In Edwin Markham’s book, _The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems_,
many of the “other poems” are excellent, some are great. If asked
to name the most poetic—not, if you please, the “loftiest” or most
“purposeful”—I think I should choose “The Wharf of Dreams.” I venture
to quote it:
Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep;
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
Flashes a signal fire across the night;
Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
Their way without a star upon the deep;
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news,
While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap—
Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land.
Really, one does not every year meet with a finer blending of
imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger
on two better lines in recent work than these:
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news.
The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical
thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and
indocible to the meaning of it.
Mr. Markham has said of Poetry—and said greatly:
She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,
And sees too deep for laughter;
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.
But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of
music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of
winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise
of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she
“speaks a various language.” Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he
seemed to be, with interpreting her fluting and warbling and “sweet
jargoning,” learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones
of the temple like the bass of a great organ.
In his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” Keats has supplied the greatest—almost
the only truly great instance of a genuine poetic inspiration derived
from art instead of nature. In his poems on pictures Mr. Markham shows
an increasingly desperate determination to achieve success, coupled
with a lessening ability to merit it. It is all very melancholy, the
perversion of this man’s high powers to the service of a foolish dream
by artificial and impossible means. Each effort is more ineffectual
than the one that went before. Unless he can be persuaded to desist—to
cease interpreting art and again interpret nature, and turn also from
the murmurs of “Labor” to the music of the spheres—the “surge and
thunder” of the universe—the end of his good literary repute is in
sight. He knows—does he know?—the bitter truth which he might have
learned otherwise than by experience: that the plaudits of “industrial
discontent,” even when strengthened by scholars’ commendations of a few
great lines in the poem that evoked it, are not fame. He should know,
and if he live long will know, that when one begins to be a “labor
leader” one ceases to be a poet.
In saying to Mr. Markham, “Thou ailest here and here,” Mrs. Atherton
has shown herself better at diagnosis than he is himself in telling
us what is the matter with the rich. “Why,” she asks him, “waste a
beautiful gift in groveling for popularity with the mob?... Striving to
please the common mind has a fatal commonizing effect on the writing
faculty.” It is even so—nothing truer could be said, and Mr. Markham
is the best proof of its truth. His early work, when he was known to
only a small circle of admirers, was so good that I predicted for
him the foremost place among contemporaneous American poets. He sang
because he “could not choose but sing,” and his singing grew greater
and greater. Every year he took wider outlooks from “the peaks of
song”—had already got well above the fools’ paradise of flowers and
song-birds and bees and women and had invaded the “thrilling region”
of the cliff, the eagle and the cloud, whence one looks down upon man
and out upon the world. Then he had the mischance to publish “The Man
with the Hoe,” a poem with some noble lines, but an ignoble poem. In
the first place, it is, in structure, stiff, inelastic, monotonous. One
line is very like another. The cæsural pauses fall almost uniformly in
the same places; the full stops always at the finals. Comparison of the
versification with Milton’s blank will reveal the difference of method
in all its significance. It is a difference analogous to that between
painting on ivory and painting on canvas—between the dead, flat tints
of the one and the lively, changing ones due to inequalities of surface
in the other. If it seem a little exacting to compare Mr. Markham’s
blank with that of the only poet who has ever mastered that medium in
English, I can only say that the noble simplicity and elevation of Mr.
Markham’s work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any
standard lower than the highest that we have.
My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought
that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry
conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the
most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated
composition has the right to be called great if the message that it
delivers is neither true nor just. All poets, even the little ones,
are feelers, for poetry is emotional; but all the great poets are
thinkers as well. Their sympathies are as broad as the race, but they
do not echo the peasant’s philosophies of the workshop and the field.
In Mr. Markham’s poem the thought is that of the labor union—even to
the workworn threat of rising against the wicked well-to-do and taking
it out of their hides.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
One is somehow reminded by these lines of Coleridge’s questions in the
Chamouni hymn, and one is tempted to answer them the same way: God.
“The Man with the Hoe” is not a product of the “masters, lords and
rulers in all lands”: they are not, and no class of men is, accountable
for him, his limitations and his woes, which are not of those “that
kings or laws can cause or cure.” The “masters, lords and rulers” are
as helpless “in the fell clutch of circumstance” as he—which Mr.
Markham would be speedily made to understand if appointed Dictator. The
notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the
great is “natural,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a
literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish. It will not
carry a poem of whatever excellence through two generations. That a man
of Mr. Markham’s splendid endowments should be chained to the body of
this literary death is no less than a public calamity.
For his better work in poetry Mr. Markham merits all the praise that
he has received for “The Man with the Hoe,” and more. It is not likely
that he is now under any illusion in the matter. He probably knows the
real nature of his sudden flare of “popularity”; knows that to-morrow
it will be “one with Nineveh and Tyre”; knows that its only service
to him is to arrest attention of competent critics and scholars who
would otherwise have overlooked him for a time. The “plaudits of the
multitude” can not long be held by the poet, and are not worth holding.
The multitude knows nothing of poetry and does not read it. The
multitude will applaud you to-day, calumniate you to-morrow and thwack
you athwart the mazzard the day after. He who builds upon the sea-sand
of its favor holds possession by a precarious tenure; the wind veers
and the wave
Lolls out his large tongue—
Licks the whole labor flat.
If the great have left the humble so wise that the philosophies of the
factory and the plow-tail are true; if the sentiments and the taste
of the mob are so just and elevated that its judgment of poetry is
infallible and its approval a precious possession; if “the masses” have
more than “a thin veneering of civilization,” and are not in peace
as fickle as the weather and in anger as cruel as the sea; if these
victims of an absolutely universal oppression “in _all_ lands” are
deep, discriminating, artistic, liberal, magnanimous—in brief, wise
and good—it is difficult to see what they have to complain about. Mr.
Markham, at least, is forbidden to weep for them, for he is a lover
of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. These taught, and taught
truly—one from the throne of an empire, one writing at a gold table,
and one in the intervals of service as a slave—the supreme value of
wisdom and goodness, the vanity of power and wealth, the triviality
of privation, discomfort and pain. Mr. Markham is a disciple of Jesus
Christ, who from the waysides and the fields taught that poverty is
not only a duty, but indispensable to salvation. So my _argumentum ad
hominem_ runs thus: The objects of our poet’s fierce invective and
awful threats have suffered his _protégés_ to remain rather better off
than they are themselves—have appropriated and monopolized only what
is not worth having. In view of this mitigating circumstance I feel
justified in demanding in their behalf a lighter sentence. Let the
portentous effigy of the French Revolution be forbidden to make faces
at them.
I know of few literary phenomena more grotesque than some of those
growing out of “The Man with the Hoe”—that sudden popularity being
itself a thing which “goes neare to be fonny.” Mr. Markham, whom for
many years those of us who modestly think ourselves _illuminati_
considered a great poet whose greatness full surely was a-ripening,
wrote many things far and away superior to “The Man,” but these
brought him recognition from the judicious only, with which we
would all have sworn that he was content. All at once he published a
poem which, despite some of its splendid lines, is neither true in
sentiment nor admirable in form—which is, in fact, addressed to peasant
understandings and soured hearts. Instantly follow a blaze and thunder
of notoriety, seen and heard over the entire continent; and even the
coasts of Europe are “telling of the sound.” Straightway before the
astonished vision of his friends the author stands transfigured! The
charming poet has become a demagogue, a “labor leader” spreading that
gospel of hate known as “industrial brotherhood,” a “walking delegate”
diligently inciting a strike against God and clamoring for repeal
of the laws of nature. Saddest of all, we find him conscientiously
promoting his own vogue. He personally appears at meetings of cranks
and incapables convened to shriek against the creed of law and
order; speaks at meetings of sycophants eager to shine by his light;
introduces lecturers to meetings of ninnies and femininnies convened to
glorify themselves. When he is not waving the red flag of discontent
and beating the big drum of revolution I presume he is resting—perched,
St.-Simeon-Styliteswise, atop a lofty capital I, erected in the market
place, diligently and rapturously contemplating his new identity. All
of which is very sad to those of us who find it difficult to unlove him.
The trouble with Mr. Markham is that he has formed the habit of
thinking of mankind as divided on the property line—as comprising only
two classes, the rich and the poor. When a man has acquired that habit
he is lost to sense and righteousness. Assassins sometimes reform,
and with increasing education thieves renounce the error of theft
to embrace the evangel of embezzlement; but a demagogue never gets
again into shape unless he becomes wealthy. I hope Mr. Markham’s fame
will so promote his pecuniary interest that it will convert him from
the conviction that his birth was significantly coincident in point
of time with the Second Advent. Only one thing is more disagreeable
than a man with a mission, namely a woman with a mission, and the
superior objectionableness of the latter is largely due to her trick of
inspiring the former.
Mr. Markham seems now to look upon himself as the savior of society;
to believe with entire sincerity that in his light and leading mankind
can be guided out of the wilderness of Self into the promised land
of Altruria; that he can alter the immemorial conditions of human
existence; that a new Heaven and a new Earth can be created by the
power of his song. Most melancholy of all, the song has lost its power
and its charm. Since he became the Laureate of Demagogy he has written
little that is poetry: in the smug prosperity that he reviles in
others, his great gift “shrinks to its second cause and is no more.”
That in the great white light of inevitable disillusion he will recover
and repossess it, giving us again the flowers and fruits of a noble
imagination in which the dream of an impossible and discreditable
hegemony has no part, I should be sorry to disbelieve.
1899.
“THE KREUTZER SONATA”
I
Nothing in this book directly discloses the author’s views of the
marriage relation. The horrible story of Posdnyschew’s matrimonial
experience—an experience which, barring its tragic finale, he affirms
not to be an individual but a general one—is related by himself. There
is no more in it to show directly what Tolstoi thinks of the matters in
hand than there is in a play to show what the playwright thought. We
are always citing the authority of Shakspeare by quotations from his
plays—in which every sentiment is obviously conceived with a view to
its fitness to the character of the imaginary person who utters it, and
supplies no clew to the author’s convictions.
In _The Kreutzer Sonata_, however, the case is somewhat different.
Whereas Shakspeare had in view an artistic (and commercial) result,
Tolstoi’s intention is clearly moral: his aim is not entertainment,
but instruction. To that end he foregoes the advantage of those
literary effects which he so well knows how to produce, confining his
exceptional powers to bald narrative, overlaid with disquisitions
deriving their only vitality from the moral purpose everywhere visible.
A man marries a woman. They quarrel of course; their life is of
course wretched beyond the power of words to express. Jealousy
naturally ensuing, the man murders the woman. That is the “plot,”
and it is without embellishment. Its amplification is accomplished
by “preaching”; its episodes are sermons on subjects not closely
related to the main current of thought. Clearly, the aim of a book so
constructed, even by a skilful literary artist, is not an artistic aim.
Tolstoi desires it to be thought that he entertains the convictions
uttered by the lips of Posdnyschew. He has, indeed, distinctly avowed
them elsewhere than in this book. Like other convictions, they must
stand or fall according to the stability of their foundation upon the
rock of truth; but the fact that they are held by a man of so gigantic
powers as Tolstoi gives them an interest and importance which the
world, strange to say, has been quick to recognize.
Some of these convictions are peculiarly Tolstoi’s own; others he
holds in common with all men and women gifted with that rarest of
intellectual equipments, the faculty of observation, and blessed with
opportunity for its use. Anybody can see, but observation is another
thing. It is something more than discernment, yet may be something
less than accurate understanding of the thing discerned. Such as it
is, Tolstoi has it in the highest degree. Nothing escapes him: his
penetration is astonishing: he searches the very soul of things,
making record of his discoveries with a pitiless frankness which to
feebler understandings is brutal and terrifying. To him nothing is a
mere phenomenon; everything is a phenomenon _plus_ a meaning connected
with a group of meanings. The meanings he may, and in my poor judgment
commonly does, misread, but the phenomenon, the naked fact, he will
see. Nothing can hide it from him nor make it appear to him better
than it is. It is this terrible power of discernment, with this
unsparing illumination compelling the reluctant attention of others,
which environs him with animosities and implacable resentments. His
is the Mont Blanc of minds; about the base of his conspicuous, cold
intelligence the Arve and Arvieron of ignorance and optimism rave
ceaselessly. It is of the nature of a dunce to confound exposure with
complicity. Point out to him the hatefulness of that which he has been
accustomed to admire, and nothing shall thenceforward convince him
that you have not had a guilty hand in making it hateful. Tolstoi,
in intellect a giant and in heart a child, a man of blameless life,
and spotless character, devout, righteous, spectacularly humble and
aggressively humane, has had the distinction to be the most widely
and sincerely detested man of two continents. He has had the courage
to utter a truth of so supreme importance that one-half the civilized
world has for centuries been engaged in a successful conspiracy to
conceal it from the other half—the truth that the modern experiment of
monogamic marriage by the dominant tribes of Europe and America is a
dismal failure. He is not the first by many who has testified to that
effect, but he is the first in our time whose testimony has arrested so
wide and general attention—a result that is to be attributed partly to
his tremendous reputation and partly to his method of giving witness.
He does not in this book deal in argument, is no controversialist. He
says the thing that is in him to say and we can take it or leave it.
_The Kreutzer Sonata_ is not an obscene nor even an indelicate
book: the mind that finds it so is an indelicate, an obscene mind.
It is not, according to our popular notions, “a book for young
girls.” Nevertheless, it is most desirable that young girls should
know—preferably through their parents who can speak with authority of
experience—the truth which it enforces: namely, that marriage, like
wealth, offers no hope of lasting happiness. Despite the implication
that “they lived happily ever after,” it is not for nothing that the
conventional love story ends with the chime of wedding bells. As the
Genius vanished when Mirza asked him what lay under the cloud beyond
the rock of adamant, so the story teller prudently forestalls further
investigation by taking himself off. He has an innate consciousness
that the course of true love whose troubled current he has been tracing
begins at marriage to assume something of the character of a raging
torrent.
Tolstoi strikes hard: not one man nor woman a year married but
must wince beneath his blows. They are all members of a dishonest
conspiracy. They conceal their wounds and swear that all is right
and well with them. They give their Hell a good character, but in
their secret souls they chafe and groan under the weight and heat
of their chains. They come out from among their corruption and dead
men’s bones only to give the sepulchre another coating of whitewash
and call attention to its manifold advantages as a dwelling. They are
like the members of some “ancient and honorable order,” who gravely
repeat to others falsehoods by which they were themselves cheated into
membership. The minatory oath alone is lacking, its binding restraint
supplied by the cowardice that dares not brave the resentment of
co-conspirators and the fury of their dupes.
No human institution is perfect, nor nearly perfect. None comes within
a world’s width of accomplishing the purpose for which it was devised,
and all in time become so perverted as to serve a contrary one. But of
all institutions, marriage as we have it here, and as they evidently
have it in Russia, most lamentably falls short of its design. Nay, it
is the one of them which is become most monstrously wrenched awry to
the service of evil. To have observed this—to have had the intrepidity
to affirm it in a world infested with fools and malevolents who can
not understand how anything can be known except by the feeble and
misleading light of personal experience—that is much. It marks Tolstoi
in a signal way as one eminent above the cloud-region, with a mental
and spiritual outlook unaffected by the ground-reek of darkened counsel
and invulnerable to the slings and arrows of defamation. Nevertheless,
while admiring his superb courage and attesting the clarity of his
vision, I think he imperfectly discerns the underlying causes of the
phenomena that he reports.
Schopenhauer explains the shamefacedness of lovers, their tendency to
withdraw into nooks and corners to do their wooing, by the circumstance
that they plan a crime—they conspire to bring a human soul into a world
of woe. Tolstoi takes something of the same ground as to the nature
of their offence. Marriage he thinks a sin, and being a religionist
regards the resulting and inevitable wretchedness as its appointed
punishment.
“Little did I think of her physical and intellectual life,” says
Posdnyschew, in explanation of conjugal antagonism. “I could not
understand whence sprang our mutual hostility, but how clearly I
see now! This hostility was nothing but the protest of human nature
against the beast that threatened to devour it. I could not understand
this hatred. And how could it have been different? This hostility was
nothing else than the mutual hatred of two accessories in a crime—that
of instigation, that of accomplishment.”
Marriage being a sin, it follows that celibacy is a virtue and a duty.
Tolstoi has the courage of his convictions in this as in other things.
He is too sharp not to see where this leads him and too honest to stop
short of its logical conclusion. Here he is truly magnificent! He
perceives that his ideal, if attained, would be annihilation of the
race. That, as he has elsewhere in effect pointed out, is no affair
of his. He is not concerned for the perpetuity of the race, but for
its happiness through freedom from the lusts of the flesh. What is it
to him if the god whom, oddly enough, he worships has done his work
so badly that his creatures can not be at the same time chaste, happy
and alive? Every one to his business—God as creator and, if he please,
preserver; Tolstoi as reformer.
For his views on the duty of celibacy, it is only fair to say, Tolstoi
goes directly to the teaching of Jesus Christ, with what accuracy of
interpretation, not being skilled in theology I am unwilling to say.
From his scorn of physicians it may be inferred that our author is
imperfectly learned in their useful art, and therefore unfamiliar with
whatever physiological side the question of celibacy may have. It is
perhaps sufficient to say that in the present state of our knowledge
the advantages of a life ordered after the Tolstoian philosophy seem
rather spiritual than physical. Doubtless “they didn’t know everything
down in Judee,” but St. Paul appears to have had a glimmering sense of
this fact, if it is a fact.
To attribute the miseries which are inseparable from marriage as the
modern Caucasian has the heroism to maintain it to any single and
simple cause is most unphilosophical; our civilization is altogether
too complex to admit of any such cheap and easy method. Doubtless there
are many factors in the problem; a few, however, seem sufficiently
obvious to any mind which, having an historical outlook wider than its
immediate environment in time and space, with
extensive view
Surveys mankind from China to Peru.
The monogamous marriage ignores, for example, the truth that Man is
a polygamous animal. Of all the men and women who have been born
into this world, only one in many has ever even so much as heard of
any other system than polygamy. To suppose that within a few brief
centuries monogamy has been by law and by talking so firmly established
as effectually to have stayed the momentum of the original instinct
is to hold that the day of miracles is not only not past, but has
really only recently arrived. It implies, too, and entails, a blank
blindness to the most patent facts of easy observation. With admirable
gravity the modern Caucasian has legislated himself into theoretical
monogamy, but he has, as yet, not effected a repeal of the laws of
nature, and has in truth shown very little disposition to disregard
them and observe his own. The men of our time and race are in heart and
life about as polygamous as their good ancestors were before them, and
everybody knows it who knows anything worth knowing. But not she to
whom the knowledge would have the greatest practical value; the person
whom all the powers of modern society seem in league to cheat; the
young girl.
Another cause of the wretchedness of the married state—but of this
Tolstoi seems inadequately conscious—is that marriage confers rights
deemed incalculably precious which there is no means whatever of
confirming and enforcing. The consciousness that these rights are held
by the precarious tenure of a “vow” which never had, to one of the
parties, much more than a ceremonial significance, and a good faith
liable, in the other, to suspension by resentment and the vicissitudes
of vanity and caprice; the knowledge that these rights are exposed to
secret invasion invincible to the most searching inquiry; the savage
superstition that their invasion “dishonors” the one to whom it is most
hateful, and who of all persons in the world is least an accomplice—all
this begets an apprehension which grows to distrust, and from distrust
to madness. The apprehension is natural because reasonable: its
successive stages of development are what you will, but the culmination
is disaster and the wreck of peace.
Of the sombre phenomena of the marriage relation observable by men like
Tolstoi, with eyes in their heads, brains behind the eyes and not too
much scruple in selecting points of view outside the obscurity and
confusion of a personal experience, a hundred additional explanations
might be adduced, all more valid, in my judgment, than that to which he
pins his too ready faith; but those noted seem sufficient. With regard
to any matter touching less nearly the unreasoning sensibilities of the
human heart, they would, I think, be deemed more than sufficient.
What, then—rejecting Tolstoi’s prescription—is the remedy? In view of
the failure of our experiment should we revert to first principles,
adopting polygamy with such modifications as would better adapt it to
the altered situation? Ought we to try free love, requiring the state
to keep off its clumsy hands and let men and women as individuals
manage this affair, as they do their religions, their friendships and
their diet?
For my part I know of no remedy, nor do I believe that one can be
formulated. It is of the nature of the more gigantic evils to be
irremediable—a truth against which poor humanity instinctively revolts,
entailing the additional afflictions of augmented nonsense and wasted
endeavor. Nevertheless something may be done in mitigation. The
marriage relation that we have we shall probably continue to have,
and its Dead Sea fruits will grow no riper and sweeter with time. But
the lie that describes them as luscious and satisfying is needless.
Let the young be taught, not celibacy, but fortitude. Point out to
them the exact nature of the fool’s paradise into which they will
pretty certainly enter and perhaps ought to enter. Teach them that the
purpose of marriage is whatever the teacher may conceive it to be, but
_not_ happiness. Mercifully reduce the terrible disproportion between
expectation and result. In so far as _The Kreutzer Sonata_ accomplishes
this end, in so far as it teaches this lesson, it is a good book.