the 'heirs of the ages' need not be as limited as you imply. The modern
man or woman can combine the Greek ideal of self-development with the
Christian ideal of self-dedication. In reality, I am not arguing, but
asserting. I know that this union is possible by the only evidence which
is admissible--the evidence of a life. I have known for many years one
person who unites in a normal experience your grandiose abstractions of
Christianity and Hellenism. This person is my mother. Do not take her
sex as an obstacle. She is a better example than some famous man might
be, because her character is not obscured by public achievement. She has
none of the limitations of a profession or career, or of some unique
strain of genius. What she is creates careers or feeds genius. She is
the most complete human being I have ever known, and yet her wholeness
is a presage of what we all might become. It is to a life like this that
you ought to go when you take stock of the philosophies of the world!
My mother's external fortune, judged by Greek standards, is good--too
good, of course, for a woman. She has received from fate much that would
have satisfied a Greek man: the consciousness of citizenship in a proud
and prospering nation; health, long life, an active mind, and enough
money to live tastefully; and, finally, satisfactory children (if I may
be permitted to say this) and the approval of her fellow citizens. The
Greek estimate of the importance of such approval springs, I suppose,
from intense feeling for the communal life. No Greek man could be
mentally less confined to the walls of a house than is my mother, and an
Athenian voter could scarcely have served his _polis_ more completely
than she serves our little town. The only difference here between her
and a Periclean citizen is that she is perplexed and shy rather than
expectant and gratified when evidences of public approval are forced
upon her.
In natural endowment, also, my mother is singularly Greek, because she
possesses diverse qualities harmoniously welded into one whole. We are
conscious of no contradictions in her, and yet she is both sane and
imaginative, sensitive and practical, dominating and gentle.
Finally, in her conscious activities she is Greek. There is, for
example, her moral insistence upon form and beauty. If you could live in
her house for a day you would see Hellenism as a diurnal practice. Her
taste is flawless; everything she touches turns to beauty and to a
tranquillizing order and simplicity. She selects a vase or a baking dish
with the aesthetic fastidiousness which beset the artists and artisans of
Athens.
And, furthermore, she is Greek in her perennial enthusiasm for fresh
knowledge. Her enjoyment of life seems to me intense because she is
never tired of exploring the world through every kind of human
achievement. She has the curiosity of the Hellenic mind. The Athenian
men who were like her made it worth while for other men to be scientists
and philosophers and poets.
And yet my mother is a Christian. You see what I believe she has and is.
Well, all of this she takes in her two hands and _offers_ daily. Of
course, she believes in immortality, but she never talks about the
future life, and I have told you of her vigorous interest in this one.
Of course, too, she has known many sorrows--who has not at seventy?--but
she has consistently concealed pain and suffering instead of enthroning
them. Her Christianity is compounded of Love. As it streams out from her
it is the creative, regenerating passion for humanity which transcended
the reasoned good-will of the pagan philosophers and transcends the
materialistic serviceableness of the modern humanitarians. In the
noblest pagan literature there is no emotion at all resembling that
which suffuses the New Testament. In this emotion my mother lives and
moves and has her being.
I snap my fingers at Nietzscheism when I realize that she is the
strongest personality in my little world. She dies daily for us, but we
live her way! No superman could impose his will more effectively than
this Christian in whom power and sacrifice are one. God is love. If all
history tried to make me a skeptic my mother's nature would keep me a
believer.
Whoso hath felt the spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny;
Yea with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.
I have spoken of my mother's health and energy. Just lately these have
flagged a little, and I came away this time with some misgivings, and
only for my husband's sake. But her letters have quite reassured me.
Lately she wrote, 'I am daily thankful that nothing prevented you from
spending this winter on the Acropolis. In thinking of you I can't manage
to dislodge you from the hill long enough to eat and sleep.'
She knows me! We have traveled all over the country this year, but
always come back to Athens and the Attic plain as to the heart of
Greece. We went to Egypt in midwinter, and on our return hurried almost
from the ship to the Parthenon. It had snowed lightly and the whitened
summits of Pentelicon and Hymettus and Parnes lay in sharp relief under
the brilliant sky. A Greek friend of mine, looking at these fleshless
mountains, said proudly, 'It is not every one who dares show her bones.'
Attica needs no softening mist, no glamorous moonlight, no romantic
obscuration. Her beauty is born of light and her teaching is light. In
Egypt man was mocked by the desert. Small wonder the Christian saints
hid themselves there to punish their poor bodies! Here man seeks the sun
and stands erect in his dignity. Mediaevalism, I grant you, must make way
for this immortal humanism. The 'mystery of suffering' is an invention
of distorted minds. Stripped of disguise, suffering is merely an evil to
be done away with by Love. This, I take it, is the message of the
Acropolis to the Christian.
We are leaving next week for a month in London, and then home. May
Fortune multiply your royalties and Athena inspire another book!
Faithfully yours.
P.S. The American mail is just in. A letter from a neighbor in my native
town says that no one in my mother's house will disobey her order that I
am not to be sent for, but that I am greatly needed. It is possible that
she will not live until I can reach her. We shall sail for New York day
after to-morrow. My world begins to crumble.
PINELANDS, MAINE, _April 20, 1915_.
MY DEAR FRIEND:--
As I begin this letter there flashes into my mind the last sentence
which I wrote to you a year ago from Greece--that my little world was
crumbling. And since then how your own world has been shattered, and the
universe almost set reeling in its course! I remember how I talked on in
that letter about areas of experience, blocking you off into twenty-year
periods! I thought then that only the years would carry us into new
seas. But in twelve months you have been swept from the moorings of your
middle life. France is again facing the enemy as she did in your
boyhood, but now your sons are risking lives more precious than your
own. Your wife and daughters are nursing the wounded and the stricken.
You, 'too old to fight,'--and so in a flash set forward into old
age,--are nevertheless finding your pen tipped with passion instead of
with philosophy. One of your lyrics is being sung in the trenches. You
are no longer an intellectualist, but a voice of France. And thousands
upon thousands of other men and women are experiencing a similar
metamorphosis. Who knows what new philosophies and religions will be
born?
I have been wondering whether you would still call Plato an intruder and
vagabond in Hellenism. Greek thought changed under the shock to Athenian
civilization caused by the Peloponnesian War. By this abstraction do we
mean anything else than that Plato and other men had brought home to
them the transitoriness of prosperity, the helplessness of morals,
learning, and art before a recrudescence of primitive violence, and the
limitations of humanism? The material stage in those days was
small,--little states wage a little war,--but in view of her spiritual
importance the suffering of Athens was a world-experience of the first
magnitude. Possibly Plato seems to you now less a vagrant than a pilot.
For certainly our 'new religion,' if we bring one to birth, cannot be
composed of truths wholly unknown before. Some of our new creative
energy will go into stripping the veil from the face of that Reality
which men at one time and another have beheld. I find it easy to believe
this because through an intensive personal experience of my own I have
been brought to perceive a truth which is two thousand years old. Last
year I argued about Christianity, choosing this part, discarding that.
This year I have knelt and touched the hem of the seamless robe. The
experience would be too intimate and sacred to reveal were it not bound
up with your own. Let me tell you about it. It is the only way in which
I can talk with you about your sons who are facing death and suffering.
I wrote you that I was called home from Athens by my mother's illness.
She died last month. During the intervening months revelation after
revelation came to me. My mother had grown worse rapidly and at first I
was shocked to my innermost heart by the change in her. All her strength
seemed turned to weakness. Her rich and varied life had shrunk to the
hushed quiet of a sick-room. Her tranquil face had become haggard. Her
eager intellect had slipped away from her. There was nothing left of the
beautiful Hellenism of her life. A Periclean Greek would now have seen
in her only an illustration of the shadow lurking within the sunshine,
the tragedy of bodily weakness and old age and death.
And since she no longer had riches to offer, what had become of her
Christianity? The question could not frame itself, for I was caught and
lifted out of my despair by the swift impression that about my frail
mother there glowed a radiance which outshone the sunlight of her active
years. The dayspring from on high had but put to flight the lesser
stars. Every one who could see her was conscious of it. One of her
nurses said to me, 'She is so different from the weak people I've seen
before. I feel so _warm_, somehow, when I'm with her.'
A further revelation was that my mother was done with life and with us.
She was exquisite in her treatment of us, managing in receiving still to
be the giver. One day she said to me, unforgettably, 'You are making
pain and sickness very beautiful.' But that inward eagerness of hers
which had led me to believe that she had the Greek feeling for this
world was now turned toward a new and vaster world. She had exhausted
the experiences of this life--marriage and children, work and
achievement, knowledge and beauty, joy and sorrow. In seeing this I saw
too how far short they fall of the potentialities of an immortal soul.
With her energy and imagination she had drained every drop out of them,
but now she tossed them aside for some new wine.
The only time she ever spoke to me of the death which I was sure she
knew was drawing close, she did it lightly, with that humor which was a
part of her sanity. The doctors had just left her room after consulting
about some new form of her sickness, and she turned to me with a smile
and said, 'Don't repair me too often! I shall never get free if I don't
get worse.' But she told a friend of her own age that nobody could
imagine how eager she was to be gone. 'I can hardly wait,' she said, 'to
find out about it all. The only thing that troubles me is that the
others will be sorry.' I am not sorry. Since she wanted eternity without
my grief, she shall have it.
In the last few months Nature did us one of her not uncommon services.
Much of my mother's physical strength came back to her, as if at the end
the body was determined to be a fit mate for the soul it had so long
accompanied. She could move about once more in her little _polis_.
During my last visit at home I was enchanted by a sweet and bubbling
gayety which seemed to flow from some hidden spring of contentment. A
week later she died swiftly, before I could reach her. All our friends
talked to me of the light in her face during that week, and an old
bedridden Irish servant, telling me of a visit from her, exclaimed, 'I
kept thinking that she was just like a bride, dressed so beautifully and
looking so happy.' The Christian figure of the soul and God! The old
Celtic eyes had seen the truth. Of such substance was my mother's faith
in a future life. It was, indeed, the _evidence of things unseen_! I
perceived the fresh heart of Christianity in a belief so aged that it
had built the pyramids centuries before it set up the temples at
Eleusis. Never again shall I be found chattering while the great trumpet
blasts for immortality echo down the ages.
But before my mother's death another veil had been lifted for me. Behind
it I found the meaning of the cross. The experience will hardly bear
words. It was very simple, the issue of intimate daily living, but it
transformed one human mind as Bible and church, history and art had
never done. On the day it happened to me I was open to no impressions
from without. The weather was severe in our northern town whose normal
beauty is not un-Greek in its austerity and lucidity. A stormy east wind
drove dark clouds across the sky, and our firs and pine trees loomed
black and forbidding. I turned from the window to the soft loveliness of
my mother's room. There my heart and mind were closed to all abstract
thought and large emotions, for the nurse was away and I was absorbed
in the details of thermometer and medicines. My whole being was centred
in the hope that I might make my mother comfortable during those hours.
With inexpressible tenderness I began to bathe her, doing for her in her
frailty at the end of life what she had so often done for me in mine at
the beginning. Then it was that my eyes were opened. You know what a
Greek would have seen in a body worn with age, emaciated by sickness,
bearing many marks of suffering. But I beheld in it the central beauty
of the world. If the noblest of the marble Aphrodites had stood in the
room I should have recoiled from her in horror. I knew that my mother's
sickness was due to her prodigal waste, for us, of her natural strength.
Her flesh had been spent for us--_for me_. In a sudden supreme moment I
was at one with the disciples, passionately loving the friend who had
given his body to be broken for them; at one with the mad Christian
iconoclasts, shattering heathen statues; at one with the mediaeval
artists, painting and carving the crucified Christ.
Later I came to see that only in that hour had I grasped the
significance of my mother's life. At first I had thought of her
suffering as subordinate to her love, an incident among her sacrifices.
Now I know it to be a sacramental reality, preexistent in all her
earlier beneficence and at the end the earnest of her immortality.
Later still I realized what had happened. In an obscure individual hour
had been reenacted an experience which once befell the world. The
antique order was swept away by a tidal wave of emotion, and in its
place was left a new life and thought and art. Mediaevalism, which had
offended me in history, issued from the feeling of men and women as
unknown as myself, married to the expression of thinkers, poets and
artists. In understanding, at last, the feeling, I came to understand
the way in which it was expressed.
When the Christian world, recovering its balance by means of the
Renaissance, once more accepted the worth of antiquity, it refused to
surrender the new treasure which it had gained in its temporary recoil
from humanism. Popes on the throne retained the symbol which had
comforted slaves in the Catacombs. The same cross survived the
Reformation and persists, plastically and verbally, as the sign of
modern Christianity. Until lately this paradox was as strange, in its
way, as that of a Borgian posing as Vicar of the Crucified. Last year I
saw all kinds of people trying to obliterate suffering: the
intellectualists were denying its efficacy, the humanitarians its
necessity, the Christian Scientists its reality. In our various modern
forms of speech we were addressing prayers to Hygeia, enshrined on the
Acropolis.
Then, with terrible suddenness, the roar of guns interrupted us.
Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot.
Some one light in the encircling gloom we must have, if we are to work
our way out into a renewal of civilization. Are we to discover it by
still another paradox, in the very mystery of suffering which we have
been denying? If one of your sons (which God forbid!) should be brought
home mutilated, you would not choose to remember him in his young
strength and beauty, because he would seem more beautiful to you
stretched upon his cross. You would not rest in your agony, or in your
fierce anger that such things are possible in the world. You would pass
from these to the conviction that his suffering for France made his
humanity divine. I do not pretend to understand the matter. I only know
it to be true. Even the Greeks presaged it at Eleusis, but they forgot
it as they turned homeward. For us it still lies beyond reason, but is
beginning to be clearer than the axioms of reason. The mystery of
suffering is more lucid than the fact of well-being.
My friend, may we not look upon this as the answer of Golgotha to the
Acropolis?
Faithfully yours.
[Illustration]
The Baptizing of the Baby
By Elizabeth Taylor
The Baby arrived in a howling nor'easter. The _fjelds_ were white with
driving snow, the sea was white with the spindrift of gale-lashed waves,
when the little procession filed into the parsonage courtyard. There
were a father, five godfathers, two godmothers, and a few non-official
friends. No baby was visible, but a muffled gurgle betrayed her
presence. One of the godfathers, a fine young Viking of a lad, had a
woman's dress-skirt buttoned around his neck and hanging down in front.
Within its warm folds was the Baby.
The Baby's age was but four weeks, and this her first journey into the
outside world. Custom has decreed that a Faroe Island baby must not pass
its parents' threshold until it goes to the Pastor to be received into
the Church, and so made secure from the Powers of Darkness. Having once
left its home, it cannot return with the sacred rite unperformed.
Imagine, then, the dismay that fell upon the Baby's escorts when they
learned that the Pastor had gone to the capital, several days before,
on important church business. _To Thorshavn!_ Only seven miles away, by
sea, to be sure, but, with that gale, it might as well be seventy. What
to do now? The Baby could not be taken back unbaptized. And there was
the baptismal feast all arranged: sweet soup, hung mutton, potatoes,
coffee, little cakes, with card-playing in the afternoon, and
rice-porridge and sandwiches in the evening. The Baby's mother was
putting the sweet soup over the fire when they left that morning. Five
miles by fjord they had come; then, as the gale increased, and they
neared the open sea, they had 'set up' on land, and trudged the
remaining three miles through deep snow.
'Oh, well,' sighed the father, 'we may as well "take it with quiet." The
women-folk are too weary, anyhow, to go through those drifts again. We
had better send one man home to explain matters, while the rest of us
visit our friends. The storm may lessen at any time, so we can go to
Thorshavn and bring home the Pastor.'
But--_the Baby_--And here the 'Pastorinde' was called upon to advise.
Yes the Pastorinde _did_ know of a newly-arrived baby in the village,
and she doubted not that its mother would kindly permit the
stranger-baby to share and share alike with her own.
I, too, was 'weather-fast.' From Thorshavn I had come, twelve days
before, to 'hold Jule' at the parsonage, intending to return two days
after Christmas. Then came this long storm. There was no going to
Thorshavn by sea; but in a roundabout way, by fjord and fjeld, it might
be done in a case of necessity, such as this church-meeting that the
Pastor must attend.
The foreman of the eight-man boat, however, flatly refused to take _me_.
'The Herr Pastor,' he explained patiently, 'has strong legs. He can jump
and stand fast in surf, climb cliffs, and go through deep snow. But it
is no journey for women-folk in high winter-time.'
So I was left behind when the Pastor went to Thorshavn.
One must start before daylight these short winter days to enable the
boats to return before dark. For eight days I had been living as much
packed up as possible, sleeping lightly, waking in the blackness of
morning at the sound of voices in the kitchen below. Groping to the head
of the stairway, I could hear the decision of the foreman: 'Not possible
to-day, Fru Pastorinde. There is _ribbingur i sjonum_ (dangerous sea)
outside.'--And back I would creep shivering, sure of one day more in the
parsonage.
'What is the Baby's name to be?' I asked one of the godfathers, as we
chanced to meet the next day. An embarrassed silence was followed by an
abrupt change of subject, and I felt that I had made a _faux pas_.
Later, I was told that a baby's name must never be asked, never be told,
before baptism. I knew, already, some bits of babylore. For instance,
if a child cries while it is being baptized, it will have a good voice
and sing well at the ballad dances. The water must never be allowed to
run down into the baby's eyes, or it will have 'second sight.' This is
not a happy gift, and I notice that the godmother holding the child,
_tilts_ it at the right moment so that the water flows back over the
forehead. I know, too, that the man who carries a baby-boy to and from
the church goes as fast as possible, so that the boy will be strong at
the oar, sure-footed on the fjelds.
All this, you observe, for the _boy_ baby. No such trouble is taken for
a mere girl. But, for both alike, there is this precaution: never leave
a child alone before it is baptized. Until then it falls easily into the
power of evil spirits, and is in danger of being carried away by
Hulderfolk. These underground creatures are not 'the little people,' or
the Brownies. In size and appearance they resemble human beings. They
have boats and go to the fishery; they have cows, sheep (that are always
gray), dogs (large black hounds that often have a light on the end of
their tails); but one thing the Hulderfolk lack and that is _souls_. If,
however, they can take away a Faroe baby and substitute one of their
own, and it is baptized, then that child will have a soul.
I know a peasant woman whose daughter died in childbirth not long ago,
leaving her baby to her mother's care. The father of the baby was
fishing in Iceland, and the old woman lived alone in her little
cottage. I went to see her, and during my visit, she wished to show me
some articles in another part of the house. Wherever we went she took
the cradle with her. I understood the reason and said to her,--
'But, Sanna, living by yourself as you do, are you not obliged sometimes
to leave the baby alone?'
'Yes, Froken,' she replied sadly, 'several times I have had to leave him
just for a few minutes. But I put the Psalm-book under his pillow, I
mark him with the sign of the Cross, and _I run my best!_'
Another story I have heard lately is about a Hulderchild on Videro. A
peasant and his wife had a baby-boy, a good happy healthy child, who
never cried or made trouble. One day the mother had to leave him alone a
little while. When she returned she found the baby crying and fretting.
Its face seemed changed, somehow, and yet she could not say that it was
_not_ their child. From that time it cried night and day until the
parents were worn out, and they took it to the Pastor to ask his advice.
Now the Pastor 'knew more than his Paternoster,' as the saying is; that
is, he had studied Black Art. He examined the child and said he feared
it _was a bytte_ (changeling). 'Now,' said he, 'go home and build a
great brewing fire in the fire-place. In each of the four corners put a
limpet-shell filled with milk. Then hide yourselves, so you can see and
hear the child, but it will not know you are there. If it says or does
anything that shows it is a Hulderchild, then you may hope to get your
own baby back again.'
The parents followed carefully the Pastor's instructions, and, trembling
with anxiety, awaited the result. As the fire roared and crackled, the
child stirred uneasily and stopped crying. Then it raised itself on its
elbow and watched the fire and the four limpet-shells that were sizzling
away in the corners. Then they heard the child laugh scornfully, and saw
it point at the limpets. 'Huh!' it exclaimed, 'how can a child be
expected to thrive in a house where they have such things for kettles!
They should just see the great kettles--the great brewing-pots--in the
house of my father, Buin!'