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Title: The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance
Author: Paul Elmer More
Corra Harris
Release Date: September 4, 2008 [EBook #26523]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JESSICA LETTERS ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
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The
Jessica Letters
An Editor's Romance
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1904
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1904
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, April, 1904
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Dear Jessica_:
_For a little while like shadows we have played our parts on a shadowy
stage, aping the passions and follies of actual life. And now, as the kind
authors who gave us being withdraw their support and leave us to fade away
into nothingness, the doubt arises whether our little comedy was not all
in vain. I do not know. A wise poet of the real world once said that man's
life was merely_ the dream of a shadow, _yet somehow men persuade
themselves that their own pursuits are greatly serious. Was our life any
less than that, and were not our hopes and sorrows and tremulous joy as
full of meaning to us as theirs to the creatures who strut upon the stage
of the world? Again I say, I do not know: Only I am troubled that so fair
an image as yours should prove after all a dream, a shadow's dream, and
melt so swiftly away_:--
In what strange lines of beauty should I draw thee?
In what sad purple dreamshine paint thee true?
How should I make them see who never saw thee?
How should I make them know who never knew?
_And my last word is a message. He who created me would convey in this, my
farewell letter, his thanks to the creator of Jessica. He himself has
found in our correspondence only pleasure, and, as he turns from this
romance to other and different work of the pen, he hopes that she who made
you will be encouraged by your charm to deal bravely with her imagination
and to give the world other romances quite her own and without the alloy
of his coarser wit_.
_Philip_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
PART I--Which shows how Jessica
visits an editor in the city, and
what comes of it 1
PART II--Which shows how the editor
visits Jessica in the country, and
how love and philosophy
sometimes clash 83
PART III--Which shows how the editor
again visits Jessica in the country, and
how love is buffeted between
philosophy and religion 212
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The First Part
which shows how Jessica visits an editor
in the city, and what comes of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
PHILIP TO JESSICA
NEW YORK, April 20, 19--.
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, I
trust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me some
right to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell you
that we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall be
pleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you can
always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say
atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of
that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject
the lively creatures of his own brain.
"Mr. Howells," you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces the
spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you
have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a
malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to
speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak
element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby,
good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals
and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic."
Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the most ungallant
editor would be constrained to call fair!
I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of great
moment. But be assured neither you nor your perplexing query has really
slipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy room
with the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my one
barricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to one
experienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life to
literature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbs
me in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words,
_give my life_. Literature is a despised goddess in these days to receive
such devotion.
Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy,
as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether
it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing
reviews and sketches and stories,--why, certainly, do so by all means. I
have no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honours
of society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, God
forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a
consuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can
only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a
people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a
great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any
sympathy for the follower?
It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I have
in all my experience met just four men who have given themselves to
literature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in the
mountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerk
in New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever an
anchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterly
unrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, the
unhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealous
passion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of clever
reading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from the
decorous worship of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failure
is the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the life
about us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due for such
earnestness in writing to one who is, after all, practically a stranger to
me.
Forgive my naïve zeal; but I remember that you spoke to me on the subject
with a note of restrained emotion which flatters me into thinking I may
not be misunderstood. And, to seek pardon for this personal tone by an
added personality, it distresses me to imagine a life like yours, with
which the world must deal bountifully in mere gratitude for the joy it
takes from you,--to imagine a life like yours, I say, sacrificed to any
such grim Moloch. Write, and win applause for gay cleverness, but do not
consider literature seriously. Above all, write me a word to assure me I
have not given offence by this very uneditorial outburst of rhetoric.
Sincerely yours,
PHILIP TOWERS.
II
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MORNINGTOWN, GEORGIA, April 27, 19--.
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Since my return home I have thought earnestly of my visit to New York.
That was the first time I was ever far beyond the community boundaries of
some Methodist church in Georgia. I think I mentioned to you that my
father is an itinerant preacher. But for one brief day I was a small and
insignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted and
unclassified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you were
not brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense of
irresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through the
buckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in the
world at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could have
danced and glorified God on a curbstone, if such a manifestation of
heathen spirituality would not have been unseemly.
But the chief event of that sensational day was my visit to you. Of course
you cannot know how formidable the literary editor of a great newspaper
appears to a friendless young writer. And from our brief correspondence I
had already pictured you grim and elderly, with huge black brows bunched
together as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I even
thought of adding a white beard,--you do use long graybeard words
sometimes, and naturally I had associated them with your chin. You can
imagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs of
my courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious in
appearance, and not even _old_! The revulsion from my fears and anxieties
was so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands in
salutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you should have had
that also.
I am so pleased to have you confirm my judgment of Howells's novel; and
that I am to have more books for review. I doubt, however, if Mr. Howells
will ever reap the benefit of my criticisms, for not long since I read a
note from him saying that he never looked into _The Gazette_. You must
already have given offence by doubting his literary infallibility.
But on the whole you question the wisdom of my ambition to "give my life
to literature." As to that I am inclined to follow Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler's opinion: "Writing is like flirting,--if you can't do it, nobody
can teach you; and if you can do it, nobody can keep you from doing it."
With a certain literary aspirant I know, writing is even more like
flirting than that,--an artful folly with literature which will never rise
to the dignity of a wedding sacrifice. She could no more give herself
seriously to the demands of such a profession than a Southern mockingbird
can take a serious view of music. He makes it quite independently of mind,
gets his inspiration from the fairies, steals his notes, and dedicates the
whole earth to the sky every morning with a green-tree ballad, utterly
frivolous. Such a performance, my dear Mr. Towers, can never be termed a
"sacrifice"; rather it is the wings and tail of humour expressed in a
song. But who shall say the dear little wag has no vocation because his
small feather-soul is expressed by a minuet instead of an anthem?
Therefore do not turn your editorial back upon me because I am incapable
of the more earnest sacrifice. Even if I only chirrup a green-tree ballad,
I shall need a chorister to aid me in winning those "laughing honours of
society." And your supervision is all the more necessary, since, as you
said to me, I live in a section where the literary point of view is more
sentimental than accurate. This is accounted for, not by a lack of native
wit, but by the fact that we have no scholarship or purely intellectual
foundations. We are romanticists, but not students in life or art. We make
no great distinctions between ideality and reality because with us
existence itself is one long cheerful delusion. Now, while I suffer from
these limitations more or less, my ignorance is not invincible, and I
could learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal,
and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial.
Sincerely,
JESSICA DOANE.
III
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledged
sooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment my
letter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they can
get nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once I
lay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond to
what seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myself
and launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to my
own experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?
Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me in
the course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances more
than once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please,
welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shut
nature out of the door, she will come in at the window," is an old saying,
and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see.
But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was not
the vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life to
literature,"--that question you very properly answered in a tone of
bantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner of
life to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heaven
save the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there is
no literature in New York. There are millions of books manufactured
here, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has no
sense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain what
I mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even the
love of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. The
distinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in my
actual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between the
life of a _religiosus_, Thomas à Kempis, let us say, and of a faithful
man of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble you
with mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southern
mockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that bird
mewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not for
spontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by express
several books....[1]
IV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I have said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that I
am going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by living
writers who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's
_Victorian Prose Masters_, and the other is Santayana's _Poetry and
Religion_. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I know
I shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a little
disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these
men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent
Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American
_bourgeoisie_. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a
good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional
weigher of books yourself, you ought to be acquainted with these
gentlemen.
V
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Do not reproach yourself for having written me a "journalistic" letter. I
always think of an editor as having only ink-bottle insides, ever ready to
turn winged fancies into printed matter, or to enter upon a "lyrical
disquisition" concerning them. Your distinction consists in a disposition
to abandon the formalities of the editorial desk that you may "respond to
the personal demands of a new acquaintance." And this humane amiability
leads me to make a naïve confession. There are some people whose demands
are always personal. I think it is their limitation, resulting from a
state of naturalness, more or less primitive, out of which they have not
yet evolved. They do not appeal to your judgment or wisdom or even to your
sympathy, but to _you_. Their very spirits are composed of a sort of
sunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term the
higher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-top
spirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistic
training of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners of
your editorial dignity by impressing _personal_ demands.
And just so am I related to the whole of life,--even to the "publicans" in
my father's congregation. Indeed, if the desire "to eat with sinners"
insured salvation, there would be less cause for alarm about my miraculous
future state. The attraction, you understand, depends not upon the fact of
their being sinners, but upon the sincerity of their mortality. The more
unassumingly these reprobates live in their share of the common flesh, far
below spiritual pretences, the more does my wayward mind tip the scales of
unregenerate humour in their direction. My instincts hobnob with their
dust. But do not infer that I have identified you with these undisciplined
characters. When I was a child, out of the rancour of a well-tutored
Southern imagination I honestly believed that every man the other side of
Mason and Dixon's line had a blue complexion, thin legs, and a long tail.
And once when I was still very young, as I hurried from school through a
lonely wood, I actually _saw_ one of these monsters quite plainly. And I
thought I observed that his tail was slightly forked at the end! I have
long since forgiven you these terrifying caudal appendages, of course,
but, for all that, I keep a wary eye upon my heavenly bodies and at least
one wing stretched even unto this day when my guardian angel introduces a
Northern man. My patriotic instincts recommend at once the wisdom of
strategy. And it is well the "personal demands" come from me to you; for,
had the direction been reversed, by this time I should have sought refuge
somewhere in my last ditch and run up a little tattered flag of rebellion
to signify the state of my mind.
It is just as well that you advise me against trying my fortunes in your
"literary metropolis." My father is set with all his scriptures against
the idea. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternal
life"; and, having predestined me for a deaconess in his church, he is
firmly convinced that the strait and narrow way for me does not lie in the
direction of New York. However, I have already whispered to my
confidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maid
desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess.
Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while
he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens
are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow,
propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring
clouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for another
outing in your literary regions.
Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has no
sense, or indeed only contempt," and I await the promised explanation with
interest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain any
opportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy
(?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and
resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of,
and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we
shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall
buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only
for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and great
operas.
The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort to
make a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburned
heels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpin
gardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give his
experience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these little
freckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses and
lilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinery
creations.
VI
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literature
in E---- College, which you will remember is not very far from
Morningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of some
old English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father's
one carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). He
is a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermit
intelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice is
pitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believing
that he is a bachelor.
Still we had some talk together, and that is how I came to practise a
deceit upon you. Seeing a copy of _The Gazette_ lying on the table this
morning, Professor M---- was reminded to say that there was a "strong
man," Philip Towers by name, connected with that paper now. I cocked my
head at once like a starling listening to a new tune, for that was the
first time I had heard your name praised by a literary man in the South.
He went on to say that he had been delighted with your last book, _Milton
and His Generation_, and asked if I had observed your work in the literary
department of _The Gazette_. I admitted demurely that I had. He praised
several reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you were
the only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modern
fiction. Then he incensed me with this final comment:
"I do not understand how he does this newspaper work so forcefully, almost
savagely, and is at the same time capable of writing such delicate,
scholarly essays as this volume contains!"
"I have seen Mr. Towers," I remarked, mentally determining that you should
suffer for that distinction.
"Indeed! what manner of man is he?"
"His dust has congealed, stiffened into a sort of plaster-of-Paris
exterior, and he has what I call a _disinterred_ intelligence!"
"A what?"
"A man whose very personality is a kind of mental reservation, and whose
intelligence has been resurrected up through the thought and philosophy of
three thousand years."
M---- looked awkward but impressed.
And I hoped he would ask how you actually looked, for I was in the mood to
give a perfectly God-fearing description of you.
But from the foregoing you will see that I am capable of sharing your
literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false rôle
created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion
with M---- that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his
judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the
assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neither
imagination nor genius has always amused me. And this one danced now as
frantically as if he had unintentionally grasped a live wire that hurt and
burned, but would not let go! Finally I said very engagingly:
"Doctor M----, I hope to improve in these matters by taking a course of
instruction under you next year."
"Now God forbid that you should ever do such a thing, Miss Doane! I would
sooner have you thrust dynamite under the chair of English Literature,
than see you in one of my classes!"
Thus am I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that
reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and
Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism
of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has
been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such
loose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do not
stick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you would
not tolerate them from me. But of all the books you have given me I like
best George Santayana's _Poetry and Religion_. Who is he anyhow? It may be
a disgraceful admission to make, but I never heard of him before. His name
is foreign, and his style is not American. For when an American says a
daring thing, particularly of religion, he says it impudently, with a
vulgar bravado. But this man writes out his opinion coolly, simply, with
that fine hauteur that will not condescend to know of opposition. I think
that is admirable. Arnold's courtesy and satirical temperance in dealing
with what he discredits is a pose by the side of this man's mental grace
and courage. And you know how we usually denominate style: it is the
little lace-frilled petticoat of the lady novelist's mincing passions, or
the breeches that belong to a male author's mental respirations. But with
this man, style is a spirit sword which cleaves between delusions and
facts, which separates religion from reality and establishes it in our
upper consciousness of ideality.
Is it not absurd for such a barbarian as I am to discuss these
gospel-makers of literature with you? But it is much more remarkable that
one or any of them should excite my admiration and respect. Really, if you
must know it, Mr. Towers, this is where I grow humble-minded in your
presence. I am fascinated with your ability to deal with the usually
indefinable, the esoteric side of art,--the esoteric side of life by
interpretation. And here I discover a shadowy, ghostly likeness between
you and this George Santayana. You do not think toward the same ends, or
write in the same style, but you _know_ things alike, as if you had both
drunk from the same Eastern fountain of mysteries.
And now I am about to change my gratitude into indignation. For I begin to
suspect that you sent me these books to inculcate the doctrine of literary
humility. If so, you have succeeded beyond your highest expectations.
Until now, writing has been a series of desperate experiments with me. I
progressed by inspiration. But these fellows--Arnold especially--discredit
all such performances. And he does it with the air of an English gentleman
inspecting a naked cannibal. He makes my flesh creep! He regards an
inspiration as a sort of vulgarity that must be dressed and stretched
before it can be used. From his point of view I infer that he considers
genius as a dangerous kind of drunkenness that fascinates the world, but
is really closely related to bad form in literature. On the other hand,
father says that if Matthew Arnold had known of me he would have purchased
me, placed me in a cage with a fountain pen, and exhibited me to his
classes at Oxford as a literary freak!
VII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I will remember your amused hostility to "hairpin gardeners" and see that
no more out-of-door books come to you until I have one with a stimulating
odour of burning cornstalks and rotting cabbages. Meanwhile let me assure
you that your reviews of _Elizabeth, Evelina, Judith_, and their sisters
have been none the less delightful for a vein of wicked impatience running
through them. The books I am now sending....
You ought not to be amazed at my dismal comments on latter-day literature.
The fact is, you have dissected our present book-makers better than I
could do it myself, for the reason that I am too amiable (I presume, you
see, that I have the wit) to judge my fellow-workers with such merciless
veracity.
But I have just read an article in the _Popular Science Monthly_ which
throws an unexpected light on the subject. The paper is by Dr. Minot and
is a biologist's comment on "The Problem of Consciousness." You might not
suppose that an argument to show how "the function of consciousness is to
dislocate in time the reactions from sensations" (!) would have much to do
with the properties of literature, but it has. Let me copy out some of his
words, as probably you have not seen the magazine:
"The communication between individuals is especially characteristic
of vertebrates, and in the higher members of that subkingdom it plays
a very great rôle in aiding the work of consciousness. In man, owing
to articulate speech, the factor of communication has acquired a
maximum importance. The value of language, our principal medium of
communication, lies in its aiding the adjustment of the individual
and the race to external reality. Human evolution is the continuation
of animal evolution, and in both the dominant factor has been the
increase of the resources available for consciousness."
Now that sounds pretty well for a scientist. It should seem to follow
that literature, being, so to speak, the permanent mode of
communication,--conveying ideas and emotions not merely from man to
man, but from generation to generation,--is the predominant means by which
this development of consciousness is attained. It is a pretty support we
derive from the enemy. But mark the serpent in the grass--"the
adjustment of the individual and the race to external reality." The real
aim of evolution is purely external, the adjustment of man to
environment; consciousness has value in so far as it promotes this
adjustment. Flatly, to me, this is pure nonsense, a putting of the
cart before the horse, a vulgar _hysteron-proteron_, none the less
execrable because it is the working principle not of a single man, but
of the whole of soctety to-day. Consciousness, I hold, is the supremely
valuable thing, and progress, evolution, civilisation, etc., are only
significant in so far as they afford nourishment to it. Literature is
the self-sufficient fruit of this consciousness, I say; the world says it
is a mere means of promoting our physical adjustment. You see I take up
lightly the huge enmity of the world.
This is wild stuff to put into a journalistic letter, no doubt. If I were
writing a treatise I would undertake to show that this difference of view
in regard to consciousness and physical adjustment is the oldest and most
serious debate of human intelligence. Saint Catharine, Thomas à Kempis,
and all those religious fanatics who counted the world well lost, made a
god of consciousness and thought very little of physical adjustment. The
debate in their day was an equal one. To-day it is all on one side--and
_væ victis_! I cry out--why should I not?--as one of the conquered, and I
am charitable enough to advise another not to enter the combat. It is a
poor consolation to wrap yourself in your virtue, mount a little pedestal,
set your hand on your heart, and spout with Lucan: _The winning cause for
the gods, but the vanquished for me_! Sometimes we begin to wonder
whether, after all, the world may not be right, and at that moment the
wind begins to blow pretty chill through our virtue.
VIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
Is my suspicion right? Was my last letter to you really a tangle of crude
ideas? That has grown to be my way, until I begin to wonder whether the
horrid noises of Park Row may not have thrown my mind a little out of
balance. For my strength lay in silence and solitude. It is hard for me to
establish any sufficient bond between my intellectual life and my personal
relationships, and as a consequence my letters, when they cease to be mere
journalistic memoranda, float out into a sea of unrestrained revery.
Yet I would ask you to be patient with me in this matter. From the first,
even before I saw you here in New York, I felt that somehow you might, by
mere patience and indulgence, if you would, re-establish the lost bond in
my life; that somehow the shadow of your personality was fitted to move
among the shadows of my intellectual world. What a strange compliment to
send a young woman!--for compliment it seems in my eyes.
Meanwhile, as some explanation of this intellectual twilight into which I
would so generously introduce you, I am sending you a little book I wrote
and foolishly printed several years ago on the quiet life of the Hindus.
The mood of the book still returns to me at times, though I have cast away
its philosophy as impracticable. I look for peace in the way that Plato
trod, and some day I shall write my palinode in that spirit. Let me, in
this connection, copy out a few verses I wrote last night and the night
before. It is my first digression into poetry since I was a boy:
THE THREE COMMANDS
I
Out of this meadow-land of teen and dole,
Because my heart had harboured in its cell
One prophet's word, an Angel bore my soul
Through starry ways to God's high citadel.
There in the shadow of a thousand domes
I walked, beyond the echo of earth's noise;
While down the streets between the happy homes
Only the murmur passed of infinite joys.
Then said my soul: "O fair-engirdled Guide!
Show me the mansion where I, too, may won:
Here in forgetful peace I would abide,
And barter earth for God's sweet benison."
"Nay," he replied, "not thine the life Elysian,
Live thou the world's life, holding yet thy vision
A hope and memory, till thy course be run."
II
Then said my soul: "I faint and seek my rest;
The glory of the vision veils mine eyes;
These infinite murmurs beating at my breast
Turn earthly music into plangent sighs.
"Because thou biddest, I will tread the maze
With men my brothers, yet my hands withhold
From building at the Babel towers they raise,
And all my life within my heart infold."
The Angel answered: "Lo, as in a dream
Thy feet have passed beyond the gates of flame;
And evermore the toils of men must seem
But wasteful folly in a path of shame.
"Yet I command thee, and vouchsafe no reason,
Thou shalt endure the world's work for a season;
Work thou, and leave to others fame and blame."
III
I bowed submission, dumb a little while.
Then said my soul: "Thy will I dare not balk;
I reach my hands to labours that defile,
And help to rear a plant of barren stalk.
"Yet only I, because in life I bear
The vision of that peace, may never feel
The spur of keen ambition, never share
The dread of loss that makes the world's work real.
"Therefore in scorn I draw my bitter breath,
And sorrow cherish as my proudest right,
Till scorn and sorrow fade in sweeter death."
The Angel answered, turning as for flight:
"The labour sorrow-done is more than sterile,
And scorn will change thy vision to soul's peril:
Be glad; thy work is gladness, child of light!"
IX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Many thanks for this copy of your book, _The Forest Philosophers of
India_. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better.
Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East.
The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost
that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations
which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a
Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a
whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression
of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short of
terrifying.
You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one of
your own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your "Three Commands" have laid me
under a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much;
and I am a little rebellious.
X
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness,
because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot's article. At last I got hold of
the magazine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crude
ideas," they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way you
expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have
been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that
desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical
novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not
know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so
readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same
slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive
the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero,
"wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these
would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.
But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection with
my first venture into the realm of biological thought. _The Popular
Science Monthly_ has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account of
its heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret the
fact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot's article. But some
demon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term
"epiphenomenon." Now a long association with the idea of omniscience has
rendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke the
imagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give a
definition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary is
his only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and he
declines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority.
Therefore he reasoned that "epiphenomenon" had been built up to
accommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mind
never dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pair
of accusing glasses, he inquired:
"My daughter, where did you see this remarkable word?"
I do not question that I am a direct descendant from my fictitious
grandmother, Eve! I am always being tempted by apples of information, and
I have often known the mortifying sensation of wishing to hide my guilty
countenance in my more modern petticoat on that account.
He read the "blasphemous" article through, only pausing to point out
heresies and perversions of the sacred truth as he went along. But when he
reached the sentence in which the author calmly asserts the theory of
monism, he actually gagged with indignation: "My child, do you know that
this godless wretch claims that the same principle of life which makes the
cabbage also vitalises man?" I looked horrified, but I could barely
restrain my laughter; for, indeed, there are "flat-dutch"-headed gentlemen
in his congregation who might as well have come up at the end of a cabbage
stalk for all the thinking they do. But I need not tell you that the
magazine containing the profane treatise on consciousness was burned,
while a livid picture was drawn of my own future if I persisted in
stealing forbidden fruit from this particular tree of knowledge.
But your last letter put me into a more serious frame of mind. And I _am_
complimented that you entertain the hope that I may be of assistance in
re-establishing the lost bond between you and real life. But do you know
that you have appealed to the missionary instincts of a barbarian? The
attributes of patience and indulgence do not belong to natures like mine.
Never has any affliction worked out patience in me, never has my strongest
affection taken the form of indulgence. In me Love and Friendship, Sorrow
and Gladness, take fiercer forms of expression.
But I will not conceal from you the fact that from the first I have felt
in our relationship a curious sensation of magic in one opposed to mystery
in the other. I have felt the abandon and madness of a happy dancer,
whirling around the dim edge of your shadow-land in the wild expectation
of beholding the disembodied spirit of you come forth to join me. It is
not that I _wished_ to work a charm, but the shadow of your mysterious
life draws me into the opposition of a counter-influence. The gift of
power is not in me to set foot across the magic line into the dim land of
your soul, any more than I could dissolve into a breath of moonlit air, or
a wave of the sea. For, in you, I seem to perceive some strange phenomenon
of a spirit changed to twilight gloom which covers all your hills and
valleys with the mournful shadow of approaching night. Often this
conception appalls me, but more frequently I conceive a wild energy from
the idea, as of one sent to rim the shadows in close and closer till some
star shall shine down and bless them into heroic form and substance. And I
have been amazed to find within my mind a witch's charm for working
rainbow miracles upon your dim sky,--but so it is. There have always been
mad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got hold
of the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of my
limitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be taken
seriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to create
the necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance.
Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows but
to-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a little
homeless wren seeking shelter in your valley.
XI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
So I am a disembodied ghost in your estimation, and you, "happy dancer,"
are whirling around the rim of my shadow-land with some sweet incantation
learned in your Georgia woods to conjure me out into the visible world.
Really I would call that a delicious bit of impertinence were I not afraid
the word might be taken in the wrong sense.
And yet, I must confess it, there is too much truth in what you say. Some
day, when I am bolder, I may unfold to you the whole story of my ruin--for
it is a ruin to be disembodied, is it not? I may even indicate the single
phrase, the mysterious word of all mysteries, that might evoke the spirit
from the past and incarnate him in the living present. Do not try to guess
the phrase, I beseech you, for it would frighten you now and so I should
lose my one chance of reincarnation. When I visit you in the South, some
day soon, I will tell you the magic word I have learned.
What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap
tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as
tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at
playing Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a mere
battling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your home
by Dr. Minot's heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadow
fight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed,
was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you think
of me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit to
a rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precocious
Mr. Pound-text printed in the New York _Observer_ when he was as much as
nine years old--and the sermon might be worse.
I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faith
that I passed through a few years later I can no more realise than I can
now realise your father's blessed assurance of heaven. I know vaguely that
it was a time of unspeakable agony for me, a rending asunder, as it were,
of soul and body. The doctrine was bred into my bones; I saw the folly of
it intellectually, but the emotional comfort of it was the very
quintessence of my life. The struggle came upon me alone and I was without
help or guidance. Into those few years of boyish vacillation, I see now
that the whole tragedy of more than a century of human experience was
thrust. One day I sat in church listening to a sermon of appealing
eloquence: "And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the
world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil." Was I too deliberately turning my back on the light? I hid my face
and cried. That was the end. I came out of the church free, but I had
suffered too much. Something passed from my life that day which nothing
can replace; for perfect faith, like love, comes to a man but once.
1 was empty of comfort and without resting-place for my spirit. Then said
I: Look you, belief in this religion as dogma is gone; why not hold fast
to its imaginative beauty! If revelation is a fraud, at least the
intricacies of this catholic faith have grown up from the long yearning of
the human heart, and possess this inner reality of corresponding with our
spiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism,
trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. But
in the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham,
a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindness
of true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now a
grown man.
Then by some inner guidance I turned to India. How shall I tell you what I
found in the philosophies of that land! One thing will surprise you.
Instead of pessimism I found in India during a certain period of time a
happiness, an exultation of happiness, such as the world to-day cannot
even imagine. And I found that this happiness sprang from no pretended
revelation but from a profound understanding of the heart. Do this, said
the books, and you will feel thus, and so step by step to the consummation
of ecstasy. I read and was amazed; I understood and knew that I too, if my
will were strong, might slip from bondage and be blessed. But I saw
further that the path lay away from this world, that I must renounce every
desire which I had learned to call good, that I must strip my soul naked
of all this civilisation which we have woven in a loom of three thousand
years. The dying command of Buddha terrified me: "All things pass away;
work out your own salvation diligently!" The words were spoken to comfort
and strengthen the bereaved disciples, but to me they sounded as an
imprecation, so different is the training of our society from theirs. The
loneliness and austerity of the command appalled me; I would not take the
first step, and turned back to seek the beautiful things of the eye.
And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal--not
Christianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement may
sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt
love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of
Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the
individual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of our
neighbour's earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians,
followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of the
world to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape--and none but a
strong man shall open that door.
So I look at the world and life, but, even as I write, something like a
foreboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father and
the straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether after
all the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this law
which darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim the joy of my
maturer years?
Alas, you who venture to trip so gayly about the rim of my shadow-land
with your brave incantations, behold what spirit of gloom and malignant
mutterings you have evoked from the night. I have written more than I
meant--too much, I fear.
XII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
An evangelist has been here this week. He fell upon us like a howling
dervish who had fed fanaticisms on locusts and wild honey. And he has
stirred up the spiritual dust of this community by showing an intimacy
with God's plans in regard to us very disconcerting to credulously minded
sinners. As for me, I have passed this primer-state of religious emotion.
I am sure a kind God made me, and so I belong to Him, good or bad. In any
case I cannot change the whole spiritual economy of Heaven with my poor
prayers and confessions. I try to think of my shortcomings, therefore, as
merely the incidents of an eternal growth. I shall outlive them all in the
course of time, quite naturally, perennially, as the trees outlive the
blight of winter and put forth each year a new greenness of aspiring
leaves. I dare not say that I know God, and I will not believe some
doctrines taught concerning Him; but I keep within the principle of life
and follow as best I can the natural order of things. And for the most
part I feel as logically related to the divine order as the flowers are to
the seasons. I know that if this really is His world,
should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
Are you shocked, dear Shadow, at such a creed of sun and dust?--you, a
dishoused soul, wandering like a vagrant ghost along life's green edge?
After all, I doubt if I am so far behind you in spiritual experience. The
difference is, I have two heavens, that orthodox one of my imagination,
and this real heaven-earth of which I am so nearly a part. But you have
forced the doors of mystery and escaped before your time. And you can
never return to the old dust-and-daisy communion with nature, yet you are
appalled at the loneliness and the terrible sacrifices made by a man in
your situation. Your spiritual ambition has outstripped your courage. You
are an adventurer, rather than an earnest pilgrim to Mecca.
And yet day after day as I have weathered farther and farther back in the
church, like a little white boat with all my sails reefed to meet the
gospel storm of damnation that has been raging from the pulpit, I have
thought of you and your Indian philosophy, by way of contrast, almost as a
haven of refuge. Our religion seems to me to have almost the limitations
of personality. There can be no other disciples but Christian disciples.
Our ethics are bounded by doctrines and dogmas. But, whether Buddhist or
Christian, the final test of initiation is always the same--"All things
pass away, work out your own salvation with diligence," "Die to the
world," "Present your bodies a living sacrifice"--and you would not make
these final renunciations. You "turned back to seek the beautiful things
of the eye." Well, if one is only wise enough to know what the really
beautiful things are, it is as good a way as any to spin up to God.
Meanwhile, I doubt if that "Western ideal," the kind-hearted naturalism
which "makes a fetish of our neighbour's welfare," will hold you long.
Already you "see one door" of escape. I wonder into what starry desert of
heaven it leads.
Do you know, I cannot rid myself of the notion that yours is an enchanted
spirit, always seeking doors of escape; but at the moment of exit the wild
wings that might have borne you out fail. Some earth spell casts you back,
incarnate once more. A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desires
of your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye,"
that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like a
sweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And prophecies
cannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentences
which shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimes
think,--like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tall
enough, only to be crowned at last with a white flag of blooms.
And do not expect me to pray you through these open ways of escape. I only
watch them to wish you may never win through. Something has changed me and
set my heart to a new tune. I must have already made my escape, for it
seems to me that I am on the point of becoming immortal. As I pass along
the world, I am Joy tapping the earth with happy heels. I am gifted all at
once with I do not know what magic, so that all my days are changed to
heaven. And almost I could start a resurrection of "beautiful things" only
to see you so glad. But that will never be. There are always your wings to
be reckoned with; and with them you are ever ready to answer the voices
you hear calling you from the night heavens, from the temples and tombs of
the East.
Yesterday I saw a woman sitting far back in the shadows of the church
wearing such a look of sadness that she frightened me. It was not goodness
but sorrow that had spiritualised her face. And to me she seemed a wan
prisoner looking through the windows of her cell, despairing, like one who
already knows his death sentence. "What if after all I am mistaken," I
thought, "and there really is occasion for such grief as that!" I could
think of nothing but that white mystery of sorrow piercing the gloom with
mournful eyes. And when at last the "penitents" came crowding the altar
with quaking cowardly knees, I fell upon mine and prayed: "Dear Lord, I am
Thine, I will be good! Only take not from me the joy of living here in the
green valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish than
the sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, asking
for heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forests
as sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more.
You see, dear "Spirit of gloom," that I have sent you all my little
scriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings." My God is a pastoral
Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of
philosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana,
revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the
thoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did you
ever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you the
heathen for your inheritance"?
XIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of
perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's
Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted
materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on
this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, I
say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes
moral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things that
are in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks under
the flowers?
As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new.
Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown into
the religion of men,--do you suppose that this was not known to the world
before? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enough
in the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working at
least, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis of
Aristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zôon_
(your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The
"social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we live
peacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existence
in a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched with
that sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of its
present manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does not
Virgil call his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholding
the poverty of the city--
neque ille
Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti?
And is not the _Æneid_ surcharged with pitying love for mankind, "the
sense of tears in mortal things"? So the life and words of St. Francis of
Assisi are full of the breath of brotherly love--not brotherhood with all
men merely, but with the swallows and the coneys, the flowers, and even
the inanimate things of nature. And the letters of St. Catherine of Siena
are aflame with passionate love of suffering men.
But there is something deplorably new in these more modern books,
something which makes of humanitarianism a cloak for what is most lax and
materialistic in the age. I mean their false emphasis, their neglect of
the individual soul's responsibility to itself, their setting up of human
love in a shrine where hitherto we worshipped the image of God, their
limiting of morality and religion to altruism. I deny flatly that
"Democracy ... affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith," as
Miss Addams says; I deny that "to attain individual morality in an age
demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal
effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to
apprehend the situation"; I say we do _not_ "know, at last, that we can
only discover truth by rational and democratic interest in life." Why did
you quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction between
individual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite the
other way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely the
rumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, in
the upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul,
concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into the
noise and constant coming and going of the lower rooms to speak a word of
encouragement or admonition, but she returns soon to her own silence and
her own contemplation. (The heart of a St. Anthony in the desert of Egypt,
the heart of many a lonely Hindu sage knows a divine joy of communication
of which Hull House with its human sympathies has no conception.) Morality
is the soul's debt to herself.
It is a striking and significant fact that these humanitarians are
continually breaking the simplest rules of honesty and decent living.
Rousseau, the father of them all, sending his children (the children of
his body, I mean) to the foundling asylum, is a notorious example of this;
and John Howard is another. I have in my own experience found these people
impossible to live with.
Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personal
integrity by allusion to a novel which comes from another
college-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden of
Christopher_, published three or four years ago,--a clever book withal and
rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his
university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with
college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance
with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by
competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his
hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his
factory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates this
trust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and,
as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in a
paragraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of the
story, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero to
sacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people is
a higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense which
would have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himself
and to the world.
I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive of
right thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which has
relaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For that
reason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil does
not shock us as it once did," I am filled with anger. I wonder at the
blindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth as
this: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and
have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive
respect."--Have we?
XIV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed to
breathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did I
make clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to any
contempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike and
distrust it for its false emphasis and for its perversion of morality--and
the two faults are practically one.
Last night I was reading in _Piers Plowman_ and came upon a passage which
exactly illustrates what I mean. The old Monk of Malvern might be called
the very fountainhead in English letters of that stream of human
brotherhood which has at last spread out into the stagnant pool of
humanitarianism. He wrote when the rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw
was fermenting, when the people were beginning to cry out for their
rights, and his vision is instinct with the finest spirit of love for the
downtrodden and the humble. Yet never once does his compassion or
indignation lead him to neglect spiritual things for material. Let me copy
out a few of his lines on "Poverte":
And alle the wise that evere were,
By aught I kan aspye,
Preiseden poverte for best lif,
If pacience it folwed,
And bothe bettre and blesseder
By many fold than richesse.
For though it be sour to suffre,
Thereafter cometh swete;
As on a walnote withoute
Is a bitter barke,
And after that bitter bark,
Be the shelle aweye,
Is a kernel of comfort
Kynde to restore.
So is after poverte or penaunce
Paciently y-take;
For it maketh a man to have mynde
In God, and a gret wille
To wepe and to wel bidde,
Whereof wexeth mercy,
Of which Christ is a kernelle
To conforte the soule.
Imagine, if you can, such a speech in the precincts of Hull House! I am
not concerned to exalt poverty, I know how much suffering it creates in
the world; and yet I say that an age to which poverty is only a
degradation without any possible spiritual compensation, is an age of
materialism. I wish I might follow the use of the word _comfort_ from its
early nobility as you see it here down to its modern degeneracy, where it
signifies the mere satisfaction of the body. The history of that word
would be an eloquent sermon. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand
what I mean by the false emphasis of our humanitarianism? And do you see
why I could not stomach your review of Miss Addams's book?--I am sending
by express several novels, among them....
XV
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Here in the South we are born into our traditions and we generally die by
them. We never encourage the mental extravagance of adding new dimensions
to our minds. When you have had an hour's conversation with any of us, or
have exchanged three letters, you can be comfortably sure of what we think
on any subject under the sun. Thus, you see, I was wholly unprepared for
the point of view expressed in your last two letters. I thought you were a
gentle disciple,--following the lights behind us indeed; but I did not
suspect that you were bent upon this journey through the dust of centuries
with the temper of a modern savage.
However, it seems a man must have either ass's ears or a cloven foot; and,
soon or late, most of us expect to find our hero in Bottom's predicament.
But I would rather have acknowledged the beam in my own eye than have
discovered this diabolical split in your heel. All my life I have been
familiar with the inhumanity of the merely spiritually minded. And I think
it was because your own spirit was not denominational, nor fitted to any
dogma of my acquaintance, that I trusted it. But really, the product is
always the same. And I begin to wonder if there is not something
fundamentally cruel in the law that governs soul-life. No matter what the
age or the colour of the doctrine is, those most highly developed in this
way generally show a _conscientious selfishness_ that is dehumanising.
They have no tender sense of touch, their relation to the world about them
is obtuse; and for this reason, I think, they excite aversion in normally
minded people.
I leave you, my dear sir, to "expose the serpent lurking under the
flowers." For my part, I believe humanitarianism is the better part of any
religion. And while my knowledge of social orders does not reach so far
back into the grave-dust of the past, I am unwilling to agree with you
that it is "coeval with human nature." But it is one of the ends toward
which all religions must tend,--for if a man love not his brother whom he
hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?--But I forget! Love
is not essential to your sort of Nirvana mysticism. In you, spirituality
is a sort of cruel aspiration toward personal perfection. Still, that
little scripture represents the advance made by this modern religion of
Christianity over your Hindu theosophy.
Do you know I think a man's religious philosophy ought to fit him
particularly for his present environment of earth and flesh. One cannot
tell so much about the life after death. It may be necessary to make us
over in the twinkling of an eye, and even to change the very direction of
all spirit life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are;
and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way of
dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more
mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves,
while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a
negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human
obligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none the
less real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by a
philosophic pose. You see I am reading your last two letters by the light
of certain earlier confessions.
And again I do not think you can fairly complain of humanitarianism
because in some books "it is synonymous with all that is lax and
materialistic in the age." The author of a novel is never so concerned to
tell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory.
You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can you
judge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a
decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The
scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest
nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that in
your "own experience" you have found these humanitarians "impossible to
live with." I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is,
Did they find _you_ impossible to live with? Come to think of it, I would
rather live with a humanitarian, myself, even if his soul was carnally
bow-legged. But my sort of charity is so perverse, so awry with humour,
that the constant contemplation of a man trying to wriggle out of the
flesh through some spiritual key-hole, made by his own imagination, into a
form of existence much higher than agreeable, would be, to say the least
of it, diverting.
You copy several sentences from the Hull-House book in your letter and cry
to me in an accusing voice to know why I quoted them in my review "with
approval." Suppose I did not comprehend their important relation to the
subject from your point of view? But I do understand enough to know that
the "social compunction" in Aristotle's day was a mere theory, a sublime
doctrine practised by a few, whereas now it is a great governing
principle, a dynamic power in the social order of mankind. And I challenge
your accuracy in calling such social sympathy "only a rumour in the lower
rooms of our existence." My notion is that the choir voice of it has
already reached that grand third story of yours, and that the "solitary
soul" in the "upper chamber" will presently find herself along with other
traditions--in the attic! Oh, I know your sort! You stay in your upper
chamber as long as atmospheric conditions make it comfortable. But before
this time I have known you to sneak down into those same "lower rooms" to
warm yourself by humanitarian hearthstones. And that you are not nearly so
immortal as you think you are is proved by these winter chills along the
spine. There come occasions when you get tired of your own stars and long
to feel the thrill of that royal life-blood that leaps like a ruby river
of love through the grimy, toiling, battling humanitarian world beneath
you. Did you once intimate to me that if ever I conjured you out of the
shadows which seem to surround you, I should be horrified at the vision?
Well, I am!
XVI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
So your servant has a cloven hoof and just escapes the adornment of ass's
ears! Dear, dear, what a temper! But, jesting aside, you must not suppose
I abhor the cant of humanitarianism from any thin-blooded selfishness or
outworn apathy. Have I not made this clear to you? It is the negative side
of humanitarianism (the word itself is an offence!), and not its portion
of human love that vexes my soul.
Through one of the crooked streets not far from Park Row that wind out
from under the grim arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, I often pass on
business. Here on the step at the entrance to a noisome court, where
heaven knows how many families huddle together behind the walls of these
monstrous printing-houses, there sits day after day a child, a little
pale, peaked boy, who seems to belong to no one and to have nothing to
do--sits staring out into the filthy street with silent, wistful eyes.
There is only misery and endurance on his face, with some wan reflection
of strange dreams smothered in his heart. He sits there, waiting and
watching, and no man knows what world-old philosophy comforts his weary
brain. The face haunts me; I see it at times in my working hours; it peers
at me often from the surging night-throngs of upper Broadway; it passes
dimly across my vision before I fall asleep. It has become a symbol to me
of the long agony of human history. Because I know the misery of that face
and the evil that has produced it, because I know that misery has been in
the world from the beginning and shall endure to the end, and because my
heart is sickened at the thought,--that is why I rebel so bitterly against
a doctrine that turns away from all spiritual consolation for some vainly
builded hope of a socialistic paradise on this earth. I have heard one of
these humanitarians avow that he and practically all his friends were
materialists, and such they are even when they will not admit it. Dear
girl, believe me, I have lived over in my mind and suffered in my heart
the long toil and agony which the human race has undergone in its effort
to wrest some assurance of spiritual joy and peace from these clouds of
illusion about us; I have read and felt what the Hindu ascetic has written
of lonely conflict in the wilderness; I have heard the Greek philosophers
reason their way to faith; I have comprehended the ecstasy of the early
Christians; I have taken sides in the high warfare of mediæval realists
against the cheap victory of nominalism. I know that the word of
deliverance has been spoken by all these and that it is always the same
word. And now come these humanitarians, with their starved imaginations,
who in practice, if not in speech, deny all the spiritual insight of the
race and seek to lower the ideal of mankind to their fools' commonwealth
of comfort in this world. Because I revolt from this false and canting
conception of brotherly love, am I therefore devoted to "conscientious
selfishness"? Ah, I beg you to revise your reading of this book of my
heart, and to remodel your criticism.
But I am saying not a word of what is most in my thoughts. In two days I
shall set out for a trip to the South which will bring me to Morningtown.
Will you turn away in horror if you see a wretched creature hobbling with
cloven hoof up the scented lane of your village? For sweet charity's sake,
for your own sweeter sake, believe that his heart is full of love however
wrong his mind may be.
-----
[1] Much of the routine matter in regard to
reviewing has been omitted from these letters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Second Part
which shows how the editor visits Jessica
in the country, and how love
and philosophy sometimes clash.
XVII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
WRITTEN AFTER RETURNING FROM MORNINGTOWN
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
It is all different and the morning has forgotten to return since I left
you where your village meets the great world. Have you kept God's common
dayspring imprisoned among your garden trees and flowers? What shall I
say? What shall I not say? Only this, that I gave my happiness into your
hands and you have broken it and let it drop to the ground. See what a
shipwreck I have suffered of all my dreams. These long years of solitary
reading and study I have been gathering up in my imagination the passions
and joys and hopes of a thousand dead lovers,--the longing of Menelaus for
Helen, the outcry of Catullus for Lesbia, the worship of Dante for
Beatrice--all these I have made my own, believing that some day my love of
a woman should be rendered fair in her eyes by these borrowed colours; and
now I have failed and lost; and what I would give, you have accounted as
light and insufficient. Is there no speech left to tell you all the truth?
I am a little bewildered, and have not been able to pluck up heart of
courage. Write me some word of familiar consolation; do not quite shut the
door upon me until my eyes grow accustomed to this darkness. All the light
is with you, and the beauty that God has given the world, all the meaning
of human life,--and I turn my back on this and go out into the night
alone. Dear girl, I would not utter a word of reproach. I know that my
love, which seemed to me so good, may be as nothing to you, is indeed not
worthy of you, for you are more than all my dreams--and yet it was all
that I had. I shall learn perhaps to write to you as a mere reviewer of
books;--the irony of it.
XVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Can you believe it? I was absurdly glad to receive your letter this
morning. Ever since you went away I have felt so brave and desolate--like
a poor dryad who has fought her way out of her own little kingdom of love
and peace and green silence, for the sake of a foreign ideal which really
belongs to the world at large. (I shouldn't wonder if I did become a
deaconess after all!) In my effort to escape a romantic sacrifice to a
strange heathen divinity, I find myself offered upon this common altar in
the name of a theory, Humanitarianism. My smoke arises. I have been
consumed, and now I write you merely in the spirit,--you see I am learning
_your_ incantations.
But being disembodied, I may at least be truthful. Besides, it is
sometimes wiser to make long-distance confessions than to tell the truth
face to face. Then listen, dear Heart, it was not Philip, but poor Jessica
who was vanquished that day as we walked through the lanes and fields
around Morningtown. I do not know how to tell you, but of a sudden I am
becoming learned in all the joys and griefs of this world. There is a
sweetheart reason for them all, lying buried somewhere. For love is
nature's vocation in us, I think. We cannot escape it. Our vision is
already love-lit when the prince comes. All he needs do is to step within
the radiant circle. Oh, my Heart, is it not terrible when you think of it,
that we may keep our wills, but our hearts we cannot keep! They go from us
happy pilgrims, and return unto us old and grey, sometimes lost and
forsaken.
You came so fast upon the heels of your other letter that I did not have
time to put on my shield and buckler before you were here in the flesh,
formidable, real, cloven hoof and all! I was frightened and
militant,--frightened lest you should win from me the freedom of my heart,
militant for the freedom of my will. Well, at least I kept the latter, but
I can tell you, it is making a poor bagpipe tune of the victory. When I
went down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy,
dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage
1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you will
bear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. In
any case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and as
you stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my hands
clasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candles
suddenly lighted in an open grave. You had not come merely to make peace
with me, you had my capitulation ready, but I knew then I should never
sign. Let the dead bury their dead; as for me, I am too much alive to die
long and amicably with any ghost of a philosopher in the "upper chamber."
I do not even belong in the "lower rooms," but outside under the skies of
our ever green world. I have already determined that if there is nothing
going on in heaven when I am translated thither, I will ask to be changed
into a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring round
and round the earth.
And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that I
do not really know _you_, only your mind. The time I saw you in New York
does not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicap
just to try each other's intellectual paces, did we not? But when you
ventured boldly down here upon my own heath--oh! that was a different
matter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should not
ride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew _you_. Well, you know
the dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by asking
his opinions or by classifying his face and expression according to
biological records. Now, a man's features are only his great-grand
somebody's modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may
not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my
own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but
friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and
virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little
heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover's wreath on
the Morningtown road beyond my father's church. And behold! it was as if
we had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs in
friendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for a
difference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did not
reach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity was
the ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the first
time I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty of
your spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimation
of Nature's indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth of
trees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassion
anywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact.
But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thought
pierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to the
life of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in the
cold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with the
trees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then I
asked myself this question: "What is the good, where is the wisdom in
loving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in life
or love?" Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayer
to be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannot
remember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leaves
upon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so that
you can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all my
will in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day,
perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but sound
as a brownie's. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in the
forest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poor
heart that was dead and shall live again,--a tall lady-tree as heartless
as any man-oak, or only a poor vine!
XIX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regrets
a witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes in
sackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I'd give half my forest now to
have back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, I
wish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman's heart yesterday,
to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach her
prudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that we
be generally true to the mood we are in.
When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of the
subject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference,
but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your "upper chamber"
and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge,
however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof of
your "higher nature." When my father, for instance, who has long suspected
the soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-fire
premises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that you
showed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict.
Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You are
angry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who the
Hull-House classes are,--people so poor and starved and cold that their
very souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy
who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you
have fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imagination
across the fair fields of youth's summer years. Believe me, the
humanitarian's calling seems stupid from your point of view because you
are born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-House
principles have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted the
whole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth,
then will be time enough for the spiritual luxury of such teachings as
yours.
The last batch of books has come, Creelman's novel, _Eagle Blood_, among
them. Evidently it is a story written to prove the intellectual and
commercial ascendency of Americans over mere Anglo-Saxons. The heroine and
a few romantic details are thrown in as a bait to the "average reader."
Alas for the "average reader"! How many crimes of this sort are committed
in his name! We can never hope to have a worthy literature until he has
been eliminated from the consciousness of those who make it. In the days
when he was not to be reckoned with, and men wrote for a very few
appreciative admirers and some desperately cruel critics, then Carlyle
began to swear at his "forty-million fool," and so attracted their
attention, and ever since we have had them with us, forty-million average
readers, calling for excitement and amusement. It is this same
"forty-million fool" who has made historical romances an inexhaustible
source of revenue to the writers of them. For he is naïve, and has never
suspected the real dime-novel character of such fiction. Can you not get
some one to write an article outlining a plan by which the "average
reader" may be abolished?
XX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
DEAR JESSICA:
I will not for any consideration of custom put such a breach between my
dreams and reality as to go on addressing you in the old formal way. It
will be idle to protest; I have bought the privilege with a great price;
nay, I have even bought you, and no outcry of your rebel will shall ever
redeem you from this bondage to my hopes. One thing I know: there is no
power in all the world equal to love, and he who has this power may win
through every opposition. And was ever a man in such a position as mine?
Others have been compelled to overcome a prejudice against what was base
or unworthy in themselves, but I am forced to defend myself for my best
heritage of understanding. Would it help me in your esteem if I flung away
all my hard-won philosophy and ranged myself with the sentimentalists of
the day? I will not believe it. I will fight this upstart folly while
breath is in me, and I will teach you to fight it with me. This morning I
took that poor book of Miss Addams's and, in place of what you sent me,
wrote such a review as will quite astound the "forty-million fool" you so
despise--we agree there, at least. And all the while I was writing, I kept
saying to myself, How will Jessica answer that? and, Will not Jessica
believe now that my hatred of humanitarianism does not spring from
selfishness or contempt, but from sympathy for mankind?
Yet if anything could bring me to hate my brothers it would be this
monstrous certainty that my feeling towards them stands in the way of the
one supreme, all consuming desire of my heart. I could cry out in the
words of the _Imitation_:
"As often as I have gone among men, I have returned less a man"; for their
foolish chatter has stolen from me the possession without which we are
dwarfed and marred in our being. Your love is more to me than all the
hopes of men. You must hearken to me. I have charged the winds with my
passion; the scent of flowers shall tell you the sweetness of love; you
shall not walk among your beloved trees but their whispering shall repeat
the words they heard me speak. I will wrap you about with fancies and
dreams and passionate thoughts till no way of escape is left you. You
shall not read a book but some word of mine shall come between your eyes
and the printed page. You shall not hear a simple song but you shall
remember that music is the voice of love. You think that I have no heart
for the many and can therefore have no heart for one. Dear girl, my love
is so great that it has made me stronger a thousand times than you; there
is no escape for you.
As I passed the little goblin boy this morning I dropped a coin in his
hand and said: "It is from a lady in Georgia who loves you." His face
lighted up with surprise at the words (not at the money, for I have given
him that before), and I was glad to extend the benediction of your
sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish
as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor;
but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from
the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism,
sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew
of _isms_!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for an
impossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among men.
They are the followers of Simon Magus, these humanitarians; they would buy
the gifts of Heaven with a price; and their creed is the real Simonism.
Have you ever read the _Imitation_, and do you remember these verses?
For though I alone possessed all the comforts of the world and might
enjoy all the delights thereof, yet it is certain that they could
endure but a little.
Wherefore, O my soul, thou canst not be fully comforted, nor be
perfectly refreshed, save in God, the comforter of the poor and the
helper of the humble.
Let temporal things be for use, but set thy desire on the eternal.
Man draweth nearer to God so as he departeth further from all earthly
comfort.
You have taught me to love, dear Heart; and now, as you see, you are
teaching me to be orthodox. Do not think I shall give you up; there is
only one power greater than my desire, and that is Death. I would not end
with so ill-omened a word, but rather with your own sweet name, Jessica.
XXI
JESSICA TO PHILIP
DEAR FATHER CONFESSOR:
You observe, I do not retaliate by addressing you as Dear Philip. After
reflecting, I conclude that this would be an undue concession to make,
while the above title removes you to a safer sphere. It limits and
qualifies your relationship and at the same time affords me the happy
advantage of confessing my heart to you. Really, I have always felt the
need of such an officer in my spiritual kingdom. I could never reconcile
myself to the incongruity of confessing in our experience meetings. It
seemed to me that sharing my confidence with so many people was heterodox
to nature itself. For this reason I have always thought that while
Protestantism is based upon a nobler theory of the truth, Roman
Catholicism is founded upon a much shrewder knowledge of human nature.
However, I do not come seeking absolution for any sins. Such shortcomings
as I have are so personal, so really a part of dear me, that I should
scarcely be complete without them. They are vixenish plagues of character
that distinguish me from more conventional saints. But now that I have
willed myself away from you, I need no longer conceal my heart. My love
has been shriven, and, like a little white ghost out of heaven, must hark
back to you occasionally for a blessing.
To begin with, then, when your letter came this morning, I took just a
peep inside to see if it was good, and then hurried away to our forest to
enjoy it, for I always feel more at home with you there. And although the
season is so far advanced that the whole earth is chilled and desolate, my
heart was like the springtide, swelling with gladness. Joy reached to my
vagabond heels, and I had much ado to maintain the resignation gait of a
minister's daughter through the village streets. And once out of sight I
kissed my hand quickly over my shoulder till my face burned. For had you
not promised to attend me? "I will wrap you about with fancies and
dreams," you said. I was like a young-lady comet drawing after me a
luminous trail of love. I began to comprehend the advantages of my
position, to rejoice in my sacrifice. I caught the finer aspiration of
love, like one who lays down his life and finds it again in nobler forms.
Brave, good father, this thing that you have revealed to me is like a
sweet eternity. It neither begins nor ends: only we do that. When our time
comes we are swept into the current of it, happy, predestined atoms, and
afterwards we are lost out of it like the leaves on the trees. But love is
like the wind in their branches; it never is gone. So it seems to me now
when all my heart's leaves are stirred to gladness by the dear gale of
love.
But do not despise me, O sage in the upper chamber, for my selfishness. I
keep far to the windward of you because I was made for love, not for
sacrifice. The altar of your soul life is very fine, very beautiful, but I
am too much alive to be offered up on such a table. Suppose I trusted you,
gave myself with my heart, and in after years you should fall upon the
idea of expurgating all sensations, all heresies, all affections from your
life as the Brahmins do, what then would become of poor Jessica? I should
sit upon your altar like a withered fairy, casting dust over my unhallowed
head and calling down elfish curses upon you. Ah me! when I come upon a
splendid man-statue that suddenly glows into living heart and flesh, I may
wonder and love, but I should never trust myself in the arms of that
phenomenon, lest, being clasped there, he should as suddenly turn back to
his native stone and freeze the life in me!
Have you noticed that I tell you nothing of the village doings here, the
little church sociables and a thousand commonplace details that go to make
up the sum of existence amid such surroundings? It is because I do not
really live among them. My mind is alien to these narrow margins of
society and religion. But it is always of the little forest that I tell
you, as if that were my real home, as indeed it is. And it is the dearer
to me now that we have walked through it together. So in each letter you
may expect a report of how things go there. This morning, as I looked
about at the sober ground covered thick with dying leaves, I thought of
what a gallant display of autumnal colors we had on that morning. Our
little friends of the summer time are flitting here and there through the
naked branches in silent confusion. There are no green boughs behind which
to conceal their orchestral moods. Besides, their inspiration is gone,
their singing hearts are benumbed by the cold. But for your letter thrust
somewhere I could not have escaped the ghost of sadness that seemed to
haunt the earth and sky. Suddenly, as I stood in the midst of it all, a
cardinal flashed like a red spark into a tall pine, fluffed out his
breast, and swept the forest with a defiant note of melody. It was a
challenge to the long winter time, a prophecy of spring and of high green
trees, and of a mate cloistered now far away in the wilderness: "You shall
not hear a simple song, but you shall remember that music is the voice of
love," whispered the letter against my heart. What a brave thing is life
when we have love and the hope of spring latent within us! I admit, as I
listened to the little red troubadour of the pine, that, had you been as
near as the dreams and fancies that wrapped me about, this fight in me for
freedom would have been at an end. Do not trust these feeble moods of
mine, however; not one of them would last half the length of time you
would need to make the journey from New York to Morningtown!
So! you have written such a review of Miss Addams's book as will astonish
the "average reader," and all the while you wondered: "How will Jessica
answer that?" Abridged, this is her opinion: That an editor should be
careful how he kicks his heels at the spirit of his age. The world has an
ancient and effective way of dealing with such heroes.
No, I am not familiar with the _Imitation_. But I gather from the passages
you quote that it is a spiritual exercise prepared for those who "possess
all the comforts of this life," and are weary enough of them to pass on to
the philosophy of renunciation. But you should remember that the
Hull-House classes have not had the necessary experience with comforts.
Renunciation is impossible for them, for they have nothing to give up.
My love to the little goblin boy.
XXII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR JESSICA:
Did ever "Father Confessor" have so sweet and so wilful a sinner to
shrive! Your only sin is that you love me, and do you think I shall grant
absolution for that? As I read your letter with its wayward confession, it
seemed to me indeed that I was in some temple of the gods instead of this
book-littered den, and the rumble of the street was transfigured into the
sound of triumphant music. And all the while the voice of the little
penitent, hidden from my eyes, but almost within reach of my breath,
murmured in my ears: "I love you, I love you, and that is my sin." Dear
girl, when you have given me your heart, do you suppose I shall be slow to
confiscate your will? It is not lawful that a man's, or a woman's, heart
and will should be at enmity with each other. I know that your will is
strong, but I know, too, that your heart is stronger. Why did you turn me
away without one word of hope or consolation when I visited you in
Morningtown? Out of the great store of happiness that God has given you,
could you not spare one little morsel? Ah, I would not offer you up a
sacrifice on the altar of any spiritual creed, but take you with me into
that upper chamber that looks toward the golden sunrise. I would share
your happiness and give you in return a portion in the hope that I too
have found. With you at my side I could walk through the world, (for I am
not such a recluse as you might suppose,) knowing that the desire of all
men's hearts had fallen to me, and that my life was consecrated henceforth
to noble uses. And yet to-day I am very sad.
Let me tell you a little story of the way your admired Simonians act when
their general promulgations of brotherhood are brought to an individual
test. Our proprietor and manager, a smooth-faced, meek-eyed Jew, who has
made himself right with this world, at least, is much concerned with
charities and civic meetings and reform clubs and progress societies and
the preaching of universal democracy, and all that,--a veritable Pharisee
among the humanitarians. He often asks me to give a good word to some
Simoniacal book. Well, I have a poor broken-down Irishman named O'Meara,
who reviews a certain class of publications for me. He is the kind of man
you would never expect to meet in this country: a relic of
eighteenth-century Grub Street,--a man who reads Latin and Greek, who can
quote pages of the Fathers, who has a high ideal of literature and
conscience in writing, and withal a victim to the demon whiskey that has
dragged him down to the very gutter. His life has been a mystery to me,
and some feeling of shame has kept him from ever telling me where and how
he lives. At intervals he comes shuffling into my office, with bleared
eyes and palsied hand, and for charity's sake I give him a book to
review--and not exactly for charity either, for he does his work well. Two
or three weeks ago our Simoniacal manager came into my office and asked me
who that tramp was whom he had seen several times go away with books. I
told him the whole story, thinking to arouse his sympathy. What was my
surprise when he broke out into a mild stream of abuse--the more startling
because he ordinarily says so little--against allowing such besotted
tramps to come into the offices! When a man drank himself into such a
state as that there was no doing anything with him, etc. O'Meara came back
in a day or two with his "copy," and I told him that the chief had ordered
me to cut him off. Poor wretch! he said never a word for himself, but
turned and shambled guiltily out of the room--I shall never forget the
sound of his trailing, despondent feet.
I heard no more from him until yesterday, when the office boy came in and
told me a beggar child insisted on seeing me. What was my astonishment
when it proved to be our goblin boy, who had been sent to ask me to come
to his father; and his father was O'Meara! It all seemed as unsubstantial
as a dream. I went with the child, of course. He guided me through the
dark entry where I had seen him so often, in behind a great printing
house, to a foul court hidden away from the street like some criminal
outlaw. I will not try to describe the noisomeness of that reeking hole. I
found O'Meara lying on a heap of sacks in a mouldering closet which was
entirely dark save for what little light came through the doorway.
Darkness, indeed, was his only comfort. He would not shake hands with me,
for he has, withal, the instincts of a gentleman, and it seemed as if the
shame of his whole degraded life lay with him before me in his misery. His
tragedy will have been played out in a day or two, I think; and I wish the
memory of it might also pass from my mind. What shall I do with the goblin
boy? The hatefulness of it all stands between me and my thoughts of you. I
cannot harden myself yet for a while to dream of pure beauty. I read your
letter over and over, but its sweet medicament cannot purge my breast. Not
even the acknowledgment of your love can drown these sighs I have heard.
XXIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. PHILIP TOWERS:
You lack the proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I have
excommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audacious
advantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in my
romantic vagrancy. For a man giving himself airs in the "upper chamber,"
you have very human ways, and I begin to suspect you only keep your creed
and philosophy up there.
But you are greatly mistaken if you think you can ever wheedle me into
such a sunrise attic. I can be domesticated, but not etherealised. And you
hold strange doctrines for an ascetic. You think that because I love it
will be easy to "confiscate" my will. Even _I_ know better than that. We
live to conquer our hearts. There is no freedom of mind and spirit till
that decisive battle has been fought and won. My heart is a gay vagabond,
ready to dance before the door of your tent, but my will is better
disciplined. It weighs and counts the costs and rejects this sentimental
bargain, because, O Stranger to my soul, I doubt if you can pay the
interest love demands upon so large an investment. There is not enough of
you; and your capital consists in something less vital,--in wind-cooled
philosophies, and the passions of an occult spirit ever ready to escape
into mysticism. Why will you not be content with a companionship on this
basis? You keep your wings and you wish mine also. Well, you shall not
have them! I have no disposition to simulate the example of those small
insects who come out in early spring with splendid wings, make one flight
far enough through the sunlight to lose them, and crawl all the remainder
of their days in the domestic dust of their little tenements.
Besides, does not the science of biology teach that romantic love, in the
very nature of things, is transient?--a little heathen angel that we
entertain unawares, who comes and goes at will? I cannot tell you what
satisfaction and what distress that theory has caused me of late. I would
have my own heart free, but I am willing to move my little heaven and
earth to prolong your bondage. Selfish?--I know, but consider upon what
loneliness and terror such selfishness is based. A man is always
sufficient unto himself, particularly if he can abstract and divert
himself into a line of thought as you are able to do, but a woman without
a lover is a pathetic thing. There is no real reason for her existence;
all her little miracles of expression and posing are for naught. She is a
sort of prima donna lost out of the play. There is no one to give her the
happy cue to the whole meaning of life. Oh, my Love! I _cannot_ live
without a lover. Do not bereave me! I should shrivel up, I am sure,--grow
old and sour and sad. I might even become a deaconess with Hull-House
propensities. I am a naïve beggar, you see; I ask all you have, and admit
that I am unwilling to give in return what I myself have.
Your account of O'Meara interests me. But what right have you to slip out
of your stern character as a merely spiritual man, and assume the guise of
a good Samaritan? Really it is not fair; your tender compassion is
illogical, and, however benign, I cannot accept it as evidence in your
favour. But your account of the poor man's distress touched my heart. And
you ask me what ought to be done with the little goblin boy. Dear Philip,
could _we_ not adopt him? Think how many years then, we should have to
correspond in and to dispute with each other about his upbringing! I would
make the jackets and you should furnish the ethics for him. You should
provide a home for him, and I would give a little of the warmth that any
woman's tenderness imparts to any child. I will begin at once with a
maternal dictation,--he must be sent into the country. For children are
like lambs, I think; they also need to grow up in a green field, and to
gambol there. He must have no cares, no obligations--just be encouraged to
let go all the good and evil there is in him. When he has expanded to his
natural size morally and physically, we can tell better what to do with
him. Are you laughing at me, or are you scandalised at such a proposition?
Then why did you ask my advice? When a child is without parents, is it not
better to provide him with a pair of them, even if one is a wizard who
knows how to metamorphose himself into many different personalities, such
as sage, mystic, lover, good Samaritan, and I know not how many more?
XXIV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
[THIS LETTER WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE PRECEDING LETTER OF JESSICA'S, BUT WAS
NOT RECEIVED UNTIL LATER.]
DEAR JESSICA:
I often wonder whether I have made it quite clear to you why it is
possible to hold in high esteem personally the workers of Hull House and
these other philanthropists, while detesting their views as formulated
into a dogma. Just after I had sent off my last letter to you I met with
something in a morning paper which will throw light on my position. In an
address before Princeton Theological Seminary Dr. Lyman Abbott is reported
to have used these words:
"To follow Christ is, first of all, to give yourself to the service
of God by serving your fellow-men. This is more important than the
question of the Trinity, of the atonement, or of creeds."
Now the question of the Trinity or of the atonement may not seem essential
to me. My faith has passed out of them--beyond them, I trust; and at least
I do not call myself a Christian. But remember that Dr. Abbott is a
teacher of Christianity and was on this occasion addressing students of
theology. Certainly to him and to his audience these are, they must be,
the first of all matters in the realm of ideas, whether accepted or
rejected, and to speak slightingly of them is to show contempt for
everything that transcends the material world. I know that Dr. Abbott,
like some others, makes this service of our fellow-men to be a form of the
service of God; but the slightest knowledge of the spirit of the day,
indeed any intelligent reading of the words I have quoted, makes plain how
entirely this "service of God" is a tag, a meaningless concession to an
older form of speech. What seriously concerns our humanitarians is the
service of mankind. Now am I not justified in saying that true religion
would at least change the order of ideas and declare that to serve mankind
is, first of all, to give one's self to the service of God? This is not a
quibbling of words, but a radical distinction. It is because I find in all
so-called humanitarians this tendency to place humanity before God,
material needs before ideals, that I call them, when all is said, the most
insidious foes of true religion. Their very virtues make them more
dangerous than outspoken materialists and scoffers. It is largely due to
them and their creed that we have no art and no literature; for art and
literature depend, at the last analysis, on a reaching out after ideas, on
an attempt to transmute material things into spiritual values,--on faith,
in a word. The humanitarians cry out against the materialism and the
commercial spirit of the age. They do not perceive that the only remedy
against this degeneracy is the renewal of faith in something greater and
higher than our material needs. Let them preach for a while the blessings
of poverty and other-worldliness. The attempt to instil benevolence or
so-called human justice into society as the chief message of religion is
merely to play into the hands of the enemy. Do you see why I call them the
real followers of Simon Magus, who sought to buy the gift of God with a
price? "Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter; for thy heart is
not right in the sight of God."
Consider how impossible it would have been in any age of genuine or real
creativeness for a leading preacher of Christianity to have pronounced Dr.
Abbott's words, and you will see how far humanitarianism has fallen from
faith in the spirit. I know that passages maybe quoted from the Bible
which might seem to make Christ himself responsible for this new Simony;
but Satan, too, may quote Scripture. Surely the whole tenor of Christ's
teaching is the strongest rebuke to this lowering of the spirit's demands.
He spent his life to bring men into communion with God, not to modify
their worldly surroundings. Indeed, the world was to him a place of misery
and iniquity, doomed to speedy destruction. He sought to save a remnant
from the wrath of judgment as a brand is plucked from the fire, and he
separated his disciples utterly from acquiescence in the comforts of this
earth; they were to be in the world but not of it: "Render unto Cæsar the
things which are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." He
taught poverty and not material progress. Those he praised were the poor
and the meek and the unresisting and the persecuted--those who were cut
off from the hopes of the world.
And now, dear girl, do you ask me to apply my preaching to my own case? Of
a truth I have faith. I think it my true service to men that I should
learn to love you greatly; and out of that love shall flow charity and
justice and righteousness toward the world. Let it be my meed of service
that men shall see the beauty of my homage.
XXV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
DEAR JESSICA:
The end has come even sooner than I looked for it. This afternoon, little
Jack, our goblin boy, came to my office and I followed him back to the
dismal court where his father lay expecting me. I had arranged that the
poor wretch should be carried into a room where at least there was a bed
and where a ray of clean sunshine might greet his soul when departing on
the long journey; and there I found him lying perfectly quiet save for the
twitching of his hands outstretched on the counterpane. I thought a
glimmer of content lightened his dull eyes as I sat down beside him. I
talked with him a little, but he seemed scarcely to heed my words. Then
turning his head towards me he plucked from under his pillow an old
thumb-worn copy of _Virgil_ (so bedraggled and spotted that no second-hand
book-seller would have looked at it) and thrust it out to me, intimating
by a gesture that he would have me read to him. I asked him where I should
begin, and he held up two fingers as if to indicate the second book of the
_Æneid_; and there I began with the fall of Troy-town.
He listened with apparent apathy, though I know not what echoes the
sonorous lines awakened in his mind, until I came to the words:
Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus.
I saw his hands clench together feebly here, and then there was no more
motion. Presently I looked into his face, and I knew that no sound of my
voice, nor any sound of the world, could ever reach him again; for the
story of his unspeakable sorrow, like the ruin of Troy, had been told to
the end. He had spoken not a single word; he had carried the silence of
his soul into the infinite silences of death. The secret of his life had
passed with him. I shall probably never know what early dreams and
ambitions had faded into this squalid despair. And his pitiful wan-faced
boy--who was the child's mother? I am glad I do not know; I am only glad I
can tell him of your love. I shall see that the father is buried decently
with a wooden slab to distinguish his grave from the innumerable dead who
rest in the earth. Might we not print above his body the last words of the
poem he seems to have loved so much: _Fugit indignata sub umbras_! For I
think it was the indignity of shame in the end that killed him. Is he not
now all that Cæsar and Virgil are? Shall he not sleep as peacefully in his
pauper's bed as the great General Grant in that mausoleum raised by the
river's side?--Commonplace thoughts that came to me as I sat for a while
musing in the presence of death; but is not death the inevitable
commonplace that shall put to rout all our originality in the end?
And all the while our Jack was sitting perfectly motionless by the window,
looking out into the court--into the blue sky, I think. I picked up one of
his thin hands and said to him: "Little Jack, your father has gone away
from us and is at rest. There is a beautiful lady in the South who loves
you as she loves me; will not her love make you happy?" He did not appear
to understand me, but shrank into himself as if afraid. Indeed, sweet
benefactress, I shall send him into the country somewhere as you bid me,
and I shall see that your love brings him greater happiness than it has
brought me, for with him you shall not withdraw with one hand what you
have held out in the other.
I went away, leaving an old woman to care for the dead man and his child.
It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noises of the
street sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence. Is it not a
strange thing that death should have this power of benediction? Of a
sudden a breath comes out of the heavens, our little cares are touched by
an eternal presence, a rift is blown in the thick mists that hem us about,
and behold, we look out into infinite visionless space. And now I am back
in my office. I open O'Meara's worn and much-stained _Virgil_, and inside
the cover I find these words scribbled in pencil: "_I have cried unto God
and He hath not heard my cry; but thou, O beloved poet, art ever near with
consolation_!" I do not know whether the sentence is original with O'Meara
or a quotation; it is certainly new to me. One other book I brought with
me, and the two were the whole worldly possession of the dead man. This is
a small but pretty thick blank-book, written over almost to the last page.
I have not examined the contents carefully, but I can see that they are
made up of miscellaneous passages copied from books and of reflections on
a great variety of topics, with few or no records of events. One of the
last entries is from Clarence Mangan's heart-breaking poem, _The Nameless
One_:
And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow
That no ray lights.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
Here, and in hell.
And is it not a touch of Fate's irony that I should be sending this
threnody of death to one who might expect to receive from me only messages
and pleadings of love? Death and love are the very antipodes of our
existence, one would say. And yet I do not know; I feel nothing
incongruous in linking the twain together. Love, too, breaks open the
barriers of our poor personality that the breath of the infinite may blow
in upon us. I cannot say how it is with others, but so it is with me: love
lays a hand upon me, and instantly the discords of the world are hushed in
my ears, the little desires and fears that trouble me are shamed into
silence, and I am rapt away into the infinitely great heart that throbs at
the centre of all. It is strange, but life itself seems to pass away in
the presence of this power that is the creator of life. I speak darkly,
but my words have a meaning. And, dear sweetheart, be not afraid that you
shall be left without a lover; that I shall bereave you! Do you think for
an instant that I can cease to love? I cannot understand this war between
your heart and your will; am I very stupid? Surely when I come to you, I
shall bring this contention to an end, and you--it hath not entered into
the heart of man to conceive what you shall give me. Out of the
conclusions of death into the prophecies of love! I am filled with
wondering.
You shall hear more hereafter of poor Jack, our adopted child.
XXVI
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR PHILIP:
See how you shame me! For this long while I have wished to begin my
letters thus, but I waited, hoping you would entreat me to do so. I
expected you to provide an excuse. I thought my own pleasure would wear
the genial air of a concession to your wishes. Indeed, the way you wait
for me to be obliged to do such things of my own accord, fills me with
superstitious anxieties. It is as if you had some unfair foreknowledge of
the natural order of events. You would take things for granted, and thus
produce an hypnotic effect by your convictions so strong as to compel my
conformity. But I console myself with the reflection that all this is
mental. You terrify only my intelligence with your strange sorcery. And
for this reason I shall always escape your bondage, for I am too wise to
concede my familiar territory to such an overbearing foreign power.
However, I must not forget the prime object I have in writing this letter.
It is to tell you that the little box of childish things, which you must
have received already and wondered at, are _not_ for the literary editor
of _The Gazette_, but for Jack, sent with the hope that they may in some
measure comfort his sad heart. I went so far as to purchase material for
the promised set of jackets, when suddenly I remembered that I was
ignorant of both his age and size. You have never told me that, though you
have given me such a real picture of him that I could almost trust my
imagination to cut those garments to fit him!
Your account of O'Meara's death affected me deeply. With what sublime
abandon does such a man let go his soul into the mystery of that silence
which we call eternity!
Is it not strange how the same impressions come to many, but by different
ways! "It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noises
of the street sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence," you
said, and the sentence recalled a somewhat similar experience of my own on
Cumberland Island, where father and I went last summer for a short
vacation. One day, leaving the group of happy bathers to their surf, I
climbed up inland among the sand-hills, that lie along the shore like the
white pillows of fabulous sea-gods. Presently I came upon one of those
great sand-pits that stretch along the Island, deep and wide like mighty
graves. Far below me a whole forest stood in ghostly silence, with every
whitening limb lifted in supplication, as if all had died in a terrified
struggle with the engulfing sands. Unawares, I had happened upon one of
Nature's griefs--and I do not know how to tell you, but the sight of it
aged me. Of a sudden this death of the trees seemed a far-off part of my
own experience. I was swept out of this contesting, energetic world into a
still region where great events come to pass in silence, and inevitably.
And so real was the illusion that, as I turned to hurry back, it seemed to
me that centuries had passed since I saw the same little tuft of flowers
like a group of purple fairies nodding to me from the top of a tall cliff.
And so I stood there confused by the significance of this silence, so
incredible that even the winds could not shake it. I felt so near and kin
to death that I became "alien" to all the living world about me. For the
first time in my life, I lost the _sense_ of God, which is always a kind
of mental protection against the terrors of infinity. There was nothing to
pray to, only the sea on one side and this grave on the other, with a
little trembling life between.
Thus you will understand that not only have I had a similar experience to
your own upon the occasion of O'Meara's death, but that for once I came
into your region of shades and terrors. I was like one on the point of
dissolution, and almost my soul escaped into your dim habitation. From
your letters I had already learned how near together love and death stood
in your consciousness. Each is an exit through which your spirit is ever
ready to pass. And for the moment, crowded in with skeleton shadows there,
you seemed sensibly near me. I was divided between fear and love. But the
blood of life in me always triumphs,--and then it was that I made my first
flight in consciousness from you. I kissed my hand to the twilight and
ran! I am sure you were there, Philip, a cold-lipped spirit-lover seeking
my mortal life. And, oh my Heart! is it wrong that I would love and be
loved in the flesh? I do not object to spirituality, only it must have a
visible presence and a warm cheek.
P. S.--But, dear Philip, how am I to reconcile this tender charity to Jack
with your anti-humanitarian views? Is a man's heart so divided from his
philosophy? Or do you intend to make a mystic of that poor child, so that
he may escape the woes of his condition? I am curious to see what you will
do with him. Also, I shall certainly defend him against your Nirvana
doctrines if I suspect you of juggling with his soul.
XXVII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
DEAR, TEASING, RARE JESSICA:
I have so many things to say to you. First of all, why do you blame me for
my "foreknowledge"? You scold me for my hostility to the sentimentalism of
the day, you scold me then for any act of common human sympathy, and now
you take me to task because I foresee how you will address me in a letter.
Dear me, what a horrid little scold it is! I wonder you didn't quote _The
Raven_,--
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or
devil!"
But really no great powers of prophecy were required. Have you forgotten
that in the very letter before this one you called me "Dear Philip"? And
wasn't that a good index of your tempestuous, contradictory sweet self,
that you should have begun your letter "My dear Mr. Philip Towers" and
then thrown in your "Dear Philip" by the way, as if it would not be
observed! Why, my naughty Jessica, when I came to that phrase, I just took
my longest, biggest blue pencil and put a ring about it so that I might
find it at a moment's notice and feast my eyes a thousand thousand times
on its sweet familiarity. Do not suppose that anything ever escapes me in
your letters. I con every little lapse in your spelling until I know it by
heart. And you do make so many slips, you know, in your reviews as well as
in your letters! I never correct them,--that would be a desecration, I
think,--but send up your copy just as it comes to me. Indeed, I find
myself imitating unawares some of your most unaccountable originalities.
Only the other day I was in the reading-room and our head proofreader, a
sour, wizened old man, cried out to me: "I say, Mr. Towers, what is the
matter with your spelling? You write _propotion_[2] for proportion and
_propersition_ for proposition, and get your _r_'s all mixed up
generally!" There was a titter from all the girls in the room. Then said
I: "Thou fool! knowest thou not that Jessica lives in the South, and
treats her _r_'s with royal contempt as she was taught to treat the black
man? And shall I not imitate her in this as in all her high-born
originalities?" Of course I didn't say that aloud, but just thought it to
myself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when
he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with
our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your
right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties with
poor human souls?
And you make my prophetic powers a bulwark for your licentious rebellion
and declare that you will always escape my bondage. Shall you, indeed? You
once intimated that I wore ass's ears. I begin to believe it. What a
blind, solemn animal I was when I came to Morningtown to beg for your
love! I was so afraid of you. And as we sat in the circle of your
watching, motionless trees, something of their stiff ways entered into my
heart. I told you of my love so solemnly, and you answered so solemnly.
Fool! Fool! I should have spoken not a single word, but just taken you in
my arms and kissed you once and twice. Don't frown now, it is too late.
There would have been one wild, tempestuous outbreak of indignation, and
then my dryad maiden would have known my "foreknowledge" indeed. Is it too
late to rehearse that curtain-raiser? Dear girl, I would be merry, but I
am not so sure that all is well with my heart. I need you so much now, for
I have entered on a new path and the way is obscure before me. I need you.
Your hand in mine would give me the courage I require.
Do you remember how you warned me of dangers when I reviewed Miss Addams's
book? You, too, were a prophet. Let me tell you how it all came about. The
other day I wrote up Mme. Adam's _Romance of My Childhood and Youth_
(Addams and Adam--the name has a fatality for me), and took occasion to
make it the text of a tremendous preachment against our latter-day
Simony,--as well it might be, for Mme. Adam grew up in the thirties and
forties when France was a huge seething caldron in which all these modern
notions were brewing together. And unfortunately we are just beginning now
where France left off a score of years ago. You have already seen the
review, no doubt, and it is superfluous to repeat its argument. But for my
own justification to you I want to quote a few sentences from the book.
You disdained to make any reply to my letter on Lyman Abbott, and I fear
you have grown weary of the whole subject; but certainly you will be
interested in what I am copying out for you now. In one of her chapters,
then, Mme. Adam writes:
Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First
comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature,
revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear
in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of
phenomena for useful social purposes.... There is no error in nature,
no perversity in man; evil comes only from society.... He [Mme.
Adam's father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man
to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite
which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the
immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily
explain.... They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father.
Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent a date to have
dried up their souls; _they no longer believed in a divine Christ;
they still believed in a human one_. They worshipped that mysterious
Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not
then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under
machinery.
Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth the
close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth
of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a
sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern
cult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of that
fresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evoke
once more the golden destiny of man?
Well, this morning the particular Simon Magus who rules _The Gazette_
walked into my office and, after some preliminary sparring, came out with
a complaint which I knew had been preparing in his brain for some time. It
seems that he had already been deluged with letters about my heretical
attack on Miss Addams, and now a new storm had begun over my further
delinquencies. He kindly told me that my views were a hundred years behind
the age and that they were doing injury to the paper. Against the latter
charge I had no defence, and immediately capitulated. To cut a
disagreeable tale short, I anticipated his purpose and offered to make way
for some man who would better harmonise with the benevolent policy of the
paper. The first of the month comes in four days, and then I shall be
thrown once again on my own resources. The shock, though expected, is a
little disconcerting; for at times a man grows weary and discouraged in
fighting against the perpetual buffeting of the current. But most of all I
am wondering how my independence will affect the hopes that were beginning
to colour my dreams. Dear Jessica, you will not forsake me now; you will
put away your perversity and love me simply and unreservedly? There are
difficulties before me, I know; but I am not afraid if only my heart is at
peace. I am free, and if there is any power in my brain, any skill in my
right hand, I will make such a pother that the world shall hear me. I will
not die till I am heard. And so I ask you to help-me. With your love I
shall be made bold, and no opposition and no repeated reverses shall
trouble me. And in the end your happiness is in my making.
Indeed, your box of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment in
Newspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack is
ten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot write
more of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to----;
and when I open that letter will it bring me joy or grief? Your joy may
cast a ruddy light on my path, but nothing that you can say will shake me
in my firm resolve. No sorrow shall hinder me, but, oh, happy Heart! I,
too, long for happiness.
XXVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
KIND SIR:
Which do you think requires the more grace in a woman, to hold out against
a dear enemy or to yield? My own experience teaches me that there is more
facility in resistance. Acting thus I have always felt in accord with
natural instincts, and there is a barbaric sense of security in following
them.... Yet I have only one thing to tell you in reply to your "so many."
Can you guess what it is? Already I think the birds know it. I have so far
departed from my natural order of perversity and self-protection that they
feel it, and twitter together when I pass by. I think they look down upon
me now with high-feathered contempt. Could anything be more mortifying?
Do not laugh, Philip! You have behaved little better than a robber in this
matter. I have lost to you, but the game was not fair; dear mendicant, you
played with a card up your sleeve! All my life I have planned to outwit
predestination. I have ignored Sabbath-day doctrines and faith-binding
dogmas to this end. I could even have held out indefinitely against your
"foreknowledge," but when you come, heralded by an unexpected misfortune,
asking "peace" of me that you may meet your own difficulties with a
steadier courage, I find you invincible. It is as if you had suddenly
slipped through the door of my heart and left will, betrayed, on guard
outside. I have no defence in my nature against your plea. The diplomacy
of your need takes me unawares, and, no matter how I fear the future, now
I am bound to add myself to you in love and hope. The prospect is terrible
and sweet. Already it has made me a stranger in my father's house, a
foreigner among the trees, and a wakeful, frightened mystery to myself. I
am full of tears and secresy. I am no longer Jessica, the wind-souled
dryad of the forest, but merely a woman in definition, facing a new world
of pain and joy. Oh, my beloved! you have taken all that I have, all that
I am! Henceforth I shall be only a part of you,--a little hyperbole of
domesticity always following after, or advancing to meet you.... Dear gods
of the world, defend me from such a fate! ... After all, I cannot admit
the "one thing." I cannot submit to this annihilation, this absorption of
character and personality. If you take me, you do so at your own risk, I
will not promise "peace," but confusion rather. But if you get me, you
must take me. Yet, if you come to Morningtown after me, I will deny my
love, not out of perversity, but out of fear. The sight of you is a signal
for me to take refuge upon my tallest bough. And I can no more come down
to you than a young lady robin could fly into your pocket. It is all very
well for you to exhort me to love you "simply and unreservedly,"--I do.
Nothing could be simpler, more elemental, than my love is; and do I
reserve a single thought of it from you? But I am not conventional enough
in heart or training to surrender. My genius for you does not extend so
far. To lose myself does not seem to me wise or logical, however
scriptural or legal the practice is. The truth is, I cannot agree to be
taken, any more than the little petticoated planet above your head can
kick off her diadem of light. I do not know what you will do about it,
because it is not my business to know these things. All I am sure of is
that I love you, and that I belong to you if only you can get my
extradition papers from Nature herself.
Meanwhile I have ventured to prepare my father's mind for a new idea. As
we sat before the library fire this evening, each employed according to
his calling, he with Fletcher's _Appeal_ and I with my sewing, I asked the
usual introductory question to our conversations. And it is always the
signal for him to raise his shield of orthodoxy; for it has long been my
habit to creep around the corner of my private opinion and tease him with
what he is pleased to term "the most blasphemous speculations." Therefore
when I said, "Father, I wish to ask you a question," he looked up with the
guarded eye of a man who expects an assault from an unscrupulous
antagonist.
"Well, my daughter, ask."
"Which would you advise me to marry, father, a humanitarian whose highest
law is the material welfare of his kind, or an ascetic whose spirituality
is something more and something less than scriptural?"
"Neither, Jessica; if you must marry, choose a man who believes in the
divinity of Christ and lives somewhere within the limits of the Ten
Commandments!"--Heavens! think of bondage with a man who is bounded upon
the north, east, south, and west of his soul by laws enacted to discipline
the Israelites in the Wilderness! In that case, I should insist upon a
bridal trip to Canaan, with the hope of reaching the Promised Land as a
widow.
And this reminds me to ask you what manner of man you are yourself. Do you
reflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you were
on guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has faded
to a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about the
picture[3], is like to vanish clean away into nothing. Only your
encompassing eyes peer at me with solemn expostulation out of the
shimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip?
And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental pose
as a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. A long
term of years with a serene, gentle-spirited man would be unbearable to
me. Rather than prolong the futility of existence with one I could not
provoke, even enrage, I should commit suicide. My own disposition is so
equally divided between perversity and repentance that I could not endure
the placidity, the ennui, of a level turnpike existence.
And now isn't it an evidence of your high-minded heartlessness, that in
the same letter where you sue for love you also introduce a philosophical
discussion and show even more heat in maintaining it than you do in your
amorous petition? Why I cannot take warning and fly to the ends of my
earth away from you now while there is yet time, is a mystery to me!
And so you expect to make such a pother in your opposition to the spirit
of the times that all the world will hear you. Dear Master, I doubt if you
will! Your bells ring too high up. The angels in heaven may hear you, but
men are not listening in that direction. I did not reply to your
contention against Lyman Abbott, because it is a far cry from you to me on
this subject. In consciousness we are at opposite ends of a great problem,
and I think the normal man walks somewhere between. Besides, I am not sure
that I understand your position; I am not familiar with the starry
highways of your mind. Still, in a general way it has always seemed to me
that material things are, after all, "counters which represent spiritual
realities." And I take comfort in the fact that it must require us all to
work out the Great Plan,--humanitarian, sage, pilgrim, ascetic, even the
butcher and candlestick maker. And while we do not know it, really we are
working together for one end hidden now in the divine economy of far-off
destiny and justice.... To me the wonder of wonders is that I may some day
light a little taper in your upper chamber myself, and kneel together with
you before the same window to worship. Only, dear Heart, please get your
deity named before I come!
P.S.--As to my spelling, that is a coquettish licence I take with the
genealogy of words. And you may tell your proofreader that the letter _r_
has never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my
omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far
more vigour without _g_'s or _r_'s than you of the North can with them.
For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is
Jack?
XXIX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
KIND MADAM:
Yes, a little more than kind, dear Jessica, for you have put into my grasp
the flower of perfect delight, and "my hand retains a little breath of
sweet." You have opened a window into my heart and poured through it the
warmth and golden glory of your own sunlight. I am filled with a
joyousness of a new spring--and yet there is something in your letter that
makes me a little sad. You express so frankly that reserve of resentment,
even of bitterness, which always, I think, abides with a woman in all the
sweetness of her love, but which with most women never comes to entire
consciousness. Listen, dear Heart, while I talk to you of yourself and
myself, until we comprehend each other better. It is so much easier for me
to understand you than for you to understand me, because a woman's nature
is single, whereas a man's is double, and in this duality lies all the
reason of that enmity of the sexes which draws us together yet still holds
us asunder.
You complain of my letter because I argue a philosophical proposition in
it while pleading for love. Do you not know that this is man's way? And I
would not try to deceive you: this philosophical proposition, which seems
to you almost a matter of indifference, is more to me than everything else
in the world. For it I could surrender all my heart's hope; for it I could
sacrifice my own person; even, if the choice were necessary, which cannot
be, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man's nature. The
ambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the world
some vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in him
side by side with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused.
Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led this
dual existence? You reviewed for me Bismarck's Love Letters and were
yourself struck by this sharp contrast between the iron determination of
the man in public affairs and the softness and sweetness of his domestic
life. That is but one case in point of the eternal dualism in masculine
nature which a woman can never comprehend, and which always, if it
confronts her nakedly, she resents. For a woman is not so. There exists no
such gap in her between her heart and brain, between her outer and inner
life. And the consequence shows itself in many ways. She is less efficient
in the world and is never a creator or impresser of new ideas; but, on the
other hand, her character possesses a certain unity that is the wonder of
all men who observe. She calls the man selfish and is bitter against him
at times, but her accusation is wrong. It is not selfishness which leads a
man if needs be to cut off his own personal desires while sacrificing
another; it is the power in him which impels the world into new courses. A
man's virtues are aggressive and turned toward outer conquest and may have
little relation to his own heart. But a woman's virtues are bound up with
every impulse of her personal being; they work out in her a loveliness and
unity of character which make the man appear beside her coarse and
unmoral. Men of vicious private life have more than once been benefactors
of the human race; I think that never happened in the case of a woman.
And because of this harmony, this unconsciousness in woman's virtue, a
man's love of woman takes on a form of idealisation which a woman never
understands and indeed often resents. What in him is something removed
from himself, something which he analyses and governs and manipulates, is
in the woman beloved an integral part of her character. Virtue seems in
her to become personified and he calls her by strange names. For this
reason men who make language tend always to give to abstract qualities the
feminine gender, as you must have observed in Latin and might observe in a
score of other tongues. For this reason, too, a man's love of woman
assumes such form of worship as Dante paid to Beatrice or Petrarch to
Laura. It would be grotesque for a woman to love in this way, for virtue
is not a man's character, but a faculty of his character. And so is it
strange that I should approach you asking for love that my soul may have
peace? It cannot enter into my comprehension that such a cry should come
from you to me. All that I strive to accomplish in the world, all that I
gird myself to battle for, the ideals that I would lay down my life that
men may behold and cherish,--is it not now all gathered up in the beauty
and serenity of your own person? What I labour to express in words is
already yours in inner possession. If I ask you for peace, it is not
selfishness, dear girl; it is prayer. If you should come to me begging for
peace, I should be filled with amazement; for I myself have it not. What I
can give is love's unwearied tenderness and love's unceasing homage to the
beauty of your body and your soul. More than that, I shall give you in the
end the crown of the world's honour. Without you I may accomplish the task
laid upon me, but only with heaviness of soul and abnegation of all that
my heart craves. I was reading in an old drama last night until I came to
these words, and then I set the book aside:
Once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies.
In that sweet hyperbole I seemed to read a transcript of your beauty. If I
am selfish, beloved, all love is selfishness.
Dear girl, it seems that always I must woo you in metaphysics and express
my ardour in theorems. But have I not made myself understood? "Man's love
is of man's life a thing apart," as a thousand women have quoted: and it
is true. But do you not see that even for this reason his love swells into
a passionate idolatry of the woman who knows no such cleavage in her soul.
Try us with sacrifices. I could throw away every earthly good to bestow on
you a year of happiness--only not my philosophic proposition, as you
sarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you--pray
heaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think,
meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of Æneas and Dido,
only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within Æneas he expressed
dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little
understanding of the poem or of human nature to censure Æneas as a cold
egotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart, _multa
gemens_? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terror
and death. The tragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so the Fates have
ordered.
But why do I write such grim reflections? There is no tragedy, no
separation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness:
The treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman's love.
All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of
this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber's part, sweet Jessica, and
he who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried away
so large a draft on the world's happiness as this that I have stolen. I
cannot be repentant while this golden glow is upon me; later I shall begin
to question my own worthiness.
I cannot now tell you one half that is in my mind to write, or answer one
half the questions in your letter. Jack is living with me just at present,
but of him I will speak next time. I have planned to change my abode, but
of that too next time. And I would not attempt to give a name to the deity
I serve in a postscript, as it were. Dear Heart, only let your love add a
little to your happiness as it has added so much to mine; and trust me.--I
am sending a letter to your father, the contents of which you might
imagine even if he should not show it to you.
XXX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER
MY BELOVED:
Last night, I dreamed myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little
wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,--but
you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness,
and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but I wore green leaves
in my hair and a red Southern rose on my breast to remind you of a brown
forest maid and summer-time far away--and you would not see me! I faced
you in gay mockery and swept a bow, but the blue silence in your eyes
terrified me. I held out my hands beseechingly, touched my cheek to yours,
and you did not feel the pressure. Then I slipped down upon the snow and
wept, and you did not hear me.
We were both "in the spirit," I think. Only, dear Love, when I am in the
spirit, all my thoughts are of you; but though I looked far and near, I
could not find in all your regions one little thought of poor Jessica. All
was misty and dim within your portals. _Your_ thoughts were vague ancient
shapes that wandered past me like Brahmin ghosts. And not one gallant
memory of Jessica legended upon those inner walls of yours!
Dear, I cannot escape now, my heart _will_ not come back to me; and since
it is too late I will not complain. But for a little while I must tell you
these things and pray for your kind comfort, till I shall have become
accustomed to your attic moods and exaltations.
Do you recall the woman I told you of last summer, whose sorrow-smitten
face in the church terrified me so? Grief became credible to me as I gazed
at her. And could it have been, do you think, a message foretold to me of
this magic future, full of intangible fears, wherein I am to live with
you?
XXXI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Love is a mystic worker of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that
very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly
standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that
I reached out my hand to touch you--but grasped only the impalpable air.
All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, seeking
in the ways of thought some word of comfort for the human heart, until at
last my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real is
this search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul were
a thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim and
perilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me out
into that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead.
And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth was
vaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomable
darkness as a clear night might look wherein no moon or stars appeared,
and so lonely "that God himself scarce seemed to be there."
Then, as often when this mood comes upon me, I went out to walk under the
hard flaring lights and amid the streaming crowds of Broadway, in order to
bring back the sense of mortal illusion and unite myself once more to
human existence. The people were pouring from the theatres, and I sought
the densest throng. But still I could not awaken in myself the illusion of
life. And then suddenly, without warning, there in the noisy brawl of the
street, I beheld you standing before me, looking into my face and smiling.
You wore a burning Southern rose upon your breast and were more wondrously
and delicately fair than the dream of poets. And there was a smile upon
your lips as if to say: "Dear Philip, thou hast put away the pleasures and
loveliness of this world as they had been a snaring web of illusion; yet I
do but look upon thee, and forthwith thou art pierced with love and know
that in this scorned desire of beauty dwells the great reality." I reached
out my hand to touch the rose against your heart, but the vision was gone,
and all about me was only the tumultuous mockery of the street.
Sweetheart, you have smitten me with remorse. Shall I take from you only
happiness, and give in return only this spectral dread? Ah, you shall
learn that I am very real, very earthly, capable of love and tenderness
and daily duties and quiet human sympathies! I told you of the dualism
into which my life, into which, indeed, every man's life, is cast; why
will you persist in clinging to that part which is cold and inhuman
instead of seizing upon that which is warm and very near by? I would not
take you with me into those bleak ways where always there is fear lest our
personality be swallowed up in the dark impersonal abyss. I would love you
as a man loves a woman and cleaves to her. Nay, more, I perceive dimly in
that love a strange reconcilement wherein the dual forces of my nature
shall be made one, wherein truth and beauty shall blend together in a
kiss, and there shall be no more seeking in obscurity, but only peace.
When the vision faded from me on Broadway, I turned back to my home, and
there, before the dawn came, tried to write out in words one thought of
the many that thronged upon me. I have almost forgotten the art of making
rhymes if ever I knew it.
A RECONCILIATION
All beauteous things the world's allurement knows:
Starred Venus, when she droops on Tyrian couch
While Evening draws her dusky curtains close,
Or pearled from morning bath she seems to crouch;
In bleak November one strayed violet;
The rathe spring-beauty scattered wide like snow;
The opal in a cirque of diamonds set;
Rare silken gowns that rustle as they flow;
The dumb thrush brooding in her lilac hedge;
The wild hawk towering in his proudest flight;
A silver fountain splashed o'er mossy ledge;
The sunrise flaming on an Alpine height;--
All these I've seen, yet never learned, till now
In thy sweet smiling, to accord my vow
Austere of truth with beauty's charmed delight.
XXXII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
WRITTEN IN ANSWER TO LETTER XXIX
MY DEAR PHILIP:
You are a magician rather than a lover. And no lover, I think, was ever so
subtle at reasoning. At least you do not act the part as I supposed it was
played. A lover, I thought, was one who stood at the door of a woman's
heart and serenaded till she crept out upon her little balcony of sighs
and kissed her hand to him, or shed a tokening bloom upon his upturned
countenance. So far as I could imagine, he was prehistoric in the
simplicity of his methods. Two things I never suspected: that love is the
kind of romantic exegesis you represent it to be, or that every lover,
psychically, is a sort of twin phenomenon--that he is _two_ men instead of
one! And after he is married, I suppose he will be a domestic _trinity_,
but with his godhead concerned with the affairs of the world at large. I
am awed by the revelation; still, it excuses much in my conduct that I had
before felt was reprehensible; for I have scarcely faced my own reflection
in the glass since my ignominious capitulation. Something within charged
treachery against poor Jessica. But if there are _two_ of you, and only
_one_ of me, that fact gives a new and honourable complexion to my part in
the transaction.
However, the way you have multiplied yourself and doubled forces upon me
may be good masculine tactics, but I am sure it is an unparliamentary
advantage you have taken. For you have not only posed as a lover, but with
the cunning words of a logician you prove what seemed wrong to be really a
sublime right; and what _I_ charged as selfishness, _you_ call "a prayer."
I am confused by your argument; it seems incontestable. But do you know,
my Philip, that a woman's convictions are never reached by a mere
argument? For they are hidden in her heart, not in her little bias-fold
mind. And so, in spite of your sweet reasoning with me, and the assumption
you make of omniscience concerning me, my convictions remain. Only, now, I
do not know whether I cherish them against you or against the God who made
me simple and you double.
But granting all you say to be true, that every man has a personal life
and at the same time a universal life energy as well, that there is in him
a little domestic fortress of love, and a battle power of life
apart,--admitting all this, how do you reconcile justice with the fact
that you frankly offer only half of your duality for all of Jessica? Have
you never suspected that she also has fair kingdoms of thought apart from
your science of her? My Prophet, it is you who have discovered them to me!
Love has added a sweet Canaan to my little hemisphere. I have heard
invisible birds singing, I have trysted with spirits of the air since I
knew you. And I have felt the pangs of a consciousness in me so new and so
tender, that I am no longer merely the maid you know, but, dear Master, I
am some one else, near and kin to you as life and spirit are kin! What is
this strange white space in my soul that love has made, so real, yet so
holy that I dare not myself lift the veil of consciousness before it? And
all I know is that I shall meet you there finally heart to heart!--Philip,
kiss me! For I am a frightened white-winged stranger in my own new heavens
and new earth. I am no longer as you imagine, simply one, but I have a
foreign power of life and death in me, and the fact terrifies me.
You declare that there is a difference and a distance between a man's love
and a man's mind which account for his dual nature. There is also an
intelligence of the heart, more astute, more vital, which divides woman's
nature also between the abandon of love and the resentment of
understanding. We know, and we do not know, and we _feel_. What we know is
of little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of each
succeeding generation. But what we do _not_ know constitutes that element
of mystery in us that makes us also dual. For we feel and suspect further
than we can understand. Thus, your faculty for projecting yourself in
spirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness
that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half
of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat,
your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the
geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb
your "philosophic proposition." The point is, I love that in you more than
I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something
apart from our relationship offends me, excites forebodings. Tell me, are
"philosophic propositions" alien to love? And after all do you think you
are the only one who may claim them? This is a secret,--I have a little
diagram of feminine wisdom hid away from you somewhere, founded upon the
wit of love. And we shall see which lasts the longer, your proposition or
my understanding!
But I must not forget to speak of a matter much more practical just now.
You mentioned the letter that you sent to father,--"The contents you might
imagine even if he did not show it to you." Well, he did not show it to
me, but from the effect it produced upon him I am obliged to infer that it
contained the most iniquitous blasphemies. Philip, I do hope you are not
subject to fits of "righteous indignation!" I could welcome a season of
secular rage in a man as I could a fierce wind in sultry weather, but this
kind of fury that cloaks itself in the guise of outraged piety is very
trying. No sooner did father read your letter than he strode in upon me
like a grey-bearded firebrand. The offending letter was crushed in his
hand, and his glasses were akimbo on his nose, the way they always are
when he is perturbed. I spare you the details, but from the nature of his
questions you might have thought he was examining you through me for a
licence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views,
but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of my
replies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon
your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in
the felony of my love, and there was a certain humorous satisfaction in
hearing father give a "philosophic proposition" to your criminality. My
only prayer was that he might not ask me if I loved you. Philip, I would
rather live on bread and water a week than confess it to any living man
besides yourself. But father has dwelt too long outside the realm of
romance to ask that very natural question. Finally I protested feebly:
"But how can it vitally affect a woman's happiness whether or not her
husband accepts the doctrine of repentance just as you do? Can he not love
and cherish his wife even if he does question the veracity of Jonah's
whaling experience?" But when I looked up and saw his face, I was ashamed,
and ran and kissed him, and straightened his glasses so that he could see
me with both eyes. But, dear Heart, his eyes were too full of tears to
fire upon me. And as I sat there upon the arm of his chair, twisting his
sacred beard, this is what he told me. When my mother died, he said, and
left me a little puckered pink mite in his arms, he had solemnly dedicated
me to God. And he declared, moreover, that he could not be faithless to
his vow by giving me in marriage to an infidel. Being an infidel, Philip,
is much worse than being a plain heathen; an infidel is a heathen raised
to the sixteenth power of iniquity! Now I rarely quote Scripture, for I
have too much guile in me to justify the liberty, but I could not refrain
from mentioning Abraham's dilemma, it seemed so appropriate to the
occasion,--how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a little
he-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggested
that instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith's little
Johnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaical
aptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul is
as worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become a
righteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this world of
temptations an unconscionably long time? But father was not to be reasoned
with or comforted. And yesterday, Sunday, he preached impressively from
the text, "Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?
"Of course _you_ are the heathen, Philip, and of course _I_ am the "vain
thing." But that is not father's idea. The vain thing you imagine is that
he will give his consent to our marriage! Well, you may settle it between
you! All I know is that now I am predestined, but not in the dedicated
deaconess direction!
JESSICA, THE BRAVE.
P.S.--What do you think, _our_ little forest is for sale. And oh, Philip,
if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life will
die of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there and
asked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (I
suppose all the prophets were like this, their writings produce that
impression!) And my father would consent, even if the bridegroom were a
heathen instead of a prophet. For he would be obliged to attend religious
services at Morningtown, and father does not believe any man can long
remain under the drippings of his sanctuary without being forgiven. And I
do not either. God would have mercy upon him somehow!
XXXIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Your letter, dearest Jessica, and your father's came by the same post, and
the sensation they gave me was as if some moral confusion had befallen the
elements and summer were mingled with winter in the same sky. Not that his
letter was anything but kind and dignified, but it seemed to remove you
and your life so far away from me. I confess I had some fears that he
might insist on the little we have seen or, as the world judges, know of
each other; it had not occurred to me that my "infidelity" would block my
path to happiness--so little do the people I commonly meet reck of that
matter. I have been accusing the world all along of indifference to the
spirit and to theology, and now, by a sort of poetical irony, I am blocked
in my progress toward happiness by meeting one who adheres to an old-world
belief in these things. The burden of his reply was in these words: "I
cannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who was
not strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I would
gladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of those
who trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility of
Christian faith. "Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love as
well as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me without
hearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father the
whole truth.
Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I must
leave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that I
have faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief in
the Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believe
the whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, are
divided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible world
is real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible,
and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusion
whereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just this
perception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to those
without faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of the
spirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because I
find among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I deny
the existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lost
the sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony of
the humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should do
better to discuss household economy than religion.
Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties,
but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to
Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my
"infidelity" is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is
sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will
Jessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoof
which I never had and those ass's ears which, alas! I did flourish so
portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a
strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically
correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a new
rendering of Catullus's _Da Basia_.
And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land,
sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry
a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for
the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by
woman's grace from the desert into the circle of perfect Paradise.
Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we should
bend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of the
trees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand in
the cool of the evening,--sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voice
of our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it was
God. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for this
dream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreams
until I come to you and learn in your arms the more "sober certainty of
waking bliss."
Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your "brothers," as you call
the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave
them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New
York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the
stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the
concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the
mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with
seriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love's isolation, but
the rude contact of affairs, yet with love's encouragement, to hold me
within practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar the
beauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk together
when I come.
I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the----and have taken a
couple of cheap rooms here at----. For some months I shall not be writing
for money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. One
room is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but still
crowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have had
in mind for several years,--the history and significance of
humanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist of that _magnum opus_
is to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form as
to stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I have
learned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. When
I return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition.
Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material is
already well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn to
making money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income--and
can you imagine what that means to you and me?
I had thought to send our goblin boy into the country as you bade me, but
for a while I am keeping him here. He sleeps in a cot beside me, and in
the day, when not at school or crouching in sphinxlike silence on the
curbstone, he sits in a great chair by the window. Often when I look up
from my book his eyes are fixed on me with a kind of mute appealing
wonder. Somehow I could not let him go. He seems a link between us in our
separation; and while my thoughts are set upon rebuking the errors of
humanitarianism it will be well to have this object of human pity before
my eyes.
I wonder if you comprehend what a strange wistful letter you have written.
You are no longer merely the maid I knew, and my ways of thought excite in
you a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment--so you say. Once
more, dear girl, we will talk of all this when I come. Until that happy
day, wait, and fortify your love with trust.
XXXIV
JESSICA TO PHILIP
I have a number of terms, my Philip, with which I might begin this letter,
but I have not yet the courage to call you by such dear names beyond the
whispering gallery of my own heart.
And you wonder how I have concealed my romantic deflections from father.
Indeed, I am sure he has noticed a heavenly-mindedness in me for some time
past; but out of the sanctity of his own heart he probably attributed this
improvement to the chastening effects of a particularly gloomy course of
religious reading that he has insisted upon my undertaking this winter.
And, after all, father is not so far wrong as to my spiritual state, for
when love becomes a woman's vocation, she carries blessings in her eyes
and all her moods tiptoe reverently like young novices who follow one
another down a cathedral aisle. This life of the heart becomes her piety,
I think, and the highest form of religion of which she is capable. Jessica
begins to magnify herself, you see! A kingdom of heaven has been set up
within me, dear creator, and naturally I feel this extension of my
boundaries.
But do not expect me to tell father "the whole truth,"--how you first
fascinated me with editorial magnanimity, then baited me with compliments,
and later with deepest confidences, and finally slipped into my Arcadia
disguised as a philosopher, but, when you had got entire possession,
declared yourself a victorious lover! I wonder that you can contemplate
the record you have made in this matter without blushing!
As for your "infidelity," and what you call your "faith," I think father
will denounce them both as blasphemous. Religion to father is something
more than "the poetry he believes in." It has the definition of
experience, miracles, and a whole body of spiritual phenomena quite as
real to him as your upper-chamber existence is to you. Only father has
this advantage of you, he has a real Divinity, with all the necessary
attributes of a man's God. His "voice of happiness" speaks to him from the
stars, and he does not call it an echo, as you do, of a fair voice within
your own heart. Father gets his salvation from the outside of his warring
elements; you speak to your own seas, "Peace be still!" As for me, between
you, I stand winking at Heaven; and I say: "It is evident that neither of
them understands this mystery of life; I will not try to comprehend. I
will be good when I can, and diplomatic when I must, and leave the rest to
heaven and earth and nature." Meanwhile, I advise you not to quote your
pagan authorities to father. If the very worst comes, you may say that you
have almost scriptural proof of my affections,--and mind you say
affections, father could not bear the romantic inflection of such a term
as love. It sounds too secular, carnal, to him.
You ask me if I will consent to abandon such a life as our forest offers
and come with you into "this great solitude of people" which you call New
York. Philip, when a man holds a starling in his hand he does not ask the
bird whether it will stay here or wing yonder, but he carries it with him
where he will; and the starling sings, no less in one place than in
another, because its nature is to sing. But, I think, dear Master, the
motive which prompts the song in the cage is not the same as the impulse
to sing in the forest. So it is with me. If we live here among the trees,
where their green waves make a summer sea high in the heavens above our
heads, I could be as content as any bird is. But if you make our home in
the city, or in the midst of a desert for that matter, I could not
withhold one thought from your happiness, for love has transformed me,
adapted life itself to a new purpose. I have been "called," and I have no
will to resist, because my heart tells me there is goodness in the
purpose, a little necklace of womanly virtues for me. When I think of
pain, and sorrow, my eyes are holden, I can see only the fair form of love
sanctified, and I can hear only your voice calling me to fulfil a destiny
which you yourself do not understand. And as all these things approach,
beloved, father's God is more to me than your fine illusion. I wish for
guardian angels, I feel the need of a Virgin Mary and of all the lady
mothers in heaven to bless me.
But I have been telling you only of my inner life. Outwardly I shall ever
be capable of the most heathen manifestations. For instance, loving as I
do, how do you account for this personal animosity I feel toward you,
almost a madness of fear at the thought of your approaching visit? There
is something that has never been finished in this affair of our hearts.
Perhaps it is that really you have never kissed me. Well, I find it as
easy to write of kisses as to review a sentimental romance, but actually
there is some instinct in me stronger than mind against the fact, do you
understand? Philip, you have no idea of the depths of feminine treachery!
Did I ever intimate a willingness to do such a thing? I do not say that I
_wish_ to kiss another, but I affirm that it would be easier for me to
kiss my father's presiding elder--and heaven knows he is a didactic
monster of head and whiskers! It is not that I do not love you, but that I
do!
Do you know what will happen when you come to Morningtown? I will meet you
at the station, not as Jessica, but as the demure little home-made
daughter of the Methodist minister here; we will greet each other with
blighting formality, for there will be the station-master's wife to
observe us; we will walk home along the main street, and we will speak of
the most trivial or useful subjects, of the weather in New York, and of
Jack more particularly. Out of sheer bravado I will scan your face now and
then, but my eyes will not rest there long enough to fall before yours
discomfited. When we reach the house father will greet you from his Sinai
elevation, with pretty much the same holy-man courtesy Moses would have
showed if a heathen Canaanite had appeared to him. And while you two are
exchanging platitudes, I will escape into this room of mine, take one
glance at my mirror, and then cover my face with my hands for joy and
shame while the red waves of love mount as high as they will over it. Ah,
Philip, I shall be _so_ glad to see you, and so afraid! But you shall have
small satisfaction in either fact, for I do not aim to make it easy for
you to win what is already yours in my heart.
P.S.--So you are keeping Jack mured up with you and your _magnum opus_. No
wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone." He prefers it
to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult
to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the
domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a
similar situation I may be driven to seek the cold curbstone for
companionship.
XXXV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
It seems to me as I read your letters, my sweet wife to be, that I am only
beginning to learn the richness of my fortune. And will you not, when you
write to me next time--will you not call me by one of those dear names
that you speak in the whispering gallery of your heart? I shall barely
receive more than one letter from you now before I come to see you in
person and tell over with you face to face the story of our love. Just a
few more days and I shall be free.
But for the present I want to talk to you about Jack. Indeed, I feel a
little sore on this point. It was you who proposed our adopting him, yet,
after your first words of advice, you have left me to work out the
situation quite unaided; and now I can see that you are laughing at me.
Poor Jack, he was something like a "philosophical proposition" which I had
never very thoroughly analysed. One thing, however, begins to grow
perfectly clear: my home is no place for him; he is only a shadow in my
life and needs to take on substance. Well, I thought at last I had solved
the problem--or at least that O'Meara had solved it for me; but here too I
was disappointed. Really, you must help me out of this muddle.
Do you remember the note-book of O'Meara's that I told you about? Ever
since his death I have been too busy really to look through the volume;
but day before yesterday it occurred to me that I might find some
information there about Jack's parentage, and with that end in view I
spent most of the day deciphering the smeared pages. At first I found
everything in the notes except what I wanted, but toward the end of the
book I discovered a whole group of memoranda and reflections in which the
name Tarrytown occurred again and again. I will read you the notes when I
come; without giving many events they tell in a disjointed way a little
idyllic episode in the story of his life. He, too, knew love, and was
loved. There in that village by the Hudson for a few short months he kept
the enemy at bay and was happy. And then, too soon, came the fatal
story--the only dated note in the book, I believe:
September 3d: A son was born and she has left me to care for him
alone. I had thought that happiness might endure, and this too was
illusion. I stand by the tomb and read the graven words: _Et ego in
Arcadia fui_.
And so, yesterday, on a venture I took our little goblin boy with me to
Tarrytown, and after some inquiry found that his mother's relations were
farm people living on the outskirts of the town. They proved to have been
poor but respectable people. At present only the grandfather is living
alone in the house, and he is very feeble. He was willing to assume the
care of Jack, but I cannot persuade myself to leave the child in those
trembling hands. Indeed, when it comes to the issue, I cannot quite decide
to let him go entirely from me, for is he not one of the ties that bind me
to you? I have brought him back with me to New York--which will only
increase your merriment at my expense.
Some day when you have come to live in New York--if this is to be our
home--we will go together up the river to Tarrytown, and you shall see the
land where O'Meara dreamed his dream of happiness and where your adopted
child was born.
And when we go there, I will take you to a bowered nook overhanging the
river, where I passed the afternoon reading and thinking of many things.
There together we will sit in the shadow of the trees and talk and plan
together how _our_ happiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and you
shall teach me to lose this haunting sense of illusion in the great
reality of love. And as the evening descends and twilight steals upon the
ever-flowing water, I will take you in my arms a moment, and this shall be
my vow: God do so to me and more also, if any darkness falls from my life
upon yours, until our evening, too, has come and the light of this world
passes quietly into the dream that lies beyond.
All this I thought yesterday while I sat alone and read once more the sad
record of O'Meara's ruin. He did not stay long in Tarrytown, it seems,
after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in the
hope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas,
you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful days
returned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them--so
one may surmise from a number of memoranda--with a new meaning he began to
discover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of the _Æneid_
became a symbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the last
bewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to his
destruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses from
those books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not a
touch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?--
There the meaning of the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was
before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the
_loetas segetes_ seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes
about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills,
and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep
slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I
used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I
would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the
crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped
heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but
laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a
horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath
them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed
to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise
the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the
fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the
poet:
_Flumina amem silvasque inglorius_,
and his pathetic envy of those
Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew
The wonders of their state!
And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself,
still I was in Virgil's haunted world. Some distance from the house
was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a
row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit
through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning
home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I
learned to enjoy the _levium spectacula rerum_, as he calls the story
of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,--so wide
and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of
men,--I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines
with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast,
With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest.
In this way Jack's father learned the illusion of life by looking back on
his happy days. I did not mean to fill my letter with this long extract
from his note-book, nor would I end with such ill-omened words. Dear girl,
I too have learned the deception of life in other ways. Teach me, when I
come to you, the great reality. In all O'Meara's memoranda after his
return to New York I could find only a single direct allusion to the woman
he loved. It was very brief: "On this day two years ago she said I made
her happy!"
Shall I bring happiness to you when I come?
A CODICIL TO LETTER XXXIV
JESSICA TO PHILIP. WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER FROM
PHILIP
Think of this,--I love you, but I do not know you. I only know your heart,
your mind, that part of you which meets me in spirit like the light from
some distant star that slips across my window sill at evening. But you,
oh! Philip, I do not know _you_. You are a stranger whom I have seen only
twice in my life. Do not be angry, my beloved, I do love you; but cannot
you understand that I must get used to the idea of your being some one
very real? These are thoughts forced upon me by your approaching visit,
and so I ask a favour: Do not tell me when to expect you. If you threaten
me with the identical day of your coming, I will vanish from the face of
the earth! But if you come upon me unawares, I shall have been spared that
consciousness of _confession_ face to face involved by a deliberate
welcome. And if you come thus, I shall not have time to retire behind my
instinctive defence against you. You see that I plan in your favour, that
I wish to be unrestrainedly glad when you come.
And about the kisses, you understand of course, dear Philip, that I am
incapable of determining them really! I only contemplated the possibility
when distance made it an impossibility. Still, you cannot fail to know
that I love you, that it would even break my heart if you did not come!
For, Philip, a woman's heart is like the Scriptures, apparently full of
contradictions, but really it is the symbol of our everlasting truth, if
only you have the wisdom to understand it.
And another thing, Philip, the more I think of it, the more I am
scandalised by the way you drag that poor goblin child about. My heart
yearns for him and his solitude in the midst of your philosophies. You
have made a perfect jumping-jack of him for your lordly amusement, and it
isn't fair. Bring him with you to Morningtown. I charge you. And remember,
don't lose him or philosophise him out of existence on the way. I have
talked with father about the boy, and he is primed with religious zeal to
snatch this tender brand from your burning.
XXXVI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Just a note, sweet lady, to bid you expect me on the afternoon train
Thursday--and is not that a long while from to-day? And please do not come
to the station. I would not have our meeting chilled by the curious eyes
of that station-master's wife; I remember the scrutiny of her gaze too
well. And as for our greeting--you have made a very pretty story out of
that, but have you not omitted Philip from the account? Is it not just
possible that he may mar all Jessica's nicely laid plans? I have a
suspicion that, in his crude masculine way, he may prefer to translate
into fact what Jessica finds so easy to contemplate in words. I feel a bit
uncertain as to how he will behave as a lover; the rôle is new to him, and
he may be awkward and a bit vehement.
Yes, I will bring Jack and leave him to be brooded under your kind
maternal feathers. You will love him for the pathos of his eyes and for
his quaint ways.
-----
[2] It is unnecessary to say that the spelling throughout
these letters has been corrected for the press.
[3] Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Third Part
which shows how the editor again visits
Jessica in the country, and how love
is buffeted between philosophy
and religion.
XXXVII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
WRITTEN ON RETURNING FROM HIS VISIT TO MORNINGTOWN
Here I am back in my own room, in this solitude of books; and how
different is this home-coming from that other when I brought with me only
bitterness and despair!
Shall I tell you, sweetheart, some of the things I learned during my three
days in Morningtown? First of all, I discovered that you are clothed with
wonderful beauty. In a dim way I knew this before, but the full mystery of
your loveliness was not revealed to me until this third time. Can it be
that love has transformed you a little and added grace to grace, or is it
only my vision that has been purged of its earthly dulness? I could love a
homely woman whose spirit was fair, but to love one who is altogether
beautiful, in whose perfect grace I can find no spot or blemish--that is
the miracle of my blessedness. There was a strange light in your eyes that
haunts me yet. Such a light I have seen on a lonely pool when the evening
sunlight slanted upon it from over the brown hills of autumn, but nowhere
else. My soul would bathe in that pure water and be baptised into the new
faith.
For my faith, of which I boasted so valiantly, has changed since I have
seen you. Faith, I had thought, was a form of insight into the illusion of
earthly things, of transient joys and fears. And always a little dread
would creep into my heart lest love, too, should prove to be such an
illusion, the last great deception of all, binding the bewildered soul in
a web of phantom desires. So I still felt as I walked with you that first
evening out into the circle of your trees. And there, dear Jessica, in the
waiting silence and the grey shadows of that seclusion I put my arms about
you and would have drawn you to my heart. Ah, shall I not remember the
wild withdrawing of your eyes as I stooped over your face! And then with a
cry of defiance and one swift bound, you tore yourself loose from me and
ran like a frightened dryad deeper into the forest. That was a mad chase,
and forever and forever I shall see your lithe form darting on before me
through the mingled shadow and light. And when at last I caught you and
held you fast, shall I not remember how you panted and fluttered against
me like a bird in the first terror of captivity! And then, suddenly, you
were still, and looked up into my face, and in your eyes I beheld the
wonder of a strange mystery which no words can name. Only I knew that my
dread was forever at end. It was for a second--nay, an eternity, I
think--as if we two were rapt out of the world, out of ourselves, into
some infinite abysm of life. It was as if the splendour of the apocalypse
broke upon us, and poured upon our eyes the ineffable whiteness of heaven.
I knew in that instant that love is not an illusion, but the one reality,
the one power that dispels illusion, the very essence of faith. I
shuddered when the vision passed; but its memory shall never fade. So much
I learned on that day.
And I also learned, or thought I learned, that your father's real
objection to my suit lay not so much in his hostility to my views, as in
his fear of losing you out of his life. And as I talked with him, even
plead with him, I was filled with pity and with something like remorse for
the sorrow I was to bring upon his heart. He is a saint, dear Love, but
very human. You have said that I acted like a robber toward you. I could
smile at your fury, but to your father I do indeed play the robber's part.
Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me and will give me the one
jewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It is
hard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own.
XXXVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all my
lilies changed once more to roses--as they did, you remember how often,
while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South you
know we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northern
women. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, to
recall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose of
love burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic of
colour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to have
mystified you.
And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as the
shadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a tryst with you
beneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless and
terrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will be
the first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!)
And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright for
me, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that I
could ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer from
this that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shall
have a saner reason for withholding them,--that of economy. For if
frugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be true
in love as in the less romantic experiences of life.
And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finished
me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered
woman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your
illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as the
little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped
yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach
my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal
emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so
sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?
Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not
everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered
soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with
many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained.
No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly
procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year,
inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as
for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to
grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!
Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there
is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for
him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but
acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be
happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches
the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally,
however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one
should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my
alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic
indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be
jealous!
XXXIX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener
and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil
was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first
great parent to me?
There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies show--
and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the
one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheek
that the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? And
was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose in
aromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I
could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in
going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in
prophecy of your many divine properties.
Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, for
these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions!
I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and
rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of
the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic
summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under
the covers and think of the day's work.
I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet,
bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe
when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a
Latin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: Does
Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)
I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little.
Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your
Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our
Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air
hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down
upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the
cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I
must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat
together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language
was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled
up, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet,
that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand
forbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads,
fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to
think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb
fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aërial vision
and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips
had all the fragrance of humanity.
Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present
bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read
of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand
seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the
groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with
the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise
before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words,
you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings
to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they
clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and
beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every
image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more
fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain
is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You
see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your
mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away.
With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:
VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS
Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found,
The moss-grown rock, the pines around!
And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms,
Catullus and his love's alarms.
_Da basia mille_, so the poem ran;
And, lip to lip, our hearts began
With ne'er a word translate the words complete:--
Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?
A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more,
And then confound the telltale score!
So may we live and love, till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.
Yon failing sun shall rise another morn,
And the thin moon round out her horn;
But we, when once we lose our waning light,--
Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!
XL
JESSICA TO PHILIP
A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have
ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if
love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to
the classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might
measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his
morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is
we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy
between the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than our
ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no
other gods can afford to bless them!
Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship
with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is
gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian
scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate
even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener
appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is
the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It
is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical
experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into
the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these
ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their
definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better
than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a
form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual
faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show
a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to
last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts.
This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our
prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent
has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my
heart as warm as kisses.
But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in
father's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _The
Forest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in the
library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as
the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he
settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst
fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an
Indian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is
based upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve
truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in
other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime
authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard,
for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no
female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your
heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought
he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be
alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the
worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a
frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to take
some radical stand against us.
Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a factitious
interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I
am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest,
particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of
"Misther Towers."
"Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone before
the library fire.
"Nope,"--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent
sympathy.
"Did he often talk to you?"
"Yes, when we went for a walk."
"Tell me what about, Jackie."
"I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation.
"You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated.
"Never did know. He talks queer!"--I tittered and Jack wrinkled up his
face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.
"Did he ever mention any of his friends," I persevered.
"Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,"--the little
scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!
"But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?"
"Never did!"--I was wounded.
"What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst.
"His pipe," he affirmed without hesitation.
"And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he
made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his
hand to 'em."
"Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?"
"Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed."
"Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed;
Mr. Towers was very rude to you!"
I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever
smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how
jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I
could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to
a prayer.
XLI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and
cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that
book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him
into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in
his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to
see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is
false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of
those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how
unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They
beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was,
not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and
dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body
is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical
civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn
away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A
man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is
in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our
salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some
day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation
according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality
to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of
reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some
way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to
be my wife.
And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my
affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp
write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside,
he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my
pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment,
(for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before
my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees
down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as
she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweet
Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake
into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself."
.la begin XLII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had cast
off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is
open to me after what has happened.
After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father
thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward
us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he
deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and
destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit,
and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will
become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is
entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am
sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore
been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this
correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any
protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a
fanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon
superstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when
opposed.
And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me
from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand
he has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his
remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will
write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in
a way a prior authority over him.
Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have tried
to take refuge in the biologist's definition of love,--that it is
essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the
blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an
epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the
gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness
out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my
glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,--only that
it is best for us both to forget now if we can.
XLIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR JESSICA:
My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to
Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have
prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if
I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle
deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house while
he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the
meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the
world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the
prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words
we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay
in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:
So let us live and love till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.
And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my
ears,--that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joy
you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not
seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of
passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me
then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have
cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have
brought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle with
religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that
resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know
Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And
so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the
poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has
troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that
no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you.
And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you
will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be
garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and
within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will
you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but
Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world,
and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There
has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name.
But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting
after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to
you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses.
And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You
are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not
exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting
loves. And once again, good-bye.
(Enclosed with the foregoing)
DEAR SIR:
My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to
you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you,
sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step
in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to
cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and
esteem.
Faithfully yours,
EZRA DOANE.
XLIV
EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the
bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of
anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the
stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after
another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written
to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself
that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy,
far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has
been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one
with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet
reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of
sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through
gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some
jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal
deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many
madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?
And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I
move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone.
Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past.
And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who
beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach,
beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your
grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so
unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a
frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my
heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that
the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense
of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my
passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade
against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase
of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast
for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my
true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed
away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the
religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I
supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined
that the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least
learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the
present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own
calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of
Fate that warns us to be humble.
And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their
foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that
have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:
_Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also.
XLV
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was
walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring
floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest.
Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise
of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly.
Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree,
holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw
the woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even passed
between them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone.
I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walk
away still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is the
meaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting till
the last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no better
than glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest?
Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces of
my physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess the
thing I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and then
without reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumbling
run. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I left
the Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness still
surged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remoteness
from life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; I
was bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, but
were shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the passion of
love, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turned
my brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit some
atrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageous
insult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, some
chance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changed
these demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physical
achievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home and
the blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it ten
years hence?
XLVI
JACK TO PHILIP
DEAR SIR:
I have not wrote you before. This is a beautiful place. I like it,
especially the young lady. The old man have been acting wild, like a cop
when he can't find out who done it. The difference is that it is the bible
in the old man and the devil in the cop. He says you have hoodooed the
young lady, and he says let you be enathermered. This is a religious cuss
word. The young lady don't cry. She is dead game, and have lost her
colour.
So good by,
Yours trewly,
JACK O'MEARA.
P.S.--The young lady have quit the family prayers, but me and the old man
have to say ours just the same, only more so.
XLVII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
A wise man of the sect of Simon Magus has replied to an assault of mine on
humanitarianism by trying to show that in this one faith of modern days
are summed up all the varying ideals of past ages,--renunciation,
self-development, religion, chivalry, humanism, pantheistic return to
nature, liberty. Ah, my dear sir, I envy you your easy, kindly vision.
Indeed, all these do persist in a dim groping way, empty echoes of great
words that have been, bare shadows without substance. What made them
something more than graceful acts of materialism was that each and all
ended not in themselves or in worldly accommodation, but in some purpose
outside of human nature as our humanitarians comprehend that nature.
Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel more
of bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of the
flesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purging
and making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of a
man's own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit of
beauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brother
to its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circle
in which humanitarianism gyrates. My dear foe might read Castiglione's
book of _The Courtier_ and learn how high the Platonic ideal of the better
humanists floated above the charitable mockery of its name to-day. As for
religion--go to almost any church in the land and hear what exhortations
flow from the pulpit. The intellectual contention of dogmas is
forgotten--and better so, possibly. But more than that: for one word on
the spirit or on the way and necessity of the soul's individual growth,
you will hear a thousand on the means of bettering the condition of the
poor; for one word on the personal relation of man to his God, you will
hear a thousand on the duties of man to man. Woe unto you, preachers of a
base creed, hypocrites! These things ought ye to have done, and not to
leave the other undone! You have betrayed the faith and forgotten your
high charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world's use of
materialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Like
your father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift of
God with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with a
kiss of brotherhood! Now might the Keeper of the Keys cry out to-day with
other meaning:
"How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouths!"
XLVIII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
Reading a foolish book on the Literature of Indiana (!) and find this
sentence on the first page: "It is not of so great importance that a few
individuals within a State shall, from time to time, show talent or
genius, as that the general level of cultivation in the community shall be
continually raised." Whereupon the author proceeds to glorify the "general
level" through a whole volume. Now the noteworthy thing about this
particular sentence is the fact that it was set down as a mere truism
needing no proof, and that it was no doubt so accepted by most readers of
the book. In reality the sentiment is so far from a truism that it would
have excited ridicule in any previous age; it might almost be said to
contain the fundamental error which is responsible for the low state of
culture in the country. Unfortunately the point cannot be profitably
argued out, for it resolves itself at last into a question of taste. There
are those who are chiefly interested in the life of the intellect and the
imagination. They measure the value of a civilisation by the kind of
imaginative and intellectual energy it displays, by its top growth in
other words. They crave to see life express itself thus, _sub specie
oeernitatis_, and apart from this conversion of human energy and emotion
into enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transient
human lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuation
of the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of one
masterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfare
of a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectual
welfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently to
the products of the higher imagination. There are others for whom this
life of the imagination has only a lukewarm interest, for the reason that
their own faculties are weak and stunted. Naturally they think it a slight
matter whether genius appear to create what they and their kind can only
dimly enjoy; on the contrary, they hold it of prime importance that
material welfare and the form of mental cunning which subdues material
forces should be widely diffused among the people.
Now no one would say a word against raising "the general level of
cultivation"; the higher it is raised the better. Only the cherishing of
this ideal becomes pernicious when it is made more sacred than the
appearance of individual genius. Nor is it proper to say that the
appearance of genius is itself contingent on the level of cultivation.
There is much confusion of thought here. The influence of the people on
literature is invariably attended with danger. It has its element of good,
for the people cherish those instinctive passions and notions of morality
which keep art from falling into artificiality. But refinement,
distinction, form, spirituality--all that makes of art a transcript of
life _sub specie oeernitatis_--are commonly opposed to the popular
interest and are even distrusted by the people. The attitude of the
Elizabethan playwrights toward their audiences gives food for reflection
on this head. Just so sure as the ideal of general cultivation is made
paramount, just so sure will the higher culture become degraded to this
consideration, and with its degradation the general cultivation itself
will grow base and material.
XLIX
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
I lead a strange dual existence, the intensity of whose contrast is almost
uncanny. After sitting for hours at my desk working on my History of
Humanitarianism, I throw myself wearily on the sofa and smoke. And as the
grey fumes float above my face, slowly they lay a spell upon me like the
waving of mesmeric hands. I lose consciousness of the objects about me,
the very walls dissolve away in a mist, and I am lifted as it were on
softly beating pinions and borne swift and far like a bird. The sensation
is curiously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, yet it never causes
me surprise. Sometimes I am carried out into the wide sky and soar as it
seems for hours without ever alighting, until I am brought to myself with
a sense of rapid falling. At other times I am borne to the blessed forest
where my love walks, and always then the same thing happens. I know not
whether it is my spirit or some emanation of my body, but, however it is,
I am there always pursuing her as once I did in reality, until at last I
lay hold of her and draw her into my arms beneath that ancient oak. I kiss
her once and twice and a third time, gazing the while into her startled
eyes. Then an inexpressible sweetness takes possession of me, a shudder
runs through my veins, and of a sudden all is dark; I am sinking down,
down, in unfathomable abysses, until abruptly I awake. No words can convey
the mingled reality and remoteness of these sensations. Jessica, Jessica,
you have troubled the very sources of my being; you have abandoned me to
contend with shadows and the fear of shadows.
L
JACK TO PHILIP
DEAR MR. TOWERS:
You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up here
and bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark of
safety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lord
have turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young lady
that is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now.
She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church.
She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jolly
all the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiar
spirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets him
under a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but I
creep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her into
something else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now and
have took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. He
knows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardened
her heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible,
nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this,
I will show it to her.
Your trew friend,
JACK O'MEARA.
P.S.--She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she give
it to the old man.
LI
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination,
and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are the
sentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and without
grip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and,
being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they
surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby
and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical
socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been
perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the
real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away
from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a
fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain.
They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages,
having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in
the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though
they mask themselves in formulæ of universal brotherhood.
LII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's.
It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that
exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of
the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by
destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections
it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who
has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As
with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate
oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the
regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping
his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure
with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to
think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled
along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted
by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his
book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the
proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying
the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his
life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that
of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they
gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He
looked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and through
that isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and even
a kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness his
mood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one's
self too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless a
strong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for without
these the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation to
throw away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifference
or something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often of
late and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of your
blessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference you
have cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare that
pursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determination
to work and in work achieve my own destiny.
LIII
PHILIP TO JACK
It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and often
I wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and you
were brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where you
are.
You must listen to everything Miss Jessica tells you about the trees and
birds, and learn to love all the beautiful things growing around you. I
remember there were four or five great trees in my father's garden when I
was a boy living in the country, and I loved them, each in a different
way, and had names for them and talked to them. One was an oak tree that
grew up almost to the clouds, and its boughs stood out stiff and square as
if nothing could bend them. That was the tree I went to when I had some
hard task to do and wanted strength. Another was an elm that always
whispered comfort to me when I was in trouble. I used to go to it as some
boys run to their mother, for I grew up like you without a mother's love,
and I did not even have any sweet lady like Miss Jessica to be fond of me.
You must ask Miss Jessica to teach you all she knows about the trees in
Morningtown, and you must listen to what she says to them. Perhaps she
will tell you about the famous oaks that grew in a place called Dodona,
and were wiser than any man or woman in the world. People used to talk
with them as Miss Jessica does with her favourite tree.
And now, dear Jack, I am going to tell you a story which I have made up
just for you. It isn't about trees exactly, but it all took place in a
deep forest that spread around a wonderful city. From the high white walls
of the town one could look out over the green tops of the trees as you
look down on the grass, and that was a marvellous sight. There was a
single road that ran through the forest right up to the gate of the city;
but it was a hard road to travel, dark most of the time because the sun
could not shine through the leaves, and very lonely, and so still that you
could hear your heart beat except when the winds blew, and then sometimes
the boughs clashed together overhead and roared and moaned until you
longed for the silence again. It was a long road too, and the men who
walked through the forest to the city all had great packs on their
shoulders. And what do you suppose was in their packs? Why, every
traveller carried with him a gorgeous suit of clothes heavy with velvet
and gold and silver; for so the people dressed in the beautiful city, and
no one could enter the gate unless he too bore with him the royal robes.
But you see, while they were walking in the rough forest, they wore their
old clothes of course.
Now in one place a wonderful woman sat by the roadside. She was a maga, or
witch, named Simona. She was beautiful if you did not see her too close,
with large round eyes that looked very gentle and kind. And when any
traveller came by, the big tears would begin to roll down her cheeks and
she would cry out to him as if she pitied him and wanted to help him.
"Dear traveller," she would say, "why do you trudge along this gloomy
road, and why do you carry that bundle which bends your shoulders and
tires your back? Don't you know that it is all a lie about the city you
are seeking? There is no city of palaces at your journey's end. Indeed,
you will never get to the end of the woods, but will walk on and on,
stumbling and falling, and growing weaker and weaker, until at last you
fall and never rise. And the wild beasts that you hear at night howling in
the bushes will rend and gnaw your body until only your bones are left."
At this the travellers would stop and say: "But what shall we do, wise
witch, and whither shall we go?"
Then she would say to them: "Turn aside by this pleasant path, and in a
little while you will come to my beautiful garden which is named
Philanthropia. There you will find many others whom I have wept for and
saved as I do you; and there amid the open glades you may live with them
in everlasting peace and love. Houses are there which you need only to
enter and call your own. And when you are hungry you have only to speak,
and immediately all that you desire to eat will appear on the tables. And
when you are tired, soft beds will rise up to receive you. And clothes
will be spread before you--not stiff and uncomfortable robes like those
you carry in your pack, but soft garments suited to that land of
comfort."
Most of the travellers believed the witch and turned into the by-path.
But, alas! it was soon worse for them than it had been on the road; for
they were led, not to a garden, but into a great sandy desert, where
nothing grew and no rain or dew ever fell. And somehow they could find no
way out of the desert, but wandered to and fro in the endless fields of
dust, while the hot sun beat upon their heads and their hearts failed them
for hunger and thirst.
But now and then a wary traveller did not believe the witch and laughed at
her tears and soft voice. And then, unless he got away very quick,
something dreadful happened to him. The witch suddenly changed into a huge
monster with a hundred flaming eyes, and a hundred mouths with which she
raved and bellowed, and a hundred long arms that coiled about like
serpents. She was so terrible that most men who saw her in her true form
fell down fainting at her feet; and these she lifted up and threw into
deep dark holes, hidden from the road, where the poor wretches soon died
of sheer loneliness.
And now comes the heart of the story, dear Jack, if you are not too tired
to read to the end.
One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was not
very strong, nor was his armour much to look at,--just an ordinary knight,
but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart to
slay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rode
he turned often to look into his lady's eyes, and always he seemed to
drink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinks
refreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passing
fair--as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest woman
in all the world. And so at last they came to where the witch was sitting
and weeping. Without a word the knight drew his sword and rushed upon her.
Of course she changed instantly to the monster with the hundred eyes and
mouths and arms. The air was filled with the fire from her eyes and with
the dreadful bellowing from her mouths, and her arms swung frantically
about on every side to seize the knight and crush him. But this was the
strange thing about the battle: as often as the knight looked at the lady,
who stood near him, he gained new strength and the witch could not harm
him.
He was cutting off her arms one by one and victory was almost his, when
down the road came an old man wagging his grey beard dolefully and
muttering into his breast. And when he reached the three there at the
roadside, he stood for a moment watching the battle and still muttering in
his beard. Then without a word he beckoned to the lady. She hesitated,
sighed, and turned away, leaving the poor knight to struggle alone without
the blessing of her eyes. And immediately his strength seemed to abandon
him and his sword dropped at his side. You may be sure the witch shouted
with triumph at this, and the noise of her bellowing sounded like the
clanging of a hundred discordant bells. It was almost over with the
knight. But suddenly he too uttered a great cry. Despair came to give him
strength where hope had been before. "For love and the world!" he cried
out and drove at the monster once again with his uplifted sword.
And, dear Jack, do you wish to know how the battle ended? I am very, very
sorry, but I can't tell you, for when I came through the forest the knight
and the witch were still fighting. There was a look of desperate
determination in the knight's eyes, but, to tell you the truth, I think
his heart was with the lady who had left him, and it is not easy to fight
without a heart in this world, you know.
Write to me soon, a long, long letter and tell me about the trees of
Morningtown. Some day when you are grown up and live with men, you will be
glad to remember the friendship and the wise conversation of those
brothers of the forest. Good-bye for a time, my boy.
Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS.
LIV
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
A wan beggar, seated on the coping that surrounds St. Paul's and
exploiting his misery before the world. A strange scene calculated to give
one pause,--the poor waif crying his distress on the curb, within the iron
fence the ancient sleeping dead, and along the thoroughfare of Broadway
the ceaseless unheeding stream of humanity. As I walked up the street with
this image in my mind, the lines of an old Oriental poem kept time with my
steps until I had converted them into English:
I heard a poor man in the grave-yard cry:
"Arise, oh friend! a little hour assume
My weight of cares, whilst I,
Long weary, learn thy respite in the tomb."
I listened that the corpse should make reply;
Who, knowing sweeter death than penury,
Broke not his silent doom.
I am reminded of that joke, rather grim forsooth, which Lowell thought the
best ever made. It is in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The god Dionysus and
his slave Xanthias are travelling the road to Hades, the slave as a matter
of course carrying the pack for the two. They meet a procession bearing a
corpse to the tomb. Xanthias begs the dead man to take the pack with him
as he is borne so comfortably on the same road to the nether world.
Whereupon they dicker over the portage. "Two shillings for the job," says
the corpse, sitting up on his bier. "Too much," says Xanthias. "Two
shillings," insists the corpse. "One and sixpence," cries Xanthias. "_I'd
see myself alive first_!" says the corpse, sinking down on the bier.
LV
JACK TO PHILIP
DEAR MR. TOWERS:
The young lady have the letter you wrote me and I cant get it. But you
needent bother about writing any more tales. I guess you done the best you
could, but we dont neither one like what you told about the witch and them
young people in the forest. Why do the knight stand there fighting the
witch when the old man have run off with his girl? Why dont he take out
after them and leave the witch to bleed to death? And the young lady
thinks of it worse than I do. She went on awful when she read it, and
cried. I guess she was sorry about the way the knight kept on cutting off
that woman's legs and arms even if she was bad. She don't say nothing else
nice about you now, nor let me. But she says you are the crewelest man she
have known. And she cries a heap when there aint nothing the matter, and
blames at every thing. The old gentleman feels bad about it but he dont
know what to do. I guess now he wishes he hadent fooled with the young
lady's salvation none. Because she have told him one day when he was
trying to talk pious at her, not to say nothing, that she dident believe
in nothing now but damnation. And he say "Dont talk that way before the
child." But I aint come to neither one of them things yet.
Your trew Frend,
JACK O'MEARA.
P.S.--She goes to see her tree spirit every day. But she dont talk to him
no more. She just lays down on her face and cries.
LVI
PHILIP TO JACK
I am afraid, little Jack, that my long story about the lady and the knight
in the woods did not interest you very much; and that is a pity, for, if I
cannot amuse you, how shall I do when I come to write stories for grown-up
folk? Well, anyway, I am going to tell you what happened after the lady
and the old man went away into the forest.
For awhile they walked side by side in silence. But the road was long and
it was already late, and by and by the night fell and wrapped all the
trees in solemn shadows. It was not easy to keep the path in the darkness,
and pretty soon they were quite lost and found themselves wandering
helplessly in the black tangled aisles of the forest. That was bad, for
the lady was tired in body and discomforted in heart. But worse happened
when the old man left her to seek out the path alone, for he only lost
himself more completely in the treacherous shadows and could not get back
to her. Ah, Jack, if the lady was beautiful when the sunlight shone upon
her, how lovely do you suppose she was here in the night with the white
beams of the moon sifting down through the swaying boughs upon her
blanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her
terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy
whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up
yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low
inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out
of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her
face under a great tree, and wept and wept for very terror and
loneliness.
Now wonderful things may happen in the night, dear Jack. The trees then
have a life of their own, and sometimes when the sun, which belongs to man
only, is gone they have power to do what they please to foolish people who
come into their circle. And so this tree that stood leaning over the
prostrate lady whispered and whispered to itself in a strange language.
Then out of the boughs there came creeping a dark cold shadow. It dropped
down noiselessly to the ground and covered the lady all about. It moved
and swayed in the faint moonlight like a column of wind-blown smoke. You
will hardly believe the rest, but it seemed slowly to take the very shape
of the lady herself, as if it were her own shadow that had found her; and
so it began to creep into her body. And as it melted into her flesh, she
grew cold and ever colder as if her blood were turning to ice. Pretty soon
it would have reached her heart and then--I shudder to think what would
have become of her. But when the first chill touched her heart, she
uttered a loud cry of fear: "Dear knight, dear knight," she called out,
"where are you? Save me! save me!"
Then another wonderful thing happened in the darkness, for at such times
our spoken words may take on a life of their own just as the trees and
shadows do. And so these words of the lady, instead of scattering in the
air, were changed into a marvellous little fairy elf that went stealing
away through the forest. And as the elf ran swiftly under the trees and
over the long grass, so lightly indeed that the flowers and weeds only
bowed under his feet as when a gentle breeze passes over them,--as the elf
sped on, I say, everywhere the earth sent up a lisping whisper, "Save me,
dear knight! save me!"
Now the knight was far away, resting from his battle with the old witch.
He had wounded her in many places, and might perhaps have killed her, had
not the sly wicked creature suddenly slipt away from him into some hiding
place of hers in the desert. And so, as he could not reach her, he was
resting, very tired and very sad. Then suddenly, as he sat with his head
hanging down, the little elf came tripping over the grass and plucked him
by the arm, and the faint whisper stole into his ear, "Save me, dear
knight! save me!"
Do you suppose he was long in rising and following the clever little elf
back to their mistress? Ah, Jack, there was a happy hour and a happy year
and a blissful life for the lady and her knight then, was there not?
And now, Jack, I will not bother you with any more stories after this.
Write to me and tell me all you are doing. Be good, little Jack, and
listen to the wise words of the trees and other growing things; and, above
all, love that sweet lady, Miss Jessica.
Affectionately,
PHILIP TOWERS.
LVII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There is
the way of the _Imitation_ trod by those who have perceived the illusion
of this life and the reality of the spirit,--the way over whose entrance
stand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, the
further doth he recede from all earthly solace." And truly he who hath
boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows
trample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that other
way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,--the
way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without
grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with
the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment
and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter
to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before
the gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doing
righteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity here
or in the _Imitation_, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, and
only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.
And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to a
man's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levelling
human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were
possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and
know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the
harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until
we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as
Millet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with the
Hoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art
with noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who
respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the
disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.
LVIII
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always
rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least
he had to proclaim to the world,--the ancient imperishable truth that man
lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern
call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself
right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting
verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seems
to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform
and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by
presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were
really playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation of
riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief
obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that
attains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight of
judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the
virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a
false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of
personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end
certain decay.
LIX
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
_Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, and
it only remains now to see this labour of months--of years,
rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book,
in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I
have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any
great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the
message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring
too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After
all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend
Sydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and
choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee." I have tried
to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present
sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless
sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no
vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--that
for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly
sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I
have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid
one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and
brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make
noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved
had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our
hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (though
this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the
ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty
and high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, make
glad your heart!"
And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has
overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things
by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from
that _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and better
growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in
themselves.
LX
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which
has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed
me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking
unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a picture
by Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide look
of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn
than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event.
A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost
indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound
into the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a
little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens.
Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan
and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint
of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of
inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eye
to intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden world
had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I
stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary
expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad
window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing
vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure that
he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement
as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its
loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through
that act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austere
exultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that the
indignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him,
as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heart
of Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his,--to
wrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlasting
beauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yet
purged of trouble.
LXI
FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. It
seemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land--not
in wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau's picture, but in
some wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarely
through the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew that
somewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted lay
in an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through the
night. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime passed, and still I
sought and could not find her--only shadows met me and fantastic shapes
out of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, if
this long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and she
perish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be more
than I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: "Fear not,
beloved; be at peace until I come!" I think I must actually have called
out in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound still
ringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own misery
has lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine what
you too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to me
so incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on your
part has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood--can it
be that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your days
that has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while I
have sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of my
work, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused me
once of conscientious selfishness--have I made you a victim of that sin?
Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a sure
determination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that you
walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of
fresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspring
within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that
even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the
half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my
dream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that
somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad
this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of
my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace,
beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no
power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us
apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.
LXII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack.
But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine,
out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I
wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I
now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest
when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold
you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me
since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch.
But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to
become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to
this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a
Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a
Hottentot,--provided either were possible.
I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come
here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did
you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than
the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less
wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own
heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to
follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into
it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with
me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion,
burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite in
father's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all
his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is
deliverance.
But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,--submitting to a
paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love
often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a
redbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers in
heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it
shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear
illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know,
draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay
rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like
the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from
it.
And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage to
break my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a
"revelation," when he is about to construe life for me according to the
prayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble the
Christian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle,
and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, my
life is so near and kin to Pan's that my vision never goes far beyond the
green edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell your
fortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!--as near as you were
that day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in our
forest,--for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures of
Catullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too,
rather than ascetic.
I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the long
fairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our good
stars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you.
Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear you
swiftly upward and ever upward. But I--I cannot soar, I cannot breathe in
that silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness of
this long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of our
love--until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning was
when a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, which
was not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way into
the office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I can
remember she was in search of fame, and she found,--ah, dear Heart,--she
found both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to a
primitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my whole
experience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow you
lifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehended
me altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had a
judgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! I
was divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more natural
one to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, that
every woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day when
first you encompassed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all in
a moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you.
You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you were
really thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a small
winged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale.
All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year
with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life
before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown,
a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and
with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not know
for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilment
was before me.
After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart,
only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And
I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier
destiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some
limitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathen
fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of
you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters,
foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some
miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your
window sill.
This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you.
Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which you
assumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass in
philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention,
compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of
your "upper chamber." I resented that cold expression of your
spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings
against your high windows.
In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I
_knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange
altitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the
first assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me
free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird
with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect
peace,--the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And I
was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of
romance to reality.
But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the
beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that
his love is a sort of _fi. fa._, which he will some day serve upon her
heart.
Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you,
for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparent
diffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantage
over the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I to
know there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your classic pose?
Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth I
marched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have saved
myself if a thousand Blüchers had hurried to my defence. And there even
came a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing to
some perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will.
But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have come
so much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same brigand
determination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll you
two looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting your
welcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justify
poor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed so
ludicrously artificial,--as if you had somehow got an undeserved iota
subscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at such
a humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard,
uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien,
that the terror I had felt in anticipation of your visit vanished away. I
think the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be trying
to domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenly
that your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were less
formidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to the
walk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from your
enigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effort
to break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about something
and kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now and
then, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon the
issue at hand.... Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. The
world changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman in
it. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, I
could have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expression
of a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startled
me so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know how
sincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should be
captured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, I
could not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that old
Merlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorry
for me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terror
and shame against your breast. Philip, why does a woman always weep when
the first man kisses her the first time, no matter how glad she is? I hope
you do not know enough to answer this question. But I am sure every woman
does weep; and I think it is because she feels even in the midst of her
great happiness, an irremediable loss, for which nothing ever fully
atones.
But another question is, How could I, after being lost to you in this dear
way, turn my face from you at the command of a religious enthusiast? A
regard for father and not for his righteousness is the explanation; for I
felt more nearly right following my heart to you. But now, dear knight, I
am ready to forgive you the fault of assenting to such an unnatural
sacrifice, if only you will come and take me once more. At present I am a
sorry little vagabond, very much the worse for wear, owing to father's
efforts to sanctify me. But if you will only love me enough, I think I
could be Jessica again. And perhaps you have some more natural way of
sanctifying me yourself; for I doubt now if I shall ever see heaven unless
I may ascend through your portals.
Every day since our bereavement of each other, I have kept a tryst under
our big tree in the forest. At first this was a tender formality, a
memorial of a happiness that had passed. But after a time I began to have
a power of mental vision that was akin to communication. I came out of
myself to meet you somewhere in that mysterious world of silence to which
you seem to belong. There were hours when I felt absolutely certain of
your nearness, a tender peace enfolded me as warm as your arms are. And I
had the supreme satisfaction of having outwitted all father's powers and
principalities. Then came days when by no sweet incantation could I bring
myself near you. I wept upon my sod like one forsaken, and grieved the
more because I conceived that you must be far out of my regions in one of
your "upper chamber" moods, where all your faculties were concentrated
upon some merely philosophical proposition. I wonder now if you are
laughing! If you knew how I have suffered, you would not even smile. If
you knew how I have _needed_ to be kissed, you would make haste to come to
me.
I had been making these excursions into the forest for a long time before
I discovered that Jack was playing the part of eavesdropping guardian
angel. Do you know, by the way, what a quaint little ragamuffin
philosopher that child is? He has a shrewd sobriety, a steady watchfulness
over all about him, and he is endowed with a power of silent devotion that
is absolutely compelling. He has been such a comfort to me! and there is
no way of keeping him out of your confidence. He knows things by some
occult science of loving. Thus I was not offended one day when I looked up
from the shadows under my oak and saw him regarding me gravely, almost
compassionately, from behind a neighbouring tree. After this we had a
tacit understanding that he might play sentinel there when I came into the
forest.
See how much I have said, and still I have not told you the strangest part
of my story--the moonlit revelation of you to me. I am writing, writing,
to ease my heart until you come. And always as I write I listen for the
sound of your dear footsteps. For many successive days I had found our
trysting place a veritable desert. I seemed to have lost my heart's way to
you; and in proportion to my bewilderment, life became more and more
intolerable. I had the desperate sensation of one who is about to be lost
in a waste land, and I felt that I could not live through the frightful
loneliness of such an experience. Yesterday again I failed to find the
comfort of your occult presence when I went into the wood. I was filled
with consternation, and when the night came I lay tossing in a sleepless
fever. Unless I knew once more in my heart that you loved me, I felt that
I could no longer endure life. So I lay far into the night. At last in
desperation I arose from my bed, slipped on my shoes and the big cloak
that you will remember, and fled away to our tree in the forest, pursued
by a thousand shadows. For indeed I am usually afraid of the dark; it is
like a silence to me--your silence, Philip--and I fear it because I do not
know what it contains. But I had got one of father's wrestling-Jacob's
moods upon me by this time, and if Mahomet's mountain had come booming by
I should not have been deterred from my purpose. But do you know that
there is more life in a little forest when darkness falls than in a big
town? and that every living thing there recognises you as an intruder with
warning calls from tree to tree? I had not more than cast myself upon the
ground to sob out all my griefs to whatever gods would listen, when a
sleepy little robin just overhead called up to his mistress the tone of my
trouble. The young leaves whispered it, the boughs swept low about me, and
the winds carried messages of it away into the heavens, so that suddenly
the whole night knew of my woe and pitied me.
I know not how long I lay there staring up at the blue abyss of stars
through the grizzly shades of night. I only know that my face was wet with
tears and that I seemed to tremble upon the brink of a long life's
despair. And oh! Philip I never _loved_ you so,--not only with my heart
and lips, but with my soul. And it was my soul that went out in a prayer
to you to come. I remembered not only the dear ways you have of folding me
into your arms and making me surpassingly happy, so against my own will,
but I remembered the silent young sage in his upper chamber, and I felt
that indeed it was to this esoteric personality that I must pray for
help.
And so I gave my soul away to the sweet silence, and waited. The moonlight
falling down through an open space made a cataract of tremulous
brightness. It edged all the shadows with a silver whiteness, as of wings
hidden.
And then suddenly there came to me out of the far abyss above my trees a
message, a sweet assurance. Oh, I know not how to call to it, only I felt
the nearness of my love. And I was afraid, my darling, and closed my eyes
lest I should _see_ you. And then, oh, Philip, I felt, I am sure I felt
your face close to mine, and in my ears a low whisper breathed like the
passing of the breeze, a voice saying: "Fear not, beloved; be at peace
until I come!" And I knew then that you loved me and had not forsaken me
altogether.
And when at last I raised my eyes, I became aware of the fact that I was
still not alone; and peering through the dim spaces about me I beheld
_Jack_ sitting hunched up on the root of his tree like a small toad of
fidelity! The little owl sprite in him never quite slumbers, I think; and
seeing me leave the parsonage, he had crept out and followed bravely after
through the shadows. But the picture he made now startled me into a peal
of laughter.
"You are the lady in the story that was lost," said Jack, with the solemn
intonation of one who has himself received a revelation.
"Yes," I confessed softly.
"But will the knight come to find you?"
"I hope so; I think he is coming now, dear Jack."
"Well damn him if he don't!" was the little wretch's impious comment. I
always suspected him capable of using strong language, but this was the
first time we had met upon a sufficiently intimate basis of friendship for
him to exploit it.
And now, Philip, that is all until you come. But hasten, my beloved! I am
already aged with this long waiting for you. Do not ask me about father.
He is a good shepherd, but I am a small black sheep determined not to be
made white according to his plan. And he has come to that place where he
would be ready to take even you as an under-shepherd of this factious ewe
lamb. Besides, could we not make a providential offering of Jack, as
Abraham did of the goat when he was about to slay Isaac? Jack, I think,
has a heavenly wit withal, and could adjust the little prayer light of his
soul even to father's high altar mind. As for me, I cannot conceive of
life alone without you one whole day longer. Indeed, so strong is my
premonition of your approach, that even now I listen for the sound of your
footsteps upon the gravel outside.
THE END
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