The Wooden Horse

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 299, 9 March 1928, Page 14

The Wooden Horse

An Occasional Column And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the. crew laughing, and forgot his course. — J. E. Flecker. I LIKE Mr Mencken, His prose is so warm. If I read him discreetly He’ll do me no harm . . . This unmannerly robustious fellow with the slide-trombone style has just flung his sixth book of “Prejudices’* at the democrats, dolts, Cool-idge-worshippers, golf-players, professional patriots, Kiwanians, snooty ecclesiastics, great whales of literary science, earnest rhetoricians, Freudian cripples, morons, philosophers, quacks, and in general the gulled complacency and the gulling hypocrites and stuntera of the grand, gaudy, unapproachable United States of America. (“[ quote,’* as lan Hay’s Hindu said, complaining of the Scotch lawstudent’s threat to give him one damn good skelp in the eyeball—“l quote his ipsissima verba.”) What can you do but give a little yelp of happy surprise—you’re always surprised and never surprised at what Mencken says—when you And him referring to the ‘‘divine booziness’* of Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,’* etc.? (By the way, Mr Arthur Mee in his latest book of collected passages records his grati-

tude for permission, to quote from “Atalanta In Corydon,” and with a little more absent mindedness or luck it might have been “Atalanta in Wonderland.”) Mr Mencken. is pleading with America’s poets to compile a “Burial Service for the admittedly damned.’* He has attended, with, every discomfort, the “funeral orgies’* of a hater of rhetoric, who “left strict orders that not a word was to be said,’* and of a “Socialist of the militantly anti-clerical variety” who had threatened on his death-bed “to leap from his coffin with roars if a clergyman were hired to snuffle over him.” The Socialist colleagues who had been asked as substitutes to address the mourners had “prepared for the business by resorting to a bootlegger, and in consequence both of them were garrulous and injudicious” —one rehearsing the career of Karl Marx as a lesson for ambitious American boys, the other reciting 20 or 30 cantos of bad poetry from “The Freethinker.” Depressed by these experiences Mr Mencken bids the poets set to preparing a form which could be read over those who reject the prayer-book service, and are but poorly ministered to by such valedictories as the Knights of Pythias have framed. T point to Blake, Tennyson, Milton, Shelley. Keats, even Swinburne; what gaudy stuff for the purpose is in “Ave atque Vale,” “Tristram of Lyonessc,” and “Atalanta in Calydon!” There is here a sweet soothing, a healing rea; r>r mice, a divine booziness —in briei, all the stuff of A No. 1 poetry, . . . Such a libretto for the inescap«*d»ie last act would be humane and valuable. I renew my suggestion that the poets spit upon their hands and confect it at once. This Is very deplorable—one reads it through the cracks of one’s fingers, laid across one’s eyes; and indeed there is much worso which my delicate pencil has revolted against transcribing. But “divine booziness,” that is a phrase for which much, for which all else must be forgiven to this rambunctious (ip. verb.) writer. Mr Mencken says a kindly word for “the authors of the Book of Common Prayer.”

Though they were pods of great talent [they] certainly did not trust only to their private inspiration. They borrowed copiously from the old missals, and they borrowed, too, directly from Holy Writ. What they concocted finally was a composite, but it was very discreetly and delicately put together, and remains impregnable to this day. despite many furious efforts to undo it; and perhaps Mr Mencken would agree with George Belcher’ • Church Charlady: “I can’: make out why there’s all this to-do abou new prayer-books. Wot they wants, Mrs Green, Is new 'assocks.”

One may a*> well go od pottering about file graveyard a little longer. Mr Cecil Torr, in “Small Talk at Wreylam!,” adds one to the stock of admirable death-bed speeches. A bereaved husbanc was speaking of hie wife’s last illness. “Her sat up sudden in the bed, and saitli T bo ia-goin’ up the Clave.’ ILustleigh •Cleave! And I s«ith to her, ‘Thee •canst not go up the Clave: thee be adyin*. And her saith to me, ‘Ye wicked, domraed. old mon.’ Poor dear soul, they was the very last words as ever her spoke.” I suppose there are some whoso ears the sad, caressing whisper of Westminster Cloisters has not yet reached? This is it: Jane Lister Dear childc died OeLober 7th, 1688. 't'be “Epitaph on a Prodigal Son” was written by George Rylands: Here was I horn and here I lie In the quiet of the cowslip fields: ! ,’liafed. at the blue unchanging sky And the t ict of the cowslip fields. So I sought my fortune beyond the A 1::! tolled and travelled and lived a? ease -Vo:l . Seated and begged and starved, and I Came back to the blue unchanging -‘~nd the auict of the cowslip fields.

Once a sailor petitioned Queen Elizabeth for five ships to fight the Spaniards. This was a sentence in his petition: "The wings of man’s life ere clumed with the feathers of death.” J. H. E. S.