Jena, May 14th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Of course I am full of contradictions. Did you
expect me to be full of anything else? And I have no doubt whatever that
in every letter I say exactly the opposite from what I said in the last
one. But you must not mind this and make it an occasion for reproof. I
do not pretend to think quite the same even two days running; if I did I
would be stagnant, and the very essence of life is to be fluid, to pass
perpetually on. So please do not hold me responsible for convictions
that I have changed by the time they get to you, and above all things
don't bring them up against me and ask me to prove them. I don't want to
prove them. I don't want to prove anything. My attitude toward life is
one of open-mouthed wonder and delight, and the open-mouthed cannot
talk. You write, too, plaintively, that some of the things I say hurt
you. I am sorry. Sorry, I mean, that you should be so soft. Can you not,
then, bear anything? But I will smooth my tongue if you prefer it
smooth, and send you envelopes filled with only sugar; talk to you about
the parks, the London season, the Foreign Office--all things of which I
know nothing--and, patting you at short intervals on the back, tell you
you are admirable. You say there is a bitter flavor about some of my
remarks. I have not felt bitter. Perhaps a little shrewish; a little
like, not a mild exhorting elder sister, but an irritated aunt. You see
I am interested enough in you to be fidgety when I hear you groan. What,
I ask myself uneasily, can be the matter with this apparently healthy,
well-cared-for young man? And then, forced to the conclusion by
unmistakable symptoms that there is nothing the matter except a surfeit
of good things, I have perhaps pounced upon you with something of the
zeal of an aunt moved to anger, and given you a spiritual slapping. You
sighed for a sister--you are always sighing for something--and asked me
to be one; well, I have apparently gone beyond the sister in decision
and authority, and developed something of the acerbity of an aunt.
So you are down at Clinches. How beautiful it must be there this month.
I think of it as a harmony in gray and amethyst, remembering your
description of it the first time you went there; a harmony in a minor
key, that captured you wholly by its tender subtleties. When I think of
you inheriting such a place later on through your wife I do from my
heart feel that your engagement is an excellent thing. She must indeed
be happy in the knowledge that she can give you so much that is
absolutely worth having. It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the
very most beautiful things in life. I quarrel with my poverty only
because I can give so little, so seldom, and then never more than
ridiculous small trumperies. To make up for them I try to give as much
of myself as possible, gifts of sympathy, helpfulness, kindness. Don't
laugh, but I am practicing on my step-mother. It is easy to pour out
love on Papa; so easy, so effortless, that I do not feel as if it could
be worth much; but I have made up my mind, not without something of a
grim determination that seems to have little enough to do with love, to
give my step-mother as much of me, my affections, my services, as she
can do with. Perhaps she won't be able to do with much. Anyhow all she
wants she shall have. You know I have often wished I had been a man,
able to pull on my boots and go out into the wide world without let or
hindrance; but for one thing I am glad to be a woman, and that one thing
is that the woman gives. It is so far less wonderful to take. The man is
always taking, the woman always giving; and giving so wonderfully, in
the face sometimes of dreadful disaster, of shipwreck, of death--which
explains perhaps her longer persistence in clinging to the skirts of a
worn-out passion; for is not the tenderer feeling on the side of the one
who gave and blessed? Always, always on that side? Mixing into what was
sensual some of the dear divineness of the mother-love? I think I could
never grow wholly indifferent to a person to whom I had given much. He
or she would not, could not, be the same to me as other people. Time
would pass, and the growing number of the days blunt the first sharp
edge of feeling; but the memory of what I had given would bind us
together in a friendship for ever unlike any other.
I have not thanked you for the book you sent me. It was very kind indeed
of you to wish me to share the pleasure you have had in reading it. But
see how unfortunately contrary I am: I don't care about it. And just the
passages you marked are the ones I care about least. I do not hold with
markings in books. Whenever I have come across mine after a lapse of
years I have marvelled at the distance travelled since I marked, and
shut up the book and murmured, 'Little fool.' I can't imagine why you
thought I should like this book. It has given me rather a surprised
shock that you should know me so little, and that I should know you so
little as to think you knew me better. Really all the explanations and
pointings in the world will not show a person the exact position of his
neighbor's soul. It is astonishing enough that the book was printed, but
how infinitely more astonishing that people like you should admire it.
What is the matter with me that I cannot admire it? Why am I missing
things that ought to give me pleasure? You do not, then, see that it is
dull? I do. I see it and feel it in every bone, and it makes them ache.
It is dull and bad because it is so dreary, so hopelessly dreary. Life
is not like that. Life is only like that to cowards who are temporarily
indisposed. I do not care to look at it through a sick creature's
jaundiced eyes and shudder with him at what he sees. If he cannot see
better why not keep quiet, and let us braver folk march along with our
heads in the air, held so high that we cannot bother to look at every
slimy creepiness that crawls across our path? And did you not notice how
he keeps on telling his friends in his letters not to mind when he is
dead? Unnecessary advice, one would suppose; I can more easily imagine
the friends gasping with an infinite relief. Persons who are
everlastingly claiming pity, sympathy, condolences, are very wearing.
Surely all talk about one's death is selfish and bad? That is why,
though there is so much that is lovely in them, the faint breath of
corruption hanging about Christina Rossetti's poetry makes me turn my
head the other way. What a constant cry it is that she wants to die,
that she hopes to die, that she's going to die, shall die, can die, must
die, and that nobody is to weep for her but that there are to be
elaborate and moving arrangements of lilies and roses and
winding-sheets. And at least in one place she gives directions as to the
proper use of green grass and wet dewdrops upon her grave--implying that
dewdrops are sometimes dry. I think the only decent attitude toward
one's death is to be silent. Talk about it puts other people in such an
awkward position. What is one to say to persons who sigh and tell us
that they will no doubt soon be in heaven? One's instinct is politely to
murmur, 'Oh no,' and then they are angry. 'Surely not,' also has its
pitfalls. Cheery words, of the order in speech that a slap on the
shoulder is in the sphere of physical expression, only seem to deepen
the determined gloom. And if it is some one you love who thinks he will
soon be dead and tells you so, the cruelty is very great. When death
really comes, is not what the ordinary decent dier wants quiet, that he
may leave himself utterly in the hands of God? There should be no
massing of temporarily broken-hearted onlookers about his bed, no
leave-takings and eager gatherings-up of last words, no revellings of
relatives in the voluptuousness of woe, no futile exhortations, using up
the last poor breaths, not to weep to persons who would consider it
highly improper to leave off doing it, and no administration of tardy
blessings. Any blessings the dier has to invoke should have been invoked
and done with long ago. In this last hour, at least, can one not be left
alone? Do you remember Pater's strange feeling about death? Perhaps you
do not, for you told me once you did not care about him. Well, it runs
through his books, through all their serenity and sunlight, through
exquisite descriptions of summer, of beautiful places, of heat and life
and youth and all things lovely, like a musty black riband, very poor,
very mean, very rotten, that yet must bind these gracious flowers of
light at last together, bruising them into one piteous mass of
corruption. It is all very morbid: the fair outward surface of daily
life, the gay, flower-starred crust of earth, and just underneath
horrible tainted things, things forlorn and pitiful, things which we who
still walk on the wholesome grass must soon join, changing our life in
the roomy sunshine into something infinitely dependent and helpless,
something that can only dimly live if those strong friends of ours in
the bright world will spare us a thought, a remembrance, a few minutes
from their plenty for sitting beside us, room in their hearts for yet a
little love and sorrow. 'Dead cheek by dead cheek, and the rain soaking
down upon one from above....' Does not that sound hopeless? After
reading these things, sweet with the tainted sweetness of decay, of,
ruin, of the past, the gone, it is like having fresh spring water dashed
over one on a languid afternoon to remember Walt Whitman's brave
attitude toward 'delicate death,' 'the sacred knowledge of death,'
'lovely, soothing death,' 'cool, enfolding death,' 'strong deliveress,'
'vast and well-veiled death,' 'the body gratefully nestling close to
death,' 'sane and sacred death.' That is the spirit that makes one brave
and fearless, that makes one live beautifully and well, that sends one
marching straight ahead with limbs that do not tremble and head held
high. Is it not natural to love such writers best? Writers who fill one
with glad courage and make one proud of the path one has chosen to walk
in?
And yet you do not like Walt Whitman. I remember quite well my chill of
disappointment when you told me so. At first, hearing it, I thought I
must be wrong to like him, but thank heaven I soon got my balance again,
and presently was solaced by the reflection that it was at least as
likely you were wrong not to. You told me it was not poetry. That upset
me for a few days, and then I found I didn't care. I couldn't argue with
you on the spot and prove anything, because the only _esprit_ I have is
that tiresome _esprit d'escalier_, so brilliant when it is too late, so
constant in its habit of leaving its possessor in the dreadful
condition--or is it a place?--called the lurch; but, poetry or not, I
knew I must always love him. You, I suppose, have cultivated your taste
in regard to things of secondary importance to such a pitch of
sensitiveness that unless the outer shell is flawless you cannot, for
sheer intellectual discomfort, look at the wonders that often lie
within. I, who have not been educated, am so filled with elementary joy
when some one shows me the light in this world of many shadows that I do
not stop to consider what were the words he used while my eyes followed
his pointing finger. You see, I try to console myself for having an
unpruned intelligence. I know I am unpruned, and that at the most you
pruned people, all trim and trained from the first, do but bear with me
indulgently. But I must think with the apparatus I possess, and I think
at this moment that perhaps what you really most want is a prolonged
dose of Walt Whitman, a close study of him for several hours every day,
shut up with no other book, quite alone with him in an empty country
place. Listen to this--you shall listen:
O we can wait no longer,
We too take ship, O soul;
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee
to me, O soul).
Carolling free, singing our song of God,
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration,
O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther sail I
Well, how do you feel now? Can any one, can you, can even you read that
without such a tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of life and
energy through your whole body that you simply must jump up and, shaking
off the dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn your back on
diseased self-questionings and run straight out to work at your
salvation in the sun?
Yours sincerely,