There’s Bourget, dyed his own sick “blue,”
There’s Loti, blowing blue soap bubbles;
There’s Mendès[6] (no Catullus, he!)
There’s Richepin,[7] sick with sensual passion.
The Dismal Throng! So foul, so free,
Yet sombre all, as is the fashion.

“Turn down the lights! put out the Sun!
Man is unclean and morals muddy.
The Fairy Tale of Life is done,
Disease and Dirt must be our study!
Tear open Nature’s genial heart,
Let neither God nor gods escape us,
But spare, to give our subjects zest,
The basest god of all—Priapus!”

The Dismal Throng! ’Tis thus they preach,
From Christiania to Cadiz,
Recruited as they talk and teach
By dingy lads and draggled ladies;
Without a sunbeam or a song,
With no clear Heaven to hunger after;
The Dismal Throng! the Dismal Throng!
The foes of Life and Love and Laughter!

By Shakespere’s Soul! if this goes on,
From every face of man and woman
The gift of gladness will be gone,
And laughter will be thought inhuman!
The only beast who smiles is Man!
That marks him out from meaner creatures!
Confound the Dismal Throng, who plan
To take God’s birth-mark from our features!

Manfreds who walk the hospitals.
Laras and Giaours grown scientific,
They wear the clothes and bear the palls
Of Stormy Ones once thought terrific;
They play the same old funeral tune,
And posture with the same dejection,
But turn from howling at the moon
To literary vivisection!

oscar wilde.

And while they loom before our view,
Dark’ning the air that should be sunny,
Here’s Oscar,[8] growing dismal too,
Our Oscar, who was once so funny!
Blue china ceases to delight
The dear curl’d darling of society,
Changed are his breeches, once so bright,
For foreign breaches of propriety!

george moore.

I like my Oscar, tolerate
My Archer[9] of the Dauntless Grammar,
Nay, e’en my Moore[10] I estimate
Not too unkindly, ’spite his clamour;
But I prefer my roses still
To all the garlic in their garden—
Let Hedda gabble as she will,
I’ll stay with Rosalind, in Arden!

O for one laugh of Rabelais,
To rout these moralising croakers!
(The cowls were mightier far than they,
Yet fled before that King of Jokers)
O for a slash of Fielding’s pen
To bleed these pimps of Melancholy!
O for a Boz, born once again
To play the Dickens with such folly!

mark twain.

Yet stay! why bid the dead arise?
Why call them back from Charon’s wherry?
Come, Yankee Mark, with twinkling eyes,
Confuse these ghouls with something merry!
Come, Kipling, with thy soldiers three,
Thy barrack-ladies frail and fervent,
Forsake thy themes of butchery
And be the merry Muses’ servant!

Come, Dickens’ foster-son, Bret Harte!
Come, Sims, though gigmen flout thy labours!
Tom Hardy, blow the clouds apart
With sound of rustic fifes and tabors!
Dick Blackmore, full of homely joy,
Come from thy garden by the river,
And pelt with fruit and flowers, old boy,
These dismal bores who drone for ever!

george meredith.

Come, too, George Meredith, whose eyes,
Though oft with vapours shadow’d over,
Can catch the sunlight from the skies
And flash it down on lass and lover;
Tell us of Life, and Love’s young dream,
Show the prismatic soul of Woman,
Bring back the Light, whose morning beam
First made the Beast upright and human!

You can be merry, George, I vow!
Wit through your cloudiest prosing twinkles!
Brood as you may, upon your brow
The cynic, Art, has left no wrinkles!
For you’re a poet to the core,
No ghouls can from the Muses win you;
So throw your cap i’ the air once more,
And show the joy of earth that’s in you!

By Heaven! we want you one and all,
For Hypochondria is reigning—
The Mater Dolorosa’s squall
Makes Nature hideous with complaining!
Ah! who will paint the Face that smiled
When Art was virginal and vernal—
The pure Madonna with her Child,
Pure as the light, and as eternal!

Pest on these dreary, dolent airs!
Confound