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Title: The Kempton-Wace Letters
Author: Jack London
Anna Strunsky
Release Date: February 27, 2010 [EBook #31422]
Language: English
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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
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* * * * *
THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
BY
JACK LONDON
AND
ANNA STRUNSKY
"_And of naught else than Love would we
discourse._"--DANTE, Sonnet II.
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED 49 RUPERT STREET LONDON, W.1
_Copyright in the United States of America, 1903, by the Macmillan
Company Printed in Great Britain by Love & Malcomson Ltd. London and
Redhill._
KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
I
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3 A QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
August 14, 19--.
Yesterday I wrote formally, rising to the occasion like the conventional
happy father rather than the man who believes in the miracle and lives
for it. Yesterday I stinted myself. I took you in my arms, glad of what
is and stately with respect for the fulness of your manhood. It is
to-day that I let myself leap into yours in a passion of joy. I dwell on
what has come to pass and inflate myself with pride in your fulfilment,
more as a mother would, I think, and she your mother.
But why did you not write before? After all, the great event was not
when you found your offer of marriage accepted, but when you found you
had fallen in love. Then was your hour. Then was the time for
congratulation, when the call was first sounded and the reveille of Time
and About fell upon your soul and the march to another's destiny was
begun. It is always more important to love than to be loved. I wish it
had been vouchsafed me to be by when your spirit of a sudden grew
willing to bestow itself without question or let or hope of return, when
the self broke up and you grew fain to beat out your strength in praise
and service for the woman who was soaring high in the blue wastes. You
have known her long, and you must have been hers long, yet no word of
her and of your love reached me. It was not kind to be silent.
Barbara spoke yesterday of your fastidiousness, and we told each other
that you had gained a triumph of happiness in your love, for you are not
of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the
heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we
are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we
can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know
that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped
out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I
have ever been? Do you know that because you love a woman and she loves
you, and that because you are swept along by certain forces, that I am
happy and feel myself in sight of my portion of immortality on earth,
far more than because of my books, dear lad, far more?
I wish I could fly England and get to you. Should I have a shade less of
you than formerly, if we were together now? From your too much green of
wealth, a barrenness of friendship? It does not matter; what is her gain
cannot be my loss. One power is mine,--without hindrance, in freedom and
in right, to say to Ellen's son, "Godspeed!" to place Hester Stebbins's
hand in his, and bid them forth to the sunrise, into the glory of day!
Ever your devoted father,
DANE KEMPTON.
II
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
September 3, 19--.
Here I am, back in the old quarters once more, with the old afternoon
climb across the campus and up into the sky, up to the old rooms, the
old books, and the old view. You poor fog-begirt Dane Kempton, could you
but have lounged with me on the window couch, an hour past, and watched
the light pass out of the day through the Golden Gate and the night
creep over the Berkeley Hills and down out of the east! Why should you
linger on there in London town! We grow away from each other, it
seems--you with your wonder-singing, I with my joyful science.
Poesy and economics! Alack! alack! How did I escape you, Dane, when mind
and mood you mastered me? The auguries were fair. I, too, should have
been a singer, and lo, I strive for science. All my boyhood was singing,
what of you; and my father was a singer, too, in his own fine way. Dear
to me is your likening of him to Waring.--"What's become of Waring?" He
_was_ Waring. I can think of him only as one who went away, "chose land
travel or seafaring."
Gwynne says I am sometimes almost a poet--Gwynne, you know, Arthur
Gwynne, who has come to live with me at The Ridge. "If it were not for
your dismal science," he is sure to add; and to fire him I lay it to the
defects of early training. I know he thinks that I never half
appreciated you, and that I do not appreciate you now. If you will
recollect, you praised his verses once. He cherishes that praise amongst
his sweetest treasures. Poor dear good old Gwynne, tender, sensitive,
shrinking, with the face of a seraph and the heart of a maid. Never were
two men more incongruously companioned. I love him for himself. He
tolerates me, I do secretly believe, because of you. He longs to meet
you,--he knew you well through my father,--and we often talk you over.
Be sure at every opportunity I tear off your halo and trundle it about.
Trust me, you receive scant courtesy.
How I wander on. My pen is unruly after the long vacation; my thought
yet wayward, what of the fever of successful wooing. And besides, ...
how shall I say?... such was the gracious warmth of your letter, of both
your letters, that I am at a loss. I feel weak, inadequate. It almost
seems as though you had made a demand upon something that is not in me.
Ah, you poets! It would seem your delight in my marriage were greater
than mine. In my present mood, it is you who are young, you who love; I
who have lived and am old.
Yes, I am going to be married. At this present moment, I doubt not, a
million men and women are saying the same thing. Hewers of wood and
drawers of water, princes and potentates, shy-shrinking maidens and
brazen-faced hussies, all saying, "I am going to be married." And all
looking forward to it as a crisis in their lives? No. After all,
marriage is the way of the world. Considered biologically, it is an
institution necessary for the perpetuation of the species. Why should it
be a crisis? These million men and women will marry, and the work of
the world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about, and the work
of the world would yet go on.
True, a month ago it did seem a crisis. I wrote you as much. It did seem
a disturbing element in my life-work. One cannot view with equanimity
that which appears to be totally disruptive of one's dear little system
of living. But it only appeared so; I lacked perspective, that was all.
As I look upon it now, everything fits well and all will run smoothly I
am sure.
You know I had two years yet to work for my Doctorate. I still have
them. As you see, I am back to the old quarters, settled down in the old
groove, hammering away at the old grind. Nothing is changed. And besides
my own studies, I have taken up an assistant instructorship in the
Department of Economics. It is an ambitious course, and an important
one. I don't know how they ever came to confide it to me, or how I found
the temerity to attempt it,--which is neither here nor there. It is all
agreed. Hester is a sensible girl.
The engagement is to be long. I shall continue my career as charted. Two
years from now, when I shall have become a Doctor of Social Sciences
(and candidate for numerous other things), I shall also become a
benedict. My marriage and the presumably necessary honeymoon chime in
with the summer vacation. There is no disturbing element even there. Oh,
we are very practical, Hester and I. And we are both strong enough to
lead each our own lives.
Which reminds me that you have not asked about her. First, let me shock
you--she, too, is a scientist. It was in my undergraduate days that we
met, and ere the half-hour struck we were quarrelling felicitously over
Weismann and the neo-Darwinians. I was at Berkeley at the time, a
cocksure junior; and she, far maturer as a freshman, was at Stanford,
carrying more culture with her into her university than is given the
average student to carry out.
Next, and here your arms open to her, she is a poet. Pre-eminently she
is a poet--this must be always understood. She is the greater poet, I
take it, in this dawning twentieth century, because she is a scientist;
not in spite of being a scientist as some would hold. How shall I
describe her? Perhaps as a George Eliot, fused with an Elizabeth
Barrett, with a hint of Huxley and a trace of Keats. I may say she is
something like all this, but I must say she is something other and
different. There is about her a certain lightsomeness, a glow or flash
almost Latin or oriental, or perhaps Celtic. Yes, that must be
it--Celtic. But the high-stomached Norman is there and the stubborn
Saxon. Her quickness and fine audacity are checked and poised, as it
were, by that certain conservatism which gives stability to purpose and
power to achievement. She is unafraid, and wide-looking and far-looking,
but she is not over-looking. The Saxon grapples with the Celt, and the
Norman forces the twain to do what the one would not dream of doing and
what the other would dream beyond and never do. Do you catch me? Her
most salient charm, is I think, her perfect poise, her exquisite
adjustment.
Altogether she is a most wonderful woman, take my word for it. And after
all she is described vicariously. Though she has published nothing and
is exceeding shy, I shall send you some of her work. There will you find
and know her. She is waiting for stronger voice and sings softly as yet.
But hers will be no minor note, no middle flight. She is--well, she is
Hester. In two years we shall be married. Two years, Dane. Surely you
will be with us.
One thing more; in your letter a certain undertone which I could not
fail to detect. A shade less of me than formerly?--I turn and look into
your face--Waring's handiwork you remember--his painter's fancy of you
in those golden days when I stood on the brink of the world, and you
showed me the delights of the world and the way of my feet therein. So I
turn and look, and look and wonder. _A shade less_ of me, of you? Poesy
and economics! Where lies the blame?
HERBERT.
III
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
September 30, 19--.
It is because you know not what you do that I cannot forgive you. Could
you know that your letter with its catalogue of advantages and
arrangements must offend me as much as it belies (let us hope) you and
the woman of your love, I would pardon the affront of it upon us all,
and ascribe the unseemly want of warmth to reserve or to the sadness
which grips the heart when joy is too palpitant. But something warns me
that you are unaware of the chill your words breathe, and that is a
lapse which it is impossible to meet with indulgence.
"He does not love her," was Barbara's quick decision, and she laid the
open letter down with a definiteness which said that you, too, are laid
out and laid low. Your sister's very wrists can be articulate. However,
I laughed at her and she soon joined me. We do not mean to be
extravagant with our fears. Who shall prescribe the letters of lovers to
their sisters and foster-fathers? Yet there are some things their
letters should be incapable of saying, and amongst them that love is not
a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit
or miss affair which "shuffling" could not affect.
Barbara showed me your note to her. "Had I written like this of myself
and Earl--"
"You could not," I objected.
"Then Herbert should have been as little able to do it," she deduced
with emphasis. Here I might have told her that men and women are races
apart, but no one talks cant to Barbara. So I did not console her, and
it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you
have baffled us with coldness.
An absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must
work changes. When Barbara called your letter unnatural, she forgot how
little she knows what is natural to you. She and I have been wont to
predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by--say by the
fact that you knew your Wordsworth and that you knew him without being
able to take for yourself his austere peace. Youth which lives by hope
is riven by unrest.
"I made no vows; vows were made for me,
Bond unknown to me was given
That I should be, else sinning gently,
A dedicated spirit."
That pale sunrise seen from Mt. Tamalpais and your voice vibrant to
fierceness on the "else sinning gently"--to me the splendour of rose on
piled-up ridges of mist spoke all for you, so dear have you always been.
It rested on the possible wonder of your life. It threw you into the
scintillant Dawn with an abandon meet to a son of Waring.
Tell me, do you still read your Wordsworth on your knees? I am bent with
regret for the time when your mind had no surprises for me, when the
days were flushed halcyon with my hope in you. I resent your development
if it is because of it that you speak prosaically of a prosaic marriage
and of a honeymoon simultaneous with the Degree. I think you are too
well pleased with the simultaneousness.
Yet the fact of the letter is fair. It cannot be that the soul of it is
not. Hester Stebbins is a poet. I lean forward and think it out as I
did some days ago when the news came. I conjure up the look of love. If
the woman is content (how much more than content the feeling she bounds
with in knowing you hers as she is yours), what better test that all is
well? I conjure up the look of love. It is thus at meeting and thus at
parting. Even here, to-night, when all is chill and hard to understand,
I catch the flash and the warmth, and what I see restores you to me, but
how deep the plummet of my mind needed to sound before it reached you.
It is because you permitted yourself to speak when silence had expressed
you better.
Show me the ideally real Hester Stebbins, the spark of fire which is
she. The storms have not broken over her head. She will laugh and make
poetry of her laughter. If before she met you she wept, that, too, will
help the smiling. There is laughter which is the echo of a Miserere
sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile
cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and
they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a
widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved.
The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in
quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots
by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing in
life.
Hester shall laugh because she is glad and must tell her joy, and she
will not lose it in the telling. Greet her for me and hasten to prove
yourself, for
"The Poet, gentle creature that he is,
Hath like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts."
You will judge by this letter that I am neither sick nor well, and that
I reach for a distress which is not near. If I were Merchant rather than
Poet, it would be otherwise with me.
DANE.
IV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
October 27, 19--.
Do I still read my Wordsworth on my knees? Well, we may as well have it
out. I have foreseen this day so long and shunned it that now I meet it
almost with extended hands. No, I do not read my Wordsworth on my knees.
My mind is filled with other things. I have not the time. I am not the
Herbert Wace of six years gone. It is fair that you should know this;
fair, also, that you should know the Herbert Wace of six years gone was
not quite the lad you deemed him.
There is no more pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love.
Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before
that, I felt and resented the growing difference between us. When under
your spell, it seemed that I was born to lisp in numbers and devote
myself to singing, that the world was good and all of it fit for
singing. But away from you, even then, doubts faced me, and I knew in
vague fashion that we lived in different worlds. At first in vague
fashion, I say; and when with you again, your spell dominated me and I
could not question. You were true, you were good, I argued, all that was
wonderful and glorious; therefore, you were also right. You mastered me
with your charm, as you were wont to master those who loved you.
But there came times when your sympathy failed me and I stood alone on
outlooks I had achieved alone. There was no response from you. I could
not hear your voice. I looked down upon a real world; you were caught up
in a beautiful cloudland and shut away from me. Possibly it was because
life of itself appealed to you, while to me appealed the mechanics of
life. But be it as it may, yours was a world of ideas and fancies, mine
a world of things and facts.
Enters here the prejudice of love. It was the lad that discovered our
difference and concealed; it was the man who was blind and could not
discover. There we erred, man and boy; and here, both men now, we make
all well again.
Let me be explicit. Do you remember the passion with which I read the
"Intellectual Development of Europe?" I understood not the tithe of it,
but I was thrilled. My common sense was thrilled, I suppose; but it was
all very joyous, gripping hold of the tangible world for the first time.
And when I came to you, warm with the glow of adventure, you looked
blankly, then smiled indulgently and did not answer. You regarded my
ardour complacently. A passing humour of adolescence, you thought; and I
thought: "Dane does not read his Draper on his knees." Wordsworth was
great to me; Draper was great also. You had no patience with him, and I
know now, as I felt then, your consistent revolt against his
materialistic philosophy.
Only the other day you complained of a letter of mine, calling it cold
and analytical. That I should be cold and analytical despite all the
prodding and pressing and moulding I have received at your hands, and
the hands of Waring, marks only more clearly our temperamental
difference; but it does not mark that one or the other of us is less a
dedicated spirit. If I have wandered away from the warmth of poesy and
become practical, have you not remained and become confirmed in all that
is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of
common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and
impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day,
have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire of yesterday?
Ah, Dane, you cannot rekindle that fire. The whirl of the world scatters
its ashes wide and far, like volcanic dust, to make beautiful crimson
sunsets for a time and then to vanish.
None the less are you a dedicated spirit, priest that you are of a dying
faith. Your prayers are futile, your altars crumbling, and the light
flickers and drops down into night. Poetry is empty these days, empty
and worthless and dead. All the old-world epic and lyric-singing will
not put this very miserable earth of ours to rights. So long as the
singers sing of the things of yesterday, glorifying the things of
yesterday and lamenting their departure, so long will poetry be a vain
thing and without avail. The old world is dead, dead and buried along
with its heroes and Helens and knights and ladies and tournaments and
pageants. You cannot sing of the truth and wonder of to-day in terms of
yesterday. And no one will listen to your singing till you sing of
to-day in terms of to-day.
This is the day of the common man. Do you glorify the common man? This
is the day of the machine. When have you sung of the machine? The
crusades are here again, not the Crusades of Christ but the Crusades of
the Machine--have you found motive in them for your song? We are
crusading to-day, not for the remission of sins, but for the abolition
of sinning, of economic and industrial sinning. The crusade to Christ's
sepulchre was paltry compared with the splendour and might of our
crusade to-day toward manhood. There are millions of us afoot. In the
stillness of the night have you never listened to the trampling of our
feet and been caught up by the glory and the romance of it? Oh, Dane!
Dane! Our captains sit in council, our heroes take the field, our
fighting men are buckling on their harness, our martyrs have already
died, and you are blind to it, blind to it all!
We have no poets these days, and perforce we are singing with our hands.
The walking delegate is a greater singer and a finer singer than you,
Dane Kempton. The cold, analytical economist, delving in the dynamics
of society, is more the prophet than you. The carpenter at his bench,
the blacksmith by his forge, the boiler-maker clanging and clattering,
are all warbling more sweetly than you. The sledge-wielder pours out
more strength and certitude and joy in every blow than do you in your
whole sheaf of songs. Why, the very socialist agitator, hustled by the
police on a street corner amid the jeers of the mob, has caught the
romance of to-day as you have not caught it and where you have missed
it. He knows life and is living. Are you living, Dane Kempton?
Forgive me. I had begun to explain and reconcile our difference. I find
I am lecturing and censuring you. In defending myself, I offend. But
this I wish to say: We are so made, you and I, that your function in
life is to dream, mine to work. That you failed to make a dreamer of me
is no cause for heartache and chagrin. What of my practical nature and
analytical mind, I have generalised in my own way upon the data of life
and achieved a different code from yours. Yet I seek truth as
passionately as you. I still believe myself to be a dedicated spirit.
And what boots it, all of it? When the last word is said, we are two
men, by a thousand ties very dear to each other. There is room in our
hearts for each other as there is room in the world for both of us.
Though we have many things not in common, yet you are my dearest friend
on earth, you who have been a second father to me as well.
You have long merited this explanation, and it was cowardly of me not to
have made it before. My hope is that I have been sufficiently clear for
you to understand.
HERBERT.
V
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3 A QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
November 16, 19--.
You sigh "Poesy and Economics," supplying the cause and thereby
admitting the fact. I wish you had shown some reluctance to see my
meaning, that you had preferred to waive the matter on the ground of
insufficient data, that you had been less eager to ferret out the
science of the thing. Do you remember how your boy's respect rose for
little Barbara whenever she cried when too readily forgiven? "She dreads
a double standard," you explained to me with generous heat. You
sympathised with her fear lest I demand less of her than of you,
honouring her insistence on an equality of duty as well as of privilege.
Is the man Herbert less proud than the child Barbara, that you speak of
a temperamental difference and ask for a special dispensation?
You are not in love (this you say in not gainsaying my attack on you,
and so far I understand), because you are a student of Economics. At the
last I stop. What is this about economics and poesy? About your
emancipation from my riotously lyric sway? The hand of the forces by
which you have been moulded cannot detain you from going out upon the
love-quest. The fact of your preference for Draper cannot forestall your
spirit's need of love. There are many codes, but there is one law,
binding alike on the economist and poet. It springs out of the common
and unappeasable hunger, commanding that love seek love through night to
day and through day to night.
Yet it is possible to put oneself outside the pale of the law, to refuse
the gift of life and snap the tie between time and space and creature.
It is possible to be too emaciated for interest or feeling. The men and
women of the People know neither love nor art because they are too
weary. They lie in sleep prostrate from great fatigue. Their bodies are
too much tried with the hungers of the body and their spirits too dimly
illumined with the hope of fair chances. It is also possible to fill
oneself so full with an interest that all else is crowded out. You have
done this. Like the cobbler who is a cobbler typically, the teacher who
is a pedagogue, the physician and the lawyer who are pathologists
merely, you are a fanatic of a text. You are in the toils of an idea,
the idea of selection, as I well know, and you exploit it like a drudge.
When a man finds that he cannot deal in petroleum without smelling of
it, it is time that he turn to something else. Every man is engaged in
the cause of keeping himself whole, in watching himself lest his man
turn machine, in watching lest the outside world assail the inner.
Nature spares the type, but the individual must spare himself. He is
strong who is sensitive and who responds subtly to everything in his
environment, but his response must be characteristic; he must sustain
his personality and become more himself through the years. He alone is
vital in the social scheme who lets nothing in him atrophy and who
persists in being varied from all others in the scale of character to
the degree of variability that was his at the beginning.
I read in your letter nothing but a decision to stop short and give
over, as if you had strength for no more than your book and your
theory! You have become slave to a small point of inquiry, and you call
it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation
rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand
out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain
that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders
"Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything
that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the
young thought preaching if it is not the right of men to their own, and
what would it avail them to come into their own if life be stripped of
romance?
I am dissatisfied because you are willing to live as others must live.
You should stay aristocrat. Ferdinand Lassalle dressed with elegance for
his working-men audiences, with the hope, he said, of reminding them
that there was something better than their shabbiness. You are of the
favoured, Herbert. It devolves upon you to endear your life to yourself.
You do not agree with me. You do not believe that love is the law which
controls freedom and life. Slave to your theory and rebel to the law,
you lose your soul and imperil another's.
"Gently! Gently!" I say to myself. Old sorrows and wrongs oppress me
and I grow harsh. My heat only helps to convince you that my position is
not based on the _rational rightness_ you hold so essential and that
therefore it is unlivable. I will state calmly, then, that it is wrong
to marry without love. "For the perpetuation of the species"--that is
noble of you! So you strip yourself of the thousand years of
civilisation that have fostered you, you abandon your prerogative as a
creature high in the scale of existence to obey an instinct and fulfil a
function? You say: "These men and women will marry, and the work of the
world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about and the work of
the world would yet go on." And you are content. You feel no need of
anything different from this condition.
Believe me, Herbert, these million men and women will not let you
shuffle them about. There are forces stronger than force, shadows more
real than reality. We know that the need of the unhungered for the one
friend, one comrade, one mate, is good. We honour the love that persists
in loving. More beautiful than starlight is the face of the lover when
the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the
worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance
(which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl
close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her
sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the
hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for
Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, what for him in the motion of waters? You
cannot explain the bloom, the charm, the smile of life, that which rains
sunshine into our hearts, which tells us we are wise to hope and to have
faith, which buckles on us an armour of activity, which lights the fires
of the spirit, which gives us Godhead and renders us indomitable.
Comparative anatomy cannot reason it down. It is sensibility, romance,
idea. It is a fact of life toward which all other facts make. For the
flush of rose-light in the heavens, the touch of a hand, the colour and
shape of fruit, the tears that come for unnamed sorrows, the regrets of
old men, are more significant than all the building and inventing done
since the first social compact.
Forgive my tediousness. I have flaunted these truisms before you in
order to exorcise that modern slang of yours which is more false than
the overstrained forms of a feudal France. To shut out glory is not to
be practical. You are not adjusting your life artistically; there is too
much strain, too little warmth, too much self-complacence. I see that
you are really younger than I thought. The world never censures the
crimes of the spirit. You are safe from the world's tongue lashings, and
in that safety is the danger against which my friendship warns you.
I have been reading Hester's poems, and I know that she is like them,
nervous, vibrant, throbbing, sensitive. I have been reading your
letters, and I think her soul will escape yours. If you have not love
like hers, you have nothing with which to keep her. This I have
undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am
the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock
measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat
unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about
making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for
it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the
blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe.
Your sister keeps me strong with the faith of love. May God be good to
her! It was five years ago that she came to me and whispered, "Earl."
When she saw I could not turn to her in joy, she leaned her little head
back against the roses of the porch and wept, more than was right, I
fear, for a girl just betrothed. Earl was a cripple and poor and
helpless, but Barbara knew better than we, for she knew how to give
herself. Poor little one, whom nobody congratulated! She sends you and
Hester her love, unfolding you both in her eager tenderness.
DANE.
VI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
November 19, 19--.
Metaphysics is contagious. I caught it from Barbara, and I cannot resist
the impulse to pass it on, and to you of all others.
The mood leapt upon Barbara out of the pages of "Katia," a story by
Tolstoy. To my mind, it is a painful tale of lovers who outlive their
love, killing it with their own hands, but the author means it to be a
happily ending novel. Tolstoy attempts to show that men and women can
find happiness only when they grow content to give over seeking love
from one another. They may keep the memory but must banish the hope.
"Hereafter, think of me only as the father of your children," and the
woman who had pined for that which had been theirs in the beginning of
their union weeps softly, and agrees. Tolstoy calls this peace, but for
Barbara and me this gain is loss, this end an end indeed, replete with
all the tragedy of ending.
I found Barbara to-day on the last page of "Katia," and much disturbed.
"Dear, I saw a spirit break," she said. I waited before asking whose,
and when I did, she answered, "That of three-quarters of the world. The
ghost of a Dream walked to-day--when after the spirit broke, I saw
it--and myself and my Earl vanished in shadow. We and our love thinned
away before the thought-shape."
"Your dreaming, Barbara, can scarce be better than your living."
We looked long at each other. She knew herself a happy woman, yet to-day
the ghost had walked in the light, and her eyes were not held, and she
saw. Even her life was not sufficient, even her plans were paltry, even
her heart's love was cramped. Such times of seeing come to happy men and
to happy women. Barbara was reading the opinions of the world and the
acceptances of the world, and in disliking them she came to doubt
herself. Perhaps she, too, should be less at peace, she too may be
amongst Pharisees a Pharisee.
"In the midst of the breaking of spirit, how can I know?" she demanded.
"Love is sure," I prompted, my hand on her forehead. "Earl and I are
sure, dear," she laughed low, and a drift of sobbing swept through the
music; "it is not that we are in doubt about ourselves, but sometimes,
like to-day, you understand, one finds oneself bitten by the sharp tooth
of the world, and a despair courses through the veins and blinds the
eyes, and then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, comes a great
visioning."
I heard her and understood, and my heart leapt as it had not done for
long. Think of it, Herbert, fifty-three and still young! When was it
that I last fluttered with joy? Ah, yes, that time the summer and the
woods had a great deal to do with it, and a few words spoken by a boy. I
think Barbara's majesty of attainment through vicarious breaking of
spirit a greater cause for rejoicing.
_And then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, came a great visioning._
When pain is good and to be thanked for, how good life is! By this alone
may you know the proportion and the value of the good of being.
Three-quarters of the world are broken spirited, but from out the
wreckage a thought-shape, and it is well. The Vision fastens upon us,
and what was full seems shrunken, what whole and of all time a passing
bit, an untraceable flash. And that is well, for the dream recalls the
hope, and the heart grows hardy with hoping and dreaming.
So Barbara.
And you? You do not repine because of these things. Let the Grand Mujik
mutter a thousand heresies, let three-quarters of the world accept and
live them, you would not think the unaspiring three-quarters
broken-spirited. You would hail them right practical. And if you held a
thought as firmly as your sister holds the thought of love, and you
found yourself alone in your esteem of it, you would part from it and go
over to the others. You would not be the fanatic your sister is, to stay
so much the closer by it that of necessity she must doubt her own
allegiance, fearing in her devotion that, without knowing it, she, too,
is cold and but half alive. You would not see visions that would put
your best to shame. The thought-shape of the more you could be, were you
and the whole world finer and greater, would not walk before you. You
would rest content and assured, and--I regret your assurance.
Always yours,
DANE KEMPTON.
VII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
December 6, 19--.
No, I am not in love. I am very thankful that I am not. I pride myself
on the fact. As you say, I may not be adjusting my life artistically to
its environment (there is room for discussion there), but I do know that
I am adjusting it scientifically. I am arranging my life so that I may
get the most out of it, while the one thing to disorder it, worse than
flood and fire and the public enemy, is love.
I have told you, from time to time, of my book. I have decided to call
it "The Economic Man." I am going over the proofs now, and my brain is
in perfect working order. On the other hand, there is Professor Bidwell,
who is likewise correcting proofs. Poor devil, he is in despair. He can
do nothing with them. "I positively cannot think," he complains to me,
his hair rumpled and face flushed. He did not answer my knock the other
day, and I came upon him with the neglected proofs under his elbows and
his absent gaze directed through window and out of doors to some rosy
cloudland beyond my ken. "It will be a failure, I know it will," he
growled to me. "My brain is dull. It refuses to act. I cannot imagine
what has come over me." But I could imagine very easily. He is in love
(madly in love with what I take to be a very ordinary sort of girl), and
expects shortly to be married. "Postpone the book for a time," I
suggested. He looked at me for a moment, then brought his fist down on
the general disarray with a thumping "I will!" And take my word for it,
Dane, a year hence, when the very ordinary girl greets him with the
matronly kiss and his fever and folly have left him, he will take up the
book and make a success of it.
Of course I am not in love. I have just come back from Hester--I ran
down Saturday to Stanford and stopped over Sunday. Time did not pass
tediously on the train. I did not look at my watch every other minute. I
read the morning papers with interest and without impatience. The
scenery was charming and I was unaware of the slightest hurry to reach
my destination. I remember noting, when I came up the gravel walk
between the rose-bushes, that my heart was not in my mouth as it should
have been according to convention. In fact, the sun was uncomfortable,
and I mopped my brow and decided that the roses stood in need of
trimming. And really, you know, I had seen brighter days, and fairer
views, and the world in more beautiful moods.
And when Hester stood on the veranda and held out her hands, my heart
did not leap as though it were going to part company with me. Nor was I
dizzy with--rapture, I believe. Nor did all the world vanish, and
everything blot out, and leave only Hester standing there, lips curved
and arms outstretched in welcome. Oh, I saw the curved lips and
outstretched arms, and all the splendid young womanhood swaying there,
and I was pleased and all that; but I did not think it too wonderful and
impossible and miraculous and the rest of the fond rubbish I am sure
poor Bidwell thinks when his eyes are gladdened by his ordinary sort of
girl when he calls upon her.
What a comely young woman, is what I thought as I pressed Hester's
hands; and none of the ordinary sort either. She has health and strength
and beauty and youth, and she will certainly make a most charming wife
and excellent mother. Thus I thought, and then we chatted, had lunch,
and passed a delightful afternoon together--an afternoon such as I might
pass with you, or any good comrade, or with my wife.
All of which rational rightness is, I know, distasteful to you, Dane.
And I confess I depict it with brutal frankness, failing to give credit
to the gentler, tenderer side of me. Believe me, I am very fond of
Hester. I respect and admire her. I am proud of her, too, and proud of
myself that so fine a creature should find enough in me to be willing to
mate with me. It will be a happy marriage. There is nothing cramped or
narrow or incompatible about it. We know each other well--a wisdom that
is acquired by lovers only after marriage, and even then with the
likelihood of it being a painful wisdom. We, on the other hand, are not
blinded by love madness, and we see clearly and sanely and are confident
of our ability to live out the years together.
HERBERT.
VIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
December 11, 19--.
I have been thinking about your romance and my rational rightness, and
so this letter.
"_One loves because he loves: this explanation is, as yet, the most
serious and most decisive that has been found for the solution of this
problem._" I do not know who has said this, but it might well have been
you. And you might well say with Mlle. de Scudéri: "_Love is--I know not
what: which comes--I know not when: which is formed--I know not how:
which enchants--I know not by what: and which ends--I know not when or
why_."
You explain love by asserting that it is not to be explained. And
therein lies our difference. You accept results; I search for causes.
You stop at the gate of the mystery, worshipful and content. I go on and
through, flinging the gate wide and formulating the law of the mystery
which is a mystery no longer. It is our way. You worship the idea; I
believe in the fact. If the stone fall, the wind blow, the grass and
green things sprout; if the inorganic be vitalised, and take on
sensibility, and perform functions, and die; if there be passions and
pains, dreams and ambitions, flickerings of infinity and glimmerings of
Godhead--it is for you to be smitten with the wonder of it and to
memorialise it in pretty song, while for me remains to classify it as so
much related phenomena, so much play and interplay of force and matter
in obedience to ascertainable law.
There are two kinds of men: the wonderers and the doers; the feelers and
the thinkers; the emotionals and the intellectuals. You take an
emotional delight in living; I an intellectual delight. You feel a thing
to be beautiful and joyful; I seek to know why it is beautiful and
joyful. You are content that it is, no matter how it came to be; I, when
I have learned why, strive that we may have more beautiful and joyful
things. "The bloom, the charm, the smile of life" is all too wonderful
for you to know; to me it is chiefly wonderful because I may know.
Oh, well, it is an ancient quarrel which neither you nor I shall
outlive. I am rational, you are romantic,--that is all there is to it.
You are more beautiful; I am more useful; and though you will not see it
and will never be able to see it, you and your beauty rest on me. I came
into the world before you, and I made the way for you. I was a hunter of
beasts and a fighter of men. I discovered fire and covered my nakedness
with the skins of animals. I builded cunning traps, and wove branches
and long grasses and rushes and reeds into the thatch and roof-tree. I
fashioned arrows and spears of bone and flint. I drew iron from the
earth, and broke the first ground, and planted the first seed. I gave
law and order to the tribe and taught it to fight with craft and wisdom.
I enabled the young men to grow strong and lusty, and the women to find
favour with them; and I gave safety to the women when their progeny came
forth, and safety to the progeny while it gathered strength and years.
I did many things. Out of my blood and sweat and toil I made it possible
that all men need not all the time hunt and fish and fight. The muscle
and brain of every man were no longer called to satisfy the belly need.
And then, when of my blood and sweat and toil I had made room, you came,
high priest of mystery and things unknowable, singer of songs and seer
of visions.
And I did you honour, and gave you place by feast and fire. And of the
meat I gave you the tenderest, and of the furs the softest. Need I say
that of women you took the fairest? And you sang of the souls of dead
men and of immortality, of the hidden things, and of the wonder; you
sang of voices whispering down the wind, of the secrets of light and
darkness, and the ripple of running fountains. You told of the powers
that pulsed the tides, swept the sun across the firmaments, and held the
stars in their courses. Ay, and you scaled the sky and created for me
the hierarchy of heaven.
These things you did, Dane; but it was I who made you, and fed you, and
protected you. While you dreamed and sang, I laboured sore. And when
danger came, and there was a cry in the night, and women and children
huddling in fear, and strong men broken, and blare of trumpets and cry
of battle at the outer gate--you fled to your altars and called vainly
on your phantoms of earth and sea and sky. And I? I girded my loins,
and strapped my harness on, and smote in the fighting line; and died,
perchance, that you and the women and children might live.
And in times of peace you throve and waxed fat. But only by our brain
and blood did we men of the fighting line make possible those times of
peace. And when you throve, you looked about you and saw the beauty of
the world and fancied yet greater beauty. And because of me your fancy
became fact, and marvels arose in stone and bronze and costly wood.
And while your brows were bright, and you visioned things of the spirit,
and rose above time and space to probe eternity, I concerned myself with
the work of head and hand. I employed myself with the mastery of matter.
I studied the times and seasons and the crops, and made the earth
fruitful. I builded roads and bridges and moles, and won the secrets of
metals and virtues of the elements. Bit by bit, and with great travail,
I have conquered and enslaved the blind forces. I builded ships and
ventured the sea, and beyond the baths of sunset found new lands. I
conquered peoples, and organised nations and knit empires, and gave
periods of peace to vast territories.
And the arts of peace flourished, and you multiplied yourself in divers
ways. You were priest and singer and dancer and musician. You expressed
your fancies in colours and metals and marbles. You wrote epics and
lyrics--ay, as you to-day write lyrics, Dane Kempton. And I multiplied
myself. I kept hunger afar off, and fire and sword from your habitation,
and the bondsmen in obedience under you. I solved methods of government
and invented systems of jurisprudence. Out of my toil sprang forms and
institutions. You sang of them and were the slave of them, but I was the
maker of them and the changer of them.
You worshipped at the shrine of the idea. I sought the fact and the law
behind the fact. I was the worker and maker and liberator. You were
conventional. Tradition bound you. You were full bellied and content,
and you sang of the things that were. You were mastered by dogma. Did
the Mediæval Church say the earth was flat, you sang of an earth that
was flat, and danced and made your little shows on an earth that was
flat. And you helped to bind me with chains and burn me with fire when
my facts and the laws behind my facts shook your dogmas. Dante's highest
audacity could not transcend a material inferno. Milton could not shake
off Lucifer and hell.
You were more beautiful. But not only was I more useful, but I made the
way for you that there might be greater beauty. You did not reck of
that. To you the heart was the seat of the emotions. I formulated the
circulation of the blood. You gave charms and indulgences to the world;
I gave it medicine and surgery. To you, famine and pestilence were acts
of providence and punishment of sin: I made the world a granary and
drained its cities. To you the mass of the people were poor lost
wretches who would be rewarded in paradise or baked in hell. You could
offer them no earthly happiness of decency. Forsooth, beggars as well as
kings were of divine right. But I shattered the royal prerogatives and
overturned the thrones of the one and lifted the other somewhat out of
the dirt.
Nor is my work done. With my inventions and discoveries and rational
enterprise, I draw the world together and make it kin. The uplift is but
begun. And in the great world I am making I shall be as of old to you,
Dane. I, who have made you and freed you, shall give you space and
greater freedom. And, as of old, we shall quarrel as when first you came
to me and found me at my rude earth-work. You shall be the scorner of
matter, and I the master of matter. You may laugh at me and my work, but
you shall not be absent from the feast nor shall your voice be silent.
For, when I have conquered the globe, and enthralled the elements, and
harnessed the stars, you shall sing the epic of man, and as of old it
shall be of the deeds I have done.
HERBERT.
IX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
December 28, 19--.
The curtain is rung down on an illusion, but it rises again on another,
this time, as before, with the look of the absolute Good and True upon
it. It is because we are at once actor and spectator that we find no
fault with blinking sight and slothful thought. We are finite branded
and content, except during the shrill, undermining moments when the
orchestra is tuning up. "Thus we half-men struggle."
I follow your letter and wonder whether your illusions have qualities of
beauty which escape me. I give you the benefit of every doubt which it
is possible for me to harbour with regard to my own system of illusions.
You glorify the crowd practical. You attach yourself to the ranks that
carried thought into action. You inspire yourself with rugged strength
by dwelling on the achievements of ruggedness, forgetting that the
progress of the world is not marshalled by those who work with line and
rule. It was not his crew, but Columbus, who discovered America. The
crew stood between the Old and the New, as indeed the crew always does.
Between the idealist and his hope were hosts of practical enemies whom
he had to subdue before he reached land. But I must not fall into your
mistake of dividing men into categories. Men are not either intellectual
or emotional; they are both. It is a rounded not an angular development
which we follow. Feeling and thinking are not mutually exclusive, and
the great personality feels deeply because he thinks highly, feels
keenly because he sees widely. Common sense is not incompatible with
uncommon sense, evil does not of necessity attend beauty, nor weakness
the strength of genius.
I shall sing of the deeds you have done if your deeds are worthy of
song. I shall sing a Song of the Sword, too, should the sword "thrust
through the fatuous, thrust through the fungous brood." Whatever helps
the races to better life sings itself into racial lore, and I alone
shall not refuse the tribute. When you come to see that the Iliad is as
great a gift to the race as the doings of Achilles, that the Iliads are
more significant than the doings they celebrate, you will cease to
classify men into doers and singers. You will cease to dishonour
yourself in the eyes of the singers with the hope that in so doing you
gain somewhat elsewhere.
Professor Bidwell is in love and it interferes with his work. You have
the advantage of him there, no doubt. However, you lose more than you
gain. You have shattered the dream and have awakened. To what? What is
this reality in which your universe is hung? Where shine the stars of
your scientific heaven? By the beauty of your dreaming alone, Herbert,
shall you be judged and known. You dream that you have learned the
lesson, solved the problem, pierced the mystery, and become a prophet of
matter. But matter does not include spirit, so the motif of your dream
grows all confused. Your race epic omits the race. You sing the branch
and the leaf rather than the sunlit and tenebral wood. Bidwell thinks
his ordinary sort of girl a "lyric love, half angel and half bird, and
all a wonder and a wild desire." Bidwell exaggerates, perhaps, but
unless he feels this for his wife, he has no wife. Barbara obeyed the
voice of her heart. That sounds sentimental, but it is none the less a
courageous thing to do. I was inconsistent enough to be sorry because
she loved a crippled man. Bidwell and Barbara are wiser and happier than
you can be, Herbert, than you from whose hand the map of Parnassus Hill
has been filched.
Is there one state of consciousness better than another? I think yes.
Better to have long, youthful thoughts and to thrill to vibrant emotions
than to grovel sluggishly; better to hope and dream and aspire and sway
to great harmonies than to be blind and deaf and dumb--better for the
type, better for the immortality of the world's soul. This to me is a
vital thought, therefore life or death is in the issue. For the rest I
know not. By the glimmer of light lent me, I can but guess greatness and
descry vagueness. You go further and would touch the phantasmagorial
veil. "Right!" I say, and I pray, "Godspeed." But there must be
intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the
beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of
life that I would wake you to bid you dream better.
Well, Herbert, I have quarrelled with you and shall to the end, I
promise. I wish I could take you away, hide you from your Hester's
sight, and pour my poetic spleen out on you. Oh, I shall torment you
into reason and passion! Whatever you may choose to be, you are my son.
I must take you and keep you as you are, of course, but I choose to tell
the truth to you though I do love you and hold you mine. Disagreeable of
me, but how else?
DANE.
X
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
Sunday, January 1, 19--.
Behold, I have lived! I press your face to the breathing, stinging roses
of my days, and bid you drink in the sweet and throb with the pain. What
is my philosophy but a translation of the facts which have stamped me?
Perhaps if I let you read these facts, you will the sooner come to share
my consecration and my faith. I must teach you to know that you are the
fact of my whole tangled web of facts, and that all that I have and am,
and all that might have been I and mine, stretches itself out in the
unmarked path which is before you.
I take you back with me to the road, white with dust, upon which like a
Viking and like a feeble girl I have travelled. It is not long, but how
many paths, what byways and what turns! What sudden glimpses of sea and
sky, what inaccessibleness! Hark, from the wood on either side
murmurings of hope and hard sobbing of despair, young laughter of joy
and aged renunciations! See from amongst the pines the farewell gleam of
a white hand. All of it dear--dearly bought and precious and miraculous,
the heartache even as the gladness.
"Life is worth living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death."
Ay, through every grain of it. Even that morning in the wood, thirty
years ago, when your mother put her hand in mine and looked a great pity
into my eyes. Indeed, she loved me well, but romance shone on the brow
of John Wace. For her his face was sunlit, and she needs must take it
between her hands and hold it forever. He was her Siegfried, her master.
Thus the gods decreed, and we three obeyed. What else was there to do?
We must be honest before all, and Ellen did not love me any more, and I
must know it, and wipe out a past of deepest mutuality, and strengthen
and console and restore the woman whose hand held mine while her eyes
were turned elsewhere.
Before that bright, black summer morning which saw me woman-pitied, I
knew I should have to renounce her. Their souls rushed together in their
first meeting. John had been away, knocking about museums and colleges,
and carrying on tempestuous radical work. He was splendidly picturesque.
I was a youth of twenty-three, almost ten years his junior, a boy full
of half-defined aims and groping powers, reaching toward what he had
firm in his grasp. Ellen talked of his coming, and she planned that she
should meet this my one friend in the environment she loved best--in my
rooms, whose atmosphere, she declared, belonged to an earlier time and
place. (She found in me Nolly Goldsmith and all of Grub Street.) So they
met at the tea-table in my study, and a great warmth stole over your
father. He spoke without looking at either of us, while Ellen looked as
if her destiny had just begun.
Without, it rained. I strode to the window and in a dazed way stared at
the lamp-post which was sticking out its flaming little tongue to the
night. Why was I mocked? There was no mocking and there should have been
no bitterness. Of that there was none either, after a while.
Ellen put her hand on my hair, and a strong primal emotion rose in me.
In that moment civilisation was as if it had not been. I reverted to the
primitive. The blood of forgotten ancestors, cave-men and river-men,
reasoned me my ethics. I turned to her, met her flushed cheeks and moved
being and the glory of dawning in her eyes. I measured my strength with
hers and your father's, Herbert. Easily, great strength was mine in my
passion, easily I could carry her off!
You, too, have had moments of upheaval when you heard the growling of
the tiger and the bear, when the brute crowded out the man. Then your
soul writhed in derision, you scoffed at that which you had held to be
the nobility of the soul, and you minced words satirically over the
exquisiteness of the type which we have evolved. Then the experiment of
life turned farce, the heavens fell about your ears and "Fool!" was upon
your lips. Oh, the hurricane that sweeps over the soul when it is
cheated of its joy! In the first instant of Ellen's indifference, when I
felt myself pushed out of her life, I forgot everything but my desire.
I could not renounce her. I was in the throes of the passion for
ownership.
Gentle girl between whom and myself there had been naught but sweetness
and fellowship! How often had we talked large (we were very young!) of
our sublimities and potentialities, how often had we pictured tragedies
of surrender and greatened in the speaking! Ah, it should come true. For
her and for me there must be miracles, and there were. So was the
strength of the spirit proven, so was it shown to be "pure waft of the
Will." So was I confirmed in the creed which believes that to keep we
must lose, and to live we must die. So was I assured that there may be
but one way, and that, the way of service.
I did not grip her passionately in my arms. I withdrew; I did much to
make her task of leaving me an easy one. Were it not for my efforts, it
would have been harder for her to obey a mandate which made for my pain.
She could not quite drown an old, Puritan voice, speaking with the
authority of tradition, which bade her hold to her vows. Yes, I made it
easy for her. Harrow my soul with theories of selection and survival if
you dare!
In those days the spires of the temple were golden, the shrine white.
The door was seen from every point in the fog-begirt world. We who
worshipped knew not of doubt. Stirred by the rumbling organ tones of
causes and ideas, we immolated our lives gladly. High priests of
thought, we swung the censers and rose on the breast of the incense.
Ellen and John and myself glorified God and enjoyed Him forever,--God,
the Type, the Final Humanity, the giant Body Soul of man. In our hearts
dwelt a religion which compelled us to serve the ideal. We strove to
become what organically we felt the "Human with his drippings of warm
tears" may become. We were the standard-bearers of the advancing margin
of the world. We were the high-water mark toward which all the tides
forever make. We were soldiers and priests.
And so when Ellen loved, and lacked courage for her love, I helped her.
A past of kindness and ardour riveted her to my side. She knew that we
were in feeling and fact divorced from each other by virtue of her
stronger love for John, yet did she do battle with the rich young love.
For two years we had been close; she had been so much my friend, she
could not in maiden charity seal for me a so unwelcome fate. I had
awakened her slumbering soul with my first look into the sphinx wonder
of her eyes. For me she had become fire and dew, flame of the sun, and
flower of the hill. Without me to help her do it she could not leave me.
To the master of matter this coping with spiritual abstractions must
appear like juggling with intellectual phantasmagoria. Yet I protest
that life is finally for intangible triumphs. Unnamed fragrances steal
upon the senses and the soul revels and greatens. Unseen hands draw us
to worlds afar, and we are gathered up in the dignity of the human
spirit. Unknown ideas attract and hold us, and we take our place in the
universe as intellectual factors. In giving up Ellen I helped her, and,
sacredly better still, I sent on into a world of vague thinking and weak
acting the impulse of devotion to revealed truth.
She had a sweet way of sitting low and resting her head on my knee. She
sat through one whole day with me thus, and for hours I could have
thought her asleep were it not for the waves of feeling which surged in
her upturned face. Toward the end she raised her head, ecstasy in her
eyes and on her cheek and lip. "Dane, I love you. Dane! Dane!" The whole
of me was caught up in the accents of that tremulousness. She had know
John three months; but her love for him was young, it had come
unexpectedly, it was still unexpressed and ineffable. Her yearning for
him led to softness toward me, and though she rose out of her mood as
one does from a dream, the hours when we were like the angels, all love
and all speech, were mine. So much was vouchsafed me.
Memories and echoes, gusts of sweet breath from the violets on your
mother's grave--the prophet of matter will have none of them, and, I
fear, will pity me that I am so much theirs. I am yours also, dear lad,
and I wish to serve you.
DANE KEMPTON.
XI
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
January 20, 19--.
I do not know whether to laugh or weep. I have just finished reading
your letter, and I can hardly think. Words seem to have lost their
meaning, and words, used as you use them, are without significance. You
appear to speak a tongue strangely familiar, yet one I cannot
understand. You are unintelligible, as, I dare say, I am to you.
And small wonder that we are unintelligible. Our difference presents
itself quite clearly to the scientific mind, and somewhat in this
fashion: Man acquires knowledge of the outer world through his
sensations and perceptions. Sensation ends in sentiment, and perception
ends in reason. These are the two sides of man's nature, and the
individual is determined and ruled by whichever side in him happens to
be temperamentally dominant. I have already classed you as a feeler,
myself as a thinker. This is, I _think_ true. You, I am confident,
_feel_ it to be true. I reason why it is true. You accept it on faith as
true, lose sight of the argument forthwith, and proceed to express it in
emotional terms--which is to say that you take it to heart and feel
badly because it happens to be so.
You feign to know this modern scientific slang, and you are contemptuous
of it because you do not know it. The terms I use freight no ideas to
you. They are sounds, rhythmic and musical, but they are not definite
symbols of thought. Their facts you do not grasp. For instance, the
prehensile organs of insects, the great toothed mandibles of the black
stag-beetle, the amorous din of the male cicada and the muteness of his
mate--these are facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor
can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters,
and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the
fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent,
splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no
worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the
glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of
silver. What make you of the hoarse voice of the gorilla? Is not the
dewlap of the ox inscrutable? the mane of the lion? the tusks of the
boar? the musk-sack of the deer? In the amethyst and sapphire of the
peacock's wing you find no rationality; to you it is a manifestation of
the wonder which is taboo. And so with the cock bird, displaying his
feathered ruffs and furbelows, dancing strange antics and spilling out
his heart in song.
I, on the other hand, dare to gather all these phenomena together, and
find out the common truth, the common fact, the common law, which is
generalisation, which is Science. I learn that there are two functions
which all life must perform: Nutrition and Reproduction. And I learn
that in all life, the performance, according to time and space and
degree, is very like. The slug must take to itself food, else it will
perish; and so I. The slug must procreate its kind, or its kind will
perish; and so I. The need being the same, the only difference is in the
expression. In all life come times and seasons when the individuals are
aware of dim yearnings and blind compulsions and masterful desires. The
senses are quickened and alert to the call of kind. And just as the fish
and the reptile glimmeringly adumbrate man, so do these yearnings and
desires adumbrate what man in himself calls "love," spelled all out in
capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amoeba, up the ladder
of life to you and me, comes this passion of perpetuation. And in
yourself, refine and sublimate as you will, it is none the less blind,
unreasoning, and compelling.
And now we come to the point. In the development of life from low to
high, there came a dividing of the ways. Instinct, as a factor of
development, had its limitations. It culminated in that remarkable
mechanism, the bee-swarm. It could go no farther. In that direction life
was thwarted. But life, splendid and invincible, not to be thwarted,
changed the direction of its advance, and reason became the all-potent
developmental factor. Reason dawned far down in the scale of life; but
it culminates in man and the end is not yet.
The lever in his arm he duplicates in wood and steel; the lenses in his
eyes in glass; the visual impressions of his brain on chemically
sensitised wood-pulp. He is able, reasoning from events and knowing the
law, to control the blind forces and direct their operation. Having
ascertained the laws of development, he is able to take hold of life and
mould and knead it into more beautiful and useful forms. Domestic
selection it is called. Does he wish horses which are fast, he selects
the fastest. He studies the physics of velocity in relation to equine
locomotion, and with an eye to withers, loins, hocks, and haunches, he
segregates his brood mares and his stallions. And behold, in the course
of a few years, he has a thoroughbred stock, swifter of foot than any
ever in the world before.
Since he takes sexual selection into his own hands and scientifically
breeds the fish and the fowl, the beast and the vegetable, why may he
not scientifically breed his own kind? The fish and the fowl and the
beast and the vegetable obey dim yearnings and vague desires and
reproduce themselves. "Poor the reproduction," says Man to Mother
Nature; "allow me." And Mother Nature is thrust aside and exceeded by
this new creator, this Man-god.
These yearnings and desires of the beast and the vegetable are the best
tools nature has succeeded in devising. Having devised them, she leaves
their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls
and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious
intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires,
promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is
called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in
sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as
they master the beast and all the acts of the beast. And they operate in
the development of man with the same blindness of chance that they
operate in the development of the beast.
Now this is the law: _Love, as a means for the perpetuation and
development of the human type, is very crude and open to improvement.
What the intellect of man has done with the beast, the intellect of man
may do with man_.
It is a truism to say that my intellect is wiser than my emotions. So,
knowing the precise value and use of this erotic phenomenon, this sexual
madness, this love, I, for one, elect to choose my mate with my
intellect. Thus I choose Hester. And I do truly love her, but in the
intellectual sense and not the sense you fanatically demand. I am not
seized with a loutish vertigo when I look upon her and touch her hand.
Nor do I feel impelled to leave her presence if I would live, as did
Dante the presence of Beatrice; nor the painful confusion of Rousseau,
when, in the same room with Madame Goton, he seemed impelled to leap
into the flaming fireplace. But I do feel for Hester what happily mated
men and women, after they have lived down the passion, feel in the
afternoon of life. It is the affection of man for woman, which is
sanity. It is the sanity of intercourse which replaces love madness; the
sanity which comes upon sparrows after the ardour of mating, when they
leave off wrangling and chattering and set soberly to work to build
their nest for the coming brood.
Pre-nuptial love is the madness of non-understanding and
part-understanding. Post-nuptial affection is the sanity of complete
understanding; it is based upon reason and service and healthy
sacrifice. The first is a blind mating of the blind; the second, a clear
and open-eyed union of male and female who find enough in common to
warrant that union. In a word and in the fullest sense of the word, it
is sex comradeship. Pre-nuptial love cannot survive marriage any
considerable time. It is doomed inexorably to flicker out, and when it
has flickered out it must be replaced by affection, or else the parties
to it must separate. We well know that many men and women, unable to
build up affection on the ruins of love, do separate, or if they do not,
continue to live together in cold tolerance or bitter hatred.
Now, Hester is my mate. We have much in common. There is intellectual,
spiritual, and physical affinity. The caress of her voice and the feel
of her mind are pleasurable to me; likewise the touch of her hand (and
you know that in the union of man and woman the higher affinities are
not possible unless there first be physiological affinity). We shall go
through life as comrades go, hand in hand, Hester and I; and great
happiness will be ours. And because of all this I say you have no right
to challenge my happiness, and vex my days, and feel for me as one dead.
My dear, bewildered Dane, come down out of the clouds. If I am wrong, I
have gone over the ground. Then do you go over that ground with me and
show where I am wrong. But do not pour out on me your romantic and
poetic spleen. Confine yourself to the Fact, man, to the irrefragable
Fact.
HERBERT.
Ah, your later letter has just arrived. I can only say that I
understand. But withal, I am pained that I am not nearer to you. These
intellectual phantasmagoria rise up like huge amorphous ghosts and hold
me from you. I cannot get through the mists and glooms to press your
hand and tell you how dear I hold you. Do, Dane, do let us cease from
this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so
long as I do no sin and harm no one; and be you father to us, and bless
us who else must go unblessed. For Hester, also, is fatherless and
motherless, and you must be to her as you are to me.
HERBERT.
XII
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
February 10, 19--.
So we have got into an argument! I have been poring over your last two
or three letters, and they read like a set of briefs for a debate.
Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become
rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week.
It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters
too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, "They make me
sick talking of their duty to God." Yet friend should speak to friend,
should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. "Let there be
light, and there was light"--a ripple of light, and a flash, then the
darkness broke and dispersed from the face of the waters. It was a
trumpet-call of words bringing drama into a nebulous creation. Let the
Word break up our night and let us not only grant, but avow the
conviction it brings us, no matter what the consequence. Let us worship
the irrefragable Fact.
You hold that marriage is an institution having for its purpose the
perpetuation of the species, and that respect and affection are
sufficient to bring two people into this most intimate possible
relation. You also hold that the business of the world, pressing hard
upon men, makes "love from their lives a thing apart," and that this is
as it should be. Your letters are an exposition and a defence of what I
may loosely call the practical theory. You show that the world is for
work and workers, and that life is for results as seen in institutions
and visible achievements. I, on the other hand, maintain that it takes a
greater dowry to marry upon than affection, and that men love as
intensely and with as much abandon as women. People love in proportion
to the depth of their natures, and the finest man in the world has an
infinite capacity for giving and receiving love store. The spell is
strongest upon the finest.
This, briefly, is what we have been saying to each other. You attack my
idealism, call me dreamer, and accuse me of being out of joint with the
time, which itself is rigorously in joint with the laws of growth. And
I class you with the Philistine because of your exaggeration of
practical values. I hold that it is gross to respect the fact tangible
at the expense of the feeling ineffable.
In your last letter you exploit the theory of Nutrition and Reproduction
with a charm and warmth which helps me see you as I have so long known
you, and which tells me again that you are worth fighting for and
saving. But to trace love to its biologic beginning is not to deny its
existence. Love has a history as significant as that of life. When, eons
ago, the primitive man looked at his neighbour and recognised him as a
fellow to himself, consciousness of kind awoke and a cell was exploded
which functioned love. When, through the ages, economic forces taught
men the need of mutual aid, when everywhere in life the law of
development charged men with leanings and desires and outreachings, then
the sway of love began in life. What was subconscious became conscious,
what, back in the past, was a mere adumbration gloried out in Aurora
splendours. The love of a Juliet is the outgrowth of natural processes
manifesting themselves everywhere down the scale, but it is also the
gift of the last evolution, and it speaks to us from the topmost notch
in the scale. The charm of morning rests on a Juliet's love because its
hour is young and yet old, striking the time of the past and the future.
It is thus that the hunger of the race and the passion of the race
become in the individual the need for happiness. The need of the race
and the need of the individual are at once the same and different.
What was the point of your letter? That sexual selection obtains? I
grant it. That it is incumbent upon us as intelligent men and women to
call to the aid of instinct our social wisdom? I grant and avow it. But
our social wisdom insists that we obey the choices of instinct; our
social wisdom is only another phase of our refinement, which, in
impelling us to a love of the beautiful, does not the less impel us to
love. Our social wisdom educates our taste without lessening our taste
for the thing. "Love a beautiful person nobly, but be sure you love
her," says our social wisdom with interesting tautology. Besides, you
are a heretic to your own breed, Herbert. It is you who would forsake
our present social wisdom, ruling modern men by laws which obtained in
primitive life. It is you who steadily hark back to the past, and to
states of consciousness which were but can never be again. The early
facts of biology cannot include that which transcends them. To borrow
from Ernest Seton Thompson, man is evolved with the lower orders in the
same way that water is changed into steam, and the nature of the change,
when it is effected, is as radical. Add a number of degrees of heat to
water and it is still water. Let one degree be wanting to the necessary
number, and the substance is still intact. Add the last degree, and
water is no longer water. From water to steam is a radical change and a
transformation.
You agree to improve upon the beasts of the fields and upon our own race
in the past, and in this you go farther than you have need if marriage
is for nothing else than to serve the instinct for perpetuation. You
shew some respect for what is natural and instinctive, yet you say that
all would be as well if individual choice had not prevailed, and men and
women were "shuffled about." You draw up a cold programme for action in
affairs of the spirit and formulate a code of procedure in matters of
the heart.
I have a programme too. Mine does not break with nature. On the
contrary, it obeys every instinct and listens to every call on the
senses. My love begins in my biologic self, grows with my growth, takes
its hues from visioned sunsets in corn-flower skies, its grace from
swaying rivers of grain seen in dreams. It is for me what it is for fish
and fowl, beast and vegetable. It is my passion for perpetuation, but it
is also something as different from this as I am different from beast
and vegetable. My love is "blind, unreasoning, and compelling," and for
that I trust it. I do not conceive myself Man-god, therefore I do not
say to Nature, "Allow me." I cannot be sure that when I say it in the
case of the horse, who obeys like me "dim yearning and vague desires," I
do not sacrifice him to a lust of my own. The lust for owning and
spoiling is hard to cope with. Perhaps a purer time is near, when,
upborne by a sense of the dignity of romance and the sacredness of life,
man will refrain from laying rough hands on his mute brothers.
The romance which is my proof of the good of being does not rest on
passion. The unclean fires that consume the loutish and degenerate are
not of love. You quote instances of the hyperphysical and hysterical.
The feeling that I would have you obey for your soul's sake and without
which you are but half alive, is not the blind passion of an oversexed
sentimentalism. Rousseau was never in love in his life, though to say it
were to accuse him of perjury.
One word more. Do you wish to know why I care? I care because I know you
to be of those who are capable of love. Probably it was one little twist
in your development that has turned you into alien ways of thinking and
living. Yes, and more than for this I care because you are the
fulfilment of a sacred past. You are the son of my sacrifice and your
mother's love.
I care very much indeed. I do not wish you to awake some terrible night
to find that you had ended your romance before you had begun it. I vex
your days and call you dead? It is because I know the life that is by
the grace of God yours, and because I cannot bear to let you coffin it.
Herbert, there is misery when the blood pales, and the tears dry up, and
the flame of the heart sinks, and all that is left is a memory of a
thought--a memory of very long ago when one was young and might have
chosen to live.
I am sorry we darken the days for each other.
Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.
XIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
February 12, 19--.
Barbara and Earl celebrated their anniversary yesterday. Invitations
were sent out, the guests consisting of Melville and myself.
"Anniversary of what?" we asked. For answer we received inscrutable
smiles. Birthdays are accidents of fate. You may regret the accident or
you may be thick enough in illusion to rejoice over it, but you cannot
in decency celebrate an occurrence wholly independent of personal
control and yet concerning itself with you! Leave the merrymaking for
appreciative friends. So rules Barbara. Not a birthday, then, nor the
date of their marriage. The occasion was in some flash struck from
Being, the memory of which enriches them,--in a mood that for an hour
held them in strong grasp, in the utterance of a word charged with
destiny, in the avowal of their love if their love awaited avowal.
Whatever the cause, they honoured it with a will.
Barbara's eyes flashed, her cheeks were sweetly suffused, and her voice
was vibrant. Earl, too, was at his best. My heart loved this man who had
lain all his life with death. His health is at its bad worst this
winter, which fact made of the "Celebration" a rather heart-rending
affair. He has been obliged to abandon the _Journal_, but we hope he can
stay with the school. Meanwhile, his chronic invalidism of body and
purse does not too much affect him. He keeps his charm of tenderness and
strength. He rivets his pupils to him almost as he riveted his Barbara.
I have discovered my proof of this couple's happiness. It is that I have
always taken it for granted. Simple, is it not? And absolute. Often in
their presence I catch myself imagining their mutual lives and seeing
vaguely the graces that each brings to each. "How she must delight him!"
I say. "How his eyes speak to her!" "They can never come to the end of
each other," and so on. The ordinary married couple so often brings a
sense of distressed surprise: "How can these two foot it together?"
"How did it happen?" "How can it go on?"
Last night counted to me. Your father and I have had such evenings, but
I did not think I could do it all over again. We spoke with the fire
(and conceit) of young students, exciting ourselves with expired
theories, hoping old hopes, smarting under blows that perhaps had long
ceased to fall. What then? What if we were ill-read in the facts? We
could not have been wrong in the feeling. For the old hope that has been
proven vain, a new; for the ancient hurt, a modern wrong, as great and
as crying. It was good to feel that we had not grown too wise to harbour
thoughts of change and redress, or too much ironed out with doctrine to
be resigned. I confess it is long since I have eaten my heart in fury,
in impatience, in wildness, but last night we awoke the radical in one
another. We condemned the system. We placed ourselves outside the
régime, refusing aught at its hands, registering our protest, hating the
inordinate scheme of things only as hotly as we loved the juster Hand of
a future time.
It is curious that we, offsprings of parvenue success, should be capable
of such repudiation. Barbara accepts the Management without the trouble
of a question. "What do you know? What do you know?" the girl demands, a
radiant little angel in white, and a conservative. "You must know
yourselves in the wrong, else would you smite your way through the
world."
Ah, Barbara has yet to learn that it is hard to live. It is not so hard
to fight, and it is easy to rest neutral, but to be fighter and bearer
both, to stand staunch, holding ever to the issue, and yet, without
tameness, to take rebuff and wait, there's the true course and the
heroic. It is difficult when one has been conquered to know it. It is
difficult to honour an outgrown ideal, which cost us, nevertheless,
comfort and prestige--prizes which youth scorns and which oncoming age,
pathetically enough, holds dear. It is difficult to pull up when driving
too fast and too far, when galloping towards fanaticism, and it is
impossible to whip oneself into passion and martyrdom. It is difficult
to live, little Barbara.
For me it is also difficult to report a social function. At this one
Browning presided, for Melville took up "Caponsacchi" and read it to us.
That voice of his is in itself an interpretation, but Browning needs
interpreting less than any other man who wrote great poems, because he
wrote the greatest. It was four in the morning when the "O great, just,
good God! Miserable me!" of the soldier-saint fell upon our ears. How we
had listened! Earl steadily paced the floor, Barbara leaned her cheek
upon my hand. Her soul was doing battle, and so was mine. We were all
fighting the gallant fight. Read "Pompilia" and you are filled with
reverence, read "Caponsacchi" and you are caught up by the spirit of
action. You must rise and forth to burn your way like he, though you may
have been too weary in spirit before to answer to your name when
opportunity called roll.
It was Earl who broke the silence caused by the inner tumult. In a
dreamy voice, his eyes very eager and intent, he told us how at one time
he had gone up a hill that faced the house in which he lived. A hard
rain was driving, he fell at every step up the slippery steepness, but
at every step the beauty of it became more and more wondrous, hardly
bearable. The little village sank lower and lower, and about him were
soft hills, graceful and verdant, a stretch of water lying dark under
the clouded sky, and the mountain gray and watchful in the distance. It
was then, in the chill of a January rain, on an oak-clad hill of a
western spot, that he recognised the dear features of the Mother, knew
her his as hers he was, and loved her with passion. The sea is vast and
wondrous, but it is alien. It holds you apart; it is not of you. But the
gentle earth with her undulating form and the growing life in her lap,
soothes with wordless harmonies. It was then that he forgave the fate
which deformed him. A twisted oak, that is all--no less a tree and no
less beautiful in the landscape! And it was sufficient to live. In the
bosom of so much beauty sufficient also to die. As he stood, thinking it
out, feeling the wonder and the glory, at times sorry for those who can
see no longer the slanting sheets of rain and the grass at the feet, at
times feeling that since this is good, in some impalpable way oblivion
to all this may be also good, as he stood there, flushed with the
climbing and sad with great joy, the thought came: With whom? It cannot
be lived alone. With whom? He turned at the touch of an arm at his
shoulder to meet the smile and the look and the quick breath of her who
had sent herself his Eve.
In the dawn stealing over the world of London, Earl told the story, and
there and then we saw it all--the hill in the heart of the hills, the
reconciled boy who had climbed its brow, the rain-drenched woman
hurrying to overtake him, with the gift of all of herself in her eyes.
We looked neither at Barbara nor at Earl. Possessed of the secret, we
spoke a few words and left. Our host had divulged what the anniversary
sought to celebrate. We understood and were glad.
Good night, lad. Would you could have shared our heyday at the dawning!
DANE.
XIV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
February 31, 19--.
Love is a something that begins in sensation and ends in sentiment.
Thanks to beautiful and permissible hyperbole, you have begun with
sensation in your description of love, and have ended with sentiment.
You have told me about love, in terms of love, which is a vain
performance and unscientific. Now let me make you a definition. _Love is
a disorder of mind and body, and is produced by passion under the
stimulus of imagination._
Love is a phase of the operation of the function of reproduction, and it
occurs solely in man. Love, adhering to the common understanding of the
term, is an emotional excitement which does not obtain among the lower
animals. The lower animals lack the stimulus of imagination, and with
them the passion for perpetuation remains a mere passion. But man has
developed imagination. The pure sexual passion is glossed over and
obscured by a cloud of fancies, mistaken yearnings, and distorted
dreams. And so well is the real intent of the function obscured, that it
is actually lost to him, especially during the period of love madness,
so that there seems an apparent divorce between the parts which go to
make up love, between passion and imagination.
The romantic lover of to-day (expressing sensation in terms of
sentiment, and fondly imagining that he is reasoning) cannot reconcile
his soul-exaltation with bodily grossness, cannot conceive that soul can
turn body, and in the embrace of body tell out all the wonder of soul.
To all sensitive and spiritual men and women come times of anguish and
tears and self-revolt, when they are confounded and heart-broken by the
physical aspect of love. Poor men and women! they suffer keenly and
sincerely through lack of something more than a sentimental concept of
love. To them, body and soul appear things apart, to be kept apart, lest
the one contaminate the other. And in the end, loving well and truly,
they prove their love by enduring, though unable ever quite to shake off
the sense of sin and shame and personal degradation. They do not
understand life, that is the trouble. The beast, lacking imagination,
needs no rational rightness for the various acts of living, such as they
need, and which they do not possess. Because of their unchecked and
unbalanced imagination they mistake the half of life for the whole, and
when forced to face the whole are affrighted and shocked. They do not
reason that the need for perpetuation is the cause of passion; and that
human passion, working through imagination and worked upon by
imagination, becomes love.
And while I am in this vein, I may as well deny that a greater spiritual
dowry than affection is required for marriage. (For that matter, I fail
to see anything so spiritual in erotic phenomena.) If a man may achieve
affection for a woman, without undergoing pre-nuptial madness,--if a man
may take the short cut, as it were,--then I see no reason why he should
not marry that woman. He is certainly justified, since affection is what
romantic love must evolve into after marriage. But do not mistake me,
Dane. I do not intend this sweepingly. It will not do for the whole
human herd; for at once enters that abhorrent thing you rightly fear,
the marriage for convenience. Alas, it too often masquerades under the
guise of romantic love. Certainly, every man is not capable of taking
this short cut and at the same time of avoiding a violation of true
sexual selection. Having little brain, the average man can only act in
line with sexual selection by undergoing the romantic love malady. But
for some few of us, and I dare to include myself, the short cut is
permissible. This short cut I shall take, and far be it from any worldly
sense of stocks and bonds and comfortable housekeeping.
Marriage means less to man than to woman? Yes, by all means, at least to
the normal man or woman. As surely as reproduction is woman's peculiar
function, and nutrition man's, just so surely does marriage sum up more
to woman than to man. It becomes the whole life of the woman, while to
the man it is rather an episode, rather a mere side to his many-sided
life. Natural selection has made it so. The countless men of the past,
even from before the time they swung down out of the trees, who devoted
more time and energy to their love-affairs than to the winning of food
and shelter, died from innutrition in various ways. Only the men, normal
men, with a proper respect for the mechanism of life, survived and
perpetuated their kind. The chance was large that the abnormal lover did
not win a wife at all. At least it is so to-day. The abnormal lover is
not a successful bidder for women, and is usually passed by.
But while we are on this topic, do not let us forget Dante Alighieri,
your prince of lovers. Has a suitable explanation ever occurred to you
concerning how he came to marry Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, who
bore him seven children, and was never once mentioned in the "Divina
Commedia?" You remember what he said of his first meeting with Beatrice,
"At that moment I saw most truly that the spirit of life which hath its
dwelling in the secretest chambers of the heart began to tremble so
violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith." And he
later had seven children by Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and whom,
as the historian has recorded, "there was no reason to suppose other
than a good wife."
As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very
primitive. How many thousands years of culture, think you, have rubbed
and polished at our raw edges? One, probably; at the best, not more than
two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body
and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as
highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla. And before that
time, think you, how many thousands of years of savagery did we endure?
and how many myriads of thousands in the long procession of life up from
the first vitalised inorganic? Two thousand years are an extremely thin
veneer with which to cover the many millions.
And further, our much-vaunted two thousand years of culture is a thing
of the mind, an acquired character. We are not born with it. Each must
gather it for himself after he is born, from the spoken and written
words of his fellow and forerunners. Isolate a babe from all of its kind
and it will never learn to speak, and without speech words, it can never
think save in the concretest possible way. Yet it will possess all the
brute instincts and passions--the raw edges which do constantly shove
through the culture varnish of the civilised man.
Our culture is the last to come, the first to go. I have seen it go from
a man in an hour, nay, on the instant. Our culture is nothing more than
the accumulated wisdom of the race. It is not part of us, not a thing or
attribute handed down from father to son. It is a something acquired in
varying degree by each individual for himself. Yes, I do well to hark
back to the primitive. It tells me where I am to-day and describes to me
the world I am living in. You, Dane, are hyper-refined, or refined
beyond the times. You are like the idealistic and advanced zealots, who,
when such action would mean destruction, advise these United States to
disarm in the face of the war-harnessed world.
But no more of this jerky letter. Soon I shall proceed to make my
contention good. I shall show the higher part intellect plays in
conjugal love, the control, restraint, forbearance, sacrifice. And I
shall show that conjugal love is higher and finer than romantic love.
HERBERT.
XV
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
March 15, 19--.
Clyde Stebbins was here an hour after your theories and definitions
reached me. The fact that I had been reading treason against his sister
made me pick my subjects a little too carefully for smooth conversation.
Your letter, partly open, was on the table before us, and my eyes fell
upon it often as I wondered what it would mean to Hester's brother--if
he could read it. I no longer think only of you.
I reject your definition of love. It is not a disorder of the mind and
body, nor is it solely the instrument of reproduction. I reject and
resent your distinction between the pre-nuptial and post-nuptial states
of feelings. Further, I hold that marriage may not be based on
affection alone, and I disagree with you that population is better than
principle. Children need not be brought into the world at any cost.
Love is not a disorder, but a growth. There is spiritual as well as
physical growth. Some men and women never grow up strong enough to love.
Their development is arrested, or they are, from the beginning, poor
creatures born of starvelings, and perhaps fated to give birth to pale,
sapless beings like themselves. Others there are who love, and this is
no ill chance, no disease of the mind and body calling for psychiater
and physician. It is a strength, a becoming, a fulfilment. Let us reason
from the effect to the cause. How does this madness manifest itself? Not
in weakness. You never saw a man or woman in love who was the worse for
it. The lover carries all things before him, and not for himself alone,
but for a larger world than ever had been his. He who loves one must
perforce love all the world and all the unborn worlds. This is the way
life goes, which is another way of saying it is a scientific fact. That
which makes men capable of consecration is not a disorder of the mind
and body. It is the greatest of all forces, and it turns the wrangling
and grabbing human creature into an inspired poet.
And the cause? The passion for perpetuation and the imagination. We
agree. But there are other and more immediate needs than the need of
perpetuation that call out love, needs that are peculiarly of the
present, being bound up with the steady outreaching for help, for
fellowship in the jerky journey through the universe. If love were no
more than an instrument of reproduction, you would be right in
maintaining that the fastidiousness I insist on is unnecessary and
unnatural. If love were that and that alone, there would be no love,
which is a paradox indeed.
"Because of our souls' yearning that we meet
And mix in soul through flesh, which yours and mine
Wear and impress, and make their visible selves,--
All which means, for the love of you and me,
Let us become one flesh, being one soul."
I dare a formula: In the beginning love arose in the passion for
perpetuation; to-day, the passion for perpetuation arises in love. Just
as we put ourselves in the way of natural selection, pitting the
microcosm against the macrocosm in a passion of ethical feeling, just so
do we reverse for ourselves processes that seem indeed to have all the
force of law. This reversal is civilisation.
The lover is impelled to perpetuate himself in the Here and the Now. The
law of life exacts from him the tribute of love. Imagination gives the
lover the key to the object of his love. He enters and he beholds only
the ideal which is hers; for him her clay self and the mere facts of her
do not exist. The conditions of love are inherent in civilisation. When
purpose is high and feeling rich, when "the everlasting possession of
the good" is desired, then is heard the I Am of love.
Now to my definition. Negatively, love is not a disorder of the mind and
body, not a madness, since it arises in the eternally most valuable,
since it is the culmination of high processes, and since it makes for
sanity of vision and strength and happiness. Positively, love is the
awakening of the personality to the beauty and worth of some one being,
caused by the passion for perpetuation and by imagination. It is a
desire to hold to the good everlastingly, and to merge with it.
Aristotle proved to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer
teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a
philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help
thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same
famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a
definition calling love a disorder.
I will continue to-morrow. A note has just been given me calling me to
Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a
game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I
think I shall be in the new West and with you before long.
Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.
XVI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
Sunday morning.
I must proceed with the three other points of my letter, so I shall stay
here and write, though there is a sharp breeze this morning and a
coquettishly escaping sunlight, and something tugs at me to go out upon
the city streets. It is not restlessness, but the love of the open. I am
fain to leave a walled house, and, better still, to get outside of the
walls within and join the city in friendship and let the city join me. I
never feel greater fellowship than when I walk--
Except when I write to you. Then do I greaten with the pride of life. My
sympathies quicken and I grow young again. I constitute myself advocate
of the world, and enthusiasm does not fail me in this high calling. It
is but natural that in the face of scepticism which I cannot share I
should feel greater faith, that in the face of revilement a sense of the
glory of the thing belittled should settle upon me. I turn zealot and
spend myself in long-drawn praising. I lay myself under a spell of
harmony because I am serving and defending and approving what I hold to
be good.
So when you insist that romantic love is pre-nuptial and that it dies at
marriage as others suppose it to die at the approach of poverty, I grow
glad with the knowledge that this is not true. I scrutinize facts which
I hitherto took for granted, and become doubly sure. You dogmatise when
you say that the lover and the husband are mutually exclusive. If there
was love in the beginning, it will be at the end. Love doubles upon
itself. Propinquity tightens bonds and there is a steady blossoming of
the character in a radiant atmosphere. The marriages that fail are the
unions which are based on liking. In these, weariness must set in, for
marriage demands that men and women be all in all to each other, and
unless it be so with them, the lives of the "contracting parties" are,
by the laws of logic, and by the force of the laws of delicacy in the
art of living, forever spoilt.
Yes, and people who truly love come to regret their married love, these
too. But these have at least begun well. Their lives are infinitely
richer for this fact. Their failure itself is made by it more bearable
than the failure of those others who act the vulgarian and demand so
little of life that even that little escapes them. No world-stains on
these who are, at least, would-be lovers. They stand mistaken but
irreproachable. It was neither their fault nor love's, and "life more
abundant" comes to them even with the mistake.
You are consistent. Just as you maintain that love is passion, so do you
think that it is no more than a preliminary thrill. You note a change;
the flutter and the excitement felt in the presence of the unknown go,
and you do not know that they give place to the steadier joys of the
unknown, that after the promise comes the fulfilment, that the hope is
not more beautiful than the realisation, that there is divinity in both,
and that love does not disappoint.
Tell me, are the placid marriages of affection you are preparing to
describe so very placid? Do these jog along so well? Is the control,
restraint, forbearance, sacrifice, of which you speak, as readily
practised for the person who is that to you which twenty others may
quite as easily be, as it is for the one beyond all whom you love and
deify, whom the laws of your being command that you serve, living and
dying? God knows, the average marriage does not exhibit a striking
picture of the practice of these virtues! Rather are such phrases ideals
on stilts on which suffering marital partners attempt to hobble across
their extremity. On the other hand, to some extent everybody practises
restraint and sacrifice since everybody is to some extent moral. But it
goes very hard with your average man and woman in your average marriage,
and there is a decided setting of the mouth and narrowing of the eyes
with the effort.
Whatever placidity there is is attained by means of vampirism. Diderot,
the husband of a stupid seamstress, had no right to the love of a Mlle.
Voland. It was vampirism and sin to take all from this woman, and to
return her favour with so much less than all, as surely as cowardice and
selfishness are sin. But the illicit relation will exist because custom
cannot rid men and women of subtle sympathies and dear yearnings,
because men and women will love though the world consider it cheap and
mad. Individually, we have no difficulty in finding our happiness, but
we are made advance toward it through the twisted byways of an unfrank
world. "No straight road! Keep turning!" has been the scream of
convention since convention began.
So for every commonplace marriage there is a canonised love, and the
story is told in the old Greek civilisation by the Hetairæ. You remember
how it reads in the history: "The low position generally assigned the
wife in the home had a most disastrous effect upon Greek morals. She
could exert no such elevating or refining influence as she casts over
the modern home. The men were led to seek social and intellectual
sympathy and companionship outside the family circle, among a class of
women known as Hetairæ, who were esteemed chiefly for their brilliancy
of intellect. As the most noted representative of this class stands
Aspasia, the friend of Pericles. The influence of the Hetairæ was most
harmful to social morality." And the practice persisted through many a
renaissance where Lauras and Beatrices were besung, down to the
brilliant encyclopædists of the eighteenth century with their avowed
loves, down to our Goethe and John Stuart Mill. All of these loves rose
in very different motives and environments, yet were they the same
fundamentally,--strong, sweet love between man and woman, very much
spoiled by the fact that custom permitted the loveless marriage at the
same time, but yet love which was good since it was the best that could
be had. And when the historian permits himself to say, "The influence of
the Hetairæ was most harmful to social morality," it is evident that he
also thinks that a marriage which compels husband or wife to seek soul's
help elsewhere than in their union is bad and wrong.
To-day there is a change in attitude. Woman is new-born in strength and
dignity, and the highest chivalry the world has ever known is in
blossom. She is an equal, a comrade, a right regal person. She is no
longer a means but an end in herself, not alone fit to mother men but
fit to live in equality with men. I repeat, she is not a means but an
individual, with a soul of her own to rear. Because of the greater and
more general emancipation of woman the subtlety of modern love has
become possible.
Now for the last point, the question of perpetuation. Just as function
precedes organ, so the love of life is inherent in the living for the
maintenance of life. But even the primitive man, in whom instinct is
strongest, proves himself capable of death. Some men have always been
able to give up their lives for some cause. (Indeed there is thought to
be suicide amongst animals.) And to-day we certainly no longer say a man
must live. Quite as often must he die. Men have found it wise to die at
the stake or on the gallows. If this be true of our relation to the life
which courses through us, how much more true is it of our instinct to
perpetuate ourselves, which pertains to the love of life biologically
only, which is often, in the social manifestation of that instinct, a
cold intellectual concept and never a dominating thought! We are not
driven to procreate. In fact, every child born into the world competes
hard for its morsel. Under our unimaginable economic régime all increase
in population is a menace.
I call bringing children into the world a codfish act which causes an
overflux of vulgar little earthlings, if the process be not humanised
and spiritualised. If the child is conceived not in lust but in love, it
is rightly born. If it is the child of your ideal, the offspring of that
which is your truest life, then is your progeny your immortality, and
then, and then only, have you reason for pride and joy in that which you
have caused to be.
My dear, dear Herbert, my love has not failed. This you must come to
understand. Love never fails. The children that might have been mine are
better unborn, since I could not give them a mother whom I loved. You
remind me that Dante married Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and she
bore him seven children. Yet, Herbert, was this wife not mentioned in
the "Commedia," nor in "La Vita Nuova," nor anywhere else in his
writings. Dante was a Conformist. He was not in all respects above his
time; witness his theology. Convention permitted the dispassionate
marriage side by side with love. He was conventional, and the infinite
moment of meeting in paradise with his Lady was embittered by her "cold,
lessoned smiles."
"Ah, from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!"
It was for Beatrice that this man vexed his spirit with immortal effort
and raised a Titan voice which yet is heard in charmed echoes. It was
for Beatrice that he descended into the dead regions and climbed the
hills of purgatory and soared towards the Rose of Paradise,--"And 'She,
where is She?' instantly I cried."
Dante, our prince of lovers, might have lived better, but he loved well.
This in answer to your letter. To meet your argument I have found it
best to employ something of your own method, but I cannot rid myself of
the feeling that I have vulgarised the subject by saying so much about
it. I fear my letter would provoke a smile from those who know love and
the wonder of its simplicity through all the subtlety. "We, in loving,
have no cause to speak so much!" would be their unanswerable criticism.
It is easier to live than to argue about life.
The thought has suddenly assailed me that what I have said may sound
derogatory to Hester. Know, then, that I do not think there is a woman
in the world who is not capable of inspiring true and abiding love in
the heart of some man. Besides, Hester to me looms up as a heroine. Not
a hair's breadth of what I know of her that is not beautiful. My regret
is that she, who could be "a vision eterne," should be doomed to receive
episodically your considerate affection. She does not know your
programme. She is a girl who takes your love for granted in the same
way as she gives hers, without niggardliness. It is the woman who cannot
be content with less than all that is slowly starved to death on a
bread-and-water diet and who does not find it out until the end.
Until the carnival time when you and Hester come to love each other, if
that time is to be, you two must be as separate in deed as you are in
fact. Forgive me and write soon.
Yours ever,
DANE.
XVII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 2, 19--.
So you have met Hester's brother? Well, I have had an outing with
Hester. She loves me well, I know, and I cannot but confess a thrill at
the thought. On the other hand, well do I know the significance of that
love, the significance and the cause. Notwithstanding that wonderful
soul of hers, she is in no wise constituted differently from her
millions of sisters on the planet to-day. She loves--she knows not why;
she knows--only that she loves. In other words, she does not reason her
emotions.
But let us reason, we men, after the manner of men. And be thou patient,
Dane, and follow me down and under the phenomena of love to things
sexless and loveless. And from there, as the proper point of departure,
let us return and chart love, its phases and occurrences, from its first
beginnings to its last manifestations.
Things sexless and loveless! Yes, and as such may be classed the drops
of life known as unicellular organisms. Such a creature is a tiny cell,
capable of performing in itself all the functions of life. That one
pulsating morsel of matter is invested with an irritability which, as
Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with
outer relations," to correspond to its environment--in short, to live.
That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its
environment uncongenial to its constitution, and the things congenial it
draws to itself and absorbs. It has no mouth, no stomach, no alimentary
canal. It is all mouth, all stomach, all alimentary canal.
But at that low plane the functions of life are few and simple. This bit
of vitalised inorganic has no sex, and because of that it cannot love.
Reproduction is growth. When it grows over-large it splits in half, and
where was one cell there are two. Nor can the parent cell be called
_mother_ or _father_: and for that matter, the parent cell cannot be
determined. The original cell split into two cells; one has as much
claim to parenthood as the other.
It lives dimly, to be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it
is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men
and women, Hester Stebbins, my mother, you!
A step higher we find the cell cluster, and with it begins that
differentiation which has continued to this day and which still
continues. Simplicity has yielded to complexity and a new epoch of life
been inaugurated. The outer cells of the cluster are more exposed to
environmental forces than are the inner cells; they cohere more
tenaciously and a rudimentary skin is formed. Through the pores of this
skin food is absorbed, and in these food-absorbing pores is foreshadowed
the mouth. Division of labour has set in, and groups of cells specialise
in the performance of functions. Thus, a cell group forms the skinny
covering of the cluster, another cell group the mouth. And likewise,
internally, the stomach, a sac for the reception and digestion of food,
takes shape; and the juices of the body begin to circulate with greater
definiteness, breaking channels in their passage and keeping those
channels open. And, as the generations pass, still more groups of cells
segregate themselves from the mass, and the heart, the lungs, the
liver, and other internal organs are formed. The jelly-like organism
develops a bony structure, muscles by which to move itself, and a
nervous system--
Be not bored, Dane, and be not offended. These are our ancestors, and
their history is our history. Remember that as surely as we one day
swung down out of the trees and walked upright, just so surely, on a far
earlier day, did we crawl up out of the sea and achieve our first
adventure on land.
But to be brief. In the course of specialisation of function, as I have
outlined, just as other organs arose, so arose sex-differentiation.
Previous to that time there was no sex. A single organism realised all
potentialities, fulfilled all functions. Male and female, the creative
factors, were incoherently commingled. Such an individual was both male
and female. It was complete in itself,--mark this, Dane, for here
individual completeness ends.
The labour of reproduction was divided, and male and female, as separate
entities, came into the world. They shared the work of reproduction
between them. Neither was complete alone. Each was the complement of the
other. In times and seasons each felt a vital need for the other. And
in the satisfying of this vital need, of this yearning for completeness,
we have the first manifestation of love. Male and female loved they one
another--but dimly, Dane. We would not to-day call it love, yet it
foreshadowed love as the food-absorbing pore foreshadowed the mouth.
As long and tedious as has been the development of this rudimentary love
to the highly evolved love of to-day, just so long and tedious would be
my sketch of that development. However, the factors may be hinted. The
increasing correspondence of life with its environment brought about
wider and wider generalisations upon that environment and the relations
of the individual to it. There is no missing link to the chain that
connects the first and lowest life to the last and the highest. There is
no gap between the physical and psychical. From _simple reflex action_,
on and up through _compound reflex action_, _instinct_, and _memory_,
the passage is made, without break, to _reason_. And hand in hand with
these, all acting and reacting upon one another, comes the development
of the imagination and of the higher passions, feelings, and emotions.
But all of this is in the books, and there is no need for me to go over
the ground.
So let me sum up with an analysis of that most exquisite of poets'
themes, a maiden in love. In the first place, this maiden must come of
an ancestry mastered by the passion for perpetuation. It is only through
those so mastered that the line comes down. The individual perishes, you
know; for it is the race that lives. In this maiden is incorporated all
the experience of the race. This race experience is her heritage. Her
function is to pass it on to posterity. If she is disobedient, she is
unfruitful; her line ceases with her; and she is without avail among the
generations to come. And, be it not forgotten, there are many obedient
whose lines _will_ pass down.
But this maiden is obedient. By her acts she will link the past to the
future, bind together the two eternities. But she is incomplete, this
maiden, and being immature she is unaware of her incompleteness.
Nevertheless she is the creature of the law of the race, and from her
infancy she prepares herself for the task she is to perform. Hers is a
certain definite organism, somewhat different from all other female
organisms. Consequently there is one male in all the world whose
organism is most nearly the complement of hers; one male for whom she
will feel the greatest, intensest, and most vital need; one male who of
all males is the fittest, organically, to be the father of her children.
And so, in pinafores and pigtails, she plays with little boys and likes
and dislikes according to her organic need. She comes in contact with
all manner of boys, from the butcher's boy to the son of her father's
friend; and likewise with men, from the gardener to her father's
associates. And she is more or less attracted by those who, in greater
or less degree, answer to her organic demand, or, as it were, organic
ideal.
And upon creatures male she early proceeds to generalise. This kind of
man she likes, that she does not like; and this kind she likes more than
that kind. She does not know why she does this; nor, with the highest
probability, does she know she is doing it. She simply has her likes and
dislikes, that is all. She is the slave of the law, unwittingly
generalising upon sex-impressions against the day when she must identify
the male who most nearly completes her.
She drifts across the magic borderland to womanhood, where dreams and
fancies rise and intermingle and the realities of life are lost. A
dissatisfaction and a restlessness come upon her. There seems no sanity
in things, and life is topsy-turvy. She is filled with vague, troubled
yearnings, and the woman in her quickens and cries out for unity. It is
an organic cry, old as the race, and she cannot shut out the sound of it
or still the clamour in her blood.
But there is one male in all the world who is most nearly her
complement, and he may be over on the other side of the world where she
may not find him. So propinquity determines her fate. Of the males she
is in contact with, the one who can more nearly give her the
completeness she craves will be the one she loves.
All of which is well and good in its way, but let us analyze further.
What is all this but the symptoms of an extreme over-excitation and
nervous disorder? The equilibrium of the organism has been overthrown
and there is a wild scrambling for the restoration of that equilibrium.
The choice made may be good or ill, as chance and time may dictate, but
the impelling excitement forces a choice. What if it be ill? What if
to-morrow a male who is a far better complement should appear? The time
is now. Nature is not neglectful, and well she knows the disaster of
delay. She is prodigal of the individual and is satisfied with one
match out of many mismatches, just as she is satisfied that of a million
cod eggs one only should develop into a full-grown cod. And so this love
of the human in no wise differs from that of the sparrow which forgets
preservation in procreation. Thus nature tricks her creatures and the
race lives on.
For the lesser creatures the trick serves the purpose well. There is
need for a compelling madness, else would self-preservation overcome
procreation and there be no lesser creatures. And man is content to rest
coequal with the beast in the matter of mating. Notwithstanding his
intelligence, which has made him the master of matter and enabled him to
enslave the great blind forces, he is unable to perpetuate his species
without the aid of the impelling madness. Nay, men will not have it
otherwise; and when an individual urges that his reason has placed him
above the beast, and that, without the impelling madness, he can mate
with greater wisdom and potency, then the poets and singers rise up and
fling potsherds at him. To improve upon nature by draining a malarial
swamp is permitted him; to improve upon nature's methods and breed
swifter carrier-pigeons and finer horses than she has ever bred is also
permitted; but to improve upon nature in the breeding of the human, that
is a sacrilege which cannot be condoned! Down with him! He is a brute to
question our divine Love, God-given and glorious!
Ah, Dane, remember the first dim yearning of divided life, and the soils
and smirches and frenzies put upon it by the spawn of multitudinous
generations. There is your love, the whole history of it. There is no
intrinsic shame in the thing itself, but the shame lies in that we are
not greater than it.
HERBERT.
XVIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 4, 19--.
There were several things in your letter which I forgot to answer. Much
of beauty and wonder is there in what you have said, and unrelated facts
without end. Many of those facts I endorse heartily, but it seems to me
you fail to embody them in a coherent argument.
I have stated, in so many words, that there are two functions common to
all life--nutrition and reproduction. Of this you have missed the
significance in your rejection of my definition of love, so I must
explain further. Unless these two functions be carried on, life must
perish from the planet. Therefore they are the most essential concerns
of life. The individual must preserve its own life and the life of its
kind. It is more prone to preserve its own life than the life of its
kind, less prone to sacrifice itself for its species. So natural
selection has developed a passion of madness which forces the individual
to make the sacrifice. In all forms of life below man the struggle for
existence is keen and merciless. The least weakness in an individual is
the signal for its destruction. Therefore it is counter to the welfare
of the individual to do aught that will tend to weaken it. On the other
hand, the law is that the individual must procreate. But procreation
means a weakening and a temporary state of helplessness. Problem: How
may the individual be brought to procreate? to do that which is inimical
to its welfare? Answer: It must be forced by something deeper than
reason, and that something is unreasoning passion. Did the individual
reason on the matter, it would certainly abstain. It is because the
passion is not rational that life has persisted to this day. Man, coming
up from the walks of lower life, brought with him this most necessary
passion. Developing imagination, he commingled the two; love was the
product.
Now, because of our imagination, do not let us confuse the issue. The
great task demanded of man is reproduction. He is urged by passion to
perform this task. Passion, working through the imagination, produces
love. Passion is the impelling factor, imagination the disturbing
factor; and the disturbance of passion by imagination produces love.
Stripped of all its superfluities, what function does love serve in the
scheme of life? That of reproduction. Nay, now, do not object, Dane; for
you state the same thing, though less clearly, in your own definition of
love. You say, "Love is the awakening of the personality to the beauty
and worth of some one being" and is a desire to merge the life with that
of the beloved being. In other words, your definition tells that the
passion for perpetuation is the cause of love, and perpetuation the end
to be accomplished. Thus nature tricks her creatures and the race lives
on.
Then you say negatively, "Love is not a disorder of mind and body, not a
madness, since it arises in the eternally most valuable, since it is the
culmination of high processes, and since it makes for strength and
sanity of vision and happiness." I have shown the value of passion, and
the processes of which love is the culmination, and I have shown that
both are unreasoning and why they are unreasoning. Do you demonstrate
where I am wrong.
Then again, you dare a formula: "In the beginning love arose in the
passion for perpetuation; to-day the passion for perpetuation arises in
love." It is clever, but is it true? Yes, as true as this formula I dare
to pattern after yours: In the beginning man ate because he was hungry;
to-day he is hungry because he eats.
There are many things more I should like to answer, but I am writing
this 'twixt breakfast and lecture hour, and time presses and students
will not wait.
HERBERT.
XIX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
April 22, 19--.
Nature tricks her creatures and the race lives on, and I, overcivilised,
decadent dreamer that I am, rejoice that the past binds us, am proud of
a history so old and so significant and of an heritage so marvellous.
Nature tricks her creatures and the race lives on, and I am prayerfully
grateful. The difference between us is that you are not. You are
suffering from what has been well called, the sadness of science. You
accept the thesis of a common origin only to regret it. You discover
that romance has a history, and lo! romance has vanished! You are a
Werther of science, sad to the heart with a melancholy all your own and
dropping inert tears on the shrine of your accumulated facts.
In this you are with your generation. Just as every age has its
prevailing disease of the body so has it its characteristic spiritual
ailment. To-day we are in the throes of travail. In our arms is the
child of our ever-delving intellect, but another deliverance is about to
be and the suffering is great. After science comes the philosophy of
science. Our eyes are bathed in Revelation, but upon our ears the music
of the Word has not yet fallen. Until that time when the meaning of it
all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in
callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what
to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of
inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been
living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of
our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it
has become evident to you that the phenomenon is common, and I, on the
other hand, shout its glory because it is universal. To myself I am
breathless with wonder, but to you and in my work I needs must shout it.
Here let me be clear. I take it that you are under the sway of a
contemporary mood, that your position is an accidental phase of
to-day's materialism. Broadly, our quarrel is that of pessimism and
optimism, only your pessimism is unconscious, which makes it the more
dangerous to yourself. You are too sad to know that you are not happy or
to care. Does my diagnosis surprise you? Analyze the argument of your
last letter. You trace the growth of the emotion of love from protoplasm
to man. You follow the progress of the force which is stronger than
hunger and cold and swifter and more final than death, from its
potential state in the unicellular stage where life goes on by division,
up through the multifarious forms of instinctive animal mating, till you
reach the love of the sexes in the human world. And the exploring leads
you to the belief that nothing has been reserved for the human worth his
cherishing, to the conviction that the plan of life is simple and
unvaried and therefore unacceptable.
You raise the wail of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity and a striving after
wind, and there is no profit under the sun." The Preacher and Omar and
Swinburne are pathetically human, and we who are also human respond to
their finality, to their quizzical indifference and their stinging
resentment. We also say, "Vanity of vanities," and bow our heads
murmuring "Ilicet," and stretch out our hands to "turn down an empty
glass," but all this in twilight moods when a dimness as of dying rests
upon the soul. There are a few with whom it is always morning, and
others who remember something of the radiance of the young day even in
the heart of midnight. These disprove the postulates of sameness and
satiety, these are not smitten by the seen fact as are you of the
microscopic retina, these "see life steadily and see it whole."
We need not fear the label of an idea. When I say that your position is
that of the pessimist, it is not more of an accusation than if I said it
was that of the optimist. The thing to concern oneself with is the
question, "which of these makes the nearer approach to the truth?" You
have been asking me, "What is love worth?" And you have answered your
question often enough and to your satisfaction, "In itself it is worth
nothing, being but the catspaw to scheming forces." With your denial of
any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an
unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race
will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a
scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the
primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land
of the children of biology.
Ah! I speak as if I were vexed instead of simply being sure I am in the
right. I wish to help you to see that there is another reading to your
facts. If love is essentially the same from protoplasm to man, it does
not for this reason become worthless. By virtue of being universal it is
enhanced and most divinely humanly binding. You tell me that love is
involuntary, compelled by external forces as old as time and as binding
as instinct, and I say that because of this, life is finally for love.
What! The cavemen, and the birds, too, and the fish and the plants,
forsooth! What! The inorganic, perhaps, as well as the organic, swayed
by this force which is wholly physical and yet wholly psychical! And
does it not fire you? You are not caught up and held by this giant fact?
You find that love is not sporadic, not individual, that it does not
begin with you or end with you, that it does not dissociate you, and you
do not warm to the world-organic kinship, you do not hear the overword
of the poets and philosophers of all times, you do not see the visions
that gladdened the star-forgotten nights of saints?
The same surprise sweeps over the mind in reading Ecclesiastes. Is it a
sorry scheme of things that one generation goes and another comes and
the world abides forever? If the same generation peopled the earth for a
million years, the dignity of life would not be increased. It is not
necessary to have the assurance of eternal life as the dole for having
come to be, in order to live under the aspect of eternity. It is larger
to be short-lived, to be but a wave of the sea rolling for one sunful
day and starry night towards a great inclusiveness. It is a higher
majesty to be inalien and a part--a ringed ripple in the Vastness--than
to lie broad and smiling in meaningless endlessness.
So it is a strange thing that men who are schooled by evolution to
relate themselves to all that exists, and to seek for new kinships,
should lament that there is no new thing under the sun. And whose eye
would be satisfied with seeing and whose ear with hearing? Who would
rather have the truth than the power to seek it? There is a way of
reading Ecclesiastes and Schopenhauer with a triumphant lilt in the
voice. After all, it is the modulation that carries the message of the
text. When you write the history of love, I find it fair reading. When
you tell me love is primal and engrossing, I hold it the more a sin to
crouch away from its fires.
"Love is the assertion of the will to live as a definitely determined
individual." This is Schopenhauer's thesis and (unnecessarily enough) he
apologises for it, as if it belittled love to say that it affects man in
his _essentia æterna_. The genius of the race takes the lover conscript
and makes him a soldier in life's battalions.
"The genius of the race," a metaphysical term, but meaning what you do
when you speak of the function of love. Schopenhauer is a pessimist
consciously, you, unconsciously; and you have both missed the living
value of your facts. "Love is ruled by race welfare," says Schopenhauer.
"It (the race welfare) alone corresponds to the profoundness with which
it is felt, to the seriousness with which it appears, to the importance
which it attributes even to the trifling details of its sphere and
occasion." Love concerns itself with "The composition of the next
generation," therefore you find it common as the commonplace, therefore
Schopenhauer regards it as a force treacherous to happiness, since to
live is to be miserable. "These lovers are the traitors who seek to
perpetuate the whole want and drudgery which would otherwise speedily
reach an end; this they wish to frustrate as others like them have
frustrated it before."
Because love frustrates the death of the race, it is the joy of my
senses and the goal of my striving.
Says Schopenhauer: "Through love man shows that the species lies closer
to him than the individual, and he lives more immediately in the former
than in the latter. Why does the lover hang with complete abandon on the
eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her?
_Because it is his immortal part that longs after her, while it is
merely his mortal part that desires everything else._" Because this is
so, love is the God of my faith.
You see where our subject takes us! And all the while I care nothing for
the points of argument except where they prick you from your position.
One must scale the skies and swim the seas in order to reach you. Well,
have I approached within your hearing?
I was sitting amongst the fennel in Barbara's garden when your letter
was brought, and I read it twice to make sure I understood. When the
sun lies warm on waving fennel and a city is before you, mysterious in a
veil of mist, it is easier to feel love than to think about it. For a
while, it was difficult to see the bearing of the data which you
marshalled so well in defence of your denial. You went far in order to
answer why you are content to marry a woman you do not love. Your
methods are not the methods of the practical mind. I am glad for that.
You idealise your attitude, you go far back in time, you enmesh yourself
in theories and generalisations, you ride your imagination proudly, in
order to reconcile yourself to something which suggests itself as more
ideal than that for which the unreasoning heart hungers. You are sad,
but you are not practical and you are not blasé.
Of Barbara, of myself, and of London doings, this is no time to write.
Tell Hester your friend thinks of her.
Yours with great memories and greater hopes,
DANE KEMPTON.
XX
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 18, 19--.
I stand aloof and laugh at myself and you. Oh, believe me, I see it very
clearly myself in the heyday and cocksureness of youth, flinging at you,
with much energy and little skill, my immature generalisations from
science; and you with an elderly beneficence and tolerance, smiling
shrewdly and affectionately upon me, secure in the knowledge that sooner
or later I am sure to get through with it all and join you in your broad
and placid philosophy. It is the penalty age exacts from youth. Well, I
accept it.
So I am suffering from the sadness of science. I had been prone to
ascribe my feelings to the passion of science. But it does not matter in
the least--only, somehow, I would rather you did not misunderstand me
so dreadfully. I do not raise the wail of Ecclesiastes. I am not sad,
but glad. I discover romance has a history, and in history I am quicker
to read the romance. I accept the thesis of a common origin, not to
regret it, but to make the best of it. That is the key to my life--to
make the best of it, but not drearily, with the passiveness of a slave,
but passionately and with desire. Invention is an artifice man employs
to overcome the roundabout. It is the short cut to satisfaction. It
makes man potent, so that he can do more things in a span. I am a worker
and doer. The common origin is not a despair to me; it has a value, and
it strengthens my arm in the work to be done.
The play and interplay of force and matter we call "evolution." The more
man understands force and matter, and the play and interplay, the more
is he enabled to direct the trend of evolution, at least in human
affairs. Here is a great and weltering mass of individuals which we call
society. The problem is: How may it be directed so that the sum of its
happiness greatens? This is my work. I would invent, overcome the
roundabout, seek the short cut. And I consider all matter, all force,
all factors, so that I may invent wisely and justly. And considering
all factors, I consider romance, and I consider you. I weigh your value
in the scheme of things, and your necessity, and I find that you are
both valuable and necessary.
But the history of progress is the history of the elimination of waste.
One boy, running twenty-five machines, turns out a thousand pairs of
socks a day. His granny toiled a thousand days to do the same. Waste has
been eliminated, the roundabout overcome. And so with romance. I strive
not to be blinded by its beauty, but to give it exact appraisal.
Oftentimes it is the roundabout, the wasteful, and must needs be
eliminated. Thus chivalry and its romance vanished before the chemist
and the engineer, before the man who mixed gunpowder and the man who dug
ditches.
I melancholy? Sir, I have not the time--so may I model my answer after
the great Agassiz. I am not a Werther of science, but rather you are a
John Ruskin of these latter days. He wept at the profanation of the
world, at the steam-launches violating the sanctity of the Venetian
canals and the electric cars running beneath the shadow of the pyramids;
and you weep at the violation of like sanctities in the spiritual world.
A gondola is more beautiful, but the steam-launch takes one places, and
an electric car is more comfortable than the hump of a camel. It is too
bad, but waste romance, as waste energy, must be eliminated.
Enough. I shall go on with the argument. I have drawn the line between
pre-nuptial love and post-nuptial love. The former, which is the real
sexual love, the love of which the poets sing and which "makes the world
go round," I have called romantic love. The latter, which in actuality
is sex comradeship, I call conjugal affection or friendship. To be more
definite, I shall call the one "love," the other "affection" or
"friendship." Now love is not affection or friendship, yet they are
ofttimes mistaken, one for the other, for it so happens that the
friendship, which is akin to conjugal affection, is in many instances
pre-nuptial in its development--a token, I take it, of the higher
evolution of the human, an audaciousness which dares to shake off the
blind passion and evade nature's trick as man evaded when he harnessed
steam and rested his feet. It is of common occurrence that a man and
woman, through long and tried friendship, reach a fine appreciation of
each other and marry; and the run of such marriages is the happiest.
Neither blinded nor frenzied by the unreasoned passion of love, they
have weighed each other,--faults, virtues, and all,--and found a
compatibility strong enough to withstand the strain of years and
misfortune, and wise enough to compromise the individual clashes which
must inevitably arise when soul shares never ending bed and board with
soul. They have achieved before marriage what the love-impelled man and
woman must achieve after marriage if they would continue to live
together; that is, they have sought and found compatibility before
binding themselves, instead of binding themselves first and then seeking
if there be compatibility or not.
Let me apparently digress for the moment and bring all clear and
straight. The emotions have no basis in reason. We smile or are sad at
the manifestation of jealousy in another. We smile or are sad because of
the unreasonableness of it. Likewise we smile at the antics of the
lover. The absurdities he is guilty of, the capers he cuts, excite our
philosophic risibility. We say he is mad as a March hare. (Have you ever
wondered, Dane, why a March hare is deemed mad? The saying is a pregnant
one.) However, love, as you have tacitly agreed, is unreasonable. In
fact, in all the walks of animal life no rational sanction can be found
for the love-acts of the individual. Each love act is a hazarding of the
individual's life; this we know, and it is only impelled to perform such
acts because of the madness of the trick, which, though it strikes at
the particular life, makes for the general life.
So I think there is no discussion over the fact that this emotion of
love has no basis in reason. As the old French proverb runs, "The first
sigh of love is the last of wisdom." On the other hand, the individual
not yet afflicted by love, or recovered from it, conducts his life in a
rational manner. Every act he performs has a basis in reason--so long as
it is not some other of the emotional acts. The stag, locking horns with
a rival over the possession of a doe, is highly irrational; but the same
stag, hiding its trail from the hounds by taking to water, is performing
a highly rational act. And so with the human. We model our lives on a
basis of reason--of the best reason we possess. We do not put the
scullery in the drawing-room, nor do we repair our bicycles in the
bedchamber. We strive not to exceed our income, and we deliberate long
before investing our savings. We demand good recommendations from our
cook, and take letters of introduction with us when we go abroad. We
overlook the petulant manner of our friend who rowed in the losing
barges at the race, and we forgive on the moment the sharp answer of the
man who has sat three nights by a sick-bed. And we do all this because
our acts have a basis in reason.
Comes the lover, tricked by nature, blind of passion, impelled madly
toward the loved one. He is as blind to her salient imperfections as he
is to her petty vices. He does not interrogate her disposition and
temperament, or speculate as to how they will coördinate with his for
two score years and odd. He questions nothing, desires nothing, save to
possess her. And this is the paradox: _By nature he is driven to
contract a temporary tie, which, by social observance and demand, must
endure for a lifetime._ Too much stress cannot be laid upon this, Dane,
for herein lies the secret of the whole difficulty.
But we go on with our lover. In the throes of desire--for desire is
pain, whether it be heart hunger or belly hunger--he seeks to possess
the loved one. The desire is a pain which seeks easement through
possession. Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is
a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I
can grant a lasting satisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be
coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire, and possession is
easement and fulfilment. Pursuit and possession are accompanied by
states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.
What is true of pursuit cannot be true of possession, no more than the
child, grasping the bright ball, can deem it the most wonderful thing in
the world--an appraisement which it certainly made when the ball was
beyond reach.
Let us suppose the loved one is as madly impelled toward the lover. In a
few days, in an hour, nay, in an instant--for there is such a thing as
love at first sight--this man and woman, two unrelated individuals, who
may never have seen each other before, conceive a passion, greater,
intenser, than all other affections, friendships, and social relations.
So great, so intense is it, that the world could crumble to star-dust so
long as their souls rushed together. If necessary, they would break all
ties, forsake all friends, abandon all blood kin, run away from all
moral responsibilities. There can be no discussion, Dane. We see it
every day, for love is the most perfectly selfish thing in the universe.
But this is easily reconcilable with the scheme of things. The true
lover is the child of nature. Natural selection has determined that
exogamy produces fitter progeny than endogamy. Cross fertilisation has
made stronger individuals and types, and likewise it has maintained
them. On the other hand, were family affection stronger than love, there
would be much intermarriage of blood relations and a consequent
weakening of the breed. And in such cases it would be stamped out by the
stronger-breeding exogamists. Here and there, even of old time, the wise
men recognised it; and we so recognise it to-day, as witness our bars
against consanguineous marriage.
But be not misled into the belief that love is finer and higher than
affection and friendship, that the yielding to its blandishments is
higher wisdom on the part of our lovers. Not so; they are puppets and
know and think nothing about it. They come of those who yielded likewise
in the past. They obey forces beyond them, greater than they, their
kind, and all life, great as the great forces of the physical universe.
Our lovers are children of nature, natural and uninventive. Duty and
moral responsibility are less to them than passion. They will obey and
procreate, though the heavens roll up as a scroll and all things come to
judgment. And they are right if this is what we understand to be "the
bloom, the charm, the smile of life."
Yet man is man because he chanced to develop intelligence instead of
instinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the
anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it
were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the
face of it somewhat to his liking. His trend has been, and still is, to
perform more and more acts with a rational sanction. He has developed a
moral nature, made laws, and by the sheer force of his will and reason
curbed his lyings and his lusts.
However, our lovers are natural and uninventive. They get married.
Pursuit, with all its Tantalus delights, its sighings and its songs, is
gone, never to return. And in its place is possession, which is
satisfaction, familiarity, knowledge. It heralds the return of
rationality, the return to duty of the weighing and measuring qualities
of the mind. Our lovers discover each other to be mere man and woman
after all. That ethereal substance which the man took for the body of
the loved one becomes flesh and blood, prone to the common weaknesses
and ills of flesh and blood. He, on the other hand, betrays little
petulancies of disposition, little faults and predispositions of which
she never dreamed in the pre-nuptial days, and which she now finds
eminently distasteful. But at first these things are not openly
unpleasant. There are no scenes. One or the other gives in on the
instant, without self-betrayal, and one or the other retires to have a
secret cry or to ruminate about it over a cigar--the first faint hints,
I may slyly suggest, of the return of rationality. _They are beginning
to think._
Ah, these are little things, you say. Precisely; wherefore I lay
emphasis upon them. The sum of the innumerable little things becomes a
mighty thing to test the human soul. Moreover, many a home has been
broken because of disagreement as to the uses or abuses of couch
cushions, and more than one divorce induced by the lingering of tobacco
odours in the curtains.
If the marriage of our lovers conform to the majority of marriages, the
first year of their wedded life will determine whether they are able to
share bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first
year--often the first months of it--marks the transition from love to
conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than
omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must
take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to
reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that
friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments
when wills clash and desires do not chime; these must be moments of
sober thought and compromise, when one or the other sacrifices self on
the altar of their nascent friendship. Upon this ability to compromise
depends their married happiness. Returning to the rationality which they
forsook during mating-time, they cannot live a joint rational existence
without compromising. If they be compatible, they will gradually grow to
fit, each with the other, into the common life; compromise, on certain
definite points, will become automatic; and for the rest they will
exhibit a tacit and reasoned recognition of the imperfections and
frailties of life.
All this reason will dictate. If they be incapable of rising to
compromise, sacrifice, and unselfishness, reason will dictate
separation. In such cases, when they will have become rational once
more, they will reason the impossibility of a continued relation and
give it up. In which case the true-love disciple may contend that there
was no real love in the beginning. But he is wrong. It was just as real
as that of any marriage, only it failed in the post-nuptial quest after
compatibility. In all marriages love--passionate, romantic love--must
disappear, to be replaced by conjugal affection or by nothing. The
former are the happy marriages, the latter the mistaken ones.
As I close, the saying of La Bruyère comes to me, "The love which arises
suddenly takes longest to cure." This generalisation upon all the
love-affairs within the scope of a single lifetime cannot but be true,
and it is quite in line with the general argument. I have shown that the
love (so called) which grows slowly is akin to friendship, that it is
friendship, in fact, conjugal friendship. On the other hand, the more
sudden a love the more intense it must be; also the less rationality can
it have. And because of its intensity and unreasonableness, the longer
period must elapse ere its frenzy dies out and cool, calm thought comes
in.
HERBERT.
P.S.--My book is out--"The Economic Man." I send it to you. I cannot
imagine you will care for the thing.
XXI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 26, 19--.
"Pretty nineteen-year-old Louisa Naveret, because her slower-minded
fiancé, Charles J. Johnson, could not understand a joke, is dying with a
bullet in her brain, and he, her murderer, lies dead at the morgue. They
were to have been married to-day."
From to-day's paper I quote the above introduction to a column
murder-sensation in simple life. Simple it was, and elemental--the man
loving steadily and doggedly and madly, after the manner of the male
before possession; the woman fluttering, and teasing, and tantalising,
after the manner of the female courting possession. They had been
engaged for some time. The woman loved the man and fully intended to
marry him. The engagement neared its close, and on the day before that
of the wedding, the man, slow minded, loving intensely, procured the
marriage licence. The woman read the document, and with the last coy
flutter before surrender told him that she would not marry him.
"I meant it as a jest," she said as she lay on a cot at the receiving
hospital; but four bullets were in her body, and Charles J. Johnson,
clumsy and natural lover, lay dead in an adjoining room with the fifth
bullet in his brain.
In this pitiful little tragedy appear two of the most salient
characteristics of love; namely, madness and selfishness. Let us analyze
Charles J. Johnson's condition. He was a lineman for a telegraph
company, healthy and strong, used to open-air life and hard work. He had
steady employment and good wages. Can't you see the man, content with a
good digestion, unailing body, and mild pleasures, and enjoying life
with bovine placidity? But pretty Louisa Naveret entered his life. The
"abysmal fecundity" was stirred and life clamoured to be created.
Peacefulness and content vanished. All the forces of his existence
impelled him to seize upon and possess "nineteen-year-old" Louisa
Naveret. He was afflicted with a disorder of mind and body, a madness
so great, a delusion so powerful, a pain and unrest so pressing, that
the possession of that particular "nineteen-year-old" woman became the
dearest thing in the world, dearer than life itself and more potent than
the "will to live."
I do well to call love a madness. Any departure from rationality is
madness, and for a man of Charles J. Johnson's calibre, suicide is an
extremely irrational act. But he also killed Louisa Naveret, wherein he
was as selfish as he was mad. Convinced that he was not to possess her,
he was determined that no other man should possess her.
While on this matter of love considered as a disorder of mind and body,
I recall a recent magazine article of Mr. Finck's, in which he analyzes
Sappho's conception of love. "In that famous poem of Sappho," he says,
"that has been so often declared a compendium of all the emotions that
make up love, I have not been able to find anything but a comic
catalogue of such feelings as might overwhelm a woman if she met a bear
in the woods--'deadly pallor,' 'a cold sweat,' 'a fluttering heart,'
'tongue paralyzed,' 'trembling all over,' 'a fainting fit.'"
Dante suffered similarly from the disorder of love, if you will
recollect. In this connection may be cited the following passage from
Diderot's "Paradox of Acting ":--
"Take two lovers, both of whom have their declarations to make. Who will
come out of it best? Not I, I promise you. I remember that I approached
the beloved object with fear and trembling; my heart beat, my ideas grew
confused, my voice failed me, I mangled all I said; I cried _yes_ for
_no_; I made a thousand blunders; I was illimitably inept; I was absurd
from top to toe, and the more I saw it the more absurd I became.
Meanwhile, under my very eyes, a gay rival, light hearted and agreeable,
master of himself, pleased with himself, losing no opportunity for the
finest flattery, made himself entertaining and agreeable, enjoyed
himself; he implored the touch of a hand which was at once given him, he
sometimes caught it without asking leave, he kissed it once and again.
I, the while, alone in a corner, avoided a sight which irritated me;
stifling my sighs, cracking my fingers with grasping my wrists, plunged
in melancholy, covered with a cold sweat, I could neither show nor
conceal my vexation."
Oh, the clamour of life to be born is a masterful thing, and so far as
the individual is concerned, a most irrational thing; and so far as the
world of beasts and emotional men and women is concerned, it is a most
necessary thing. That life may live and continue to live, a driving
force is needed that is greater than the puny will of life. And in the
disorder produced by the passion for perpetuation, whether or not
assisted by imagination, is found this driving force. As Ernest Haeckel,
that brave old hero of Jena, explains:--
"The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Otillia,
or Paris to Helen, and leaps all bounds of reason and morality, is the
same _powerful, unconscious_, attractive force which impels the living
spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilisation of
the egg of the animal or plant--the same impetuous movement which unites
two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen for the formation of a
molecule of water."
But with the advent of intellectual man, there is no longer need for
obeying blind and irresistible compulsion. Intellectual man, changing
the face of life with his inventions and artifices, performing telic
actions, adjusting himself and his concerns to remote ends and ultimate
compensations, will grapple with the problem of perpetuation as he has
grappled with that of gravitation. As he controls and directs the great
natural forces so that, instead of menacing, they are made to labour for
his safety and comfort, so will he control and direct the operation of
the reproductive force so that life will not only be perpetuated but
developed and made higher and finer. This is not more impossible than is
the steam-engine impossible or democracy impossible.
HERBERT.
XXII
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
June 12, 19--.
Please remember that these letters are written to you alone. I do not
think that there is less love in the world than ever before. I make you
representative of a class, which, in turn, is characteristic of the
modern scientific type, but I do not make you representative of all that
to-day's world has lived up to and lived down. So I do not join my
Ruskin in lamenting the past. To be sure, you are contemporary and you
are parvenu. What then? You are few, nevertheless, and like the parvenu
rich, you must pass into something quite unlike yourself. It is the law
of growth. I ask you to account for yourself as an individual. The thing
is fiercely personal. But you choose the roundabout method of answering
me. For a view of what in your eyes is pertinent to this matter, you
stretch a canvas wide as the world. You are resolved that your course
should dramatise the whole play and interplay of force and matter. It is
ideally ambitious of you and I am glad. It puts you in the ranks with
the students of the ideal tendencies. It shows that you are not always
impatient for short cuts, and that you begin to be of those who harness
"horses of the sun to plough in earth's rough furrows."
Your letter sounds conclusive. Romance is waste, love is unreasoning;
compatibility alone is worth while. You think this, and are ready to
encrust yourself with what is conventional and practical. Ah, no, it is
not even decently conventional! The formal world pretends, at least, to
love. It also reaches for the fires that thrill and thaw, whereas you
stand before a cold hearth and think the chill well and welcome, since
you understand its cause. You have grasped part of a truth, and though
my mind complete your arc into the perfection of a circle, I cannot
place it about your head as a halo. My confusion comes from thinking of
you more than of my creed. A pregnant factor in our debate is the
debater. The Hafiz of the Hafiz maxims, the philosopher of your
philosophy happens to interest me. You have been building yourself up
before my eyes, and for watching I cannot speak.
With what does romance interfere? If it implied a waste of vital force,
a giving up, a postponement of life, it were a roundabout path to
development and happiness. But we live most when we are most under its
sway, and it is for such self-promised sparks that we live at all.
Romance quickens and controls as does nothing else, and because of this
it is not only a means but an end in itself. It is stirred-up life. We
live most when we love most. The love of romance and the romance of love
is the only coin for which the heart-hurt sell their death. A trick?
Perhaps. The love of life is a trick to save the races from self-murder.
Nature makes legitimate her tricks. Let the Genius of the Race lure us
with passion and dreaming! We are not the losers by it. And if the dream
fades and we grow gray despite what has been lived, then it is something
to remember that soul and sense have leapt and pulsed. I am thankful
that romance has an aftermath, and that old men and women can prattle
about days that were robust. I am thankful that the soldiers of life are
at the end given a furlough in which to fondle the arms they wielded
with clumsiness and with spirit, and in which to pass themselves in
review before their pension expires and their days are over. Youth has
the romance of loving, and age the romance of remembering.
Lovers are not always compatible, you say, and, before all, you insist
upon good partnership. How will you insure yourself against unfitness?
Surely not by a registering and weighing of qualities, not by bargaining
and speculating. We do not choose our wives as we do our saddle-horses;
we do not plan our marriages as we plan our houses. It may sound
paradoxical, but there is a higher compatibility than that of quality
and degree. It is not whether people can live together, but whether they
should live together. "It is an awkward thing to play with souls,"--you
override the fastidiousness of the soul in marrying your companion.
Unless you are an automaton, you cannot rest happy in the fact that you
and she do not disagree. For comfort's sake you would have a negative
dimension to your cosmos, forgetting that your longings and your needs
and, it may be, your dreams, are positive. If sex-comradeship and
affection were not as accidental and as dependent on mood as love
itself, your position would have much in its favour. You could then
arrange for compatibility in marriage.
You speak of the methods in economics that conserve energy and capital,
such as the employ of the machine-guiding boy, which saves the labour
power of a hundred men, and you hold that in the realm of personal life
like methods may obtain with value and dignity. I can see how natural it
has become for you to take this viewpoint. One can be a zealot in
matters frigid. The law behind the fact has you in its coil, and your
passion goes to ice. You burn for that cold thing, compatibility. You,
too, are in the market-place bound to a stake--it is not for such as you
to escape the fire. If you look to compatibility and want it intensely,
as others want love, then you suffer, and from your standpoint (not
mine) you raise a vain cry; for compatibility, like everything else, is
illusory. The illusions of love are a strength, and the ways of love are
divine; through them we come to that feeling of completion which is
compatibility and which is as ineffable as the white-lipped promise of
waves heard by those who have also listened to weeping. Love is not
responsible for institutionalism. There would be no fewer marriages if
people married for convenience, nor would the law make such unions less
binding. It is not the fault of love that the great social paradox
exists. In the precipitancy of feeling, you say, the lover fastens upon
an unsuitable mate, and, with possession, love dies. Here I attack your
facts. If an awakening comes, it is not for either of these reasons.
Love is not essentially rational, but then it is love. There is some
consistency in affairs natural, and the esoteric draught that enchanted
at one time cannot poison at another.
Love is not essentially rational, and it will not of a sudden become so
at the possession of the loved one. People who marry from convenience
may wake to find their union most inconvenient. "There are more things
in heaven and earth," and there are more intricacies of feeling and more
sloughs and depths, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. A definite
understanding as to sofa cushions and tobacco smoke does not always
insure unwearied forbearance and devotion. With love, on the other hand,
disappointment is very much less likely to spring up, for the reason
that it is free from calculation. Love is a sympathy. It takes hold, it
grows upon the soul and the senses, and it does not flee before argument
and explanation.
Still less can I admit that possession kills love. Do we give up living
because the world is based on Will and Idea? Yet to will is to want,
Schopenhauer tells us, and to want is to be in pain. Do we know
ourselves in pain every minute of our lives? Hardly. This applies. You
hold that, with the fulfilled hope and the appeased hunger, indifference
takes the place of desire. It reads so in logic, but not in life. If
what is in our possession be good, we prize it more highly for its being
within reach. The good in our keeping does not sate; it pains with
divine hungers. We do not tire of what we have; we rise to it. We do not
know the sweetness of being steadfast until we are so impelled by the
love with which we have grown great. The lover may well say: "She was
not my ideal; before I knew her I was not great enough to think her. She
taught me."
Besides, an acquaintance with your wife's faults does not kill your
love. You cannot turn from your brother or your friend if he commit even
a lurid act; you cannot turn from a stranger; much less can you turn
from your beloved. Herbert, when men set themselves to judge, they are
invariably ridiculous and an offence to high heaven. Believe me, it is
artificial. The true judge cares not for the fact of the deed, but for
its motive. And the lover knows the motive. He has the key to the life.
He knows his beloved, not as she is, but "as she was born to be." His
lips press and his arms enfold not her so much as the ideal of her, and
unless she unmake herself, he cannot unlove her. "To judge a man by the
fruit of his actions," says Professor Edward Howard Griggs, "it is
necessary to know all of the fruit, which is impossible. You can only
know what he eternally must be if you catch the aspect of his soul and
grow to understand his aspirations and his loves." To idealise,
therefore, is not to be blind, but to be far-seeing.
There is another way of looking on this question of the paradox. Granted
that it is caused by romantic love, romantic love is still exclusively
the best thing in the world. You cannot pay too dearly for the good of
life. I know that the misery of being in the intimacy of wedlock with
one who is not loved is unutterable. It is to become degraded and
unrecognisable, it is to wear the brand of liar before God! The man
whose outer life belies the inner is an enforced suicide. There is
something of majesty on "laying one's self down with a will," and there
is something of strength in cloistering the body for the spirit's
health's sake, but to die when all within is warm and clamorous for life
is terrible. Such a death they die who are held together, not by the
bonds of the spirit, but by those of convention. They who would go from
each other and dare not, die the ignominious death of fear. The suicide
is contemptible, besides being pitiable, when he is hounded out of life
despite himself, when he is a little embezzler of a clerk who rushes
from the music hall to the Thames and thinks of the unfinished glass
with his last breath. No, I do not underestimate the tragedy of the
paradox. Yet I say that if love were accountable for it (which it is
not), it would still be folly to forswear love. Do you ask why? Because
its dangers are the dangers common to all life, and we are so made that
we cannot be frightened away from our portion of experience. We are as
loth to give up our nights as our days. The winters as the summers, all
the seasons and all the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail
of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard
jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep
rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem
of your speech about the dangers of disillusion!
Madness and selfishness were the cause of Louisa Naveret's death, and
the man who was mad and selfish was her lover. The poor man had not the
strength to renounce when he thought he found himself face to face with
the necessity of renouncing. But all lovers are not too weak to cope
with love. John Ruskin, if you remember, loved his wife, and he shot
neither himself, nor her, nor Millais. Charles J. Johnson is not a
Ruskin, and Ruskin's love was not a madness.
And, Herbert, to me there is nothing comic in a stress of feeling. Let
the lover pale and flutter and faint; in the presence of his deity it is
an acceptable form of worship. The very self-possessed lover is more
preposterous!
Your book has not yet reached me. To-morrow I shall write again,
providing I remember how to write a natural letter.
Yours,
DANE KEMPTON.
XXIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
June 20, 19--.
There are impersonal hours when the things of the day drop below
consciousness and the spirit grows devotional and wends a pilgrimage to
larger spheres, there to sit apart. Such a respite was mine to-day.
There had been a call to rouse and put forth work, and I wrought with
all the puniness of my might (woe is me!), and earned my post at the
window that looks out upon the large things. The best of nights and days
of toil is that there comes a twilight in which fatigued eyes see clear.
I said it did not matter how you do about your marriage. Time may right
you in a way I cannot know. I said it did not matter if you are not
righted in this, there being so much that never rights itself. Both hope
and despair were followed by a calm of neutrality. The inquiry waited
no solution. The stress no longer touched me, and my twilight became
luminous. I saw things as from a height and forms dropped out of my
range, when Barbara came tugging at me, and my pale while of abstraction
was at an end.
She wanted to know what troubled me. She made her way to me, hurried but
resolved, and stated her demand. "You catechised me yesterday; to-night
you shall answer."
She had come to defend herself. My talk having of late taken on the
sameness of that of the man of one idea, Barbara was aroused. I was
gauging her because she distressed me, was her thought. (I had been
trying to find whether it is possible to live differently from her and
live happily and well.) "You think I am not close enough to Earl,
because I mourn for my little one, perhaps. You think me not
sufficiently happy to be wifely." Could I suppose aught else from such
an utterance but that there was an estrangement and hidden pain? How,
unless there were sorrow, could the woman see herself sorrowed for? My
mind leapt to possibilities. Little Barbara on the rack was more than I
could bear. I groped for her hands. It was a fault in her to be so much
on her guard. She had no sorrow to confess, and spoke--only to ward off
what was not directed toward her.
"The tenour of your talk led me on to believe--" she stammered with hot
cheeks. It is a standing offence of hers to imagine herself accused, and
she admits it is a weakness born of lack of poise. "But I took all for
granted, I thought you fortunate beyond any other woman," I protested.
At this the radiance broke forth. I forgave the chill that her first
words on entering the room struck to my heart, and she forgot what she
had imagined.
There is nothing more important than the play and interplay of feeling.
Were Barbara "unwifely," I could not blame her, but neither could I have
at hand my proof of dear miracles. My proof remained to me, for there
she stood, her face lifted toward mine, her mouth tremulous, her grey
eyes swimming. The mate woman was stirred. Barbara is twenty-six and has
been married seven years, and she still vibrates with the old wonder to
find herself loving and beloved.
I meant to tell you of what we spoke later, in the hope that I could
show you a little better what I hold dear and why. But my hand grows
nerveless. The twilight of abstraction has set in. A little while ago
this hand was quick to rest on Barbara's as I called her my heroine. She
is that, not alone because she is pure and good and strong, but because
she can accept the test of her instincts. It takes both faith and
strength to obey oneself. "When shows break up, what but one's Self
remains?" asks Whitman. The shows are but shows for Barbara. Will I look
into your eyes on the morrow and find them, like hers, clear? Grant that
it be!
DANE.
XXIV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
July 1, 19--.
Somewhere in Ward you may read, "It must constantly be borne in mind
that all progress consists in the arbitrary alteration, by human efforts
and devices, of the normal course of nature, so that civilisation is
wholly an artificial product." Why, Dane, this is large enough to base a
sociology upon. And I must ask you first, is it true? Second, do you
understand, do you appreciate, the tremendous significance of it? And
third, how can you bring your philosophy of love in accord with it?
Romantic love is certainly not natural. It is an artifice, blunderingly
and unwittingly introduced by man into the natural order. Is this
audacious? Let us see. In a state of nature the love which obtains is
merely the passion for perpetuation devoid of all imagination. The male
possesses the prehensile organs and the superior strength. Beyond the
ardour of pursuit the female has no charms for him. But he is driven
irresistibly to pursuit. And by virtue of his prehensile organs and
superior strength he ravishes the females of his species and goes his
way. But life creeps slowly upward, increasing in complexity and
necessarily in intelligence. When some forgotten inventor of the older
world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it
was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies
with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said
to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to
change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the
cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILISATION!
Trace it up. Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first
of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which
fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the
riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree. The
one is crudely artificial, the other consummately artificial. That is
all. There have been improvements. The first inventors grasped that
truthful paradox, "the longest way round is the shortest way home," and
forsook the direct pursuit of happiness for the indirect pursuit of
happiness. If the happiness of a savage depended upon his crossing an
extensive body of water, he did not directly proceed to swim it, but
turned his back upon it, selected a tree from the forest, shaped it with
his rude tools and hollowed it out with fire, then launched it in the
water and paddled toward where his happiness lay.
Now concerning love. In the state of nature it is a brutal passion,
nothing more. There is no romance attached. But life creeps upward, and
the gregarious human forms social groups the like of which never existed
before. Consider the family group, for instance. Such a group becomes in
itself an entity. By means of the group man is better enabled to pursue
happiness. But to maintain the group it must be regulated; so man
formulates rules, codes, dim ethical laws for the conduct of the group
members. Sexual ties are made less promiscuous and more orderly. A
greater privacy is observed. And out of order and privacy spring respect
and sacredness.
But life creeps upward, and the family group itself becomes but a unit
of greater and greater groups. And rules and codes change in accordance,
until the marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to
itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund,
to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And
the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual,
overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing
him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as
his savage forebears loved, but as his group loves. And the love method
of his group is determined by its love traditions. Does the individual
compare his beloved's eyes to the stars--it is a trick of old time which
has come down to him. Does he serenade under her window or compose an
ode to her beauty or virtue--his father did it before him. In his
lover's voice throb the voices of myriads of lovers all dead and dust.
The singers of a thousand songs are the ghostly chorus to the song of
love he sings. His ideas, his very feelings are not his, but the ideas
and feelings of countless lovers who lived and loved and whose lives and
loves are remembered. Their mistaken facts and foolish precepts are
his, and likewise their imaginative absurdities and sentimental
philanderings. Without an erotic literature, a history of great loves
and lovers, a garland of love songs and ballads, a sheaf of spoken love
tales and adventures--without all this, which is the property of his
group, he could not possibly love in the way he does.
To illustrate: Isolate a boy babe and a girl babe of cultured breed upon
a desert isle. Let them feed and grow strong on shell-fish and fruit;
but let them see none other of their species; hear no speech of mouth,
nor acquire knowledge in any way of their kind and the things their kind
has done. Well, and what then? They will grow to man and woman and mate
as the beasts mate, without romance and without imagination. Does the
woman oppose her will to that of the man--he will beat her. Does he
become over-violent in the manifestation of his regard, she will flee
away, if she can, to secret hiding-places. He will not compare her eyes
to the stars; nor will she dream that he is Apollo; nor will the pair
moon in the twilight over the love of Hero and Leander. And the many
monogamic generations out of which he has descended would fail to
prevent polygamy did another woman chance to strand on that particular
isle.
It is the common practice of the man of the London slum to kick his wife
to death when she has offended him. And the man of the London slum is a
very natural beast who expresses himself in a very natural manner. He
has never heard of Hero and Leander, and the comparison of the missus'
eyes to the stars would to him be arrant bosh. The gentle, tender,
considerate male is an artificial product. And so is the romantic lover,
who is fashioned by the love traditions which come down to him and by
the erotic literature to which he has access.
And now to the point. Romantic love being an artificial product, you
cannot base its retention upon the claim that it is natural. Your only
claim can be that it is the best possible artifice for the perpetuation
of life, or that it is the only perfect, all-sufficient, and
all-satisfying artifice that man can devise. On the one hand, for the
perpetuation of life, man demonstrates the inefficiency of romantic love
by his achievements in the domestic selection of animals. And on the
other hand, the very irrationality of romantic love will tend to its
gradual elimination as the human grows wiser and wiser. Also, because
it is such a crude artifice, it forces far too many to contract the
permanent marriage tie without possessing compatibility. During the time
romantic love runs its course in an individual, that individual is in a
diseased, abnormal, irrational condition. Mental or spiritual health,
which is rationality, makes for progress, and the future demands greater
and greater mental or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality.
The brain must dominate and direct both the individual and society in
the time to come, not the belly and the heart. Granted that the function
romantic love has served has been necessary; that is no reason to
conclude that it must always be necessary, that it is eternally
necessary. There is such a thing as rudimentary organs which served
functions long since fallen in disuse and now unremembered.
The world has changed, Dane. Sense delights are no longer the sole end
of existence. The brain is triumphing over the belly and the heart. The
intellectual joy of living is finer and higher than the mere sexual joy
of living. Darwin, at the conclusion of his "Origin of Species,"
experienced a nobler and more exquisite pleasure than did ever Solomon
with his thousand concubines and wives. And while our sense delights
themselves have become refined, their very refinement has been due to
the increasing dominion over them of the intellect. Our canons of art
are not founded on the heart. No emotion elaborated the laws of
composition. We cannot experience a sense of delight in any art object
unless it satisfies our intellectual discrimination. "He is a _natural_
singer," we say of the poet who works unscientifically; "but he is lame,
his numbers halt, and he has no knowledge of technique."
The intellect, not the heart, made man, and is continuing to make
him--ah, slowly, Dane, for life creeps slowly upward. The "Advanced
Margin" is a favourite shibboleth of yours. And I take it that the
Advanced Margin is that portion of our race which is more dominated by
intellect than the race proper. And I, as a member of that group,
propose to order my affairs in a rational manner. My reason tells me
that the mere passion of begetting and the paltry romance of pursuit are
not the greatest and most exquisite delights of living. Intellectual
delight is my bribe for living, and though the bargain be a hard one, I
shall endeavour to exact the last shekel which is my due.
Wherefore I marry Hester Stebbins. I am not impelled by the archaic sex
madness of the beast, nor by the obsolescent romance madness of
later-day man. I contract a tie which my reason tells me is based upon
health and sanity and compatibility. My intellect shall delight in that
tie. My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the
slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject
the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?
HERBERT WACE.
XXV
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
July 5, 19--.
I had not intended to answer your letter critically, but, on re-reading,
find I am forced to speak if for no other reason than your epithet
"parvenu." The word has no reproach. It was ever thus that the old and
perishing recognised the vigorous and new. Parvenu, upstart--the term is
replete with significance and health. I doubt not Elijah himself was
dubbed parvenu when he fluttered with his golden harp into that
bright-browed throng, pride-swollen for that they had fought with
Michael when Lucifer was hurled into hell.
"We do not choose our wives as we buy our saddle-horses; we do not plan
our marriages as we do the building of our houses,"--so you say, and it
is said excellently. No better indictment of romantic love do I ask. And
oh, how many good men and women have I heard bitterly arraign society in
that in the begetting of children it does not exercise the judgment
which it exercises in breeding its horses and its dogs! Marriage is
something more than the mere pulsating to romance, the thrilling to
vague-sweet strains, the singing idly in empty days, the sating of self
with pleasure--what of the children?
"Never mind the children," says selfish little Love. "It has been our
wont never to give any thought to the children; they were incidental.
Always have we sought our own pleasure; let us continue to seek our own
pleasure." So Society continues to breed its horses and dogs with
judgment and forethought and to trust to luck for its children.
But it won't do, Dane. Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And
all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact
cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders
afar. Chivalry went mad over an idea. It idealised, if you please. It
made of love a fine art, and countless knights-errant devoted themselves
to the service of the little god. It sentimentalised over ladies'
gloves and forgot to make for living and surviving. And while chivalry
committed suicide over its ladies' gloves, the stout, wooden-headed
burghers, with an eye to the facts of life, dickered and bickered in
trade. And on the wreck and ruin of chivalry they flaunted their parvenu
insolence. God, how they triumphed! The children and cobblers and
shop-keepers buying with the yellow gold the "thousand years old names!"
buying with their yellow gold the proud flesh and blood of their lords
to breed with them and theirs! patronising the arts, speaking a kind
word to science, and patting God on the back! But they triumphed, that
is the point. They reverenced the fact and made for living and
surviving.
Love is life, you say, and you seem to hold it the achievement of
existence. But I cannot say that life is love. Life? It is a toy, i'
faith, given to us, we know not why, to play with as we chance to
please. Some elect to dream, some to love, and some to fight. Some
choose immediate happiness, and some ultimate happiness. One stakes the
Here and Now upon the Hereafter; another takes the Here and Now and lets
the Hereafter go. But each grasps the toy and does with it according to
his fancy And while none may know the end of life, all know that life
is the end of love. Love, poor little, crude little, love, is the means
to life--and so we complete the circle. Life? It is a toy, i' faith,
given us, we know not why, to play with as we chance to please.
But this we know, that love is the means to life, and it is subject to
inevitable improvement. By our intellect will we improve upon it. Life
abundant! finer life! higher life! fuller life! When we scientifically
breed our race-horses and our draught-horses, we make for life abundant.
And when we come scientifically to breed the human, we shall make for
life abundant, for humanity abundant.
You say an acquaintance with the petty vices of one's wife does not kill
one's love. Oh yes, it does, and out of the ashes of that love rises
affection, comradeship, in kind somewhat similar to the affection and
comradeship which I have for my brother. I do not _love_ my brother, and
it is because I do not love him, and because I do have _affection_ and
_comradeship_ for him, that I do not turn away when he commits even a
lurid act. Love, you will remember, takes its rise in the emotions, and
is unstable and wanton and capricious. But affection takes its rise in
the intellect, is based upon judgment of the brain. Love is unyielding
tyranny; affection is compromise. Love never compromises, no more than
does the mad little mating sparrow compromise.
My brother?--I played with him as a boy. His weaknesses and faults
incensed and hurt me, as mine incensed and hurt him. Many were our
quarrels. But he had also good qualities which pleased me, and at times
performed gracious acts and even sacrifices. And I likewise. And with my
brain I weighed his weaknesses and faults against his gracious acts and
sacrifices, and I achieved a judgment upon him. The ethics of the family
group also contributed to this judgment. The duties of kinship and the
responsibilities of blood ties were impressed upon me. We grew up at our
mother's knee, and she and our father became factors in determining what
my conduct should be. They, too, taught me that my brother was my
brother, and that in so far as he was my brother, my relations with him
must be different from my relations with those who were not my brothers.
And all went to crystallise an intellectual judgment, or a set of
criteria, as it were, to guide all sane, unemotional acts and even to
control and repress any emotional acts. These criteria, I say, became
crystallised, became automatic in my thought processes.
And now, in manhood, my brother commits a lurid act, an act repulsive to
me, one capable of arousing emotions of anger, of bitterness, of hatred.
I experience an emotional impulse to pour my wrath upon him, to be
bitter toward him, to hate him. Then I experience an intellectual
impulse. Whatever way I may act, I must first settle with my
crystallised criteria. The personal bonds of my boyhood and manhood
press upon me--the gracious acts and sacrifices and compromises, our
father and our mother, the duties of kinship and the responsibilities of
blood. Thus two counter-impulses strive with me. I desire to do two
counter things. Heart and head the fight is waged, and heart or head I
shall act according to which is the stronger impulse. And if my
affection be stronger, I shall not turn away, but clasp my brother in my
arms.
I fear I have not made myself clear. It is difficult to write hurriedly
of things psychological, when the extreme demand is made upon intellect
and vocabulary; but at least you may roughly catch my drift. What I have
striven to say is, that I forgive my brother, not because I _love_ him,
but because of the _affection_ I bear him; also that this affection is
the product of reason, is the sum of the judgments I have achieved.
HERBERT.
XXVI
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
July 21, 19--.
"Progress is an arbitrary alteration, by human efforts and devices, of
the normal course of nature, so that civilisation is wholly an
artificial product." You ask me to consider this refracted bit of
sociology and by its light to cast out my exalted notion of love. As if
you have proven that love is incompatible with civilisation! We make
over life with each successive step, but we do not give over living. In
developing new forms and in establishing more and more subtle social
relations we are only building upon what we find ready to hand. The
paradox of creature and creator does not exist. When your sociologist
speaks of arbitrary alterations, he has reference to polities and
governments and criteria, to the material and ideal forces which a
progressive society may wield for itself. He cannot include under
progress an alteration of those needs of existence which make up the
quality of existence. Speak of a community which equally distributes the
products of labour and I will grant that there has been an arbitrary
alteration, the normal course of nature being that the stronger, openly,
and even with the common assent, takes to the repletion of his desire
from the weaker. But speak of a condition so progressive that it
subverts the need, so that where in the one case hunger was equitably
gratified, in the other, hunger was done away with, and I will say that
you are giving an Arabian Nights' entertainment.
Love is of a piece with life, like hunger, like joy, like death. Your
progress cannot leave it behind; your civilisation must become the
exponent of it.
Your last letter is formal and elaborate, and--equivocal. In it you
remind me, menacingly, of the possibilities of progress, you posit that
love is at best artificial, and you apotheosise the brain. As an
emancipated rationality, you say you cut yourself loose from the
convention of feeling. Progress cannot affect the need and the power to
love. This I have already stated. "How is it under our control to love
or not to love?" Life is elaborate or it is simple (it depends upon the
point of view), and you may call love the paraphernalia of its
wedding-feast or you may call it more--the Blood and Body of all that
quickens, a Transubstantiation which all accept, reverently or
irreverently, as the case may be.
I can more readily conceive the existence of a central committee elected
for the purpose of regulating the marriages of a community, than of a
community satisfied with such a committee. There is no logic in social
events. The world persists in not taking the next step, and what to the
social scout looked a dusty bypath may prove to be the highway of
progress for the hoboing millions. Side issues are constantly cropping
up to knock out the main issues of the stump orator; so let us be
humble. For this reason I refuse to discuss possibilities in infinity.
You and I cannot have become products of an environment which is not in
existence. It is safe to suppose that our needs are like those of the
race and that in us nothing is vestigial that is active in others. You
cannot have become too rational to love. The device has not yet been
formed.
You think I should take your word for it? But why? Have you never found
yourself in the wrong, never disobeyed your best promptings never meant
to take the good and grasped the bad? Is it not possible that you are
not yet awake, or, God pity you, that you are hidebound in the dogmatism
of your bit of thinking.
It is for the second point of your letter that I called you equivocal.
Earlier in our discussion, I remember, you laid stress on the fact that
love is an instinct common to all forms of life; now you go to great
lengths in order to show that it is artificial.
How do you differentiate between the artificial and nature? Surely a
development is not artificial because it is recent! Surely man is as
integral to life as his progenitors! When we come to civilisation, we
are face to face with the largest and subtlest thing in life, and the
civilisation of human society is not artificial. It is the fulfilment of
the nature of man, the promise made good, the career established, the
influence sent out. A universe of mind-stuff and a civilising force
constantly causing change, for change is growth, constantly compelling
expression of that change--to conceive it is to conceive infinitude. And
the purpose? Development, always development. To that end the individual
perishes, to that end the race is conserved, to that end the peril and
the sacrifice, and the agony of triumph in the overcharged heart at its
last bound. And what is this refining of the type, this goal for which
we all make with such tragic directness, but the gaining in the power to
love? We begin with love to end with greater love, and that is progress.
To write the epic of civilisation is a task for some giant artist who
shall combine in himself Homer and Shakespeare, and the work will be a
love story.
We do not throw away the grain and keep the chaff, nor do we transmit
the "absurdities" and "philanderings" alone. If in the lover's voice
throb the voices of myriads of lovers, it is because he is stirred even
as they. If a ballad wakes a response in him, it is because its motif
has been singing itself of its own accord in his heart, and its rhythm
was the dream nightingale to which he bade Her hearken. Behind the
tradition lies the fact. The expression may be ephemeral, the song flat,
the motto conventional, but the feeling which prompted it is true. Else
it could not have survived. And it has more than survived. It has grown
with growth. For centuries it lodged in the nature of man, lulled in
acquiescence, then, when the sense of recognition awoke, back in those
wondrous young days, it wakened to pale life, and now the feeling is
man's whole support, giving him courage to work and purpose to live.
But the half brute of the London slums kicks his wife when she offends
him and knows nothing of love. Well for the honour of love that it is
so! The half brute of the London slums had not food enough when a child,
and malnutrition is deadly. Later, he stole and lied in order to eat,
and he was bullied and kicked for it out of human shape. The trick was
passed on to him. The unfortunate of the London slums will push us all
from heaven's gate, because we do not do battle with the conditions that
make him. It is not such as he that should lead you to scorn love, for
he is a mistake and a crime.
In your example of the isolated boy babe and girl babe we meet with a
different condition. The individual repeats the history of the race, and
as these have been left out by the civilising forces, they revert to
past racial states. For these it is natural to live stolidly--is it
therefore natural for us? The point I make is that our refinement,
crying in us with great voice, is as much a part of us as are the simple
few hungers of the racial infant. We are not the less natural for being
subtle. And can it not be that the face of romance reveals itself even
to savage eyes? According to the need is the power, and the early man
needs must hope and desire; he is curbed by waiting and taught by loss
in the hunting, he is hungry, and he dreams that he is feasting. This
dream is his romance--a red flicker in the dawn, then still the gray. To
suppose this is not to be unscientific, for what is true of us must have
had a beginning, and feeling, as well as being, cannot have been
spontaneously generated.
There is an absolute gravitation to justice in nature. This was the
creed preached by Huxley to Kingsley a week after his boy's death. Grief
had turned the mind upon itself, and in the upheaval he formulated a
philosophy of faith and joy!
Our reward is meted out according to our obedience to all of the law,
spiritual and physical. Nature keeps a ledger paying glad life's arrears
each minute of time. And the creed rises to my lips when I hear you cry
shame upon the delight of love. It must be good, this thing which is so
fraught with joy! You brand it sense delight, but all delight is of the
senses, and Darwin at the conclusion of "The Descent of Man," if he was
not overtaken by a feeling of incompleteness in the work and a
consuming fever for the further task, was glad in a human way, with the
senses and through the emotions. Darwin's supreme moment may have come
at quite a different time. What can we know of the moments of repletion
that fall into another's life? With Huxley we may only know that our
hearts bound high when we strike a chord of harmony and prove ourselves
obedient to "all of the law," and our hearts bound high when we love. It
is nature's way of showing her approval. Oh, the strength of love and
the miracles of its compensations! The sense of becoming that it gives,
even in its defeats, the gladness that ripples in its sob-strangled
throat!
The day for asceticism is gone, or shall we say the night? We are not
afraid of sense delights. We are intent upon living on all sides of our
natures, roundly and naturally. You have a fine gospel of work and I
congratulate you upon it, but you make no mention of the purpose of it
all. It must not be work for work's sake. "When I heard the learned
astronomer--" says Whitman. Do you remember? He caught in one hour the
whole majesty, caught to himself the wonder that was unseen by the
watching astronomers. Somehow you feel the learned ones had made a
mistake in calculating so long that they had no time to see with
personal eyes the glory of the stars, and that Whitman had been
philosopher and had gained where they failed. The inspiration of the
poet, of the painter, of the economist, and biologist, is in the
revelation which they receive of what to do and why to do. For this
reason philosophy, which treats of the life and works of man, is in the
highest sense sociological. The generalisations of philosophy go to
improve our methods so that we may have greater proneness for sense of
delight and greater possibility for sense delight. Why, what else is
there? You are a poet, and you give an unrestorable day, when the sun is
shining and the hills lie purple in the distance, to writing a sonnet.
If you do so merely to employ yourself, it must be that the wolf of
despair is at your being's door. You have come to the end, and the sun
and the hills do not matter. You and they have parted company. But if
you write, impelled by the wish that others should read and recognise,
read and remember, and grow to know and feel better, and perhaps to love
the sun and hills better, then is yours a work of love, and it will be
made good to you, so that for the day which you have not seen, your
night shall be instinct with light. And if your labours are more
especially in the service of art, then, also, with each approach toward
expression, you are warmed through with the delight of achievement.
Is my meaning quite dashed away by this torrent of speech? It is simply
this: Before we think we feel, and the end of thinking is feeling. The
century of Voltaire and Dr. Johnson held that man is rational, the
century of James, Ribot, Lange, and Wundt is thrilled to the heart with
the doctrine that first, last, and always man is emotional. To speak
loosely, the dimensions of the human cosmos are feeling, emotion, and
sensation.
Build your fine structures. We like to see the foundations laid well and
the thick walls go up. Keep to your wizard inventions. We like to live
in a magic world. And ah, the indomitable machines with their austere
promise of free days for weary hands, and ah, the locomotives and the
ships steaming their ways toward intercourse, toward comity, toward
fellowship! We like the intricacy and the vastness of the world in which
we live. But "an unconsidered life is not fit to be lived by any man,"
says Aristotle. We must consider the phenomenon, civilisation, searching
down for the nucleus of its worth. We will find that the stone
structure without hope were a pitiable thing, that the making of
compacts and the banking of capital, without hope, were pitiable. This
hope that is the life germane, the immortal flash of mortality, the most
keenly human point in all humanity, is the hope for greater and greater
social happiness. Our world is an ever unfinished house which we are
employed in building. If we are imbued with the spirit of the architect
and not of the hod-carrier, we will hope sweetly for the work. The house
beautiful will begin to mean our life, and each night we will consult
our drawings, looking to it that on the house built of our days the sun
shall wester, and that within shall be intimacy, and laughter, great
speech and close love, looking to it that the home be such as to better
to-day's tenant so that he be more loving and lovable than the one of
yesterday.
We are wrong, perhaps. Long ago we were no less than now. When we
reached a hand in the darkness and grasped that of our fellow, the love
and the strongly frail human abandon were no less. We have not grown in
heart's munificence, perhaps. It is one of the illusions only. But the
hope is ours. For what do you hope?
DANE.
XXVII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
July 22, 19--.
Your birthday, Herbert, and for greeting I state that I walk your length
with you. A truce to quarrelling! It is now a year since you informed me
you were going to be married, and since then the gods have thundered
their laughter at the sight of two muttering men who sat themselves on
the axes of earth to dangle their legs into orbit vastness. Chronic
somnambulists that they are, they took their monopolist way thither in
their sleep.
I cannot tell you how full of vagary the correspondence we have fallen
into seems to me. I deliberately attempted to write you into passion and
for months you deliberately continued to convict yourself out of your
own mouth, and we did not see that it was tragic and comic and
preposterous. Could we personify this our dealing, we would do well to
call it a kind of Caliban. And the tentacles we threw out, clawing at
everything, stealing for prop to our little theory all of man and God!
It is the conceit of us that I find utterly hopeless of grace. So I drop
my rôle of omniscience. I take my form off the hub, believing the system
will maintain its gravity though I go my private way, and I promise to
let you alone. Forgive me, and God bless you. Ah, yes, and many happy
returns of the day. All my heart in the blessing and the wish.
I did some remembering to-day, dear lad. When you were born, I was five
years younger than you are now, yet I felt myself old. "If we were as
old as we feel, we would die of old age at twenty-one." My life seemed
all behind me, long, turbulent, packed with pain, useless. I spoke of
myself as if all were over. "It had been full of purpose, but what came
of it? A few rhymes and a spoilt hope." To my morbid fancy your having
come to be was a signal for me to go. I had no thought of dying, yet I
accepted you as the proof of my failure. In the exacting eyes of the
genius of the race I was insolvent. You were not mine. I looked into
Time, and saw none of me there.
Yet the letter I wrote to your parents was sincere,--how else? And that
night and the next and the next, I wrote "Gentleman Adventurers," which
the critics called the epitome of all that is balladesque. One pitied
the dead because they could go forth no more on water and under sky.
This poem, written in a mood which beneficent nature sends on the
too-sick spirit, has served for more than a quarter of a century as the
complete and accepted catalogue of the reasons for living. Well, I must
not laugh at it. It may be true that the passion of my heart incarnated
itself in it beyond the rest, that my one song sang itself out those
first three days of your life. If so, it is true that love is never
cheated of its fruit, and that the joy which might have been for the
individual oozes out of him to the race, that the strength which would
have settled upon itself in the calm of satisfied hope, filters through
him outwards.
Good night, lad. My hand is on your shoulder and I am loath to take it
off. For a while I would like what cannot be, to travel with you the
red-brown country-roads fragrant with hay, to cross the stiles and knock
upon the cabin doors, and enter where sorrow and where gladness is, big
with greeting and sure of welcome. I have often pleased myself with the
fancy that the outer aspects of life are patterned after the inner, so
that in the map of the spirit are to be found city and country, wood,
desert, and sea, so that we know these outer worlds through having
travelled the worlds within. Though I stay behind, my eyes can follow
you from this night's landmark along the stretch, on to the city
avenues, up the highways, tracing the twists of the bypaths, clambering
untrod trails of wilderness and mountain, on, on, till out upon the sea.
In one of the near turnings a woman with waiting face smiles subtly. Her
hands beckon you to the tryst. Godspeed, my son.
DANE.
XXVIII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
August 6, 19--.
As I have constantly insisted, our difference is temperamental. The
common words we lay hold of mean one thing to you and another thing to
me. I do not equivocate when I say that love is instinctive, and that
the latter-day expression of love is artificial. "Art," as I understand
the term in its broadness, contradistinguishes from nature. Whatever man
contrives or devises is an artifice, a thing of art not of nature, and
therefore artificial.
As for ourselves, among animals we are the only real inventors and
artificers. Instead of hair and hide, we have soft skins, and we weave
cunning textures and wear wondrous garments. In cold weather, in place
of eating much fat meat, we keep ourselves warm by grate fires and
steam heat. We cut up our blood-dripping meat chunks with pieces of iron
hardened by fire and sharpened by stone, and we eat fish with a fork
instead of our fingers. We put a roof over our heads to keep out storm
and sunshine, sleep in pent rooms, and are afraid of the good night air
and the open sky. In short, we are consummately artificial.
As I recollect, I have shown that the natural expression of the love
instinct is bestial and brutal and violent. I have shown how imagination
entered into the development of the expression of this love instinct
till it became _romantic_. And, in turn, I have shown how artificial was
the romantic expression of this love instinct, by isolating a boy babe
and a girl babe in a natural state wherein they expressed their love
instinct bestially and brutally and violently. As you say, they have
simply been "left out by the civilising force." And this civilising, or
socialising force is simply the sum of our many inventions. The isolated
pair merely expressed their instincts in the unartificial, natural way.
They had not been taught a certain particular fashion in which to
express those instincts as have you and I and all artificial beings been
taught.
As Mr. Finck has said, "Not till Dante's 'Vita Nuova' appeared was the
gospel of modern love--the romantic adoration of a maiden by a
youth--revealed for the first time in definite language."
Dante, and the men who foreshadowed and followed him, were inventors.
They introduced an artifice for protracting one of our most vital
pleasures. Well, they succeeded. And what of it? There are artifices and
artifices, and some are better than others. The automobile is a more
cunning artifice than the ox-cart, the subway than a palanquin. Devices
come and devices go. Change is the essence of progress. All is
development. The end of rapes and romances is the same--perpetuation.
There may be head love as well as heart love. And in the time to come,
when the brain ceases to be the servant of the belly, the head the
lackey of the heart, in that time stirpiculture, which is scientific
perpetuation, will take the place of romantic love. And in the present
there may be men ready for that time. There must be a beginning, else
would we still be jolting in ox-carts. And I am ready for that time now.
You say, "Love is of a piece with life, like hunger, like joy, like
death." Quite true. And civilisation is merely the expression of
life--a variform utterance which includes love, and hunger, and joy, and
death. Else what is this civilisation for? How did it happen to be? And
I answer: It is the sum of the many inventions we have made to aid us in
our pursuit of life and love and joy. It helps us to live more
abundantly, to love more fruitfully, to joy more intelligently, and to
get grim old Death by his knotty throat and hold him at arm's length as
long as possible.
I stated that "all progress consists in the arbitrary alteration, by
human efforts and devices, of the normal course of nature." This
sociological concept comes inevitably into accord with my philosophy of
love. It is the law of development, and all things of human life (which
includes love) come inside of it. Wherefore, certainly, I am not outside
our province when I demand of you to bring your philosophy of love into
like accord.
Incidentally, I will state that I _have_ fallen in love. I have grown
feverish with desire, gone mad with dumb yearning. I have felt my
intellect lose dominion, and learned that I was only a garmented beast,
for all the many inventions very like the other beasts ungarmented.
Nay, I am no cold-blooded theorist, no thick-hided dogmatist; nor am I a
chastely simple young man mooning in virginal innocence. My
generalisations have been tempered in the heats of passion, and what I
know I know, and without hearsay.
I have seen a learned man, drunk with wine, interrogate the new states
of consciousness of his unwonted condition, and so doing, gain a more
comprehensive psychological insight. So I, with my loves. I was impelled
toward the women I shall presently particularise. I asked why the
impulsion. I reasoned to see if there were a difference between these
illicit passions of mine and the illicit passions of my respectable and
respected friends. And I found no difference. Separated from codes and
conventions, shorn of imagination, divested of romance, stripped naked
down to the core of the matter, it was old Mother Nature crying through
us, every man and woman of us, for progeny. Her one unceasing and
eternal cry--PROGENY! PROGENY! PROGENY!
Just as little girls, instinctively foreshadowing motherhood, play with
dolls, so children feel vague sex promptings, and in sweetly ridiculous
ways love and quarrel and make up after the approved fashion of lovers.
You loved little girls in pigtails and pinafores. We all did. And in our
lives there is nothing fairer and more joyful to look back upon than
those same little pigtails and pinafores. But I shall pass the child
loves by, and instance first my calf love.
Do you remember the incident of the torn jacket and the blackened
eyes?--so inexplicable at the time. Try as you would, neither you nor
Waring could get anything out of me. Oh, believe me, it was tragic! I
was fifteen. Fifteen, and athrill with a strange new pulse; flushed, as
the dawn, with the promise of day. And, of course, I thought it was the
day, that I loved as a man loved, and that no man ever loved more. Well,
well, I laugh now. I was only fifteen--a young calf who went out and
butted heads with another calf in the back pasture.
She was a demure little coquette, Celia Genoine, Professor Genoine's
daughter, if you will recollect. "Ah," I hear you remonstrate, "but she
was a woman." Just so. Fifteen and twenty-two is usually the way of calf
loves. I invested her with all the glow and colour of first youth, and
in her presence became a changed being. I blushed if she looked at me;
trembled at the touch of her hand or the scent of her hair. To be in
her presence was to be closeted with the awfulness and splendour of God.
I read immortality in her eyes. A smile from her blinded me, a gentle
word or caressing look and I went faint and dizzy, and I was content to
lurk in some corner and gaze upon her secretly with all my soul. And I
took long, solitary walks, with book of verse beneath my arm, and
learned to love as lovers had loved before me.
Sufficient romance was engendered for me to pass more than one night
worshipping beneath her window. I mooned and sentimentalised and fell
into a gentle melancholy, until you and Waring began to worry over an
early decline, to consult specialists, and by trick and stratagem to
entice me into eating more and reading less. But she married--ah, I have
forgotten whom. Anyway, she married, and there was trouble about it,
too, and I bade adieu to love forever.
Then came the love of my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton
creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My
blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my
dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate,
indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can
I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered
the globe with his sword and pillowed his head between the slim breasts
of Egyptian Cleopatra while that hard-won world crashed to wrack and
ruin?
As I say, This was the love of my whelpage, and it was vigorous,
masterful, masculine. There was no sentimentalising, no fond foolishness
of youth; nor was there that cool, calm poise which comes of the
calculation and discretion of age. Man and woman, we were in full tide,
strong, simple, and elemental. Life rioted in our veins; we were
a-bubble with the ferment; and it is out of such abundance that Mother
Nature has always exacted her progeny. From the strictly emotional and
naturalistic viewpoint, I must consider it, even now, the perfect love.
But it was decreed that I should develop into an intellectual animal,
and be something more than a mere unconscious puppet of the reproductive
forces. So head mastered my heart, and I laid the grip of my will over
the passion and went my way.
And then came another man's wife, a proud-breasted woman, the perfect
mother, made pre-eminently to know the lip clasp of a child. You know
the kind, the type. "The mothers of men," I call them. And so long as
there are such women on this earth, that long may we keep faith in the
breed of men. The wanton was the Mate Woman, but this was the Mother
Woman, the last and highest and holiest in the hierarchy of life. In her
all criteria were satisfied, and I reasoned my need of her.
And by this I take it that I was passing out of my blind puppetdom. I
was becoming a conscious selective factor in the scheme of reproduction,
choosing a mate, not in the lust of my eyes, but in the desire of my
fatherhood. Oh, Dane, she was glorious, but she was another man's wife.
Had I been living unartificially, in a state of nature, I would
certainly have brained her husband (a really splendid fellow), and
dragged her off with me shameless under the sky. Or had her husband not
been a man, or had he been but half a man, I doubt not that I would have
wrested her from him. As it was, I yearned dumbly and observed the
conventions.
Nor are these experiences heart soils and smirches. They have educated
me, fitted me for that which is yet to be. And I have written of them to
show you that I am no closet naturalist, that I speak authoritatively
out of adequate understanding. Since the end of love, when all is said
and done, is progeny; and since the love of to-day is crude and
wasteful; as an inventor and artificer I take it upon myself to
substitute reasoned foresight and selection for the short-sighted and
blundering selection of Mother Nature. What would you? The old dame
would have made a mess of it had I let her have her way. She tried hard
to mate me with the wanton, for it was not her method to look into the
future to see if a better mother for my progeny awaited me.
And now comes Hester. I approach her, not with the milk-and-water
ardours of first youth, nor with the lusty love madness of young
manhood, but as an intellectual man, seeking for self and mate the ripe
and rounded manhood and womanhood which comes only through the having of
children--children which must be properly born and bred. In this way,
and in this way only, can we fully express ourselves and the life that
is in us. We shall utter ourselves in the finest speech in the world,
and, our children being properly born and bred, it shall be in the
finest terms of the finest speech in the world. To do this is to have
lived.
HERBERT.
XXIX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
August 26, 19--.
You insist that the question is not on the value of love but on the
significance of the artificial. Be that as it may. To me love is
integral with life, and to speak of civilising it away, seems, in point
of fact, as preposterous and as anomalous as a Hamletless play of
Hamlet. You forget that in developing you carry yourself along; you
change, yet you remain racial and natural. Else there were too many
missing links in all your departments. We read Homer to-day--telling
proof that the chain of sympathy stretches unbroken through epochs of
inventions and discoveries and revolutions. Truism that it is, it
presents itself with particular force at this stage.
With how much force? We stand in danger of exaggerating these vociferous
thoughts. This question of naturalness as opposed to artificiality is
not immediately pertinent to our problem, nor is the matter of optimism
and pessimism, nor the biologic idea of survival. We should have looked
more to the way of love in the lives of men and women and become
historians of the method and conduct of the force. There would have been
less confusion. So I write, "Be that as it may," and go back to more
immediate considerations. And yet we were not far wrong! The little
flower in the crannied wall could tell what God and man is. This is of
all thoughts the most charged with truth. Let me understand one of your
conclusions, root and all, and all in all, and such is the gracious plan
of oneness in the branching and leafage and uptowering, that I must know
and name the tree. Your winding bypath, could I but follow it to the
end, must bring me to the highway of your thought, every step tell-tale
of the journey's destination. But soon I shall be with you (the fifth
of next month, after all; the arrangements as planned). Then we will
begin to know each other, and we will no longer be tormented by the
irksomeness of writing. Therefore, until easier and more fluent times,
to the heart of the subject straight.
Your love-affairs--how well you have outgrown them and how ably you
criticise them! They have not withstood the test of time, for you bear
them no loyalty. Calfdom and whelpage, vagaries of adolescence, you call
them. You do not show them much respect! For this reason your examples
lose what weight they might have borne. They belong so wholly to the
past, they are mere wraiths of bygone stirrings, they cannot clothe you
with knowledge of love. Cold now, what boots it that you have been
afire? You cannot be taught by what is utterly over.
You are catching what I aim to say, I hope, for I aim to say much. Put
it that instead of a girl whom you idealised, it was a principle--some
scheme of reform which you honoured with all the passion of young hope
and dream, and which knit your alert being into a Laocoon of striving.
Your maturer eyes see this ideal impossible and narrow. In no wise can
it satisfy your bolder reach and larger sympathy. But you do not laugh
at what has been. If you strove for it sincerely at any time, no matter
how remote, you could never again deride it. Because once you loved it
you are eternal keeper of the key to its good. What has been wholly
yours you never quite desert. Nothing has remained to you of your
love-affairs, therefore your recital of them is empty of meaning. If you
were in love to-day, and because of your philosophy you determined to do
battle with your feeling, your experience would be more authoritative.
You have known love, and having known you refuse it. Henceforth, it must
be reason and not feeling. "What is your objection?" you ask. This
merely, that the thing cannot be. Marriage to be marriage must come
through love, through the reddest romance of love, through fire of the
spirit, yes, even through the love of calfdom and whelpage. Else it is a
mockery. Where is the woman of character who would sell the be-all and
end-all of her existence for a neat catalogue of possible advantages?
Where is the man who would frankly and without embellishment dare make
such proposal? You point to yourself. But you have never explained
yourself to Hester, and even to me you are embellishing the matter with
all the might in your persuasive pen.
The ardours of calfdom and whelpage that you smile at I would have you
throb with. You underrate the firstlings of the heart, the rose and
white blossoming, the call upon the senses and the readiness to respond
and to fulfil, to give and to take, to be and make happy--the great
pride and utter abandon which is young love. At fifteen, fortunately for
the development of mind and character, hope is placed where hope must
pine. Love, then, is doomed to be tragic. The youth "attains to be
denied." But he sounds his depth. Thereafter, he knows what to expect of
himself. He has a precedent. After this he will count it a sin to
forget, and to accept the solace of mediocrity. In this lies the value
of the tragedy.
I sometimes think that whatever is youngest is best. It is the young
that, timid and bold, pay greatest reverence to knowledge, receiving
without chill of prejudice and shameful cowardice of quibbling the brave
new thought. Wisdom may be of age, but passion for scholarships,
trail-breaking, and hardy prospecting in the treasure mines of research,
is of young pioneerhood alone. It is a youth who dares be radical, who
dares, in splendid largess, build mistake upon mistake, bleeding his
life out in service. And it is a youth, standing tiptoe upon the earth,
now waiting in unperturbed ease, now searching with unbridled zeal, who
is lover and mystic. "The best is yet to be," says Rabbi Ben Ezra, "the
last of life, for which the first is made." Yes, the last of life will
be good, but only if it is like youth, beating with its pulse and
instinct with its spirit.
The unhappy youth is left on the battle-field but not to die. The
sword-thrusts challenge him to put forth greater strength in fiercer
wars. He learns hard and well.
Indeed, I cannot leave this subject of first love. How do you know it
was not good for you to love as you did? It is strange you should
resolve to love no more because at one time you loved deeply enough
almost to remain in love. It cannot be that you have grown old and that
nature is resolving for you. You tell me of your experiences in order
that I may be convinced that you know whereof you speak and I listen in
wonder. Your conclusions are unwonted.
Then something was amiss, for you have outgrown and forgotten, but how
is it with you in the present when your indifference waits not upon
time? You approach your future wife clothed in indifference as in mail,
and you do violence. How can I show you? I speak as I would to a child
to whom it is necessary to explain that it is bad to abandon an
education. Life is a school, and to me it seems that you are about to
resign long before diploma and degree, so I interpose. I was taught by
first love, and I honour that time beyond any other. I was Ellen's. I
have been lonely. For the mere human need, for the sake of that which to
the lonely is very dear, I have thought of marriage, but I remembered
and I refused to do violence to myself remembering. Long ago my standard
was established. I learned how deeply I could feel, and I refuse to
acknowledge myself bankrupt, I refuse to approach an honourable human
being with less than my all. Until my soul flower out again, until suns
flame about my head as in that dear yoretime, I shall keep teeming with
dreams and make no affront. I who have seen love, dare not live without
love.
I would not give in to fate, Herbert. I would assert my manhood. I would
abide in the strength of the first output, going with the flush of the
first glow into the gloom. I would spurn the calm of compromise and
mediocrity and register a high claim. I would keep the peace with
Romance and fly her colours to the last. You have lived? It is well, and
it might have been better, but do not give over and talk of
stirpiculture. You are not wiser than the laws which made you.
DANE.
XXX
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
September 18, 19--.
How abominable I must seem to you, Dane! For certainly a creature is
abominable that lays rough hands on one's dearest possessions. I doubt
if even you realise how deeply you are stirred by my conduct towards
love. My marriage with Hester, considering the quality and degree of the
contracting parties, must appear as terrible to you as the sodomies that
caused God's ancient wrath to destroy cities. You see, I take your side
for the time, see with your eyes, live your thoughts, suffer what you
suffer; and then I become myself again and steel myself to continue in
what I think is the right.
After all, mine is the harder part. There are easier tasks than those of
the illusion-shatterer. That which is established is hard to overthrow.
It has the nine points of possession, and woe to him who attempts its
disestablishment; for it will persist till it be drowned and washed away
in the blood of the reformers and radicals.
Love is a convention. Men and women are attached to it as they are
attached to material things, as a king is attached to his crown or an
old family to its ancestral home. We have all been led to believe that
love is splendid and wonderful, and the greatest thing in the world, and
it pains us to part with it. Faith, we will not part with it. The man
who would bid us put it by is a knave and a fool, a vile, degraded
wretch, who will receive pardon neither in this world nor the next.
This is nothing new. It is the attitude of the established whenever its
conventions are attacked. It was the attitude of the Jew toward Christ,
of the Roman toward the Christian, of the Christian toward the infidel
and the heretic. And it is sincere and natural. All things desire to
endure, and they die hard. Love will die hard, as died the idolatries
of our forefathers, the geocentric theory of the universe, and the
divine right of kings.
So, I say, the rancour and warmth of the established when attacked is
sincere. The world is mastered by the convention of love, and when one
profanes love's Holy of Holies the world is unutterably shocked and
hurt. Love is a thing for lovers only. It must not be approached by the
sacrilegious scientist. Let him keep to his physics and chemistry,
things definite and solid and gross. Love is for ardent speculation, not
laboratory analysis. Love is (as the reverend prior and the learned
bodies told brother Lippo of man's soul):--
"--a fire, smoke ... no, it's not ...
It's vapour done up like a new-born babe--
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It's ... well, what matters talking, it's the soul!"
I thoroughly understand the popular sentimental repugnance to a
scientific discussion of love. Because I dissect love, and weigh and
calculate, it is denied that I am capable of experiencing love. It is
too radiant and glorious a thing for a dull clod like me to know. And
because I cannot experience love and be made mad by it, my fitness to
describe its phenomena is likewise denied. Only the lover may describe
love. And only the lunatic, I suppose, may compose a medical brochure on
insanity.
HERBERT.
XXXI
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
October 7, 19--.
It is true that you have a hard task before you, but it is not because
you are fighting convention and shattering illusion; it is because you
are assailing a good. Love has never acquired the prestige of the
established, and the run of marriages are prompted by advantage,
routine, or passion. So you are no innovator, Herbert. The idolatry of
love will not be overthrown by a drawn battle between those of the Faith
and those of the Reformation. Nothing so spectacular awaits us.
I have a friend who has undertaken to translate "Inferno" into English,
keeping to the _terza rima_. "It is like climbing the Matterhorn," he
says gravely. "I get to places where I feel I can go neither forward nor
back. The task is prodigious." And it is. But whom will it concern if
he succeeds in going forward? There are few who will read his book. The
translation is of more importance to the translator than to anyone else.
Yet the professor's _magnum opus_ confers a degree upon us all. Because
a standard is upheld and a man is willing and able to climb a Matterhorn
of thought, we can ourselves stride forward with better courage. The
work will be an output of heroism, and it will ennoble even those who
will not know of it.
I have another friend who ruined his life for love, so says the world
that you think steeped in the idolatry of love. A priest, who by a few
strokes was able to quell in America a strong and bitter movement, a
gifted orator, a man of giant powers, and who was won away at the age of
forty from his career by a mere girl. The girl planned nothing. She
found herself a force in his life almost despite herself. The mere fact
that she lived was enough to wrest this Titan from the arms of the
Church. He told me that she criticised him with the directness of a
simple nature, and that he came to understand her truths better than she
herself. I think she must have loved him at first, but she did not go
to him when all grew calm. I wish it could have been otherwise, and that
she could have brought him a woman's heart.
The priest, as the professor, is a hero. Both made great outputs.
There are few who can live like these. But because there are a few who
can love and work, the game is saved. And because there are a few of
these, we must ever quarrel with the many who are not like them.
"Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the Muse,--
Nothing refuse."
Does this really seem such poor philosophy to you? And when, Herbert,
will you marry?
DANE KEMPTON.
XXXII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
November 20, 19--.
Hester met me at the station, and we walked through the Arboretum to her
home on the campus. Then followed an evening together in the dormitory
parlour. I have just left her. Her face was tumultuously joyous when I
murmured my "At last!" Her tearful excitement was like Barbara's. You
did not tell me she is so young. You must have made her feel our
closeness, or she may have found a bit of my verse that all expressed
her, and presto, the whole-hearted one is my friend. Her poet is now her
father, brother, comrade,--what she chooses, and all she chooses.
At one time, before we were well out of the Arboretum, our eyes met, and
there was something so sad and mild and strange in the burn of her gaze
that I felt her frank spirit was unveiling itself in an utterness of
speech. But I have become too much spoilt by mere length of living to be
able to remember back and recognise what young eyes mean when they look
like that. From London to Palo Alto is a short trip, if at the end of it
you meet a Hester. Yet I am sad. The mood crept on me the moment we grew
aware that evening had come, and we stopped a little in front of the
arch to observe the night-look of the foot-hills. Lights had begun to
appear in the corridors of the quadrangle, and here and there in a
professor's office, while Roble and Encina looked like lit-up ferries.
There was a spell of mystery and promise in the quiet which was deeper
for being suggestive of the seething student-life just subsided. It was
a silence that seemed to echo with bells and recitations, and babble and
laughter and heartache. I fell into thought. One generation cometh and
another passeth away. There is no respite. March with time and find
death, mayhap, before it has found you. As years ago the flamelet of the
street-lamp, so now these outposts of the colossal embryo of a world
derided me and seemed to point me out and away. The evening grew chill
with "a greeting in which no kindness is."
"Your coming has been announced in every class, and your lecture is on
the bulletin-boards. After that, can you be depressed?"
The light words were spoken low, as if doubtful whether they could be
taken in good part, and they came with something that was like music.
Was it the voice or some inexplicable feeling? I turned in wonder. Her
head was raised, and in the indistinctness I caught that sweet look of
hers which besought me, and which I answered without knowing to what
question.
I owe you a great happiness. Good-night.
DANE KEMPTON.
XXXIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
Wednesday.
Last night I delivered my address to the student body. Behold the chapel
crowded to the doors, aisles and window-seats crammed, and faces peering
in from without, those of boys and girls who had perched themselves on
the outer sills. A student audience is at the same time most critical
and the most generous. I spoke on Literature and Democracy.
Hester approved my effort. "How does it feel to be great?" she laughed.
"How does it feel to be cruel?" I retorted. "But think, Mr. Kempton,
when you visited the English classes you were just so much text for us.
It should count us a unit merely to have seen you."
A memory stood up and had its revenge on me. It taunted me for the
half-expressed thought, for the fled insight, for the swelling note that
midmost broke. Praise the artist, and he feels himself betrayer.
Blear-eyed, the poet recalls the poem's sunrise, straightens himself
with the old pride, is held again by the splendour which forecasts the
about-to-be-steadier glory of day, and even with the recalling he
shrinks together before what he knows was a false dawn. There was never
a day. The song's note never sang itself at all.
Hester looked up with that wistfulness which so draws me. Her look said:
"I pity you. I wish you were as happy as I." And a thought leaped out in
answer to her look which would have smote her had it spoken. It was,
"You, too, are awakened by a false dawning." Why is she so sure of
herself and of you? Is she sure? The puny bit of writing had a vigorous
rising. The ragged author was clad in it as in ermine. So the seeming
love makes a strong call, for a while holding the girl intent upon a
splendour of unfolding, her nature roused, her being expectant. But
later, for poet and lover, the failure and the waste! Were it otherwise
with your feeling for your betrothed, the comparison would not hold.
Hester does not think these things, and she is beautiful and happy.
Yours devotedly,
DANE KEMPTON.
XXXIV
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
Saturday.
Her happiness wrung it from me. Before I could intervene, the question
asked itself, "How will it be with you in after years?"
Straight the answer came, "There will be Herbert."
Hester is proud. To-night I saw it in the lift of her chin, in the set
of her neck, in the brilliance of her cheek. She knows herself endowed.
So when she prattled with abandon of all you both meant to be and do,
her form erect before me, her hands eloquent with excitement, her voice
pleading for the right to her very conscious self-esteem, I asked her to
look still further. Further she saw you, and was content.
That was before dinner. Later we were walking. "I have a friend in
Orion," she said. The witchery of starshine played in her eyes and
about her mouth. Where were you, Herbert? This night will never return.
Yet what has been was for you--the more, perhaps, that you seemed away.
So it is with lovers. She thinks you love her.
"I am sorry for your mood," she said. "You are holding yourself to
account these days in a way I know." Then she spoke, and I learned with
new heaviness of spirit that she does know the way of it. You never
thought Hester had much to struggle with?
"I am difficult," she said. And again, "There are times when no power
can hold me." Then she quoted Browning:--
"Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?"
"Are you unhappy, Hester?" I asked.
"Yes, but with no more reason than you for your unhappiness. Since you
have come here, you have renewed your demands upon yourself. You wish to
go to school with the youngest and find you cannot. You suffer because
more seems behind you than before." Her voice rose as if she were
fighting tears. It was different with her, I told her. Nothing was
behind her.
"You test your work and I test my love. When you are sad, it is because
the soul of the song spent itself to gain body--" She did not finish.
Why is she sad? Because the soul of her love is narrower than she hoped?
On our return from our walk she sank on the seat under the '95 oak. "Did
you think I meant I was always unhappy?" she asked. Her words seem
always to say more than her meaning. She imparts something of her own
elaborateness to them. I laughed.
"How could I with the 'Herbert is' in my ears?" Then her love became
voluble. I forgot what I knew of your theories and grew aflame with her
ardour. I anticipated as largely as she. She was again possessed by her
hopes.
There, under the shadow of the quadrangle which her young strides
measured, she spoke of what, with you in her life, the years must be.
Beyond words you are blessed, Herbert. But if she mistakes?
D.K.
XXXV
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
November 27, 19--.
Be outspoken! What will happen I can only surmise, but you must tell her
what she is to you. Set her right.
This is the fourth letter in seven days about Hester. I am endeavouring
to make you acquainted with her. I had no need if you loved her. How she
loves you! Yet she thinks that your calm is depth, your silence prayer.
Her pride protects her, but she strains for the word which does not
come. She has never been quite sure, and I thank God for that. Hester
has been fearing somewhat, and she has been doubting, and it is this
that may save her when the night sets in and the storm breaks over her
head.
You, too, are thankful that her instincts served her true and that she
never quite accepted the gift that seemed to have been proffered?
You have a right to demand the reason for my renewed attack. It is
because I have learned the strength of her love. "You are blessed beyond
words," I said two days ago, but as you reject the blessing, Hester must
know it and you must tell her. Herbert, I am your friend.
DANE KEMPTON.
XXXVI
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
November 29, 19--.
What a flutter of letters! And what a fluttery Dane Kempton it is! The
wine of our western sunshine has bitten into your blood and you are
grown over-warm. I am glad that you and Hester have found each other so
quickly and intimately; glad that you are under her charm, as I know her
to be under yours; but I am not glad when you spell yourself into her
and write out your heart's forebodings on her heart. For you are
strangely morbid, and you are certainly guilty of reading your own
doubts and fears into her unspoken and unguessed thoughts.
Believe me, rather than the soul of her love seeming narrower than she
hopes, the truth is she gives her love little thought at all. She is
too busy--and too sensible. Like me, she has not the time. We are
workers, not dreamers; and the minutes are too full for us to lavish
them on an eternal weighing and measuring of heart throbs.
Besides, Hester is too large for that sort of stuff. She is the last
woman in the world to peer down at the scales to see if she is getting
full value. We leave that to the lesser creatures, who spend their
courtship loudly protesting how unutterable, immeasurable, and
inextinguishable is their love, as though, forsooth, each dreaded lest
the other deem it a bad bargain. We do not bargain and chaffer over our
feelings, Hester and I. Surely you mistake, and stir storms in teacups.
"Be outspoken," you say. If my conscience were not clear, I should be
troubled by that. As it is, what have I hidden? What sharp business have
I driven? And who is it that cried "cheated!"? Be outspoken--about what,
pray?
You bid me tell her what she is to me. Which is to bid me tell her what
she already knows, to tell her that she is the Mother Woman; that of all
women she is dearest to me; that of all the walks of life, that one is
pleasantest wherein I may walk with her; that with her I shall find the
supreme expression of myself and the life that is in me; that in all
this I honour her in the finest, loftiest fashion that man can honour
woman. Tell her this, Dane. By all means tell her.
"Ah, I do not mean that," I hear you say. Well, let me tell you what you
mean, in my own way, and bid you tell her for me. In the lust of my eyes
she is nothing to me. She is not a mere sense delight, a toy for the
debauchery of my intellect and the enthronement of emotion. She is not
the woman to make my pulse go fevered and me go mad. Nor is she the
woman to make me forget my manhood and pride, to tumble me down
doddering at her feet and gibbering like an ape. She is not the woman to
put my thoughts out of joint and the world out of gear, and so to
befuddle and make me drunk with the beast that is in me, that I am ready
to sacrifice truth, honesty, duty, and purpose for the sake of
possession. She is not the woman ever to make me swamp honour and poise
and right conduct in the vortex of blind sex passion. She is not the
woman to arouse in me such uncontrolled desire that for gratification I
would do one ill deed, or put the slightest hurt upon the least of
human creatures. She is not the most beautiful woman God Almighty ever
planted on His footstool. (There have been and are many women as true
and pure and noble). She is not the woman for whose bedazzlement I must
advertise the value of my goods by sweating sonnets to her, or shivering
serenades at her, or perpetuating follies for her. In short, she is not
anything to me that the woman of conventional love is to the man.
And again, what _is_ she to me? She is my other self, as it were, my
good comrade, and fellow-worker and joy-sharer. With her woman she
complements my man and makes us one, and this is the highest civilised
sense of union. She is to me the culmination of the thousands of
generations of women. It took civilisation to make her, as it takes
civilisation to make our marriage. She is to me the partner in a
marriage of the gods, for we become gods, we half brutes, when we muzzle
the beast and are not menaced by his growls. Under heaven she is my wife
and the mother of my children.
Tell her, then, tell her all you wish, you dear old fluttery, mothery
poet father--as though it made any difference.
HERBERT.
XXXVII
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
December 3, 19--.
Not three weeks ago you were sitting opposite me and speaking of Hester.
You admitted many things that night, amongst them that the girl never
carried you off your feet. You stated over again with precision all you
had written. You betrothed yourself, not because Hester is different
from everybody else in the world, but because she is like. You took her
for what is typical in her, not for what is individual. You preferred to
walk toward her before your steps were impelled, because you feared that
impulsion would preclude rational choice. With the hope of out-tricking
nature, you reached for Hester Stebbins, in order that there might be a
wall between your heart's fancy and yourself, should your heart become
rebellious. I was to understand that this is the new school, that so
live the masters of matter and of self.
And as you spoke, I wondered about the woman Hester and the form of
love-making which existed between you, and whether she was simple and
without any charm despite her culture and her gift of song. "She either
loves him too well to know or to have the strength to care, or she is,
like him, of the new school," I thought. I sat and watched you, noting
your youth, surprised by the scorn in your eyes and the sadness on your
lips. You seemed hopeless and helpless. I closed my eyes. "What has he
left himself?" I kept asking. "How will he tread 'The paths gray heads
abhor?'" My own head bowed itself as before an irreparable loss. I had
rejoined the child of my care only to find him blasted as by grief, the
first sunshine smitten from his face and his heart weighted. One word,
one ray lighting your looks in a wonted way, one uncontrolled movement
of the hand, one little silence following the mention of her, would have
led me to believe that I had not understood and that all was well. The
night grew old with your plans and analyses. We parted with a sense of
shame upon us that we should have written and spoken so long and with
such heat, and to such little purpose.
You do not see how this answers your last letter. I will tell you. It
shows you that you have explained yourself fully the night we spoke face
to face.
You say that Hester is the woman to complement your man. This sounds
like a lover, only I happen to know that she is not the irresistible
woman. I found it out quite by accident--a few words dropped into a
letter, a corroboration of the fact and further committal, a protracted
defence of your position, running through a correspondence of over a
year, and, finally, a face-to-face declaration. What boots it now that
you write prettily? You do not love Hester. You want her to mother your
children, and you install her in your life for the purpose before the
need.
Love is not lust, and it is good. The irresistible marriage, alone, is
the right one. Upon it, alone, does the sacrament rest. The chivalry of
your last letter refers less to the girl than to your own ends. It is
not because Hester is what she is, that "of all the walks in life that
one is pleasantest wherein you may walk with her," but because that walk
is the one you choose beyond any other for your wife to follow. The
mother woman is legion, and you refuse to specialise.
Hester does not peer down at the scales to see if she is getting full
value, yet she does look to her dignity, and, being poor, will not
account herself rich. Hester has felt since you made known to her that
you wished her to be yours, that she counted punily in your scheme, that
you placed little of yourself in charge of her. She loved you and avowed
it, but she has never been happy. The tragedy of love is not (what it is
thought to be) the unreciprocated love, but the meagerly returned love.
It is better to be rejected, equal turned from equal, than to be held
with slim desire for slight purpose. Can you see this, Herbert? You are
hurting the girl's life. She will ask for what you withhold, though not
a word rise to her lips; will thirst for it through the years, will
herself grow cramped with your denial till her own love seem a thing of
dream, unstable and vague and illusive. And all the time you are gentle.
You are devoted to her interests, furthering her happiness to the best
in your power; but your power cannot touch her happiness. It is not what
you do; it is the motive to your acts, and Hester would know that she
has left you unmoved. You respect the function of motherhood, but you do
not love Hester. Tell her this, and prevent her from entering a union in
which she must feel herself half useful, half wifely, half happy, and
therefore all unhappy.
It is not Hester's fault that you cannot love her, and perhaps it is not
her misfortune. There is no need for panic. Of two persons, one loving
and one loath, the indifferent one is in the right. Can a tree defend
itself from the hewer's axe? What would avail it, then, to feel pain at
the blows? It is beyond our control to love or not to love, and no
effort that we may put forth can draw love to us when it is denied. It
does not avail us to suffer from unrequited love.
This which I have just said is an article of faith which the doctrine of
experience often contradicts, for there may be mistake, and the one who
does not love may be in the wrong. If only you could wait to see the
beauty which is she before you call her! A year later and Hester may
flower for you in a passionate blossoming; her face may challenge you to
live. A year later and you may find that she is indeed the woman to
guide you and to follow you; her voice a song; her eyes a light in the
day. As yet, you have not gauged her, and you would put her to small
uses. Stand aside, dear Herbert. It will be better.
I have played a surly part. I may be accused of having been to you both
a Dmitri Roudin and an Iago. I beg you to believe that it has not been
easy for me. I have uttered the earnest word, have driven you on by the
goad of friendship, which drives far. I looked upon the days that came
tripping toward you out of the blue-white horizon of time and saw them
gray for a dear woman, gray and silent as the tomb over a dead love, and
heavy hearted for a man who is my son.
Ever wholly yours,
DANE KEMPTON.
XXXVIII
FROM HESTER STEBBINS TO HERBERT WACE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
December 15, 19--.
Over and ended. It shall be as I said last night. Herbert, there is no
call for anger; believe me, there is not. I am doing what I cannot help
doing. You have not changed, but my faith in you has, and I cannot
pretend to a happiness I do not feel.
Oh, but I laugh, my very dear one, I laugh that I could seem to choose
to wrest myself from you. Did you at one time love me? That morning of
wild sunshine when you took my hand and asked me to be your wife seems
very long ago. I should have understood--the blame is all mine--I should
have known you did not love me, I should have been filled with anger and
shame instead of happiness. The blame is all mine.
Last night, while you were speaking, I was standing in the window
wondering what all the trouble was about. I could afford to be calm
since I knew I was not hurting you very deeply. At most I was
disappointing a very self-sufficient man. How do women find courage, O
God, to take from men who love them the love they gave? No such ordeal
mine?
Farewell, Herbert. Let us think calmly of each other since we have
helped each other for so long a stretch of life. Farewell, dear.
Always your friend,
HESTER STEBBINS.
XXXIX
FROM HESTER STEBBINS TO DANE KEMPTON
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
December 18, 19--.
Herbert has analyzed the situation and has arrived at the conclusion
that my dissatisfaction arises in an inordinate desire for happiness.
You should not care so much about yourself, he says. Poor, dear, young
Herbert! He is very young and cannot as yet conceive how much there is
about oneself that demands care. I thought it out in the hills to-day.
It was gray and there was a fitful wind. What is this selfishness but a
prompting to make much of life? You and I and people of our kind are old
before our time, that is the reason we are not reckless. Our dreams
mature us. I was a mere girl when Herbert said he wished to marry me,
but I was old enough to grasp the full meaning of the pact, as he could
not grasp it. In a moment I had travelled my way to the grave and back.
I looked at the sheer, quick clouds that flitted past the blue, and I
felt that I had caught up with life; I had overtaken the wonders that
hung in the sky of my dreaming. Then I looked at him and the sunshine
got in my face and made me laugh (or cry)--I was so more than happy,
being so much too sure of his need of me. I am glad I walked to-day. The
view from the hills was beautiful. (You see I am not unhappy!) I stood
on a rock and looked about me, thinking of you, of Barbara,--I feel I
know her,--and of Herbert. He and I had often come to these spots. Oh,
the hungry memories! Yet what were we but a young man and a young woman,
who, without being battered into apathy by misfortune, without being
wearied or ill, were taking each other for better or for worse because
they seemed compatible? We were doing just that, to Herbert's certain
knowledge! I failed him; he hoped for more complaisance. Marriage is a
hazard, Mr. Kempton, confess it is, and a man does much when he binds
himself to make a woman the mother of his children--nay, the grandmother
of theirs, even that. What else and what more? I would never have been
wholly in my husband's life, comrade and fellow to it. Herbert knew this
clearly, and I vaguely but I acted with clearness on my vagueness. It
was hard to do. It has left me breathless and a little afraid to be
myself,--as if I had killed a dear thing,--and tearful, too, and
spasmodic for your sympathy and sanction.
I told him that for a long time I did not understand, supposing myself
beloved and desired and chosen for him by God, thinking he yearned for
the subtlety and mystery of me, thinking all of him needed me and
cleaved earths and parted seas to come to me. Later, when I became
oppressed by a lack and was made to hear the stillness that followed my
unechoed words, I became grave and still myself. He had unloved me, I
said, and I waited. Something seemed pending, and meanwhile I could
love! I made much of every word of comfort that he dropped me, and dwelt
with hope on the future. All this I told Herbert the night when I
explained, and he turned pale. "You people fly away with yourselves. I
cannot follow you. What is wrong, Hester?" He smiled in his distress.
Yet was there in his softness an imperiousness, commanding me to be
other than I am, forbidding me the right to crave in secret what I had
made bold to ask for openly. His man was stronger than my woman, and I
leapt to him again. "My husband," I whispered, my hands in his. This,
even after I understood, dearest Mr. Kempton.
It is a sorry tangle. If only one could suit feeling to theory! It is
not for a theory that I refuse to be Herbert's wife. Yet if I loved him
enough, I could give up love itself for him. He hinted it, looking as
from a distance at me in my attitude of protest and restraint. If I
loved him enough, I could forego love itself for him. Somewhere there is
a fault, it would seem, somewhere in my abandon is restraint, in my
love, self-seeking. Remorse overcame me just as he was about to leave,
and I schooled myself to think that there had been no affront, that it
honours a woman to be wanted no matter for what end, that every use is a
noble use, that we die the same, loved or used. If Herbert Wace wants a
wife and thinks me fitting, why, it is well. I thought all this and aged
as I thought. Nevertheless, my hand did not put itself out a second time
to detain the man who had forced me to face this.
There is a youth here who loves me. If Herbert's face could shine like
his for one hour, I believe I would be happier than I have ever been.
And it would not spoil that happiness if this love were toward another
than myself. Say you believe me. You must know it of me that before
everything else in the world I pray that knowledge of love come to the
man over whom the love of my girlhood was spilled.
Do you ask what is left me, dear friend? Work and tears and the intact
dream. Believe me, I am not pitiable.
HESTER.
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