetle-
browed priests with flowing beards and quaint tri-
angular caps (not unlike a species of elongated
dahabiyeh) upon their heads. We have left the West
behind us. Here in this fantastic town, with its
minarets and its cupolas, its narrow streets of blank
white walls, its rice bazaars and its extraordinary
blaze of bright colours, we have crossed the threshold
into another world. We have left behind us the
world of hurry and bustle, of tramcars and electric
light, of post offices and public-houses, of sewers
and suffragettes, and entered a realm where nothing
has altered since the birth of time, and where every
fairy tale comes true.
Needless to say, the hotel accommodation is not
of the best. The principal establishments — the
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Hotel de Londres and the Hotel Asquith — face one
another across the principal square. Neither of
them can boast more than twenty bedrooms, and
at the former, where my wife and I stayed, there
was not even a bath to be procured save in the large
tank in the courtyard that did duty as a recreation
ground for the pack elephants that came across the
desert from Abyssinia with the numerous caravans.
The proprietor, a stoutish, yellow gentleman with
the euphonious name of Chook, knew a little
English. In early life he had (so he told me) been a
member of a troupe of jugglers that had toured
through Europe, including the British Isles. He
knew Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Stow-in-the-
Wold, and, of course, London. But as the vocabu-
lary which he had acquired was mostly of a de-
nunciatory and imprecatory character it was not
of very much assistance. Happily my wife be-
thought her of a visit to the British Consul. He,
poor man, was delighted to see us, as no British
tourists had visited the city — (" infernal hole,"
he called it) — since the beginning of the last rainy
season. After giving me a glass of really excellent
whisky, he proceeded with the utmost despatch
to send for an interpreter. In five minutes the
man arrived. Like the rest of his nationality, he
turned out to be a most arrant swindler. We kneW;
though the knowledge was of little avail to us,
as we were helpless in his hands, that he cheated
us most outrageously whenever he made a
purchase on our behalf. But that is the price the
traveller in strange places of the earth must always
expect to pay for the satisfaction of his curiosity ;
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
and after all, we might have gone farther and fared
much worse, for Abdul Gomez, though he himself
defrauded us right and left, would never allow any-
one else to do so. Once at least he proved a very
present help in time of trouble. My wife, when
speeding along in a rickshaw, had accidentally
thrown a banana skin in the face of a wooden deity
that happened at that moment to be passing along
the street with a procession of ragged devotees. It
seemed for a few anxious moments as though we
were going to be the central figures of an ugly street
row. Things had already taken an awkward turn, and
the leader of the mob was ominously sharpening his
wicked-looking curved yashmak when Abdul arrived
upon the scene, and, by explaining briefly that we were
English, speedily cleared up the misunderstanding.
Wonderful though this dream city of the East is
at all times, it is perhaps at the annual festival that
it is most alluring, most challenging, most marvellous
of all. The festival is held in honour of the goddess
Quog (properly speaking, the goddess of toads,
though it may be doubted whether one modern
Bangkokian in a thousand knows of the lady's asso-
ciation with those unattractive animals), and for a
whole week the population, men, women, and child-
ren, give themselves up to a delirious riot of worship
and amusement. All the houses are gaily draped
with silk hangings — green, yellow, red, blue, orange,
indigo and violet. Flags stream merrily from every
flagpole ; triumphal arches guard the entrance to
every street, even in the humblest quarters ; danc-
ing, singing and praying go on incessantly from
morning till sundown, and the purveyors of fruit
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COLLECTED PARODIES
and cooling drinks drive a roaring trade. As evening
falls a thousand heavy and intoxicating odours rise
from streets and river. The songs subside, the noise
of the dancing feet is gradually stilled, the Present
fades away, the Past comes out, spreading great
wings, and broods over the great city. Night and the
eternities have reasserted their sway. The heat and
excitement of the joyous day have, dying, left be-
hind them a subtle essence that gives the key to
much that one had not understood in the character
and religion of this strange people. The flames on
the roofs of the goddess' temple sink and die away ;
the smoke floats off and is dispelled ; nothing breaks
the stillness save the wail of some river bird and the
weak cry of a new-born babe. Here, under the alien
stars of this alien sky, the great processes of life are
going on and will not be denied.
That was ten years ago. Probably if 1 went back
to Bangkok to-day I should find the railway there
and taxi-cabs awaiting arrivals at the station, and
lifts in all the houses, and French bookshops and
cookshops in the great square. The clamorous West
will invade the place^ — may have invaded it already ;
iron and electricity and steam and " education "
will shatter the fair illusions that have survived
countless centuries of storm and stress. Yet even
now, I fancy, to the man of seeing eye and under-
standing heart the old, dreamy Bangkok, all-wise,
all-sorrowful, swathed in her garments of starshine
and the declining sun's last ineluctable breath, will
reveal herself as of old — a symbol, a spirit, a re-
minder of things too deep for tears, a monument
more perennial than brass.
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
IV
THE PRETTY FABLE
The sun beat down pitilessly. The illimitable
sands stretched out tawny and blindingly hot to the
horizon. The blue sky trembled and burned with a
fierceness that seemed as if it could never be dimmed.
The Man toiled on beneath his load. How long
had he been walking thus over these parched wastes?
Centuries, thousands of years, perhaps ... he
had lost all count of time. He could not remember
the days when he had been free. It seemed to him
as though from the dawn of the world he had been
treading the sands, scorched by the rays of that
torrid sun and mocked by the intense blue of that
yawning gulf over his head. His back bent beneath
his burden and great gouts of sweat gathered on his
brow and rolled down his furrowed cheek.
No, there was no hope. For thousands of years
he had been alone. Every century at sunset a Shape
had passed him. One had passed him yesterday. He
had held out pleading hands to it, but his reward
had been gibes of scorn. And every Shape as it
swept past him had added to his load !
One came and put an Island on his back, and
one a Sea. One had burdened him with a Yoke of
Oxen, and one with a Great Cheese. There had
come a gaunt Shape, more horrible than the others,
and he had brought in his hand for addition to the
man's burden a Great Ship with sides of iron and a
heart of iron ; and another, whose teeth were made of
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COLLECTED PARODIES
diamonds and his nose of a single pearl, had flung
on the bowed shoulders the Corpse of a Butterfly.
He was very weary.
Mile after mile he walked on, looking neither to
the right hand nor to the left. His eyes were leaden
in their hue, like the eyes of sick cattle. His brow,
lined and scored with the furrows of ages, streamed
with Great Gouts of Sweat. Over his bare shoulders
fell a few grey and mud-stained locks, ragged and
pathetic, but still unkempt. His chest and feet were
bare, also his poor feet, that were bruised and bleed-
ing with the long journey ; and round his loins was
a wisp of cloth.
But Resolution was in his heart.
It chanced that, toiling on over the hot sands, he
espied a Rock by the wayside. He was very weary.
With an effort — for he had become so accustomed
to walking in a straight line that he could scarcely
compel his feet to turn aside from the direct track
— he turned aside and sought its shelter. For it was
very hot.
He lay down.
And as he lay down, with his burden still cling-
ing to his shoulders, it happened that he fell into a
sleep. He was very weary, and his sleep was pro-
found. And as he lay in a profound sleep it happened
that he fell into a dream.
He dreamt that he was in a great forest, a forest
that had never been penetrated by the light of the
sun. Giant writhing creepers stretched from tree
to tree. The trees were ancient and their trunks
massive. How lofty they were he could not tell, for
the darkness was such and the density of their foliage
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
such that he could not see their tops. In his
dream he saw himself lying, bound hand and foot,
at the base of one of the largest trees in the forest.
How long he had been there he did not know. It
might have been centuries, it might have been thou-
sands of years. As his eyes became more accust-
omed to the strange light he noticed that he was not
alone. There, right in front of him, at the base of
the next tree, gleamed two eyes, as red as live coals,
in a form vague but horrible.
The eyes looked at him. They fascinated him.
He could not take his eyes off them. They seemed
to bum and bore their way into the deepest recesses
and caverns of his soul. And they seemed to speak
to him.
At first, for all his straining, the Man could not
penetrate the meaning of the words. They came
floating to him, vague and unintelligible as words
in a dream, which indeed they were. " Oh," he
thought, " that I could understand ! " But he could
not understand. And his dream shivered and ended.
And again he dreamt. This time he lay in a reedy
marsh by the brink of a great lake. The reeds were
around and about him, but through their waving
tops he could perceive patches of a twilight sky,
cloudy, yet clean and star-sprinkled between the
interstices of the clouds. The wind sighed and the
reeds rustled, and instinctively he made a move-
ment with his hands. To his surprise, though he
knew not why he should be astonished at it, he found
that his hands were free. He felt over his body, his
poor, wasted body, and he knew that it was his own.
But when he felt his feet they were firmly bound,
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COLLECTED PARODIES
and he could not release them. And suddenly he
knew that he was not alone. There, right in front
of him, were two eyes. They were bright, but they
did not burn ; they glowed, but with the radiance
not of a furnace, but of a large and lustrous moon.
And as he looked he knew that the eyes were speak-
ing to him.
At first he could not hear the words aright. They
were strange and foreign, like words in a dream,
which, indeed, they were. But as, leaning forward
with his ears straining and all his strength con-
centrated on the task, he listened and listened to the
syllables which were repeated again and again like
the syllables in some magic incantation, he heard, at
first indistinctly, then more plainly, the words that
the eyes were speaking.
" You are afraid," they said.
And again his dream was shattered, and again he
dreamed. He lay in an open meadow under a sky
of dawn. Not a cloud marred the placid surface of
the heavens, and though the light of morning had
half flooded the sky, a few hrge stars still gleamed
in the inefi"able vault. He felt happy, he knew not
why ; but when he felt his body he knew. His hands
and his feet also were free ; his strength had returned
to him ; his thews and sinews were robust and
braced as in a youth that he had long forgotten ; he
sighed contentedly and stretched himself, his breast
gently heaving v/ith some mysterious sense as of
freedom new- won and a world new-conquered.
And as he lay and stretched himself he knew that he
was not alone.
There, standing on the grass right in front of him,
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
stood a Being in form and feature like a man but
more glorious. His long garment without seam fell
in a gracious curve from his neck to his feet. His
brow was calm and his lips curved in a faint and
beatific smile. But his eyes were wonderful, and
shone Hke the fading stars. And as the man looked
at him it seemed as though the eyes spoke.
And he knew what they said at once, without
doubt or hesitation. This was their message : " You
are not afraid."
And the Man rose and stretched his arms towards
the rim of the golden sun now appearing over the
edge of the world. He cried aloud in the strength
of his joy and his new- won freedom. And as he
cried there blew a little wind ; and as the wind
blew there came from the far away a little voice, a
still small voice no bigger than a man's hand.
And the voice whispered : " You have con-
quered."
And the Man fell down, and the Woman danced
on his Chest.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
VI
THE TURKEY CARPET
(or " SEE HOW MANY AUTHORS / CAN MENTION ! ")
" Life was built for them, not on the hope of a
Hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness of
noble souls." Thus J. R. Green of the Anglo-Saxons.
The gifted historian of the English people sum-
marises in this one brief sentence the whole spiritual
and mental outlook of a people. It is an outlook very
distinct and clear-cut, but an outlook from which
we of the twentieth century have moved far indeed.
It is difficult perhaps to define the distinction with
any degree of exactitude. One remembers the philo-
sopher in " Rasselas." " Deviation from nature is
deviation from happiness," said he. " Let me only
know what it is to live according to nature," ob-
served the much-impressed Rasselas. " To live
according to nature," rephed the philosopher, " is
to act always with due regard to the fitness arising
from the relations and qualities arising from causes
and effects : to concur with the great and unchange-
able scheme of universal felicity ; to co-operate
with the general disposition and tendency of the
present system of things." A kind of disquisition
no more illuminating was that of Voltaire's pro-
fessor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmologigology.
" It is demonstrable," said he, *' that things cannot
be otherwise than they are ; for all being created
for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.
Observe that the nose has been formed to bear
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
spectacles — thus we have spectacles." We should be
wary, therefore, of attempting to draw hard and
fast lines where no such lines may exist.
Nevertheless, it requires no very great penetra-
tion to discover that wherever the difference may
lie there is certainly a difference, a difference so
large, one may almost say, that it ceases to be a
difference in degree and becomes one of kind, be-
tween a view of life such as that attributed to the
Anglo-Saxons by Green (and even that of the Greeks
as so acutely expounded by Mr. Lowes Dickinson
in his excellent little manual), and that of the average
Englishman, or for that matter P>enchman, of our
own day. " Nothing but the infinite pity," said the
author of "John Inglesant," " is sufficient for the in-
finite pathos of human life." There perhaps we have
the clue to the new factor which has intervened and
worked a complete transformation in man's ways of
looking at himself and at the universe. The same
note may be found struck again and again over the
whole vast range of modern literature. We find it in
Shorthouse, we find it in Maeterlinck, we find it in
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we find it
in Tennyson, we find it in a writer so far apart from
them all as Emile Zola.
It is true that here and there there is a revulsion,
a throwback to the earlier type. Through the cosmic
sea of sympathy that has flooded, as it were, the
surface of the globe, the primeval fires beneath
fling up now and then some reeking volcano of iron-
heartedness and cynicism. This same Zola had a
strong vein of it. One remembers that terrible sneer
in " Dr. Pascal " ; " Suffering humanity cannot live
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COLLECIED PARODIES
without some lie or other to console it." Gissing
too, a man in many respects poles apart from the
great French realist, has that singularly sardonic
remark in * ' Henry Rycroft " : " We needs must laugh
a little in the presence of suffering." Yet in his case
it is rather perhaps that it is the very excess of his
pity that makes him pitiless ; for the phrase has an
appendix, " else how should we live our lives ? "
In Matthew Arnold it is frequently possible without
an undue exercise of fancy to detect the cynicism
that is born of softness, the cruelty that is the obverse
of the medal of love. " Few understood his langU3
age ; none understood his aims." Thus G. H.
Lewes of Goethe ; and how often, indeed, do the
greatest amongst us speak to us in an alien tongue
that we do not comprehend ? There is often a
barrier, impalpable, yet none the less real, between
the genius and the mass of men among whom he
moves. " If," says Rousseau in his " Confessions,"
" I strive to speak to the people I meet, I certainly
say some stupid thing to them ; if I remain silent
I am a misanthrope, an unsociable animal, a bear."
Too true, alas !, it is that the man who wishes to
attract the gaze of the " general " cannot do it by
speaking frankly and freely the truth that is in him.
It has been the same from the dawn of the world.
" It is a kind of policy in these days," writes old
Burton of the *' An^my," " to prefix a phantastical
title to a book which is to be sold : for as larks come
down to a day-net, many vain readers will tarry and
stand gazing, like silly passengers, at an antick picture
in a painter's shop, that will not look on a judicious
piece." There are those in all times who possess a
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
fatally potent gift for thus compelling the public
gaze. As Seneca so forcibly put it, " there are some
who by the strangeness of their conceits will make
him loiter by the way that was going to fetch a
midwife for his daughter now ready to lie in." Sim-
pHcity and directness of utterance have always been
recognised as a supreme merit by the few who can
judge of these things. " Grandis, et ut ita dicam,
pudica oratio non est maculosa, nee turgida, sed
naturali pulchritudine exsurgit." Thus Petronius :
but he was too much man of the world to let his
practice accord with his principles.
In truth, the old materialism, whether of the
more erect and admirable type or of the wallowing
and grovelling type, is dead. We call ourselves
materialists now, just as we call ourselves by many
other strange names, but materialism no longer
walks the globe. " The Animus," said Sterne,
" taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling Hke
a tadpole, all day long, both summer and winter,
in a puddle, or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or
thin soever, he would say, shocked his imagination."
The phraseology may be paralleled from Swin-
burne's amusing but perhaps rather too irreverent
parody of Tennyson : " The soul squats down in
the body like a tinker drunk in a ditch." After all,
though, we ought not perhaps to carp at the free-
dom of Mr. Swinburne's jesting. Was it not Eras-
mus, himself the prince of jesters, yet a very serious
man withal, who declared in his *' Encomium Moriae "
that " wits have always been allowed this privilege,
that they might be smart upon any transactions of
life, if so that their liberty did not extend unto
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railing." Though he himself qualifies his judgment
somewhat by his implied rebuke to Juvenal for
" raking in the sink of vices to procure a laughter."
Certainly, if we cannot go the whole way with those
who would elevate jesting to the highest place at
the feast of life, we can, nevertheless, appreciate
the force of the gentle Elia's rebuke to Coleridge.
" I think, Charles," remarked the poet (referring
to the pulpit experiences of his earlier life), " that
you never heard me preach." " My dear boy,"
replied Lamb, " I never heard you do anything
else ! " But genius is like the wind. It bloweth
where it Hsteth. Carlyle was uttering nothing more
than a much-needed warning when in " Sartor
Resartus " he asked, " Would criticism erect not
only finger-posts and turnpikes, but spiked gates
and impassable barriers, for the mind of man ? "
It may even be doubted whether at bottom all
criticism is not entirely useless and purposeless.
The critical spirit of Walt Whitman criticised criti-
cism itself. " Showing the best and dividing it from
the worst," runs that memorable passage in the
" Song of Myself," " age vexes age ; knowing the
perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe, and admire my-
self." And even were all criticisms unquestionably
just and impeccably acute, could they instruct any
save the already instructed .'' " The power of in-
struction," observes Gibbon, " is seldom of much
efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where
it is already superfluous." Machiavelli was even
more sweeping. " The world," says he in his placid
way, " consists only of the vulgar."
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
PART FOUR
MODELS FOR PRACTICAL JOURNALISTS
I
THE MODEL LEADING ARTICLE
The Report of the Royal Commission on Gramo-
phones which, as will be seen in another column,
was issued last night, is bulky and complicated even
when compared with previous documents of this
character. It is scarcely necessary for us, we pre-
sume, to recall to the minds of our readers the
circumstances which led to the Commission's ap-
pointment. To most of us they are only too pain-
fully familiar. Suffice it to say that the ever-grow-
ing volume of public indignation on the subject of
reference had by 1902 reached such a pitch that the
Government of the day was compelled to yield to
the pressure of opinion and appoint a Commission
with the object of discovering what exactly was the
present position of the law as bearing upon gramo-
phones, and what changes, if any, were desirable.
The Commissioners, who met for the first time on
9th March, 1904, were a very strong and repre-
sentative body of men, amongst them being Lord
Fitzgibbet, Lord Crimp, Viscount Bourton-on-the-
Water (one of the greatest Speakers the House of
Commons ever had), Mr. Aiidrew Hogmanay of
the Mechanical Music Noise Abatement Society,
Sir Heinrich Spitzbergen, M.P., Sir Giuseppe
Piccolomini, M.P., Mr. Ivan Levinski, M.P., Lord
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COLLECTED PARODIES
Julias Van Ostade, Mrs. Toop, Mr. Isaac L.
Cholmondeley, the famous entrepreneur, Madame
Coloratura, and Mr. Adolphus Jugg, of the Home
Office, who acted as secretary. The first six years
out of the nine over which their sittings extended
were devoted to the collection of a vast body of
evidence from hundreds of witnesses of every shade
of opinion ; and the last two years have been spent
on the preparation of the Report. Nothing could
well have been more thorough than this investi-
gation. What is the outcome of it all } What is it
that the Commission suggests should be done to
diminish what is admittedly one of the most irri-
tating of the many nuisances that harass the respect-
able citizen in modern England }
The suggestions of the Commissioners — who
are unanimous save as respects certain minor points
in connection with which Mrs. Toop has expressed
her dissent from her colleagues — may be divided
into two parts : the general or positive proposals,
and the particular or negative proposals. With re-
gard to the former it will be as well to say here and
now that most people will find it impossible to give
them their unqualified approval. Doubtless there
are some sections in this half of the Report in which
the reasoning of the Commissioners is irrefragable
and their conclusions unchallengeable. But at the
most we can only say that this portion of the Report
is, like the curate's egg, good in parts. It was in-
evitable that any Royal Commission which should
take it upon itself to cross the Rubicon which
divides the idealistic (and as we think, sound) con-
ception of social dynamics from the purely material
216
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
conception would provoke at once general and bitter
indignation. It is painful to have to say this ; but it
is no use blinking facts, and we think that the vast
majority of the people of this country will refuse to
blink them with no uncertain voice. The develop-
ment of events, the process of cosmic change, has
brought us to a stage where it is inevitable that we
should make a choice. Nations cannot remain for
ever like the proverbial donkey between the two
equidistant bundles of hay ; they cannot serve two
masters ; either they must love the one and hate
the other or they must forsake the one and seek
after the other. Much of the Labour unrest which
has been of late so disquieting a feature to all stu-
ents of social essences is directly, or at any rate
indirectly, traceable to the prevailing confusion in
the public mind in regard to this all-important
matter. Our politicians, let us frankly admit, have
given us a poor guidance in this respect. They have
been in this connection but blind leaders of the
blind. But it is high time that somebody should
speak out.
Such are the recommendations of the Royal Com-
mission. It is with genuine regret that we find our-
selves unable to accord them our unqualified ap-
proval. That, for reasons which we have already
adequately explained, is impossible. We need
scarcely explain that we do not mean to convey that
we put the whole of their recommendations in-
stantly and completely out of court. On the con-
trary, we have little doubt but that Governments
of the future will find the Report a rich storehouse
from which to draw suggestions for legislation which,
217
COLLECTED PARODIES
without making too sudden a break in the slow and
orderly evolution of English institutions, will by an
adjustment here and a modification there cause the
whole machine to work more smoothly. That, how-
ever, is a matter with which the future will have to
deal. It remains for us only to again express our
sense of deep gratitude to the public-spirited men
and women who by devoting so long a period to the
study of one of the most grave and pressing prob-
lems that confront us to-day have set an example
which every citizen would do well to follow.
^i8
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
II
THE MODEL MUSICAL CRITICISM
Last night at the Cacophonic Hall, Herr Zoppy
Zqzqzqzqwich gave his last recital of the present
season to an audience which filled all parts of the
building. Herr Zqzqzqzqwich is not one of those,
alas, too-plentiful virtuosi whose chief mission in
life it is apparently to tickle the ears of the ground-
lings with displays of meretricious brilliancy of
technique. He° is an artist to the finger-tips, and,
what is perhaps rarer still, a scholar. It was, there-
fore, in anticipation of a rich musical treat that the
whole of music-loving London wended its way last
night to the famous hall in Clamour Street, and it
was by no means disappointed. The principal item
in the great violinist's programme was Potbouille's
delightful but exacting Concerto, the only example
in that form that the famous Gallic leader of the
Turbinistic school has yet produced, although rumour
has it that he will shortly present us with another.
The introductory Allegretto was played with in-
comparable spirit, the deftness of the player's
brushwork when he came to the last rapid bars of
the recurrent second theme taking the audience by
storm. The same qualities were displayed in the
Scherzo and the Finale ; but it was naturally in the
Andante that Herr Zqzqzqzqwich was at his greatest.
Both his ton and his couleur were superb ; never
has that marvellously poignant fragment, which in
its sorrowful yet serene wisdom seems to plumb
the very depths of the human soul, been played
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COLLECTED PARODIES
with more convincing sanity and passion. The run
of glissandic thirteenths towards the end of the
movement — a thing that might well have taxed the
resources of a Paganini — was negotiated with con-
summate ease and purity, and the sudden magic
check in the triplicated barberinis at the close liter-
ally sent an almost terrible shudder over the whole
of the vast audience. Needless to say, the player
received a great ovation at the close.
Of Herr Zqzqzqzqwich's other numbers the'most
important were the familiar but ever-fresh Con-
certo of Beethoven and a Rhapsodic Chinoise by
Muck, which had not previously been heard in this
country. It is a work which it is not easy to grasp at
first hearing, but there are some memorable passages
in the daring young German's familiar idiom. The
remaining items were Tartini's " Trille du Diable,"
Bach's rather saccharine " Air," and a pretty but
scarcely profound " Danse des Ivrognes " by Gus-
tave Coquetaille. The orchestral parts were sus-
tained by the Bayswater Symphony Orchestra under
Mr. James Jamieson, which also gave a stirring
rendition of that gifted young English composer,
Mr. Dunham Downe's " Third ' Soho ' Suite."
220
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
III
THE MODEL COLUMN OF PERSONAL CHAT
One of the prettiest weddings of the year will be
that of Lord Arthur Grandison and Miss Arabella
Van Eyck Caffer, which will be celebrated at Holy
Trinity, Pont Street, in the second week of next
month. Holy Trinity is rapidly becoming one of the
most popular churches for fashionable weddings,
and there are good judges who believe that it has a
future in store for it which will eclipse even the
glories of St. George's, Hanover Square, in its
prime. Lord Arthur, who was born in 1813, is a
younger brother of the late Marquess of Stoke, of
whom it used to be said that he had a family on
which the sun never set, he and the Marchioness
(who was " daughter of the celebrated " Billy "
Dawson, of Skibbereen) having had no less than
twenty-two children, most of whom, for one reason
or another, went abroad to live. Lord Arthur was
educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and, entering the
Army, attained the rank of Major in the Royal Horse
Guards (Blues) ; since his retirement in 1848 he
has spent his time mostly between London and
Glenvommit, his beautiful and picturesque place
in Clackmannanshire. He is quite one of the most
popular of the younger men about town.
The bride-to-be, who first met her prospective
husband at a house party of the Countess of Bibby's
in April last, was born just fifteen years ago in New-
port, Long Island, where her late father, " Bunco"
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COLLECTED PARODIES
Caffer, of New York, built himself one of the finest
marble palaces in the Eastern States. A pretty
blonde, with fascinating blue eyes and a wealth of
beautiful fair hair. Miss CaflFer married as her first
husband Mr. Bellville P. Boyler, of Philadelphia,
since when she has resumed her maiden name.
Three bishops are to help tie the nuptial knot ; there
are to be eighteen bridesmaids and two pages,
amongst the former being the Ladies Faith, Charity,
and Hope Grandison (nieces of the bridegroom).
Lady Ursula Stookenham, the Hon. Peggy Rhein-
ault (only daughter of Lord Capelcourt), Miss Lois
Urquhart (youngest daughter of Urquhart of Ercil-
doune and Mrs. Urquhart), and three pretty cousins
of the bride — the Misses Poppy Spoof, Maisie
Van Eyck, and Clytemnestra Honk. The pages will
be the Master of Mactavish and little Master Barth-
olomew Jobbe, son of the ParUamentary Secretary
to the Labour Board.
The bride will be given away "by her father, and
Lord Arthur's best man will be the Earl of Torquay,
who fought at his side when he went through the
Pondoland campaign as personal A.D.C. to Prince
Augustus of Harz-Goldenberg. Presents are pour-
ing in on the happy couple from the friends of both
families, amongst those who have sent valuable and
costly gifts being H.R.H. the Crown. Prince of
Servia, Princess Franz Karl of Hoppe-Blichten-
stein, and Count Polonyi, the eminent Hungarian
statesman, whose brother not long ago married Miss
Caffer 's sister. The wedding dress is being made
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THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
by Aglavaine, of 1864 Bond Street. It is of white
Thibetan silk with a train of Coromandel suede
trimmed with seed-pearls and a veil of Coan ninon.
The bride's bouquet will be of arum lilies, which
are becoming very popular for weddings just now,
and the bridesmaids will carry tall sprays of pink
excruciabilia supplied by Tibson's. The honeymoon
will be spent at Boby Castle, Skye, which has been
lent to the happy pair by the bridegroom's brother-
in-law, the Duke of Fulham.
The monthly meet of the Rickshaw Club will be
held (weather permitting) on Wednesday, the 23rd.
Southwark Park is, as usual, the venue, and it is
hoped that there will be a large turn-out, especially
as the meet is the last of the present season. Amongst
those who are sure to be there are Sir Guy Vaux,
Lord MacgilHcuddy, Viscount de Rosenheim, Mrs.
Abinger-Hammer, Rear-Admiral Sir Capulet John-
stone, and Mr. " Pat " O'Connell, without whom
nowadays no gathering of the kind is complete.
Several people have lately been seen dining at
the Hotel Cordiale. Amongst those to be noticed
there in the present week have been Lord Hind-
stairs, Mr. Ike Poppenheim, Sir Anthony Rowley,
and the Marquess of Boxehill, whose little parties
at the Cordiale are quite an institution.
Congratulations to Lord Bucklershard, who
attained his majority last Thursday. Lord Bucklers-
hard comes of a fighting stock. His maternal grand-
father was the celebrated Sir Pyke Peyton, whose
223
COLLECTED PARODIES
gallant defence of Monte Video in the earlier years
of the last century earned him the commendation
of the Iron Duke. His father died in one of our
" little wars " on the North- West Frontier, and
eight of his uncles have attained the rank of general
or admiral. The young peer is expected to take a
prominent part in the organisation of the Terri-
torials in his own county. He is well blessed with
this world's goods and has five historic country
seats as well as a magnificent town house in Bellasis
Square.
No less than three big dances are fixed for the
24th and many people are almost in despair about
it, especially in view of the difficulty of getting
young men nowadays. The dances include Lady
Straphanger's, Lady Alicia Chope's, and the great
ball at Ditcham House, which will have almost a
semi-ofiicial character and which it is expected that
royalty will honour with its presence.
It is officially announced that no more tickets can
be issued for the Royal Parade at the Brentford
Cattle Show. Since it became known that the King
and Queen would both be present at this most de-
lightful of annual functions, the Lord Chamberlain's
department has been literally inundated with appli-
cations for tickets. Even as it is, the task of allocating
them will be no easy matter. Whatever may be said
of other State officials, nobody can deny that the
Lord Chamberlain's staff^ certainly earn their salaries.
224
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
IV
THE MODEL PUZZLE CORNER
RIDDLES
What is the difference between a schoolmaster
ind an engine-driver ?
When is a door not a door ?
What famous general never had an eye, never
had a tooth, never had a leg, never had a mouth, and
never had an arm, and never lost a battle ?
What kind of poultry live upon Tanagra statu-
ettes ?
Why should a musician consider himself the in-
ferior of a butcher ?
What distinguished scriptural character frequently
complained of neuralgia ?
Where was Moses when the light went out ?
ACROSTIC
My first is in fork but not in spoon,
My second's in sun but not in moon.
My third is in planet but not in star,
My fourth is in raffle but not in bazaar,
My fifth is in donkey but not in ape.
My sixth is in form but not in shape,
My seventh's in bush not but in tree,
My whole is something you never will be.
BURIED RIVERS
The hippopotamus is a noble beast and is much
misunderstood.
I saw your Aunt Mary with a mess-jacket on.
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COLLECTED PARODIES
Please immerse your hands in this refreshing
water
No spectacle could be more depressing than a
limp opossum.
He began gesticulating immediately he perceived
me.
You had better take precisely the third turn to the
right.
Oh no, said the sparrow, that will never do.
I am getting rather tired of the salmon that Uncle
James will insist on sending.
SQUARE WORD
1 . A river in Ecuador.
2. A certain thing you very often walk over.
3. A Jewish composer.
4. A leading daily paper.
5. A vegetable substance much used in cotton
mills.
6. One of the wives of Henry the Eighth.
7. A celebrated poet recently dead.
8. A tax.
The answers to last week's puzzles have been
unavoidably held over owing to the enormous mass
of attempts at solution sent in. The editor hopes to
be able to publish them next week with the full list
of awards in connection with our- great competition.
In itjsponse to inquiries from " Stork " (Birching-
ton-on-Sea) and other readers, the editor must once
more make it clear that his decision is final.
226
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
THE MODEL POLITICAL NOTES
I understand that a whole series of changes in the
Cabinet are imminent. At least three ministers will
in all probability give up their portfolios, and there
will be an almost general reshuffle of the other posts.
The official announcement may be expected at any
moment. But the Government may think it more
politic to postpone the changes until the beginning
or even the end of next Session. It is certain that
before long one of the law officers of the Crown will
be promoted to a high judicial position, which, of
course, will necessitate his retirement from the
Parliamentary arena.
There is widespread dissatisfaction amongst
Ministerialists with regard to the course taken by
the Government with regard to the Dogs' Diseases
(Ireland) Bill. The measure passed through all its
stages in the Commons quite early in the Session,
but the lords after giving it a second reading have
hung it up, as it appears, indefinitely. The Radical
" forwards " are making it uncomfortably clear that
in their opinion the Government should send their
lordships a clear intimation that the situation is
such as to, unless something is done with the Bill
immediately, eventuate in literally swamping the
Upper House with new creations.
A Bill estabUshing a maximum working day for
lighthouse keepers was introduced on Tuesday by
227
COLLECTED PARODIES
Major Black, Unionist member for Mid-Rutland.
The Bill, which has the support of members of all
parties, will, if passed, come into operation on the
first of January next year. Its backers include Lord
Lundy, Lord William Rockingham, Colonel Mohun,
Sir Zebedee Haythornethwaite, Sir Thomas Higg-
ins, Mr. Arthur Pouch, Mr. Sam Winkle, Mr. J.
Dummit, and Mr. Michael O'Raffertv.
It is expected that Mr. Norman Mavromichealis,
the victor of Bootham-on-Tees, will take the oath
and his $eat to-morrow. The Unionists will give
him a great reception.
Captain Beverley-Lunn has obtained a return
which throws a glaring light upon the proceedings
of the last few years. It appears that since the present
Government came into office the total number of
new officials created has amounted to the colossal
total of 5,837,927, with salaries amounting in the
aggJ'egate to ^^29,576,847,365 per annum. Nothing
could show more clearly the insidious way in which
the Government is attempting to saddle the country
with an army of bureaucrats of whom it will be
almost impossible to get rid once they have been
called into existence. Captain Beverley-Lunn has
put down a motion on the subject for an early date :
" That this House expresses its strong disapproval
of the legislative and administrative action of the
present Government whereby the country is being
saddled with a new and dangerous bureaucracy
which is dangerous to the national \velfare, ruinous
228
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
to the taxpayer, and entirely out of consonance with
all the best traditions of the national life."
Yesterday a meeting was held in Committee
Room No. 99 of members interested in Paraguay.
About twenty members of all parties were present,
and it was decided that a deputation should wait
upon the Prime Minister upon the subject. The
matter may also be raised on the Foreign Office vote
the week after next.
It is announced that the veteran Mr. Benjamin
Martin, who has for so many years proved himself
such an excellent chairman of committees, will not
seek re-election at the next General Election. Had
Mr. Martin come into the House six years earlier
than he did he would have succeeded the late Sir
Robert Miggleby as father of the House. It is felt
that the occasion of Mr. Martin's retirement ought
not to be allowed to pass by without some suitable
commemoration, and a small committee has been
formed, with Mr. Herbert Rogers as secretary, to
organise a subscription for a presentation.
229
COLLECTED PARODIES
VI
THE MODEL ART CRITICISM
At the Haliburton Galleries, Wendover Street,
Messrs. Didler have just opened an important show
of oil paintings by modern Montenegrin masters.
Not since 1902, the year of the memorable exhibi-
tion at the Guildhall, have we had an opportunity
of seeing in London so representative a collection
of works, both of the Cettinje and of the Dulcigno
schools. Practically every man of note is represented
by his most representative works, and the hundred
odd pictures as a body will certainly convince the
sceptic — if there have been any such — of the
genuineness and magnitude of the Trans-Adriatic
Renaissance.
Naturally one turns first to the work of M. Vlilpo
Scouacho, happily still alive though no longer act-
ive, the man who above all others must be regarded
as the leader and in some respects the creator of the
Neo-Montenegrin movement. No less than eighteen
pictures from his brush hang here — with one or
two exceptions all painted in his prime. Undoubt-
edly the clou is " Pol Opsik, Antivari " (No. 13).
Storm lours over the little port, a forlorn handful of
white houses huddled between the vastness of the
sea and the vastness of the mountains. Trees and
waters, rocks and walls, shudder with prescience of
the coming tempest ; never has such an inconceiv-
able lavishness of idea been so united with an in-
credible economy of means. A landscape almost
230
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
equally great is " On the Skutari Road " (No. 87).
The soft rays of the sunken sun gild the top of a
solitary hill where foot of man has never trodden.
The picture in its combined ruggedness and tender-
ness seems to typify the strangely blended Monte-
negrin character, but one doubts the advisability
of the dab of Chinese white in the middle fore-
ground. It is a picture, to return to again and again.
There is an indefinable charm in all the sea pictures,
in none more than in " L'Aube Consolatrice " (No.
49). Long even ripples sparkling in the full blaze
of the noonday sun evenly flowing into a little beach
where a grey corse lies motionless amid the wet
weeds. In essence it is religious — though not in the
slightest degree didactic, for didacticism in art is the
abomination of desolation — in its revelation of the
littleness of man and the immensity of the eternal
verities. Of the other examples, " In a Sock- Sus-
pender Factory, Monastir," is perhaps the most
striking, both from the point of view of the historian
of artistic development, and from that of the purely
aesthetic connoisseur. The blaze of yellows and pinks
and greens, the treatment of light and shade almost
staggers and blinds one in its audacity ; but yet
how true it all is, how free from the slightest taint
of triviality and commonplace ; Scouacho's niche
in the temple of the immortals is assured.
Scouacho's chief lieutenant, Porko Biska, died
perhaps before he had reached the full maturity of
his powers, but the memorable qualities in his rich,
splendid, almost obstreperous art are unmistakable.
Such paintings as that of a wood in autumn (76),
and that of the opening of the Montenegrin
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COLLECTED PARODIES
Parliament (54) roar with the wild yet intellectual
orchestration of a Strauss ; the force of paint could no
farther go. A kindred spirit is abundantly evident
in the work of his confrere and brother-in-law,
Stunto Jokoso, who, as somebody once humorously
said, sees red everywhere. More classical is the spirit
of Fonio Lubar, a master of flowing and graceful
line and colour. A man of whom little has previously
been heard in this country is Tono Likkowich,
whose symphonic landscapes, notably Nos. 22 and
49, wear a smile as mysterious and as reticent as
that of Monna Lisa herself. Distinctly worthy of
attention, too, is the work of Joski Protose, who is
strongly under the influence of modern German
realism, but brings to his work much that is dis-
tinctly his own. Of his genre pictures, " A Dead
Louse " (37), for sheer ruthlessness and virility of
treatment could scarcely be excelled.
In another room Messrs. Didler are exhibiting a
number of water-colours of the Swedish Tyrol by
Mr. J. Macdonald Barron. They are well worth a
visit.
232
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
VII
THE MODEL COLUMN FOR HOUSEWIVES
TWO USEFUL RECIPES
No. I. — Take a saucepan and fill with water to
the depth of two or three inches. Put it on stove and
allow it to remain there until water is well on the
boil. Take an egg (or two if one be deemed insuffi-
cient) and without breaking the shell place it in
saucepan so that it is just covered by water. Con-
tinue to keep water on boil for three and a half or,
if a somewhat denser consistency of substance be
desired, four minutes. Time may be gauged with
watch, clock, or sand-glass specially prepared for
purpose (Messrs. Spatchcock and Wilson, of High
Holborn, make excellent articles of the sort), but
comparative exactitude should, if possible, be
secured. At end of specified time saucepan should
be briskly removed, large spoon (or fork if no spoon
handy) inserted into water and egg extracted. The
egg immediately after emergence from water will
be seen to be wet. This, however, need cause no
alarm, as water will speedily evaporate, leaving nice,
clean, smooth, dry surface. Place egg in small cup
of suitable shape ; serve hot and consume with salt
and pepper to taste.
No. 2. — A Cheap, Easy Dish for a Large Family.
Take two pounds of best Astrakhan caviare and
fourteen ounces of superfine pate-de-foie-gras, and
mix until a uniform paste has been secured. Take
also the gizzards of eight ptarmigan and two pounds
233
COLLECTED PARODIES
of fresh lemon pips and grind as small as possible.
Boil the first mixture in butter for about twenty
minutes and then add the second, stirring softly
over a slow fire. When the desired softness has been
obtained, drain off the water and stand aside for the
steam to come off. Transfer to double saucepan and
add the yolks of twelve eggs and a quarter to half a
pound of guava jelly ; stir and boil slowly for an
hour and half. Add half-a-pint of water ; allow the
mixture to stand for two hours and then strain
through a clean cloth. The solid remaining in the
cloth may be thrown away ; the liquid that comes
through will, if allowed to stand for two hours, form
a jelly. Place the jelly on a dish and serve with a
garniture of bread-crumbs. If the utmost possible
economy is necessary the bread-crumbs may be
omitted.
HOW^ TO OPEN A DOOR
A number of young housewives have lately in-
formed me that they have considerable difficulty in
opening doors. I cannot quite understand this, as
the process is really quite a simple one. Take the
handle of the door in the right hand (or the left, as
the case may be) and turn slowly and without the
application of unnecessary force, so that the upper
portion of the handle moves from right to left (or
from left to right, as the case may be), and the lower
portion from left to right (or, as the case may be,
from right to left). If this is done properly (unless
the door is out of order, in which case the services
of a locksmith should be requisitioned) the catch
will be found to slip. A slight push (in some cases a
234
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
pull is required, as some doors open out of a room
in a different way from that in which they open into
a room) must then be given and the door will then
be found to yield in the manner aimed at. It may be
taken as a general rule — though, like most rules, it
will admit of exceptions — that a door should be shut
after the opener has passed through it. Open doors
frequently admit draughts, and experienced doctors
will tell you that there is nothing like a draught for
assisting the contraction of a cold. I have seen doors,
however, which open in a different way from those
above described. Each kind, of course, as is always
the case in life, must be treated according to its
particular nature, but the instructions I have given
above will be found to be of fairly general appli-
cation.
WHAT SORT OF SHOES SHOULD BABY WEAR ?
Mothers frequently have much worry and search-
ing of hearts with respect to their babies' footwear.
Babies are tender creatures and cannot in every way
be treated just as we would treat grown-up persons,
whose bodies and brains are alike more fully devel-
oped. To take an extreme example, nobody, for
instance, would dream of putting a baby into
Wellington boots. Their little feet are neither so
large nor so hardened as those of their elders ; and
the same thing indeed may be said of their hands.
Madame Pupa, of Z6 Palmyra Buildings, Chancery
Lane, has some admirable assortments of babies
shoes, comfortable and hygienic in every way,
which she is always glad to sell to readers who
mention The Daily Wheezer.
235
COLLECTED PARODIES
VIII
THE MODEL CUPID'S CORNER
{The Editress is always glad to give advice to those
of her fair readers who have love or complexion
troubles.)
• '
Martha (Greenwich). — No, I do not think it
would be feasible or, if feasible, profitable for you
to bring three Breach of Promise actions at the same
time against three different men, even under the
circumstances you mention. Juries are always apt
to look at these matters from the male point of view ;
and, after all, you have been a little fickle in your
affections, haven't you .''
RosiE B. (Newcastle-on-Tyne). — Yes, your
position does seem to be a rather cruel one. You
say that you are quite certain he loves you ; and yet
somehow I feel that if he really loves you as much
as he says he does, he ought to be willing to give up
the garlic. Try what a little quiet persuasion will do,
dear ; endeavour to make him see matters more
from your point of view. God has given us women
a great gift in the power of our tongues. If you find
him still obdurate, let me hear from you again.
Lily of the Valley (Seven Dials). — Your com-
plaint sounds like eczema. It is very hard to get rid
of it The best cream for it that I know is prepared
by Madame Scheherazade, of Bond Street, whose
advertisement will be found in another column.
Coon (Portarlington) — You are a very foolish
236
THE ASPIRANT'S MANUAL
girl, Coon, and I am very much ashamed of you. I
should have thought that at this time of day every-
body would have known that tight-lacing is one of
the very worst things from the point of view of
physical well-being. The girl who, as you say you
have done, brings her waist down to seven inches,
is committing a crime against society. But there, I
suppose I am very old-fashioned.
Distracted Teacher (Exeter). — Yes, he has be-
haved very, very badly indeed, and I must say that
in your position I should find it very, very hard to
forgive a man who had behaved in such a manner.
I do not think you did wisely in refraining from
reproaching him when you found out that he was
meeting your friend and you on alternate Saturday
afternoons and taking her to stalls at the theatre
when he only took you to a beggarly cinematograph
show. In my opinion you should have gone straight
to his mother and told her outright what you thought
of her son. Depend on it, my dear, a man who will
" carry on " like this is not worth thinking about. I
am sure he would never make a good husband.
Poppy (Stornoway). — I think you have acted
hastily. Poppy. To attempt to attach a man by lead-
ing strings is the worst mistake a woman can make.
You say that he cut you in the street when he was
w^alking out with another young lady. Well, what if
he did } He may have had very good reason ; and
in any case you ought to have afforded him an oppor-
tunity of giving an explanation before sending him
a letter of the sort that you enclose. If only young
people would be more tolerant of each other's little
ways, the world would be a much happier place
237
COLLECTED PARODIES
than it is. I think, Poppy, that you will learn that
when you are a year or two older.
Mabel (Bettws-y-Coed). — No ; most emphati-
cally no !
Juniper (London). — Asafoetida is an excellent
thing for it and also very pleasant to take.
238
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