metaphysics in one of our great universities. I may have given some
intimation of my despairing state. In any case, he instructed me in the
laws governing mind. He drew a diagram of my mind on a piece of paper
and showed me how it worked. I had only one consolation as I studied
this thing--that he did not know or suspect the thoughts I was thinking
about him at that moment. They were not complimentary.
I rejected his theory, but I could not get the picture of his infernal
diagram out of my mind. Every time I sat down to work at my desk,
I could see the lines and segments of my mind on that piece of
paper and the dot where a thought would probably appear. The result
was a hysteria of self-consciousness mentally which made thinking
impossible. Quite by accident that great student hit upon the method
of obstructing thought. The mind turned like a worm on itself!
In my opinion it is wiser not to fumble with this delicate piece of
machinery, no matter how much you may find out by tearing it to pieces.
What I know is that he who peeps at his mind will never have the use of
it. It is wiser to leave not only your mind but your gender severely
alone if you hope to do good spirit-level thinking. It would not
surprise me at all if these were not the bonds which do somehow bind us
to God, to be accepted, but not understood.
After all is said and done and taught that we can possibly learn from
others, every man faces his own problems and solves them the best way
he can. The lawyer learns law, then he practices law according to the
bias of his own mind and character. Maybe he is a shyster. Maybe he
has an honest legal sense. It all depends on the kind of man he is.
The same thing is true about the physician. After a while he gets his
own mental habits of diagnosing our complaints and diseases. If his
mind catches and holds some fixed idea about neurasthenic tendencies,
apt as not he will diagnose your case accordingly, although you may
be having fits on account of an ulcer in the stomach. In any case, he
finally works out a system of favorite prescriptions. Then he fits us
to his medicines, and his methods as he grows older, no matter how new
our disease may be. He cannot help it. His mind has made him and it is
too old, inelastic, to add another cubit to his wisdom or courage as a
physician. If you are about to become a patient, the risks are six of
one and half a dozen of the other whether you choose a young doctor in
the experimental stage of his practice or this old one who has settled
down in his methods, because they are reasonably successful and rarely
ever result in your death.
Preachers are the same way. They see God according to their lights,
make sermons until they exhaust their vision. Then they go on preaching
this same body of thought as long as they live under various texts from
the Scriptures.
I am wondering how a literary critic would go about reviewing the
mind of an author instead of his book. He would probably decline the
assignment. He is a judge of the material, the copy a writer produces,
but he is no mental mechanic to pass judgment upon the amazing
motor of our faculties. The best he could do would be to write an
illuminating essay upon the times in which an author lived; the effect,
by inference, of that particular period of civilization upon his work;
whether he was well and in good circumstances, or wrote under the
pressure of ill-health and poverty.
But none of these circumstances would account for the main fact that he
became an author instead of, say, a fishmonger or a banker. The great
majority of poor people or sick people never take it out on the world
by writing books. Neither does their state of health determine their
literary style or their choice of material to convert into copy. Robert
Louis Stevenson was an invalid, suffering from an incurable malady.
By all the laws governing such a life he was due to die early without
accomplishing anything. But he sat up in bed and wrote the healthiest,
most entrancing stories of his times, and died later.
The mind is something else, not us. It is an instrument set up in us,
controlled by spiritual forces which reach it through the medium of our
emotions. It can be well and powerful when we are weak and ill. ‘By my
spirit,’ thus also sayeth such a man. On the other hand, the mind is
frequently ill to the point of dissolution when we are enjoying perfect
health. Witness the sickly slime copy produced by a decadent writer
who may be an athlete physically. ‘By my spirit,’ also says such a man
who has adopted his powers and principalities of darkness. My notion
is that it is a choice between spirits which determines the quality
of your thinking, but not the power with which you can do it. That, I
suppose, is the personal equation in the whole phenomenon and would
depend upon the strength of your emotions and the capacity of your
mental motor.
It is not for me to venture into the realm of metaphysics with my
cheerful, flat-footed ignorance of this subject, but I am now writing
the record of my own mind in relation to my work as an author merely
from experience. The conclusions I have reached in this manner may be
erroneous from the standpoint of the professional students. But I have
frequently erred with the happiest practical results in my own living
and achieving.
I remember being very much upset upon learning that poetry, religion,
and sex animation were all products of the same emotional reactions.
This was a serious matter. If I could not dispose of it in a manner
satisfying to my mental and moral platform in living, it would take
the luster off my thoughts and render me some sort of automaton in
spiritual consciousness. You are not really the author of a thought
which splashes up like spray from a wave of emotion which has its
origin in sex. This information was too diminishing. Also, I prefer to
believe in God, not because of my sex, even if I was of the other sex,
but because I have a spiritual consciousness which only the idea of
Providence can satisfy.
Still, I had a squeamish feeling that we probably were made precisely
by this economical pattern, one emotion carrying all our sensations;
thrift in expenses being one of the axioms in creation as I have
observed it.
Any sensible person must have reached the same conclusion I reached,
provided he did not consult too many learned authorities, but stuck
like a leech to his Scriptures, which was something like this: By
nature, delicacy, and decency, by all prayers, every hope and noble
ambition, the sensations of sex are so mixed in us with the highest
emotions of religion, eloquence, and every sublime imagination that we
have been for ages the parents of spiritually minded beings instead of
brutes.
I suppose this was the only way to insure such a phenomenon in an
apparently physical and carnal world. We are thus born convinced of
immortality by that admirable device of the Almighty. I am ready to
stretch a neck ahead of the current animal propaganda concerning sex
and contend that it is probably the basic principle of the instinct
we have of immortality. How else does the lowest type of savage also
arrive at faith in God and keep company with ghosts and spirits?
Superstition is the name we apply to that, when it may be a much
sounder, though more elemental, faith than we have ourselves. In any
case, how do you account for the character of his superstitions or for
his ability to produce them at all? He has no Bible, no literature,
neither theologians nor scholars to direct his mental processes. But
he has his emotions. He is some kind of stick-in-the-mud poet, and he
arrives at the idea of God because he is a man. A dog cannot do it,
though he has the same procreating instinct, but is not informed with
the spiritual sense.
These conclusions have given me great satisfaction as a writer. I am
never embarrassed if a particularly entrancing thought comes to me.
I do not attribute it to the inspirations of my gender, but to the
spiritual quality of the mind produced by gender in general, if you
will have it so, not that I am personally disposed to dig down to the
rudiments of my thoughts. Some mysteries are sacred so long as they are
hidden, but shocking when they are exposed. It seems to me that the
tendency of our times is to suspect sex of something which is really
good, but that we are inclined to make something bad of what we suspect.
XXVII
DO YOU WANT TO WRITE?
I should be slow to advise the most gifted person to enter the literary
profession. It is a life of infinite labor and hardship. The rewards
are commensurate if you win them. But comparatively few who strive to
enter in do so. Nobody lacks the sense to write, I believe; but most
people lack the intuition, that hidden truth out of which romance and
poetry and all literary illusions are made.
Very few people who read books know or suspect the literary casualties
in an author’s life. The most successful, as the least renowned of us,
suffer amazing losses in labor and a corresponding depreciation in
self-confidence. You may buy a seat on the stock exchange, get a ticker
and do business there according to your own secret information about
the market. But you cannot buy a seat among the editors in this country
if you are a writer. Neither can you discover the ticker in their mind
which determines the worth and unworthiness of your copy. They also are
taking a chance with the public which reads. It is a fickle public, apt
to change its mind any time.
Nothing is less profitable than to study a magazine with reference to
producing copy peculiar to it. You are almost sure to make the mistake
of writing something similar to the article or story you have studied,
when your common sense should warn you that the editor will not want to
repeat that dose. You have been subtly guilty of a repetition of the
motive back of the story you took for a pattern, which is reason enough
to expect that the thing will be refused.
An editor must have a kaleidoscopic mind. He cannot tell you with any
degree of accuracy what he wants, because he does not know very far in
advance what his readers want. But he can tell you as quick as a flash
what he does not want, because he has more past experience than you can
imagine to guide him in rejecting unavailable copy.
The best bet, I discovered long ago, was to find out what was true and
vital in the experience of the greatest number of people and to write
that. As a rule it is so old and elemental as to have become identical
with them, like a man’s ribs. He rarely ever thinks of them. There is
such a body of thought and emotion in all of us of which we no longer
speak. We have lost the words to do so. But when we see them written
out it is as if we had recovered some dearer speech of ourselves.
The language we use is for the obvious, the things we do and say, or
for the impressions we wish to make upon others. We have ten thousand
dialogues for lovers, a considerable vocabulary for speaking piety and
eloquence, and we are not short on narrative sentences; but I challenge
any man to prove that it is easy to tell in words what is going on in
his mind which is peculiar to him and not to be told. He is thinking
them in the same way he breathes to live--by way of being mentally
conscious. He is registering himself in every emotion, motive, and
desire faster than these mental sensations can be translated into
words.
Language is artificial. We only use it to be heard, or to be seen in
the written word, or when we are so moved that we are practically
talking to ourselves. The greater part of the thinking we do is
so mixed with feeling that it is like a circulatory system of
consciousness, therefore the only absolutely veracious mental versions
of what we really are.
To set down as much of this copy of us as possible has been my
particular business as an author. It requires a sort of loving cunning
in the use of words which has been the most fascinating feature of my
work. Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and
pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that
makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the
reader’s mind. If you take pains, make every one count like a stroke
in the picture of a secret trait which is peculiar to all of us, the
individual reader gets the same shock of surprise that he would have
if his mother had been eavesdropping his mind. It makes him nervous,
wondering how much else she has heard.
As to that, it is like seeing God; you cannot do it without being pure
in heart. So I doubt if we could interpret the secret hearts of men
and women without feeling very close to them in love and sympathy.
My observation of meaner-minded people is that they never really
understand other people, only what is evil or potentially evil in them.
I reckon it is a blessed provision of Providence that we only see
through the glass darkly when our deeds are evil. Otherwise the wicked
would have a frightful advantage over the innocent and good.
One of the most profitable experiments I make along this line is to
write out good impulses peculiar to people who are not good, but have a
perpetual hankering after their might-have-been virtues.
They invariably rise like woefully undone children to the bait. I get
a batch of letters from sinners the moment such a paragraph picture of
their futile goodness appears in print. Some of them very smart and
bitter, but feeling that soothing plaster I have laid on the wounds
their sins have made in them. Others are low in the dust. They do not
expect to rise. Still, they want me to know they have enjoyed the
relief of a few tears on their cheeks.
I do think this is a dear thing about men, even the worst of them--how
they will confess their tears of grief or regret to a woman in whom
they believe or whose confidence they desire to win. If she is an
elderly person with some wisdom of their sex, she knows that these
are histrionic tears, shed to move her. Still, it is an artless sort
of compliment they pay her good old simplicity. But if we should tell
how many men and which men we have seen weep, the world would never
believe us! The poor things are driven to it as we are driven to little
hysterical manifestations with our dearer men which we should never try
to put over on another woman. Before other men they must play the part
of pride, strength, and courage, even if they have no such attributes;
but once in so often the last of them will break down before one of
us, quiver his chin and let his tears flow, because he knows that we
know he is really a child who never grows up, begging for cake when he
is a boy and for sympathy when he is a man.
Very few lost and undone women ever show up, but now and then one
comes in a letter, lays her head on my Circuit Rider’s Widow’s knees
and whispers that she remembers when she felt like that, referring to
some paragraph, say, in ‘My Book and Heart.’ This is as near as one of
them ever comes to admitting that she no longer has the right to feel
like that. And none of them ever sign their names. Thus they let you
know they do not expect an answer. It is their sad way of walking like
ghosts for a few lines close to what they believe is a kind heart.
It must be fearful not to be good if you are a woman, because you never
can forgive yourself, while a man can and will do so with the least
encouragement from you. If the woman he loves shrives him, he will rise
up and strut like a spiritual peacock without ever taking the trouble
to lay his case before the Lord in prayer. He is the greatest economist
in contrition the world ever saw.
But when you think about it, this only goes to prove how transparent
they are. I am by men as I am by the more occult Scriptures--they are
not difficult to understand if you have the right mind toward them, not
antagonistic or suspicious.
But I am always careful never to let one know I am reading him. Nothing
upsets a man so quickly as to realize that you are seeing him maneuver
in and out of sight behind the lines of the rôle he is reciting so
well to you. He is offended. He takes his leave of you like a puppy
with its tail between its legs, or he goes off with a prideful stride.
Presently he tells somebody that he does not like that woman. But he
does. He simply dislikes the glimpse he had of himself mirrored in her
old Sea-of-Galilee mind.
I never answer such letters. Let them read Paul’s epistles! But I do
feel closer kin to them than one ever does to the comfortable saints or
to the brazenly virtuous.
When you have been a mother and known such richness of hovering love
as that, after you are childless the wings of your heart do feel
strangely empty. I have sometimes considered adopting a bunch of bad
grown-up children and starting them all over at their A B C’s of morals
and decencies. But it would never do. This whole countryside would be
working presently with runaway children. I have a vague suspicion that
I am not an easy person to live with. I have a hot and heady temper,
and exacting standards acquired in these lonely hills where there is
no world to obstruct or soften my convictions about what is right or
wrong, and about the exceedingly early hour when dutiful people should
get up and go about their tasks. As the stepmother of sinners I might
be rather terrible in my manifestations. Besides, I could not love them
as a real mother loves. I should lack that essential wisdom in dealing
with them. So I have abandoned the idea, except to think about it.
XXVIII
EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF
Personally, I do not think so much of self-expression as a noble
yearning. I would not go so far as to suggest that it is a wave of
feminine psychosis; but the suspicion grows in my mind that it may be
a sort of hysteria peculiar to that class of people who have boastful
souls and considerable mortal vanity, neither of which can be financed
by the finer art of living privately. We notice it in women now, as
we do other symptoms which were formerly characteristic only of men.
Job had a notable case of it. He fretted his wife until at last she
lost patience with his groaning vanity about his integrity and advised
him to curse God and die. Carlyle made his wife miserable while he
expressed himself like a winged leviathan in ‘Sartor Resartus.’ It is
easier to write an epic than to live your own life becomingly with no
audience to cheer the performance. Therefore we are a trifle long on
epics and short on achieving a good record of ourselves in secret.
Women have at last become infected with this disorder of the mind, a
pathetic desire to cast themselves on the wide screen of the world in
some rôle of self-expression.
My mail has been laden with letters from them for years asking advice
about how to do it. They are either distracted spinsters or married
women who are childless and unhappy. Their homes and their husbands
have got on their nerves. They are the pseudo heroines of their own
sorrows, futile egotists in tears who wish to publish their tears in
a book. They have only a martyr illusion of themselves and no sense
at all of other people. They are totally lacking in that quality
of the medium without which there is no such thing as a truthful
interpretation of any life. God himself could not teach such a woman
to write an honest sentence about herself, much less her husband,
concerning whom she is determined to reveal the worst.
Recently a mean little wife with a soul-pulling use of words sent
in a long account of her grievances. She had married beneath her
own position in life. Her husband was an honest man, but not--oh,
not a gentleman! He did not understand or appreciate her. He was
cruel, contemptuous, and overbearing. Judging by the way she praised
herself, it was easy to infer that she was one of those women who
make a damnable use of their virtues and would not lend one for any
consideration to her husband. I suppose she wore that sad accusative
look which provokes the worst in any man. She felt that it might
relieve the tension if she could find some means of self-expression and
she wanted advice about writing the revelations of her married life.
On account of being partly Irish, I am not always able to resist the
temptation to use the shillalah of my wit upon these little Judases.
‘Do not write the record of your wrongs,’ I advised her; ‘but meet your
husband with a smile the next time he comes in and strike him over the
head with some blunt instrument. He will probably clean you up, which
is precisely what you need. This will much more quickly relieve your
nervous tension than writing a book, which is a drastic business and
very hard on the nerves, even when you tell the truth.’
The women’s organizations have a less sensational way of cashing in
these unhappy ones. They give them a task to perform in connection with
their vast activities. They are doing everything, maintaining schools
and clinics, they are lobbying for bills. They are the most rapacious
collectors for charity on earth. They have their publicity departments
and their propaganda. They are setting up monuments and preserving the
memory of honorable men. They almost invariably do what they set out to
do and they are the only corporations in this country that get their
labor free of charge, that even collect dues from their workers--which
will indicate the fierce passion in the women of our times to achieve
worthy ends and to express themselves in honorable service before the
world, whatever happens to their homes, husbands, and children.
No one respects them more than I do, but a burned child is afraid of
fire. For so many years I did not have the use of my own life. It was
controlled entirely by the rules of the Methodist Church and limited by
the adversities of a circuit-rider’s life. Never in this world would I
yield it to the executive committee of any kind of woman’s board. I am
a woman myself and know very well how much greater our talent is for
governing others than the most despotic form of government founded by
men.
My idea is that the good little life, with no publicity screen in the
background, leads with less confusion and certainly less embarrassment
to peace and happiness.
The theory is excellent and does me credit written out in words. But a
master mind could never put into words the web I have spun upon it to
ensnare my own life, liberty, and happiness.
For years past I have felt my immortal spirit zooning in it like an
insect with its legs tied. No woman ever longed for self-expression as
I long now to escape from my own plan of happiness.
XXIX
SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE
I could have been contented with intimate blessings. I do not remember
ever to have craved a career. I do not now understand those who strive
so brilliantly and senselessly for recognition, fame, and one sort of
distinction or another.
For me the career of an author was purely accidental and resulted from
a desperate emergency. I have written all this out more particularly
in another book, but while we are on this subject of careers and
recognition I may as well set down now what I have to say about that.
Anything you do, however well, which draws the world’s attention is a
fearful thing, not to be lightly sought. And I do not refer in this
connection to the competitive jealousies engendered by success, having
had no experiences along this line. What I am trying to tell you is
that with the rewards one earns in this business some right to live
privately passes away. Your habitation may be divided from the crowded
world by a thousand hills, but there are voluntary biographers in it
who create the life they think you live back there. I could write much
more entrancing legends about myself.
I have an ambition to sit gracefully in the public eye, one hand
resting on my desk, neatly littered with manuscript, and the other
curled like a white lily across my breast. When you are posing thus
in your own mind it is disconcerting to learn that you are a country
policeman, conscientious in the discharge of your duties. I respect
policemen, but I should shrink from crowding into that profession.
If you have written much testifying to your Christian faith, even if
you do admit a somewhat crank-sided human nature, it is depressing to
learn that you are an atheist smoking with bad doctrines.