Or is your cup habitually brimming With water from the Heliconian fount? Then remember the hubristic, the profane, the pugilistic, Are the only things in poetry that count. So select a tragic argument, ensuring The maximum expenditure of gore, And the epithets "arresting," "unalluring," "Elemental" will re-echo as before.
But if your bent propels you into fiction, You should clearly and completely understand That your duty in a novel is not to soar, but grovel, If you want it to be profitably banned. So be lavish and effusive in suggesting A malignant and mephitic atmosphere, And you're sure to be applauded as "arresting," "Elemental," "unalluring," and "sincere."
[Sidenote: _Mr. Gosse and the Georgian Poets_]
In the same year Mr. Edmund Gosse had indulged in some caustic criticism of the Poetry of the Future. Mr. Gosse had said that "the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our poetry." Also that "verses of excellent quality in this primitive manner can now be written by any smart little boy in a grammar school." Hence a squib in which _Punch_ makes disrespectful fun of "the Sainte-Beuve of the House of Lords," who, it may be added, has since made his peace with the young lions whom he had treated so disrespectfully. In 1913 the cult of Rabindranath Tagore had become fashionable. Here was an Oriental poet who sedulously eschewed the flamboyant exuberance of the westernized Indian, but _Punch_, while finding him a less fruitful theme for burlesque than the Babu immortalized by Mr. Anstey, regarded his mystical simplicity as fair game for parody, and declined to worship at his shrine. Another foreign importation, Mr. Conrad--whom in virtue of long residence in England, marvellous command of our language and unequalled insight into the magic of the sea and the simple heroism of the British sailorman, we are proud to call one of ourselves and one of the glories of English fiction--fascinated _Punch_ in 1900, the year in which _Lord Jim_ appeared. _Punch_ was a little disconcerted at first by Mr. Conrad's oblique method of narration, but the fascination grew with advancing years.
I find few references to Continental authors, but may single out the "little English wreath" which _Punch_ added to the memorial tributes to Alphonse Daudet on his death in 1897. Daudet's affinities with Dickens, always one of _Punch's_ heroes, naturally appealed to him apart from the humour of _Tartarin_ and the masterly studies of the Second Empire which Daudet had seen from the inside as one of the Duc de Morny's private secretaries. Towards American writers _Punch_ was almost uniformly sympathetic. It is true that he appreciated the earlier and American manner of Henry James more than the later cosmopolitan phase which began with _The Portrait of a Lady_. But during the short period in which _Punch_, in his "additional pages," published a number of short stories by various authors, Henry James was a contributor, and _Mrs. Medwin_ appeared in serial form in four successive numbers in August and September, 1901. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who died in 1894, is compared to Elia in the graceful memorial stanzas modelled on "The Last Leaf." Mr. W. D. Howells's papers on London and England in _Harper's Magazine_ in 1904 prompt a generous acknowledgment of their reasonableness, sanity and humour, together with an expression of amazement at the productivity of American short-story writers, mostly in the manner of Mr. Henry James. _Punch_, both then and afterwards, refused to take Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox seriously, and described her essays, _The Woman of the World_, as "high-toned but serenely platitudinous; 'bland, passionate, but deeply religious.'" Mark Twain, on his visit to London in 1907, was welcomed with pen and pencil--in the cartoon "To a Master of his Art," where _Punch_ salutes him over the punch-bowl and in some verses, _à propos_ of the dinner at the Pilgrims' Club:--