Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  Perhaps some morning I shall understand — and return no more to this our world.

  THE REVIEWER

  EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS

  IN Edwin Markham’s book, The. Man With the Hoe and Other. Poems, many of the “other poems” are excellent, some are great. If asked to name the most poetic — not, if you please, the “loftiest” or most “purposeful” — I think I should choose “The Wharf of Dreams.” I venture to quote it:

  Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep;

  Shadows of shadows pass, and many; a light

  Flashes a signal fire across the night;

  Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep

  Their way without a star upon the deep;

  And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,

  Come cries of incommunicable news,

  While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap —

  Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,

  Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,

  Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,

  Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,

  Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,

  And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land

  Really, one does not every year meet with a finer blending of imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger on two better lines in recent work than these:

  And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,

  Come cries of incommunicable news.

  The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and indocible to the meaning of it. Mr. Markham has said of Poetry — and said greatly:

  She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,

  And sees too deep for laughter;

  Her touch is a vibration and a light

  From worlds before and after.

  But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she “speaks a various language.” Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he seemed to be, with interpreting her fluting and warbling and “sweet jargoning,” learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones of the temple like the bass of a great organ.

  In his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” Keats has supplied the greatest — almost the only truly great instance of a genuine poetic inspiration derived from art instead of nature. In his poems on pictures Mr. Markham shows an increasingly desperate determination to achieve success, coupled with a lessening ability to merit it. It is all very melancholy, the perversion of this man’s high powers to the service of a foolish dream by artificial and impossible means. Each effort is more ineffectual than the one that went before. Unless he can be persuaded to desist — to cease interpreting art and again interpret nature, and turn also from the murmurs of “Labor” to the music of the spheres — the “surge and thunder” of the universe — the end of his good literary repute is in sight. He knows — does he know? — the bitter truth which he might have learned otherwise than by experience: that the plaudits of “industrial discontent,” even when strengthened by scholars’ commendations of a few great lines in the poem that evoked it, are not fame. He should know, and if he live long will know, that when one begins to be a “labor leader” one ceases to be a poet.

  In saying to Mr. Markham, “Thou ailest here and here,” Mrs. Atherton has shown herself better at diagnosis than he is himself in telling us what is the matter with the rich. “Why,” she asks him, “waste a beautiful gift in groveling for popularity with the mob?... Striving to please the common mind has a fatal commonizing effect on the writing faculty.” It is even so — nothing truer could be said, and Mr. Markham is the best proof of its truth. His early work, when he was known to only a small circle of admirers, was so good that I predicted for him the foremost place among contemporaneous American poets. He sang because he “could not choose but sing,” and his singing grew greater and greater. Every year he took wider outlooks from “the peaks of song” — had already got well above the fools’ paradise of flowers and song-birds and bees and women and had invaded the “thrilling region” of the cliff, the eagle and the cloud, whence one looks down upon man and out upon the world. Then he had the mischance to publish “The Man with the Hoe,” a poem with some noble lines, but an ignoble poem. In the first place, it is, in structure, stiff, inelastic, monotonous. One line is very like another. The cæsural pauses fall almost uniformly in the same places; the full stops always at the finals. Comparison of the versification with Milton’s blank will reveal the difference of method in all its significance. It is a difference analogous to that between painting on ivory and painting on canvas — between the dead, flat tints of the one and the lively, changing ones due to inequalities of surface in the other. If it seem a little exacting to compare Mr. Markham’s blank with that of the only poet who has ever mastered that medium in English, I can only say that the noble simplicity and elevation of Mr. Markham’s work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any standard lower than the highest that we have.

  My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated composition has the right to be called great if the message that it delivers is neither true nor just. All poets, even the little ones, are feelers, for poetry is emotional; but all the great poets are thinkers as well. Their sympathies are as broad as the race, but they do not echo the peasant’s philosophies of the workshop and the field. In Mr. Markham’s poem the thought is that of the labor union — even to the workworn threat of rising against the wicked well-to-do and taking it out of their hides.

  Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

  A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

  Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

  Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

  Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

  Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

  One is somehow reminded by these lines of Coleridge’s questions in the Chamouni hymn, and one is tempted to answer them the same way: God. “The Man with the Hoe” is not a product of the “masters, lords and rulers in all lands”: they are not, and no class of men is, accountable for him, his limitations and his woes, which are not of those “that kings or laws can cause or cure.” The “masters, lords and rulers” are as helpless “in the fell clutch of circumstance” as he — which Mr. Markham would be speedily made to understand if appointed Dictator. The notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the great is “natural,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish. It will not carry a poem of whatever excellence through two generations. That a man of Mr. Markham’s splendid endowments should be chained to the body of this literary death is no less than a public calamity.

  For his better work in poetry Mr. Markham merits all the praise that he has received for “The Man with the Hoe,” and more. It is not likely that he is now under any illusion in the matter. He probably knows the real nature of his sudden flare of “popularity”; knows that to-morrow it will be “one with Nineveh and Tyre”; knows that its only service to him is to arrest attention of competent critics and scholars who would otherwise have overlooked him for a time. The “plaudits of the multitude” can not long be held by the poet, and are not worth holding. The multitude knows nothing of poetry and does not read it. The multitude will applaud you to-day, calumniate you to-morrow and thwack you athwart the mazzard the day after. He who builds upon the sea-sand of its favor holds possession by a precarious tenure; the wind veers
and the wave

  Lolls out his large tongue —

  Licks the whole labor flat.

  If the great have left the humble so wise that the philosophies of the factory and the plow-tail are true; if the sentiments and the taste of the mob are so just and elevated that its judgment of poetry is infallible and its approval a precious possession; if “the masses” have more than “a thin veneering of civilization,” and are not in peace as fickle as the weather and in anger as cruel as the sea; if these victims of an absolutely universal oppression “in all lands” are deep, discriminating, artistic, liberal, magnanimous — in brief, wise and good — it is difficult to see what they have to complain about. Mr. Markham, at least, is forbidden to weep for them, for he is a lover of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. These taught, and taught truly — one from the throne of an empire, one writing at a gold table, and one in the intervals of service as a slave — the supreme value of wisdom and goodness, the vanity of power and wealth, the triviality of privation, discomfort and pain. Mr. Markham is a disciple of Jesus Christ, who from the waysides and the fields taught that poverty is not only a duty, but indispensable to salvation. So my argumentum ad hominem runs thus: The objects of our poet’s fierce invective and awful threats have suffered his protégés to remain rather better off than they are themselves — have appropriated and monopolized only what is not worth having. In view of this mitigating circumstance I feel justified in demanding in their behalf a lighter sentence. Let the portentous effigy of the French Revolution be forbidden to make faces at them.

  I know of few literary phenomena more grotesque than some of those growing out of “The Man with the Hoe” — that sudden popularity being itself a thing which “goes neare to be fonny.” Mr. Markham, whom for many years those of us who modestly think ourselves illuminati considered a great poet whose greatness full surely was a-ripening, wrote many things far and away superior to “The Man,” but these brought him recognition from the judicious only, with which we would all have sworn that he was content. All at once he published a poem which, despite some of its splendid lines, is neither true in sentiment nor admirable in form — which is, in fact, addressed to peasant understandings and soured hearts. Instantly follow a blaze and thunder of notoriety, seen and heard over the entire continent; and even the coasts of Europe are “telling of the sound.” Straightway before the astonished vision of his friends the author stands transfigured! The charming poet has become a demagogue, a “labor leader” spreading that gospel of hate known as “industrial brotherhood,” a “walking delegate” diligently inciting a strike against God and clamoring for repeal of the laws of nature. Saddest of all, we find him conscientiously promoting his own vogue. He personally appears at meetings of cranks and incapables convened to shriek against the creed of law and order; speaks at meetings of sycophants eager to shine by his light; introduces lecturers to meetings of ninnies and femininnies convened to glorify themselves. When he is not waving the red flag of discontent and beating the big drum of revolution I presume he is resting — perched, St.-Simeon-Styliteswise, atop a lofty capital I, erected in the market place, diligently and rapturously contemplating his new identity. All of which is very sad to those of us who find it difficult to unlove him.

  The trouble with Mr. Markham is that he has formed the habit of thinking of mankind as divided on the property line — as comprising only two classes, the rich and the poor. When a man has acquired that habit he is lost to sense and righteousness. Assassins sometimes reform, and with increasing education thieves renounce the error of theft to embrace the evangel of embezzlement; but a demagogue never gets again into shape unless he becomes wealthy. I hope Mr. Markham’s fame will so promote his pecuniary interest that it will convert him from the conviction that his birth was significantly coincident in point of time with the Second Advent. Only one thing is more disagreeable than a man with a mission, namely a woman with a mission, and the superior objectionableness of the latter is largely due to her trick of inspiring the former.

  Mr. Markham seems now to look upon himself as the savior of society; to believe with entire sincerity that in his light and leading mankind can be guided out of the wilderness of Self into the promised land of Altruria; that he can alter the immemorial conditions of human existence; that a new Heaven and a new Earth can be created by the power of his song. Most melancholy of all, the song has lost its power and its charm. Since he became the Laureate of Demagogy he has written little that is poetry: in the smug prosperity that he reviles in others, his great gift “shrinks to its second cause and is no more.” That in the great white light of inevitable disillusion he will recover and repossess it, giving us again the flowers and fruits of a noble imagination in which the dream of an impossible and discreditable hegemony has no part, I should be sorry to disbelieve.

  1899.

  THE KREUTZER SONATA

  I

  NOTHING in this book directly discloses the author’s views of the marriage relation. The horrible story of Posdnyschew’s matrimonial experience — an experience which, barring its tragic finale, he affirms not to be an individual but a general one — is related by himself. There is no more in it to show directly what Tolstoi thinks of the matters in hand than there is in a play to show what the playwright thought. We are always citing the authority of Shakspeare by quotations from his plays — in which every sentiment is obviously conceived with a view to its fitness to the character of the imaginary person who utters it, and supplies no clew to the author’s convictions.

  In The Kreutzer Sonata, however, the case is somewhat different. Whereas Shakspeare had in view an artistic (and commercial) result, Tolstoi’s intention is clearly moral: his aim is not entertainment, but instruction. To that end he foregoes the advantage of those literary effects which he so well knows how to produce, confining his exceptional powers to bald narrative, overlaid with disquisitions deriving their only vitality from the moral purpose everywhere visible.

  A man marries a woman. They quarrel of course; their life is of course wretched beyond the power of words to express. Jealousy naturally ensuing, the man murders the woman. That is the “plot,” and it is without embellishment. Its amplification is accomplished by “preaching”; its episodes are sermons on subjects not closely related to the main current of thought. Clearly, the aim of a book so constructed, even by a skilful literary artist, is not an artistic aim. Tolstoi desires it to be thought that he entertains the convictions uttered by the lips of Posdnyschew. He has, indeed, distinctly avowed them elsewhere than in this book. Like other convictions, they must stand or fall according to the stability of their foundation upon the rock of truth; but the fact that they are held by a man of so gigantic powers as Tolstoi gives them an interest and importance which the world, strange to say, has been quick to recognize. —

  Some of these convictions are peculiarly Tolstoi’s own; others he holds in common with all men and women gifted with that rarest of intellectual equipments, the faculty of observation, and blessed with opportunity for its use. Anybody can see, but observation is another thing. It is something more than discernment, yet may be something less than accurate understanding of the thing discerned. Such as it is, Tolstoi has it in the highest degree. Nothing escapes him: his penetration is astonishing: he searches the very soul of things, making record of his discoveries with a pitiless frankness which to feebler understandings is brutal and terrifying. To him nothing is a mere phenomenon; everything is a phenomenon plus a meaning connected with a group of meanings. The meanings he may, and in my poor judgment commonly does, misread, but the phenomenon, the naked fact, he will see. Nothing can hide it from him nor make it appear to him better than it is. It is this terrible power of discernment, with this unsparing illumination compelling the reluctant attention of others, which environs him with animosities and implacable resentments. His is the Mont Blanc of minds; about the base of his conspicuous, cold intelligence the Arve and Arvieron of ignorance and optimism rave ceaselessly. It is of
the nature of a dunce to confound exposure with complicity. Point out to him the hatefulness of that which he has been accustomed to admire, and nothing shall thenceforward convince him that you have not had a guilty hand in making it hateful. Tolstoi, in intellect a giant and in heart a child, a man of blameless life, and spotless character, devout, righteous, spectacularly humble and aggressively humane, has had the distinction to be the most widely and sincerely detested man of two continents. He has had the courage to utter a truth of so supreme importance that one-half the civilized world has for centuries been engaged in a successful conspiracy to conceal it from the other half — the truth that the modern experiment of monogamie marriage by the dominant tribes of Europe and America is a dismal failure. He is not the first by many who has testified to that effect, but he is the first in our time whose testimony has arrested so wide and general attention — a result that is to be attributed partly to his tremendous reputation and partly to his method of giving witness. He does not in this book deal in argument, is no controversialist. He says the thing that is in him to say and we can take it or leave it.

  The Kreutzer Sonata is not an obscene nor even an indelicate book: the mind that finds it so is an indelicate, an obscene mind. It is not, according to our popular notions, “a book for young girls.” Nevertheless, it is most desirable that young girls should know — preferably through their parents who can speak with authority of experience — the truth which it enforces: namely, that marriage, like wealth, offers no hope of lasting happiness. Despite the implication that “they lived happily ever after,” it is not for nothing that the conventional love story ends with the chime of wedding bells. As the Genius vanished when Mirza asked him what lay under the cloud beyond the rock of adamant, so the story teller prudently forestalls further investigation by taking himself off. He has an innate consciousness that the course of true love whose troubled current he has been tracing begins at marriage to assume something of the character of a raging torrent.