A Satire Anthology

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Carolyn Wells

Год написания книги

2017

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…

This bard’s a Browning! there’s no doubt of that;
But, ah, ye gods, the sense! Are we so sure
If sense be sense unto our common-sense,
Low sense to higher, high to low, no sense
All sense to those, all sense no sense to these?
That’s where your poet tells! and you’ve no right
(Insensate sense with sensuous thought being mixed)
To ask analysis! How can else review,
Save in the dialect of his verse, be writ?
So write we: (would we might foresee the end!)
So has he taught us, i’ “The Ring and the Book,”
De gustibus, concerning taste, non est
There’s no – disputing, disputandum (Ha!
’Tis not so difficult) – and we submit.

…

This Album-book —
“Hail, sham obliquity, lugubrious plot!” —
Is well-nigh read; you end the tangle, smash!
Here’s Browning’s recipe: take heaps o’ hate,
Take boundless love, hydraulic-pressed, in bales,
Distilments keen of baseness and of pride,
And innocence and cunning; mix ’em well,
And put a body round ’em! Add the more
O’ this, or that, you have another – stay!
The sex don’t count; make female of the male,
Male female, all the better; let them meet,
Talk, love, hate, cross, till satisfied; then, kill!
So here: lord, finding situation tough
(Between two fires, hate and a horsewhip-threat),
Writes i’ the Album, goes without and waits.
Superb One, having read, takes hand of snob,
Accepts his love till death; then lord comes back.
What did he write? “Refinement every inch,
From brow to boot-end” – ’twas a threat to tell
The country curate of his wife’s disgrace —
He, the disgracer! Snob gets wild at that,
Screams, jumps, and clutches.

All at once we see
One character dead, but how, we don’t quite know.
Then she, Superb One, writes in Album, dies
By force of will (no hint of instrument!),
Leaving the snob alone and much surprised.
Cousin is heard without; but ere the door
Opens, the story closes. Only this remains,
The last conundrum, hardly guessable
By the unbrowninged mind. Since what it means,
If aught the meaning, means some other thing,
And that thing something else, but this not that,
Nor that the other; we adopt the lines
As most expressing what we fail express,
Our solemn verdict, handkerchief and all,
Upon the book.

…

The meaning, ask you, O ingenuous soul?
Why, were there such for you, what then were left
To puzzle brain with, pump conjecture dry,
And prove you little where the poet’s great?
Great must he be, you therefore little. Go!
The curtain falls, the candles are snuffed out:
End, damned obliquity, lugubrious plot!

Bayard Taylor.

THE POSITIVISTS

LIFE and the Universe show spontaneity:
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.

Wise are their teachers beyond all comparison,
Comte, Huxley, Tyndall, Mill, Morley, and Harrison.
Who will adventure to enter the lists
With such a squadron of Positivists?

Social arrangements are awful miscarriages;
Cause of all crime is our system of marriages.
Poets with sonnets, and lovers with trysts,
Kindle the ire of the Positivists.

Husbands and wives should be all one community,
Exquisite freedom with absolute unity.
Wedding-rings worse are than manacled wrists —
Such is the creed of the Positivists.

There was an ape in the days that were earlier;
Centuries passed, and his hair became curlier;
Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist —
Then he was Man, and a Positivist.

If you are pious (mild form of insanity),
Bow down and worship the mass of humanity.