# Captain Craig; A Book of Poems/Captain Craig

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 't is 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: 'T is 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 f,
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 Wurzburger, 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 chlorophyl To xanthophyl, 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 would n'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:
"'Yes, I go to London Town’ (Merrily waved the feather), ’And if you go to London Town, Yes, we’ll go together.' So in the autumn bright and brown, Just as the year began to frown, All the way to London Town Rode the two together.
"’I go to marry a fair maid' (Lightly swung the feather)— ’Pardie, a true and loyal maid' (Oh, the swinging feather!)—
’For us the wedding gold is weighed, For us the feast will soon be laid; We’ll make a gallant show,' he said,— 'She and I together.’
"The feathered man will do a thousand things And the world go smiling; but the feathered man May do too much. Now mark how he continues:
"’And you—you go to London Town?' (Breezes waved the feather)— ’Yes, I go to London Town.' (Ah, the stinging feather!)— 'Why do you go, my merry blade? Like me, to marry a fair maid?'— ’Why do I go? . . . God knows,’ he said; And on they rode together.
"Now you have read it through, and you know best What worth it has. We fellows with gray hair Who march with sticks to music that is gray Judge not your vanguard fifing. You are one To judge; and you will tell me what you think:— Barring the Town, the Fair Maid, and the Feather, The dialogue and those parentheses,
You cherish it, undoubtedly. Pardee! You call it, with a few conservative Allowances, an excellent small thing For patient inexperience to do: Derivative, you say,—still rather pretty. But what is wrong with Mr. Killigrew? Is he in love, or has he read Rossetti?— Forgive me! I am old and doddering . . . When are you coming back to Tilbury Town?"
I could forgive the Captain soon enough, But Killigrew—there was a question there; Nor was it answered when the next week brought A letter from him. After rocketing For six or seven pages about love, Truth, purity, the passion of the soul, And other salutary attributes, Discovered or miraculously born Within six months, he said: "The Patriarch Is not quite as he should be. There's a clutch Of something on him that will not let go; And there are days together when his eyes Are like two lamps in ashes. The gray look, Which we thought once the glory and the crown Of your too flexible determinist, Has gone all over him. And when he laughs, He waits as if to hear the angels weep:
It seems to make him sorry when he laughs, And I know what it does to me. But here As at the station—I remember that— The quantitative bias of the boy May slant me too much to the other side And make me blind again. By Jove! old man, If you could really know her as I do 'T would be the revelation of your life: You would see that there are women in the world Who are altogether different," etc.
There was more generosity in "women" I thought than in the man without the feather.— Meanwhile I saw that Captain Craig was dying.
III
I found the old man sitting in his bed, Propped up and uncomplaining. On a chair Beside him was a dreary bowl of broth, A magazine, some glasses, and a pipe. "I do not light it nowadays," he said, "But keep it for an antique influence That it exerts, an aura that it sheds— Like hautboys, or Provence. You understand:
The charred memorial defeats us yet, But think you not for always. We are young, And we are friends of time. Time that made smoke Will drive away the smoke, and we shall know The work that we are doing. We shall build With embers of all shrines one pyramid, And we shall have the most resplendent flame From earth to heaven, as the old words go, And we shall need no smoke . . . Why don't you laugh?"
I gazed into those calm, half-lighted eyes And smiled at them with grim obedience. He told me that I did it very well, But added that I should undoubtedly Do better in the future: "There is nothing," He said, "so beneficial in a sick-room As a well-bred spontaneity of manner. Your sympathetic scowl obtrudes itself, And is indeed surprising. After death, Were you to take it with you to your coffin An unimaginative man might think That you had lost your life in worrying To find out what it was that worried you. The ways of unimaginative men Are singularly fierce . . . Why do you stand?
Sit here and watch me while I take this soup. The doctor likes it, therefore it is good.
"The man who wrote the decalogue," pursued The Captain, having swallowed four or five Heroic spoonfuls of his lukewarm broth, "Forgot the doctors. And I think sometimes The man of Galilee (or, if you choose, The men who made the sayings of the man) Like Buddha, and the others who have seen, Was to men's loss the Poet—though it be The Poet only of him we revere, The Poet we remember. We have put The prose of him so far away from us, The fear of him so crudely over us, That I have wondered—wondered."—Cautiously, But yet as one were cautious in a dream, He set the bowl down on the chair again, Crossed his thin fingers, looked me in the face, And looking smiled a little. "Go away," He said at last, "and let me go to sleep. I told you I should eat, but I shall not. To-morrow I shall eat; and I shall read Some clauses of a jocund instrument That I have been preparing here of late For you and for the rest, assuredly.
’Attend the testament of Captain Craig: Good citizens, good fathers and your sons, Good mothers and your daughters.' I should say so. Now go away and let me go to sleep."
I stood before him and held out my hand, He took it, pressed it; and I felt again The sick soft closing on it. He would not Let go, but lay there, looking up to me With eyes that had a sheen of water on them And a faint wet spark within them. So he clung, Tenaciously, with fingers icy warm, And eyes too full to keep the sheen unbroken. I looked at him. The fingers closed hard once, And then fell down.—I should have left him then.
But when we found him the next afternoon, My first thought was that he had made his eyes Miraculously smaller. They were sharp And hard and dry, and the spark in them was dry. For a glance it all but seemed as if the man Had artfully forsworn the brimming gaze Of yesterday, and with a wizard strength Inveigled in, reduced, and vitalized
The straw-shine of October; and had that Been truth, we should have humored him not less, Albeit he had fooled us,—for he said That we had made him glad by coming to him. And he was glad: the manner of his words Revealed the source of them; and the gray smile Which lingered like a twilight on his face Told of its own slow fading that it held The promise of the sun. Cadaverous, God knows it was; and we knew it was honest.
"So you have come to have the old man read To you from his last will and testament: Well, it will not be long—not very long— So listen." He brought out from underneath His pillow a new manuscript, and said, "You are doing well to come and have me read My testament. There are men in the world Who say of me, if they remember me, That I am poor;—and I believe the ways Of certain men who never find things out Are stranger than the way Lord Bacon wrote Leviticus, and Faust." He fixed his eyes Abstractedly on something far from us, And with a look that I remembered well Gazed hard the while we waited. But at length
He found himself and soon began to chant, With a fitful shift at thin sonorousness The jocund instrument; and had he been Definitively parceling to us All Kimberly and half of Ballarat, The lordly quaver of his poor old words Could not have been the more magniloquent. No promise of dead carbon or of gold, However, flashed in ambush to corrupt us:
"I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast, Sage-errant, favored of the Cosmic Joke, And self-reputed humorist at large, Do now, confessed of my world-worshiping, Time-questioning, sun-fearing, and heart-yielding, Approve and unreservedly devise To you and your assigns for evermore, God's universe and yours. If I had won What first I sought, I might have made you beam By giving less; but now I make you laugh By giving more than what had made you beam, And it is well. No man has ever done The deed of humor that God promises, But now and then we know tragedians Reform, and in denial too divine For sacrifice, too firm for ecstasy, Record in jolly letters or in books
What fragment of God's laughter they have caught, What earnest of its rhythm; and I believe That I, in having somewhat recognized The formal measure of it, have endured The discord of infirmity not less Through fortune than by failure. What men lose, Man gains; and what man gains reports itself In losses we but vaguely deprecate, So they be not for us;—and this is right, Except that when the devil in the sun Misguides us we go darkly where the shine Misleads us, and we know not what we see: We know not if we climb or if we fall; And if we fly, we know not where we fly.
"And here do I insert an urging clause For climbers and up-fliers of all sorts, Cliff-climbers and high-fliers: Phaethon, Bellerophon, and Icarus did each Go gloriously up, and each in turn Did famously come down—as you have read In poems and elsewhere; but other men Have mounted where no fame has followed them, And we have had no sight, no news of them, And we have heard no crash. The crash may count,
Undoubtedly, and earth be fairer for it; Yet none save creatures out of harmony Have ever, in their fealty to the flesh, Made crashing an ideal. It is the flesh That ails us, for the spirit knows no qualm, No failure, no down-falling: so climb high, And having set your steps regard not much The downward laughter clinging at your feet, Nor overmuch the warning; only know, As well as you know dawn from lantern-light, That far above you, for you, and within you, There burns and shines and lives, unwavering And always yours, the truth. Take on yourself But your sincerity, and you take on Good promise for all climbing: fly for truth, And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, No laughter to vex down your loyalty.
"I think you may be smiling at me now— And if I make you smile, so much the better; For I would have you know that I rejoice Always to see the thing that I would see— The righteous thing, the wise thing. I rejoice Always to think that any thought of mine, Or any word or any deed of mine, May grant sufficient of what fortifies Good feeling and the courage of calm joy
To make the joke worth while. Contrariwise, When I review some faces I have known— Sad faces, hungry faces—and reflect On thoughts I might have moulded, human words I might have said, straightway it saddens me To feel perforce that had I not been mute And actionless, I might have made them bright Somehow, though only for the moment. Yes, Howbeit I confess the vanities, It saddens me;—and sadness, of all things Miscounted wisdom, and the most of all When warmed with old illusions and regrets, I mark the selfishest, and on like lines The shrewdest. For your sadness makes you climb With dragging footsteps, and it makes you groan; It hinders you when most you would be free, And there are many days it wearies you Beyond the toil itself. And if the load It lays on you may not be shaken off Till you have known what now you do not know— Meanwhile you climb; and he climbs best who sees Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall,
One road remains and one firm guidance always; One way that shall be taken, climb or fall.
"But ’falling, falling, falling.' There's your song, The cradle-song that sings you to the grave. What is it your bewildered poet says?—
"’The toiling ocean thunders of unrest And aching desolation; the still sea Paints but an outward calm that mocks itself To the final and irrefragable sleep That owns no shifting fury; and the shoals Of ages are but records of regret Where Time, the sun's arch-phantom, writes on sand The prelude of his ancient nothingness.'
"'T is easy to compound a dirge like that, And it is easy too to be deceived And alienated by the fleshless note Of half-world yearning in it; but the truth To which we all are tending,—charlatans And architects alike, artificers In tinsel as in gold, evangelists Of ruin and redemption, all alike,— The truth we seek and equally the truth We do not seek, but yet may not escape,
Was never found alone through flesh contempt Or through flesh reverence. Look east and west And we may read the story: where the light Shone first the shade now darkens; where the shade Clung first, the light fights westward—though the shade Still feeds, and there is yet the Orient.
"But there is this to be remembered always: Whatever be the altitude you reach, You do not rise alone; nor do you fall But you drag others down to more or less Than your preferred abasement. God forbid That ever I should preach, and in my zeal Forget that I was born an humorist; But now, for once, before I go away, I beg of you to be magnanimous A moment, while I speak to please myself— The moment now for flowers; and your patience:
"Though I have heard it variously sung That even in the fury and the clash Of battles, and the closer fights of men When silence gives the knowing world no sign,
One flower there is, though crushed and cursed it be, Keeps rooted through all tumult and all scorn,— Still do I find, when I look sharply down, There's yet another flower that grows well And has the most unconscionable roots Of any weed on earth. Perennial It grows, and has the name of Selfishness; No doubt you call it Love. In either case, You propagate it with a diligence That hardly were outmeasured had its leaf The very juice in it of that famed herb Which gave back breath to Glaucus; and I know That in the twilight, after the day's work, You take your little children in your arms, Or lead them by their credulous frail hands Benignly out and through the garden-gate And show them there the things that you have raised; Not everything, perchance, but always one Miraculously rooted flower plot Which is your pride, their pattern. Socrates, Could he be with you there at such a time, Would have some unsolicited shrewd words To say that you might hearken to; but I Say nothing, for I am not Socrates.— So much, good friends, for flowers; and I thank you.
"There was a poet once who would have roared Away the world and had an end of stars. Where was he when I quoted him?—oh, yes: 'T is easy for a man to link loud words With woeful pomp and unschooled emphasis And add one thundered contribution more To the dirges of all-hollowness, I said; But here again I find the question set Before me, after turning books on books And looking soulward through man after man, If there indeed be more determining Play-service in remotely sounding down The world's one-sidedness. If I judge right, Your pounding protestations, echoing Their burden of unfraught futility, Surge back to mute forgetfulness at last And have a kind of sunny, sullen end, Like any cold north storm.—But there are few Still seas that have no life to profit them, And even in such currents of the mind As have no tide-rush to them, but are drowsed, Crude thoughts may dart in armor and upspring With a waking sound, when all is dim with peace, Like sturgeons in the twilight out of Lethe; And though they be discordant, hard, grotesque, And all unwelcome to the lethargy That you think means repose, you know as well
As if your names were shouted when they leap, And when they leap you listen.—Ah! friends, friends, There are these things we do not like to know: They trouble us, they make us hesitate, They touch us, and we try to put them off. We banish one another and then say That we are left alone: the midnight leaf That rattles where it hangs above the snow— Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn—scarcely may seem So cold in all its palsied loneliness As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet Profoundly and severely to find out That there is more of unpermitted love In most men's reticence than most men think.
"Once, when I made it out fond-headedness To say that we should ever be apprised Of our deserts and their emolument At all but in the specious way of words, The wisdom of a warm thought woke within me And I could read the sun. Then did I turn My long-defeated face full to the world, And through the clouded warfare of it all Discern the light. Through dusk that hindered it, I found the truth, and for the first whole time
Knew then that we were climbing. Not as one Who mounts along with his experience Bound on him like an Old Man of the Sea— Not as a moral pedant who drags chains Of his unearned ideals after him And always to the lead-like thud they make Attunes a cold inhospitable chant Of All Things Easy to the Non-Attached,— But as a man, a scarred man among men, I knew it, and I felt the strings of thought Between us to pull tight the while I strove; And if a curse came ringing now and then To my defended ears, how could I know The light that burned above me and within me, And at the same time put on cap-and-bells For such as yet were groping?"
Killigrew Made there as if to stifle a small cough. I might have kicked him, but regret forbade The subtle admonition; and indeed When afterwards I reprimanded him, The fellow never knew quite what I meant. I may have been unjust.—The Captain read Right on, without a chuckle or a pause, As if he had heard nothing:
"How, forsooth, Shall any man, by curses or by groans, Or by the laugh-jarred stillness of all hell, Be so drawn down to servitude again That on some backward level of lost laws And undivined relations, he may know No longer Love's imperative resource, Firm once and his, well treasured then, but now Too fondly thrown away? And if there come But once on all his journey, singing down To find him, the gold-throated forward call, What way but one, what but the forward way, Shall after that call guide him? When his ears Have earned an inward skill to methodize The clash of all crossed voices and all noises, How shall he grope to be confused again, As he has been, by discord? When his eyes Have read the book of wisdom in the sun, And after dark deciphered it on earth, How shall he turn them back to scan some huge Blood-lettered protest of bewildered men That hunger while he feeds where they should starve And all absurdly perish?"
Killigrew Looked hard for a subtile object on the wall,
And, having found it, sighed. The Captain paused: If he grew tedious, most assuredly Did he crave pardon of us; he had feared Beforehand that he might be wearisome, But there was not much more of it, he said,— No more than just enough. And we rejoiced That he should look so kindly on us then. ("Commend me to a dying man's grimace For absolute humor, always," Killigrew Maintains; but I know better.)
"Work for them, You tell me? Work the folly out of them? Go back to them and teach them how to climb, While you teach caterpillars how to fly? You tell me that Alnaschar is a fool Because he dreams? And what is this you ask? I make him wise? I teach him to be still? While you go polishing the Pyramids, I hold Alnaschar's feet? And while you have The ghost of Memnon's image all day singing, I sit with aching arms and hardly catch A few spilled echoes of the song of songs— The song that I should have as utterly For mine as other men should once have had The sweetest a glad shepherd ever trilled
In Sharon, long ago? Is this the way For me to do good climbing any more Than Phaethon's? Do you think the golden tone Of that far-singing call you all have heard Means any more for you than you should be Wise-heartedly, glad-heartedly yourselves? Do this, there is no more for you to do; And you have no dread left, no shame, no scorn. And while you have your wisdom and your gold, Songs calling, and the Princess in your arms, Remember, if you like, from time to time, Down yonder where the clouded millions go, Your bloody-knuckled scullions are not slaves, Your children of Alnaschar are not fools.
"Nor are they quite so foreign or far down As you may think to see them. What you take To be the cursedest mean thing that crawls On earth is nearer to you than you know: You may not ever crush him but you lose, You may not ever shield him but you gain— As he, with all his crookedness, gains with you. Your preaching and your teaching, your achieving, Your lifting up and your discovering, Are more than often—more than you have dreamed—
The world-refracted evidence of what Your dream denies. You cannot hide yourselves In any multitude or solitude, Or mask yourselves in any studied guise Of hardness or of old humility, But soon by some discriminating man— Some humorist at large, like Socrates— You get yourselves found out.—Now I should be Found out without an effort. For example: When I go riding, trimmed and shaved again, Consistent, adequate, respectable,— Some citizen, for curiosity, Will ask of a good neighbor, ’What is this?'— ’It is the funeral of Captain Craig,' Will be the neighbor's word.—'And who, good man, Was Captain Craig?'—'He was an humorist; And we are told that there is nothing more For any man alive to say of him.'— ’There is nothing very strange in that,' says A; ’But the brass band? What has he done to be Blown through like this by cornets and trombones? And here you have this incompatible dirge— Where are the jokes in that?'—Then B should say: ’Maintained his humor: nothing more or less.
The story goes that on the day before He died—some say a week, but that's a trifle— He said, with a subdued facetiousness, "Play Handel, not Chopin; assuredly not Chopin."'—He was indeed an humorist."
He made the paper fall down at arm's length; And with a tension of half-quizzical Benignity that made it hard for us, He looked up—first at Morgan, then at me— Almost, I thought, as if his eyes would ask If we were satisfied; and as he looked, The tremor of an old heart's weariness Was on his mouth. He gazed at each of us, But spoke no further word that afternoon. He put away the paper, closed his eyes, And went to sleep with his lips flickering; And after that we left him.—At midnight Plunket and I looked in; but he still slept, And everything was going as it should. The watchman yawned, rattled his newspaper, And wondered what it was that ailed his lamp. He said it wheezed. He feared it might explode.
Next day we found the Captain wide awake, Propped up, and searching dimly with a spoon Through another dreary dish of chicken-broth,
Which he raised up to me, at my approach, So fervently and so unconsciously, That one could only laugh. He looked again At each of us, and as he looked he frowned; And there was something in that frown of his That none of us had ever seen before. "Kind friends," he said, "be sure that I rejoice To know that you have come to visit me; Be sure I speak with undisguised words And earnest, when I say that I rejoice."— "But what the devil!" whispered Killigrew. I kicked him, for I thought I understood.
The old man's eyes had glimmered wearily At first, but now they glittered like to those Of a glad fish. "Beyond a doubt," said he, "My dream this morning was more singular Than any other I have ever known. Give me that I might live ten thousand years, And all those years do nothing but have dreams, I doubt me much if any one of them Could be so quaint or so fantastical, So pregnant, as a dream of mine this morning. You may not think it any more than odd; You may not feel—you cannot wholly feel— How droll it was:—I dreamed that I found Hamlet—
Found him at work, drenched with an angry sweat, Predestined, he declared with emphasis, To root out a large weed on Lethe wharf; And after I had watched him for some time, I laughed at him and told him that no root Would ever come the while he talked like that: The power was not in him, I explained, For such compound accomplishment. He glared At me, of course,—next moment laughed at me, And finally laughed with me. I was right, And we had eisel on the strength of it:— ’They tell me that this water is not good,' Said Hamlet, and you should have seen him smile. Conceited? Pelion on Ossa?—pah! . . .
"But anon comes in a crocodile. We stepped Adroitly down upon the back of him, And away we went to an undiscovered country— A fertile place, but in more ways than one So like the region we had started from, That Hamlet straightway found another weed And there began to tug. I laughed again, Till he cried out on me and on my mirth, Protesting all he knew: 'The Fates,' he said, ’Have ordered it that I shall have these roots.'
But all at once a dreadful hunger seized him, And it was then we killed the crocodile— Killed him and ate him. Washed with eisel down That luckless reptile was, to the last morsel; And there we were with flag-fens all around us,— And there was Hamlet, at his task again, Ridiculous. And while I watched him work, The drollest of all changes came to pass:— The weed had snapped off just above the root, Not warning him, and I was left alone. The bubbles rose, and I laughed heartily To think of him; I laughed when I woke up; And when my soup came in I laughed again; I think I may have laughed a little—no?— Not when you came? . . . Why do you look like that? You don't believe me? Crocodiles—why not? Who knows what he has eaten in his life? Who knows but I have eaten Atropos? . . . 'Briar and oak for a soldier's crown,' you say? Provence? Oh, no . . . Had I been Socrates, Count Pretzel would have been the King of Spain."
Now of all casual things we might have said To make the matter smooth at such a time,
There may have been a few that we had found Sufficient. Recollection fails, however, To say that we said anything. We looked. Had he been Carmichael, we might have stood Like faithful hypocrites and laughed at him; But the Captain was not Carmichael at all, For the Captain had no frogs: he had the sun. So there we waited, hungry for the word,— Tormented, unsophisticated, stretched— Till, with a drawl, to save us, Killigrew Good-humoredly spoke out. The Captain fixed His eyes on him with some severity.
"That was a funny dream, beyond a doubt," Said Killigrew;—"too funny to be laughed at; Too humorous, we mean."—"Too humorous?" The Captain answered; "I approve of that. Proceed."—We were not glad for Killigrew.
"Well," he went on, "'t was only this. You see My dream this morning was a droll one too: I dreamed that a sad man was in my room, Sitting, as I do now, beside the bed. I questioned him, but he made no reply,— Said not a word, but sang."—"Said not a word, But sang," the Captain echoed. "Very good. Now tell me what it was the sad man sang."
"Now that," said Killigrew, constrainedly, And with a laugh that might have been left out, "Is why I know it must have been a dream. But there he was, and I lay in the bed Like you; and I could see him just as well As you see my right hand. And for the songs He sang to me—there's where the dream part comes."
"You don't remember them?" the Captain said, With a weary little chuckle; "very well, I might have guessed it. Never mind your dream, But let me go to sleep."—For a moment then There was half a frown on Killigrew's good face, But he turned it to a smile.—"Not quite," said he; "The songs that he sang first were sorrowful, And they were stranger than the man himself— And he was very strange; but I found out, Through all the gloom of him and of his music, That a kind of—well, say mystic cheerfulness, Or give it almost any trumped-up name, Pervaded him; for slowly, as he sang, There came a change, and I began to know The method of it all. Song after song Was ended; and when I had listened there For hours—I mean for dream-hours—hearing him,
And always glad that I was hearing him, There came another change—a great one. Tears Rolled out at last like bullets from his eyes, And I could hear them fall down on the floor Like shoes; and they were always marking time For the song that he was singing. I have lost The greater number of his verses now, But there are some, like these, that I remember:
"'Ten men from Zanzibar, Black as iron hammers are. Riding on a cable-car Down to Crowley's theatre.' . . .
"Ten men?" the Captain interrupted there— "Ten men, my Euthyphron? That is beautiful. But never mind, I wish to go to sleep: Tell Cebes that I wish to go to sleep. . . . O ye of little faith, your golden plumes Are like to drag . . . par-dee!"—We may have smiled In after days to think how Killigrew Had sacrificed himself to fight that silence, But we were grateful to him, none the less; And if we smiled, that may have been the reason.
But the good Captain for a long time then Said nothing: he lay quiet—fast asleep, For all that we could see. We waited there Till each of us, I fancy, must have made The paper on the wall begin to squirm, And then got up to leave. My friends went out, And I was going, when the old man cried: "You leave me now—now it has come to this? What have I done to make you go? Come back! Come back!"
There was a quaver in his cry That we shall not forget—reproachful, kind, Indignant, piteous. It seemed as one Marooned on treacherous tide-feeding sand Were darkly calling over the still straits Between him and irrevocable shores Where now there was no lamp to fade for him, No call to give him answer. We were there Before him, but his eyes were not much turned On us; nor was it very much to us That he began to speak the broken words, The scattered words, that he had left in him.
"So it has come to this? And what is this? Death, do you call it? Death? And what is death?
Why do you look like that at me again? Why do you shrink your brows and shut your lips? If it be fear, then I can do no more Than hope for all of you that you may find Your promise of the sun; if it be grief You feel, to think that this old face of mine May never look at you and laugh again, Then tell me why it is that you have gone So long with me, and followed me so far, And had me to believe you took my words For more than ever misers did their gold?"
He listened, but his eyes were far from us— Too far to make us turn to Killigrew, Or search the futile shelves of our own thoughts For golden-labeled insincerities To make placebos of. The marrowy sense Of a slow November storm that splashed against The shingles and the glass reminded us That we had brought umbrellas. He continued:
"Oh, can it be that I, too credulous, Have made myself believe that you believe Yourselves to be the men that you are not? I prove and I prize well your friendliness, But I would have that your last look at me
Be not like this; for I would scan to-day Strong thoughts on all your faces—no regret, No fine commiseration—oh, not that, Not that! Nor say of me, when I am gone, That I was cold and harsh, for I was warm To strangeness, and for you . . . Say not like that Of me—nor think of me that I reproached The friends of my tight battles and hard years, But say that I did love them to the last And in my love reproved them for the grief They did not—for they dared not—throw away. Courage, my boys,—courage, is what you need: Courage that is not all flesh-recklessness, But earnest of the world and of the soul— First of the soul; for a man may be as brave As Ajax in the fury of his arms, And in the midmost warfare of his thoughts Be frail as Paris . . . For the love, therefore, That brothered us when we stood back that day From Delium—the love that holds us now More than it held us at Amphipolis— Forget you not that he who in his work Would mount from these low roads of measured shame To tread the leagueless highway must fling first And fling forevermore beyond his reach
The shackles of a slave who doubts the sun. There is no servitude so fraudulent As of a sun-shut mind; for 't is the mind That makes you craven or invincible, Diseased or puissant. The mind will pay Ten thousand fold and be the richer then To grant new service; but the world pays hard And accurately sickens till in years The dole has eked its end and there is left What all of you are noting on all days In these Athenian streets, where squandered men Drag ruins of half-warriors to the grave— Or to Hippocrates."
His head fell back, And he lay still with wearied eyes half-closed. We waited, but a few faint words yet stayed: "Kind friends," he said, "friends I have known so long, Though I have jested with you in time past, Though I have stung your pride with epithets Not all forbearing,—still, when I am gone, Say Socrates wrought always for the best And for the wisest end . . . Give me the cup! The truth is yours, God's universe is yours . . . Good-by . . . good citizens . . . give me the cup" . . .
Again we waited; and this time we knew Those lips of his that would not flicker down Had yet some fettered message for us there. We waited, and we watched him. All at once, With a faint flash, the clouded eyes grew clear; And then we knew the man was coming back, And we knew that he would speak in the old way. We watched him, and I listened. The man smiled And looked about him—not regretfully, Not anxiously; and when at last he spoke, Before the long drowse came to give him peace, One word was all he said. "Trombones," he said.
That evening, at "The Chrysalis" again, We smoked and looked at one another's eyes, And we were glad. The world had scattered ways For us to take, we knew; but for the time That one snug room where the big beech logs roared smooth Defiance to the cold rough rain outside Sufficed. There were no scattered ways for us That we could see just then, and we were glad:
We were glad to be on earth, and we rejoiced No less for Captain Craig that he was gone. We might, for his dead benefit, have run The gamut of all human weaknesses And uttered after-platitudes enough— Wrecked on his own abstractions, and all such— To drive away Gambrinus and the bead From Bernard's ale; and I suppose we might Have praised, accordingly, the Lord of Hosts For making us to see that we were not (Like certain unapproved inferiors Whom we had known, and having known might name) Abominable flotsam. But the best And wisest occupation, we had learned,— At work, at home, or at "The Chrysalis," Companioned or unfriended, winged or chained,— Was always to perpetuate the bead.
So Plunket, who had knowledge of all sorts, Yet hardly ever spoke, began to plink O tu, Palermo!—quaintly, with his nails,— On Morgan's fiddle, and at once got seized, As if he were some small thing, by the neck. Then the consummate Morgan, having told Explicitly what hardship might accrue To Plunket if he did that any more,
Made roaring chords and acrobatic runs— To charge his fingers and the strings, he said,— And then, with his kind eyes on Killigrew, Struck up the schoolgirls' march in Lohengrin, So Killigrew might smile and stretch himself And have to light his pipe. When that was done We knew that Morgan, by the looks of him, Was in the mood for almost anything From Bach to Offenbach;—and of all times That he has ever played, that one somehow— That evening of the day the Captain died— Stands out like one great verse of a good song, One strain that sings itself beyond the rest For the magic and a glamour that it has.
The ways have scattered for us, and all things Have changed; and we have wisdom, I doubt not, More fit for the world's work than we had then; But neither parted roads nor cent per cent May starve quite out the child that lives in us— The Child that is the Man, the Mystery, The Phœnix of the World. So, now and then, That evening of the day the Captain died Returns to us; and there comes always with it The storm, the warm restraint, the fellowship,
The friendship and the firelight, and the fiddle. So too there comes a day that followed it— A windy, dreary day with a cold white shine That only gummed the tumbled frozen ruts We tramped upon. The road was hard and long, But we had what we knew to comfort us, And we had the large humor of the thing To make it advantageous; for men stopped And eyed us on that road from time to time, And on that road the children followed us; And all along that road the Tilbury Band Blared indiscreetly the Dead March in Saul.