FullReads

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: