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(Life as operetta. A member of Gilbert’s College? By the banks of the Thames, do I receive that Northern Crowning, finally, after these 5 years of leasehold? In it for the admiration? Surely not arbitrary admiration! But yes, I freely admit in soliloquy, I write it all down for the ladies — my Doctrine to the ladies! — but in particular, for the milk maid, my love of loves, my evasive maid who enters the operetta claiming to know no love, whose name is Patience. She finds love through the martyrdom — to “common-place” middle class life! — of her poet husband.)
Lyrics:
| Am I alone, And unobserved? I am! Then let me own This air severe This cynic smile This costume chaste Let me confess! |
A languid love for lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens
By any means.
I do not long for all one sees
That’s Japanese.
I am not fond of uttering platitudes
In stained-glass attitudes.
In short, my mediaevalism’s affectation,
Born of a morbid love of admiration!
| If you’re anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them ev’rywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. And ev’ry one will say, |
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)
Be eloquent in praise of the very dull old days
which have long since passed away,
And convince ‘em, if you can, that the reign of good Queen Anne
was Culture’s palmiest day.
Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever’s fresh and new,
and declare it’s crude and mean,
For Art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine.
And ev’ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If that’s not good enough for him which is good enough for me,
Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth this kind of youth must be!”
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Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen, An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not- too-French French bean! Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand. And ev’ryone will say, |
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Loved it — does that mean I pass the philistine test! Reminds me of Sufi theosophic ecstatic poetry whose double-entendres elicited the most virulent attacks of the exoteric scholars.