A PHILISTINE PÆAN;
Or, The Triumph of the Timid One.
At last! I see signs of a turn in the tide,
And O, I perceive it with infinite gratitude.
No more need I go with a crick in my side
In attempts to preserve a non-natural attitude.
Something has changed in the season, somewhere;
I'm sure I can feel a cool whiff of fresh air!
Mental malaria worse than the grippe
Has asphyxiated my mind, or choke-damped it.
The plain honest truth has been strange to my lip;
I've shammed it, and fudged it, humbugged it and vamped it
Till I wasn't I, self-respect was all gone,
And I hadn't a taste that I dared call my own.
I do not love horror. I do not like muck;
And mystical muddle to me is abhorrent.
In Stygian shallows long time I have stuck,
Or, like a dead dog on a sewage-fouled torrent,
Have gone with the stream; but beyond the least doubt
I'm grateful—so much—for a chance to creep out.
Egomania it seems then is not the last word
Of latter-day wisdom! By Jove I am glad!
I always did feel it was highly absurd
To worship the maudlin, and aim at the mad;
And now, there's a chance for the decent again,
One may relish one's Dickens, yet not seem insane!
The ghoulish-grotesque, and the grimy-obscure,
I have tried to gloat on in poem and prose,
But oh! all the while there seemed something impure
In the sniff of the thing that tormented my nose;
And as to High Art—well, to me it seemed high,
Like an over-hung hare—only food for the fly.
Yet I didn't dare say that I felt it to be
Pseudo-sphinxian fudge, and sheer Belial bosh;
Or that after Art-babble at five o'clock tea,
I felt that the thing I most craved was—a wash;
Because in the view of the Mystical School,
That would just write you down a mere Philistine fool.
I am not quite sure that I quite understand
How they've suddenly found all our fads are degenerate;
Why Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Verlaine, Sarah Grand,
Tolstoi, Grant Allen, Zola, are "lumped"—but, at any rate,
I know I'm relieved from one horrible bore,—
I need not admire what I hate any more.
