I
"The dream of Pharaoh is one. The seven kine are seven years; and the
seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.... And for that the
dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing is
established."...
In other words: Behind three or four subtitles and changes of time, scene,
characters, this tale of strong hearts is one. And for that the tale is
tripled or quadrupled unto you three or four times (the number will
depend); it is because in each of its three or four aspects--or separate
stories, if you insist--it sets forth, in heroic natures and poetic fates,
a principle which seems to me so universal that I think Joseph would say
of it also, as he said to the sovereign of Egypt, "The thing is
established of God."
I know no better way to state this principle, being a man, not of letters,
but of commerce (and finance), than to say--what I fear I never should
have learned had I not known the men and women I here tell of--that
religion without poetry is as dead a thing as poetry without religion. In
our practical use of them, I mean; their infusion into all our doing and
being. As dry as a mummy, great Joseph would say.
Shall I be more explicit? Taking that great factor of life which men, with
countless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, call
Religion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in like
manner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of tales
is one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls and
fates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry and
Religion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reach
their highest plane, merges them into identity. Is that any clearer? You
see I am no scientist or philosopher, and I do not stand at any dizzy
height, even in my regular business of banking and insurance, except now
and then when my colleagues of the clearing-house or board want something
drawn up--"Whereas, the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has taken from
among us"--something like that.
I tell the stories as I saw them occur. I tell them for your
entertainment; the truth they taught me you may do what you please with.
It was exemplified in some of these men and women by their failure to
incarnate it. Others, through the stained glass of their imperfect
humanity, showed it forth alive and alight in their own souls and bodies.
One there was who never dreamed he was a bright example of anything, in a
world which, you shall find him saying, God--or somebody--whoever is
responsible for civilization--had made only too good and complex and big
for him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we must
keep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-
provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we give
life its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, under
no better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation,
finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practical
demands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down the
circumference of his life to limits within which he might hope to turn
_some_ of its daily issues into good poetry. This is the main reason why I
tell of him first, and why the parts of my story--or the stories--do not
fall into chronological order. I break that order with impunity, and adopt
that which I believe to be best in the interest of Poetry and themselves.
Only do not think hard if I get more interested in the story, or stories,
than in the interpretation thereof.