(_Eastlake summarizes, and intends to conclude._)
My lady, my humor of to-day makes me take up the charges in your last
letters; I will define, not defend, myself. You fall out with me
because I am a dilettante (or many words to that one effect), and you
abuse me because I deal in the form rather than the matter of love. Is
that not just to you?
In short, I am not as your other admirers, and the variation in the
species has lost the charm of novelty.
Believe me that I am honest to-day, at least; indeed, I think you will
understand. Only the college boy who feeds on Oscar Wilde and
sentimental pessimism has that disease of indifference with which you
crudely charge me. It is a kind of chicken-pox, cousin-French to the
evils of literary Paris. But I must not thank God too loudly, or you
will think I am one with them at heart.
No, I am in earnest, in terrible earnest, about all this--I mean life
and what to do with it. That is a great day when a man comes into his
own, no matter how paltry the pittance may be the gods have given
him--when he comes to know just how far he can go, and where lies his
path of least resistance. That I know. I am tremendously sure of myself
now, and, like your good business men, I go about my affairs and
dispose of my life with its few energies in a cautious, economical way.
What is all this I make so much to-do about? Very little, I confess,
but to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine
is an infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master
the material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop,
with only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations,
and one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I
shall accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I
shall have moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or
I to life. But that is not our problem to-day.
Why do I isolate myself? Because a few pursuits in life are great
taskmasters and jealous ones. A wise man who had felt that truth wrote
about it once. I must husband my devotions: love, except the idea of
love, is not for me; pleasure, except the idea of pleasure, is too keen
for me; energy, except the ideas energy creates, is beyond me. I am
limited, definite, alone, without you.
I confess that two passions are greater than any man, the passion for
God and the passion of a great love. They send a man hungry and naked
into the street, and make his subterfuges with existence ridiculous.
How rarely they come! How inadequate the man who is mistaken about
them! We peer into the corners of life after them, but they elude us.
There are days of splendid consciousness, and we think we have
them--then----
No, it is foolish, _bête_, dear lady, to be deceived by a sentiment;
better the comfortable activities of the world. They will suit you
best; leave the other for the dream hidden in a glass of champagne.
But let me love you always. Let me fancy you, when I walk down these
gleaming boulevards in the silent evenings, as you sit flashingly
lovely by some soft lamplight, wrapped about in the cotton-wools of
society. That will reconcile me to the roar of these noonday streets.
The city exists for _you_.