’Twas Fifty Years Ago

(Lines suggested by an old Magazine.)

Published the year I went to school— The second of life’s seven ages— How fragrant of Victorian rule Are these forgotten pages! When meat and fruit were still uncanned; When good CHARLES DICKENS still was writing; And SWINBURNE’S poetry was banned As rather too exciting.

No murmurs of impending strife Were heard, no dark suggestions hinted; Our novelists still looked on life Through spectacles rose-tinted; And Paris, in those giddy years, Still laughed at OFFENBACH and SCHNEIDER, Blind to the doom of blood and tears, With none to warn or guide her.

The index and the authors’ names, Their stories and their lucubrations, Recall old literary aims And faded reputations; We wonder at the influence That SALA’S florid periods had on His fellows, and the vogue immense Of versatile Miss BRADDON.

And yet I read Aurora Floyd In youth with rapture quite unholy— Not in the way that I enjoyed Mince-pies or roly-poly; While “G. A. S.” appeared to me Like a Leonid fresh from starland, Not the young lion that we see Portrayed in Friendship’s Garland.

And there are tinklings of the lute In orthodox decorous fashion, But altogether destitute Of “elemental” passion; And illustrations which refrain From all that verges on the shady, But glorify the whiskered swain, The lachrymose young lady.

The sirens of the “sixties” showed No inkling of our modern Circes, And swells had not evolved the code That guides our precious Percys; Woman, in short, was grave or gay, But not a problem or a riddle, And maidens still were taught to play The harp and not the fiddle.

And writers in the main eschewed All topics tending to disquiet, All efforts to reorganize Our dogmas or our diet; You could not carp at MENDELSSOHN Without creating quite a scandal, And rag-time on the gramophone Had not supplanted HANDEL.

Blameless and wholesome in their way, At times agreeably subacid, I love these records of a day Long dead, but calm and placid; And with a sigh I now replace This ancient volume of Belgravia And turn the “latest news” to face Mutans amaris suavia.