born (two out of the ten living children, several others had died
early) makes the Bronté Parsonage, over which it is the fashion to
shiver, seem like an amiable idyl by contrast. Samuel Wesley, the
father, was passionately religious. The first of his concerns was the
saving of his own soul for immortal happiness, the second was the
saving of as many other like heirs to bliss as possible, and a part of
this second ambition implied the training of his sons for the ministry.
In pursuit of these ends he sacrificed the comfort and happiness of
his wife and seven lovely daughters with a ruthless persistency and
consistency that would be incredible did we not have his own complacent
writings in testimony thereto.
The sons found his example worthy of imitation, it appears. Of late,
apropos of the Wesley Centennial, one has heard much of John Wesley, of
his tangled love affairs and his amazing marriage, and one can't but be
conscious of a secret liking for that tempestuous termagant, Mrs. John,
because that she after a fashion avenged those eight unlucky kinswomen
whose lives he so complacently sucked dry to nourish his religious
aspirations.
One has wondered, when reading them, if those meek and loyal addresses
from the scaffold, made to Henry VIII. by the innocent victims of his
bloodthirstiness, could have been genuine documents. They contradict
all one knows of human nature in their humble acquiescence and
submissive affection; but here in this book we have Hetty Wesley's
own tender appeal to her father--a father who had ruthlessly cast her
into a lifelong hell--to forgive what he called a sin, really only a
girl's generous foolish mistake, and we have also his answer. An answer
which would have made even Tudor Henry blush for its cruelty. One
could almost wish that there was somewhere an immortal part of Samuel
Wesley, burning eternally in the knowledge of himself as he really was.
Mrs. John Wesley saves us the need of wishing that Hetty's brother had
a soul.
After all, this is but one of thousands of grim stories of human beings
trampling upon the lives and hearts of their fellows in the endeavour
to achieve for themselves an infinity of bliss. To my heretical mind
such behaviour for such an end seems inexpressibly sordid, vulgar, and
selfish. I at least prefer to be one with the dumb beasts that perish,
but who pass away knowing that no creature has ever suffered a pang in
order that they may have saved their souls alive.
A Grateful Spaniard.
Time is not long enough for me
To hate mine enemy perfectly,
But God is of infinite mercy and he
To Time has added Eternity.
October 16.
Bores.
I reproached J---- last night for sending me to dinner with E----.
"This is the third time you have done it," I grumbled, "and it is just
twice too often. None of the other women will talk to him, and because
I treat him decently you take advantage of my good nature."
"Oh, but my dear," she countered impishly, "you know you are so juicy
with bores!"
Of course, that was true, though there is nothing I envy more
than the courage of ruthlessness--one of the first laws of social
self-preservation. I am always the helpless prey of bores. They drink
as they choose from my "sacred fount," though it is shallow enough,
heaven knows! for me to need all its contents for myself. If this
condition of affairs arose from good nature I should not be ashamed of
it, but it is all sheer cowardliness. My imagination is so vivid that I
can feel the corroding humiliation of neglect and indifference to the
poor souls as if it were being applied to my own skin, and I labour
on, crying protests inwardly, rather than free myself by a moment of
brutality.
"Tell bores who waste my time and me" that the best hours of my life
have been burned in their dull fires. Again and again have I lost my
opportunity to seek the friendship of some adorably amusing creature
while sweating to pull the oar that was the bore's own proper task.
This indolent cowardice enfeebles me in a dozen ways; makes it
impossible for me to train my dogs for fear of hurting their feelings,
and to discharge a servant costs me a white night and a _fausse
digestion_. It is not kindliness, it is only that I feel their
discomfort more than they do themselves.
November 7.
Emotions and Oxydization.
H---- told a curious story last night of the bobstay on his yacht,
which time after time rusted, broke, and betrayed him at critical
moments of racing. Replacing with the best material and by the best
workmen was futile, though all the rest of the wire rigging remained
intact. It seemed a "hoodoo" until it was discovered to be due to
oxydization from a bolt which touched a copper plate on the stem. F----
said it was easy to see how, before the chemical action of steel and
copper were understood, the most sensible and logical mind might be
driven to attribute such a thing to witchcraft, and it occurred to me
that perhaps when we know more of the chemistry of psychology, many
of our emotional puzzles will be more easily solved. Jealousy, anger,
suspicion, ingratitude, it will then be easy to correct by some simple
act of insulation. We know that many evil moral tendencies are caused
by pressure upon certain portions of the brain, and my own personal
experience and long observation makes me confident that half the baser
passions are due to acidity in the blood. It makes one slow to indulge
one's emotions when one realizes they may simply be the result of a
lack of a therapeutic alkali. With such a conviction one will generally
wait for the slower and more balanced action of reason.
What a great alteration would take place in the history of the world
if it could be rewritten from the point of view of what the doctors
describe as "the gouty acid diathesis."
Bess of Hardwicke's marital troubles, which convulsed all England, and
even drew Elizabeth and Burleigh into the turmoil, were due entirely to
the unhappy Earl's gout, as no one can doubt after reading his letters.
Charles V. was driven from his throne by it, and Napoleon's gout lost
him the battle of Leipsic and set his feet in "slippery places." Henry
VIII.'s shoes were not slashed without reason, and Pitt was lost to
England when she most needed him by the same agent. These are but a few
of the notorious examples, but how many wars, revolutions, massacres,
had their origin in that same corroding oxydization of the spirit of
man we will probably never fully determine.
November 10.
Abelard to Heloise.
Dear Sister in Christ:
God send you peace from Heaven!
I would that to your restless heart
His blessed peace was given,
And that you found
In contemplation of His love
Balm for that wound
That ever frets you sore.
'Twere meet you wore
Much sack cloth,
And with scourge and fasting drove
This passion from your soul....
Christ's Bride thou art;
Therefore give Him the whole.
I charge thou keep'st back not any part
Of His just due to spend upon a worm....
Nay, woman! would'st thou bring on me a curse
For that I stand between thy soul and God?...
Thy love for me is but a thing perverse.
Cast it forth from thee, or a heavy rod
May prove that God is still a jealous God.
But that you are a woman, and infirm
Of will and purpose, I should say
Some bitter words to purge you of this sin!
Natheless each day
I painful penance do
For that 'twas I who led you first astray--
(For which great sin may He my soul assoil!)
And wrestle mightily each night in prayer
That Christ may yet your stubborn heart subdue
To His sweet will, and--the sharp fret and coil
Of earth cast forth--He then may enter in
To find a garnished chamber, and an altar fair....
--Nay, now, bethink you!
Love like yours is grievous sin,
And the time wasteth swift toward death.
All love is but a breath
Which clouds the glass that we see darkly through--
When you to Heaven shall win
And there see face to face your risen Lord,
Wilt know 'twas but the hot fume of a word
Spake by a devil, dimmed your earthly glass....
In essence love is sin!--
Save only love of God.
It is a gin,
Set by the Evil One to snare the feet
Of those who haste toward Heaven,
By its false likeness to the spiritual love,
And by it man is driven
Down the steep slope to Hell.
'Tis thus when sanctioned by the Church; how then
Of love like thine, which is accursed of men,
And doubly cursed by God?...
Last night in dreams I trod
Up the long windings of the heavenly stair,
And heard the angels singing loud and sweet,
And neared the gate, when sudden both my feet
Were caught amid the tangles of thy hair,--
Spread like a cruel web across my path,--
In which I struggled, mad with woe and wrath,
And could not free me; so at last I fell,
Stumbling and plunging down to blackest Hell,
Wherein I cursed the hour I saw thy face,
And most I cursed the hour, the day, the place
When thou didst give me love....
Waking then, I strove
For holier thoughts, and could at last forgive
The wrong thou didst me.
But no more, I prithee, vex me with thy tale
Of love. It wearieth me, and henceforth I must live
In larger peace, or I may not prevail
Within the Schools
Against the babbling of the narrow fools
Who blindly are withstanding my new light
Upon the Divine Essence's nature, and my clasp
Of the ringed Trinitarian mysteries. Matters your slight
Woman's comprehension may not grasp....
Farewell. Neglect not prayer.
Heloïse to Abelard.
My good Lord Abbot:--But this once
I speak, and then no more.
I must not 'gainst the lore
Of the great Schools
Set my weak cries
For warmth and life and love.
The snow now lies
Deep round the Paraclete,
Where from my pale nuns rise
In never ceasing chant of nones and primes
Incense of prayers to ease the need of God
For broken contrite hearts and dropping tears.
And sometimes I have fears
That each one wears
'Neath her long habit
As sad a heart as mine,
For in their eyes,
Which each unto the skies
Lifts many times each day,
I see desire for love,
A gift they pray
From God, since man gives not
That which they need.
I watch them from my carven chair,
While lingering on a bead,
And add, beneath my hood,
Beads to my rosary of tears
To think how good
To each 'twould seem to change
This Latin drone and censer's clank
For the dear homely noise
Around the hearth
Of little girls and boys--
For all these weary prayers
The daily household cares
For some tired labourer
Who earned their bread.
Oh, little hands and feet!--
There is no room
Within this cloistered tomb
Wherein we worship God,
For one dear curly head.
* * * * *
Sometimes at prayers
A vision seems to rise--
Borne on an air
Mayhap that blows from Hell.
And then I see the great Lord Jove
And all His mighty peers
Who ruled so many years
Above the ancient heavens,
Dwindle, and fade, and pass away,
And only Love remains--
I see the doctors of the ancient schools,
Great Egypt's sages, those who made the rules
Of wisdom in the Academe,
Fade also like a dream;
All their wise thoughts grow foolishness
And all their learning turns to dust,
And only Love remains
Forever young, forever wise and great,
And in the time to come
I see the same strong fate
Seize on our Mighty God
Who binds us in his chains,
And makes our love a sin
To drive our souls to Hell,
He too, with all his doctors
Fades--and only Love remains
Forever and forever. Fare you well.
November 30.
Yumei Mujitsu.
The Japanese possess a delightful word--Yumei Mujitsu--which signifies
"Having-the-Name-but-not-the-Reality." They use it to express certain
assumptions--such, for example, as the claim of the Mikado's descent
from the Sun Goddess, which, like the formulæ of Algebra, achieve
desired results though they recognize that in itself it has no
existence. How valuable such a word would be to express the attitude of
the Sentimentalist regarding a coloured man named Booker Washington,
much discussed of late.
Now if there is one creature more than a saint whom I fear and
distrust it is the Sentimentalist, whom Hawthorne pungently
characterizes as "that steel machine of the Devil's own make." The
ruthless heartlessness of the Sentimentalist would be unbelievable
if one had not seen it with one's own eyes. Take, for example, the
Abolitionists. To gratify their own emotions they caused the death
of a million men, the infliction of wounds and pain that make the
imagination shudder, and all that long succeeding anguish of a
people--the grief, the poverty, humiliation, and despair that burned
itself indelibly upon the hearts of those who shared it.
Stevenson--that misunderstood moralist now chiefly remembered as a
story teller!--put his finger upon the enigma of the Sentimentalist's
cruelty:
"Everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency
of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual
goodness:--Ah, if I could show you these! if I could show you these
men and women all the world over ... clinging in the brothel and on
the scaffold to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!...
They may seek to escape and yet they cannot ... they are condemned to
some nobility, all their lives the desire of good is at their heels,
the implacable hunter.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in
him the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his
God."
The Sentimentalist, along with all his kind, is hunted by that
implacable need of virtue. To satisfy it he seizes upon the wrongs done
by others, and in his hot denunciation of another's sin, in his clamour
for its punishment, he experiences the warm ennobling glow of personal
merit.
The pietist will meticulously perform rites and ceremonies in this same
need to soothe the imperious call within him for some justification
of his life. Having washed and bowed and recited, his sins of
practice trouble him but little--those genuflections have made his
balance good in the book of virtue. But the Sentimentalist cannot
content himself with pale ceremonies. He is by instinct devouring and
bloody, but his soul cringes before his inward monitor. By fierce
denunciation of the sins he has no mind to he can soothe his desire
to inflict pain in perfect content, upborne by a consciousness of his
own righteousness. Torquemada was a type, John Brown of Ossawatamie
another; both were criminal paranoics tortured by desire for blood
and for self-justification. Real goodness does not stimulate the
Sentimentalist's emotions--it gives no opportunity for the outcries
that warm his heart with a consciousness of rectitude.
The Boer war was a great opportunity for the American Sentimentalist.
Protesting against the suppression of a Republic, he could forget
his own suppression of the Confederate Republic and of the nascent
government of the Philippines. Execrating the burning of farmhouses
in the Veldt, he could ignore the track of smoking desolation that
marked Sherman's march through Georgia or Sheridan's raid in Virginia.
Criticism of British greed for gold kept him cheerfully superior to the
contrast of the gift of fifteen millions and the patient labour spent
by the English to repatriate the Boer and start him again in life, with
the protest he and his kind made against General Grant's willingness
to leave to the Southern soldier his starved horse as a means of
reaching his ruined home.
Conscience, demanding of the Sentimentalist the bread of uprightness,
he prodigally offers it a stone upon which to break its gnawing teeth.
The African brother has long been one of the most valued of the
Sentimentalist's resources. Passionately generous demands for the
negro's equality have made it possible for him to cordially and
contentedly insult and oppress his white fellow countrymen.
It is in this relation that the Sentimentalists find Booker Washington
so greatly to their taste. Washington, innocent of their purposes,
of course is an admirable and sensible man, who has established an
excellent school for the young people of his race. A school far
wiser and more merciful in conception than any attempt made by the
negrophiles to benefit their protégés, and all honour is due this
enlightened ex-slave for his own astonishing progress and his generous
sharing of his fruitful labours with his own people. The Sentimentalist
professes to find in it "something godlike," a "touch of the divine,"
as one of them recently characterized what is, reduced to simple facts,
the establishing of an industrial school for negroes by a negro.
December 1.
The Real Thing.
The man who has educated the negro, the man who has had in him really a
touch of the divine, would never appeal to the Sentimentalist.
Booker Washington, very properly, of course, lives and lives well upon
the results of his school. He has claimed from the rich, and justly has
received, lavish aid for his enterprise. He dresses well, lives amply,
travels in comfort, is entertained by Royalty and Chief Magistrates,
and with his family, is put beyond even a chance of narrow means by his
sympathizers' lavishness. But who heeds the man who has really educated
the negro? What crowned head or President entertains the small farmer
in rough brogans and faded jeans, who sweats over his hoe in the cotton
and tobacco fields, or in the steaming rice and sugar-cane swamps, and
who has in forty years spent more than a hundred millions upon the
education of the negro? This is the man, and the son of the man who
turned heart-brokenly home on the begrudged horse to fields overgrown
and laid waste--fields to which his conquerors, unlike the English,
contributed no seeds or implements or stock--and from that land he has
wrung by the hard labour of his hands that hundred millions which has
been spent in educating his ex-slave.
He has lived hardly, in dingy, decaying houses, he has eaten of the
coarsest, he has known no beauty or grace, and but scant comfort, he
has been clothed in the plainest, he has politically known little but
injury and contempt from the larger and wealthier half of his country,
and worst of all he has seen his sons grow to manhood but partially
and inadequately equipped with learning, because so large a portion of
their birthright must be shared in the teaching of the negro in whose
name he had been plundered and slaughtered.
The touching point of the story is that it has all been done without
any consciousness of special merit. The duty was to be done, and was
done without trumpets or drums. Such silent, patient, unreflecting,
unadvertised goodness would, of course, never appeal to the
Sentimentalist. If he could be brought to see it 'twould merely disturb
his self-satisfaction.
It is only to the fantastic mind of a heretic that its meaning appeals,
only the heart of a cynic is touched by the instinctive heroism of the
white man of the South.
December 15.
"Oh, Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death."
I am just home from a meeting of one of those literary clubs we
American women so much affect, in the absence of any masculine society,
and we have been talking about Stevenson as the poet most typical of
the mind of the nineteenth century. It was all that delicious welter in
the sentimentalities of the domestic affections which any assemblage
of females finds it impossible to avoid; and we read aloud to one
another--with the _vox humana_ lilt turned on--all those decidedly
dull little lyrics in the "Child's Garden of Verses," and came away
with just that moist brightness of the eye, that wistful, tender
"mother-smile," which was correct of the occasion.
I say _we_, but of course my wicked old eyes were as hard as horn,
yet, thank heaven! my unruly tongue uttered not a note out of tune
with the Domestic Symphony. Who will say that social slappings have
taught me nothing? Even I can be daunted by the unhappy silences that
so often greet my blurted comments, and by the soft rustles of relief
that respond to the rising of some gentle lady, who will obliquely but
certainly crush me with her pious phrases, that throb with the warm
sweetness of the dear old human platitudes, and which are rewarded by
applause which politely accentuates my disgrace.... Oh, amiable and
philosophic white page! To you I can be a tiresome and protesting bore,
sure of no strictures in your silence. Here I can unpack my heart with
words, unrebuked. Here I can whisper safely my suspicion that dear R.
L. S. himself would have been consumed with cheerful amusement at our
gentle comments upon his doughty spirit.
The world says all sorts of absurd things about Stevenson. Some one
the other day called him "an unquenchable Calvinist"!--He who was all
pagan and Roman. The Calvinist was the European most subdued by the
Semitic beliefs, most merged into Oriental preconceptions of life.
Certainly the European mind in its natural state faced its
consciousness of existence with no preconceived theories. Its attitude
was that of the child. It found itself face to face with a great,
astonishing, beautiful universe, and asked itself what it must think of
this universe; how use its opportunities therein. The child stumbled
into a thousand infantile delusions and misconceptions, but its
eyes were unclouded, its intelligence good. He soon discovered that
though many things were pleasant, these pleasant things, when used
indiscreetly, had a hidden potentiality of pain. With this second
discovery, however--being a wise child--came no foolish horror of all
pleasant things; only an illumination as to the value of moderation.
The phenomena of age, death, and decay left the child serious, but not
depressed. These were not pleasant things, admittedly; but since they
appeared inevitable, there was plainly no use in attempting to escape
them. The proper attitude toward such solemnities was a manly courage,
a brave submission. In any case, the child concluded, with all the
sufferings, contradictions, and puzzling inequalities of existence, at
least for all those called upon to face these griefs, there remained
some small space of clear, warm, beautiful life; sunshine, food, love,
and--more and better than all--that tingling, exquisite quiver of the
senses which he agreed to call by the divine name of Beauty. He saw
that the pains, the joys, the growth and blight, decay and extinction,
were not of his lot only, but were shared by all his surroundings.
Feeling himself alone neither in his opportunities nor his inevitable
doom, he accepted his fate with the courageous calm, the uncomplaining
resignation, of his fellow-creatures. He lived and he died as
unresentfully as did the summer leaves, whose season of existence was
so much briefer than his own.
His kinship with encompassing nature was so close that it touched him
on every side. He became as aware of the souls of all things about him
as he was aware of his own. He felt a similar spirit of life in the
trees of the forest, the stones of the mountains, in the sea winds,
in the brooks, the rivers and their reeds. He guessed at their names,
their loves, their histories, as one guesses at those of unknown
passers-by travelling the same road. Out of these speculations arose
all his arts, his poetry, his legends, and his myths. When the moon
stooped toward the western hills she leaned in a passion like his own
toward youth and desire. The blood of a slain love became visible to
him as it returned to the upper air in dim, faint-scented blossoms,
bearing written on their purple leaves the plaintive _ai! ai!_ of her
left mourning for dead beauty. The very breeze that sighed through the
rushes was the wistful voice of one unwisely reluctant of earthly joy
and pain.
It is almost impossible for us--so long saturated with Semitic
thought--to recreate for ourselves the mind of the Greeks and
Romans fed upon the strength and beauty of a noble pantheism--whose
interpretation of life knit their souls to the wholesome earth,
and filled them with zest to live and patience to die--whose gods
embodied their own lovely ideals of youth immortal, beauty unfading,
serene wisdom, the soil's natural wealth, the vine's purple joy. Their
attention was fixed upon the present life--their problem how to live it
bravely, wisely, richly. All beyond this were uncertain shadows, about
which it was impossible to know, and useless to speculate.