Jena, May 6th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--How can I help it if things look golden to me? You
almost reproach me for it. You seem to think it selfish, and talk of the
beauty of sympathy with persons less fortunately constituted. That's a
gray sort of beauty; the beauty of mists, and rains, and tears. I wish
you could have been in the meadows across the river this morning and
seen the dandelions. There was not much grayness about them. From the
bridge to the tennis-courts--you know that is a long way, at least
twenty minutes' walk--they are one sheet of gold. If you had been there
before breakfast, with your feet on that divine carpet, and your head in
the nickering slight shadows of the first willow leaves, and your eyes
on the shining masses of slow white clouds, and your ears filled with
the fresh sound of the river, and your nose filled with the smell of
young wet things, you wouldn't have wanted to think much about such gray
negations as sympathizing with the gloomy. Bother the gloomy. They are
an ungrateful set. If they can they will turn the whole world sour, and
sap up all the happiness of the children of light without giving out any
shining in return. I am all for sun and heat and color and scent--for
all things radiant and positive. If, crushing down my own nature, I set
out deliberately to console those you call the less fortunately
constituted, do you know what would happen? They would wring me quite
dry of cheerfulness, and not be one whit more cheerful for all the
wringing themselves. They can't. They were not made that way. People are
born in one of three classes: children of light, children of twilight,
children of night. And how can they help into which class they are born?
But I do think the twilight children can by diligence, by, if you like,
prayer and fasting, come out of the dusk into a greater brightness. Only
they must come out by themselves. There must be no pulling. I don't at
all agree with your notion of the efficacy of being pulled. Don't you
then know--of course you do, but you have not yet realized--that you are
to seek _first_ the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you? And don't you know--oh, have you
forgotten?--that the Kingdom of God is within you? So what is the use of
looking to anything outside of you and separated from you for help?
There is no help, except what you dig out of your own self; and if I
could make you see that I would have shown you all the secrets of life.
How wisely I talk. It is the wisdom of the ever-recurring grass, the
good green grass, the grass starred with living beauty, that has got
into me; the wisdom of a May morning filled with present joy, of the joy
of the moment, without any weakening waste of looking beyond. So don't
mock. I can't help it.
Do you, then, want to be pitied? I will pity you if you like, in so many
carefully chosen words; but they will not be words from the heart but
only, as the charming little child in the flat below us, the child with
the flaunting yellow hair and audacious eyes, said of some speech that
didn't ring true to her quick ears, 'from the tip of the nose.' I cannot
really pity you, you know. You are too healthy, too young, too fortunate
for that. You ought to be quite jubilant with cheerfullest gratitude;
and, since you are not, you very perfectly illustrate the truth of _le
trop_ being _l'ennemi du bien_, or, if you prefer your clumsier mother
tongue, of the half being better than the whole. How is it that I,
bereft of everything you think worth having, am so offensively cheerful?
Your friends would call it a sordid existence, if they considered it
with anything more lengthy than just a sniff. No excitements, no
clothes, acquaintances so shabby that they seem almost moth-eaten, the
days filled with the same dull round, a home in a little town where we
all get into one groove and having got into it stay in it, to which only
faint echoes come of what is going on in the world outside, a place
where one is amused and entertained by second-rate things, second-rate
concerts, second-rate plays, and feels oneself grow cultured by
attendance at second-rate debating-society meetings. Would you not think
I must starve in such a place? But I don't. My soul doesn't dream of
starving; in fact I am quite anxious about it, it has lately grown so
fat. There is so little outside it--for the concerts, plays, debates,
social gatherings, are dust and ashes near which I do not go--that it
eagerly turns to what is inside it, and finds itself full of magic
forces of heat and light, forces hot and burning enough to set every
common bush afire with God. That is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I mean
about the common bushes. A slightly mutilated Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, but still a quotation; and if you do not happen to know it I
won't have you go about thinking it pure Schmidt. Ought I if I quote to
warn you of the fact by the pointing fingers of inverted commas? I don't
care to, somehow. They make such a show of importance. I prefer to
suppose you cultured. Oh, I can see you shiver at that impertinence, for
I know down in your heart, though you always take pains to explain how
ignorant you are, you consider yourself an extremely cultured young man.
And so you are; cultured, I should say, out of all reason; so much
cultured that there's hardly anything left that you are able to like.
Indeed, it is surprising that you should care to write to a rough,
unscraped sort of person like myself. Do not my crudities set your teeth
on edge as acutely as the juice of a very green apple? You who love half
tones, subtleties, suggestions, who, lifting the merest fringe of
things, approach them nearer only by infinite implications, what have
you to do with the downrightness of an east wind or a green apple? Why,
I wonder that just the recollection of my red hands, knobbly and spread
with work, does not make you wince into aloofness. And my clothes? What
about my clothes? Do you not like exquisite women? Perfectly got-up
women? Fresh and dainty, constantly renewed women? It is two years since
I had a new hat; and as for the dress that sees me through my days I
really cannot count the time since it started in my company a Sunday and
a fête-day garment. If you were once, only once, to see me in the middle
of your friends over there, you would be cured for ever of wanting to
write to me. I belong to your Jena days; days of hard living, and
working, and thinking; days when, by dint of being forced to do without
certain bodily comforts, the accommodating spirit made up for it by its
own increased comfort and warmth. Probably your spirit will never again
attain to quite so bright a shining as it did that year. How can it,
unless it is amazingly strong--and I know it well not to be that--shine
through the suffocating masses of upholstery your present life piles
about it? Poor spirit. At least see to it that its flicker doesn't quite
go out. To urge you to strip your life of all this embroidery and let it
get the draught of air it needs would be, I know, mere waste of ink.
My people send you every good wish.
Yours sincerely,