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Title: Lauds and libels
Author: Charles L. Graves
Release date: July 8, 2018 [eBook #57467]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by JoAnn Greenwood, Bryan Ness and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAUDS AND LIBELS ***
LAUDS AND LIBELS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
- THE HAWARDEN HORACE
- MORE HAWARDEN HORACE
- HUMOURS OF THE FRAY
- PARTY PORTRAITS
- THE BRAIN OF THE NATION
- WAR’S SURPRISES
LAUDS AND LIBELS
BY
C. L. GRAVES
LONDON
SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD.
1918
CONTENTS
| MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS— | PAGE |
| Piccadilly | 9 |
| To “Martin Ross” | 11 |
| To Stephen Leacock | 14 |
| To “Bartimeus” | 16 |
| On Re-reading “Barchester Towers” | 18 |
| “Bleak House” | 20 |
| Lines on a New History | 22 |
| To my Godson | 24 |
| The House-Master | 27 |
| The Old Matron | 29 |
| Constable Jinks | 31 |
| ’Twas Fifty Years Ago | 33 |
| New Men and Old Studies | 36 |
| Remunerative Rhymes | 39 |
| WAR WORKERS AND OTHERS— | |
| To Mr. Balfour on his Return | 43 |
| The Submerged Leader | 45 |
| A Ministerial Wail | 47 |
| The Flapper | 49 |
| The Feminine Factotum | 52 |
| To a New Knight | 54 |
| The Tenth Muse | 56 |
| LAYS OF THE LARDER— | |
| Sugar | 59 |
| Tea Shortage | 62 |
| Margarine | 65 |
| A Ballad of Eels | 67 |
| A Song of Food-Saving | 70 |
| A Queue Song | 73 |
| The Imperfect Economist | 74 |
| The War Pig: a Palinode | 75 |
| VARIA— | |
| Bath | 79 |
| In Wild Wales | 82 |
| The Little River | 84 |
| Six Vile Verbs | 86 |
| Some More Bad Words | 88 |
| To a Modern Muse | 90 |
| Ballade of Free Verse | 92 |
| The Strife of Tongues | 93 |
| “Jong” | 95 |
NOTE
Acknowledgment is due to the Proprietors and Editor of “Punch”
for their courtesy in allowing me to reprint these pieces.
C. L. G.
MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS
PICCADILLY
Gay shops, stately palaces, bustle and breeze,
The whirring of wheels and the murmur of trees;
By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,
Whatever my mood is—I love Piccadilly.
Thus carolled Fred Locker, just sixty years back,
In a year (’57) when the outlook was black,
And even to-day the war-weariest Willie
Recovers his spirits in dear Piccadilly.
We haven’t the belles with their Gainsborough hats,
Or the Regency bucks with their wondrous cravats,
But now that the weather no longer is chilly
There’s much to enchant us in New Piccadilly.
As I sit in my club and partake of my “ration,”
No longer I’m vexed by the follies of fashion;
The dandified Johnnies so precious and silly—
You seek them in vain in the New Piccadilly.
The men are alert and upstanding and fit,
They’ve most of them done or they’re doing their bit;
With the eye of a hawk and the stride of a gillie
They add a new lustre to Old Piccadilly.
And the crippled but gay-hearted heroes in blue
Are a far finer product than wicked “old Q,”
Who ought to have lived in a prison on skilly
Instead of a palace in mid Piccadilly.
The women are splendid, so quiet and strong,
As with resolute purpose they hurry along—
Excepting the flappers, who chatter as shrilly
As parrots let loose to distract Piccadilly.
Thus I muse as I watch with a reverent eye
The New Generation sweep steadily by,
And judge him an ass or a born Silly Billy
Who’d barter the New for the Old Piccadilly.
TO “MARTIN ROSS”
(After reading “Irish Memories.”)
Two Irish cousins greet us here
From Bushe “the silver-tongued” descended,
Whose lives for close on thirty year
Were indistinguishably blended;
Scorning the rule that holds for cooks,
They pooled their brains and joined their forces,
And wrote a dozen gorgeous books
On men and women, hounds and horses.
They superseded Handley Cross;
They glorified the “hunting fever”;
They purged their pages of the dross,
While bettering the fun, of Lever;
With many a priceless turn of phrase
They stirred us to Homeric laughter,
When painting Ireland in the days
Before Sinn Fein bewitched and “strafed” her.
With them we watched good Major Yeates
Contending with litigious peasants,
With “hidden hands” within his gates,
With claims for foxes and for pheasants;
We saw Leigh Kelway drop his chin—
That precious English super-tripper—
In shocked amazement drinking in
The lurid narrative of Slipper.
Philippa’s piercing peacock squeals,
Uttered in moments of expansion;
The grime and splendour of the meals
Of Mrs. Knox and of her mansion;
The secrets of horse-coping lore,
The loves of Sally and of Flurry—
All these delights and hundreds more
Are not forgotten in a hurry.
Yet the same genial pens that freight
Our memories with joyous magic
Gave us the tale of Francie’s fate—
So vulgar, lovable and tragic;
Just to the land that gave them birth
They showed her smiling, sad and sullen,
And turning from the paths of mirth
Probed the dark soul of Charlotte Mullen.
Alas! the tie, so close, so dear,
Two years ago death rent asunder;
Hushed is the voice so gay and clear
Which moved us once to joy and wonder;
Yet, though they chronicle a loss
Whose pang no lapse of time assuages,
The spirit of brave “Martin Ross”
Shines like a star throughout these pages.
TO STEPHEN LEACOCK
(Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal, and author of “Further Foolishness” and other notable works of humour.)
The life that is flagrantly double,
Conflicting in conduct and aim,
Is seldom untainted by trouble
And commonly closes in shame;
But no such anxieties pester
Your dual existence, which links
The functions of don and of jester—
High thoughts and high jinks.
Your earliest venture perhaps is
Unique in the rapture intense
Displayed in these riotous Lapses
From all that could savour of sense,
Recalling the “goaks” and the gladness
Of one whom we elders adored—
The methodical midsummer madness
Of Artemus Ward.
With you, O enchanting Canadian,
We laughed till you gave us a stitch
In our sides at the wondrous Arcadian
Exploits of the indolent rich;
We loved your satirical sniping,
And followed, far over “the pond,”
The lure of your whimsical piping
Behind the Beyond.
In place of the squalor that stretches
Unchanged o’er the realist’s page,
The sunshine that glows in your Sketches
Is potent our griefs to assuage;
And when, on your mettlesome charger,
Full tilt against reason you go,
Your Lunacy’s finer and Larger
Than any I know.
The faults of ephemeral fiction,
Exotic, erotic or smart,
The vice of delirious diction,
The latest excesses of Art—
You flay in felicitous fashion,
With dexterous choice of your tools,
A scourge for unsavoury passion,
A hammer for fools.
And yet, though so freakish and dashing,
You are not the slave of your fun,
For there’s nobody better at lashing
The crimes and the cant of the Hun;
Anyhow, I’d be proud as a peacock
To have it inscribed on my tomb:
“He followed the footsteps of Leacock
In banishing gloom.”
TO “BARTIMEUS”
(From a grateful Landsman.)
Although the movements of the sea
Have always been a grief to me
And still at times disastrously
Affect my corpus vile,
Sailors of high and low degree
I long have honoured highly.
But now we honour them far more
Than ever in the days of yore
For all they’re doing in the War
To guard and shield and free us;
And this is where the man on shore
Can learn from “Bartimeus.”
For lately, when I couldn’t stick
A “fearless” book which made me sick
And positively long to kick
The author to the ceiling,
By luck I chanced on your Long Trick
And found immediate healing.
Relentless realists protest
You only have one type—the best,
Drawn from the Islands of the Blest—
Of comrades, sons and mothers;
They’d rather see you foul your nest
Than praise the “band of brothers.”
No matter; leave their ink to flow;
It cannot work you weal or woe;
The verdict of the men who know
The truth in its essentials
Should make the armchair critic slow
To challenge your credentials.
The naval officer you paint
Is not at all a plaster saint;
He doesn’t always brook restraint;
He isn’t prim or stolid;
But still he’s void of any taint
That’s mean or low or squalid.
And then you write of wondrous things
That pluck our hearts’ most secret strings—
The tender grace that childhood flings
On scenes of stern endeavour;
The news that joy and comfort brings
Or chills the heart for ever.
So when young writers, void of ruth,
Portray the flower of England’s youth
As ill-conditioned and uncouth—
In short as Huns might see us—
I turn for solace and for truth
To you, good “Bartimeus.”
ON RE-READING “BARCHESTER TOWERS”
In days when Bellona less madly
The wheels of her chariot drave,
To you, Father Anthony, gladly
My doggerel homage I gave;
And again uncontrollably yearning
For solace in desolate hours
I find a brief respite in turning
To Barchester Towers.
How good are the women, how various,
As slowly their natures unfold!—
The feudal Miss Thorne; the gregarious
And amiable Eleanor Bold;
Mrs. Quiverful, dauntless though dowdy,
With fourteen young ravens to feed,
Who managed to melt Mrs. Proudie,
So great was her need.
Mrs. Proudie, of course, is prodigious,
A terror to friends and to foes,
Ambitious, correctly religious,
Yet leading her lord by the nose;
Very far from an angel or jewel,
Very near to a feminine Pope,
And priceless in waging the duel
That smashed Mr. Slope.
And who would not willingly linger
With you, O Signora, who twirled
Round the tip of your white little finger
Staid clerics and men of the world!
Commanding the spells of a Circe;
Bewitching, though crippled and lame;
Redeeming your malice with mercy
And playing the game.
The clergy—Tractarian, Erastian,
Low Churchmen—you faithfully paint
Reveal to our view no Sebastian,
No martyr, and hardly a saint;
Though perhaps, by so freely discarding
Preferment and riches and fame,
The guileless and good Mr. Harding
Is worthy the name.
You looked upon country and city
With kindly and tolerant eyes;
You never set out to be witty,
Though seldom you failed to be wise;
You were neither ornate nor elliptic,
But most unaffectedly shrewd,
For the art that is consciously cryptic
You strictly tabooed.
Your outlook is certainly narrowed
To lives that are never sublime;
Our hearts are not haunted or harrowed
With desperate anguish or crime;
But a mutual trust is for ever
’Twixt author and reader maintained,
And we know all along we shall never
Be wantonly pained.
“BLEAK HOUSE”
There was a time when, posing as a purist,
I thought it fine to criticize and crab
Charles Dickens as a crude caricaturist,
Who laid his colours on too thick and slab,
Who lacked the temper of a judge or jurist
And made life lurid when it should be drab;
In short I branded as a brilliant dauber
The man who gave us Pecksniff and Micawber.
True, there are blots—like spots upon the sun—
And genius, lavish of imagination,
In sheer profusion always has outrun
The bounds of strict artistic concentration;
But when detraction’s worst is said and done,
How much remains for fervent admiration,
How much that never palls or wounds or sickens
(Unlike some moderns) in great generous Dickens!
And in Bleak House, the culminating story
That marks the zenith of his swift career,
The sovereign qualities that won him glory,
As writer and reformer, all appear:
Righteous resentment of abuses hoary,
Of pomp and cant, self-centred, insincere;
And burning sympathy that glows unchecked
For those who sit in darkness and neglect.
Who, if his heart be not of steel or stone,
Can read unmoved of Charley or of Jo;
Of dear Miss Flite, who, though her wits be flown,
Has kept a soul as pure as driven snow;
Of the fierce “man from Shropshire” overthrown
By Law’s delays; of Caddy’s inky woe;
Or of the alternating fits and fluster
That harass the unhappy slavey, Guster?
And there are scores of characters so vivid
They make us friends or enemies for life:
Hortense, half-tamed she-wolf, with envy livid;
The patient Snagsby and his shrewish wife;
The amorous Guppy, who poor Esther chivvied;
Tempestuous Boythorn, revelling in strife;
Skimpole, the honey-tongued artistic cadger;
And that tremendous woman, Mrs. Badger.
No wonder then that, when we seek awhile
Relief and respite from War’s strident chorus,
Few books more swiftly charm us to a smile,
Few books more truly hearten and restore us
Than his, whose art was potent to beguile
Thousands of weary souls who came before us—
No wonder, when the Huns, who ban our fiction,
Were fain to free him from their malediction.
LINES ON A NEW HISTORY
Weary of Macaulay, never nodding,
Weary of the stodginess of Stubbs,
Weary of the scientific plodding
Of the school that only digs and grubs;
I salute, with grateful admiration
Foreign to the hireling eulogist,
Chesterton’s red hot self-revelation
In the guise of England’s annalist.
Here is no parade of erudition,
No pretence of calm judicial tone,
But the stimulating ebullition
Of a sort of humanized cyclone;
Unafraid of flagrant paradoxes,
Unashamed of often seeing red,
Here’s a thinker who the compass boxes
Standing most at ease upon his head.
Yet with all this acrobatic frolic
There’s a core of sanity behind
Madness that is never melancholic,
Passion never cruel or unkind;
And, although his wealth of purple patches
Some precisians may excessive deem,
Still the decoration always matches
Something rich and splendid in the theme.
Not a textbook—that may be admitted—
Full of dates and Treaties and of Pacts,
For our author cannot be acquitted
Of a liberal handling of his facts;
But a stirring proof of Britain’s title,
Less in Empire than in soul, of “Great,”
And a frank and generous recital
Of “the glories of our blood and State.”
TO MY GODSON
(Aged six weeks.)
Small bundle, enveloped in laces,
For whom I stood sponsor last week,
When you slept, with the pinkest of faces,
And never emitted a squeak;
Though vain is the task of illuming
The Future’s inscrutable scroll,
I cannot refrain from assuming
A semi-prophetical rôle.
I predict that in paths Montessorian
Your infantile steps will be led,
And with modes which are Phrygian and Dorian
Your musical appetite fed;
You’ll be taught how to dance by a Russian,
“Eurhythmics” you’ll learn from a Swiss,
How not to behave like a Prussian—
No teaching is needed for this!
Will you learn Esperanto at Eton?
Or, if Eton by then is suppressed,
Be sent to grow apples or wheat on
A ranche in the ultimate West?
Will you aim at a modern diploma
In civics or commerce or stinks?
Inhale the Wisconsin aroma
Or think as the humanist thinks?
Will you learn to play tennis from Covey
Or model your stroke on Jay Gould?
Will you play the piano like Tovey
Or by gramophone records be schooled?
Will you golf, or will golfing be banished
To answer the needs of the plough,
And links from the landscape have vanished
To pasture the sheep and the cow?
Your taste in the region of letters
I only can dimly foresee,
But guess that from metrical fetters
The verse you’ll affect must be free;
And I shan’t be surprised or astounded
If your generation rebels
Against adulation unbounded
Of Shaw and of Bennett and Wells.
Upholding ancestral tradition
Your uncle has booked you at Lord’s,
But I doubt if you’ll sate your ambition
Athletic on well-levelled swards;
No, I rather opine that you’ll follow
The lead that we owe to the Wrights,
And soar like the eagle or swallow
On far and adventurous flights.
THE HOUSE-MASTER
Four years I spent beneath his rule,
For three of which askance I scanned him,
And only after leaving school
Came thoroughly to understand him;
For he was brusque in various ways
That jarred upon the modern mother,
And scouted as a silly craze
The theory of the “elder brother.”
Renowned at Cambridge as an oar
And quite distinguished as a wrangler,
He felt incomparably more
Pride in his exploits as an angler;
He held his fishing on the Test
Above the riches of the Speyers,
And there he lured me, as his guest,
Into the ranks of the “dry-flyers.”
He made no fetish of the cane
As owning any special virtue,
But held the discipline of pain,
When rightly earned, would never hurt you;
With lapses of the normal brand
I think he dealt most mercifully,
But chastened with a heavy hand
The sneak, the liar and the bully.
We used to criticize his boots,
His simple tastes in food and fiction,
His everlasting homespun suits,
His leisurely old-fashioned diction;
And yet we had the saving nous
To recognize no worse disaster
Could possibly befall the House
Than the removal of its Master.
For though his voice was deep and gruff,
And rumbled like a motor-lorry,
He showed the true angelic stuff
If anyone was sick or sorry;
So when pneumonia, doubly dread,
Of breath had nearly quite bereft me,
He watched three nights beside my bed
Until the burning fever left me.
He served three Heads with equal zeal
And equal absence of ambition;
He knew his power, and did not feel
The least desire for recognition;
But shrewd observers, who could trace
Back to their source results far-reaching,
Saw the true spirit of the race
Embodied in his life and teaching.
The War’s deep waters o’er him rolled
As he beheld Young England giving
Life prodigally, while the old
Lived on without the cause for living;
And yet he never heaved a sigh
Although his heart was inly riven;
He only craved one boon—to die
In harness, and the boon was given.
THE OLD MATRON
A stone’s-throw from the College gate
There lives a very noble lady;
A cottage-lawn her whole estate,
Without a tree to keep it shady;
For thirty years she served the school
In quite a number of positions,
And by her character and rule
Upheld its very best traditions.
School generations came and went,
Head followed Head—but in this story
’Tis foreign to my main intent
To say which gained the greatest glory;
Enough that minds of every size,
Hustlers and scholars, bloods and boobies,
All came in time to recognize
Her price was far above all rubies.
For, though immersed in household cares
And such extremely mundane matters
As washing, packing and repairs
Of wardrobes normally in tatters,
She found with unobtrusive tact
A hundred ways of help and healing,
And never overlooked an act
Of cruelty or double-dealing.
Her office and her Spartan breed
Forbade her to be sentimental,
But in an hour of real need
She could be wonderfully gentle;
To fashion, to the swift or strong
She was incapable of truckling,
But helped the lonely soul along
And comforted the ugly duckling.
Robust in body and in mind,
Free from all feminine caprices,
Seeing the best in all her kind,
Though loving nephews more than nieces,
She made no pets; if haply one
Appealed to her beyond another,
It was the orphan or the son
Neglected by a selfish mother.
Too fond to quit a scene so dear,
Too wise to fancy she was slighted,
Loth to intrude or interfere,
Though always helpful when invited,
She is the first whom boys on leave
Greet when they seek their alma mater,
The last they part from on the eve
Of their return to trench and crater.
For in her strong and homely face,
Her life serene and self-forgetting,
They see the Genius of the Place
Incarnate in a human setting;
And, though they readily would own
Their debt to Founder, Saint and Patron,
Keep in their heart of hearts a throne
Of special glory for the Matron.