(_Eastlake continues apropos of a chance meeting_.)
So you rather like the curious flavor of this new dish, but it puzzles
you. You ask for facts? What a stamp Chicago has put on your soul! You
will continue to regard as facts the feeble fancies that God has
allowed to petrify. I warn you that facts kill, but you shall have
them. I had meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been
disdainfully shoved into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you,
my lady!
Do you remember when I was very young and _gauche_? Doubtless, for
women never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very
badly, and were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of
your father's provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the
foreigners. I had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school,
where I was to learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps
you remember my father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of
conceiving an interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I
think he had some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about
my becoming a loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was
to become a great mill owner.
It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to
be other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his
desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the
mechanical, deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got
courage enough to tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I
had the audacity to propose two years abroad. We compromised on one,
but I understood that I must not finally disappoint him. He cared so
much that it would have been wicked. A few people in this world have
positive and masterful convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if
their wills smoulder in ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more
than inclinations. It seems wise and best that those of mere
inclinations should waive their prejudices in favor of those who feel
intensely. So much for the great questions of individuality and
personality that set the modern world a-shrieking. This is a
commonplace solution of the great family problem Turgénieff propounded
in "Fathers and Sons." Perchance you have heard of Turgénieff?
So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly.
His life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not plain
to me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange,
cosmopolitan world. I was supposed to attend courses at the École
Polytechnique, but I became mad with the longings that are wafted about
Europe from capital to capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and Florence
and Rome--to Athens and Constantinople and Vienna. In a word, I
unfitted myself for Wabash as completely as I could, and troubled my
spirit with vain attempts after art and feeling.
You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few
hundred francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead.
You do not know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding
and the power of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and
a mechanic hell the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to
grudge each sunbeam that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in
some neglected city, each face of the living wherein possible life
looks out untried by you, each picture that means a new curiosity. No,
for, after all, you are material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a
Baedeker, even in the land of dreams. All men, I like to think, for one
short breath in their lives, believe this narrow world to be shoreless.
They feel that they should die in discontent if they could not
experience, test, this wonderful conglomerate of existence. It is an
old, old matter I am writing you about. We have classified it nicely,
these days; we call it the "romantic spirit," and we say that it is
made three parts of youth and two of discontent--a perpetual expression
of the world's pessimism.
I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you
have something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you
would all be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a
masculine soul that shall harmonize your discontent into happiness.
Most of you are not very nice about it; you make your hero out of the
most obvious man. Yet it is pathetic, that longing for something beyond
yourselves. That passionate desire for a complete illusion in love is
the one permanent note you women have attained in literature. In your
heart of hearts you would all (until you become stiff in the arms of an
unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he could make the world dance for
you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard to satisfy--for example, you,
my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant little way, flirting with
this man, coquetting with that, examining a third, until your heart
grows weary or until you are at peace. You may marry for money or for
love, and in twenty years you will teach your daughters that love
doesn't pay at less than ten thousand a year. But you don't expect them
to believe you, and they don't.
I am not sneering at you. I would not have it otherwise, for the world
would be one half cheaper if women like you did not follow the
perpetual instinct. True, civilization tends to curb this romantic
desire, but when civilization runs against a passionate nature we have
a tragedy. The world is sweeter, deeper, for that. Live and love, if
you can, and give the lie to facts. Be restless, be insatiable, be
wicked, but believe that your body and soul were meant for more than
food and raiment; that somewhere, somehow, some day, you will meet the
dream made real, and that _he_ will unlock the secrets of this life.
It is late. I am tired. The noises of the city begin, far down in the
darkness. This carries love.