’TWAS FIFTY YEARS AGO
(Lines suggested by an old Magazine.)
Published the year I went to school—
The second of life’s seven ages—
How fragrant of Victorian rule
Are these forgotten pages!
When meat and fruit were still uncanned;
When good Charles Dickens still was writing;
And Swinburne’s poetry was banned
As rather too exciting.
No murmurs of impending strife
Were heard, no dark suggestions hinted;
Our novelists still looked on life
Through spectacles rose-tinted;
And Paris, in those giddy years,
Still laughed at Offenbach and Schneider,
Blind to the doom of blood and tears,
With none to warn or guide her.
The index and the authors’ names,
Their stories and their lucubrations,
Recall old literary aims
And faded reputations;
We wonder at the influence
That Sala’s florid periods had on
His fellows, and the vogue immense
Of versatile Miss Braddon.
And yet I read Aurora Floyd
In youth with rapture quite unholy—
Not in the way that I enjoyed
Mince-pies or roly-poly;
While “G. A. S.” appeared to me
Like a Leonid fresh from starland,
Not the young lion that we see
Portrayed in Friendship’s Garland.
And there are tinklings of the lute
In orthodox decorous fashion,
But altogether destitute
Of “elemental” passion;
And illustrations which refrain
From all that verges on the shady,
But glorify the whiskered swain,
The lachrymose young lady.
The sirens of the “sixties” showed
No inkling of our modern Circes,
And swells had not evolved the code
That guides our precious Percys;
Woman, in short, was grave or gay,
But not a problem or a riddle,
And maidens still were taught to play
The harp and not the fiddle.
And writers in the main eschewed
All topics tending to disquiet,
All efforts to reorganize
Our dogmas or our diet;
You could not carp at Mendelssohn
Without creating quite a scandal,
And rag-time on the gramophone
Had not supplanted Handel.
Blameless and wholesome in their way,
At times agreeably subacid,
I love these records of a day
Long dead, but calm and placid;
And with a sigh I now replace
This ancient volume of Belgravia
And turn the “latest news” to face
Mutans amaris suavia.