CAPTAIN CRAIG
A Book of Poems
BY
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
SECOND EDITION.
[Illustration: Publisher’s Colophon]
Boston and New York
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October, 1902_
CONTENTS
PAGE
CAPTAIN CRAIG 1
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 85
THE RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 103
AUNT IMOGEN 108
THE KLONDIKE 115
THE GROWTH OF “LORRAINE” 121
THE SAGE 123
ERASMUS 124
THE WOMAN AND THE WIFE 125
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 127
SAINTE-NITOUCHE 150
AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 159
THE CORRIDOR 163
CORTÈGE 164
THE WIFE OF PALISSY 166
TWILIGHT SONG 169
CAPTAIN CRAIG
I
I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
As they had looked at ashes; but a few--
Say five or six of us--had found somehow
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life,
And he had shared, with all of humankind,
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,
By some resplendent metamorphosis,
Whatever he was not. And after time,
When it had come sufficiently to pass
That he was going patch-clad through the streets,
Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid
Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve
And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,
Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”
He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,
And after it moved others--one or two;
For Captain Craig, before the day was done,
Got back to the scant refuge of his bed
And shivered into it without a curse--
Without a murmur even. He was cold,
And old, and hungry; but the worst of it
Was a forlorn familiar consciousness
That he had failed again. There was a time
When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,
And he could work no more, that he might beg
Nor be the less for it; but when it came
To practice he found out that he had not
The genius. It was that, and that was all:
Experience had made him to detect
The blunder for his own, like all the rest
Of him. There were no other men to blame.
He was himself, and he had lost the speed
He started with, and he was left behind.
There was no mystery, no tragedy;
And if they found him lying on his back
Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,--
Well, once upon a time there was a man--
_Es war einmal ein König_, if it pleased him.
And he was right: there were no men to blame:
There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune--
A note that able-bodied men might sound
Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.
They might have made him sing by feeding him
Till he should work again, but probably
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;
They found it more melodious to shout
Right on, with unmolested adoration,
To keep the tune as it had always been,
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.
He must have understood that afterwards--
When we had laid some fuel to the spark
Of him, and oxidized it--for he laughed
Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,
And then, for gratitude, made game of us:
“You are the resurrection and the life,”
He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;
O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”
We were not quite accoutred for a blast
Of any lettered nonchalance like that,
And some of us--the five or six of us
Who found him out--were singularly struck.
But soon there came assurance of his lips,
Like phrases out of some sweet instrument
Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt
“No penitential shame for what had come,
No virtuous regret for what had been,--
But rather a joy to find it in his life
To be an outcast usher of the soul
For such as had good courage of the Sun
To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;
And on the bottom of it, like a king,
For longer time than I dare chronicle,
Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized
His opportunity. My friends got out,
Like brokers out of Arcady; but I--
May be for fascination of the thing,
Or may be for the larger humor of it--
Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.
When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze
Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled
At me and then continued, earnestly:
“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,
For a motive hardly vindicated yet
By prudence or by conscience, have remained;
And that is very good, for I have things
To tell you: things that are not words alone
Which are the ghosts of things--but something firmer.
“First, would I have you know, for every gift
Or sacrifice, there are--or there may be--
Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind
We feel for what we take, the slower kind
We feel for what we give. Once we have learned
As much as this, we know the truth has been
Told over to the world a thousand times;--
But we have had no ears to listen yet
For more than fragments of it: we have heard
A murmur now and then, an echo here
And there, and we have made great music of it;
And we have made innumerable books
To please the Unknown God. Time throws away
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows
No death denies not one: the books all count,
The songs all count; and yet God’s music has
No modes, his language has no adjectives.”
“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;
“But what has all of this that you say now--
This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk--
To do with you and me?” The Captain raised
His hand and held it westward, where a patched
And unwashed attic-window filtered in
What barren light could reach us, and then said,
With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines
The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,
And wisdom comes to us with every whirl
We count throughout the circuit. We may say
The child is born, the boy becomes a man,
The man does this and that, and the man goes,--
But having said it we have not said much,
Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think,
That it will be the end of anything
When I am gone? There was a soldier once
Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.
Sad friends went after, and they brought him home
And had a brass band at his funeral,
As you should have at mine; and after that
A few remembered him. But he was dead,
They said, and they should have their friend no more.--
However, there was once a starveling child--
A ragged-vested little incubus,
Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all
Capacity for childhood’s happiness--
Who started out one day, quite suddenly,
To drown himself. He ran away from home,
Across the clover-fields and through the woods,
And waited on the rock above the stream,
Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,
Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,
There came along a man who looked at him
With such an unexpected friendliness,
And talked with him in such a common way,
That life grew marvelously different:
What he had lately known for sullen trunks
And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,
Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind
That once had made the loneliest of all
Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;
And the water that had called him once to death
Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,
Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.--
Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:
Good occupation for a sonneteer,
Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,
But small work for a soldier. By the way,
When you are weary sometimes of your own
Utility, I wonder if you find
Occasional great comfort pondering
What power a man has in him to put forth?
‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,
Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’
Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;
‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods
He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,
Turning the broken mould, year after year.’...
“I turned a little furrow of my own
Once on a time, and everybody laughed--
As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not
The First Intelligence, which we have drawn
In our competitive humility
As if it went forever on two legs,
Had some diversion of it: I believe
God’s humor is the music of the spheres--
But even as we draft omnipotence
Itself to our own image, we pervert
The courage of an infinite ideal
To finite resignation. You have made
The cement of your churches out of tears
And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:
The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored
So long with unavailing compromise
Will crumble down to dust and blow away,
And younger dust will follow after them;
Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled
First atom of the least that ever flew
Shall be by man defrauded of the touch
God thrilled it with to make a dream for man
When Science was unborn. And after time,
When we have earned our spiritual ears,
And art’s commiseration of the truth
No longer glorifies the singing beast,
Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,--
Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,
Through time, through flesh, God’s music of the soul.
For wisdom is that music, and all joy
That wisdom:--you may counterfeit, you think,
The burden of it in a thousand ways;
But as the bitterness that loads your tears
Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,
Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.
And at the fairest and the frenziedest
Alike of your God-fearing festivals,
You so compound the truth to pamper fear
That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith
You clamor for the food that shadows eat.
You call it rapture or deliverance,--
Passion or exaltation, or what most
The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness
Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch
For something larger, something unfulfilled,
Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have
Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”
And with a calm Socratic patronage,
At once half sombre and half humorous,
The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs
And fixed his eyes on something far away;
Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,
And at the moment unendurable
For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.--
“But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease
With altruism yet.--He made a kind
Of reminiscent little inward noise,
Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,
And that was all his answer: not a word
Of explanation or suggestion came
From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left,
I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow
And had the world-wide air to breathe again,--
Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth
And honored the endurance of his hand--
Whether or not, securely closeted
Up there in the stived haven of his den,
The man sat laughing at me; and I felt
My teeth grind hard together with a quaint
Revulsion--as I think back on it now--
Not only for my Captain, but as well
For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth--
Albeit I could swear, at the same time,
That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.
I question if in tremors or in tears
There be more guidance to man’s worthiness
Than--well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes
It humors us to think that we possess
By some divine adjustment of our own
Particular shrewd cells, or something else,
What others, for untutored sympathy,
Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives
To catch--like cheerful sinners to catch faith;
And I have not a doubt but I assumed
Some egotistic attribute like this
When, cautiously, next morning I reduced
The fretful qualms of my novitiate,
For most part, to an undigested pride.
Only, I live convinced that I regret
This enterprise no more than I regret
My life; and I am glad that I was born.
That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found
The faces of my comrades all suffused
With what I chose then to denominate
Superfluous good feeling. In return,
They loaded me with titles of odd form
And unexemplified significance,
Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”
“Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”
“Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more
That I remember, and a dozen more
That I forget. I may have been disturbed,
I do not say that I was not annoyed,
But something of the same serenity
That fortified me later made me feel
For their skin-pricking arrows not so much
Of pain as of a vigorous defect
In this world’s archery. I might have tried,
With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate
What they had only snapped at and thereby
Made out of my best evidence no more
Than comfortable food for their conceit;
But patient wisdom frowned on argument,
With a side nod for silence, and I smoked
A series of incurable dry pipes
While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,
Some things that I detested.--Killigrew,
Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,
Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made
Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.
It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats
That night, but I have rather to believe
As I lay turning, twisting, listening,
And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,
What possible satisfaction those dead leaves
Could find in sending shadows to my room
And swinging them like black rags on a line,
That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness
Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned
In fearing to believe what I believed,
And I was paying for it.--Whimsical,
You think,--factitious; but “there is no luck,
No fate, no fortune for us, but the old
Unswerving and inviolable price
Gets paid: God sells himself eternally,
But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;
And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,
And with half mad minuteness analyzed
The Captain’s attitude and then my own,
I felt at length as one who throws himself
Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,
And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up
And opens them again, what seems at first
An unfamiliar sunlight in his room
And in his life--as if the child in him
Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew
Some prowling superfluity of child
In me had found the child in Captain Craig
And had the sunlight reach him. While I slept,
That thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,
And in the morning it was with me still.
Through March and shifting April to the time
When winter first becomes a memory
My friend the Captain--to my other friend’s
Incredulous regret that such as he
Should ever get the talons of his talk
So fixed in my unfledged credulity--
Kept up the peroration of his life,
Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think,
Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh
Sometimes, and then again he made me weep
Almost; for I had insufficiency
Enough in me to make me know the truth
Within the jest, and I could feel it there
As well as if it were the folded note
I felt between my fingers. I had said
Before that I should have to go away
And leave him for the season; and his eyes
Had shone with well-becoming interest
At that intelligence. There was no mist
In them that I remember; but I marked
An unmistakable self-questioning
And a reticence of unassumed regret.
The two together made anxiety--
Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see
No more of him for six or seven months,
And I was there to tell him as I might
What humorous provision we had made
For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.
That finished--with a few more commonplace
Prosaics on the certified event
Of my return to find him young again--
I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us,
Nor very much at odds with destiny.
At any rate, save always for a look
That I had seen too often to mistake
Or to forget, he gave no other sign.
When I was in the street I heard him shout
Some anxious Latin down; but a slow load
Of trailing rails absorbed it, and I lost
Whatever of good counsel or farewell
It may have had for me. I turned about
And having waved a somewhat indistinct
Acknowledgment, I walked along. The train
Was late and I was early, but the gap
Was filled and even crowded. Killigrew
Had left his pigeonholes to say good-by,
And he stood waiting by the ticket window
Like one grin-cursed of Orcus.--“You have heard?”
Said he.--“Heard what?” said I.--“He! he!” said he;
“Then your gray-headed beneficiary--
Your paragon of abstract usefulness--
Your philhellenic proletariat--
He! he!”--“But what the devil is it all
About?” said I. “What has he done? What ails him?”--
“What has he done? Ye gods! What has he done?
Man, he’s a tramp--a Waggles--a dead beat!
I have a friend who knew him fifteen years
Ago, and I have his assurance now
That your sequestered parasite achieved
The same discreet collapse, at intervals,
Then as when first you found him. And you ask
What he has done! Go find a looking-glass
And you may see some recent work of his--
The most remunerative, and I think
The most unconscious.”
With another man
I might have made of that last adjective
A stimulating text; but Killigrew
Was not the one for me to stimulate
In five defective minutes, and I knew it.
So I offer no defense for keeping still
While he gave birth to phrases for my sake,
Nor more for staring at the changeless curve
Where river and railroad vanished, half a mile
Beyond us to the north. I gave him leave
To talk as long as he had words in him,
And watched the track and waited for the train;
And I remember, when the brakes had ceased
Their welcome wheezing and the place was filled
With yells and shadows and official smash,
How he ground my patient fingers and said, “Well,
Good-by, old man!--good-by! And don’t forget:
Patrician, but all Waggles to the grave.”
The grin became a smile soon after that,
And I knew that he had let the Captain go;
And I could read, where once the jest had been,
The spirit of the friend who cared the most.
The train began to move; and as it moved,
I felt a comfortable sudden change
All over and inside. Partly it seemed
As if the strings of me had all at once
Gone down a tone or two; and even though
It made me scowl to think so trivial
A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,
It made me laugh to think that I was free.
But free from what--when I began to turn
The question round--was more than I could say:
I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,
Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;
But I was eased of some restraint, I thought,
Not qualified by those amenities,
And I should have to search the matter down;
For I was young, and I was very keen.
So I began to smoke a bad cigar
That Plunket, in his love, had given me
The night before; and as I smoked I watched
The flying mirrors for a mile or so,
Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,
They gave me of the woodland over west,
A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years
Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,
With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;
But I soon yawned out of that and set myself
To face again the loud monotonous ride
That lay before me like a vista drawn
Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.
II
Yet that ride had an end, as all rides have;
And the days that followed after took the road
That all days take,--though never one of them
Went by but I got some good thought of it
For Captain Craig. Not that I pitied him,
Or nursed a mordant hunger for his presence;
But what I thought (what Killigrew still thinks)
An irremediable cheerfulness
Was in him and about the name of him,
And I fancy that it may be most of all
For the jokes he made that I have saved his letters.
I like to think of him, and how he looked--
Or should have looked--in his renewed estate,
Composing them. They may be dreariness
Unspeakable to you that never saw
The Captain; but to five or six of us
Who knew him they are not so bad as that.
It may be we have smiled not always where
The text itself would seem to indicate
Responsive titillation on our part,--
Yet having smiled at all we have done well,
For we know that we have touched the ghost of him.
He tells me that he thinks of nothing now
That he would rather do than be himself,
Wisely alive. So let us heed this man:--
“The world that has been old is young again,
The touch that faltered clings; and this is May.
So think of your decrepit pensioner
As one who cherishes the living light,
Forgetful of dead shadows. He may gloat,
And he may not have power in his arms
To make the young world move; but he has eyes
And ears, and he can read the sun. Therefore
Think first of him as one who vegetates
In tune with all the children who laugh best
And longest through the sunshine, though far off
Their laughter, and unheard; for ’tis the child,
O friend, that with his laugh redeems the man.
Time steals the infant, but the child he leaves;
And we, we fighters over of old wars--
We men, we shearers of the Golden Fleece--
Were brutes without him,--brutes to tear the scars
Of one another’s wounds and weep in them,
And then cry out on God that he should flaunt
For life such anguish and flesh-wretchedness.
But let the brute go roaring his own way:
We do not need him, and he loves us not.
Let music be for us the forward song,
And let us give the good world one more chance.
“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.
“At first they stood aloof and cocked their small,
Smooth, prudent heads at me and made as if,
With a cryptic idiotic melancholy,
To look authoritative and sagacious;
But when I tossed a piece of apple to them,
They scattered back with a discord of short squawks
And then came forward with a craftiness
That made me think of Eden. Atropos
Came first, and having grabbed the morsel up,
Ran flapping far away and out of sight,
With Clotho and Lachesis hard after her;
But finally the three fared all alike,
And the next day I persuaded them with corn.
In a week they came and had it from my fingers
And looked up at me while I pinched their bills
And made them sneeze. Count Pretzel’s Carmichael
Had said they were not ordinary Birds
At all,--and they are not: they are the Fates,
Foredoomed of their own insufficiency
To be assimilated.--Do not think,
Because in my contented isolation
It suits me at this time to be jocose,
That I am nailing reason to the cross,
Or that I set the bauble and the bells
Above the crucible; for I do nought,
Say nought, but with an ancient levity
That is the forbear of all earnestness.
“The cross, I said.--I had a dream last night:
A dream not like to any other dream
That I remember. I was all alone,
Sitting as I do now beneath a tree,
But looking not, as I am looking now,
Against the sunlight. There was neither sun
Nor moon, nor do I think of any stars;
Yet there was light, and there were cedar trees,
And there were sycamores. I lay at rest,
Or should have seemed at rest, within a trough
Between two giant roots. A weariness
Was on me, and I would have gone to sleep,--
But I had not the courage. If I slept,
I feared that I should never wake again;
And if I did not sleep I should go mad,
And with my own dull tools, which I had used
With wretched skill so long, hack out my life.
And while I lay there, tortured out of death,
Great waves of cold, as if the dead were breathing,
Came over me and through me; and I felt
Quick fearful tears of anguish on my face
And in my throat. But soon, and in the distance,
Concealed, importunate, there was a sound
Of coming steps,--and I was not afraid;
No, I was not afraid then, I was glad;
For I could feel, with every thought, the Man,
The Mystery, the Child, a footfall nearer.
Then, when he stood before me, there was no
Surprise, there was no questioning: I knew him,
As I had known him always; and he smiled.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked; and reaching down,
He took up my dull blades and rubbed his thumb
Across the edges of them and then smiled
Once more.--‘I was a carpenter,’ I said,
‘But there was nothing in the world to do.’
‘Nothing?’ said he.--‘No, nothing,’ I replied.--
‘But are you sure,’ he asked, ‘that you have skill?
And are you sure that you have learned your trade?
No, you are not.’--He looked at me and laughed
As he said that; but I did not laugh then,
Although I might have laughed.--‘They are dull,’ said he;
‘They were not very sharp if they were ground;
But they are what you have, and they will earn
What you have not. So take them as they are,
Grind them and clean them, put new handles to them,
And then go learn your trade in Nazareth.
Only be sure that you find Nazareth.’--
‘But if I starve--what then?’ said I.--He smiled.
“Now I call that as curious a dream
As ever Meleager’s mother had,--
Æneas, Alcibiades, or Jacob.
I’ll not except the scientist who dreamed
That he was Adam and that he was Eve
At the same time; or yet that other man
Who dreamed that he was Æschylus, reborn
To clutch, combine, compensate, and adjust
The plunging and unfathomable chorus
Wherein we catch, like a bacchanale through thunder,
The chanting of the new Eumenides,
Implacable, renascent, farcical,
Triumphant, and American. He did it,
But he did it in a dream. When he awoke
One phrase of it remained; one verse of it
Went singing through the remnant of his life
Like a bag-pipe through a mad-house.--He died young,
And the more I ponder the small history
That I have gleaned of him by scattered roads,
The more do I rejoice that he died young.
That measure would have chased him all his days,
Defeated him, deposed him, wasted him,
And shrewdly ruined him--though in that ruin
There would have lived, as always it has lived,
In ruin as in failure, the supreme
Fulfillment unexpressed, the rhythm of God
That beats unheard through songs of shattered men
Who dream but cannot sound it.--He declined,
From all that I have ever learned of him,
With absolute good-humor. No complaint,
No groaning at the burden which is light,
No brain-waste of impatience--‘Never mind,’
He whispered, ‘for I might have written Odes.’
“Speaking of odes now makes me think of ballads.
Your admirable Mr. Killigrew
Has latterly committed what he calls
_A Ballad of London_--London ‘Town,’ of course--
And he has wished that I pass judgment on it.
He says there is a ‘generosity’
About it, and a ‘sympathetic insight;’
And there are strong lines in it, so he says.
But who am I that he should make of me
A judge? You are his friend, and you know best
The measure of his jingle. I am old,
And you are young. Be sure, I may go back
To squeak for you the tunes of yesterday
On my old fiddle--or what’s left of it--
And give you as I’m able a young sound;
But all the while I do it I remain
One of Apollo’s pensioners (and yours),
An usher in the Palace of the Sun,
A candidate for mattocks and trombones
(The brass-band will be indispensable),
A patron of high science, but no critic.
So I shall have to tell him, I suppose,
That I read nothing now but Wordsworth, Pope,
Lucretius, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare.
Now this is Mr. Killigrew’s performance:
“_‘Say, do you go to London Town,
You with the golden feather?’--
‘And if I go to London Town
With my golden feather?’--
‘These autumn roads are bright and brown,
The season wears a russet crown;
And if you go to London Town,
We’ll go down together.’_
“I cannot say for certain, but I think
The brown bright nightingale was half assuaged
Before your Mr. Killigrew was born.
If I have erred in my chronology,
No matter,--for the feathered man sings now: