Jena, Nov. 20th.
I am glad you did not laugh at that silly letter of mine about scorching
in the sun on rocks. Indeed I gather, my dear Roger, that you liked it.
Make the most of it then, for there will be no more of the sort. A
decent woman never gets on to rocks, and if she scorches she doesn't say
so. And I believe that it is held to be generally desirable that she
should not, even under really trying circumstances, part with her
dignity. I rather think the principle was originally laid down by the
husband of an attractive wife, but it is a good one, and so long as I am
busy clinging to my dignity obviously I shall have no leisure for
clinging to you, and then you will not be suffocated with the
superabundance of my follies.
About those two sinners who are appalling us: how can I agree with you?
To do so would cut away the ground from under my own feet. The woman
plays such a losing game. She gives so much, and gets so little. So long
as the man loves her I do see that he is worth the good opinion of
neighbors and relations, which is one of the chilliest things in the
world; but he never seems able to go on loving her once she has begun to
wither. That is very odd. She does not mind his withering. And has she
not a soul? And does not that grow always lovelier? But what, then,
becomes of her? For wither she certainly will, and years rush past at
such a terrific pace that almost before she has begun to be happy it is
over. He goes back to his wife, a person who has been either patient or
bitter according to the quantity of her vitality and the quality of her
personal interests, and concludes, while he watches her sewing on his
buttons in the corner she has probably been sitting in through all his
vagrant years, that marriage has its uses, and that it is good to know
there will be some one bound to take care of you up to the last, and who
will shed decent tears when you are buried. She goes back--but where,
and to what? They have gone long ago, her husband, her children, her
friends. And she is old, and alone. You too, like everybody else, seem
unable to remember how transient things are. Time goes, emotions wear
out. You say these people are in the hands of Fate, and can no more get
out of them and do differently than a fly in a web can walk away when it
sees the hungry spider coming nearer. I don't believe in webs and
spiders; at least, I don't today. Today I believe only in my
unconquerable soul--
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not care
a straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven
knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flying
opportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; but
what afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It is
true there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest,
Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul that
has transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to use
the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death at
the exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has a
strange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to die
seems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Now
just think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, had
lived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man in
literature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as he
declared himself ready to have done had he been aware of the
unfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done it
with every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he had
caused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been no
philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguish
of love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Ages
equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, a
faded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps with
sharpness, a mediæval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristan
grown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we not
have lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that they
themselves would have lost a great deal; for I don't see that
contentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life--and beat as
thin as you will it never does cover quite across the years--is to be
compared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest,
keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on your
side, but I'm not really, because you, you know, think of love as a
perpetual _crescendo,_ and I, though I do hear the _crescendo_ and
follow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of its
splendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable
_diminuendo_ to the dead level--and then? Why, the rest is not even
silence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused
complaining, not very loud, not very definite, but always there till the
last chord is reached a long time afterwards--that satisfactory common
chord of death. My point is, that if you want to let yourself go to
great emotions you ought to have the luck to die at an interesting
moment. The alternative makes such a dreary picture; and it is the
picture I always see when I hear of love at defiance with the law. The
law wins; always, inevitably. Husbands are best; always, inevitably.
Really, the most unsatisfactory husband is a person who should be clung
to steadily from beginning to end, for did not one marry him of one's
own free will? How ugly then, because one had been hasty, foolish,
unacquainted with one's usually quite worthless mind, to punish him. The
brilliant professor, the fascinating little lady, what are they but
grossly selfish people, cruelly punishing the husband and wife who had
the misfortune to marry them? Oh, it's a mercy most of us are homely,
slow of wit, heavy of foot; for so at least we stay at home and find our
peace in fearful innocence and household laws. (Please note my
familiarity with the British poets.) But isn't that a picture of frugal
happiness, of the happiness that comes from a daily simple obedience to
the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, beside which stormy, tremendous,
brief things come off very badly? I don't believe you do in your heart
side with the two sinners. Bother them. They have made me feel like a
Lutheran pastor on a Sunday afternoon. But you know I love you.