My window is open, though it is a night in the late autumn. I have
sat sipping this beverage until my brain is aroused to false action.
Listen! There comes a band of music, marching. It is coming nearer and
nearer until I can hear the human shouts of applause. I can see the
crowd swaying and forging up the street past my window. I can see that
they are escorting a chief to a rostrum where they may proclaim him
leader! How grand and humble must he feel, knowing their expectations
and his limitations.
Hear the fighting, onward notes of that music! It seems to say for him:
“Come on, my followers! I have won. I have triumphed! At last I have
come into my own. Life is not a failure! My forehead beats with the
inspiration of fame, of music, of triumphal progress. The bells are
ringing for me, and every clash of their tongues sends a quiver through
my blood. The whistles shriek! Each blast makes the hair on my head
tingle. And the shouts: ‘Huzzah! Huzzah! Tiger! Three cheers for Me!
And three times three! Huzzah! Huzzah!’”
The band, the crowd and the leader have passed my window, and the music
has died away. I sit looking up into the star-lighted heavens, sipping
my sangaree.
I wonder how many of the followers of that exalted man had longed to
hear the music sound what it was sounding for him? Or was it? Ah, the
dream of fame that was, but never is, pewter for silver. I see the
spirits of the things which were to be, hovering about the living facts
of the things which are, I see them standing as shadow sentinels to us,
the sullen puppets of fate.
That crowd begins to march before me.
“You there! what are you? A clerk? A neat, scribbling clerk, and in
your hopeful youth, in the knee breeches of sturdy boyhood, you dreamed
that you were to be an architect! An architect of what? You alone can
tell us. Oh yes, I know you.
“Next! What art thou? A cringing politician, and from the height
of your white temple, one might surmise that good blood flowed in
your veins. What of you? Back at college, are you? I mean in your
memory. Very good, do you remember a clear-eyed enthusiastic youth
with ideals of civic purity, a young lawyer hearing the dictates of
righteousness--where is he? Dead! And you stand in his place, stanching
the wounds of conscience with the cobwebs of half-success. You had
money. It was not the greed for money, no, not that, but the easy
greed of ambition. Cheap ambition! Has the band played for you? How,
pray, does it sound? Tell us that? Ah yes, I know you.
“And you too, you lazy being with a sleek, well-fed smile upon your
rosy lips, yes, yes, I know you well. You have shirked doing anything
except to stroll along the Road of Least Resistance. You were born an
inheritor of great wealth, were you not? You are the scion of a great
money-getter who was at heart a voluptuary, and so you have never done
what you have not wanted to do, eh? No, that is not strictly the truth,
else why have you not done what you _really_ wanted to do? Look back
to that brilliant dawn of your manhood, when your soul bade you speak,
and you had a decent ambition to tell your fellow beings the truth,
that you were not to be envied, that it was not so! And you thought of
a great poem of discontent, of half-lighted love--aha, I know you well.
Do you ever hear the band?
“Here is another of your ilk, only he was poor, and had more excuse.
See his fingers, smeared with ink. See his nervous eye, dodging us
lest we read his secret. He has a little money now; he can buy food
and raiment, yet even when he is physically most at ease, he is still
uncomfortable. He wrote what he did not want to write. He wrote what
he did not believe. He had to please or starve, so he pleased. Ah, sir,
I do not want to examine you, for you know yourself. I knew your twin
brother once, years ago, he had genius, whereas you have talent. Why
did he cut his throat?
“Who is that pompous one over there? Let him step forward. He looks
the part of self-made success. He comes nigh to the World’s Conception
of Complete Rapture, only he speaks fairly bad grammar. He is the
practical ideal of the present-day American, industrious, self-reliant,
not embarrassed by his past, confident in his contempt for others--we
almost hear the conquering music as he advances. But do we know him?
Let him come closer. You struggled all your youth and manhood and
middle life, did you not? He nods. You slaved for your children and
for your children’s children, to perpetuate your name above want and
in respectability. Ah yes, I think I know you. Your children? They are
not what you willed them to be. He hung his head. And sadder than that,
you imagined that you outgrew the wife of your struggles. You may take
your stand under the Banner of Success for Others; it is just ahead of
the Banner of Success. The band plays a little sweetly for you, but it
does not thrill you. The zest is gone.”
Charity, charity, I pray God for charity toward the Other’s Self and
toward myself. Charity!
For, sirs, I, too, have had Macbeth’s vaulting ambition which o’erlept
itself. I, too, have horsed the clouds with Kaiser Peer Gynt, and
ridden under the stars. Ozymandias, king of kings, never looked upon
grander works than those on my demense. And I have dropped from poetry
into fact. I have sailed the sea and cried, “Fear not. You carry
Caesar!”
Macbeth became a murderer; Peer Gynt something worse. Ozymandias has
been forgotten; and we know not where Julius Caesar lies.
On such a night as this, the heavens seem aglow with brilliants. Stars,
moons, planets, suns, worlds--how many of you are inhabited as ours
is? Or do you reckon at all of such atoms as men and women? You have
shone upon a mighty host of leaders and their followers. You shine
indifferently upon our passing shows and remain to shine when we are
gone, mocking our longest efforts. Ah, how does that Eternity of the
Past outdo the little Eternity of the Future of which poor man has
dreamed!
Tell us, Moon, did the mastodons shed their heavy hair when the ice
receded? And did the Aztecs have a written alphabet?
Was Helen of Troy sweet to look upon? Or was she bold and brazen?
Was Shakespeare a drunkard? And did he consider Marlowe a failure?
In that company of Greeks who came to Philip with the request: “Sir, we
would see Jesus;”--did they think that Christ had Grecian blood in his
veins, as his thought indicated?
When I die, will I get my sleep at last in the wide bed which holds us
all? Failures and successes cut much the same figure under the great
green sheet of that bed, don’t they?
Sandy, the moon has set and will not answer me. You may go to sleep,
Sandy. I am going out for an early morning walk and gather us some
mushrooms before the sun strikes them.