"The British thoroughbred is not played out by any means. Look at the success of imported blood all over the world. Look at Phantom, the grandsire of Voltaire, and Bay Middleton——" Mr Bevan paused. He was addressing George Lambert, and suddenly found that he was addressing the entire dinner-table in one of those hiatuses of conversation in which every tongue is suddenly held.
"Yes," said Hamilton-Cox, continuing some desultory remarks on literature, in general, into which this eruption of stud book had broken; "but you see the old French ballads are for the most part by the greatest of all poets, Time. Beside those the greatest modern poems seem gaudy and Burlington Arcady,[Pg 224] if I may use the expression. An old folk-song that has been handed from generation to generation, played on, so to speak, like an old fiddle by all sorts of hands, gains a sweetness and richness never imagined by the simple-minded person who wrote it or invented it.
"You write poems?" asked Miss Morgan.
"My dear lady," sighed Hamilton-Cox, "nobody writes poems nowadays, or if they do they keep the fact a secret. I have a younger brother who writes poetry——"
"Thought you said no one wrote it."
"Younger brothers are nobodies. I say I have a younger brother, he writes most excellent verse—reams of it. Some years ago he would have been pursued by publishers. Well, only the other day he copied out some of his most cherished productions and approached a London publisher with them. He entered the office at five o'clock, and some few minutes later the people in Piccadilly were asking of each other, 'What's all that row in Vigo Street?' No, a publisher of to-day would as soon see a burglar in his office as a poet."
"I never took much stock in poetry," said[Pg 225] the practical Miss Morgan. "I'm like Mr Bevan."
"I can't stand the stuff," said Charles. "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, and all that sort of twaddle, makes me ill."
Pamela looked slightly pained. Charles was enjoying his dinner; Burgundy and Moselle had induced a slight flush to suffuse his countenance. If you are engaged and a gourmand never let your fiancée see you eat. A man mad drunk is to the sensitive mind a less revolting picture than a man "enjoying his food."
"I heard a man once," said Miss Morgan, "he was squiffy——"
"Lulu!"
"Well, he was; and he was reciting I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight. He'd got everything mixed, and had got as far as
"'I stood on the moon by bridgelight
As the church was striking the tower—'
when every one laughed, and he sat down—on another man's hat. That's the sort of poetry I like, something to make you laugh. Gracious! what's the good of manufacturing misery and letting it loose in little poems to[Pg 226] buzz round and torment people? isn't there enough misery ready made? Hood's Song of the Shirt always makes me cry."
"Hood," said Professor Wilson, "was a man of another age, a true poet. He could not have written his Song of the Shirt to-day; the decadence——"
"Now, excuse me," said Hamilton-Cox, "we have fought that question of decadence out, you and I. Hood, I admit, could not have written his Song of the Shirt to-day, simply because shirts are manufactured wholesale by machinery, and he would have to begin it. 'Whir—whir—whir,' which would not be poetry. Women slave at coats and waistcoats and other garments nowadays, and you could scarcely write a song of the waistcoat or a song of the pair of—you understand my point. Poetry is very false, the matchbox-maker is as deserving of the poet's attention as the shirt-maker, yet a poem beginning 'Paste, paste, paste' would be received with laughter, not with tears. You say we are decadents because we don't encourage poetry. I say we are not, we are simply more practical—poetry is to all intents and purposes dead——"
[Pg 227]
"Is it?" said George Lambert. "Is King Lear dead? I was crying over him last night, but it wasn't at his funeral I was crying. Is old Suckling dead? I bought a first edition of him some time ago, and the fact wasn't mentioned or hinted at in the verses. Is Sophocles dead? Old Maloney at Trinity pounded him into my head, and he's there now alive as ever; and if I was blind to-morrow, I'd still have the skies over his plays to look at and the choruses to hear. Ah no, Mr Cox, poetry is not dead, but they don't write it just now. They don't write it, but it's in every one's heart waiting to be tapped, only there's no man with an augur sharp enough and true enough to do the tapping."
Pamela looked pleased.
"I did not know that you were fond of poetry," she said.
"I love it," said Lambert, in a tone that reminded Charles Bevan of Fanny's tone when she declared her predilection for cats.
"I declare it's delightful," said Professor Wilson, "to find a man of the world who knows all about horses, and is a good [Pg 228]billiard-player, and all that, confessing a love for poetry."
"Perhaps Mr Lambert is a poet himself," said Hamilton-Cox, with a suspicion of a sneer, "or has written poetry."
"Poetry! yards of it," answered the accused with a mellow laugh, "when I was young and—wise. The first poem I ever wrote was all about the moon; I wrote it when I was eleven, and sent it to a housemaid. Oh, murder! but the things that we do when we are young."
"Did she read it?"
"She couldn't read; it was in the days before the Board schools and the higher education of women. She couldn't read, she was forty, and ugly as sin; and she boxed my ears and told my mother, and my mother told my father, and he leathered me. He said, 'I'll teach you to write poetry to housemaids.' But somehow," said Mr Lambert, admiring with one eye the ruby-tinted light in his glass of port, "somehow, with all his teaching, I never wrote a poem to a housemaid again."
"That must have been a loss to literature."
[Pg 229]
"Yes, but it was a gain to housemaids; and as housemaids seem the main producers of novels and poems nowadays, begad," said Mr Lambert, "it's, after all, a gain to literature."
"That's one for you, Cox," said Professor Wilson, and Hamilton-Cox laughed, as he could well afford to do, for his lucubrations bro............