“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thought
So are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”
—ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
Janet worked out a new theory of life. For a time she had ceased to form
opinions, and I had rejoiced in seeing her ideas driven like dead leaves
before the first healthy emotion of her life. Now she drew herself
together and deluded herself into the belief that she had a new
philosophy.
“The trouble with us all is,” she remarked sententiously to me one day,
“that we are always trying to convince God of our perfect intellectual
clearness in matters religious, while all the time God, ‘if there be a
God,’ knows perfectly well that we haven’t the means of getting it. He
wants the kind of answer that we can give, not the kind that we cannot
give.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“Action,” she answered, “determination toward good, even when we cannot
understand the whole scheme of things.”
I watched the girl’s quickly changing face with much admiration and with
some amusement. Once she had mistaken her peculiar moods for speculative
thought; now she was mistaking her thought of the Lad for a system of
philosophy. She had translated her lover’s personality into ethics.
“We keep asking questions,” she went on, “and thinking that there will
be an answer. I suppose that God wishes us to answer our own questions
in deeds and not in words.”
I liked her new ideas because they made her happy. Intrinsically they
were better than the old ones. But I fear that I should have liked any
thought of hers that made her face look like that. There was a light in
it that I had never seen before.
“I think,” she said, looking up at me wistfully, “that all the sickening
sense I had of defeat—defeat before the battle—was because I stood
waiting for a voice from heaven to tell me what the outcome was to be. I
forgot that the voice must speak through my own lips.”
“Isn’t your new gospel of action very much like the Lad’s?” I
insinuated.
“I suppose it is,” said Janet, slowly; “and yet, and yet the Lad is a
positivist. He insists that the present world is the limit of all our
knowledge, perhaps of all our action.”
“And you do not?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. “I sometimes wonder if the will to be and
to be good cannot rule in another world as well as in this. Perhaps the
will needs another world to realize the hope of this.”
“Won’t you explain?” I begged meekly. I sometimes find it difficult to
understand the wisdom of the young.
“I mean,” she said, “that we speak of God and love and immortality, and
ask if our ideas can be true. But God and love and immortality are not
to be had for the asking. They are true in so far as we make them true.”
“So you have solved the problem of the Sphinx?” I said. “It is a good
solution; that is, as good as any mere thought about life can be.”
“I suppose,” continued Janet, “that we are bound to answer back in act
to every question we can ask. We must rise to the level of our loftiest
inquiry. The first suspicion we get of immortality makes us responsible
for it. Henceforth we must win it for ourselves.”
“O Socrates!” I interrupted, “how did you learn so much in so short a
time?”
“Don’t stop me,” laughed the girl. “You may never have another chance to
listen to words of optimism from my lips. Listen: if we can even wonder
whether love works back of all the hurt of life, aren’t we bound to act
as if it were true?”
“You must found a school,” I said. “Let me be your first disciple.”
“No,” said Janet. “It has all been said a great many times, but I never
understood it before. The only thing that puzzles me is the Lad.”
“That is simply fair. You puzzle him as well,” I murmured.
“His renouncement of belief in another world to work in makes him more
eager to do well the work of this one. His denial of a life to be gives
him an added interest in this.”
I assented, and in doing so felt that I was making a generous admission.
I was usually impatient with the pseudo-scientific thought of my
agnostic friends.
“But remember that positivism would have a different effect on a nature
less rare,” I added by way of caution.
“There is something very beautiful in it, something fine and
self-controlled, yet very sad,” said Janet, with a look of tenderness
creeping into her eyes. “He so longs to find the most exquisite
adjustment of this life to its ends, to make it a perfect artistic
whole. And I cannot make him say, with my pet philosopher,” said the
girl, looking up with one of her sweet, sudden smiles, “‘God, love, and
immortality shall be, for I am!’”