least hint of what was going on. When at last I came face to face with
my local likeness I was confounded. Long afterward the explanation
occurred to me--in dealing with other people it is a mistake not to
take into account the furtiveness of human nature and the guarded
indirectness of the mortal mind. Wearing creeds and civilization like
garments, we still practice within many of the traits of our primitive
ancestors. A man is frequently on guard or on the offensive when we
approach him in a friendly tail-wagging spirit, all unconscious of his
bristling attitude, due to some weakness in himself of which you are
not aware, or to a competitive animosity which you do not feel.
I have learned this too late in life to practice a corresponding
discretion in my association with other people. I seem to have an
infernal gift for telling what is going on in my mind or feelings. This
is the quickest way possible to kick the skylights out of your own
reputation. But I do not regret it, having had a grander time telling
on myself than most people ever have concealing themselves. I have told
the truth too much. It makes you free, but you pay for it. I remember
hoping at the time that the scandalous caricature of my virtues might
be a compliment inadvertently implied. One must protect himself before
his immediate public either with conceit or with resignation. I use
both as the occasion demands.
After this experience, I resolved to have done with my various
reputations. They are nowhere required of us in the Scriptures. On the
contrary, in the second chapter of Philippians, it is recorded that
he ‘made himself of no reputation.’ I have willed mine to the world,
which makes them and takes them away. They are too ephemeral and too
expensive to keep up. If you have caught the wind of the world in your
sails, you have only to do your work to insure your fame--a drastic
business, but not nearly so difficult as maintaining your own personal
reputation if you have become one of the assets of the public mind.
Besides, the older you grow the less comfortably does any reputation
fit you. It is like a garment you used to wear, now out of style with
your thoughts and your aspirations, which are stretching away like
dreams beyond the mind of this world. There was a time, for example,
when it troubled me to be regarded as a tightwad, because instead of
contributing in the conventional public-spirited manner to movements,
memorials, monuments and notorious charities, I have done my alms in
secret. And though my heavenly Father who seeth in secret has not
yet seen fit to reward me openly as they are praised who do good
accompanied by a press agent, I am beginning to feel more solvent
morally and independent spiritually by disregarding these character
prints, good or bad, left in passing upon the minds of other people.
The image depends too much upon the quality of the mind that receives
it to be always reputable or veracious.
But whenever you become truly philosophical, you never are quite
truthful toward your own humanness. I may write convincingly concerning
this noble ideal of myself. It is held, you may say, on principle; I
have never been able to live up to it except by fits and starts. The
fact remains that I frequently suffer like a sinner under conviction
over the impression made upon a friend, knowing how I have touched up
the crooked lines of his character so that it will shine in a sentence
more becoming to him. When he reads this sentence later in the book,
he never seems to recognize himself. He never comes to clasp me by the
hand and regard me with tear-dimmed eyes of appreciation. But just let
me write out a fault, and forty men and women of my acquaintance will
take offense, when my innocent purpose had been to dramatize one of my
own secret shortcomings!
The greatest inconvenience I experience comes from the constant effort
to repress my friendly instincts. I have a talent for loving people
and would like to use it, but my flare of affection is put out when
I perceive myself mirrored in the eye of that man or this woman as a
fearsome person, liable to explode an opinion which will reflect upon
his dearest prejudice or outrage her most sacred fallacy.
I am not complaining, you understand; I am simply indicating how much
worm-and-dust wisdom of this world is required to finance a reputation
even for sweetness and light, and that it does not pay if you have any
safer way of employing your talents.
We permit conscience to make cowards of us all. Then by instinct we
turn upon the highest everywhere to reduce it to the level of our own
conduct. We cannot even get far enough away from our own transgressions
to believe in the Almighty. We condemn ourselves to dust and despair,
and we cover the whole ignoble performance with flubdub philosophy and
think we get away with it. But we do not. We live best by faith, not
by what we know or the uttermost that we can think; and certainly not
according to our reputations, because very few people know what kind of
reputations they have.
XLVI
FITTING INTO LIFE
Growing up year after year in a place like this requires more studious
application than taking a master’s degree in a university, where
you attend lectures and have a course of reading to defend you from
thinking your own thoughts on that subject. It is a fact which you
discover for yourself under the circumstances that ‘knowledge comes,
but wisdom lingers.’ We are at best no more than the imitators of
wisdom. We borrow it, show off in it; but I have yet to see the
faintest trace of natural wisdom in man, though the lower animals
seem gifted with enough of it not to worry about their fate, whatever
fate it is. I reckon this is the reason they remain lower, the damned
harnessed victims of their content, as we are the more aspiring victims
of our discontent, doubts and anxieties.
I do not think, for example, that a man ever lived who could have
conceived the idea of peace. That is something handed down to us by
inspiration and tradition from the great beginning. The Lord alone
knows what peace is, and He declared it--‘On earth peace, good will
toward men.’ We have been repeating that Scripture for ages as children
recite verses without the mind to comprehend the meaning. This is not
hypocrisy on our part; it is our very nature to be incapable of peace.
After a while you get to the clear place in mind where you can see
through so many theories and philosophies, even professions of faith,
you know that they are no more than the defenses we throw up against
our own weaknesses and fears. One of the touching revelations of this
kind to me has been the shrewd way we shift for ourselves at the very
last. We get a marvelous confidence in the goodness of God then. We
come clean and do see Him, whether we were ever before pure in heart or
not.
The last deathbed I attended was that of a notoriously wicked man. No
saint could have been more serenely at peace so far as his immortal
future was concerned. He had worked hard and sinned fiercely. No man,
it seemed, was his brother; but he lay there upon his dingy pillows
beneath his ragged quilt with the innocent eyes of a child. He had done
with guilt. He was out of pain so far as the Lord was concerned. Lying
so wanly weak, never again to move hand or foot, he assured me that
he was ready to go. The idea that he would be off presently upon an
immeasurable journey was fixed in his mind, accompanied by no fears.
They who stick to their creeds and the meaner mortal facts we all
produce in living cannot comprehend the courage of a man like this. In
considering his case they remember their favorite damnation doctrines,
but never their own transgressions. Nothing will convince them that the
Lord is not a theologian, but a Creator; and that a history of His will
would be a history of the one fundamental law, not as we understand
law, but what He has made it, followed whether you keep it or break it
by inevitable consequences.
This man had broken it in his flesh, and was dying for that reason as
surely as if he had cut himself down. But now he was forced at last to
keep that last most important part of it. With the vision of a child
he had learned the meaning of God. He rested serenely upon what we
preach and so rarely have the courage to achieve--real faith in God,
and it had turned out precisely as the Scriptures promise--eased him of
every fear. His sins had been removed as far from his consciousness as
presently his body would be. I felt very close and soothingly kin to
him, and reverently amazed at this perfect miracle of faith; also glad
that he would die and escape that pit of himself into which he surely
would have fallen if he had survived.
When you get far down your slope of time, however, and care less than
you used to care about being the heroine of your life dolled up in your
best deeds, then you can take a look at yourself according to the mind
you have now calmed and cooled by the years, and you may come into that
last and greatest of all vanities--the boldness to portray the person
you really are.
Most people think they do that when they confess their sins; the worse
they are the better they are for this purpose. My notion about that is
if you must boast, it is more polite to proclaim your virtues. I have
always been very courteous to others about that. But the queer thing
is that I have never felt that my virtues really belong to me. Lecky’s
‘History of European Morals’ knocked the last ray of conceit out of
me about being even a chaste woman. First one virtue and then another
seems to have been thrust upon us according to the self-protecting
instinct of men against frauds in paternity or some other economy for
their comfort and peace of mind.
I am not complaining, you understand. It has all turned out for the
best long ago; but I am just saying how queer I feel about having had
decency and honor thrust upon us like foreordination by men, instead
of choosing these distinctions for ourselves according to the word and
will of God as we think we do. I have wondered if other women feel
the same way about this. But I have never had the courage to ask the
question point-blank. I have a sort of premonition that most of us are
so ignorant of the processes by which we become virtue-bearing in an
unvirtuous world that almost any woman might resent the question.
But I suppose our sins do actually belong to us. However, there is
practically no originality about them. We can only commit two or three,
the others are mere variation of the same perversities. My notion is
that there is not much satisfaction to be had from exposing them. If
you make an art, a literature, or a science of your vices, the result
is some kind of puerile decadence, not entertaining to normal people.
In any case, I have been a very dull person along this line. To the
best of my knowledge I have never committed an interesting sin, nor one
that even held my own attention for longer than the moment it took to
get rid of it by prayer and repentance. For this reason I am obliged to
confine myself to the moderate activities of that narrow and monotonous
existence already mentioned with becoming heat in these pages.
Looking back now through the mirror of my mind, the thing that
astonishes me most is that nothing seems to have changed me. I made
my little history of courage, honor and sacrifices, and from start to
finish I can trace the silent, invincible child I was through all the
women I have become in various periods of my life. I lived the whole
of it with a curious mental reservation which was myself. I still
love with a stronger passion the things that child loved--the earth,
the sky, the living things that do not speak, but know and mean so
much more than we can think or even tell with all our living or dead
languages.
There is a speech in the wind that we do not know, a heroism in Nature
that we do not comprehend, some wisdom of beauty in the grass and
the faintest flowers that bloom which we shall never achieve, a kind
of fearless liberty to live to which we shall never attain with all
our ideals and declarations of independence. We only believe that
all men are created free and equal and entitled to the pursuit of
happiness, but it is something we have never experienced because our
minds constrain us. These verdant boughs have no mind, so they live
in perfect liberty without our poor fears and transient knowledges.
The seeds of the grass that is cut down and withers to-day will spring
green above our graves to-morrow with not one memory of pain or death.
As a child, I could not have said what drew me to the earth, but it
was this feeling of being closer there to life that neither fears nor
perishes.
I am poorer in faith than that child was, but I still believe wearily
in the same Providence in which she rejoiced. As she went silently
about her affairs regardless, so have I gone on doing the thing I
meant to do with a determination that will not be defeated. I made no
appearance at this business, and do not now attract the least attention
at working my will; only the thing accomplished is seen and read, not
me. What I mean is that I am literally an unobtrusive person by nature.
No one would recognize me except by name. I remember the same shyness
as a child at being noticed. I have played my little tunes on the heart
of the world, but I never craved to be identified by my strut with my
works.
XLVII
FACTS AND TRUTHS
I love truth, although I shall die hating mere facts, because they are
misleading. They are the weapons and defense of literalists, strangely
mean-minded people in my opinion who have caused much trouble and
strife in the world. But I have the same happy talent the child I was
had for prevaricating. Let me have some wisdom of the truth even if
it is no larger than a mustard seed and the sensation inflates me. I
cannot set it down in the little raw words of mere veracity. I must
garnish it and spread it like a rainbow above my mind.
Some people would call this lying. I think they have done it, but I am
not embarrassed or convinced. My notion is that it is a very precious
kind of inebriation of the spirit. I remember lying myself into a state
of happy intoxication as a child, even if I had to go out behind the
house to do it where no one could hear me. I think this is one reason
I live concealed behind so many hills now. The occasional excursions I
make into the world bring me face to face with so many confusing and
depressing facts which I cannot endure and cannot deny. Here, there is
nothing to deny. All is an affirmation of the old order of things as in
the beginning. It is only my mind that travels. Sometimes then I see
visions of the future like Cassandra. But I try to be sensible about
this and remember that it is the weariness of the years which darkens
the glass.
The world is not really whirling to destruction. It is we who are old
and no longer able to keep pace with the times and who must pass away.
Everything will go on as usual when we are out of it. And I shall not
be scared up out of my grave, disheveled and demented by the din of
some fearful battle going on above me. Such thoughts I do have for
the moment, and am mastered by them as I used to be enchanted when I
was young by a star-blossoming night. But presently I take a sort of
recumbent comfort in the situation; nothing is really changed that
should remain fixed by His almighty will--the same bright days, the
same kind nights, the same seasons; only I have grown older.
As to facts, I have always been a faithful interpreter of the truth
as my mind finds it; but I never have been able to stick to facts.
In my opinion they are among the most misleading things we have to
contend with in this present world. A fact is something somebody finds
out about you that is not true, one of those capital-letter deeds you
performed in a high mood or a low mood which is not characteristic of
the man you really are. Personally, I had much rather be judged by the
life I have lived than by the books I have written. In both places I
have said things or done things that outrage the fact-tacking genius of
critics. But on the whole I have come out very well.
My idea of Heaven is a place where there are no hard and fast facts of
mortality sticking to us, but we shall be what we really are, true
hearts at last, easy to know and easier to believe, no reasons left to
envy one another or to suspect one another. I have a faint impression
that this may reduce mental activity among us beyond endurance, but I
am willing to try it for a while.
I am not opposed to facts, you understand; but my point is that we
attach too much importance to them as evidence. Facts make war; they
are used by ambitious men and greedy men to sway the minds of people.
Does any one believe now that there would have been any Great War if
the common people who furnished the cannon fodder for it had known the
real truth underlying the conflict? I doubt it.
I should like to get back to that honest feline normalcy of being just
a woman with the ordinary exercise of my give-and-take disposition.
I would spare more time for living instead of working. I wish above
everything else to indulge more in inconsequential conversation about
just pleasant things. What has become of all the natural, cheerful
little topics we used to discuss? I rarely ever hear a conversation now
that does not turn out for the worst instead of ending in a gale of
laughter.
Am I wrong, or is there a note of sinister wisdom in laughter these
days? Is there some dreadful quality in the knowledge we are getting
which changes innocent merriment to cynical hysteria? I must be wrong
about this; but when you live alone most of the time, and only go
abroad occasionally in the world, you do notice things like that--the
eyes of people not so trustful of one another as I remember them long
ago, a fearful wit, and that queer triumphant note in laughter like a
comment indulged at the world’s expense.
I am merely setting down my thoughts about all this as one thrusts out
his hands in the dark and feels his way toward the door. What actually
happens is that I spend most of my days alone here in this cabin with a
companionable fire upon the hearth. Usually I get away with it; but if
I am in a particularly keen mood, the illusion fails. I know it is only
a bright combustion of heat and wood in the fireplace. No real sense
to the crackling of these blazing logs. I read some, walk abroad with
the dogs, and I have my usual look at the stars, as a poor lonesome
shepherd may watch his flock a long way off and beyond his reach, but
his sheep still. So are these stars mine. The heavens above this cabin
are familiar to me like a garment I have worn a long time upon my heart.
But I have never seen an angel ascending or descending! That keeps one
strained up too much--no respite from this business of believing what
you cannot see with the naked eye. I am not denying that it is good for
the soul, but sometimes I have wished for something that was just good
for me.
XLVIII
BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS
When the harvests are in and all the summertime guests are gone and a
crisper, cooler silence begins to blow through this valley, I settle
down to a nine months’ stretch of living alone here in the best company
to be had. What I mean is that you can lay the book you are reading
on the shelf without being obliged to think about what you will serve
to the hero and heroine for dinner that evening. But after dinner you
can take it up again and resume your companionship with the author
and these characters which are frequently more interesting than real
people, because they are derived from human nature at large and are the
composites of many men and women. Also, there is the country in which
they live, which may be on the other side of the world from where you
live. So, sitting in your chair before your own fire, you enjoy all the
benefits of travel without the inconvenience and confusion.
To read any one of Balzac’s stories is like spending an evening in
France, even if you have never been in France and cannot pronounce one
single fluted word of that language. And to read Victor Hugo is like
spending one half the evening among the sobbing stars and the other
half of it amid scenes of the direst poverty made by the meanest minds.
Hugo was the dramatist of human emotions at their highest pitch
and lowest ebb. He had the gift of being vicariously sublime in
a character like that of the old communist or Jean Valjean, but I
doubt if he himself possessed the attributes of any kind of permanent
character. I have the feeling that he was an irresponsible person with
a histrionic conscience and practically no modesty of morals. Otherwise
it is not clear to me how we can account for the serial romances of his
own life, or his description of the Battle of Waterloo, or the fact
that he took his morning ablutions in a glass bathroom on top of his
house. The sun was, indeed, above him, but the populace was also in
attendance in the streets below.
As for Balzac, he was a literary comedian who handled the tragedies of
the human heart with a wit kin to the irony of fate. He could never
have interpreted any other people but the French. He is peculiar to
them, a medium through which the France of his day still lives, loves,
sins, and suffers with a charm and a talent for indecency which it
probably never had in reality. The art of a master is required to lift
the squalor of the lowest lives and the grandeur of the noblest lives
into imperishable scenes on paper, because in life they do change and
fade into forgetfulness.
I recall one of his heroines, a stupid moron who could impart no
animation to her immorality. He finds her reclining on a couch and
spends ten thousand words describing her figure. I can spend a
fascinating hour under that splendid spray of language, reading the
mind and nature of the author. There is something idiotic in French
genius of the first water like the artless simplicity of a defective
person going about with his clothing disarranged.
Before he has done making images of this woman she has ceased to exist
except as a feminine mollusk of beauty. Then I am invariably moved
to mirth by his efforts to get her off the couch and induce her to
say something or do something bad enough or sufficiently entrancing
to justify his description. Only an author who has struggled with a
stubborn or stupid character in a story can appreciate his dilemma,
and the fiasco when she finally sits up and sobs, with no visible
explanation of the sob. The reader is left in suspense until the next
chapter reveals the cause of her grief, which is not grief at all, but
the French hysteria of passion. It is clear to the envious like me that
he cannot bear to sacrifice one sentence of the marvelous description
he has written of her and that she can never measure up to it in actual
performance.
I remember having a similar experience years ago with one of my own
heroines who turned out to be another kind of fool. Nothing was further
from my expectations when I introduced her with a few complimentary
sentences. I must have got the idea from an old valentine card. Anyway,
she was standing beautifully gowned beside a tall fluted column on the
veranda of a magnificent old Southern mansion. I managed to give the
reader the impression that she was rich, handsome, thirty, not married
and vaguely unhappy.
She stood regarding the gently rolling landscape with this expression,
which was as far as my talents as a struggling literary genius could
carry her. I knew what would happen to her next day, but by no flight
of my imagination could I fathom the thoughts that should be passing
through her sad spinster mind at that moment. Neither could I move
her from her gracefully leaning pose against the column. She became
cataleptic. I labored with her frantically through three blistering hot
summer days without ever persuading her to so much as turn her head.
Finally, in desperation, I sent her an anonymous note by a messenger
couched in the language of a bold lover, saying that he would see
her presently and settle a few old scores. She had run through with
many lovers in her earlier youth, and could only perceive that the
chirography of this note was vaguely familiar. It was a disgraceful
thing to do, but the effect was electrical. From that time to the end
of the story I have never had a more elastic heroine. Every author
must have similar experiences, but very few of us would dare Balzac’s
insolence to the reader’s intelligence and get by with the performance.