Hawthorn and Lavender | Page 9

old-world bloom:
When speech was
elegant and talk was fit,
For slang had not been canonised as wit;

When manners reigned, when breeding had the wall,
And
Women--yes!--were ladies first of all;
When Grace was conscious of
its gracefulness,
And man--though Man!--was not ashamed to dress.

A brave formality, a measured ease
Were his--and hers--whose
effort was to please.
And to excel in pleasing was to reign,
And, if
you sighed, never to sigh in vain.
But then, as now--it may be, something more--
Woman and man were
human to the core.
The hearts that throbbed behind that brave attire

Burned with a plenitude of essential fire.
They too could risk, they
also could rebel:
They could love wisely--they could love too well.

In that great duel of Sex, that ancient strife
Which is the very central
fact of life,
They could--and did--engage it breath for breath,
They
could--and did--get wounded unto death.
As at all times since time
for us began
Woman was truly woman, man was man,
And joy and
sorrow were as much at home
In trifling _TUNBRIDGE_ as in
mighty _ROME_.
Dead--dead and done with! Swift from shine to shade
The roaring

generations flit and fade.
To this one, fading, flitting, like the rest,

We come to proffer--be it worst or best--
A sketch, a shadow, of one
brave old time;
A hint of what it might have held sublime;
A dream,
an idyll, call it what you will,
Of man still Man, and woman--Woman
still!
II. RICHARD SAVAGE
_By J. M. Barrie and H. B. Marriott Watson_, _Criterion Theatre_,
_April_ 16, 1891.
To other boards for pun and song and dance!
Our purpose is an essay
in romance:
An old-world story where such old-world facts
As hate
and love and death, through four swift acts--
Not without gleams and
glances, hints and cues,
From the dear bright eyes of the Comic
Muse!--
So shine and sound that, as we fondly deem,
They may
persuade you to accept our dream:
Our own invention,
mainly--though we take,
Somewhat for art but most for interest's sake

One for our hero who goes wandering still
In the long shadow of
_PARNASSUS HILL_;
Scarce within eyeshot; but his tragic shade

Compels that recognition due be made,
When he comes knocking at
the student's door,
Something as poet, if as blackguard more.
Poet and blackguard. Of the first--how much?
As to the second, in
quite perfect touch
With folly and sorrow, even shame and crime,

He lived the grief and wonder of his time!
Marked for reproaches
from his life's beginning;
Extremely sinned against as well as sinning;

Hack, spendthrift, starveling, duellist in turn;
Too cross to cherish
yet too fierce to spurn;
Begrimed with ink or brave with wine and
blood;
Spirit of fire and manikin of mud;
Now shining clear, now
fain to starve and skulk;
Star of the cellar, pensioner of the bulk;
At
once the child of passion and the slave;
Brawling his way to an
unhonoured grave--
That was _DICK SAVAGE_! Yet, ere his ghost
we raise
For these more decent and less desperate days,
It may be

well and seemly to reflect
That, howbeit of so prodigal a sect,
Since
it was his to call until the end
Our greatest, wisest Englishman his
friend,
'Twere all-too fatuous if we cursed and scorned
The strange,
wild creature _JOHNSON_ loved and mourned.
Nature is but the oyster--Art's the pearl:
Our _DICK_ is neither
sycophant nor churl.
Not as he was but as he might have been
Had
the Unkind Gods been poets of the scene,
Fired with our fancy,
shaped and tricked anew
To touch your hearts with love, your eyes
with rue,
He stands or falls, ere he these boards depart,
Not as dead
Nature but as living Art.
III. ADMIRAL GUINEA
_By W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson_,
_Avenue Theatre_,
_Monday_, _November_ 29, 1897.
Spoken by Miss ELIZABETH ROBINS.
Once was an Age, an Age of blood and gold,
An Age of shipmen
scoundrelly and bold--
_BLACKBEARD_ and _AVORY_,
_SINGLETON_, _ROBERTS_, _KIDD_:
An Age which seemed, the
while it rolled its quid,
Brave with adventure and doubloons and
crime,
Rum and the Ebony Trade: when, time on time,
Real Pirates,
right Sea-Highwaymen, could mock
The carrion strung at
_EXECUTION DOCK_;
And the trim Slaver, with her raking rig,

Her cloud of sails, her spars superb and trig,
Held, in a villainous
ecstasy of gain,
Her musky course from _BENIN_ to the _MAIN_,

And back again for niggers:
When, in fine,
Some thought that _EDEN_ bloomed across the Line,

And some, like _COWPER'S NEWTON_, lived to tell
That
through those parallels ran the road to Hell.
Once was a pair of Friends, who loved to chance
Their feet in any

by-way of Romance:
They, like two vagabond schoolboys, unafraid

Of stark impossibilities, essayed
To make these Penitent and
Impenitent Thieves,
These _PEWS_ and _GAUNTS_, each man of
them with his sheaves Of humour, passion, cruelty, tyranny, life,
Fit
shadows for the boards; till in the strife
Of dream with dream, their
Slaver-Saint came true,
And their Blind Pirate, their resurgent
_PEW_
(A figure of deadly farce in his new birth),
Tap-tapped his
way from _ORCUS_ back to earth;
And so, their Lover and his Lass
made one,
In their best prose this _Admiral_ here was done.
One of this Pair sleeps till the crack of doom
Where the great
ocean-rollers