CHAPTER XV.--CONTAINS A DISQUISITION ON MODERN POETRY, AND AFFORDS THE

READER A PEEP BEHIND THE EDITORIAL CURTAIN.

The position in which Frere had placed himself prevented Bracy from discerning his features as he entered, and he accordingly accosted his visitor as follows:--

“My dear sir, I am really distressed to have kept you waiting, but as you arrived I was just jotting down the result of a little flirtation with the Muse.”

“And that is it, I suppose?” observed Frere, turning his face towards the speaker and pointing to the document before alluded to.

“Why, Frere, is it you, man?” exclaimed Bracy in surprise. “As I’m a sinner, I took you for that learned elder, Dr.-------. My young imp told me you were a gentleman who wished to see me on particular business. If that juvenile devil takes to telling lies _to_ instead of _for_ me, I shall have to give him his due for once, in the shape of a sound caning.”

“You may spare yourself the trouble,” returned Frere, “as by some accident he has only spoken the truth this time; for I hope you don’t mean to insinuate that I am anything but a gentleman, and I have most assuredly come to you on business--that is, always supposing Mr. -------- of -------- Street has informed me correctly in regard to your editorial functions.”

“What! has the _cacoethes scribendi_ seized you also, and tempted you into the commission of some little act of light literature?” added Bracy.

“Thank goodness, no,” answered Frere. “I’m happy to say I’m not so far gone as all that comes to yet. No, this is a different case altogether,” and he then proceeded to inform his companion of Rose’s, application, and the necessity which existed to make her talents available for practical purposes.

“Magazine writing affords rather a shady prospect for realising capital in these days,” observed Bracy, shaking his head discouragingly. “Let’s look at the young lady’s interesting efforts. Have you ever seen her? Arundel’s sister ought to be pretty. What’s this? ‘The Preacher’s Address to the Soul.’ Why, it’s a sermon in rhyme. Heaven help the girl! what’s she thinking of?”

“Read it and you’ll see. I like it very much,” returned Frere, slightly nettled at the reception his _protégées_ productions appeared likely to meet with.

“Oh! it’s a sermon clearly,” continued Bracy; “here’s something about vanity and the grave. I heard it all last Sunday at St. Chrysostom’s, only the fellow called it gwave and gwace. He’d picked up some conscientious scruple against the use of the letter R, I suppose. It’s quite wonderful, the new-fangled doctrines they develop nowadays. Hum--ha--‘Making the desert home,’--rather a young idea, eh? ‘Happy birds,’--don’t like that, it puts one too much in mind of ‘jolly dogs’ or ‘odd fish.’ I should have said dicky birds, if it had been me; that’s a very safe expression, and one that people are accustomed to. ‘The joy of flowers,’--what on earth does she mean by that, now? I should say nobody could understand that; for which reason, by the way, it’s the best expression I’ve seen yet. Poetry, to be admired in the present day, must be utterly incomprehensible. We insert very little, but that’s the rule I go by. If I can’t understand one word of a thing, I make a point of accepting it; it’s safe to become popular. ‘Love for time, Heaven for eternity,’--well, that’s all very, nice and pretty, but I’m sorry to say it won’t do; it’s not suited to the tone of the Magazine, you see.”

“I can’t say I _do_ see very clearly at present,” returned Frere; “what kind of poetry is it that you accept?”

“Oh, there are different styles. Now here’s a little thing I’ve got in the June part, ‘The Homeless Heart, by L. O. V. E.’ Her real name is Mary Dobbs, but she couldn’t very well sign herself M.D.; people would think she was a physician. She’s a very respectable young woman (such a girl to laugh), and engaged to an opulent stockbroker. Now listen:

“‘Homeless, forsaken,

Deeply oppress’d,

Raving, yet craving

Agony’s rest;

Bitterly hating,

Fondly relenting,

Sinning, yet winning

Souls to repenting;

When for her sorrow

Comes a to-morrow,

Shall she be bless’d?’”

“That’s a question I can’t take upon myself to answer,” interrupted Frere. “But if those are in the style you consider suited to the tone of your Magazine, it must be a very wonderful publication.”

“I flatter myself it is, rather,” replied Bracy complacently. “But that’s by no means the only style; here’s a thing that will go down with the million sweetly. Listen to this,” and as he spoke he extracted from a drawer a mighty bundle of papers labelled “Accepted Poetry,” and selecting one or two specimens from the mass, read as follows:--

“THE COUNTESS EMMELINE’S DISDAINMENT.”

“Bitter-black the winter’s whirlwind wail’d around the haunted hall,

Where the sheeted snow that fleeted fester’d on the mouldering wall.

“But his blacker soul within him childish calm appear’d to view,

And when gazing, ’twas amazing whence the sceptic terror grew.

“Then her voice, so silver-blended, to a trumpet-blast did swell,

As she task’d him when she asked him, ‘Mr. Johnson, is it well?’

“Ashen-white the curdled traitor paled before her eagle eye,

Whilst denying, in replying, deeper grew his perjury.”

“There! I can’t stand any more of that, at any price!” exclaimed Frere, putting his hands to his ears. “Unless you wish to make me seriously ill, spare me the infliction of those detestable compound adjectives.”

“My dear fellow, you’ve no taste,” returned Bracy. “Why, that’s written by one of our best contributors; an individual that will make Tennyson look to his laurels, and do the Brownings brown, one of these days. But if that’s too grand for you, here’s a little bit of pastoral simplicity may suit you better:--

“‘TO A HERBLET, NAME UNKNOWN.

‘Once upon a holiday,

Sing heigho;

Still with sportive fancy playing

While all nature was a-maying,

On a sunny bank I lay;

Where the happy grass did grow,

‘Neath the fragrant lime-tree row,

Sing heigho!

‘There a little fairy flower,

Sing heigho!

Glancing from its baby eyes

With a look of sweet surprise,

Grew beneath a bower,

Brought unto my soul the dawning

Of a mystic spirit warning,

Sing heigho!

‘Then I wept, and said, despairing,

Sing heigho!

Fate is dark, and earth is lonely,

And the heart’s young blossoms only

Render life worth bearing----”

“Now then, what’s the matter with you?” inquired Bracy, interrupting himself on seeing Frere snatch up his hat and umbrella.

“If you’re going to read any more of that, I’m off; that’s all,” returned Frere. “My powers of endurance are limited.”

“Oh, if you are positively such a Hottentot as to dislike it,” rejoined Bracy, “I’ll not waste any more of its sweet simplicity upon you; but, you’ll see, the gentle public will rave about it to an immense extent.”

“Now tell me honestly, Bracy--you don’t really admire that childish rubbish?”

Thus appealed to, Bracy’s face assumed an expression of most comical significance; and after pausing for a moment in indecision, he replied--

“Well, I’ve a sort of respect for your good opinion, Frere, and I don’t exactly like to send you away fancying me a greater ass than I am; so I’ll honestly confess that, what between affected Germanisms on the one hand and the puerilities of the Wordsworth-and-water school on the other, the poetry of the present day has sunk to a very low ebb indeed.”

“Then don’t you consider it the duty of every honest critic to point this out, and so guide and reform the public taste as to evoke from the ‘well of English undefiled’ a truer and purer style?” returned Frere earnestly.

“My dear fellow, that all sounds very well in theory, but in practice, I’m afraid (to use a metaphor derived from one of the humane and intellectual amusements of our venerated forefathers), that cock won’t fight. It may be all very well for some literary Don Quixote, with a pure Saxon taste and a long purse, to tilt at the public’s pet windmills, because he conceives them to be giant abuses. If he meets with a fall, he need only put his hand in his pocket and purchase a plaster, getting a triple shield of experience in for the money. But it is far otherwise with a magazine. If that is to continue in existence it must pay; in order to pay it must be rendered popular; to make a thing popular you must go with the stream of public opinion, and not against it. The only chance is to head the tide and turn it in the direction you desire. But to attempt that a man ought to possess first-rate talent, and I’m free to confess that I, for one, do not; and therefore, you see, as people must be amused, I’m very willing to amuse them in their own way, as long as I find it pleasant and profitable to do so. _Voila!_ do you comprehend?”

“I comprehend this much,” returned Frere gruffly, “that the ground of your argument is expediency and not principle; and I tell you plainly that does not suit me, and I’m afraid Miss Arundel is too much of my mind in that particular for her writings to suit your wonderful magazine; so the sooner I take my departure the better for your morning’s work.”

“Stay a moment, don’t get on stilts, man,” returned Bracy, resuming his examination of Rose’s papers. “Is there nothing but verses? What have we here? ‘My First Dinner-Party’--this seems more likely.”

He paused, and ran his eye over several of the pages, muttering from time to time as he went along, “Yes, good lively style--quick powers of observation--a very graphic touch--bravo! ha! ha! here, listen to this--

“‘Immediately before me stood a dish which even my inexperience believed itself able to recognise; it was jelly of some kind, with certain dark objects encased in it, as flies occasionally are in amber. These opaque portions I settled, in my own mind, must be preserved fruit, and accordingly (fearful lest, in my ignorance of fashionable dishes, I should say “yes” to some tremendous delicacy which might prove utterly impracticable), when invited to partake of it, I graciously signified my assent. Imagine my horror when, on putting the first mouthful to my lips, I discovered the jelly was savoury--_i.e_. all pepper and salt, and the creature embedded in it a fragment of some dreadful fish! Eating the thing was out of the question; the mere taste I had taken of it made me feel uncomfortable: an attempt to conceal it beneath the knife and fork proved utterly futile. I glanced at the butler, but he was too much absorbed in his own dignity and the dispensation of champagne to observe me; I gazed appealingly at a good-looking young footman, but he merely pulled up his shirt-collar foppishly, thinking he had made an impression; I even ventured to call, in a low voice, to the sprightly waiter who had eloped with my untouched plate of lamb five minutes before, but he did not hear me; and there I sat with a huge plateful of horrible food before me, which I could neither eat nor get rid of, “a cynosure for neighbouring eyes,” forced, as my fears suggested, to run the gauntlet of all the mocking glances of the assembled company.’”

“There,” continued Bracy, “I call that a stunning description; I could not have done it better myself. The girl writes so easily! Let me see, 18--25--28 lines in a page of manuscript; there’s not much of it, I think I can get it in. I want two pages of amusing matter in the fourth sheet.”

“Ahl something light, about two. Now I understand,” exclaimed Frere, pointing to the mysterious document on the table; “that was not a memorandum in regard to luncheon, then.”

“A what?” returned Bracy, shouting with laughter. “No,” he continued, as soon as he had in some measure recovered his composure, “that is the ‘make-up,’ as we call it, of the third and fourth sheets of the Magazine.”

“Indeed!” returned Frere. “I should think it must require a great deal of careful reflection to select suitable articles and arrange them properly.”

“Eh! no, not a bit; the thing’s simple enough when you once get in the way of it. Have plenty of variety, that’s the grand point--what one doesn’t like, another will. Take large shot for big birds, and small shot for little ones, and then you’ll bag the whole covey; that’s my maxim. Now, look here: first we begin with a scientific article, ‘Questions on Quicksilver.’ There’s not one reader in a hundred that can understand that paper when they’ve read it; and very few even of those who can take it in care two straws about quicksilver--why should they? But they all read it, because it’s a cheap way of getting up the necessary amount of scientific jargon to hash into small talk. I never look at that man’s papers myself; I know they’re safe, though I can’t understand a word of ’em--but they’re a great help to the Magazine. Then comes our friend, the ‘Homeless Heart.’ I put that in as a drop of romantic barley-sugar to soften the women’s throats after swallowing the science. Next we have ‘An Historical Parallel.’ Famous fellows they are; the principal dodge in writing them is to take an ‘entirely new reading of the character,’ as the actors say. In the present article, if I recollect right, they prove Cour-de-Lion to have been a hypocritical fanatic, and Cromwell a chivalric, magnanimous enthusiast. It’s safe to take, depend upon it. ‘L’Incomprise’ tells its own tale--it’s as close an imitation of Eugene Sue and George Sand as English morality will tolerate, though the invention of guttapercha, or some other elastic agent, enables even that stiff material nowadays to stretch to lengths which would astonish our grandmothers. Then comes the ‘Plea for the Industrial Classes’--a regular savage poke at the present Poor Law (we’re obliged to do a little bit of political economy as well as our neighbours, you know); it’s awfully heavy, but it will neutralise any ill effects ‘L’Incomprise’ may have had on fathers of families all the better. Lastly, there’s my own little thing, ‘Dog-cart Drives.’ Ahem! have you seen that?”

“Not I,” replied Frere; “I’ve no time for reading tra---- I mean novels and that sort of thing.”

“I believe it’s liked; I hear it’s a good deal talked about,” continued Bracy with an air of bashful self-complacency. “‘Bell’s Life’ spoke very handsomely of it last week; there were six whole lines devoted to it, I think. Upon my word I should like you to read it.”

At this moment Frere suddenly discovered that he had remained over his time, and should be too late for some deeply interesting experiments that were to come off that morning at what his companion termed his science shop; so receiving an assurance from Bracy that Rose’s sketch should be inserted in the Magazine, and that he would consider what would be her best mode of proceeding in regard to the poetry, the friends shook hands and parted, Frere promising to make himself acquainted with the subject-matter of “Dog-cart Drives” at an early opportunity.