For my faith, of which I boasted so valiantly, has changed since I have

seen you. Faith, I had thought, was a form of insight into the illusion of

earthly things, of transient joys and fears. And always a little dread

would creep into my heart lest love, too, should prove to be such an

illusion, the last great deception of all, binding the bewildered soul in

a web of phantom desires. So I still felt as I walked with you that first

evening out into the circle of your trees. And there, dear Jessica, in the

waiting silence and the grey shadows of that seclusion I put my arms about

you and would have drawn you to my heart. Ah, shall I not remember the

wild withdrawing of your eyes as I stooped over your face! And then with a

cry of defiance and one swift bound, you tore yourself loose from me and

ran like a frightened dryad deeper into the forest. That was a mad chase,

and forever and forever I shall see your lithe form darting on before me

through the mingled shadow and light. And when at last I caught you and

held you fast, shall I not remember how you panted and fluttered against

me like a bird in the first terror of captivity! And then, suddenly, you

were still, and looked up into my face, and in your eyes I beheld the

wonder of a strange mystery which no words can name. Only I knew that my

dread was forever at end. It was for a second--nay, an eternity, I

think--as if we two were rapt out of the world, out of ourselves, into

some infinite abysm of life. It was as if the splendour of the apocalypse

broke upon us, and poured upon our eyes the ineffable whiteness of heaven.

I knew in that instant that love is not an illusion, but the one reality,

the one power that dispels illusion, the very essence of faith. I

shuddered when the vision passed; but its memory shall never fade. So much

I learned on that day.

And I also learned, or thought I learned, that your father's real

objection to my suit lay not so much in his hostility to my views, as in

his fear of losing you out of his life. And as I talked with him, even

plead with him, I was filled with pity and with something like remorse for

the sorrow I was to bring upon his heart. He is a saint, dear Love, but

very human. You have said that I acted like a robber toward you. I could

smile at your fury, but to your father I do indeed play the robber's part.

Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me and will give me the one

jewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It is

hard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own.

XXXVIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all my

lilies changed once more to roses--as they did, you remember how often,

while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South you

know we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northern

women. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, to

recall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose of

love burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic of

colour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to have

mystified you.

And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as the

shadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a tryst with you

beneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless and

terrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will be

the first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!)

And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright for

me, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that I

could ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer from

this that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shall

have a saner reason for withholding them,--that of economy. For if

frugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be true

in love as in the less romantic experiences of life.

And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finished

me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered

woman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your

illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as the

little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped

yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach

my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal

emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so

sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?

Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not

everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered

soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with

many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained.

No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly

procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year,

inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as

for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to

grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!

Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there

is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for

him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but

acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be

happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches

the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally,

however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one

should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my

alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic

indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be

jealous!

XXXIX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener

and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil

was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first

great parent to me?

There is a garden in her face,

Where roses and white lilies show--

and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the

one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheek

that the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? And

was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose in

aromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I

could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in

going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in

prophecy of your many divine properties.

Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, for

these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions!

I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and

rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of

the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic

summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under

the covers and think of the day's work.

I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet,

bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe

when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a

Latin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: Does

Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)

I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little.

Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your

Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our

Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air

hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down

upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the

cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I

must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat

together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language

was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled

up, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet,

that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand

forbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads,

fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to

think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb

fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aerial vision

and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips

had all the fragrance of humanity.

Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present

bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read

of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand

seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the

groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with

the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise

before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words,

you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings

to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they

clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and

beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every

image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more

fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain

is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You

see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your

mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away.

With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:

VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS

Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found,

The moss-grown rock, the pines around!

And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms,

Catullus and his love's alarms.

_Da basia mille_, so the poem ran;

And, lip to lip, our hearts began

With ne'er a word translate the words complete:--

Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?

A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more,

And then confound the telltale score!

So may we live and love, till life be out,

And let the greybeards wag and flout.

Yon failing sun shall rise another morn,

And the thin moon round out her horn;

But we, when once we lose our waning light,--

Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!

XL

JESSICA TO PHILIP

A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have

ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if

love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to

the classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might

measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his

morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is

we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy

between the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than our

ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no

other gods can afford to bless them!

Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship

with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is

gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian

scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate

even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener

appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is

the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It

is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical

experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into

the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these

ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their

definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better

than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a

form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual

faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show

a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to

last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts.

This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our

prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent

has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my

heart as warm as kisses.

But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in

father's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _The

Forest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in the

library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as

the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he

settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst

fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an

Indian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is

based upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve

truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in

other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime

authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard,

for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no

female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your

heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought

he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be

alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the

worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a

frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to take

some radical stand against us.

Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a factitious

interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I

am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest,

particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of

"Misther Towers."

"Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone before

the library fire.

"Nope,"--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent

sympathy.

"Did he often talk to you?"

"Yes, when we went for a walk."

"Tell me what about, Jackie."

"I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation.

"You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated.

"Never did know. He talks queer!"--I tittered and Jack wrinkled up his

face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.

"Did he ever mention any of his friends," I persevered.

"Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,"--the little

scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!

"But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?"

"Never did!"--I was wounded.

"What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst.

"His pipe," he affirmed without hesitation.

"And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he

made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his

hand to 'em."

"Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?"

"Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed."

"Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed;

Mr. Towers was very rude to you!"

I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever

smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how

jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I

could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to

a prayer.

XLI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and

cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that

book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him

into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in

his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to

see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is

false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of

those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how

unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They

beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was,

not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and

dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body

is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical

civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn

away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A

man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is

in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our

salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some

day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation

according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality

to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of

reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some

way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to

be my wife.

And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my

affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp

write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside,

he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my

pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment,

(for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before

my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees

down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as

she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweet

Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake

into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself."

.la begin XLII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had cast

off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is

open to me after what has happened.

After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father

thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward

us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he

deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and

destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit,

and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will

become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is

entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am

sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore

been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this

correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any

protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a

fanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon

superstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when

opposed.

And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me

from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand

he has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his

remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will

write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in

a way a prior authority over him.

Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have tried

to take refuge in the biologist's definition of love,--that it is

essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the

blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an

epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the

gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness

out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my

glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,--only that

it is best for us both to forget now if we can.

XLIII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR JESSICA:

My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to

Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have

prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if

I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle

deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house while

he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the

meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the

world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the

prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words

we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay

in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:

So let us live and love till life be out,

And let the greybeards wag and flout.

And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my

ears,--that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joy

you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not

seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of

passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me

then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have

cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have

brought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle with

religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that

resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know

Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And

so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the

poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has

troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that

no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you.

And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you

will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be

garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and

within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will

you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but

Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world,

and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There

has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name.

But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting

after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to

you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses.

And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You

are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not

exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting

loves. And once again, good-bye.

(Enclosed with the foregoing)

DEAR SIR:

My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to

you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you,

sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step

in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to

cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and

esteem.

Faithfully yours,

EZRA DOANE.

XLIV

EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the

bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of

anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the

stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after

another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written

to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself

that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy,

far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has

been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one

with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet

reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of

sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through

gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some

jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal

deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many

madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?

And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I

move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone.

Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past.

And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who

beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach,

beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your

grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so

unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a

frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my

heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that

the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense

of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my

passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade

against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase

of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast

for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my

true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed

away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the

religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I

supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined

that the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least

learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the

present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own

calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of

Fate that warns us to be humble.

And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their

foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that

have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:

_Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also.

XLV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was

walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring

floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest.

Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise

of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly.

Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree,

holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw

the woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even passed

between them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone.

I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walk

away still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is the

meaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting till

the last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no better

than glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest?

Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces of

my physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess the

thing I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and then

without reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumbling

run. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I left

the Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness still

surged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remoteness

from life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; I

was bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, but

were shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the passion of

love, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turned

my brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit some

atrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageous

insult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, some

chance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changed

these demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physical

achievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home and

the blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it ten

years hence?

XLVI

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR SIR:

I have not wrote you before. This is a beautiful place. I like it,

especially the young lady. The old man have been acting wild, like a cop

when he can't find out who done it. The difference is that it is the bible

in the old man and the devil in the cop. He says you have hoodooed the

young lady, and he says let you be enathermered. This is a religious cuss

word. The young lady don't cry. She is dead game, and have lost her

colour.

So good by,

Yours trewly,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--The young lady have quit the family prayers, but me and the old man

have to say ours just the same, only more so.

XLVII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

A wise man of the sect of Simon Magus has replied to an assault of mine on

humanitarianism by trying to show that in this one faith of modern days

are summed up all the varying ideals of past ages,--renunciation,

self-development, religion, chivalry, humanism, pantheistic return to

nature, liberty. Ah, my dear sir, I envy you your easy, kindly vision.

Indeed, all these do persist in a dim groping way, empty echoes of great

words that have been, bare shadows without substance. What made them

something more than graceful acts of materialism was that each and all

ended not in themselves or in worldly accommodation, but in some purpose

outside of human nature as our humanitarians comprehend that nature.

Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel more

of bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of the

flesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purging

and making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of a

man's own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit of

beauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brother

to its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circle

in which humanitarianism gyrates. My dear foe might read Castiglione's

book of _The Courtier_ and learn how high the Platonic ideal of the better

humanists floated above the charitable mockery of its name to-day. As for

religion--go to almost any church in the land and hear what exhortations

flow from the pulpit. The intellectual contention of dogmas is

forgotten--and better so, possibly. But more than that: for one word on

the spirit or on the way and necessity of the soul's individual growth,

you will hear a thousand on the means of bettering the condition of the

poor; for one word on the personal relation of man to his God, you will

hear a thousand on the duties of man to man. Woe unto you, preachers of a

base creed, hypocrites! These things ought ye to have done, and not to

leave the other undone! You have betrayed the faith and forgotten your

high charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world's use of

materialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Like

your father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift of

God with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with a

kiss of brotherhood! Now might the Keeper of the Keys cry out to-day with

other meaning:

"How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake

Creep and intrude and climb into the fold!

Of other care they little reckoning make

Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest.

Blind mouths!"

XLVIII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

Reading a foolish book on the Literature of Indiana (!) and find this

sentence on the first page: "It is not of so great importance that a few

individuals within a State shall, from time to time, show talent or

genius, as that the general level of cultivation in the community shall be

continually raised." Whereupon the author proceeds to glorify the "general

level" through a whole volume. Now the noteworthy thing about this

particular sentence is the fact that it was set down as a mere truism

needing no proof, and that it was no doubt so accepted by most readers of

the book. In reality the sentiment is so far from a truism that it would

have excited ridicule in any previous age; it might almost be said to

contain the fundamental error which is responsible for the low state of

culture in the country. Unfortunately the point cannot be profitably

argued out, for it resolves itself at last into a question of taste. There

are those who are chiefly interested in the life of the intellect and the

imagination. They measure the value of a civilisation by the kind of

imaginative and intellectual energy it displays, by its top growth in

other words. They crave to see life express itself thus, _sub specie

oeernitatis_, and apart from this conversion of human energy and emotion

into enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transient

human lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuation

of the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of one

masterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfare

of a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectual

welfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently to

the products of the higher imagination. There are others for whom this

life of the imagination has only a lukewarm interest, for the reason that

their own faculties are weak and stunted. Naturally they think it a slight

matter whether genius appear to create what they and their kind can only

dimly enjoy; on the contrary, they hold it of prime importance that

material welfare and the form of mental cunning which subdues material

forces should be widely diffused among the people.

Now no one would say a word against raising "the general level of

cultivation"; the higher it is raised the better. Only the cherishing of

this ideal becomes pernicious when it is made more sacred than the

appearance of individual genius. Nor is it proper to say that the

appearance of genius is itself contingent on the level of cultivation.

There is much confusion of thought here. The influence of the people on

literature is invariably attended with danger. It has its element of good,

for the people cherish those instinctive passions and notions of morality

which keep art from falling into artificiality. But refinement,

distinction, form, spirituality--all that makes of art a transcript of

life _sub specie oeernitatis_--are commonly opposed to the popular

interest and are even distrusted by the people. The attitude of the

Elizabethan playwrights toward their audiences gives food for reflection

on this head. Just so sure as the ideal of general cultivation is made

paramount, just so sure will the higher culture become degraded to this

consideration, and with its degradation the general cultivation itself

will grow base and material.

XLIX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I lead a strange dual existence, the intensity of whose contrast is almost

uncanny. After sitting for hours at my desk working on my History of

Humanitarianism, I throw myself wearily on the sofa and smoke. And as the

grey fumes float above my face, slowly they lay a spell upon me like the

waving of mesmeric hands. I lose consciousness of the objects about me,

the very walls dissolve away in a mist, and I am lifted as it were on

softly beating pinions and borne swift and far like a bird. The sensation

is curiously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, yet it never causes

me surprise. Sometimes I am carried out into the wide sky and soar as it

seems for hours without ever alighting, until I am brought to myself with

a sense of rapid falling. At other times I am borne to the blessed forest

where my love walks, and always then the same thing happens. I know not

whether it is my spirit or some emanation of my body, but, however it is,

I am there always pursuing her as once I did in reality, until at last I

lay hold of her and draw her into my arms beneath that ancient oak. I kiss

her once and twice and a third time, gazing the while into her startled

eyes. Then an inexpressible sweetness takes possession of me, a shudder

runs through my veins, and of a sudden all is dark; I am sinking down,

down, in unfathomable abysses, until abruptly I awake. No words can convey

the mingled reality and remoteness of these sensations. Jessica, Jessica,

you have troubled the very sources of my being; you have abandoned me to

contend with shadows and the fear of shadows.

L

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR MR. TOWERS:

You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up here

and bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark of

safety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lord

have turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young lady

that is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now.

She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church.

She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jolly

all the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiar

spirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets him

under a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but I

creep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her into

something else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now and

have took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. He

knows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardened

her heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible,

nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this,

I will show it to her.

Your trew friend,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she give

it to the old man.

LI

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination,

and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are the

sentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and without

grip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and,

being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they

surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby

and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical

socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been

perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the

real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away

from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a

fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain.

They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages,

having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in

the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though

they mask themselves in formulae of universal brotherhood.

LII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's.

It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that

exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of

the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by

destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections

it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who

has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As

with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate

oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the

regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping

his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure

with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to

think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled

along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted

by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his

book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the

proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying

the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his

life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that

of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they

gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He

looked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and through

that isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and even

a kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness his

mood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one's

self too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless a

strong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for without

these the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation to

throw away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifference

or something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often of

late and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of your

blessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference you

have cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare that

pursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determination

to work and in work achieve my own destiny.

LIII

PHILIP TO JACK

It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and often

I wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and you

were brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where you

are.

You must listen to everything Miss Jessica tells you about the trees and

birds, and learn to love all the beautiful things growing around you. I

remember there were four or five great trees in my father's garden when I

was a boy living in the country, and I loved them, each in a different

way, and had names for them and talked to them. One was an oak tree that

grew up almost to the clouds, and its boughs stood out stiff and square as

if nothing could bend them. That was the tree I went to when I had some

hard task to do and wanted strength. Another was an elm that always

whispered comfort to me when I was in trouble. I used to go to it as some

boys run to their mother, for I grew up like you without a mother's love,

and I did not even have any sweet lady like Miss Jessica to be fond of me.

You must ask Miss Jessica to teach you all she knows about the trees in

Morningtown, and you must listen to what she says to them. Perhaps she

will tell you about the famous oaks that grew in a place called Dodona,

and were wiser than any man or woman in the world. People used to talk

with them as Miss Jessica does with her favourite tree.

And now, dear Jack, I am going to tell you a story which I have made up

just for you. It isn't about trees exactly, but it all took place in a

deep forest that spread around a wonderful city. From the high white walls

of the town one could look out over the green tops of the trees as you

look down on the grass, and that was a marvellous sight. There was a

single road that ran through the forest right up to the gate of the city;

but it was a hard road to travel, dark most of the time because the sun

could not shine through the leaves, and very lonely, and so still that you

could hear your heart beat except when the winds blew, and then sometimes

the boughs clashed together overhead and roared and moaned until you

longed for the silence again. It was a long road too, and the men who

walked through the forest to the city all had great packs on their

shoulders. And what do you suppose was in their packs? Why, every

traveller carried with him a gorgeous suit of clothes heavy with velvet

and gold and silver; for so the people dressed in the beautiful city, and

no one could enter the gate unless he too bore with him the royal robes.

But you see, while they were walking in the rough forest, they wore their

old clothes of course.

Now in one place a wonderful woman sat by the roadside. She was a maga, or

witch, named Simona. She was beautiful if you did not see her too close,

with large round eyes that looked very gentle and kind. And when any

traveller came by, the big tears would begin to roll down her cheeks and

she would cry out to him as if she pitied him and wanted to help him.

"Dear traveller," she would say, "why do you trudge along this gloomy

road, and why do you carry that bundle which bends your shoulders and

tires your back? Don't you know that it is all a lie about the city you

are seeking? There is no city of palaces at your journey's end. Indeed,

you will never get to the end of the woods, but will walk on and on,

stumbling and falling, and growing weaker and weaker, until at last you

fall and never rise. And the wild beasts that you hear at night howling in

the bushes will rend and gnaw your body until only your bones are left."

At this the travellers would stop and say: "But what shall we do, wise

witch, and whither shall we go?"

Then she would say to them: "Turn aside by this pleasant path, and in a

little while you will come to my beautiful garden which is named

Philanthropia. There you will find many others whom I have wept for and

saved as I do you; and there amid the open glades you may live with them

in everlasting peace and love. Houses are there which you need only to

enter and call your own. And when you are hungry you have only to speak,

and immediately all that you desire to eat will appear on the tables. And

when you are tired, soft beds will rise up to receive you. And clothes

will be spread before you--not stiff and uncomfortable robes like those

you carry in your pack, but soft garments suited to that land of

comfort."

Most of the travellers believed the witch and turned into the by-path.

But, alas! it was soon worse for them than it had been on the road; for

they were led, not to a garden, but into a great sandy desert, where

nothing grew and no rain or dew ever fell. And somehow they could find no

way out of the desert, but wandered to and fro in the endless fields of

dust, while the hot sun beat upon their heads and their hearts failed them

for hunger and thirst.

But now and then a wary traveller did not believe the witch and laughed at

her tears and soft voice. And then, unless he got away very quick,

something dreadful happened to him. The witch suddenly changed into a huge

monster with a hundred flaming eyes, and a hundred mouths with which she

raved and bellowed, and a hundred long arms that coiled about like

serpents. She was so terrible that most men who saw her in her true form

fell down fainting at her feet; and these she lifted up and threw into

deep dark holes, hidden from the road, where the poor wretches soon died

of sheer loneliness.

And now comes the heart of the story, dear Jack, if you are not too tired

to read to the end.

One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was not

very strong, nor was his armour much to look at,--just an ordinary knight,

but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart to

slay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rode

he turned often to look into his lady's eyes, and always he seemed to

drink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinks

refreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passing

fair--as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest woman

in all the world. And so at last they came to where the witch was sitting

and weeping. Without a word the knight drew his sword and rushed upon her.

Of course she changed instantly to the monster with the hundred eyes and

mouths and arms. The air was filled with the fire from her eyes and with

the dreadful bellowing from her mouths, and her arms swung frantically

about on every side to seize the knight and crush him. But this was the

strange thing about the battle: as often as the knight looked at the lady,

who stood near him, he gained new strength and the witch could not harm

him.

He was cutting off her arms one by one and victory was almost his, when

down the road came an old man wagging his grey beard dolefully and

muttering into his breast. And when he reached the three there at the

roadside, he stood for a moment watching the battle and still muttering in

his beard. Then without a word he beckoned to the lady. She hesitated,

sighed, and turned away, leaving the poor knight to struggle alone without

the blessing of her eyes. And immediately his strength seemed to abandon

him and his sword dropped at his side. You may be sure the witch shouted

with triumph at this, and the noise of her bellowing sounded like the

clanging of a hundred discordant bells. It was almost over with the

knight. But suddenly he too uttered a great cry. Despair came to give him

strength where hope had been before. "For love and the world!" he cried

out and drove at the monster once again with his uplifted sword.

And, dear Jack, do you wish to know how the battle ended? I am very, very

sorry, but I can't tell you, for when I came through the forest the knight

and the witch were still fighting. There was a look of desperate

determination in the knight's eyes, but, to tell you the truth, I think

his heart was with the lady who had left him, and it is not easy to fight

without a heart in this world, you know.

Write to me soon, a long, long letter and tell me about the trees of

Morningtown. Some day when you are grown up and live with men, you will be

glad to remember the friendship and the wise conversation of those

brothers of the forest. Good-bye for a time, my boy.

Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS.

LIV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

A wan beggar, seated on the coping that surrounds St. Paul's and

exploiting his misery before the world. A strange scene calculated to give

one pause,--the poor waif crying his distress on the curb, within the iron

fence the ancient sleeping dead, and along the thoroughfare of Broadway

the ceaseless unheeding stream of humanity. As I walked up the street with

this image in my mind, the lines of an old Oriental poem kept time with my

steps until I had converted them into English:

I heard a poor man in the grave-yard cry:

"Arise, oh friend! a little hour assume

My weight of cares, whilst I,

Long weary, learn thy respite in the tomb."

I listened that the corpse should make reply;

Who, knowing sweeter death than penury,

Broke not his silent doom.

I am reminded of that joke, rather grim forsooth, which Lowell thought the

best ever made. It is in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The god Dionysus and

his slave Xanthias are travelling the road to Hades, the slave as a matter

of course carrying the pack for the two. They meet a procession bearing a

corpse to the tomb. Xanthias begs the dead man to take the pack with him

as he is borne so comfortably on the same road to the nether world.

Whereupon they dicker over the portage. "Two shillings for the job," says

the corpse, sitting up on his bier. "Too much," says Xanthias. "Two

shillings," insists the corpse. "One and sixpence," cries Xanthias. "_I'd

see myself alive first_!" says the corpse, sinking down on the bier.

LV

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR MR. TOWERS:

The young lady have the letter you wrote me and I cant get it. But you

needent bother about writing any more tales. I guess you done the best you

could, but we dont neither one like what you told about the witch and them

young people in the forest. Why do the knight stand there fighting the

witch when the old man have run off with his girl? Why dont he take out

after them and leave the witch to bleed to death? And the young lady

thinks of it worse than I do. She went on awful when she read it, and

cried. I guess she was sorry about the way the knight kept on cutting off

that woman's legs and arms even if she was bad. She don't say nothing else

nice about you now, nor let me. But she says you are the crewelest man she

have known. And she cries a heap when there aint nothing the matter, and

blames at every thing. The old gentleman feels bad about it but he dont

know what to do. I guess now he wishes he hadent fooled with the young

lady's salvation none. Because she have told him one day when he was

trying to talk pious at her, not to say nothing, that she dident believe

in nothing now but damnation. And he say "Dont talk that way before the

child." But I aint come to neither one of them things yet.

Your trew Frend,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--She goes to see her tree spirit every day. But she dont talk to him

no more. She just lays down on her face and cries.

LVI

PHILIP TO JACK

I am afraid, little Jack, that my long story about the lady and the knight

in the woods did not interest you very much; and that is a pity, for, if I

cannot amuse you, how shall I do when I come to write stories for grown-up

folk? Well, anyway, I am going to tell you what happened after the lady

and the old man went away into the forest.

For awhile they walked side by side in silence. But the road was long and

it was already late, and by and by the night fell and wrapped all the

trees in solemn shadows. It was not easy to keep the path in the darkness,

and pretty soon they were quite lost and found themselves wandering

helplessly in the black tangled aisles of the forest. That was bad, for

the lady was tired in body and discomforted in heart. But worse happened

when the old man left her to seek out the path alone, for he only lost

himself more completely in the treacherous shadows and could not get back

to her. Ah, Jack, if the lady was beautiful when the sunlight shone upon

her, how lovely do you suppose she was here in the night with the white

beams of the moon sifting down through the swaying boughs upon her

blanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her

terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy

whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up

yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low

inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out

of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her

face under a great tree, and wept and wept for very terror and

loneliness.

Now wonderful things may happen in the night, dear Jack. The trees then

have a life of their own, and sometimes when the sun, which belongs to man

only, is gone they have power to do what they please to foolish people who

come into their circle. And so this tree that stood leaning over the

prostrate lady whispered and whispered to itself in a strange language.

Then out of the boughs there came creeping a dark cold shadow. It dropped

down noiselessly to the ground and covered the lady all about. It moved

and swayed in the faint moonlight like a column of wind-blown smoke. You

will hardly believe the rest, but it seemed slowly to take the very shape

of the lady herself, as if it were her own shadow that had found her; and

so it began to creep into her body. And as it melted into her flesh, she

grew cold and ever colder as if her blood were turning to ice. Pretty soon

it would have reached her heart and then--I shudder to think what would

have become of her. But when the first chill touched her heart, she

uttered a loud cry of fear: "Dear knight, dear knight," she called out,

"where are you? Save me! save me!"

Then another wonderful thing happened in the darkness, for at such times

our spoken words may take on a life of their own just as the trees and

shadows do. And so these words of the lady, instead of scattering in the

air, were changed into a marvellous little fairy elf that went stealing

away through the forest. And as the elf ran swiftly under the trees and

over the long grass, so lightly indeed that the flowers and weeds only

bowed under his feet as when a gentle breeze passes over them,--as the elf

sped on, I say, everywhere the earth sent up a lisping whisper, "Save me,

dear knight! save me!"

Now the knight was far away, resting from his battle with the old witch.

He had wounded her in many places, and might perhaps have killed her, had

not the sly wicked creature suddenly slipt away from him into some hiding

place of hers in the desert. And so, as he could not reach her, he was

resting, very tired and very sad. Then suddenly, as he sat with his head

hanging down, the little elf came tripping over the grass and plucked him

by the arm, and the faint whisper stole into his ear, "Save me, dear

knight! save me!"

Do you suppose he was long in rising and following the clever little elf

back to their mistress? Ah, Jack, there was a happy hour and a happy year

and a blissful life for the lady and her knight then, was there not?

And now, Jack, I will not bother you with any more stories after this.

Write to me and tell me all you are doing. Be good, little Jack, and

listen to the wise words of the trees and other growing things; and, above

all, love that sweet lady, Miss Jessica.

Affectionately,

PHILIP TOWERS.

LVII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There is

the way of the _Imitation_ trod by those who have perceived the illusion

of this life and the reality of the spirit,--the way over whose entrance

stand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, the

further doth he recede from all earthly solace." And truly he who hath

boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows

trample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that other

way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,--the

way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without

grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with

the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment

and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter

to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before

the gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doing

righteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity here

or in the _Imitation_, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, and

only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.

And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to a

man's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levelling

human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were

possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and

know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the

harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until

we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as

Millet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with the

Hoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art

with noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who

respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the

disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.

LVIII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always

rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least

he had to proclaim to the world,--the ancient imperishable truth that man

lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern

call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself

right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting

verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seems

to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform

and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by

presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were

really playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation of

riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief

obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that

attains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight of

judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the

virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a

false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of

personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end

certain decay.

LIX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

_Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, and

it only remains now to see this labour of months--of years,

rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book,

in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I

have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any

great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the

message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring

too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After

all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend

Sydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and

choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee." I have tried

to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present

sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless

sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no

vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--that

for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly

sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I

have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid

one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and

brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make

noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved

had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our

hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (though

this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the

ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty

and high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, make

glad your heart!"

And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has

overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things

by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from

that _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and better

growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in

themselves.

LX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which

has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed

me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking

unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a picture

by Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide look

of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn

than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event.

A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost

indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound

into the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a

little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens.

Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan

and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint

of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of

inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eye

to intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden world

had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I

stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary

expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad

window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing

vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure that

he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement

as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its

loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through

that act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austere

exultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that the

indignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him,

as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heart

of Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his,--to

wrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlasting

beauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yet

purged of trouble.

LXI

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. It

seemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land--not

in wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau's picture, but in

some wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarely

through the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew that

somewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted lay

in an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through the

night. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime passed, and still I

sought and could not find her--only shadows met me and fantastic shapes

out of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, if

this long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and she

perish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be more

than I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: "Fear not,

beloved; be at peace until I come!" I think I must actually have called

out in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound still

ringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own misery

has lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine what

you too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to me

so incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on your

part has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood--can it

be that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your days

that has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while I

have sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of my

work, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused me

once of conscientious selfishness--have I made you a victim of that sin?

Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a sure

determination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that you

walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of

fresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspring

within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that

even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the

half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my

dream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that

somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad

this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of

my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace,

beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no

power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us

apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.

LXII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack.

But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine,

out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I

wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I

now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest

when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold

you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me

since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch.

But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to

become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to

this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a

Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a

Hottentot,--provided either were possible.

I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come

here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did

you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than

the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less

wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own

heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to

follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into

it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with

me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion,

burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite in

father's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all

his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is

deliverance.

But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,--submitting to a

paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love

often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a

redbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers in

heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it

shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear

illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know,

draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay

rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like

the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from

it.

And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage to

break my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a

"revelation," when he is about to construe life for me according to the

prayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble the

Christian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle,

and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, my

life is so near and kin to Pan's that my vision never goes far beyond the

green edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell your

fortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!--as near as you were

that day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in our

forest,--for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures of

Catullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too,

rather than ascetic.

I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the long

fairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our good

stars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you.

Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear you

swiftly upward and ever upward. But I--I cannot soar, I cannot breathe in

that silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness of

this long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of our

love--until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning was

when a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, which

was not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way into

the office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I can

remember she was in search of fame, and she found,--ah, dear Heart,--she

found both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to a

primitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my whole

experience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow you

lifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehended

me altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had a

judgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! I

was divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more natural

one to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, that

every woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day when

first you encompassed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all in

a moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you.

You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you were

really thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a small

winged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale.

All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year

with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life

before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown,

a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and

with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not know

for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilment

was before me.

After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart,

only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And

I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier

destiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some

limitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathen

fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of

you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters,

foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some

miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your

window sill.

This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you.

Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which you

assumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass in

philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention,

compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of

your "upper chamber." I resented that cold expression of your

spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings

against your high windows.

In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I

_knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange

altitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the

first assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me

free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird

with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect

peace,--the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And I

was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of

romance to reality.

But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the

beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that

his love is a sort of _fi. fa._, which he will some day serve upon her

heart.

Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you,

for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparent

diffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantage

over the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I to

know there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your classic pose?

Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth I

marched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have saved

myself if a thousand Bluechers had hurried to my defence. And there even

came a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing to

some perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will.

But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have come

so much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same brigand

determination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll you

two looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting your

welcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justify

poor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed so

ludicrously artificial,--as if you had somehow got an undeserved iota

subscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at such

a humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard,

uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien,

that the terror I had felt in anticipation of your visit vanished away. I

think the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be trying

to domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenly

that your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were less

formidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to the

walk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from your

enigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effort

to break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about something

and kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now and

then, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon the

issue at hand.... Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. The

world changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman in

it. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, I

could have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expression

of a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startled

me so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know how

sincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should be

captured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, I

could not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that old

Merlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorry

for me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terror

and shame against your breast. Philip, why does a woman always weep when

the first man kisses her the first time, no matter how glad she is? I hope

you do not know enough to answer this question. But I am sure every woman

does weep; and I think it is because she feels even in the midst of her

great happiness, an irremediable loss, for which nothing ever fully

atones.

But another question is, How could I, after being lost to you in this dear

way, turn my face from you at the command of a religious enthusiast? A

regard for father and not for his righteousness is the explanation; for I

felt more nearly right following my heart to you. But now, dear knight, I

am ready to forgive you the fault of assenting to such an unnatural

sacrifice, if only you will come and take me once more. At present I am a

sorry little vagabond, very much the worse for wear, owing to father's

efforts to sanctify me. But if you will only love me enough, I think I

could be Jessica again. And perhaps you have some more natural way of

sanctifying me yourself; for I doubt now if I shall ever see heaven unless

I may ascend through your portals.

Every day since our bereavement of each other, I have kept a tryst under

our big tree in the forest. At first this was a tender formality, a

memorial of a happiness that had passed. But after a time I began to have

a power of mental vision that was akin to communication. I came out of

myself to meet you somewhere in that mysterious world of silence to which

you seem to belong. There were hours when I felt absolutely certain of

your nearness, a tender peace enfolded me as warm as your arms are. And I

had the supreme satisfaction of having outwitted all father's powers and

principalities. Then came days when by no sweet incantation could I bring

myself near you. I wept upon my sod like one forsaken, and grieved the

more because I conceived that you must be far out of my regions in one of

your "upper chamber" moods, where all your faculties were concentrated

upon some merely philosophical proposition. I wonder now if you are

laughing! If you knew how I have suffered, you would not even smile. If

you knew how I have _needed_ to be kissed, you would make haste to come to

me.

I had been making these excursions into the forest for a long time before

I discovered that Jack was playing the part of eavesdropping guardian

angel. Do you know, by the way, what a quaint little ragamuffin

philosopher that child is? He has a shrewd sobriety, a steady watchfulness

over all about him, and he is endowed with a power of silent devotion that

is absolutely compelling. He has been such a comfort to me! and there is

no way of keeping him out of your confidence. He knows things by some

occult science of loving. Thus I was not offended one day when I looked up

from the shadows under my oak and saw him regarding me gravely, almost

compassionately, from behind a neighbouring tree. After this we had a

tacit understanding that he might play sentinel there when I came into the

forest.

See how much I have said, and still I have not told you the strangest part

of my story--the moonlit revelation of you to me. I am writing, writing,

to ease my heart until you come. And always as I write I listen for the

sound of your dear footsteps. For many successive days I had found our

trysting place a veritable desert. I seemed to have lost my heart's way to

you; and in proportion to my bewilderment, life became more and more

intolerable. I had the desperate sensation of one who is about to be lost

in a waste land, and I felt that I could not live through the frightful

loneliness of such an experience. Yesterday again I failed to find the

comfort of your occult presence when I went into the wood. I was filled

with consternation, and when the night came I lay tossing in a sleepless

fever. Unless I knew once more in my heart that you loved me, I felt that

I could no longer endure life. So I lay far into the night. At last in

desperation I arose from my bed, slipped on my shoes and the big cloak

that you will remember, and fled away to our tree in the forest, pursued

by a thousand shadows. For indeed I am usually afraid of the dark; it is

like a silence to me--your silence, Philip--and I fear it because I do not

know what it contains. But I had got one of father's wrestling-Jacob's

moods upon me by this time, and if Mahomet's mountain had come booming by

I should not have been deterred from my purpose. But do you know that

there is more life in a little forest when darkness falls than in a big

town? and that every living thing there recognises you as an intruder with

warning calls from tree to tree? I had not more than cast myself upon the

ground to sob out all my griefs to whatever gods would listen, when a

sleepy little robin just overhead called up to his mistress the tone of my

trouble. The young leaves whispered it, the boughs swept low about me, and

the winds carried messages of it away into the heavens, so that suddenly

the whole night knew of my woe and pitied me.

I know not how long I lay there staring up at the blue abyss of stars

through the grizzly shades of night. I only know that my face was wet with

tears and that I seemed to tremble upon the brink of a long life's

despair. And oh! Philip I never _loved_ you so,--not only with my heart

and lips, but with my soul. And it was my soul that went out in a prayer

to you to come. I remembered not only the dear ways you have of folding me

into your arms and making me surpassingly happy, so against my own will,

but I remembered the silent young sage in his upper chamber, and I felt

that indeed it was to this esoteric personality that I must pray for

help.

And so I gave my soul away to the sweet silence, and waited. The moonlight

falling down through an open space made a cataract of tremulous

brightness. It edged all the shadows with a silver whiteness, as of wings

hidden.

And then suddenly there came to me out of the far abyss above my trees a

message, a sweet assurance. Oh, I know not how to call to it, only I felt

the nearness of my love. And I was afraid, my darling, and closed my eyes

lest I should _see_ you. And then, oh, Philip, I felt, I am sure I felt

your face close to mine, and in my ears a low whisper breathed like the

passing of the breeze, a voice saying: "Fear not, beloved; be at peace

until I come!" And I knew then that you loved me and had not forsaken me

altogether.

And when at last I raised my eyes, I became aware of the fact that I was

still not alone; and peering through the dim spaces about me I beheld

_Jack_ sitting hunched up on the root of his tree like a small toad of

fidelity! The little owl sprite in him never quite slumbers, I think; and

seeing me leave the parsonage, he had crept out and followed bravely after

through the shadows. But the picture he made now startled me into a peal

of laughter.

"You are the lady in the story that was lost," said Jack, with the solemn

intonation of one who has himself received a revelation.

"Yes," I confessed softly.

"But will the knight come to find you?"

"I hope so; I think he is coming now, dear Jack."

"Well damn him if he don't!" was the little wretch's impious comment. I

always suspected him capable of using strong language, but this was the

first time we had met upon a sufficiently intimate basis of friendship for

him to exploit it.

And now, Philip, that is all until you come. But hasten, my beloved! I am

already aged with this long waiting for you. Do not ask me about father.

He is a good shepherd, but I am a small black sheep determined not to be

made white according to his plan. And he has come to that place where he

would be ready to take even you as an under-shepherd of this factious ewe

lamb. Besides, could we not make a providential offering of Jack, as

Abraham did of the goat when he was about to slay Isaac? Jack, I think,

has a heavenly wit withal, and could adjust the little prayer light of his

soul even to father's high altar mind. As for me, I cannot conceive of

life alone without you one whole day longer. Indeed, so strong is my

premonition of your approach, that even now I listen for the sound of your

footsteps upon the gravel outside.

THE END