“I wish I could,” said I. “The two copies of verses which, as you know, without having read them, I contributed to the literature—I mean the writings—in connection with the war could scarcely be called pacific.”
“They were quite an effective medium for getting rid of his superfluous steam,” said Dorothy to him. “I made no attempt to prevent his writing them.”
“It would have been like sitting on the safety-valve, wouldn't it?” said he. “I think that literature would not have suffered materially if a good number of safety-valves had been sat upon by stouter wives of metre-engineers than you will ever be, O guardian lady of the Garden of Peace! The poets of the present hour have got much to recommend them to the kindly notice of readers of taste, but they have all fallen short of the true war note on their bugles. Perhaps when they begin to pipe of peace they will show themselves better masters of the reed than of the conch.”
“Whatever some of them may be——” I began, when he broke in.
“Say some of us, my friend: you can't dissociate yourself from your pals in the dock: you will be sentenced en bloc, believe me.”
“Well, whatever we may be we make a better show than the Marlborough Muses or the Wellington or the Nelson Muses did. What would be thought of The Campaign if it were to appear to-morrow, I wonder. But it did more in advancing the interests of Addison than the complete Spectator.”
“Yes, although some feeble folk did consider that one hit of it was verging on the blasphemous—that about riding on the whirlwind and directing the storm,” remarked Friswell; he had a good memory for things verging on the blasphemous.
“The best war poem is the one that puts into literary form the man in the street yelling 'hurrah!'” said I. “If the shout is not spontaneous, it sounds stilted and it is worthless.”
“I believe you,” said Friswell. “If your verse does not find an echo in the heart of the rabble that run after a soldiers' band, it is but as the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals that crash on the empty air. But touching the poets of past campaigns——”
“I was thinking of Scott's Waterloo,” said I; “yes, and Byron's stanzas in Childe Harold, and somebody's 'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay, We saw the Frenchmen lay—'the Frenchmen lav,' mind you—that's the most popular of all the lays, thanks to Braham's music and Braham's tenor that gave it a start. I think we have done better than any of those.”