Читать книгу The Bab Ballads - William Schwenck Gilbert - Страница 13

Oh, that my soul its gods could see

As years ago they seemed to me

When first I painted them;

Invested with the circumstance

Of old conventional romance:

Exploded theorem!

The bard who could, all men above,

Inflame my soul with songs of love,

And, with his verse, inspire

The craven soul who feared to die

With all the glow of chivalry

And old heroic fire;

I found him in a beerhouse tap

Awaking from a gin-born nap,

With pipe and sloven dress;

Amusing chums, who fooled his bent,

With muddy, maudlin sentiment,

And tipsy foolishness!

The novelist, whose painting pen

To legions of fictitious men

A real existence lends,

Brain-people whom we rarely fail,

Whene’er we hear their names, to hail

As old and welcome friends;

I found in clumsy snuffy suit,

In seedy glove, and blucher boot,

Uncomfortably big.

Particularly commonplace,

With vulgar, coarse, stockbroking face,

And spectacles and wig.

My favourite actor who, at will,

With mimic woe my eyes could fill

With unaccustomed brine:

A being who appeared to me

(Before I knew him well) to be

A song incarnadine;

I found a coarse unpleasant man

With speckled chin—unhealthy, wan—

Of self-importance full:

Existing in an atmosphere

That reeked of gin and pipes and beer—

Conceited, fractious, dull.

The warrior whose ennobled name

Is woven with his country’s fame,

Triumphant over all,

I found weak, palsied, bloated, blear;

His province seemed to be, to leer

At bonnets in Pall Mall.

Would that ye always shone, who write,

Bathed in your own innate limelight,

And ye who battles wage,

Or that in darkness I had died

Before my soul had ever sighed

To see you off the stage!