The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10 · Chapter 8Dolce Far Niente and Dollars. (8)
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What he did is hard to condense into an article. I can do no more than skim over his career, and make out a feature here and there. He was an unstudious youth. He was not disciplined. He grew as he might, and he absorbed information at haphazard from any book he found to his liking, but he was a sort of intellectual Ishmael. He studied things not in the curriculum. He plunged into Arabic and Hindustani, and was "rusticated." He cared nothing for the classics, yet he left a redaction of Catullus that is a splendid exposition of that singer's fearful corruption, and with all of his art. He entered the Indian Army, and he became so powerful, though a subordinate, that he was repressed. His superiors feared, that in him, they would find another Clive or Hastings. Then he joined the Catholic church, but he joined many a church thereafter to find its hidden meaning. He was trusted to a limited extent by Sir Charles Napier, and he so insinuated himself with the natives, that he was one of them, and sharer of their mysterious powers. Kipling has pictured him under the name of "Strickland" as an occultly powerful personage in several of his stories. He was close to the Sikh war, and he mingled with the hostile natives in disguise, until he knew their very hearts. His pilgrimage to Mecca was a feat that startled the world. He was the first "infidel" to kiss the Kaabba. To do this he had to become a Mohammedan, and to perform almost hourly minute ceremonials, in which, had he failed of perfection, he would have been torn to pieces. His book on this journey is a narration that displays the deadly cold quality of his courage, and indeed a stupendous consciencelessness in the interest of science. Next we find him in the Crimea in the thick of things, and always in trouble. He said that all his friends got into trouble, and Burton was, usually, "agin the government." It was after the Crimea that he met the lady who became his remarkable wife, in the remarkable manner I have sketched. Then he went off to discover the sources of the Nile, and with Speke navigated Lake Tanganyika. He knew that he had not discovered the source, and he wanted to try again, but he and Speke quarreled, and pamphleteered against each other in the press. Burton, deficient in money, and in sycophancy, was discredited for a time, although now his name is immortal in geography as a pioneer of African travel. We have seen how he left his betrothed to study the Mormons, and he studied them more closely than his wife's book intimates, for she everything extenuated and ignored for her God-like Richard.
After his experiences of marriage in Mormondom, undertaken it now seems, in a desire to ascertain if polygamy were not better for him than monogamy, he returned to London, and was married despite the objections of Isabel Arundell's Catholic family. The lot of the couple was poverty, although now and then, thoughtful friends invited them to visit, and they accepted to save money. After a long wait he was appointed Consul at Fernando Po, on the West African coast. This was a miserable place, but Burton made it lively; he disciplined the negroes, and he made the sea captains fulfill their contracts under threat of guns. He went home, and then went back to Fernando Po, and undertook delicate dealings with the king of Dahomey, and explored the west coast. He went to Ireland, but Ireland was too quiet for him, but he found there were Burtons there, which accounted to himself for much of himself. After that he went to Brazil as Consul at Santos, Sao Pablo, another "Jumping off place." He explored. He found rubies, and he obtained a concession for a lead mine for others. He met there the Tichborne Claimant, and invented a Carbine pistol. He visited Argentina. All this time he was writing upon many things, or having his wife take his dictation. She went into the wilds, down into the mines, everywhere with him. Next he was transferred to Damascus, where his honesty got him into trouble, and his wife's Catholicity aroused great sentiment against him. He went into Syria, and he created consternation among the corrupt office holders in Asia Minor. One can scarcely follow his career without dizziness. By way of obliging a friend, who wanted a report on a mine, he went to Iceland, and came back to take the Consulship at Trieste. He went back to India and into Egypt, and then returned to Trieste to die. He wrote pamphlets, monographs, letters and books about everything he saw, and every place he visited. He had information exact, and from the fountain head about innumerable things; religions, races, ruins, customs, languages, tribal genealogies, plants, geology, archaeology paleontology, botany, politics, morals, almost everything that was of human interest and value, and besides all this, he was familiar with Chaucer's vocabulary, with recondite learning about Latin colloquialisms, and read with avidity everything from the Confessions of Saint Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus is familiar to students, but not edifying. He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales. He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the catalogue of a small library. All the world knows about his book, "The Scented Garden," which he translated from the Persian, and which, after his death, his wife burned rather than permit the publication of its naked naturalism. It was in the same vein as his "Arabian Nights," and contained much curious comment upon many things that we Anglo Saxons do not talk about, save in medical society meetings, and dog Latin.
When such a man sat down to write a poem, embodying his view of "the Higher Law," what could have been expected but a notable manuscript. With his poem, "the Kasidah," we shall now concern ourselves. It purports to be a translation from the Arabic of Haji Abdu El Yezdi. Its style is like that of the Rubaiyat. It is erude, but subtile. It is brutal in its anti-theism, and yet it has a certain tender grace of melancholy, deeper than Omar's own. It is devoid of Omar's mysticism and epicureanism, and appallingly synthetic. It will not capture the sentimentalists, like the Rubaiyat, but, when it shall be known, it will divide honors with the now universally popular Persian poem. Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has issued it in beautiful and chaste form, for the edification of his clientele of searchers for the literature that is always almost, but never quite completely forgotten. The "Kasidah" was written in 1853, and it is, in its opening, much like Fitz Gerald's Rubaiyat, though Burton never saw that gem of philosophy and song, until eight years after. "The Kasidah" was not printed until 1880. It is difficult to interpret, because it so clearly interprets itself. It must be read. It cannot be "explained."
The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived, and it holds forth the writer's own view. He maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided, and distributed in this world. Self cultivation is, in his view, the sole sufficient object of human life, with due regard for others. The affections, the sympathies, and "the divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments. He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions." This is pure agnosticism. There runs all through the poem a sad note that heightens the courage with which the writer faces his own bleak conclusion, and, "the tinkling of the camel bell" is heard faint and far in the surge of his investive, or below the deepest deep of his despair. In Arabia, Death rides a camel, instead of a white horse, as our occidental myth has it, and the camel's bell is the music to which all life is attuned. Burton reverts from time to time to this terrifying tintinnabulation, but he blends it with the suggested glamour of evening, until the terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power, of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts, Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus the vine and the rose, and ali Persian silkiness. The problem he sets out to solve, and he solves it by a petitio principii, is
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.
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.
The gods have given us brains to make of our country a brawny one, and we have used our talent to corrupt what was once equality into the unequal factions of power and poverty. The gods have given us genius to soften the crudities of the early century and to brighten our homes and our lives, and instead the inventions and the creations but serve to gild the mansions of the monopolist and to gird the iron more tightly on the wrist of the toiler. We are avaricious, we are vulgar, and we are base. We have lost the dignity of Nature that gave to a fragile lily a royalty before which Solomon's grandeur paled. We have piled stone and brick where the forest oak towered, and voice our strident city cries where the imperious roar of the forest king once startled the echoes. We have turned the oil and filth of our refineries into the streams that once crept purling and laughing through the wild-flowers and grasses, and the black smoke of our factories has silenced the plaintive note of the thrush and strangled the wondrous song of the nightingale. Our grandeur is ostentation and our dignity a dead-letter. The greatness that once longed for new worlds to conquer has degenerated into yellow-fingered grasping for ginger-bread display. The powerful figure of the pioneer could swing its mighty as into the forest root, but in the rythm of labor there was time to pause and rest and listen where "soft music ripples along shore, as the lake breathes." In the stillness Nature's god speaks, and in the patient face of the woman, shading her eyes where she watches him from the cabin door, is sweeter and nobler dreaming than ever finds resting place in the sharpened and querulous features of our modern rushed society woman.
In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's religion—"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a kindergarten. Thus have we grown avaricious and vulgar and in their weariness of things as they are, have our women grown base. They know that their lives miss something, they know that their fierce rivalry and feverish straining for precedence bring them no nearer the Mecca that closes its austere gates to their aching eyes. And for the dignity and pride their lives have lacked, they give their fortunes and sell their bodies and exchange, for a title, the name of which they have grown ashamed. They perhaps shrink, in physical repulsion, from the man who they feel despises while he endures them. They perhaps hunger, with all the woman- nature their pitiful lives have left them, for other lips murmuring in slumber beside them. But over their burning eyes they press the metal circle for which they have crushed their hearts and outraged their sex, and around the delicate limbs they draw the ermines that cannot hide their shame, and in all their poor, empty glory they only read in the cold eyes of the patrician women around them the chill contempt that stamps them as among, but not of their order. "I sometimes think it wisest not to think," and this warped and twisted human nature has a pathos in all its chasing after a gilded butterfly that has always a grinning skull peering through the gold of its wings. The hunger that finds but Apples of Sodom, the life-labor that wins but the gold of Midas, the ambition that crushes its toy baloon—"and man plods his way through thorns to ashes."
America freed her blacks but rests her social aegis on barter far more hideous. Optimists prate of the world growing better, with their eyes on the mountain tops, but when one reads of frail Lais fined ten dollars in the court- room for earning her daily bread in the only manner possible to a nature in which sin has been bred in the bone by generations of ancestors, and then pictures Dr. Brown of exclusive St. Thomas', New York, murmuring "Benedicite!" over an international marriage ceremony, his handsome face and melodious voice and aristocratic bearing doing full justice to the grandeur of the occasion—it is a contrast in which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house.
Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving? Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida., October 1.
* * * SALMAGUNDI.
My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d——d tongues cut out." Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.
Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a d—n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during the dark of the moon, spawned in a dry goods box and raised on bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or coon I cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is cock-sure—"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.