Lauds and libels — A Closer Reading

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.

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.”

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?