Part 8

Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of Must, Without our leave or ask or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust?

The impermanence of things oppresses him, for he says in an adieu,

. . . Haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same man shall meet; the years shall make us other men.

He crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread."

There is an echo of Koleleth in his contempt for the divinity of the body. It is unclean without, impure within. The vanity of vanity is proclaimed with piteous indignation.

"And still the weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man, Weaving the unpattern'd, dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan. Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears and blood, Man say thy mercy made what is, and saw the made and said 'twas good?"

And then he sings:

Cease Man to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy the shining hour of sun; We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?

In sweeping away the old philosophies and religions, he is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the Greek paganism runs:

And when at length, "Great Pan is dead" uprose the loud and dolorous cry, A glamour wither'd on the ground, a splendor faded in the sky. Yes, Pan is dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three, whose three is one. . . .

Then the lank Arab, foul with sweat, the drainer of the camel's dug, Gorged with his leek-green, lizard's meat, clad in his filmy rag and rug, Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands Where, he asks, are all the creeds and crowns and scepters, "the holy grail of high Jamshid?" Gone, gone where I and thou must go, borne by the winnowing wings of Death, The Horror brooding over life, and nearer brought with every breath. Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they rose and reigned, they fought and fell, As swells and swoons across the wold the tinkling of the camel's bell.

For him "there is no good, there is no bad; these be the whims of mortal will." They change with place, they shift with race. "Each Vice has borne a Virtue's crown, all Good was banned as Sin or Crime." He takes up the history of the world, as we reconstruct it for the period before history, from geology, astronomy and other sciences. He accepts the murderousness of all processes of life and change. All the cruelty of things

"Builds up a world for better use; to general Good bends special Ill." And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in the time to be Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari-men another falling star shall see: Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone, no Thought can tell,-- Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling of the camel-bell. Yet follow not the unwisdom path, cleave not to this and that disclaim; Believe in all that man believes; here all and naught are both the same. Enough to think that Truth can be; come sit me where the roses glow, Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow.

He denies the Soul and wants to know where it was when Man was a savage beast in Primeval forests, what shape it had, what dwelling place, what part in nature's plan it played. "What men are pleased to call the Soul was in the hog and dog begun."

Life is a ladder infinite-stepped that hides its rungs from human eyes: Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the skies.

The evolution theory he applies to the development of reason from instinct. He protests against the revulsion from materialism by saying that "the sordider the stuff, the cunninger the workman's hand," and therefore the Maker may have made the world from matter. He maintains that "the hands of Destiny ever deal, in fixed and equal parts their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and weal" to all that breathe our upper air. The problem of predestination he holds in scorn. The unequality of life exists and "that settles it" for him. He accepts one bowl with scant delight but he says "who drains the score must ne'er expect to rue the headache in the morn." Disputing about creeds is "mumbling rotten bones." His creed is this:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phanton's dwell, A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a tinkling of the Camel's bell.

He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first is "eternal war with Ignorance." He says: "Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against a myriad giants. The end is to "learn the noblest lore, to know that all we know is naught." Self-approval is enough reward. The whole duty of man is to himself, but he must "hold Humanity one man" and, looking back at what he was, determine not to be again that thing. "Abjure the Why and seek the How." The gods are silent. The indivisible puny Now in the length of infinite time is Man's all to make the best of. The Law may have a Giver but let be, let be!

Thus I may find a future life, a nobler copy of our own, Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be known; Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on earth he sees a part; Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope deferred shall hurt the heart. But--faded flower and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent tree; A man once dropt by Tree of Life, what hope of other life has he? The shattered bowl shall know repair; the riven lute shall sound once more; But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man restore? The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed shall pipe again; But we, we die and Death is one, the doom of brutes, the doom of men. Then, if Nirvana round our life with nothingness, 'tis haply blest; Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won their guerdon--Rest. Cease, Abou, cease! My song is sung, nor think the gain the singer's prize Till men hold Ignorance deadly sin till Man deserves his title, "Wise." In days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men, These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake responsive strain: Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell-- The whispers of the Desert wind: the tinkling of the Camel's bell.

So ends the song. The notes appended thereto by Burton are a demonstration of his learning and his polemic power. The poem is his life of quest, of struggle, of disappointment coined into song more or less savage. It seems to me that he overlooked one thing near to him that would have lighted the darkness of his view, while looking To Reason for balm for the wounds of existence. He ignored his wife's love which, silly and absurd as it seems at times, in the records she has left us, is a sweeter poem than this potent plaint and protest he has left us. He explored all lands but the one in which he lived unconsciously--the Land of Tenderness. This is the pity of his life and it is also its indignity. He was crueler than "the Cruelty of Things." He "threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe"--a woman's heart. But--how we argue in a circle!--that he, with his fine vision could not see this, is perhaps, a justification of his poem's bitterness. Even her service went for naught, seeing it brought no return of love from its object.

Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife's life was one continuous act of love for him that he ignores and her life was a failure, too, since she never succeeded in making the world worship him as she did. Still "the failures of some the infinities beyond the successes of others" and all success is failure in the end. Still again, it is better to have loved in vain than never to have loved at all, and fine and bold and brave as was Richard Francis Burton, his wife, with her "strong power called weakness," was the greater of the two. She wrote no "Kasidah" of complaint, but suffered and was strong. St. Louis, August 16th, 1897.

* * * MARRIAGE AND MISERY.

BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

Charles Goodwin, editor Salt Lake Tribune, puts into the mouth of a figurative John Bull, who is lecturing his children, the following sentence:

"Why, ours is an old family. One of our ancestors was knighted by Henry VII for stealing cattle from the Scotch some time in the fifteenth century. I am tracing up the lineage, and I believe we are all barons. I expect to get the title confirmed, and then each one of you boys must sell himself to a beautiful American girl for from 75,000 to 250,000 pounds. Under the rose, it will help the stock damnably, for your mother was a barmaid. Things are working all right, my lads. Our conquest of the United States still goes on."

Apropos of a snub given the Prince of Wales by an American girl, Lillian Russell--even our much-married Lillian--raises her voice in protest at international marriages, and incidentally American snobbery.

What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to the physically and financially anaemic nobility across the water, to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage. The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their Fifth Avenue Christ.

And yet, to go back to first principles, is it not that the time are out of joint, and the America herself is responsible for her daughters' shame? America has blinded her eyes with avarice and glutted her brain with greed. She has starved her intellect and gorged her ambition. She has bartered her birthright of nobility and sold her soul to crawling sycophants. She has prostituted her sceptre of power to trusts for tinsel and cowers under the lash of corporations because they bind her brow with a cap of bells that tinkle an empty song of "Freedom." In the mad rush for gain, America has forgotten its greatness, and in their blind struggle for gold Americans forget what is grand. We have sold our freedom to Britain, we have sold our pride, our individuality, our independence, our self-respect, our power, our dignity and our daughters.