again visits Jessica in the country, and
how love is buffeted between
philosophy and religion 212
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The First Part
which shows how Jessica visits an editor
in the city, and what comes of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
PHILIP TO JESSICA
NEW YORK, April 20, 19--.
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, I
trust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me some
right to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell you
that we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall be
pleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you can
always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say
atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of
that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject
the lively creatures of his own brain.
"Mr. Howells," you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces the
spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you
have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a
malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to
speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak
element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby,
good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals
and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic."
Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the most ungallant
editor would be constrained to call fair!
I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of great
moment. But be assured neither you nor your perplexing query has really
slipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy room
with the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my one
barricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to one
experienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life to
literature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbs
me in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words,
_give my life_. Literature is a despised goddess in these days to receive
such devotion.
Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy,
as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether
it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing
reviews and sketches and stories,--why, certainly, do so by all means. I
have no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honours
of society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, God
forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a
consuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can
only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a
people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a
great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any
sympathy for the follower?
It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I have
in all my experience met just four men who have given themselves to
literature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in the
mountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerk
in New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever an
anchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterly
unrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, the
unhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealous
passion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of clever
reading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from the
decorous worship of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failure
is the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the life
about us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due for such
earnestness in writing to one who is, after all, practically a stranger to
me.
Forgive my naive zeal; but I remember that you spoke to me on the subject
with a note of restrained emotion which flatters me into thinking I may
not be misunderstood. And, to seek pardon for this personal tone by an
added personality, it distresses me to imagine a life like yours, with
which the world must deal bountifully in mere gratitude for the joy it
takes from you,--to imagine a life like yours, I say, sacrificed to any
such grim Moloch. Write, and win applause for gay cleverness, but do not
consider literature seriously. Above all, write me a word to assure me I
have not given offence by this very uneditorial outburst of rhetoric.
Sincerely yours,
PHILIP TOWERS.
II
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MORNINGTOWN, GEORGIA, April 27, 19--.
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Since my return home I have thought earnestly of my visit to New York.
That was the first time I was ever far beyond the community boundaries of
some Methodist church in Georgia. I think I mentioned to you that my
father is an itinerant preacher. But for one brief day I was a small and
insignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted and
unclassified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you were
not brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense of
irresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through the
buckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in the
world at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could have
danced and glorified God on a curbstone, if such a manifestation of
heathen spirituality would not have been unseemly.
But the chief event of that sensational day was my visit to you. Of course
you cannot know how formidable the literary editor of a great newspaper
appears to a friendless young writer. And from our brief correspondence I
had already pictured you grim and elderly, with huge black brows bunched
together as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I even
thought of adding a white beard,--you do use long graybeard words
sometimes, and naturally I had associated them with your chin. You can
imagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs of
my courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious in
appearance, and not even _old_! The revulsion from my fears and anxieties
was so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands in
salutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you should have had
that also.
I am so pleased to have you confirm my judgment of Howells's novel; and
that I am to have more books for review. I doubt, however, if Mr. Howells
will ever reap the benefit of my criticisms, for not long since I read a
note from him saying that he never looked into _The Gazette_. You must
already have given offence by doubting his literary infallibility.
But on the whole you question the wisdom of my ambition to "give my life
to literature." As to that I am inclined to follow Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler's opinion: "Writing is like flirting,--if you can't do it, nobody
can teach you; and if you can do it, nobody can keep you from doing it."
With a certain literary aspirant I know, writing is even more like
flirting than that,--an artful folly with literature which will never rise
to the dignity of a wedding sacrifice. She could no more give herself
seriously to the demands of such a profession than a Southern mockingbird
can take a serious view of music. He makes it quite independently of mind,
gets his inspiration from the fairies, steals his notes, and dedicates the
whole earth to the sky every morning with a green-tree ballad, utterly
frivolous. Such a performance, my dear Mr. Towers, can never be termed a
"sacrifice"; rather it is the wings and tail of humour expressed in a
song. But who shall say the dear little wag has no vocation because his
small feather-soul is expressed by a minuet instead of an anthem?
Therefore do not turn your editorial back upon me because I am incapable
of the more earnest sacrifice. Even if I only chirrup a green-tree ballad,
I shall need a chorister to aid me in winning those "laughing honours of
society." And your supervision is all the more necessary, since, as you
said to me, I live in a section where the literary point of view is more
sentimental than accurate. This is accounted for, not by a lack of native
wit, but by the fact that we have no scholarship or purely intellectual
foundations. We are romanticists, but not students in life or art. We make
no great distinctions between ideality and reality because with us
existence itself is one long cheerful delusion. Now, while I suffer from
these limitations more or less, my ignorance is not invincible, and I
could learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal,
and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial.
Sincerely,
JESSICA DOANE.
III
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledged
sooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment my
letter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they can
get nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once I
lay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond to
what seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myself
and launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to my
own experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?
Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me in
the course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances more
than once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please,
welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shut
nature out of the door, she will come in at the window," is an old saying,
and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see.
But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was not
the vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life to
literature,"--that question you very properly answered in a tone of
bantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner of
life to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heaven
save the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there is
no literature in New York. There are millions of books manufactured
here, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has no
sense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain what
I mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even the
love of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. The
distinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in my
actual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between the
life of a _religiosus_, Thomas a Kempis, let us say, and of a faithful
man of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble you
with mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southern
mockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that bird
mewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not for
spontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by express
several books....[1]
IV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I have said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that I
am going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by living
writers who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's
_Victorian Prose Masters_, and the other is Santayana's _Poetry and
Religion_. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I know
I shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a little
disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these
men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent
Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American
_bourgeoisie_. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a
good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional
weigher of books yourself, you ought to be acquainted with these
gentlemen.
V
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Do not reproach yourself for having written me a "journalistic" letter. I
always think of an editor as having only ink-bottle insides, ever ready to
turn winged fancies into printed matter, or to enter upon a "lyrical
disquisition" concerning them. Your distinction consists in a disposition
to abandon the formalities of the editorial desk that you may "respond to
the personal demands of a new acquaintance." And this humane amiability
leads me to make a naive confession. There are some people whose demands
are always personal. I think it is their limitation, resulting from a
state of naturalness, more or less primitive, out of which they have not
yet evolved. They do not appeal to your judgment or wisdom or even to your
sympathy, but to _you_. Their very spirits are composed of a sort of
sunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term the
higher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-top
spirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistic
training of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners of
your editorial dignity by impressing _personal_ demands.
And just so am I related to the whole of life,--even to the "publicans" in
my father's congregation. Indeed, if the desire "to eat with sinners"
insured salvation, there would be less cause for alarm about my miraculous
future state. The attraction, you understand, depends not upon the fact of
their being sinners, but upon the sincerity of their mortality. The more
unassumingly these reprobates live in their share of the common flesh, far
below spiritual pretences, the more does my wayward mind tip the scales of
unregenerate humour in their direction. My instincts hobnob with their
dust. But do not infer that I have identified you with these undisciplined
characters. When I was a child, out of the rancour of a well-tutored
Southern imagination I honestly believed that every man the other side of
Mason and Dixon's line had a blue complexion, thin legs, and a long tail.
And once when I was still very young, as I hurried from school through a
lonely wood, I actually _saw_ one of these monsters quite plainly. And I
thought I observed that his tail was slightly forked at the end! I have
long since forgiven you these terrifying caudal appendages, of course,
but, for all that, I keep a wary eye upon my heavenly bodies and at least
one wing stretched even unto this day when my guardian angel introduces a
Northern man. My patriotic instincts recommend at once the wisdom of
strategy. And it is well the "personal demands" come from me to you; for,
had the direction been reversed, by this time I should have sought refuge
somewhere in my last ditch and run up a little tattered flag of rebellion
to signify the state of my mind.
It is just as well that you advise me against trying my fortunes in your
"literary metropolis." My father is set with all his scriptures against
the idea. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternal
life"; and, having predestined me for a deaconess in his church, he is
firmly convinced that the strait and narrow way for me does not lie in the
direction of New York. However, I have already whispered to my
confidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maid
desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess.
Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while
he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens
are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow,
propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring
clouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for another
outing in your literary regions.
Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has no
sense, or indeed only contempt," and I await the promised explanation with
interest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain any
opportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy
(?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and
resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of,
and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we
shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall
buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only
for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and great
operas.
The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort to
make a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburned
heels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpin
gardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give his
experience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these little
freckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses and
lilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinery
creations.
VI
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literature
in E---- College, which you will remember is not very far from
Morningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of some
old English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father's
one carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). He
is a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermit
intelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice is
pitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believing
that he is a bachelor.
Still we had some talk together, and that is how I came to practise a
deceit upon you. Seeing a copy of _The Gazette_ lying on the table this
morning, Professor M---- was reminded to say that there was a "strong
man," Philip Towers by name, connected with that paper now. I cocked my
head at once like a starling listening to a new tune, for that was the
first time I had heard your name praised by a literary man in the South.
He went on to say that he had been delighted with your last book, _Milton
and His Generation_, and asked if I had observed your work in the literary
department of _The Gazette_. I admitted demurely that I had. He praised
several reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you were
the only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modern
fiction. Then he incensed me with this final comment:
"I do not understand how he does this newspaper work so forcefully, almost
savagely, and is at the same time capable of writing such delicate,
scholarly essays as this volume contains!"
"I have seen Mr. Towers," I remarked, mentally determining that you should
suffer for that distinction.
"Indeed! what manner of man is he?"
"His dust has congealed, stiffened into a sort of plaster-of-Paris
exterior, and he has what I call a _disinterred_ intelligence!"
"A what?"
"A man whose very personality is a kind of mental reservation, and whose
intelligence has been resurrected up through the thought and philosophy of
three thousand years."
M---- looked awkward but impressed.
And I hoped he would ask how you actually looked, for I was in the mood to
give a perfectly God-fearing description of you.
But from the foregoing you will see that I am capable of sharing your
literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role
created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion
with M---- that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his
judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the
assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neither
imagination nor genius has always amused me. And this one danced now as
frantically as if he had unintentionally grasped a live wire that hurt and
burned, but would not let go! Finally I said very engagingly:
"Doctor M----, I hope to improve in these matters by taking a course of
instruction under you next year."
"Now God forbid that you should ever do such a thing, Miss Doane! I would
sooner have you thrust dynamite under the chair of English Literature,
than see you in one of my classes!"
Thus am I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that
reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and
Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism
of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has
been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such
loose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do not
stick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you would
not tolerate them from me. But of all the books you have given me I like
best George Santayana's _Poetry and Religion_. Who is he anyhow? It may be
a disgraceful admission to make, but I never heard of him before. His name
is foreign, and his style is not American. For when an American says a
daring thing, particularly of religion, he says it impudently, with a
vulgar bravado. But this man writes out his opinion coolly, simply, with
that fine hauteur that will not condescend to know of opposition. I think
that is admirable. Arnold's courtesy and satirical temperance in dealing
with what he discredits is a pose by the side of this man's mental grace
and courage. And you know how we usually denominate style: it is the
little lace-frilled petticoat of the lady novelist's mincing passions, or
the breeches that belong to a male author's mental respirations. But with
this man, style is a spirit sword which cleaves between delusions and
facts, which separates religion from reality and establishes it in our
upper consciousness of ideality.
Is it not absurd for such a barbarian as I am to discuss these
gospel-makers of literature with you? But it is much more remarkable that
one or any of them should excite my admiration and respect. Really, if you
must know it, Mr. Towers, this is where I grow humble-minded in your
presence. I am fascinated with your ability to deal with the usually
indefinable, the esoteric side of art,--the esoteric side of life by
interpretation. And here I discover a shadowy, ghostly likeness between
you and this George Santayana. You do not think toward the same ends, or
write in the same style, but you _know_ things alike, as if you had both
drunk from the same Eastern fountain of mysteries.
And now I am about to change my gratitude into indignation. For I begin to
suspect that you sent me these books to inculcate the doctrine of literary
humility. If so, you have succeeded beyond your highest expectations.
Until now, writing has been a series of desperate experiments with me. I
progressed by inspiration. But these fellows--Arnold especially--discredit
all such performances. And he does it with the air of an English gentleman
inspecting a naked cannibal. He makes my flesh creep! He regards an
inspiration as a sort of vulgarity that must be dressed and stretched
before it can be used. From his point of view I infer that he considers
genius as a dangerous kind of drunkenness that fascinates the world, but
is really closely related to bad form in literature. On the other hand,
father says that if Matthew Arnold had known of me he would have purchased
me, placed me in a cage with a fountain pen, and exhibited me to his
classes at Oxford as a literary freak!
VII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I will remember your amused hostility to "hairpin gardeners" and see that
no more out-of-door books come to you until I have one with a stimulating
odour of burning cornstalks and rotting cabbages. Meanwhile let me assure
you that your reviews of _Elizabeth, Evelina, Judith_, and their sisters
have been none the less delightful for a vein of wicked impatience running
through them. The books I am now sending....
You ought not to be amazed at my dismal comments on latter-day literature.
The fact is, you have dissected our present book-makers better than I
could do it myself, for the reason that I am too amiable (I presume, you
see, that I have the wit) to judge my fellow-workers with such merciless
veracity.
But I have just read an article in the _Popular Science Monthly_ which
throws an unexpected light on the subject. The paper is by Dr. Minot and
is a biologist's comment on "The Problem of Consciousness." You might not
suppose that an argument to show how "the function of consciousness is to
dislocate in time the reactions from sensations" (!) would have much to do
with the properties of literature, but it has. Let me copy out some of his
words, as probably you have not seen the magazine:
"The communication between individuals is especially characteristic
of vertebrates, and in the higher members of that subkingdom it plays
a very great role in aiding the work of consciousness. In man, owing
to articulate speech, the factor of communication has acquired a
maximum importance. The value of language, our principal medium of
communication, lies in its aiding the adjustment of the individual
and the race to external reality. Human evolution is the continuation
of animal evolution, and in both the dominant factor has been the
increase of the resources available for consciousness."
Now that sounds pretty well for a scientist. It should seem to follow
that literature, being, so to speak, the permanent mode of
communication,--conveying ideas and emotions not merely from man to
man, but from generation to generation,--is the predominant means by which
this development of consciousness is attained. It is a pretty support we
derive from the enemy. But mark the serpent in the grass--"the
adjustment of the individual and the race to external reality." The real
aim of evolution is purely external, the adjustment of man to
environment; consciousness has value in so far as it promotes this
adjustment. Flatly, to me, this is pure nonsense, a putting of the
cart before the horse, a vulgar _hysteron-proteron_, none the less
execrable because it is the working principle not of a single man, but
of the whole of soctety to-day. Consciousness, I hold, is the supremely
valuable thing, and progress, evolution, civilisation, etc., are only
significant in so far as they afford nourishment to it. Literature is
the self-sufficient fruit of this consciousness, I say; the world says it
is a mere means of promoting our physical adjustment. You see I take up
lightly the huge enmity of the world.
This is wild stuff to put into a journalistic letter, no doubt. If I were
writing a treatise I would undertake to show that this difference of view
in regard to consciousness and physical adjustment is the oldest and most
serious debate of human intelligence. Saint Catharine, Thomas a Kempis,
and all those religious fanatics who counted the world well lost, made a
god of consciousness and thought very little of physical adjustment. The
debate in their day was an equal one. To-day it is all on one side--and
_vae victis_! I cry out--why should I not?--as one of the conquered, and I
am charitable enough to advise another not to enter the combat. It is a
poor consolation to wrap yourself in your virtue, mount a little pedestal,
set your hand on your heart, and spout with Lucan: _The winning cause for
the gods, but the vanquished for me_! Sometimes we begin to wonder
whether, after all, the world may not be right, and at that moment the
wind begins to blow pretty chill through our virtue.
VIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
Is my suspicion right? Was my last letter to you really a tangle of crude
ideas? That has grown to be my way, until I begin to wonder whether the
horrid noises of Park Row may not have thrown my mind a little out of
balance. For my strength lay in silence and solitude. It is hard for me to
establish any sufficient bond between my intellectual life and my personal
relationships, and as a consequence my letters, when they cease to be mere
journalistic memoranda, float out into a sea of unrestrained revery.
Yet I would ask you to be patient with me in this matter. From the first,
even before I saw you here in New York, I felt that somehow you might, by
mere patience and indulgence, if you would, re-establish the lost bond in
my life; that somehow the shadow of your personality was fitted to move
among the shadows of my intellectual world. What a strange compliment to
send a young woman!--for compliment it seems in my eyes.
Meanwhile, as some explanation of this intellectual twilight into which I
would so generously introduce you, I am sending you a little book I wrote
and foolishly printed several years ago on the quiet life of the Hindus.
The mood of the book still returns to me at times, though I have cast away
its philosophy as impracticable. I look for peace in the way that Plato
trod, and some day I shall write my palinode in that spirit. Let me, in
this connection, copy out a few verses I wrote last night and the night
before. It is my first digression into poetry since I was a boy:
THE THREE COMMANDS
I
Out of this meadow-land of teen and dole,
Because my heart had harboured in its cell
One prophet's word, an Angel bore my soul
Through starry ways to God's high citadel.
There in the shadow of a thousand domes
I walked, beyond the echo of earth's noise;
While down the streets between the happy homes
Only the murmur passed of infinite joys.
Then said my soul: "O fair-engirdled Guide!
Show me the mansion where I, too, may won:
Here in forgetful peace I would abide,
And barter earth for God's sweet benison."
"Nay," he replied, "not thine the life Elysian,
Live thou the world's life, holding yet thy vision
A hope and memory, till thy course be run."
II
Then said my soul: "I faint and seek my rest;
The glory of the vision veils mine eyes;
These infinite murmurs beating at my breast
Turn earthly music into plangent sighs.
"Because thou biddest, I will tread the maze
With men my brothers, yet my hands withhold
From building at the Babel towers they raise,
And all my life within my heart infold."
The Angel answered: "Lo, as in a dream
Thy feet have passed beyond the gates of flame;
And evermore the toils of men must seem
But wasteful folly in a path of shame.
"Yet I command thee, and vouchsafe no reason,
Thou shalt endure the world's work for a season;
Work thou, and leave to others fame and blame."
III
I bowed submission, dumb a little while.
Then said my soul: "Thy will I dare not balk;
I reach my hands to labours that defile,
And help to rear a plant of barren stalk.
"Yet only I, because in life I bear
The vision of that peace, may never feel
The spur of keen ambition, never share
The dread of loss that makes the world's work real.
"Therefore in scorn I draw my bitter breath,
And sorrow cherish as my proudest right,
Till scorn and sorrow fade in sweeter death."
The Angel answered, turning as for flight:
"The labour sorrow-done is more than sterile,
And scorn will change thy vision to soul's peril:
Be glad; thy work is gladness, child of light!"
IX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Many thanks for this copy of your book, _The Forest Philosophers of
India_. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better.
Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East.
The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost
that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations
which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a
Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a
whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression
of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short of
terrifying.
You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one of
your own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your "Three Commands" have laid me
under a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much;
and I am a little rebellious.
X
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness,
because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot's article. At last I got hold of
the magazine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crude
ideas," they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way you
expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have
been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that
desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical
novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not
know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so
readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same
slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive
the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero,
"wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these
would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.
But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection with
my first venture into the realm of biological thought. _The Popular
Science Monthly_ has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account of
its heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret the
fact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot's article. But some
demon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term
"epiphenomenon." Now a long association with the idea of omniscience has
rendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke the
imagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give a
definition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary is
his only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and he
declines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority.
Therefore he reasoned that "epiphenomenon" had been built up to
accommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mind
never dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pair
of accusing glasses, he inquired:
"My daughter, where did you see this remarkable word?"
I do not question that I am a direct descendant from my fictitious
grandmother, Eve! I am always being tempted by apples of information, and
I have often known the mortifying sensation of wishing to hide my guilty
countenance in my more modern petticoat on that account.
He read the "blasphemous" article through, only pausing to point out
heresies and perversions of the sacred truth as he went along. But when he
reached the sentence in which the author calmly asserts the theory of
monism, he actually gagged with indignation: "My child, do you know that
this godless wretch claims that the same principle of life which makes the
cabbage also vitalises man?" I looked horrified, but I could barely
restrain my laughter; for, indeed, there are "flat-dutch"-headed gentlemen
in his congregation who might as well have come up at the end of a cabbage
stalk for all the thinking they do. But I need not tell you that the
magazine containing the profane treatise on consciousness was burned,
while a livid picture was drawn of my own future if I persisted in
stealing forbidden fruit from this particular tree of knowledge.
But your last letter put me into a more serious frame of mind. And I _am_
complimented that you entertain the hope that I may be of assistance in
re-establishing the lost bond between you and real life. But do you know
that you have appealed to the missionary instincts of a barbarian? The
attributes of patience and indulgence do not belong to natures like mine.
Never has any affliction worked out patience in me, never has my strongest
affection taken the form of indulgence. In me Love and Friendship, Sorrow
and Gladness, take fiercer forms of expression.
But I will not conceal from you the fact that from the first I have felt
in our relationship a curious sensation of magic in one opposed to mystery
in the other. I have felt the abandon and madness of a happy dancer,
whirling around the dim edge of your shadow-land in the wild expectation
of beholding the disembodied spirit of you come forth to join me. It is
not that I _wished_ to work a charm, but the shadow of your mysterious
life draws me into the opposition of a counter-influence. The gift of
power is not in me to set foot across the magic line into the dim land of
your soul, any more than I could dissolve into a breath of moonlit air, or
a wave of the sea. For, in you, I seem to perceive some strange phenomenon
of a spirit changed to twilight gloom which covers all your hills and
valleys with the mournful shadow of approaching night. Often this
conception appalls me, but more frequently I conceive a wild energy from
the idea, as of one sent to rim the shadows in close and closer till some
star shall shine down and bless them into heroic form and substance. And I
have been amazed to find within my mind a witch's charm for working
rainbow miracles upon your dim sky,--but so it is. There have always been
mad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got hold
of the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of my
limitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be taken
seriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to create
the necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance.
Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows but
to-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a little
homeless wren seeking shelter in your valley.
XI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
So I am a disembodied ghost in your estimation, and you, "happy dancer,"
are whirling around the rim of my shadow-land with some sweet incantation
learned in your Georgia woods to conjure me out into the visible world.
Really I would call that a delicious bit of impertinence were I not afraid
the word might be taken in the wrong sense.
And yet, I must confess it, there is too much truth in what you say. Some
day, when I am bolder, I may unfold to you the whole story of my ruin--for
it is a ruin to be disembodied, is it not? I may even indicate the single
phrase, the mysterious word of all mysteries, that might evoke the spirit
from the past and incarnate him in the living present. Do not try to guess
the phrase, I beseech you, for it would frighten you now and so I should
lose my one chance of reincarnation. When I visit you in the South, some
day soon, I will tell you the magic word I have learned.
What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap
tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as
tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at
playing Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a mere
battling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your home
by Dr. Minot's heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadow
fight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed,
was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you think
of me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit to
a rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precocious
Mr. Pound-text printed in the New York _Observer_ when he was as much as
nine years old--and the sermon might be worse.
I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faith
that I passed through a few years later I can no more realise than I can
now realise your father's blessed assurance of heaven. I know vaguely that
it was a time of unspeakable agony for me, a rending asunder, as it were,
of soul and body. The doctrine was bred into my bones; I saw the folly of
it intellectually, but the emotional comfort of it was the very
quintessence of my life. The struggle came upon me alone and I was without
help or guidance. Into those few years of boyish vacillation, I see now
that the whole tragedy of more than a century of human experience was
thrust. One day I sat in church listening to a sermon of appealing
eloquence: "And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the
world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil." Was I too deliberately turning my back on the light? I hid my face
and cried. That was the end. I came out of the church free, but I had
suffered too much. Something passed from my life that day which nothing
can replace; for perfect faith, like love, comes to a man but once.
1 was empty of comfort and without resting-place for my spirit. Then said
I: Look you, belief in this religion as dogma is gone; why not hold fast
to its imaginative beauty! If revelation is a fraud, at least the
intricacies of this catholic faith have grown up from the long yearning of
the human heart, and possess this inner reality of corresponding with our
spiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism,
trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. But
in the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham,
a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindness
of true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now a
grown man.
Then by some inner guidance I turned to India. How shall I tell you what I
found in the philosophies of that land! One thing will surprise you.
Instead of pessimism I found in India during a certain period of time a
happiness, an exultation of happiness, such as the world to-day cannot
even imagine. And I found that this happiness sprang from no pretended
revelation but from a profound understanding of the heart. Do this, said
the books, and you will feel thus, and so step by step to the consummation
of ecstasy. I read and was amazed; I understood and knew that I too, if my
will were strong, might slip from bondage and be blessed. But I saw
further that the path lay away from this world, that I must renounce every
desire which I had learned to call good, that I must strip my soul naked
of all this civilisation which we have woven in a loom of three thousand
years. The dying command of Buddha terrified me: "All things pass away;
work out your own salvation diligently!" The words were spoken to comfort
and strengthen the bereaved disciples, but to me they sounded as an
imprecation, so different is the training of our society from theirs. The
loneliness and austerity of the command appalled me; I would not take the
first step, and turned back to seek the beautiful things of the eye.
And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal--not
Christianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement may
sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt
love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of
Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the
individual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of our
neighbour's earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians,
followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of the
world to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape--and none but a
strong man shall open that door.
So I look at the world and life, but, even as I write, something like a
foreboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father and
the straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether after
all the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this law
which darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim the joy of my
maturer years?
Alas, you who venture to trip so gayly about the rim of my shadow-land
with your brave incantations, behold what spirit of gloom and malignant
mutterings you have evoked from the night. I have written more than I
meant--too much, I fear.
XII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
An evangelist has been here this week. He fell upon us like a howling
dervish who had fed fanaticisms on locusts and wild honey. And he has
stirred up the spiritual dust of this community by showing an intimacy
with God's plans in regard to us very disconcerting to credulously minded
sinners. As for me, I have passed this primer-state of religious emotion.
I am sure a kind God made me, and so I belong to Him, good or bad. In any
case I cannot change the whole spiritual economy of Heaven with my poor
prayers and confessions. I try to think of my shortcomings, therefore, as
merely the incidents of an eternal growth. I shall outlive them all in the
course of time, quite naturally, perennially, as the trees outlive the
blight of winter and put forth each year a new greenness of aspiring
leaves. I dare not say that I know God, and I will not believe some
doctrines taught concerning Him; but I keep within the principle of life
and follow as best I can the natural order of things. And for the most
part I feel as logically related to the divine order as the flowers are to
the seasons. I know that if this really is His world,
should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
Are you shocked, dear Shadow, at such a creed of sun and dust?--you, a
dishoused soul, wandering like a vagrant ghost along life's green edge?
After all, I doubt if I am so far behind you in spiritual experience. The
difference is, I have two heavens, that orthodox one of my imagination,
and this real heaven-earth of which I am so nearly a part. But you have
forced the doors of mystery and escaped before your time. And you can
never return to the old dust-and-daisy communion with nature, yet you are
appalled at the loneliness and the terrible sacrifices made by a man in
your situation. Your spiritual ambition has outstripped your courage. You
are an adventurer, rather than an earnest pilgrim to Mecca.
And yet day after day as I have weathered farther and farther back in the
church, like a little white boat with all my sails reefed to meet the
gospel storm of damnation that has been raging from the pulpit, I have
thought of you and your Indian philosophy, by way of contrast, almost as a
haven of refuge. Our religion seems to me to have almost the limitations
of personality. There can be no other disciples but Christian disciples.
Our ethics are bounded by doctrines and dogmas. But, whether Buddhist or
Christian, the final test of initiation is always the same--"All things
pass away, work out your own salvation with diligence," "Die to the
world," "Present your bodies a living sacrifice"--and you would not make
these final renunciations. You "turned back to seek the beautiful things
of the eye." Well, if one is only wise enough to know what the really
beautiful things are, it is as good a way as any to spin up to God.
Meanwhile, I doubt if that "Western ideal," the kind-hearted naturalism
which "makes a fetish of our neighbour's welfare," will hold you long.
Already you "see one door" of escape. I wonder into what starry desert of
heaven it leads.
Do you know, I cannot rid myself of the notion that yours is an enchanted
spirit, always seeking doors of escape; but at the moment of exit the wild
wings that might have borne you out fail. Some earth spell casts you back,
incarnate once more. A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desires
of your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye,"
that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like a
sweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And prophecies
cannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentences
which shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimes
think,--like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tall
enough, only to be crowned at last with a white flag of blooms.
And do not expect me to pray you through these open ways of escape. I only
watch them to wish you may never win through. Something has changed me and
set my heart to a new tune. I must have already made my escape, for it
seems to me that I am on the point of becoming immortal. As I pass along
the world, I am Joy tapping the earth with happy heels. I am gifted all at
once with I do not know what magic, so that all my days are changed to
heaven. And almost I could start a resurrection of "beautiful things" only
to see you so glad. But that will never be. There are always your wings to
be reckoned with; and with them you are ever ready to answer the voices
you hear calling you from the night heavens, from the temples and tombs of
the East.
Yesterday I saw a woman sitting far back in the shadows of the church
wearing such a look of sadness that she frightened me. It was not goodness
but sorrow that had spiritualised her face. And to me she seemed a wan
prisoner looking through the windows of her cell, despairing, like one who
already knows his death sentence. "What if after all I am mistaken," I
thought, "and there really is occasion for such grief as that!" I could
think of nothing but that white mystery of sorrow piercing the gloom with
mournful eyes. And when at last the "penitents" came crowding the altar
with quaking cowardly knees, I fell upon mine and prayed: "Dear Lord, I am
Thine, I will be good! Only take not from me the joy of living here in the
green valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish than
the sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, asking
for heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forests
as sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more.
You see, dear "Spirit of gloom," that I have sent you all my little
scriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings." My God is a pastoral
Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of
philosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana,
revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the
thoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did you
ever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you the
heathen for your inheritance"?
XIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of
perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's
Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted
materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on
this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, I
say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes
moral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things that
are in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks under
the flowers?
As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new.
Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown into
the religion of men,--do you suppose that this was not known to the world
before? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enough
in the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working at
least, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis of
Aristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zoon_
(your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The
"social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we live
peacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existence
in a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched with
that sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of its
present manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does not
Virgil call his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholding
the poverty of the city--
neque ille
Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti?
And is not the _AEneid_ surcharged with pitying love for mankind, "the
sense of tears in mortal things"? So the life and words of St. Francis of
Assisi are full of the breath of brotherly love--not brotherhood with all
men merely, but with the swallows and the coneys, the flowers, and even
the inanimate things of nature. And the letters of St. Catherine of Siena
are aflame with passionate love of suffering men.
But there is something deplorably new in these more modern books,
something which makes of humanitarianism a cloak for what is most lax and
materialistic in the age. I mean their false emphasis, their neglect of
the individual soul's responsibility to itself, their setting up of human
love in a shrine where hitherto we worshipped the image of God, their
limiting of morality and religion to altruism. I deny flatly that
"Democracy ... affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith," as
Miss Addams says; I deny that "to attain individual morality in an age
demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal
effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to
apprehend the situation"; I say we do _not_ "know, at last, that we can
only discover truth by rational and democratic interest in life." Why did
you quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction between
individual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite the
other way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely the
rumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, in
the upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul,
concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into the
noise and constant coming and going of the lower rooms to speak a word of
encouragement or admonition, but she returns soon to her own silence and
her own contemplation. (The heart of a St. Anthony in the desert of Egypt,
the heart of many a lonely Hindu sage knows a divine joy of communication
of which Hull House with its human sympathies has no conception.) Morality
is the soul's debt to herself.
It is a striking and significant fact that these humanitarians are
continually breaking the simplest rules of honesty and decent living.
Rousseau, the father of them all, sending his children (the children of
his body, I mean) to the foundling asylum, is a notorious example of this;
and John Howard is another. I have in my own experience found these people
impossible to live with.
Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personal
integrity by allusion to a novel which comes from another
college-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden of
Christopher_, published three or four years ago,--a clever book withal and
rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his
university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with
college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance
with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by
competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his
hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his
factory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates this
trust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and,
as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in a
paragraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of the
story, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero to
sacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people is
a higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense which
would have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himself
and to the world.
I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive of
right thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which has
relaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For that
reason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil does
not shock us as it once did," I am filled with anger. I wonder at the
blindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth as
this: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and
have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive
respect."--Have we?
XIV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed to
breathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did I
make clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to any
contempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike and
distrust it for its false emphasis and for its perversion of morality--and
the two faults are practically one.
Last night I was reading in _Piers Plowman_ and came upon a passage which
exactly illustrates what I mean. The old Monk of Malvern might be called
the very fountainhead in English letters of that stream of human
brotherhood which has at last spread out into the stagnant pool of
humanitarianism. He wrote when the rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw
was fermenting, when the people were beginning to cry out for their
rights, and his vision is instinct with the finest spirit of love for the
downtrodden and the humble. Yet never once does his compassion or
indignation lead him to neglect spiritual things for material. Let me copy
out a few of his lines on "Poverte":
And alle the wise that evere were,
By aught I kan aspye,
Preiseden poverte for best lif,
If pacience it folwed,
And bothe bettre and blesseder
By many fold than richesse.
For though it be sour to suffre,
Thereafter cometh swete;
As on a walnote withoute
Is a bitter barke,
And after that bitter bark,
Be the shelle aweye,
Is a kernel of comfort
Kynde to restore.
So is after poverte or penaunce
Paciently y-take;
For it maketh a man to have mynde
In God, and a gret wille
To wepe and to wel bidde,
Whereof wexeth mercy,
Of which Christ is a kernelle
To conforte the soule.
Imagine, if you can, such a speech in the precincts of Hull House! I am
not concerned to exalt poverty, I know how much suffering it creates in
the world; and yet I say that an age to which poverty is only a
degradation without any possible spiritual compensation, is an age of
materialism. I wish I might follow the use of the word _comfort_ from its
early nobility as you see it here down to its modern degeneracy, where it
signifies the mere satisfaction of the body. The history of that word
would be an eloquent sermon. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand
what I mean by the false emphasis of our humanitarianism? And do you see
why I could not stomach your review of Miss Addams's book?--I am sending
by express several novels, among them....
XV
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Here in the South we are born into our traditions and we generally die by
them. We never encourage the mental extravagance of adding new dimensions
to our minds. When you have had an hour's conversation with any of us, or
have exchanged three letters, you can be comfortably sure of what we think
on any subject under the sun. Thus, you see, I was wholly unprepared for
the point of view expressed in your last two letters. I thought you were a
gentle disciple,--following the lights behind us indeed; but I did not
suspect that you were bent upon this journey through the dust of centuries
with the temper of a modern savage.
However, it seems a man must have either ass's ears or a cloven foot; and,
soon or late, most of us expect to find our hero in Bottom's predicament.
But I would rather have acknowledged the beam in my own eye than have
discovered this diabolical split in your heel. All my life I have been
familiar with the inhumanity of the merely spiritually minded. And I think
it was because your own spirit was not denominational, nor fitted to any
dogma of my acquaintance, that I trusted it. But really, the product is
always the same. And I begin to wonder if there is not something
fundamentally cruel in the law that governs soul-life. No matter what the
age or the colour of the doctrine is, those most highly developed in this
way generally show a _conscientious selfishness_ that is dehumanising.
They have no tender sense of touch, their relation to the world about them
is obtuse; and for this reason, I think, they excite aversion in normally
minded people.
I leave you, my dear sir, to "expose the serpent lurking under the
flowers." For my part, I believe humanitarianism is the better part of any
religion. And while my knowledge of social orders does not reach so far
back into the grave-dust of the past, I am unwilling to agree with you
that it is "coeval with human nature." But it is one of the ends toward
which all religions must tend,--for if a man love not his brother whom he
hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?--But I forget! Love
is not essential to your sort of Nirvana mysticism. In you, spirituality
is a sort of cruel aspiration toward personal perfection. Still, that
little scripture represents the advance made by this modern religion of
Christianity over your Hindu theosophy.
Do you know I think a man's religious philosophy ought to fit him
particularly for his present environment of earth and flesh. One cannot
tell so much about the life after death. It may be necessary to make us
over in the twinkling of an eye, and even to change the very direction of
all spirit life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are;
and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way of
dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more
mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves,
while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a
negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human
obligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none the
less real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by a
philosophic pose. You see I am reading your last two letters by the light
of certain earlier confessions.
And again I do not think you can fairly complain of humanitarianism
because in some books "it is synonymous with all that is lax and
materialistic in the age." The author of a novel is never so concerned to
tell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory.
You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can you
judge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a
decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The
scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest
nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that in
your "own experience" you have found these humanitarians "impossible to
live with." I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is,
Did they find _you_ impossible to live with? Come to think of it, I would
rather live with a humanitarian, myself, even if his soul was carnally
bow-legged. But my sort of charity is so perverse, so awry with humour,
that the constant contemplation of a man trying to wriggle out of the
flesh through some spiritual key-hole, made by his own imagination, into a
form of existence much higher than agreeable, would be, to say the least
of it, diverting.
You copy several sentences from the Hull-House book in your letter and cry
to me in an accusing voice to know why I quoted them in my review "with
approval." Suppose I did not comprehend their important relation to the
subject from your point of view? But I do understand enough to know that
the "social compunction" in Aristotle's day was a mere theory, a sublime
doctrine practised by a few, whereas now it is a great governing
principle, a dynamic power in the social order of mankind. And I challenge
your accuracy in calling such social sympathy "only a rumour in the lower
rooms of our existence." My notion is that the choir voice of it has
already reached that grand third story of yours, and that the "solitary
soul" in the "upper chamber" will presently find herself along with other
traditions--in the attic! Oh, I know your sort! You stay in your upper
chamber as long as atmospheric conditions make it comfortable. But before
this time I have known you to sneak down into those same "lower rooms" to
warm yourself by humanitarian hearthstones. And that you are not nearly so
immortal as you think you are is proved by these winter chills along the
spine. There come occasions when you get tired of your own stars and long
to feel the thrill of that royal life-blood that leaps like a ruby river
of love through the grimy, toiling, battling humanitarian world beneath
you. Did you once intimate to me that if ever I conjured you out of the
shadows which seem to surround you, I should be horrified at the vision?
Well, I am!
XVI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
So your servant has a cloven hoof and just escapes the adornment of ass's
ears! Dear, dear, what a temper! But, jesting aside, you must not suppose
I abhor the cant of humanitarianism from any thin-blooded selfishness or
outworn apathy. Have I not made this clear to you? It is the negative side
of humanitarianism (the word itself is an offence!), and not its portion
of human love that vexes my soul.
Through one of the crooked streets not far from Park Row that wind out
from under the grim arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, I often pass on
business. Here on the step at the entrance to a noisome court, where
heaven knows how many families huddle together behind the walls of these
monstrous printing-houses, there sits day after day a child, a little
pale, peaked boy, who seems to belong to no one and to have nothing to
do--sits staring out into the filthy street with silent, wistful eyes.
There is only misery and endurance on his face, with some wan reflection
of strange dreams smothered in his heart. He sits there, waiting and
watching, and no man knows what world-old philosophy comforts his weary
brain. The face haunts me; I see it at times in my working hours; it peers
at me often from the surging night-throngs of upper Broadway; it passes
dimly across my vision before I fall asleep. It has become a symbol to me
of the long agony of human history. Because I know the misery of that face
and the evil that has produced it, because I know that misery has been in
the world from the beginning and shall endure to the end, and because my
heart is sickened at the thought,--that is why I rebel so bitterly against
a doctrine that turns away from all spiritual consolation for some vainly
builded hope of a socialistic paradise on this earth. I have heard one of
these humanitarians avow that he and practically all his friends were
materialists, and such they are even when they will not admit it. Dear
girl, believe me, I have lived over in my mind and suffered in my heart
the long toil and agony which the human race has undergone in its effort
to wrest some assurance of spiritual joy and peace from these clouds of
illusion about us; I have read and felt what the Hindu ascetic has written
of lonely conflict in the wilderness; I have heard the Greek philosophers
reason their way to faith; I have comprehended the ecstasy of the early
Christians; I have taken sides in the high warfare of mediaeval realists
against the cheap victory of nominalism. I know that the word of
deliverance has been spoken by all these and that it is always the same
word. And now come these humanitarians, with their starved imaginations,
who in practice, if not in speech, deny all the spiritual insight of the
race and seek to lower the ideal of mankind to their fools' commonwealth
of comfort in this world. Because I revolt from this false and canting
conception of brotherly love, am I therefore devoted to "conscientious
selfishness"? Ah, I beg you to revise your reading of this book of my
heart, and to remodel your criticism.
But I am saying not a word of what is most in my thoughts. In two days I
shall set out for a trip to the South which will bring me to Morningtown.
Will you turn away in horror if you see a wretched creature hobbling with
cloven hoof up the scented lane of your village? For sweet charity's sake,
for your own sweeter sake, believe that his heart is full of love however
wrong his mind may be.
-----
[1] Much of the routine matter in regard to
reviewing has been omitted from these letters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Second Part
which shows how the editor visits Jessica
in the country, and how love
and philosophy sometimes clash.
XVII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
WRITTEN AFTER RETURNING FROM MORNINGTOWN
MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
It is all different and the morning has forgotten to return since I left
you where your village meets the great world. Have you kept God's common
dayspring imprisoned among your garden trees and flowers? What shall I
say? What shall I not say? Only this, that I gave my happiness into your
hands and you have broken it and let it drop to the ground. See what a
shipwreck I have suffered of all my dreams. These long years of solitary
reading and study I have been gathering up in my imagination the passions
and joys and hopes of a thousand dead lovers,--the longing of Menelaus for
Helen, the outcry of Catullus for Lesbia, the worship of Dante for
Beatrice--all these I have made my own, believing that some day my love of
a woman should be rendered fair in her eyes by these borrowed colours; and
now I have failed and lost; and what I would give, you have accounted as
light and insufficient. Is there no speech left to tell you all the truth?
I am a little bewildered, and have not been able to pluck up heart of
courage. Write me some word of familiar consolation; do not quite shut the
door upon me until my eyes grow accustomed to this darkness. All the light
is with you, and the beauty that God has given the world, all the meaning
of human life,--and I turn my back on this and go out into the night
alone. Dear girl, I would not utter a word of reproach. I know that my
love, which seemed to me so good, may be as nothing to you, is indeed not
worthy of you, for you are more than all my dreams--and yet it was all
that I had. I shall learn perhaps to write to you as a mere reviewer of
books;--the irony of it.
XVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Can you believe it? I was absurdly glad to receive your letter this
morning. Ever since you went away I have felt so brave and desolate--like
a poor dryad who has fought her way out of her own little kingdom of love
and peace and green silence, for the sake of a foreign ideal which really
belongs to the world at large. (I shouldn't wonder if I did become a
deaconess after all!) In my effort to escape a romantic sacrifice to a
strange heathen divinity, I find myself offered upon this common altar in
the name of a theory, Humanitarianism. My smoke arises. I have been
consumed, and now I write you merely in the spirit,--you see I am learning
_your_ incantations.
But being disembodied, I may at least be truthful. Besides, it is
sometimes wiser to make long-distance confessions than to tell the truth
face to face. Then listen, dear Heart, it was not Philip, but poor Jessica
who was vanquished that day as we walked through the lanes and fields
around Morningtown. I do not know how to tell you, but of a sudden I am
becoming learned in all the joys and griefs of this world. There is a
sweetheart reason for them all, lying buried somewhere. For love is
nature's vocation in us, I think. We cannot escape it. Our vision is
already love-lit when the prince comes. All he needs do is to step within
the radiant circle. Oh, my Heart, is it not terrible when you think of it,
that we may keep our wills, but our hearts we cannot keep! They go from us
happy pilgrims, and return unto us old and grey, sometimes lost and
forsaken.
You came so fast upon the heels of your other letter that I did not have
time to put on my shield and buckler before you were here in the flesh,
formidable, real, cloven hoof and all! I was frightened and
militant,--frightened lest you should win from me the freedom of my heart,
militant for the freedom of my will. Well, at least I kept the latter, but
I can tell you, it is making a poor bagpipe tune of the victory. When I
went down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy,
dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage
1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you will
bear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. In
any case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and as
you stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my hands
clasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candles
suddenly lighted in an open grave. You had not come merely to make peace
with me, you had my capitulation ready, but I knew then I should never
sign. Let the dead bury their dead; as for me, I am too much alive to die
long and amicably with any ghost of a philosopher in the "upper chamber."
I do not even belong in the "lower rooms," but outside under the skies of
our ever green world. I have already determined that if there is nothing
going on in heaven when I am translated thither, I will ask to be changed
into a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring round
and round the earth.
And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that I
do not really know _you_, only your mind. The time I saw you in New York
does not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicap
just to try each other's intellectual paces, did we not? But when you
ventured boldly down here upon my own heath--oh! that was a different
matter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should not
ride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew _you_. Well, you know
the dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by asking
his opinions or by classifying his face and expression according to
biological records. Now, a man's features are only his great-grand
somebody's modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may
not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my
own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but
friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and
virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little
heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover's wreath on
the Morningtown road beyond my father's church. And behold! it was as if
we had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs in
friendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for a
difference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did not
reach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity was
the ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the first
time I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty of
your spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimation
of Nature's indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth of
trees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassion
anywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact.
But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thought
pierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to the
life of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in the
cold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with the
trees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then I
asked myself this question: "What is the good, where is the wisdom in
loving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in life
or love?" Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayer
to be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannot
remember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leaves
upon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so that
you can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all my
will in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day,
perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but sound
as a brownie's. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in the
forest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poor
heart that was dead and shall live again,--a tall lady-tree as heartless
as any man-oak, or only a poor vine!
XIX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regrets
a witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes in
sackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I'd give half my forest now to
have back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, I
wish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman's heart yesterday,
to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach her
prudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that we
be generally true to the mood we are in.
When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of the
subject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference,
but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your "upper chamber"
and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge,
however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof of
your "higher nature." When my father, for instance, who has long suspected
the soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-fire
premises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that you
showed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict.
Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You are
angry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who the
Hull-House classes are,--people so poor and starved and cold that their
very souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy
who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you
have fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imagination
across the fair fields of youth's summer years. Believe me, the
humanitarian's calling seems stupid from your point of view because you
are born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-House
principles have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted the
whole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth,
then will be time enough for the spiritual luxury of such teachings as
yours.
The last batch of books has come, Creelman's novel, _Eagle Blood_, among
them. Evidently it is a story written to prove the intellectual and
commercial ascendency of Americans over mere Anglo-Saxons. The heroine and
a few romantic details are thrown in as a bait to the "average reader."
Alas for the "average reader"! How many crimes of this sort are committed
in his name! We can never hope to have a worthy literature until he has
been eliminated from the consciousness of those who make it. In the days
when he was not to be reckoned with, and men wrote for a very few
appreciative admirers and some desperately cruel critics, then Carlyle
began to swear at his "forty-million fool," and so attracted their
attention, and ever since we have had them with us, forty-million average
readers, calling for excitement and amusement. It is this same
"forty-million fool" who has made historical romances an inexhaustible
source of revenue to the writers of them. For he is naive, and has never
suspected the real dime-novel character of such fiction. Can you not get
some one to write an article outlining a plan by which the "average
reader" may be abolished?
XX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
DEAR JESSICA:
I will not for any consideration of custom put such a breach between my
dreams and reality as to go on addressing you in the old formal way. It
will be idle to protest; I have bought the privilege with a great price;
nay, I have even bought you, and no outcry of your rebel will shall ever
redeem you from this bondage to my hopes. One thing I know: there is no
power in all the world equal to love, and he who has this power may win
through every opposition. And was ever a man in such a position as mine?
Others have been compelled to overcome a prejudice against what was base
or unworthy in themselves, but I am forced to defend myself for my best
heritage of understanding. Would it help me in your esteem if I flung away
all my hard-won philosophy and ranged myself with the sentimentalists of
the day? I will not believe it. I will fight this upstart folly while
breath is in me, and I will teach you to fight it with me. This morning I
took that poor book of Miss Addams's and, in place of what you sent me,
wrote such a review as will quite astound the "forty-million fool" you so
despise--we agree there, at least. And all the while I was writing, I kept
saying to myself, How will Jessica answer that? and, Will not Jessica
believe now that my hatred of humanitarianism does not spring from
selfishness or contempt, but from sympathy for mankind?
Yet if anything could bring me to hate my brothers it would be this
monstrous certainty that my feeling towards them stands in the way of the
one supreme, all consuming desire of my heart. I could cry out in the
words of the _Imitation_:
"As often as I have gone among men, I have returned less a man"; for their
foolish chatter has stolen from me the possession without which we are
dwarfed and marred in our being. Your love is more to me than all the
hopes of men. You must hearken to me. I have charged the winds with my
passion; the scent of flowers shall tell you the sweetness of love; you
shall not walk among your beloved trees but their whispering shall repeat
the words they heard me speak. I will wrap you about with fancies and
dreams and passionate thoughts till no way of escape is left you. You
shall not read a book but some word of mine shall come between your eyes
and the printed page. You shall not hear a simple song but you shall
remember that music is the voice of love. You think that I have no heart
for the many and can therefore have no heart for one. Dear girl, my love
is so great that it has made me stronger a thousand times than you; there
is no escape for you.
As I passed the little goblin boy this morning I dropped a coin in his
hand and said: "It is from a lady in Georgia who loves you." His face
lighted up with surprise at the words (not at the money, for I have given
him that before), and I was glad to extend the benediction of your
sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish
as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor;
but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from
the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism,
sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew
of _isms_!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for an
impossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among men.
They are the followers of Simon Magus, these humanitarians; they would buy
the gifts of Heaven with a price; and their creed is the real Simonism.
Have you ever read the _Imitation_, and do you remember these verses?
For though I alone possessed all the comforts of the world and might
enjoy all the delights thereof, yet it is certain that they could
endure but a little.
Wherefore, O my soul, thou canst not be fully comforted, nor be
perfectly refreshed, save in God, the comforter of the poor and the
helper of the humble.
Let temporal things be for use, but set thy desire on the eternal.
Man draweth nearer to God so as he departeth further from all earthly
comfort.
You have taught me to love, dear Heart; and now, as you see, you are
teaching me to be orthodox. Do not think I shall give you up; there is
only one power greater than my desire, and that is Death. I would not end
with so ill-omened a word, but rather with your own sweet name, Jessica.
XXI
JESSICA TO PHILIP
DEAR FATHER CONFESSOR:
You observe, I do not retaliate by addressing you as Dear Philip. After
reflecting, I conclude that this would be an undue concession to make,
while the above title removes you to a safer sphere. It limits and
qualifies your relationship and at the same time affords me the happy
advantage of confessing my heart to you. Really, I have always felt the
need of such an officer in my spiritual kingdom. I could never reconcile
myself to the incongruity of confessing in our experience meetings. It
seemed to me that sharing my confidence with so many people was heterodox
to nature itself. For this reason I have always thought that while
Protestantism is based upon a nobler theory of the truth, Roman
Catholicism is founded upon a much shrewder knowledge of human nature.
However, I do not come seeking absolution for any sins. Such shortcomings
as I have are so personal, so really a part of dear me, that I should
scarcely be complete without them. They are vixenish plagues of character
that distinguish me from more conventional saints. But now that I have
willed myself away from you, I need no longer conceal my heart. My love
has been shriven, and, like a little white ghost out of heaven, must hark
back to you occasionally for a blessing.
To begin with, then, when your letter came this morning, I took just a
peep inside to see if it was good, and then hurried away to our forest to
enjoy it, for I always feel more at home with you there. And although the
season is so far advanced that the whole earth is chilled and desolate, my
heart was like the springtide, swelling with gladness. Joy reached to my
vagabond heels, and I had much ado to maintain the resignation gait of a
minister's daughter through the village streets. And once out of sight I
kissed my hand quickly over my shoulder till my face burned. For had you
not promised to attend me? "I will wrap you about with fancies and
dreams," you said. I was like a young-lady comet drawing after me a
luminous trail of love. I began to comprehend the advantages of my
position, to rejoice in my sacrifice. I caught the finer aspiration of
love, like one who lays down his life and finds it again in nobler forms.
Brave, good father, this thing that you have revealed to me is like a
sweet eternity. It neither begins nor ends: only we do that. When our time
comes we are swept into the current of it, happy, predestined atoms, and
afterwards we are lost out of it like the leaves on the trees. But love is
like the wind in their branches; it never is gone. So it seems to me now
when all my heart's leaves are stirred to gladness by the dear gale of
love.