hopeful for my fine children, interested in a work I have chosen and
which was not forced upon me, rich in friends, in good health, and
seeing progressively the sad splendid beauty of Nature and Art, hopeful
for man’s struggle to break his bonds and interested in coöperating
with him, and yet, in spite of all, passionately unsatisfied!
Passionately unsatisfied, and yet to me she is more beautiful, more
wonderful than ever! This inaccessible woman, approaching middle age,
more loving to me and more remote than ever, consciously rejecting
me as a lover and accepting me warmly as a child, her complete and
impersonal loveliness, is the one perfect experience of my life, the
experience that permeates and affects all others, that has subtly
intertwined itself in my love for children and nature, for work and for
the destiny of my fellow-men. It has been the sap of my life, which has
urged the slender stalk into the full-grown tree with its many branches
and its decorative voluminous lines.
The sap still urges its undeniable way; my youthful passion still
maintains itself but now more than ever it meets only the rich maternal
smile, full of knowledge and a kind of tender scorn. As I write these
lines--she, for the moment, distant from me by the length of an
ocean--I remember the days when with a certain response she played
with me with a light grace. Two little incidents come back to me from
the multitudinous deluge of the past--one, when, with the laughter of
unconventionality, we openly and completely embraced on the bosom of a
Swiss glacier encouraged by the full sun of noon! Again, when, in our
fancy, she was the wife of another, and we indulged in sweet mutual
infidelity after a delicious supper in a French garden on the banks of
the Seine! How we talked and smiled, and how we held for the moment
aloof the serious madness that was behind my passion! How we enjoyed
the decorous and polite knowledge of the host who ushered us to the
guilty couch! And how our French epigrams were mixed up with our light
and happy caresses! And at that time, she was beginning to see Him, and
I had thrown my cone--my play with the lady in Italy! And this added
zest, and she threw at me with more than joyous lightness a glass of
wine which stained my white immaculate shirt and brought me to her
with a quick reproachful embrace!
Yes, these gestures I must remember, in this the day of the waning of
our lighter relations! The waning, yes, of our lighter amorousness,
indeed the beginning of the day when she pushes me away, but at the
same time the beginning of a love for me that passes understanding,
that has no material expression, that is full of compassion, of a kind
of dignified pity! A love in which the temperament plays no part, but
to which all that has been between us--pleasure, pain, difficulties,
work and infidelities--give an indescribable solidity and depth.
Nothing on earth can separate us. Our relation, indeed, is built on a
fortress which nothing but a double death can destroy, and perhaps not
even that!
What is the romance of a young couple, previous to their first
nuptials, as compared with our full experience? Why do novels, as a
rule, end with the first slight lyrical gesture? Why do we inculcate in
the imagination of the young and in our moral code a false conception
of the nature of virtue? Why do we imply that chastity in woman has
anything to do with goodness, or that physical movements necessarily
affect a soul relation? I do not know why we have built up historically
these colossal lies which give us pain and unnecessary jealousy and
despair.
But what is to me the deepest mystery of all--and this a glorious
mystery which distils a spiritual fragrance to all of life--is
what holds a man and woman together through an entire eternity of
experience. She is to me the key of existence that opens up the realm
of the Infinite which, though I can never reach, yet sheds upon all
things its colorful meaning. It is only the conception of the Eternal
which gives interest to every concrete detail. God inheres as a quality
in all things. Religion is right when it points the fact that without
Him there is nothing.