This Mortal Coil | Page 3

To be quite candid, I've written too many of them."
"If criticism in literature's like 'criticism in art," the young painter rejoined, smiling, "why, with the one usual polite exception of yourself, Massinger, I can't say 1 think very much of the critics. But what do you mean, I should like to know, by saying you don't care for 'your own verses? Surely no man can do anything great, in literature or art or in shoe-blacking or pig-sticking, if it comes to that unless he thoroughly believes in his own vocation."
Massinger laughed a musical laugh. "In shoe-blacking or pig-sticking," he said, with a delicate curl of his thin lip?, "that's no doubt true; but in verse-making, query? Who on earth at the present day could even pretend to himself to believe in poetry? Time was, I dare say though I'm by no means sure of it when the bard, hoary old impostor, was a sort of prophet, and went about the world with a harp in his hand, and a profound conviction in his innocent old heart that when he made 'Sapphic' rhyme to 'traffic,' or produced a sonnet on the theme of 'Catullus,' 'lull us,' and 'cull us,' he was really and truly enriching humanity with a noble gift of divine poesy. If the amiable old humbug could actually bring himself to believe in his soul that stringing together fourteen lines into an indifferent piece, or balancing 'mighty' to chime with 'Aphrodite,' in best Swinburnian style, was fulfilling his appointed function in the scheme of the universe, I'm sure I should be the last to interfere with the agreeable delusion under which (like the gentlemen from Argos in Horace) he must have been laboring. It's so delightful to believe in anything, that for my own part, I wouldn't attempt to insinuate doubts into the mind of a contented Buddhist or a devout worshiper of Mumbo Jumbo."
"But surely you look upon yourself as a reaction against this modern school of Swinburnians and ballad-mongers, don't you?" Relf said, with a shrug.
"Of course I do. Byron's my man. I go back to the original inspiration of the romantic school. It's simpler, and it's easier. But what of that? Our method's all the same at bottom, after all. Who in London in this nineteenth century can for a moment affect to believe in the efficacy of poetry? Look at this last new volume of my own, for example! You won't look at it, of course, I'm well aware, but that's no matter : nobody ever does look at my immortal works, I'm only too profoundly conscious.
I cut them myself in a dusty copy at all the libraries, in order to create a delusive impression on the mind of the public that I've had at least a solitary reader. But let that pass. Look, metaphorically, I mean, and not literally, at this last new volume of mine! How do you think a divine bard does it? Simply by taking a series of rhymes 'able,' and 'stable,' and 'table,' and 'cable;' 'Mabel,' and 'Babel,' and 'fable,' and 'gable' and weaving them all together cunningly by a set form into a Procrustean mold to make up a poem. ' Perhaps 'gable,' which you've mentally fixed upon for the fourth line, won't suit the sense. Very well, then; you must do your best to twist something reasonable, or at least inoffensive, out of 'sable' or 'label,' or 'Cain and Abel,' or anything else that will make up the rhmye and complete the meter."
"And that is your plan, Massinger?"
"Yes, all this' last lot of mine are done like that: just bouts rimes I admit the fact; for what's all poetry but bouts rimes in the highest perfection? Mechanical, mechanical. I draw up a lot of lists of rhymes beforehand : 'kirtle,' and 'myrtle,' and 'hurtle,' and 'turtle' (those are all original); 'paean,' 'Aegan,' 'plebeian,' and 'Tean' (those are fairly new); 'battle,' and 'cattle,' and 'prattle,' and 'rattle' (those are all commonplace); and then, when the divine afflatus seizes me, I take out the -lists and con them over, and weave them up into an undying song for future generations to go wild about and comment upon. 'What profound thought,' my unborn Malones and Furnivalls and Leos will ask confidingly in their learned editions, 'did the immortal bard mean to convey by this obscure couplet?' I'll tell you in confidence. He meant to convey the abstruse idea that 'passenger' was the only English word he could find in the dictionary at all like a rhyme to the name of 'Massinger'?"
Warren Relf looked up at him a little uneasily. "I don't like to hear you run down poetry like that," he said, with an evident tinge of disapprobation. "I'm not a poet myself, of course; but still I'm sure it isn't