There, little girl, don't cry!
You are awfully broke, I know;
And of course you've spent
Far more than you meant,
And lots of bills you owe.
But at Christmas time one has to buy--
There, little girl, don't cry, don't cry!
The Re-Echo Club met in their pleasant rooms at No. 4, Poetic Mews.
Spring had passed, so their fancy was lightly turning to other matters
than Love, and it chanced to turn lightly to the Cubist Movement in Art.
"Of course," mused the President, rolling his eyes in an especially fine
frenzy, "this movement will strike the poets next."
"Ha," said Dan Rossetti, refraining for a moment from the refrain he was
building, "we must be ready for it."
"We must advance to meet it," said Teddy Poe, who was ever of an
adventurous nature. "What's it all about?"
"The principles are simple," observed Rob Browning, glancing from heaven
to earth, from earth to heaven; "in fact, it's much like my own work
always has been. I was born cubic. You see, you just symbolize the
liquefaction of the essence of an idea into its emotional constituents,
and there you are!"
"Dead easy!" declared Lally Tennyson, who went out poeting by the day,
and knew how to do any kind. "What's the subject?"
"That's just the point," said the President; "preeminently and
exclusively it's subjective, and you must keep it so. On no account
allow an object of any kind to creep in. Now, here's one of the Cubist
pictures. They call it 'A Nude Descending the Staircase.' They pick
names at random out of a hat, I believe. Take this, you fellows, and
throw it into poetry."
"Any rules or conditions?" asked Billy Wordsworth.
"Absolutely none. It's the Ruleless School."
Then the Poets opened the aspiration valves, ignited the divine spark
plugs, and whiz! went their motor-meters in a whirring, buzzing melody.
Soon their Cubist emotions were splashed upon paper, and the Poets read
with justifiable pride these symbolic results.
* * * * *
Ally Swinburne tossed off this poetic gem without a bit of trouble.
Square eyelids that hide like a jewel;
Ten heads,--though I sometimes count more;
Six mouths that are cubic and cruel;
Of mixed arms and legs, twenty-four;
Descending in Symbolic glories
Of lissome triangles and squares;
Oh, mystic and subtle Dolores,
Our Lady of Stairs.
You descend like an army with banners,
In a cyclone of wrecked parasols.
You look like a mob with mad manners
Or a roystering row of Dutch dolls.
Oh, Priestess of Cubical passion,
Oh, Deification of Whim,
You seem to walk down in the fashion
That lame lobsters swim.
Here we have Mr. P.B. Shelley's noble lines:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Nude thou never wert.
Not from Heaven nor near it
Breathed thy cubic heart
In profuse stairs of unintelligible art.
What thou art, we know not;
What is thee most like?
Snakes tied in a bow-knot?
Stovepipes on a strike?
Or Bellevue inmates on a Suffrage hike!
We look before and after,
And pine thy face to see;
Our sincerest laughter
Is aroused by thee.
Art thou perchance the sad cube root of 23?
Mr. R. Kipling felt a flash of his old fire, and threw in a high speed:
On an old symbolic staircase,
Looking forty ways at once;
There's a Cubist Nude descending,
With the queerest sort of stunts.
For the staircase is a-falling,
And the Noodle seems to say:
"Though you hear my soul a-calling,
You can't see me, anyway!"
Oh, this symbol balderdash,
And this post-Impression trash;
Can't you see their paint a-chunkin in a hotchy-potchy splash?
Where the motives bold and brash
Of the Cubist painters clash,
And the Nude descends like thunder down a staircase gone to smash!
Mr. D.G. Rossetti, ever a sweet singer, warbled thus tunefully:
The Blessed Nude at eve leaned out
From the gold staircase rail;
Her paint was deeper than the depth
Of waters in a pail.
She wore three bonnets on her heads,
And seven coats of mail.
And still she bowed herself and swayed
In circling cubic charms.
And the pigments of her painted soul
Were loud as war's alarms.
But the staircase lay as if asleep
Along her fourteen arms.
(I saw her move!) But soon her path
Was cubes instead of spheres;
And then she disappeared among
The staircase barriers;
And, after she was gone, I saw
She'd wept some large paint tears!
Mr. R. Browning found the subject greatly to his liking:
Who will may hear the Staircase story told;
All its blobs, splotches, facets,--what you will;
The vague Nude, compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred stairs,
Dizzily plunging with tumultuous glee!
Whirling the stairdust, hazarding oblique,
The moon safe in her pocket! See she treads
Cool citric crystals, fierce pyropus stone;
While crushing sunbeams in a triple line
Smirk at the insane roses in her hair,
And Strojavacca, frowning, looks asquint
To see that trick of toe,--that dizened heel,--
As she, the somewhat, hangs 'twixt naught and naught.
A perfect Then,--a sub-potential Now--
A facile and slabsided centipede.
And here is Mr. B. Jonson's little jingle:
Still to be cubed, still to be square,
As you were going down a stair;
Still to see lurid pigments sluiced,--
Lady, it is to be deduced,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not square, all is not round.
Give me a cube, give me a line
That makes a whirling maze design;
Robes made of sheet-iron, flowing free,--
Such sweet device more taketh me
Than masterpieces by old Rubes
Which charm not eyes attuned to cubes.
And Mr. J.W. Riley sang in his usual comforting strain:
There, Little Nude, don't cry!
You've descended the stairs, I know;
And the weird wild ways
Of the Cubist Jays
Have made you a holy show!
But Post Impressions will soon pass by.
There Little Nude, don't cry, don't cry!
Sir A. Tennyson caught the Cubical spirit neatly thus:
As the staircase is, the Nude is; thou art painted by a freak.
And I think that he has knocked thee to the middle of next week.
He will paint thee (till this fashion shall expend its foolish force),
Something like a rabid dog,--a little larger than a horse.
Semblance? Likeness? Scorned of Cubists! This th' evangel that he sings;
Any picture's crown of glory is to look like other things!
So thou art not seen descending in the ordinary way,
But, like fifty motor-cycles, breaking speed laws in Cathay.
Mr. C. Kingsley was greatly interested:
My Cubist Nude, I have no song to give you;
I could not pipe you, howsoe'er I tried;
But ere I go, I wish that you would teach me
That Staircase Slide!
Be skittish, child, and let who will be graceful,
Do whizzy whirls whenever you've the chance;
And so make life, death and that grand old staircase
One song and dance.
Oscar Wilde was moody and this was his mood:
Adown the stairs the Nudelet came;
(Pale pink cats up a purple tree!)
Hark! to the smitten cubes of flame!
Ah, me! Ah, jamboree!
Her soul seethed in emotions sweet;
(Pale pink cats up a purple tree!)
Symbolling like a torn-up street;
Ah, jamboree! Ah, me!
And still the Nude's soul-cubes are there,--
(Pale pink cats up a purple tree!)
In writhen glory of despair,--
Ah, me! Ah, Hully Gee!
Mr. W. Wordsworth was frankly disdainful:
She trod among the untrodden maze
Of Cubists on a spree;
A Nude whom there were none to praise,
And very few could see.
A violet 'neath a mossy stone,
Quite hidden from the eye,
Is far more easy to discern
Than that same Nude to spy.
She lived unseen. Though some few fakes
Pretended her to see;
But if she's on the stairs, it makes
No difference to me.
Mr. Longfellow fairly let himself go:
The picture's done! And the staircase
Falls like the crash of night.
And the Nude is wafted downward
Like a catapult in flight.
There's a feeling of strange emotion
That is not akin to art;
And resembles a picture only
As a Tartar resembles a tart.
Such art has power to rouse
Our laughter at any time,
And comes like electrocution
That follows after crime.
And Mr. Bunner's poetic gem has a charm all its own:
It was an old, old, old, old lady,
On a staircase at half-past three;
And the way she was painted together
Was beautiful for to see.
She wasn't visible any,
And the staircase, no more was he;
For it was a Cubist picture
With a feeling of deep skewgee.
'Twas a symbol of soul expression,
Though you'd never have known it to be!
That emotional old, old lady
On a staircase at half-past three.
Mr. Wordsworth treated the subject boldly, thus:
She was a phantom of a fright
When first she burst upon my sight;
A Cubist apparition meant
To symbolize a Nude's descent.
Her eyes like soft-shell crabs aflare
Like loads of brick her dusky hair;
And all things else about her drawn
As by one coming home at dawn.
A fearsome shape, an image fierce,
To haunt, to startle, and to pierce.
I saw her upon nearer view,
Like a symbolic oyster stew;
A countenance in which did meet
The paving blocks from some old street;
The staircase, floating fancy-free,
With steps of Cubic liberty.
A perfect lady, nobly built,
Constructed like a crazy quilt.
Or a volcano on a spree,
Or herd of elephants at tea.
The staircase, by a bombshell wrecked,
With something of a burst effect.
What do you think of A. Dobson's triolet:
Oh, see the Nude
Descend the Stair!
Fear not, oh, prude,
To see the Nude;
For by the rood,
She isn't there!
Oh, see the Nude
Descend the Stair!
Of course, no one is a sweeter poetess than Miss A.A. Proctor:
Seated one day at my easel,
I was hungry and somewhat faint,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the tubes of paint.
I know not what I was drawing,
Or what I was painting there,
But I splotched a Cubic Symbol!
Like a Nude Descending a Stair!
It flooded the crimson canvas
With the gush of a broken dam;
And it lay in sticky masses
Like upset gooseberry jam.
It rioted blazing color,
Like love ballyragging strife;
It seemed the loquacious echo
Of our discordant wife.
It linked all Futurist meanings
Into one perfect cube,
And broke itself up into facets
Like a wreck in a Hudson Tube.
I seek, but I seek it vainly,
That vast, symbolic line,
That came from the head of the staircase
And entered into mine.
It may be that Pab Picasso
Has painted the thing before,
And it may be that only in Bedlam
I shall paint that Nude some more.
And now the admirers of Mr. Poe will enjoy this:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom made of squares,
That a Lady lived whom you may know
As the Nude Descending the Stairs,
And the lady lived with no other home,
But those racketty-packetty stairs!
And the moon never beams
Without jarring the seams
Of those cubic triangular stairs;
And the earth never quakes
Without bringing the shakes
To those wigglety-wagglety stairs.
And neither the artists in circles above,
Or critics who view the debris,
Can ever dissever the Nude from the Stairs,
For both are so hobble-de-gee,
So hobble-de-wobble-de-gee!
Mr. A. Tennyson is quite frank in his opinions, and it would seem that
he does not altogether admire the lady:
Lady Clara Stair de Stair,
Of me you shall not win renown.
You thought to charm the country's heart
As you the staircase tumbled down.
At me you splashed; but unabashed,
I saw you in your paint attired;
You daughter of a hundred cubes,
You are not one to be desired!
Lady Clara Stair de Stair,
I care not for these wild etudes;
A simple Titian in a frame
Is worth a hundred Staircase Nudes.
Howe'er it be, it seems to me
It isn't noble to be fools;
Fine arts are more than Futurists,
And simple lines than Cubist Schools.
At one meeting of The Re-Echo Club, it chanced that there was no one
present but Omar Khayyam. He had mistaken the date, and came to the
clubroom, only to find it empty. Absent-mindedly, he picked up paper and
pen, and, on leaving, left behind these additional Rubaiyat: