Part 2
“I cannot think of anything to-day That I would rather do than be myself, Primevally alive, and have the sun Shine into me; for on a day like this, When the chaff-parts of a man’s adversities Are blown by quick spring breezes out of him-- When even a flicker of wind that wakes no more Than a tuft of grass, or a few young yellow leaves, Comes like the falling of a prophet’s breath On altar-flames rekindled of crushed embers,-- Then do I feel, now do I feel, within me No dreariness, no grief, no discontent, No twinge of human envy. But I beg That you forego credentials of the past For these illuminations of the present, Or better still, to give the shadow justice, You let me tell you something: I have yearned In many another season for these days, And having them with God’s own pageantry To make me glad for them,--yes, I have cursed The sunlight and the breezes and the leaves To think of men on stretchers and on beds, Or on foul floors, like starved outrageous lizards, Made human with paralysis and rags; Or of some poor devil on a battle-field, Left undiscovered and without the strength To drag a maggot from his clotted mouth; Or of women working where a man would fall-- Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulness Made neuter by the work that no man counts Until it waits undone; children thrown out To feed their veins and souls with offal.... Yes, I have had half a mind to blow my brains out Sometimes; and I have gone from door to door, Ragged myself, trying to do something-- Crazy, I hope.--But what has this to do With Spring? Because one half of humankind Lives here in hell, shall not the other half Do any more than just for conscience’ sake Be miserable? Is this the way for us To lead these creatures up to find the light, Or the way to be drawn down to find the dark Again? What is it? What does the child say?
“But let us not make riot for the child Untaught, nor let us hold that we may read The sun but through the shadows; nor, again, Be we forgetful ever that we keep The shadows on their side. For evidence, I might go back a little to the days When I had hounds and credit, and grave friends To borrow my books and set wet glasses on them, And other friends of all sorts, grave and gay, Of whom one woman and one man stand out From all the rest, this morning. The man said One day, as we were riding, ‘Now, you see, There goes a woman cursed with happiness: Beauty and wealth, health, horses,--everything That she could ask, or we could ask, is hers, Except an inward eye for the plain fact Of what this damned world is. The cleverness God gave her--or the devil--cautions her That she must keep the china cup of life Filled somehow, and she fills it--runs it over-- Claps her white hands while some one does the sopping With fingers made, she thinks, for just that purpose, Giggles and eats and reads and goes to church, Makes pretty little penitential prayers, And has an eighteen-carat crucifix Wrapped up in chamois-skin. She gives enough, You say; but what is giving like hers worth? What is a gift without the soul to guide it? “Poor dears, and they have cancers?--Oh!” she says; And away she works at that new altar-cloth For the Reverend Hieronymus Mackintosh-- Third person, Jerry. “Jerry,” she says, “can say Such lovely things, and make life seem so sweet!” Jerry can drink, also.--And there she goes, Like a whirlwind through an orchard in the springtime-- Throwing herself away as if she thought The world and the whole planetary circus Were a flourish of apple-blossoms. Look at her! Lilies and roses! Butterflies! Great Scott! And here is this infernal world of ours-- And hers, if only she might find it out-- Starving and shrieking, sickening, suppurating, Whirling to God knows where.... But look at her! Confucius, how she rides! And by Saint Satan, She’s galloping over to talk with us, woman and horse All ours! But look--just look at her!--By Jove!’...
“And after that it came about somehow, Almost as if the Fates were killing time, That she, the spendthrift of a thousand joys, Rode in her turn with me, and in her turn Made observations: ‘Now there goes a man,’ She said, ‘who feeds his very soul on poison: No matter what he does, or where he looks, He finds unhappiness; or, if he fails To find it, he creates it, and then hugs it: Pygmalion again for all the world-- Pygmalion gone wrong. You know I think If when that precious animal was young, His mother, or some watchful aunt of his, Had spanked him with _Pendennis_ and _Don Juan_, And given him the _Lady of the Lake_, Or _Cord and Creese_, or almost anything, There might have been a tonic for him? Listen: When he was possibly nineteen years old He came to me and said, “I understand You are in love”--yes, that is what he said,-- “But never mind, it won’t last very long; It never does; we all get over it. We have this clinging nature, for you see The Great Bear shook himself once on a time And the world is one of many that let go.” But I let the creature live, and there you see him; And he would have this life no fairer thing Than a certain time for numerous marionettes To do the Dance of Death. Give him a rose, And he will tell you it is very sweet, But only for a day. Most wonderful! Show him a child, or anything that laughs, And he begins at once to crunch his wormwood And then runs on with his “realities.” What does he know about realities, Who sees the truth of things almost as well As Nero saw the Northern Lights? Good gracious! Can’t you do something with him? Call him something-- Call him a type, and that will make him cry: One of those not at all unusual, Prophetic, would-be-Delphic manger-snappers That always get replaced when they are gone; Or one of those impenetrable men, Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads, “We are abstruse, but not quite so abstruse As we think the Lord intended we should be;” One of those men who never quite confess That Washington was great;--the kind of man That everybody knows and always will,-- Shrewd, critical, facetious, insincere, And for the most part harmless, I’m afraid. But even then, I truly think you ought To tell him something.’--And I said I would.
“So in one afternoon you see we have The child in absence--or, to say the least, In ominous defect,--and in excess Commensurate, likewise. Now the question is, Not which was right and which was wrong, for each, By virtue of one-sidedness, was both; But rather--to my mind, as heretofore-- Is it better to be blinded by the lights, Or by the shadows? By the lights, you say? The shadows are all devils, and the lights Gleam guiding and eternal? Very good; But while you say so do not quite forget That sunshine has a devil of its own, And one that we, for the great craft of him, But vaguely recognize. The marvel is That this persuasive and especial devil, By grace of his extreme transparency, Precludes all common vision of him; yet There is one way to glimpse him and a way, As I believe, to test him,--granted once That we have ousted prejudice, which means That we have made magnanimous advance Through self-acquaintance. Not an easy thing For some of us; impossible, may be, For all of us: the woman and the man I cited, for example, would have wrought The most intractable conglomerate Of everything, if they had set themselves To analyze themselves and not each other; If only for the sake of self-respect, They would have come to no place but the same Wherefrom they started; one would have lived awhile In paradise without defending it, And one in hell without enjoying it; And each had been dissuaded neither more Nor less thereafter. There are such on earth As might have been composed primarily For object-lessons: he was one of them, And she--the devil makes us hesitate: ’Tis easy to read words writ well with ink That makes a good black mark on smooth white paper; But words are done sometimes with other ink Whereof the smooth white paper gives no sign Till science brings it out; and here we come To knowledge, and the way to test a devil.
“To the greater number of us, you contend, This demon of the sunlight is a stranger; But if you break the sunlight of yourself, Project it, and observe the quaint shades of it, I have a shrewd suspicion you may find That even as a name lives unrevealed In ink that waits an agent, so it is The devil--or this devil--hides himself To all the diagnoses we have made Save one,--sincerity. The quest is hard-- As hard as truth; but once we seem to know That his compound obsequiousness prevails Unferreted within us, we may find That sympathy, which aureoles itself To superfluity from you and me, May stand against the soul for five or six Persistent and indubitable streaks Of irritating brilliance, out of which A man may read, if he have knowledge in him, Proportionate attest of ignorance, Hypocrisy, good-heartedness, conceit, Indifference,--with all of these out-hued By the spiritual inactivity Which more than often is identified With individual intensity, And is the parent of that selfishness Whereof no end of lesser _tions_ and _isms_ Are querulously born. But there are things To be considered here, or your machine May never justify the purchase of it; For if you fail to gauge the difference Between self-sacrifice and self-contempt, Your light will be all devil and your faith Diseased,--whatever courage you have left: Courage is not enough to make men glad For laughter when that laughter is itself The tribute of recriminating groans; Nor are the shapes of obsolescent creeds Much longer to flit near enough to make Men glad for living in a world like this; But wisdom, courage, knowledge, and the faith Which has the soul and is the soul of reason-- These are the world’s achievers. And the child-- The child that is the saviour of all ages, The prophet and the poet, the crown-bearer, Must yet with Love’s unhonored fortitude, Survive to cherish and attain for us The candor and the generosity, By leave of which we smile if we bring back Some first ideal flash that wakened us When wisdom like a shaft of dungeon-light Came searching down to find us.
“Halfway back I made a mild allusion to the Fates, Not knowing then that ever I should have Dream-visions of them, painted on the air,-- Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Faint-hued They seem, but with a faintness never fading, Unblurred by gloom, unshattered by the sun, Still with eternal color, colorless, They move and they remain. The while I write These very words I see them,--Atropos, Lachesis, Clotho; and the last is laughing: When Clotho laughs, Atropos rattles her shears; But Clotho keeps on laughing just the same. Some time when I have dreamed that Atropos Has laughed, I’ll tell you how the colors change-- The colors that are changeless, colorless.”
* * * * *
I fear I may have answered Captain Craig’s Epistle Number One with what he chose, Good-humoredly but anxiously, to take For something that was not all reverence; From the tone of Number Two it seemed almost As if the flanges of the old man’s faith Had slipped the treacherous rails of my allegiance And left him by the roadside, humorously Upset, with nothing more convivial To do than be facetious and austere:--
“If you did not like _Don César de Bazan_ There must be some imperfection in your vitals. Flamboyant and old-fashioned? Overdone? Romantico-robustious?--Dear young man, There are fifteen thousand ways to be one-sided, And I have indicated two of them Already. Now you bait me with a third-- As if it were a spider with nine legs; But what it is that you would have me do, What fatherly wrath you most anticipate, I lack the needed impulse to discern. If you did not like _Don César de Bazan_, However, there are comedies in reach That have the fashion always. For example:--
“At the time when there was not enough of laurel On Parnassus to feed quite the Boston market, An admirable poet undertook With earnest fingers to graft asphodels And old world cypress-plumes on apple-boughs; And at the end of his experiments, Like Johann Kepler, he brought forth a book. The book was not sublime, but from its hard And uncommutative perversity Of words there came, like jewels out of sand, Six measured songs too beautiful to die. So I take that self-repudiating name ‘Perversity’ and throw it like a spleen To the last and farthest of Thalia’s kennels-- Though I who shape no songs of any sort, I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas,-- I who have added nothing to the world The world would reckon save long-squandered wit-- Might with half-pardonable reverence Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn Extent of some sequestered murmuring Anent the vanities. No doubt I should, If mine were the one life that I have lived; But with a few good glimpses I have had Of heaven through the little holes in hell, I do not any longer feel myself To be ordained or even qualified For criticising God to my advantage. If you doubt the true humility of this, You doubt the spectrum; and if you doubt that, You cannot understand what price it was The poet paid, at one time and another, For those indemnifying sonnet-songs That are to be the kernel in what lives To shrine him when the new-born men come singing.
“Nor can you understand what I have read From even the squeezed items of account Which I have to my credit in that book Whereof the leaves are ages and the text Eternity. What do I care to-day For the pages that have nothing? I have lived, And I have died, and I have lived again; And I am very comfortable. Yes, Though I look back through barren years enough To make me seem--as I transmute myself In a downward retrospect from what I am-- As unproductive and as unconvinced Of the living bread and the soul’s eternal draught As a frog on a Passover-cake in a streamless desert,-- Still do I trust the light that I have earned, And having earned, received. You shake your head, But I do not know that you will shake it off.
“Meanwhile I have the flowers and the grass, My brothers here the trees, and all July To make me joyous. Why do you shake your head? Why do you laugh?--because you are so young? Do you think if you laugh hard enough the truth Will go to sleep? Do you think of any couch Made soft enough to put the truth to sleep? Do you think there are no proper comedies But yours that have the fashion? For example, Do you think that I forget, or shall forget, One friendless, fat, fantastic nondescript Who knew the ways of laughter on low roads,-- A vagabond, a drunkard, and a sponge, But always a free creature with a soul? For a compliment to your intelligence I bring him back, though not without misgivings, And I caution you to damn him sparingly.
“Count Pretzel von Würzburger, the Obscene (The beggar may have had another name, But no man to my knowledge ever knew it) Was a poet and a skeptic and a critic, And in his own mad manner a musician: He had found an old piano in a bar-room, And it was his career--three nights a week, From ten o’clock till twelve--to make it rattle; And then, when I was just far down enough To sit and watch him with his long straight hair, And pity him, and think he looked like Liszt, I might have glorified a musical Steam-engine, or a xylophone. The Count Played half of everything and ‘improvised’ The rest: he told me once that he was born With a genius in him that ‘prohibited Complete fidelity,’ and that his art ‘Confessed vagaries,’ therefore. But I made Kind reckoning of his vagaries then: I had the whole great pathos of the man To purify me, and all sorts of music To give me spiritual nourishment And cerebral athletics; for the Count Played indiscriminately--with an 𝆑, And with incurable presto--cradle-songs And carnivals, spring-songs and funeral marches, The Marseillaise and Schubert’s Serenade-- And always in a way to make me think Procrustes had the germ of music in him. And when this interesting reprobate Began to talk--then there were more vagaries: He made a reeking fetich of all filth, Apparently; but there was yet revealed About him, through his words and on his flesh, That ostracizing nimbus of a soul’s Abject, apologetic purity-- That phosphorescence of sincerity-- Which indicates the curse and the salvation Of a life wherein starved art may never perish.
“One evening I remember clearliest Of all that I passed with him. Having wrought, With his nerve-ploughing ingenuity, The _Träumerei_ into a Titan’s nightmare, The man sat down across the table from me And all at once was ominously decent. ‘“The more we measure what is ours to use,”’ He said then, wiping his froth-plastered mouth With the inside of his hand, ‘“the less we groan For what the gods refuse.” I’ve had that sleeved A decade for you. Now but one more stein, And I shall be prevailed upon to read The only sonnet I have ever made; And after that, if you propitiate Gambrinus, I shall play you that Andante As the world has never heard it played before.’ So saying, he produced a piece of paper, Unfolded it, and read, ‘SONNET UNIQUE DE PRETZEL VON WÜRZBURGER, DIT L’OBSCÉNE:--
“‘_Carmichael had a kind of joke-disease, And he had queer things fastened on his wall. There are three green china frogs that I recall More potently than anything, for these Three frogs have demonstrated, by degrees, What curse was on the man to make him fall: “They are not ordinary frogs at all, They are the Frogs of Aristophanes._”
“‘_God! how he laughed whenever he said that; And how we caught from one another’s eyes The flash of what a tongue could never tell! We always laughed at him, no matter what The joke was worth. But when a man’s brain dies, We are not always glad.... Poor Carmichael!_’
“‘I am a sowbug and a necrophile,’ Said Pretzel, ‘and the gods are growing old; The stars are singing _Golden hair to gray, Green leaf to yellow leaf_,--or chlorophyll To xanthophyll, to be more scientific,-- So speed me one more stein. You may believe That I’m a mendicant, but I am not: For though it look to you that I go begging, The truth is I go giving--giving all My strength and all my personality, My wisdom and experience--myself, To make it final--for your preservation; Though I be not the one thing or the other, Though I strike between the sunset and the dawn, Though I be cliff-rubbed wreckage on the shoals Of Circumstance,--doubt not that I comprise, With all of my disintegrated zeal, Far more than my appearance. Here he comes; Now drink to good old Pretzel! Drink down Pretzel! _Quousque tandem_, Pretzel, and O Lord, How long! But let regret go hang: the good Die first, and of the poor did many cease To be. Beethoven after Wordsworth. _Prosit!_ There were geniuses among the trilobites, And I suspect that I was one of them.’
“How much of him was earnest and how much Fantastic, I know not; nor do I need Profounder knowledge to exonerate The squalor or the folly of a man Than a consciousness--though even the crude laugh Of indigent Priapus follow it-- That I get good of him. The poet made Six golden sonnets. Well, Count Pretzel made No golden sort of product I remember Except a shield of wisdom for the mind Of Captain Craig--whatever you may think Of him or of his armor. If you like him, Then some time in the future, past a doubt, You will have him in a book, make metres of him,-- To the great delight of Mr. Killigrew, And the grief of all your kinsmen. Christian shame And self-confuted Orientalism For the more sagacious of them; vulture-tracks Of my Promethean bile for the rest of them; And that will be a joke. There’s nothing quite So funny as a joke that’s lost on earth And laughed at by the gods. Your devil knows it.
“I come to like your Mr. Killigrew, And I rejoice that you speak well of him. The sprouts of human blossoming are in him, And useful eyes--if he will open them; But one thing ails the man. He smiles too much. He comes to see me once or twice a week, And I must tell him that he smiles too much. If I were Socrates, how I should do it!”
* * * * *
Epistle Number Three was longer coming. I waited for it, even worried for it-- Though Killigrew, and of his own free will, Had written reassuring little scraps From time to time, and I had valued them The more for being his. “The Sage,” he said, “From all that I can see, is doing well-- I should say very well. Three meals a day, Siestas, and innumerable pipes-- Not to the tune of water on the stones, But rather to the tune of his own Ego, Which seems to be about the same as God. But I was always weak in metaphysics, And I pray therefore that you be lenient. I’m going to be married in December, And I have made a poem that will scan-- So Plunket says. You said the other wouldn’t:
“_Augustus Plunket, Ph. D., And oh, the Bishop’s daughter; A very learned man was he And in twelve weeks he got her;_ _And oh, she was as fair to see As pippins on the pippin tree ... Tu, tui, tibi, te,--chubs in the mill water._
“Connotative, succinct, and erudite; Three dots to boot. Now goodman Killigrew May wind an epic one of these glad years, And after that who knoweth but the Lord-- The Lord of Hosts who is the King of Glory?”
Still, when the Captain’s own words were before me, I seemed to read from them, or into them, The protest of a mortuary joy Not all substantiating Killigrew’s Off-hand assurance. The man’s face came back The while I read them, and that look again, Which I had seen so often, came back with it. I do not know that I can say just why, But I felt the feathery touch of something wrong:--
“Since last I wrote--and I fear the weeks have gone Too long for me to leave my gratitude Unuttered for its own acknowledgment-- I have won, without the magic of Amphion Without the songs of Orpheus or Apollo, The frank regard--and with it, if you like, The fledged respect--of three quick-footed friends. (‘Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’ Said Sophocles; and I say after him: ‘He traps and captures, all-inventive one, The light birds and the creatures of the wold, And in his nets the fishes of the sea.’) Once they were pictures, painted on the air, Faint with eternal color, colorless,-- But now they are not pictures, they are fowls.