Page:Masque of the Edwards of England (1902).djvu/42

 I am the unknown God, my art

Can blind the eyes and steel the heart.

I regulate life, I give to the kiss

A scientific analysis.

The complacent christian I can twist

Into a sleek materialist,

While I burn as a quaking, perfumed joss stick,

My ancient idolatrous agnostic;

Progress needs both of them, Progress is old,

Progress you see blows hot and cold.

SELF-COM.: Yours is a wonderful constitution!

What have you brought us, Evolution?

EVOL.: A genuine education bill!

SELF-COM. : Bluff! Too British, fill, come fill!

EVOL.: A treatise on bacteriology:

Two parsons squabbling at theology!

SELF-COM.: Still at the old game? Press down the lid.

EVOL.: And a ponderous book by Benjamin Kidd!

ALL: Ho, ho, for the melting pot,

Bubbling, simmering, seething hot,

It goes in thus, and it come out, what?

Ho, ho, for the melting pot!

SELF-COM. : Come first, come last! your contribution,

Rabid and wry-necked Revolution?

REVOLUTION: Wry-necked, yes, if the only tune

Were the one that I hummed as British buffoon,

But I'm only rabid when joining the dance

In the red cap and rages I borrow from France.

In England we always damn the eyes

Of all who don't cry 'compromise,'

While now, 'stead of charters and proclamations,

Grand independence declarations,

Uncrownings of kings and such like devices,

It's the strike, the combine, the industrial crisis;

And as for republics, why, now, the deuce! it's

A polite aristocracy in Massachusetts.

In the fulness of Time we shall set an embargo

On even the brazen throat of Chicago.

Republics forsooth! Revolution grows organized

As the world's machinery gets more 'Morganised.'

Yet old mother Progress chuckles and churns,

Watching the cruddle she turns and turns.

SELF-COM.: In with it, cease your mouthing and mystery.

REV.: A crown, and a lesson in cast-off history!

SELF-COM.: Men never learn lessons from you!

REV.: They must!

SELF-COM.: Let's see, what next.

REV.: An American Trust!

ALL : Ho, ho, for the melting pot,

Bubbling, seething, simmering hot,

It goes in thus, and it comes out, what?

Ho, ho, for the melting pot!

SELF-COM. : Are you still moaning over the schism?

Up and in with it, Radicalism!

RADICALISM: Woe's me, alas! Woe's me, alack!

That have still to bear Harcourt on my back,

And the musty makeshifts of them that befool

The world with the myths of the Manchester school.

While the worst of it is I'm such a sham

That I don't know myself any more what I am.

Fie, mother Progress! was it fair,

First to coquette with 'l'aissez făire,'

And then to allow yourself to be kissed,

By—never mind who—the collectivist!

Can you wonder, so lax in your right & wrong,

That I, your child, know not to whom I belong.

All that's left to the once wild harum-scarum

Is to puff the Pro-Boer and to snarl at old Sarum.

Who'd have thought, now I'm grown so lame and hoary,

That Progress—my Progress!—could ever turn Tory.

SELF-COM.: In with it, in with it! never mind

Though Progress has left you thus behind!

RAD.: They're heavy! all the back volumes of 'Truth,'

And a 'Little England' the dream of my youth!

ALL: Ho, ho, for the melting pot,

Bubbling, simmering, seething hot!

It goes in thus, and it comes out, what?

Ho, ho, for the melting pot!

SELF-COM.: Your innings next and let your fling go,

In with its wonted bombast, Jingo!

JINGOISM: Proud of my bombast, proud of my pride,

Proud of my insolence, leaden-eyed,

Proud with the pride of a dilettante

Of my old redoubtable Rosinante

Once ridden by Pam and Disraeli.

Proud of the tongue that shall never fail ye,

Or my manners truculent, sloven and slack,

Proud of the skin that I bear on my back—

Don't be alarmed, it's only a try on,—

The moth-eaten skin of the British Lion:

The ass looks out from beneath, and brays

As of old in a number of different ways.

For I was bred where the Cockney bawls

In his millions among the music halls

Of the largest and loathsomest city, or where

In a still larger, noisier hemisphere

The American Yellow Press teaches him style

In what he knows as the 'Dily Mile.'

East or West what matter to me

The Jingo slips from the self-same tree,

And the 'white man's burden' remains to grapple

As well in the Bowery as in Whitechapel.

Poor little Cockney! however should he know

To synthesise 'Boer' and 'Philipino!'

Let him waste the remains of his wretched lungs 38