Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast,
Show marks of toil, and by his general dress
You judge him to have been an artisan.
Doubtless, could all his life be written out,
The story would not thrill nor start a tear;
He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,
And now rests peacefully, with upturned face
Whose look belies all struggle in the past.
A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen
The greatest of the earth go stately by,
While shouting multitudes beset the way,
With less of awe. The gap between a king
And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,
Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now
Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself.
Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he is
Transfigured by a touch from out the skies
Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace,
The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.
This is a fitting transition to _Lyrics of Brotherhood_, which,
together with his latest volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton’s
work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy
of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see.
Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she
presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he
might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and,
once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be
effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps.
Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by
hope and memory and their own ideal. They shall see only by one of
those “flashes struck from midnight” of a personal tragedy—and often
enough we gain our vision thus.
There is a penetrative insight, that of the social economist, for
example, that may possess no ray of sympathetic divination. It may
probe to the heart of a condition, correlate causes and tendencies and
divine effects, all from a scientific motive as professional as the
practice of law, and as keen and cold. One may even be an avowed
philanthropist and never come in sight of a human soul, as will the
poet who looks upon the individual not as a case to be classified and
tabulated, but as one walking step to step with him, though more
heavily, whom he may reach out and touch now and then with the
quickening hand of sympathy, and whose load he may bear bewhiles on
the journey.
Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is shapen to one image with
his fellows. To him literature is not an entity to be weighed only in
the scales of beauty by the balances of Flaubert; it is to-day’s and
to-morrow’s speech. In his prose, especially, this directness is
marked; but in his poems one feels rather the inner relation with
their spirit, for the magnetism of touch is less communicative than in
the more flexible medium of prose. What is communicative, however, is
the feeling that Mr. Burton is living at the heart of things where the
fusion is taking place that makes us one. _Lyrics of Brotherhood_ is a
genuine clasp of hand to hand, nor is he dismayed by the grime of the
hand, for the primal unities are primal sanctities to him. Longing,
strife, defeat, achievement, are all interpreted to him of personal
emotion, solvent in personal sympathy.
_Lyrics of Brotherhood_ opens with a poem that redeems from odium one
opprobrious symbol as old as time. It is that catch-penny epithet,
“black sheep,” that we bandy about with such flippancy, tossing it as
loose change in a character appraisal and little recking what
truth-valuation may lie behind it. It is good to feel that the impulse
to redeem this symbol came to Mr. Burton and wrought so well within
him, for “Black Sheep” is one of his truest inspirations in feeling
and expression:
From their folded mates they wander far,
Their ways seem harsh and wild;
They follow the beck of a baleful star,
Their paths are dream-beguiled.
Yet haply they sought but a wider range,
Some loftier mountain-slope,
And little recked of the country strange
Beyond the gates of hope.
And haply a bell with a luring call
Summoned their feet to tread
Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall
And the lurking snare are spread.
Maybe, in spite of their tameless days
Of outcast liberty,
They’re sick at heart for the homely ways
Where their gathered brothers be.
And oft at night, when the plains fall dark
And the hills loom large and dim,
For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark,
And their souls go out to him.
Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry,
Safe in the inner fold;
And maybe they hear, and wonder why,
And marvel, out in the cold.
Throughout Mr. Burton’s work there is a warm feeling for the simple
tendernesses, the unblazoned heroisms of life; the homely joys, the
homely valors, the unknown consecrations, the unconfessed
aspirations,—in a word, for all that songless melody of the common
soul whose note we do not catch in the public clamor. There is a
tendency, however, in his later work that, from an artistic
standpoint, is carried too far,—the tendency to analogize. Everything
in life presents an analogy to him who is alert for it; and the habit
of looking for analogies and symbols and making poems thereon grows
upon one with the fatal facility of punning, upon a punster. A symbol,
or the subtler and more profound analysis that seeks the causal
relation of dissimilar things, which we term analogy, must have the
magic of revelation; it must flash upon the mind some similitude
unthought or unguessed. Emerson is the past-master of this symbolistic
magic; they bring him rubies, and they become to him souls, of
Friends to friends unknown:
Tides that should warm each neighboring life
Are locked in frozen stone.
Here is the eye of the revelator, for who, looking upon rubies, would
have seen in them what Emerson saw, and yet what a truth bides at the
heart of this symbol!
Mr. Burton has several analogies, such as “On the Line,” “North
Light,” and “Black Sheep,” quoted above, that are excellently wrought;
indeed, it is not so much the manner in which the analogy is
elaborated that one would criticise, as the frequently too-obvious
nature of it.
The danger to a poet in dropping too often into analogy is that he
will become a singer of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and
forget to look for the gleam within himself and make it the light of
his seeing. If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of
report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and
emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and
emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but
their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so
acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien
to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for
poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol
of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. Mr.
Burton has some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final couplet
a stronger tone, but from the nature of the case they cannot possess
any fresh suggestion; on the contrary in such lines as “Nostalgia,”
“In The Shadows,” “The First Song,” “If We Had The Time,” though less
poetic in theme, there is a personal note; one feels back of them the
great weariness, the futile yearning of life. Some of the elemental
emotion is in them, the personal appeal that is so much Mr. Burton’s
note when he does not give himself too much to things without. Even
though one use the visible event but as a sign of the spirit, as the
objective husk of the subjective truth, it is a vision which, if
over-indulged, leads at length away from the living, the creative
passion within. One philosophizes, one contemplates, but the angel
descends less often to trouble the waters within one’s own being, and
it is, after all, for this movement that one should chiefly watch.
_Message and Melody_, Mr. Burton’s latest collection, opens with
perhaps his strongest and most representative poem, “The Song of the
Unsuccessful.” It is a poem provocative of thought, and upon which
innumerable queries follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy against
modern thinking; our friends, the Christian Scientists and Mental
Scientists and Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords with
Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over the initial statement that
God has “barred” from any one the “gifts that are good to hold.”
Indeed, the entire poem would come under their indictment for the same
reason. But something would be won from the conflict; the stuff from
which thought is made is in the poem. In the mean time let us have it
before we consider it further. Here are the types marshalled before
us; we recognize them all as they appear:
We are the toilers from whom God barred
The gifts that are good to hold.
We meant full well, and we tried full hard,
And our failures were manifold.
And we are the clan of those whose kin
Were a millstone dragging them down.
Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sin
And lose the victor’s crown.
The seeming-able, who all but scored,
From their teeming tribe we come:
What was there wrong with us, O Lord,
That our lives were dark and dumb?
The men ten-talented, who still
Strangely missed of the goal,
Of them we are: it seems Thy will
To harrow some in soul.
We are the sinners, too, whose lust
Conquered the higher claims;
We sat us prone in the common dust,
And played at the devil’s games.
We are the hard-luck folk, who strove
Zealously, but in vain:
We lost and lost, while our comrades throve,
And still we lost again.
We are the doubles of those whose way
Was festal with fruits and flowers;
Body and brain we were sound as they,
But the prizes were not ours.
A mighty army our full ranks make;
We shake the graves as we go;
The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak,
They both have brought us low.
And while we are laying life’s sword aside,
Spent and dishonored and sad,
Our epitaph this, when once we have died,
“The weak lie here, and the bad.”
We wonder if this can be really the close,
Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance;
And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes,
“God give us another chance!”
The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the
forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity
underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic
standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had
its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful
are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is
presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the
inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from
impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been
a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may
say at once that
The men ten-talented who still
Strangely missed of the goal,
were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them,
rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in
soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to
analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of
will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that
there is
The clan of those whose kin
Were a millstone dragging them down;
that there are
The hard-luck folk who strove
Zealously, but in vain;
and
The seeming-able, who all but scored,
who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the
victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who
failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess
passed them?
Mr. Burton’s poem is too broad to discuss in the limits of a brief
sketch; it would furnish a text for the sociologist. All the
complexities of modern conditions lie back of its plaint, which
becomes an arraignment. One feels that if God be not within the
shadow, he should at least have given Responsibility and Will surer
means of keeping watch above their own. The Omaric figure of the Wheel
“busied with despite” rises before one as a symbol of this whirling
strife where only the strongest may cling, and where the swift
revolving thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of them a
cushion for its turning; or, in Omar’s phrase, “It speeds to grind
upon the open wound.”
This is the apparent fact; but within it as axle to the Wheel is the
law upon which it rotates, the law of individual choice. Each was
given his supreme gift; his word was whispered to him; if he failed to
hear it, or heed it, or express it in the predestined way, the flying
Wheel casts him to the void, but the law is not impeached thereby.
Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable
radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey
the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight
of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. Mr.
Burton’s poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook upon the
unsuccessful as merely those who are cast from the Wheel, and presents
the truer view that they are by no means always the incompetents or
degenerates:
We are the doubles of those whose way
Was festal with fruits and flowers;
Body and brain we were sound as they,
But the prizes were not ours.
Why? Let the sociologist or the psychologist determine; in the mean
time we have the quickened sympathy that follows upon the poem.
_Message and Melody_ has a group of songs turning upon some music
theme; of these “Second Fiddle” is the most notable. “In A Theatre”
discloses a narrative vein and shows that Mr. Burton has a keen sense
of the dramatic in daily life. He has for some time been working upon
a group of narrative poems with a prologue connecting them, which are
soon to be issued, and which, judging from the fugitive examples in
his other volumes, will disclose an interesting phase of his talent.
To leave the impression of Mr. Burton’s work that is most
characteristic,—the impression of its tenderness, its sympathy, its
emphasis upon the essential things,—one can scarcely do better than
to summarize it in his own well-known lines, “The Human Touch”:
High thoughts and noble in all lands
Help me; my soul is fed by such.
But ah, the touch of lips and hands,—
The human touch!
Warm, vital, close, life’s symbols dear,—
These need I most, and now, and here.
XIV
CLINTON SCOLLARD
THAT genial and delicate satirist, Miss Agnes Repplier, laments in one
of her clever essays that our modern poets incline to dwell upon the
sombre side of things, and hence contribute so little to the cheer of
life. One cannot but wonder what poetry Miss Repplier has been
reading, for our own acquaintance with the song of to-day has been so
much the opposite that it is difficult on the spur of the moment to
recall any poet of the present group in America whose work is not in
the main wholesome and heartening and who is not facing toward the
sun. To be sure, there must be the relief of shade, lest the light
glare; but they who journey to Castaly are in general cheerful
wayfarers, taking gladly the gift of the hours and rendering the Giver
a song, and among the blithest of them is Clinton Scollard, to whom
life is always smilingly envisaged, and to whom, whether spring or
autumn betide, it is still the “sweet o’ the year.”
[Illustration: Clinton Scollard]
If Mr. Scollard’s way has ever been “through dolor and dread, over
crags and morasses,” he is too much the optimist to let the fact be
known, or, better still, to recognize it as such; for we see what our
own eyes reflect from within, and it is certain that Mr. Scollard’s
outlook upon life is governed by the inherent conviction that her ways
are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace. Possibly this
conviction would have more value to the less assured nature if the
testimony of its winning were set down as a strength-giving force by
the way, as we incline in daily life to undervalue the amiability and
cheer which are matters of birthright rather than of overcoming; but
this is a standard narrow in itself and wide of the issue at stake,
which is so much cheer _per se_, whether the fortunate dower of
nature, or the alchemic result of experience; nor may one draw too
definite a line between the temperamental gift and the spiritual
acquisition, especially when the psychology of literature furnishes
the only data. It is sufficient to note the result in the work, and
its bearing upon the art which shapes it. To Mr. Scollard, then,
“Life’s enchanted cup” not only “sparkles at the brim;” but when he
lifts it to his lips a rainbow arches in its depths, and he has
communicated to his song the flash of sunshine and color sparkling in
the clearness of his own draught of life.
Mr. Scollard is almost wholly an objective poet, and by method a
painter. His palette is ever ready for the picture furnished him at
every turn, and hence his several volumes relating to the Orient,
_Lutes of Morn_, _Lyrics of the Dawn_, _Songs of Sunrise Lands_, etc.,
are perhaps truer standards by which to measure his work than any
other, illustrating as they do the pictorial side of his talent. Every
object in the Orient is a picture with its individual color and
atmosphere, but Mr. Scollard does not merely offer us a sketch in
color; the outwardly picturesque is made to interpret a phase of life,
and the spiritual contrasts in this land—where one religion or
philosophy succeeds another, bringing with it another civilization and
leaving desolate the ancient shrines—are indicated with vivid phrase,
as in these lines:
A turbaned guard keeps stolid ward by the Zion gate in the sun,
And the Paynim bows his shaven brows at the shrine of Solomon;
At the chosen altars, long, long quenched is the flame of the sacred
fire,
And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
Great Herod’s pride with its columned aisles is grown with the olive
bough,
And Gath and Dan are but crumbling piles, while Gaza is gateless now;
The sea on the sands of Ascalon sets hands to a mournful lyre,
And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
The closing stanza draws the contrast, or rather makes the spiritual
application of the poem by which “the starry fame of one holy name”
Has blazoned Bethlehem for aye the heart of the world’s desire,
While the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
The final line of these stanzas may offer a metrical stumbling-block
until one catches the sweep of the rhythm and falls in note with the
cæsural pause after the word “tomb.” Mr. Scollard is nothing if not
lyrical, and it would be easier for the traditional camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a captious critic to discover a
metrical falsity in his tuneful song.
But to return to the Orient, not alone the reverence for the Christian
faith speaks in these poems, but the artistic beauty in the Moslem and
other faiths has entered into them; one is stirred to sympathetic
devotion by these lines,—
From many a marble minaret
We heard the rapt muezzin’s call;
And to the prayerful cries my guide,
During each trembling interval,
With reverence serene replied,—
and finds throughout the poems the higher assurance that
The East and West are one in Allah’s grace:
Which way so’er ye turn, behold—His face!
It is difficult to choose from the several volumes portraying Oriental
life, such poems as shall best represent it, since in any direction we
shall find a picture full of color and of strange new charm: the white
mosques and minarets; the gardens of citron and pomegranate; the
bazaars, with their rare fabrics and curios; the pilgrims, dozing in
the shade of the temples; the Bedouins, riding in from the desert; the
women carrying from the springs their water-jars. We shall hear the
sunrise cry of the muezzin from the minarets; the zither and lute in
the gardens at evening; the jargon of tongues in booth and
market-place; the philosopher expounding the Koran; the lover singing
the songs of Araby. The dramatic life of that impulsive, passionate
people will be seen in such poems as the “Dancing of Suleima,” “At the
Tomb of Abel,” and “Yousef and Melhem,” and the philosophical side in
many a poem translating the precepts of the Koran into action; but it
is, after all, for the picture in which all this is set that one comes
with chief pleasure to these songs. Not only the human element of that
strangely fascinating life is incorporated in them, but all the
phenomena of nature in its swift-changing moods pass in review before
one’s eyes, particularly of the swift transitions of the desert sun,
stayed by no detaining cloud, and followed by the immediate gloom of
night. The graphic lines—
When on the desert’s rim,
In sudden, awful splendor, stood the sun—
are excelled in terse, pictorial force by the record of its setting,—
Then sudden dipped the sun.—
Nor easily forgotten are those pictures of lying in the open when the
cooling dark had fallen upon the yearning land, or upon the hills when
The night hung over Hebron all her stars,
Miraculous processional of flame,
and below from out the “purple blur” rose the minarets of the mosque
where
Sepulchred for centuries untold,
The bones of Isaac and of Joseph lay;
And broidered cloths of silver and of gold
Were heaped and draped o’er Abraham’s crumbled clay.
In _The Lutes of Morn_ there are two sonnets—though lyrics in effect,
so does the song prevail with Mr. Scollard—that serve hastily to
sketch a moving scene and in their touch bring to mind Paul the
chronicler. The first is “Passing Rhodes,” and contains these lines
with a biblical tang,
At day’s dim marge, hard on the shut of eve,
We rocked abreast the rugged Rhodian isle,
which tang appears in stronger flavor in the racy opening of the
following:
Cleaving the seadrift through the starlit night,
We left the barren Patmian isle behind,
And scudding northward with a favoring wind,
Lay anigh Chios at the dawn of light.
The shore, the tree-set slopes, the rugged height,
Clear in the morning’s roseate air outlined,—
This was his birthplace who, albeit blind,
Saw tall Troy’s fall, and sang the tragic sight.
Resting within the roadstead, while the day
Grew into gradual glory, on the ear
Continuous broke the surge-song of the brine;
And as we marked it rise, or die away
To rise again, it seemed that we could hear
The swell and sweep of Homer’s mighty line.
Mr. Scollard’s musical and finely descriptive poem, “As I Came Down
From Lebanon,” has become a favorite with the readers of his verse;
but while it has great charm, it is not as strong a piece of work as
are many other of the Oriental poems, contained in his later volumes,
_The Lutes of Morn_ and _Lyrics of the Dawn_, nor as that realistic
poem, “Khamsin,” which appeared in the same collection. Here indeed is
the breath of the sirocco:
Oh, the wind from the desert blew in!
Khamsin,
The wind from the desert blew in!
It blew from the heart of the fiery south,
From the fervid sand and the hills of drouth,
And it kissed the land with its scorching mouth;
The wind from the desert blew in!
It blasted the buds on the almond bough,
And shrivelled the fruit on the orange-tree;
The wizened dervish breathed no vow,
So weary and parched was he.
The lean muezzin could not cry;
The dogs ran mad, and bayed the sky;
The hot sun shone like a copper disk,
And prone in the shade of an obelisk
The water-carrier sank with a sigh,
For limp and dry was his water-skin;
And the wind from the desert blew in.
* * * * *
Into the cool of the mosque it crept,
Where the poor sought rest at the prophet’s shrine;
Its breath was fire to the jasmine vine;
It fevered the brow of the maid who slept,
And men grew haggard with revel of wine.
The tiny fledglings died in the nest;
The sick babe gasped at the mother’s breast.
Then a rumor rose and swelled and spread
From a tremulous whisper, faint and vague,
Till it burst in a terrible cry of dread,
_The plague! the plague! the plague!_—
Oh the wind, Khamsin,
The scourge from the desert blew in!
Of the lighter notes, upon love and kindred themes, Mr. Scollard has
many in his poems of the Orient; “The Song of the Nargileh” is of
especial charm, but unfortunately too long to quote. Very graceful,
too, is the “Twilight Song” with one of Mr. Scollard’s graphic
beginnings, but one quaint bit from _The Lutes of Morn_ is so
characteristic as showing Oriental felicity of speech that while
merely a jotting in song, and less important in an artistic sense than
many others touching upon the theme of love, I cannot refrain from
citing it instead: it is called “Greetings—Cairo.”