Thomas Wingfold, Curate | Page 7

send Helen poetry I cannot
imagine, but that very morning she had received by post a small
volume of verse, which, although just out, and by an unknown author,
had already been talked of in what are called literary circles. Wingfold
had read some extracts from the book that same morning, and was
therefore not quite unprepared when Helen asked him if he had seen it.
He suggested that the poems, if the few lines he had seen made a fair
sample, were rather of the wailful order.
"If there is one thing I despise more than another," said Bascombe, "it
is to hear a man, a fellow with legs and arms, pour out his griefs into
the bosom of that most discreet of confidantes, Society, bewailing his
hard fate, and calling upon youths and maidens to fill their
watering-pots with tears, and with him water the sorrowful pansies and
undying rue of the race. I believe I am quoting."
"I think you must be, George," said Helen. "I never knew you venture
so near the edge of poetry before."
"Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!" returned Bascombe.
"--And then," he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, "what is it they
complain of? That some girls preferred a better man perhaps, or that a
penny paper once told the truth of their poetry."

"Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad," said Wingfold.
"But don't you think," he continued, "it is hardly worth while to be
indignant with them? Their verses are a relief to them, and do nobody
any harm."
"They do all the boys and girls harm that read them, and themselves
who write them more harm than anybody, confirming them in tearful
habits, and teaching eyes unused to weep. I quote again, I believe, but
from whom I am innocent. If I ever had a grief, I should have along
with it the decency to keep it to myself."
"I don't doubt you would, George," said his cousin, who seemed more
playfully inclined than usual. "But," she added, with a smile, "would
your silence be voluntary, or enforced?"
"What!" returned Bascombe, "you think I could not plain my woes to
the moon? Why not I as well as another? I could roar you as 'twere any
nightingale."
"You have had your sorrows, then, George?"
"Never anything worse yet than a tailor's bill, Helen, and I hope you
won't provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I remember a
fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine-party, who, alone
with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the part of the unheeded poet,
complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his generation. I
went into his room once, and found him with the tears running down
his face, a pot of stout half empty on the table, and his den all but
opaque with tobacco-smoke, reciting, with sobs--I had repeated the
lines so often before they ceased to amuse me, that I can never forget
them--
'Heard'st thou a quiver and clang? In thy sleep did it make thee start?
'Twas a chord in twain that sprang-- But the lyre-shell was my heart.'
He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed like a
locomotive."

"But it's not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see," said Helen, who
had a woman's weakness for the side attacked, in addition to a human
partiality for fair play.
"No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense," said Bascombe.
"He had been reading Heine," said Wingfold.
"And burlesquing him," returned Bascombe. "Fancy hearing one of the
fellow's heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his fiddle in the
press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have they any
anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good poetry."
"Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each
other?" asked Wingfold.
"I confess a leaning to that opinion," replied Bascombe, with a
half-conscious smile.
"What do you say of Horace, now?" suggested Wingfold.
"Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I
have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He
never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But
common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse."
"Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached
us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more enticing
acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking them up
to-day."
"That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,"
returned Bascombe. "For