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Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Vol. 146 February 11 1914 by Various Seaman Owen Editor
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Ebook has 347 lines and 16916 words, and 7 pages
From RAPHAEL until PCESZY TURGIDOFF all true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels. But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had trickled into a very delta of arid sentiment. The critic could walk all the galleries of Europe and find nothing to lighten his melancholy until he entered one of those caverns of earliest man and stood in ecstatic reverence before the incomparable masterpieces wherein the first of the Futurists created Man, not as he is to his own dull eye, but Man as he is to the inner retina of the universe. Man, the simple triangle on two stilts, the creature on one plane and of one dimension, an outline without entity, a nothingness staring, faceless, at the nothingness which baffles his soul.
Emotion, idealism, beauty--these have been always the evil spirits that have fettered art. The new art has so exorcised them that they have fled from it with demoniac cries. Pulziacco's splendid rhomboid, "Cleopatra"; Weber-Damm's tender parallelograms, "The Daughters of James Bowles, Esq., J.P"; Todwarden Jones's rectilineal wizardry, "A Basket of Oranges"; and Arabella Machicu's triumph of astigmatism, "The Revolving Bookcase," are examples of this conquest of the inner retina over the brutal insistences of form and matter.
Of still deeper significance is that terribly sad picture of Philip Martini, "The Mumpers: a Group at Lloyds." Nothing is more illustrative of the courage demanded for the struggle of the new art against convention than this poignant work, wherein, true to the verities, the artist has confounded realism in its own domain by the unrecognisable faces of his sitters.
THE TROPHY.
I'd dined at home; I'd read till ten; I'd thought, "The space upon the wall Above the stuffed Thames trout Wants filling." That was really all: And then I closed my eyes, and then I let my pipe go out.
We crawled, the Khan of Khot and I, On a Thibetan precipice , A place of snow and black abyss; We lay on rock--mid wind and sky-- Above a beetling brink.
One thing at least is clear, and that's My empty wall is yet to fill; Though oft with even's shade I see that great head from the hill, Unstable as the Cheshire cat's, Look down therefrom and fade.
"Mr. Robert Bowes ...."
"Mr. Robert Bowes is in his seventy-ninth year.... But then he is much younger than many older men."
So are all of us. Mr. BOWES'S distinction is in being twelve years younger than himself.
ALL'S WELL THAT BEGINS WELL.
THE LESSON.
"Why don't you ask me to play with you?" she asked. "You never teach mo anything."
"There's ingratitude. Why, I gave you your first lesson at golf only last Thursday."
"So you did. I know golf. Now show me billiards."
I looked at my watch.
"We've only twenty minutes. I'll play you thirty up."
"Right-o... What do you give me--a ball or a bisque or what?"
"I can't spare you a ball, I'm afraid. I shall want all three when I get going. You may have fifteen start, and I'll tell you what to do."
"Well, what do I do first?"
"Select a cue."
She went over to the rack and inspected them.
"This seems a nice brown one. Now then, you begin."
"Celia, you've got the half-butt. Put it back and take a younger one."
"I thought it seemed taller than the others." She took another. "How's this? Good. Then off you go."
"Will you be spot or plain?" I said, chalking my cue.
"Does it matter?"
"Not very much. They're both the same shape."
"Then what's the difference?"
"Well, one is more spotted than the other."
"Then I'll be less spotted."
I went to the table.
"I think," I said, "I'll try and screw in off the red." . "Or perhaps," I corrected myself, as soon as the ball had left me, "I had better give a safety miss."
I did. My ball avoided the red and came swiftly back into the left-hand bottom pocket.
"That's three to you," I said without enthusiasm.
Celia seemed surprised.
"But I haven't begun yet," she said. "Well, I suppose you know the rules, but it seems funny. What would you like me to do?"
"Well, there isn't much on. You'd better just try and hit the red ball."
"Right." She leant over the table and took long and careful aim. I held my breath.... Still she aimed.... Then, keeping her chin on the cue, she slowly turned her head and looked up at me with a thoughtful expression.
"Oughtn't there to be three balls on the table?" she said, wrinkling her forehead.
"No," I answered shortly.
"But why not?"
"Because I went down by mistake."
"Yes. You're eighteen to my nothing."
"Yes. Well, now I shall have to aim all over again." She bent slowly over her cue. "Does it matter where I hit the red?"
"Not much. As long as you hit it on the red part."
She hit it hard on the side, and both balls came into baulk.
"Too good," I said.
"Does either of us get anything for it?"
"No." The red and the white were close together, and I went up the table and down again on the off-chance of a cannon. I misjudged it, however.
"That's three to you," I said stiffly, as I took my ball out of the right-hand bottom pocket. "Twenty-one to nothing."
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