No More Learning

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond
author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the
_errata_, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kinds of strata (only
these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born
well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed,
squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride
become an aversion,--my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a
change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an _o_'s being wry, a limp in
an _e_, or a cock in an _i_,--but to have the sweet babe of my brain
served in _pi! _ I am not queasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet
as that was quite out of the question.

In the edition now issued no pains are neglected, and my verses, as
orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the public's
own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a
character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one,
has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine,
whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking
together, would not be _my_ way. I can hardly tell whether a
question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune
agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though
not the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying
and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not
found so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side
or t'other.

For my other _anonymi_, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a
caricature, and what by a portrait. There _are_ those who think it is
capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, but
the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see
something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women
nor men for their gender, nor own any sex in a pen. I choose just to
hint to some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are
always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two
parties also to every good laugh.




A FABLE FOR CRITICS


Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;
Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,
And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;
And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her,
He somehow or other had never forgiven her;
Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,
Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic, 10
And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over
By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.
'My case is like Dido's,' he sometimes remarked;
'When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as _she_ thought--but (ah, how Fate mocks! )
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,--
You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!
What romance would be left? --who can flatter or kiss trees? 20
And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,--
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood?
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough!
If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right,
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite. ' 30

Now, Daphne--before she was happily treeified--
Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,
And when she expected the god on a visit
('Twas before he had made his intentions explicit),
Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,
To look as if artlessly twined in her hair,
Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,
Like the day breaking through, the long night of her tresses;
So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,
Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table 40
(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,
Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),--
He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,
As I shall at the----, when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I've been spinning,
I've got back at last to my story's beginning:
Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,
As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,
Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,
We read of his verses--the Oracles, namely,-- 50
(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,
For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,
They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,
And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors
Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,--)
First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is
Would induce a mustache, for you know he's _imberbis;_
Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position
Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;
At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately, 60
And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;
'Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding felonious,--
Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?
Look well to your seat, 'tis like taking an airing
On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;
It leads one, 'tis true, through the primitive forest,
Grand natural features, but then one has no rest;
You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,
When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,--
Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any? ' 70
--Here the laurel leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.

'Oh, weep with me, Daphne,' he sighed, 'for you know it's
A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!
But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,
She never will cry till she's out of the wood!
What wouldn't I give if I never had known of her?
'Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over:
If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,
I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,
And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her.