The Conservative (Lovecraft)/March 1923/An Amateur Humorist
An Amateur Humorist
By Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
Notwithstanding a dearth of genuine humour in recent Amateur periodicals an opulent wit breathes, and has its being within the “magic circle.” And this jocularity is in nowise forced, or deliberate. It springs as naturally from the well of being as a fluctuant imp from a fabulous Arabian bottle. Amateurs have coldly courted the smile, have ceaselessly strained after brilliancy. And Laughter has pensively folded her wings, and with tear-stained visage and melancholy mien has hid herself away in some dim cavern, inaccessible, remote. But the new voice is oracular—its message is replete with the cryptic wisdom of an ancient clown. It resembles the insensate quips of some King’s jester with green cap and golden bells lost amid the melancholy of funereal bearers. And this brilliant joker (what a figure of Romance he is, in sooth) devotes his uncanny insight, his almost spiritual penetration to—the Poets of Amateurdom. And in a recent issue of The Oracle we behold him in all of the glory of his prismatic raiment. He dances in wild glee before the adamant and ivory throne of a King, and displays to the sad eyes of the tolerant but unhappy monarch the exceedingly colourful back of a baboon. Occasionally he stretches forth his long, yellow snout and bites the King viciously upon the ear with sharp, black teeth. And then he retreats in panic, awed, but still defiant, his finger to his nose. The King smiles a wan, indulgent smile, and perhaps in his heart he pities the jester. He is an eminently kind-hearted King. But the jester is happy. He has succeeded in creating a sensation; admiring eyes have been turned for one brief moment in his direction, and it should be said at once that the Jester lives for that sort of thing. He is well pleased, and all concede him wit. But as the gifted playboy lacks oven the rudiments of a creative imagination he does not know that he wearies the King—and he lingers on and says many absurd and childish things. One characteristic of a jester is his utter lack of all sense of beauty. The divinest strain from the most enchanted lyre drives him to a gnashing of teeth and an insane stamping of feet. His appreciation of the arts is limited. He is in a small measure interested in “thought” and he is very careful to warn us that Matthew Arnold and Milton were also profoundly thoughtful individuals. And yet it is certain that all of the nuances and subtleties of thought escape him. And as for beauty and feeling, which are of far greater import, he does not even concede their right to exist. He is hopelessly black in this respect; ho has no colour in his soul; he has never gazed upon a spiritual prism. But his multi-hued raiment is so bright and dazzling that one can forgive him. He is such a jolly fellow. He mentions vision, and passion, and like a small boy who juggles with large phrases, he has not the slightest realisation of the occult significance back of the symbols. But he dotes upon the frozen didacticism of Arnold. He does not say so, of course. He is divinely witty. Oh, divinely witty. But how poor old Arnold must shock him at times. He must shriek with horror at the mere thought of Dover Beach, and one can imagine him astutely grimacing at certain other passages:
“Vainly docs each as he glides, fable and dream, of the lands which the River of Time had left ere he woke on its breast, or shall reach when his eyes have been closed.”
The jester is interested in no age but his own. To dream of other happier, lovelier lands on the marge of the River of Time is not to be thought of; it destroys that humility, and balance, and gray resignation so much esteemed by the whole tribe of Lacimaginatus.
But I seem to recall a poet named Samuel Loveman who sings in a voice of “surprising beauty” of ultimate, dim thules, and of distant alien mainlands, of far incredible sea beaches, and of dim pools of ebony in centuried forests on whose banks grow monstrous red nenuphars; of miraged cities lying “within the dim West,” cities of alabaster, and of bronze, and of porphyry, with tall emerald towers from the narrow windows of which ruby lights glow and send thin streams of liquid radiance out across the blue and yellow waters; and of midnight seas; and of cold, Northern suns; of griffin-guarded gateways of ivory and gold; of buccaneers from the Spanish Main; of buried treasure, and Isles lost in the misty Hebrides—but above all else he hymns the praises of that beauty which is lost to the world forever—the great, white, silent beauty of immeasurable antiquity—a beauty whose fleeting garments and fire-ensandalled feet pass with the rapidity of silver lightning in an ancient dawn. There pale white ladies wander endlessly beneath skies of opal fire, their blue eyes wide with wonder, their yellow hair wind-blown, and their cheeks suffused with ecstasy. For Samuel Loveman has “felt the eternal woes of the soul that aspires, and knows,” and there can be no closing of the book for him. He has awaked from the common dream, and in his eyes the white splendour lingers still, and in his ears there still rings the “music of the spheres.” He has passed through lands where nightingales sing eternally, and whore the foliage is wrought of the purest gold; and he has glimpsed the beauty of the silver night; the morning beauty of stars, and wind, and rain; and he knows the beauty of the enormous void, and the beauty of the Tomb. And he has seen other stranger, sweeter things—his eyes are still open upon that Supernal Loveliness that dwells in Heaven upon a sapphire throne, and communes with the seraphs who chant in ecstasy a golden antiphon. But the jester laughs with mirthless mockery, and sends up his impotent protest to the pale stars. He has never heard the wind moan about the purple promontories of Mytilene; he has never looked upon the face of Sappho, her eyes congealed with the wind and silver spray; never has he beheld the dream-enchanted Isles lying white and still in a sea of the deepest blue, where “grew the Arts of War, and Peace!”—never has he beheld Delos rise, and Phoebus spring. What to him are the “Islands of the Blest” and the pity of beauty vanishing before the day?
There is a faculty divine called imagination—the jester docs not know it. There is vision, and passion, and pity, in the world—the jester does not know it! There is tolerance, and understanding, and sympathy in the world—this excellent joker stamps his feet, and grimaces. He has annoyed the Monarch on his adamant throne, and no one will deny him wit.
But he is so utterly naive! He reads “A Triumph in Eternity,” and all of its unearthly beauty and splendour of vision is lost upon him. Loveman has wrought with moonlight, and iris, and pearl, but to the jester these lovely attributes are merely “fireworks”—a framework upon which to hang the poem (or was it the other way about)? He then proceeds to dissect this exquisite lyric with a pair of rusty tweezers, and flatters himself that the experiment is a strictly scientific one. But after he has pulled it all to pieces he discovers to his horror that each individual fragment glows with a spectral beauty of its own. There is but one thing left for him to do; he must consign the poem to everlasting perdition. So he confers upon it the following splendid benediction: “In anyone but an amateur poet with an amateur perception of things held sacred in a Christian country the whole piece would be considered blasphemous!” There was a time when a statement of that sort would have called the gods down from the sky; unfortunately the gods to-day are occupied with mora important matters. But here is a gem: “It may fairly be asserted that the time when readers are interested in the antics of pagan gods is gone forever.” When Swinburne read anything of that sort he emitted a low scream, and vanished. I shall emulate him. OO00oo!