or two which contained the strictly human touch in words. Paul comes
somewhere near it in his tender letters to Timothy, but all these
apostles were made too grave by their suffering to catch the light of
that message we should have. The place where it really belongs is in
those passages quoted from Jesus. I am certain they failed to record
all he said, or that it has been lost, or that it is still hidden
away in the archives of time. He was fearless, merciful, so good at
remembering that we are dust, he would have made a little allowance
for that kind of happiness humans need; not an indulgence in sin, but
an indulgence in life.
I do hope it is not blasphemous to say that I can almost see Jesus in
such a mood; His people at ease about Him. It would be a quiet, bright
morning before the multitudes began to gather. And He will have looked
at these chosen to keep and defend the Word with that blessing look
even we can bestow upon children whom we love. And He will have said,
‘Little children, be happy!’ Something like that He must have said,
knowing what travails they were to pass through and how greatly they
would need the respite of light-heartedness. But nothing of the kind is
recorded anywhere in the Bible.
The word ‘happy’ does occur at rare intervals, but it is too fearfully
qualified. ‘Happy is the man that feareth alway,’ says Solomon. And
Job in great pain catches his breath with this: ‘Happy is the man whom
God correcteth.’ And James says, ‘We count them happy which endure.’
All of which means, fortunate are they who are prepared for the worst,
take their punishments with meekness, and endure with courage. These
are the evidences of a good character and a noble mind, but not my idea
of real happiness. One wearies of worrying all the time with his best
attributes, especially in plain sight of the wicked, who do seem to
flourish without any such attributes. I have never taken this as hard
as Jeremiah did; still, I have had my feelings.
One day Jeremiah’s virtues irked him. He was too aloof and lonesome.
And he had what you may call an altercation with the Lord:
‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk
with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked
prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?
Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they
bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their
reins.’
He goes on reminding the Lord of his own obedience and how he has borne
his trials until his sense of outraged justice gets the better of him,
and he exclaims, ‘Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and
prepare them for the day of slaughter.’
I do not suppose the very treacherous are happy and I have never wanted
the wicked pulled out like sheep for the slaughter, but I have always
wanted to ask a truly bad man who seemed to be having a good time if he
really was enjoying himself.
I have always had a hankering after some cheerful salvation, suitable
and sanctifying to me as a human being in this present world, where
I know what I am doing and what I want. I feel that I have a buried
talent for just happiness, a sort of incandescence of my own nature
which longs to shine. It seems to me that I have never made my happy
sounds in living. I have missed that laughter which is the speech of
a merry heart. But I have heard it many a time in a crowd and always
flirted my head around to see who made it. Usually a young person whose
burdens are still being borne by others.
But once, I remember, it was an old woman standing in her own dooryard
watching two children, serious and absorbed in their play. Such a
figure! Tall and gaunt, so straight and finely posed, her homely dress
might have been a rag flung over an imperishable ideal. Such a face!
Wrinkled, brown, rough, like a crude verse written by somebody like
Ossian; the wind and the weather of life had passed over it, but now
the sun in her eyes, the simplicity of the deepest wisdom made humorous
upon her smiling lips. No comeliness anywhere, but that beauty of
honest happiness in every line. I think of her as a song I saw once in
the flesh set to a good stout tune of laughter.
I have a distinct recollection of such people through the whole of
my life. They do exist--women who have survived all their fears and
learned their burdens by heart and stand canonized by that undefeated
look of happiness. I have seen someone go by who looked like a joyful
traveler on his way to some happiness he had earned, carrying himself,
you may say, with the long light stride of a good conscience. At such
times I have felt the light of my wings as if I had seen the witness of
my own hopes go by.
These are the only people I have ever envied. They have an expression
of animation not intellectual, but vital, so different from that
conquered look of peace which I am always fearing will settle upon my
face before I know what they have learned, not by thinking, but by some
happier use they have made of living.
I cannot now recall when this idea first took possession of me, but it
was far back in the years--that the life I was living was not mine,
but a sentence imposed upon me by fate, to be served faithfully. And
then as a reward further on I should have my very own life, which would
be different. I was not so concerned as my husband to win heaven. I
had an impression then which has persisted with me to this day, that
for all we know this life may be a rest the Lord gives us between
long spells of eternity. I anticipated some place in my years where
happiness would begin, as tired people look forward to a vacation.
Shortly after ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was published, it seemed to me I
saw it, as you look a long way down the road and see a wider brighter
place where you turn in through a gate and enter your own house. I
remember saying something to Lundy about this. We would get away
presently from all the cares we had ever had, take a little house in
the country and begin to live happy ever after. I remember his silence,
the look he gave me. If in the last day when we are called there is one
who hears, but cannot rise from his dust, he will have just that look
of terrible comprehension.
It comforts me now to remember that not even in this dark time when the
shades were deepening about him did I ever raise my hands to heaven and
cry, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ I think well
of myself that my one concern was to keep him and comfort him as long
as I could reach him. Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one
thing I have had--the terrible wisdom of love. I cannot doubt that I
have received the best of my life and nearly every gift that prospered
in me from my association with Lundy. What really troubles me sometimes
is whether or not he might have fared better in the spirit if he had
been free as a monk to seek his sacrifices and renunciations.
I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have
skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it.
And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one
great anxiety--and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about
it by having missed it.
I came nearer to what happiness must be, a sort of deliverance from
the things that are, after I began to do creative work. Once I had a
pen in my hand and the use of my faculties, the casements of all my
darkness were flung wide and I escaped into a very bright, quiet, good
world of thoughts. Every memory from my earliest childhood came back to
me, luminous substances to be worked into words. It was like weaving
love and deeds and the beautiful colors of every sensation upon the
loom of my mind. What I accomplished was as nothing to the visions I
had. If, as Matthew Arnold claimed, genius consists in the power to
recall, I may lay some claim to having genius. In one small room all my
lights and darkness came; people that I had seen, but never knew, were
suddenly revealed to me, so that I could write down the very secrets of
their hearts. Men and women, long since dead, lived again and waited
there close as life to be used in case I needed them for a paragraph
or two. Things that Lundy had said, poetry and philosophy that he had
read to me, piled up like notes on my desk, changed, you understand, by
the alchemy of my own mind, but still the parents of my thoughts. When
I think of the vast stores of material I have had, the wonder and grief
to me is that I have made such a dim and poor use of them.
Once you get away from the Word, any discussion of religion is
unprofitable and apt to become acrimonious. For this last page or two
I have felt my own spiritual gorge rising, a mean and distasteful
sensation which has no place in this record. It is better to go back to
my original speculations on happiness.
This is not a thing to tell, for it concerns the more intimate annals
of my mind and is set down here with the same apology one should make
for shouting in public when in an exalted spiritual mood. But here it
is. Many a time when I have filched a grand thought or some finer truth
out of life to write down, I am too moved to do it. I get up and pace
the floor. I cast a thankful look through the ceiling at my heavenly
Father, or I rush bareheaded out of doors in the bleakest weather to
cool off this happiness, so that presently I may return and copy it
into words.
If this is happiness, I have had it; but my suspicion is that I may
have experienced then only the pangs of a great joy. It is not a thing
achieved by inspiration, even if you write an epic or paint a noble
picture. You have produced something. My idea of happiness is something
you get. It is intaking, not creative. You cannot think it. It comes
to you in the reality of personal experience, selfish and satisfying.
What I want to know is how I have missed it. Is it by some infernally
digestive attitude of my mind toward common human experience which
consumes my illusions, or is it on account of circumstances over which
I have no control, or have I just led myself like a wanderer walking in
a blind circle between two worlds?
XXXV
THE LATTER DAYS
I have often wondered what becomes of us here in this life. For what
we were in the beginning does pass away, and we become the millstone
around our own neck. No matter how good we try to be or how bad we
actually are, we barely keep up appearances. It is not time that
changes us, but our own desires, ambitions and the fierce struggle
we make to get what we want. The body breaks under the strain, our
faculties begin to wabble like shooting stars, even if they leave a
trail of light behind them. We lose our grip, let go and stand aside,
but not satisfied. No matter how wise we have been, we grow simple. No
matter how rich, we become mendicants searching the faces of youth for
a little praise or recognition, ready to accept any flattery, however
obvious, disposed to keep our noses and let out that long plaint of
weariness and disillusionment peculiar to our condition.
Many years ago there was a distinguished Methodist preacher in
Tennessee. He rose so high in the ranks of his brethren that we called
him a divine, and he had some kind of double-D title conferred upon
him. He was a good man and did valiant service for his Lord and for the
Church. At last his strength began to fail. Some power of the Presence
went out of him as it always does when the magnetism of personality
dies down in a preacher. His sermons lengthened intolerably, which
is the final symptom a minister in our Church shows before the bishop
and presiding elders superannuate him. No congregation wants the Word
drooled to it even by a saint. So this old man was retired on his
niggardly little pension and went to live with his married daughter.
One day I met him on the street, pushing a baby carriage with his
youngest grandchild in it. He wore his pastoral clothes, stiff collar,
and white bow tie. His linen was as white as the apron of a neat
nursemaid. But what a look in his eye, an expression of tears! Isaiah
demoted! Nothing humanly unkind had happened to him. His daughter had
probably taken this method of airing the baby and getting her father to
take exercise at the same time. But when you have preached salvation
with power from the pulpit for fifty years, it is worse than a fall
from grace to be reduced to pushing a baby carriage.
I halted to wish him good-morning and to admire the baby. He did not
care much for this morning, and let the baby go for a moment; he wished
to say something to me.
‘If you knew what old age really is, you would pray for death while you
are young!’ he quavered.
I tried to comfort him, but he was too terribly wise to be comforted.
‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am not supposed to be of sound mind. So they
give me little tasks like this to keep me occupied,’ regarding the
infant ruefully.
‘When you have been ordained and preached the gospel for many years,
and moved men by the spirit, it’s a terrible experience to be set aside
as of no further consequence. I may act a little queer; you do when
misfortune and defeat overtake you in your old age. But if I behaved
as senselessly as a lot of young men do, I’d be hailed before a lunacy
commission!’
And this was twenty years ago, when nobody thought of summoning an
alienist to determine the mental responsibility of a youth who had run
amuck and committed a crime.
As I grow older and feel the changes that wisdom and experience make in
me, and learn to sit down more to husband my failing strength and to
keep silent longer when younger people are exploiting the foolishness
of their wits, I often think of that old man toddling feebly behind
the baby carriage, shorn of all his earthly glories save the insignia
of his long pastoral coat tails, despised because his mind had passed
the spring and summer seasons of animal wit and aggressiveness, but
pathetically wise.
I am determined to avoid his fate by taking thought now while my will
is strong, and I have fairly good business sense, and still reign
supreme in my own estimation to be spoofed or cajoled by the flattery
of being merely humored. I am already old enough to fix a measuring
eye upon any younger person who undertakes to pacify me with the mere
assurance that such-and-such a thing is all right; nothing is going to
break; everything is greased and the clutch is working properly. I have
known myself to get out of the car and find something wrong and ready
to break, and much of it not greased, and the clutch needing to be
relined.
This sort of enterprise does not enhance your reputation for sweetness
and light among young people, but we must simply keep up our courage
and stand the gaff. If you are a woman, and have passed the age
of control by your merely feminine charms, the only thing left is
to exercise sufficient authority to put the fear of God in these
youngsters and sit tight. My grandfather was not so far wrong when he
was dying and ordered us who were about to supersede him in living out
of the room! That was the last act of authority performed by a gallant
gentleman who showed a proper contempt for sniveling youth.
I do not know how it happens, but as we grow older our friends and
relatives become miraculously younger. We seem to survive too many of
those companions with whom we started in life and passed our achieving
years. As our infirmities increase, they wax stronger, and we become
no more than a memory sitting in the chimney corner. However generous
and considerate they are of your feeling and comfort, you have lost
your standing among them. The consequences are inevitable. You cannot
hold your hand with them. With the best intentions, they are ready to
take up your burdens and manage your affairs, which is really a tender
way of taking your life away from you and leaving you in your old age
without the means of supporting your own vanities and self-respect.
Never again can you show how much better judgment you have than they
have in matters of management and economy! You may be permitted to hold
your dear old yellow deeds, though frequently in a weary moment you
also surrender them; but they have come into real possession of your
property and they are inclined to use it recklessly, according to this
speeding, spending new world they are making for themselves, while you
become the helpless pensioner upon your own hard-earned bounties.
Nothing like that shall happen to me. I have observed young people very
carefully. They are really the pensioners upon our wisdom and reared
upon our earnings. If every man and woman past sixty should suddenly
die, there would be one grand wake of a funeral, then this world would
rock upon its foundations and go to pieces. I give youth thirty days to
destroy the whole thing. What I mean is that we are very important the
older we grow, and for conscience’ sake should endeavor to live as long
as possible in full possession of our powers and affairs.
I have sometimes considered passing my last days writing a book of
gospels for the aged, designed to stimulate their courage and sense of
self-importance. I have observed that we begin to lose them when we
lose the purely physical attributes of strength and animation. This
is that period when the mind clears and can be used most effectively
according wisdom and experience, instead of those emotions which
inevitably affect our actions and judgments during our younger years.
The time comes when these friends and these relatives who have grown
up long after we grew up will gather around you out of respect,
affection, and politeness; but you are a short circuit. There will be
such a divergence in your point of view from their points of view that
no common ground of conversation or comradeship remains. They will be
sitting up with you off and on in this manner as if you were the dear
dead body of an ancestor, although you may be getting your breath as
usual and looking straight through those innocent young things, too
polite to read aloud what you see going on inside of them.
The thing to do then is not to retire to your own room like a sundown
old cat, or like a pathetically forgiving old woman, but to exile
them. Send them back to sink or swim in the world they have made for
themselves, and keep yours. Live and die under your own roof, even if
you do it alone. I have a suspicion that it is a lonely passage, even
if everybody is present.
I willed the world to these young powers and princes ten years ago
when I came to this valley. They can have it. I am willing any time to
spare them a few words of advice about how to conduct it, and I like to
step around in it once in so often to see how things are going. But I
reserve this small one, laid off like a garden between these hills and
fitted to me as a fine old tune is fitted to the simple words of a good
old hymn.
Once you begin to fumble according to your own light with a
denominational idea of God or to mix politics with your religion, your
light goes out and you find yourself being tried for heresy or in some
brotherhood which denies the divinity of Jesus, whereas if you had your
own right mind toward the Lord you would know that any brotherhood
which denies Jesus is apt to be a vindictive corporation organized
against all men who do not belong to that union. We are not brothers
except according to the way and the life of the great Galilean. I
myself cannot pretend to be more than the disgusted stepbrother of all
modernists in the Church and of red radicals in general.
But after all we spend most of our centuries maneuvering in the right
direction. It is only now and then that a demoniacal cat-fit starts
somewhere, as in Russia at the present time. The hysteria spreads as
demoniacal dancing did in the middle centuries, but it dies down. The
whole thing comes from some monstrous mob ignorance of the spirit. The
individual Russian still believes in his God, but the evil forces of
stronger minds are exploiting him.
The thing that grieves is the casualties among the innocent along the
way.
Here is a poor old bishop who has written a book in which he denies
a personal deity and doubts there ever existed such a historical
character as Jesus Christ. On the cover of his book is the emblem of
Soviet Russia, the hammer and the sickle. Beneath that is the red star,
emblem of the workers’ party in America, and the first sentence of
the book is a quotation from Karl Marx, ‘Religion is the opium of the
people.’ I am touched by that old man’s predicament as I am sometimes
at the sight of an old Confederate soldier who had a brave record, but
who has lost his wits and goes about decorated with cheap pewter and
brass medals; only this poor soul has got them published on the cover
of his book instead of being pinned upon his breast.
I have noticed a certain thing especially about brilliant men. They
retain the use of their faculties long after they lose their judgment.
If one of them remains in business too long after the prime of life, he
is apt to slip up and make an investment which costs him the whole of
a hard-earned fortune. If he is a thinker and an authority upon some
obtuse subject, he is apt to lose his grip, take a header and show up
among the spiritists, as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, who appears
to have retained his thinking powers long after he lost the sense to
use them.
It would not surprise me if H. G. Wells turned out to be a religious
fanatic in his last days. These people suffer some kind of reverse
in mind. They go off on tangents. So this innocent old bishop with
the ascetic countenance and a noble Christian life behind him lost
the rudder of his faculties, and is now being exploited by those arch
madmen, the communists. He has apparently reached the mimetic stage
of senility, got his metaphors mixed, and is trying to impersonate
both the grand old bishop and the grand old communist so magnificently
interpreted in the first chapters of ‘Les Miserables.’
Old men are sometimes subject to great vanities of the soul without
any wisdom. How else does one of them get the idea of calling himself
the Episcopus Bolsheviscum et Infidelium? Instead of being tried
for heresy, he should be rescued, put away in a quiet, comfortable
place and allowed to fan himself out according to his illusions. He
is obviously a good old man who has been tricked and flattered by
designing men and their still more designing propaganda. Somebody
has reversed the lever of his mind, else his training in spiritual
consciousness would have insured him against being upset by discovering
traces of our Scriptures in mythology and every heathen religion and
philosophy. These pagans, the very barbarians and savages, naturally
borrow, plagiarize and take the truth as we do, frequently veiled in
tradition. We all have the same God and must feel the stirrings of
His image in us. If this man had been in his right senses, does any
one believe that the study of astronomy could have possibly upset his
strictly Christian faith? Can what we know or suspect about a purely
physical universe affect the everlasting fact that our spirit does bear
witness to the truth of such Scriptures as the Ten Commandments, the
twenty-third Psalm and the Sermon on the Mount?
Words are dangerous things. They lead to heresy trials now, and they
formerly led many martyrs to the stake. I suppose the good Bishop
still believes in Providence, but here he is in his old age trying to
liquidate his God into natural law. Somebody has stolen that many pages
of his mind or he would know there never was a law without a lawmaker.
‘Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!’ he cries.
Well, that has been done in Russia. Religion certainly is the opium of
the people there. Never has the world seen such a politically pious
people. They sleep, indeed, but what uneasy slumber is this that
filches all a man has and degrades him by his very sacrifices! Imagine
living under a government which permits its people to prosper for a few
years, in order that it may step in and confiscate their wealth and
thus reduce them once more to the direst poverty of a national ideal
where the only capitalist is this rogue of a government and the only
god is the pickled body of an arch-fiend who even in death imposed his
monstrous will upon them.