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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
* * * * *
JACK LONDON'S BOOKS
"_He opened windows for them upon the splendour and the savagery, the
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MILLS & BOON, Ltd., 49 Rupert St., London, W.1.
* * * * *
THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
BY
JACK LONDON
AND
ANNA STRUNSKY
"_And of naught else than Love would we
discourse._"--DANTE, Sonnet II.
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED 49 RUPERT STREET LONDON, W.1
_Copyright in the United States of America, 1903, by the Macmillan
Company Printed in Great Britain by Love & Malcomson Ltd. London and
Redhill._
KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
I
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3 A QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
August 14, 19--.
Yesterday I wrote formally, rising to the occasion like the conventional
happy father rather than the man who believes in the miracle and lives
for it. Yesterday I stinted myself. I took you in my arms, glad of what
is and stately with respect for the fulness of your manhood. It is
to-day that I let myself leap into yours in a passion of joy. I dwell on
what has come to pass and inflate myself with pride in your fulfilment,
more as a mother would, I think, and she your mother.
But why did you not write before? After all, the great event was not
when you found your offer of marriage accepted, but when you found you
had fallen in love. Then was your hour. Then was the time for
congratulation, when the call was first sounded and the reveille of Time
and About fell upon your soul and the march to another's destiny was
begun. It is always more important to love than to be loved. I wish it
had been vouchsafed me to be by when your spirit of a sudden grew
willing to bestow itself without question or let or hope of return, when
the self broke up and you grew fain to beat out your strength in praise
and service for the woman who was soaring high in the blue wastes. You
have known her long, and you must have been hers long, yet no word of
her and of your love reached me. It was not kind to be silent.
Barbara spoke yesterday of your fastidiousness, and we told each other
that you had gained a triumph of happiness in your love, for you are not
of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the
heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we
are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we
can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know
that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped
out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I
have ever been? Do you know that because you love a woman and she loves
you, and that because you are swept along by certain forces, that I am
happy and feel myself in sight of my portion of immortality on earth,
far more than because of my books, dear lad, far more?
I wish I could fly England and get to you. Should I have a shade less of
you than formerly, if we were together now? From your too much green of
wealth, a barrenness of friendship? It does not matter; what is her gain
cannot be my loss. One power is mine,--without hindrance, in freedom and
in right, to say to Ellen's son, "Godspeed!" to place Hester Stebbins's
hand in his, and bid them forth to the sunrise, into the glory of day!
Ever your devoted father,
DANE KEMPTON.
II
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
September 3, 19--.
Here I am, back in the old quarters once more, with the old afternoon
climb across the campus and up into the sky, up to the old rooms, the
old books, and the old view. You poor fog-begirt Dane Kempton, could you
but have lounged with me on the window couch, an hour past, and watched
the light pass out of the day through the Golden Gate and the night
creep over the Berkeley Hills and down out of the east! Why should you
linger on there in London town! We grow away from each other, it
seems--you with your wonder-singing, I with my joyful science.
Poesy and economics! Alack! alack! How did I escape you, Dane, when mind
and mood you mastered me? The auguries were fair. I, too, should have
been a singer, and lo, I strive for science. All my boyhood was singing,
what of you; and my father was a singer, too, in his own fine way. Dear
to me is your likening of him to Waring.--"What's become of Waring?" He
_was_ Waring. I can think of him only as one who went away, "chose land
travel or seafaring."
Gwynne says I am sometimes almost a poet--Gwynne, you know, Arthur
Gwynne, who has come to live with me at The Ridge. "If it were not for
your dismal science," he is sure to add; and to fire him I lay it to the
defects of early training. I know he thinks that I never half
appreciated you, and that I do not appreciate you now. If you will
recollect, you praised his verses once. He cherishes that praise amongst
his sweetest treasures. Poor dear good old Gwynne, tender, sensitive,
shrinking, with the face of a seraph and the heart of a maid. Never were
two men more incongruously companioned. I love him for himself. He
tolerates me, I do secretly believe, because of you. He longs to meet
you,--he knew you well through my father,--and we often talk you over.
Be sure at every opportunity I tear off your halo and trundle it about.
Trust me, you receive scant courtesy.
How I wander on. My pen is unruly after the long vacation; my thought
yet wayward, what of the fever of successful wooing. And besides, ...
how shall I say?... such was the gracious warmth of your letter, of both
your letters, that I am at a loss. I feel weak, inadequate. It almost
seems as though you had made a demand upon something that is not in me.
Ah, you poets! It would seem your delight in my marriage were greater
than mine. In my present mood, it is you who are young, you who love; I
who have lived and am old.
Yes, I am going to be married. At this present moment, I doubt not, a
million men and women are saying the same thing. Hewers of wood and
drawers of water, princes and potentates, shy-shrinking maidens and
brazen-faced hussies, all saying, "I am going to be married." And all
looking forward to it as a crisis in their lives? No. After all,
marriage is the way of the world. Considered biologically, it is an
institution necessary for the perpetuation of the species. Why should it
be a crisis? These million men and women will marry, and the work of
the world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about, and the work
of the world would yet go on.
True, a month ago it did seem a crisis. I wrote you as much. It did seem
a disturbing element in my life-work. One cannot view with equanimity
that which appears to be totally disruptive of one's dear little system
of living. But it only appeared so; I lacked perspective, that was all.
As I look upon it now, everything fits well and all will run smoothly I
am sure.
You know I had two years yet to work for my Doctorate. I still have
them. As you see, I am back to the old quarters, settled down in the old
groove, hammering away at the old grind. Nothing is changed. And besides
my own studies, I have taken up an assistant instructorship in the
Department of Economics. It is an ambitious course, and an important
one. I don't know how they ever came to confide it to me, or how I found
the temerity to attempt it,--which is neither here nor there. It is all
agreed. Hester is a sensible girl.
The engagement is to be long. I shall continue my career as charted. Two
years from now, when I shall have become a Doctor of Social Sciences
(and candidate for numerous other things), I shall also become a
benedict. My marriage and the presumably necessary honeymoon chime in
with the summer vacation. There is no disturbing element even there. Oh,
we are very practical, Hester and I. And we are both strong enough to
lead each our own lives.
Which reminds me that you have not asked about her. First, let me shock
you--she, too, is a scientist. It was in my undergraduate days that we
met, and ere the half-hour struck we were quarrelling felicitously over
Weismann and the neo-Darwinians. I was at Berkeley at the time, a
cocksure junior; and she, far maturer as a freshman, was at Stanford,
carrying more culture with her into her university than is given the
average student to carry out.
Next, and here your arms open to her, she is a poet. Pre-eminently she
is a poet--this must be always understood. She is the greater poet, I
take it, in this dawning twentieth century, because she is a scientist;
not in spite of being a scientist as some would hold. How shall I
describe her? Perhaps as a George Eliot, fused with an Elizabeth
Barrett, with a hint of Huxley and a trace of Keats. I may say she is
something like all this, but I must say she is something other and
different. There is about her a certain lightsomeness, a glow or flash
almost Latin or oriental, or perhaps Celtic. Yes, that must be
it--Celtic. But the high-stomached Norman is there and the stubborn
Saxon. Her quickness and fine audacity are checked and poised, as it
were, by that certain conservatism which gives stability to purpose and
power to achievement. She is unafraid, and wide-looking and far-looking,
but she is not over-looking. The Saxon grapples with the Celt, and the
Norman forces the twain to do what the one would not dream of doing and
what the other would dream beyond and never do. Do you catch me? Her
most salient charm, is I think, her perfect poise, her exquisite
adjustment.
Altogether she is a most wonderful woman, take my word for it. And after
all she is described vicariously. Though she has published nothing and
is exceeding shy, I shall send you some of her work. There will you find
and know her. She is waiting for stronger voice and sings softly as yet.
But hers will be no minor note, no middle flight. She is--well, she is
Hester. In two years we shall be married. Two years, Dane. Surely you
will be with us.
One thing more; in your letter a certain undertone which I could not
fail to detect. A shade less of me than formerly?--I turn and look into
your face--Waring's handiwork you remember--his painter's fancy of you
in those golden days when I stood on the brink of the world, and you
showed me the delights of the world and the way of my feet therein. So I
turn and look, and look and wonder. _A shade less_ of me, of you? Poesy
and economics! Where lies the blame?
HERBERT.
III
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
September 30, 19--.
It is because you know not what you do that I cannot forgive you. Could
you know that your letter with its catalogue of advantages and
arrangements must offend me as much as it belies (let us hope) you and
the woman of your love, I would pardon the affront of it upon us all,
and ascribe the unseemly want of warmth to reserve or to the sadness
which grips the heart when joy is too palpitant. But something warns me
that you are unaware of the chill your words breathe, and that is a
lapse which it is impossible to meet with indulgence.
"He does not love her," was Barbara's quick decision, and she laid the
open letter down with a definiteness which said that you, too, are laid
out and laid low. Your sister's very wrists can be articulate. However,
I laughed at her and she soon joined me. We do not mean to be
extravagant with our fears. Who shall prescribe the letters of lovers to
their sisters and foster-fathers? Yet there are some things their
letters should be incapable of saying, and amongst them that love is not
a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit
or miss affair which "shuffling" could not affect.
Barbara showed me your note to her. "Had I written like this of myself
and Earl--"
"You could not," I objected.
"Then Herbert should have been as little able to do it," she deduced
with emphasis. Here I might have told her that men and women are races
apart, but no one talks cant to Barbara. So I did not console her, and
it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you
have baffled us with coldness.
An absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must
work changes. When Barbara called your letter unnatural, she forgot how
little she knows what is natural to you. She and I have been wont to
predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by--say by the
fact that you knew your Wordsworth and that you knew him without being
able to take for yourself his austere peace. Youth which lives by hope
is riven by unrest.
"I made no vows; vows were made for me,
Bond unknown to me was given
That I should be, else sinning gently,
A dedicated spirit."
That pale sunrise seen from Mt. Tamalpais and your voice vibrant to
fierceness on the "else sinning gently"--to me the splendour of rose on
piled-up ridges of mist spoke all for you, so dear have you always been.
It rested on the possible wonder of your life. It threw you into the
scintillant Dawn with an abandon meet to a son of Waring.
Tell me, do you still read your Wordsworth on your knees? I am bent with
regret for the time when your mind had no surprises for me, when the
days were flushed halcyon with my hope in you. I resent your development
if it is because of it that you speak prosaically of a prosaic marriage
and of a honeymoon simultaneous with the Degree. I think you are too
well pleased with the simultaneousness.
Yet the fact of the letter is fair. It cannot be that the soul of it is
not. Hester Stebbins is a poet. I lean forward and think it out as I
did some days ago when the news came. I conjure up the look of love. If
the woman is content (how much more than content the feeling she bounds
with in knowing you hers as she is yours), what better test that all is
well? I conjure up the look of love. It is thus at meeting and thus at
parting. Even here, to-night, when all is chill and hard to understand,
I catch the flash and the warmth, and what I see restores you to me, but
how deep the plummet of my mind needed to sound before it reached you.
It is because you permitted yourself to speak when silence had expressed
you better.
Show me the ideally real Hester Stebbins, the spark of fire which is
she. The storms have not broken over her head. She will laugh and make
poetry of her laughter. If before she met you she wept, that, too, will
help the smiling. There is laughter which is the echo of a Miserere
sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile
cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and
they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a
widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved.
The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in
quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots
by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing in
life.
Hester shall laugh because she is glad and must tell her joy, and she
will not lose it in the telling. Greet her for me and hasten to prove
yourself, for
"The Poet, gentle creature that he is,
Hath like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts."
You will judge by this letter that I am neither sick nor well, and that
I reach for a distress which is not near. If I were Merchant rather than
Poet, it would be otherwise with me.
DANE.
IV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
October 27, 19--.
Do I still read my Wordsworth on my knees? Well, we may as well have it
out. I have foreseen this day so long and shunned it that now I meet it
almost with extended hands. No, I do not read my Wordsworth on my knees.
My mind is filled with other things. I have not the time. I am not the
Herbert Wace of six years gone. It is fair that you should know this;
fair, also, that you should know the Herbert Wace of six years gone was
not quite the lad you deemed him.
There is no more pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love.
Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before
that, I felt and resented the growing difference between us. When under
your spell, it seemed that I was born to lisp in numbers and devote
myself to singing, that the world was good and all of it fit for
singing. But away from you, even then, doubts faced me, and I knew in
vague fashion that we lived in different worlds. At first in vague
fashion, I say; and when with you again, your spell dominated me and I
could not question. You were true, you were good, I argued, all that was
wonderful and glorious; therefore, you were also right. You mastered me
with your charm, as you were wont to master those who loved you.
But there came times when your sympathy failed me and I stood alone on
outlooks I had achieved alone. There was no response from you. I could
not hear your voice. I looked down upon a real world; you were caught up
in a beautiful cloudland and shut away from me. Possibly it was because
life of itself appealed to you, while to me appealed the mechanics of
life. But be it as it may, yours was a world of ideas and fancies, mine
a world of things and facts.
Enters here the prejudice of love. It was the lad that discovered our
difference and concealed; it was the man who was blind and could not
discover. There we erred, man and boy; and here, both men now, we make
all well again.
Let me be explicit. Do you remember the passion with which I read the
"Intellectual Development of Europe?" I understood not the tithe of it,
but I was thrilled. My common sense was thrilled, I suppose; but it was
all very joyous, gripping hold of the tangible world for the first time.
And when I came to you, warm with the glow of adventure, you looked
blankly, then smiled indulgently and did not answer. You regarded my
ardour complacently. A passing humour of adolescence, you thought; and I
thought: "Dane does not read his Draper on his knees." Wordsworth was
great to me; Draper was great also. You had no patience with him, and I
know now, as I felt then, your consistent revolt against his
materialistic philosophy.
Only the other day you complained of a letter of mine, calling it cold
and analytical. That I should be cold and analytical despite all the
prodding and pressing and moulding I have received at your hands, and
the hands of Waring, marks only more clearly our temperamental
difference; but it does not mark that one or the other of us is less a
dedicated spirit. If I have wandered away from the warmth of poesy and
become practical, have you not remained and become confirmed in all that
is beautifully impractical? If I have adventured in a new world of
common things, have you not lingered in the old world of great and
impossible things? If I have shivered in the gray dawn of a new day,
have you not crouched over the dying embers of the fire of yesterday?
Ah, Dane, you cannot rekindle that fire. The whirl of the world scatters
its ashes wide and far, like volcanic dust, to make beautiful crimson
sunsets for a time and then to vanish.
None the less are you a dedicated spirit, priest that you are of a dying
faith. Your prayers are futile, your altars crumbling, and the light
flickers and drops down into night. Poetry is empty these days, empty
and worthless and dead. All the old-world epic and lyric-singing will
not put this very miserable earth of ours to rights. So long as the
singers sing of the things of yesterday, glorifying the things of
yesterday and lamenting their departure, so long will poetry be a vain
thing and without avail. The old world is dead, dead and buried along
with its heroes and Helens and knights and ladies and tournaments and
pageants. You cannot sing of the truth and wonder of to-day in terms of
yesterday. And no one will listen to your singing till you sing of
to-day in terms of to-day.
This is the day of the common man. Do you glorify the common man? This
is the day of the machine. When have you sung of the machine? The
crusades are here again, not the Crusades of Christ but the Crusades of
the Machine--have you found motive in them for your song? We are
crusading to-day, not for the remission of sins, but for the abolition
of sinning, of economic and industrial sinning. The crusade to Christ's
sepulchre was paltry compared with the splendour and might of our
crusade to-day toward manhood. There are millions of us afoot. In the
stillness of the night have you never listened to the trampling of our
feet and been caught up by the glory and the romance of it? Oh, Dane!
Dane! Our captains sit in council, our heroes take the field, our
fighting men are buckling on their harness, our martyrs have already
died, and you are blind to it, blind to it all!
We have no poets these days, and perforce we are singing with our hands.
The walking delegate is a greater singer and a finer singer than you,
Dane Kempton. The cold, analytical economist, delving in the dynamics
of society, is more the prophet than you. The carpenter at his bench,
the blacksmith by his forge, the boiler-maker clanging and clattering,
are all warbling more sweetly than you. The sledge-wielder pours out
more strength and certitude and joy in every blow than do you in your
whole sheaf of songs. Why, the very socialist agitator, hustled by the
police on a street corner amid the jeers of the mob, has caught the
romance of to-day as you have not caught it and where you have missed
it. He knows life and is living. Are you living, Dane Kempton?
Forgive me. I had begun to explain and reconcile our difference. I find
I am lecturing and censuring you. In defending myself, I offend. But
this I wish to say: We are so made, you and I, that your function in
life is to dream, mine to work. That you failed to make a dreamer of me
is no cause for heartache and chagrin. What of my practical nature and
analytical mind, I have generalised in my own way upon the data of life
and achieved a different code from yours. Yet I seek truth as
passionately as you. I still believe myself to be a dedicated spirit.
And what boots it, all of it? When the last word is said, we are two
men, by a thousand ties very dear to each other. There is room in our
hearts for each other as there is room in the world for both of us.
Though we have many things not in common, yet you are my dearest friend
on earth, you who have been a second father to me as well.
You have long merited this explanation, and it was cowardly of me not to
have made it before. My hope is that I have been sufficiently clear for
you to understand.
HERBERT.
V
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3 A QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
November 16, 19--.
You sigh "Poesy and Economics," supplying the cause and thereby
admitting the fact. I wish you had shown some reluctance to see my
meaning, that you had preferred to waive the matter on the ground of
insufficient data, that you had been less eager to ferret out the
science of the thing. Do you remember how your boy's respect rose for
little Barbara whenever she cried when too readily forgiven? "She dreads
a double standard," you explained to me with generous heat. You
sympathised with her fear lest I demand less of her than of you,
honouring her insistence on an equality of duty as well as of privilege.
Is the man Herbert less proud than the child Barbara, that you speak of
a temperamental difference and ask for a special dispensation?
You are not in love (this you say in not gainsaying my attack on you,
and so far I understand), because you are a student of Economics. At the
last I stop. What is this about economics and poesy? About your
emancipation from my riotously lyric sway? The hand of the forces by
which you have been moulded cannot detain you from going out upon the
love-quest. The fact of your preference for Draper cannot forestall your
spirit's need of love. There are many codes, but there is one law,
binding alike on the economist and poet. It springs out of the common
and unappeasable hunger, commanding that love seek love through night to
day and through day to night.
Yet it is possible to put oneself outside the pale of the law, to refuse
the gift of life and snap the tie between time and space and creature.
It is possible to be too emaciated for interest or feeling. The men and
women of the People know neither love nor art because they are too
weary. They lie in sleep prostrate from great fatigue. Their bodies are
too much tried with the hungers of the body and their spirits too dimly
illumined with the hope of fair chances. It is also possible to fill
oneself so full with an interest that all else is crowded out. You have
done this. Like the cobbler who is a cobbler typically, the teacher who
is a pedagogue, the physician and the lawyer who are pathologists
merely, you are a fanatic of a text. You are in the toils of an idea,
the idea of selection, as I well know, and you exploit it like a drudge.
When a man finds that he cannot deal in petroleum without smelling of
it, it is time that he turn to something else. Every man is engaged in
the cause of keeping himself whole, in watching himself lest his man
turn machine, in watching lest the outside world assail the inner.
Nature spares the type, but the individual must spare himself. He is
strong who is sensitive and who responds subtly to everything in his
environment, but his response must be characteristic; he must sustain
his personality and become more himself through the years. He alone is
vital in the social scheme who lets nothing in him atrophy and who
persists in being varied from all others in the scale of character to
the degree of variability that was his at the beginning.
I read in your letter nothing but a decision to stop short and give
over, as if you had strength for no more than your book and your
theory! You have become slave to a small point of inquiry, and you call
it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation
rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand
out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain
that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders
"Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything
that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the
young thought preaching if it is not the right of men to their own, and
what would it avail them to come into their own if life be stripped of
romance?
I am dissatisfied because you are willing to live as others must live.
You should stay aristocrat. Ferdinand Lassalle dressed with elegance for
his working-men audiences, with the hope, he said, of reminding them
that there was something better than their shabbiness. You are of the
favoured, Herbert. It devolves upon you to endear your life to yourself.
You do not agree with me. You do not believe that love is the law which
controls freedom and life. Slave to your theory and rebel to the law,
you lose your soul and imperil another's.
"Gently! Gently!" I say to myself. Old sorrows and wrongs oppress me
and I grow harsh. My heat only helps to convince you that my position is
not based on the _rational rightness_ you hold so essential and that
therefore it is unlivable. I will state calmly, then, that it is wrong
to marry without love. "For the perpetuation of the species"--that is
noble of you! So you strip yourself of the thousand years of
civilisation that have fostered you, you abandon your prerogative as a
creature high in the scale of existence to obey an instinct and fulfil a
function? You say: "These men and women will marry, and the work of the
world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about and the work of
the world would yet go on." And you are content. You feel no need of
anything different from this condition.
Believe me, Herbert, these million men and women will not let you
shuffle them about. There are forces stronger than force, shadows more
real than reality. We know that the need of the unhungered for the one
friend, one comrade, one mate, is good. We honour the love that persists
in loving. More beautiful than starlight is the face of the lover when
the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the
worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance
(which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl
close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her
sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the
hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for
Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, what for him in the motion of waters? You
cannot explain the bloom, the charm, the smile of life, that which rains
sunshine into our hearts, which tells us we are wise to hope and to have
faith, which buckles on us an armour of activity, which lights the fires
of the spirit, which gives us Godhead and renders us indomitable.
Comparative anatomy cannot reason it down. It is sensibility, romance,
idea. It is a fact of life toward which all other facts make. For the
flush of rose-light in the heavens, the touch of a hand, the colour and
shape of fruit, the tears that come for unnamed sorrows, the regrets of
old men, are more significant than all the building and inventing done
since the first social compact.
Forgive my tediousness. I have flaunted these truisms before you in
order to exorcise that modern slang of yours which is more false than
the overstrained forms of a feudal France. To shut out glory is not to
be practical. You are not adjusting your life artistically; there is too
much strain, too little warmth, too much self-complacence. I see that
you are really younger than I thought. The world never censures the
crimes of the spirit. You are safe from the world's tongue lashings, and
in that safety is the danger against which my friendship warns you.
I have been reading Hester's poems, and I know that she is like them,
nervous, vibrant, throbbing, sensitive. I have been reading your
letters, and I think her soul will escape yours. If you have not love
like hers, you have nothing with which to keep her. This I have
undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am
the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock
measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat
unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about
making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for
it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the
blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe.
Your sister keeps me strong with the faith of love. May God be good to
her! It was five years ago that she came to me and whispered, "Earl."
When she saw I could not turn to her in joy, she leaned her little head
back against the roses of the porch and wept, more than was right, I
fear, for a girl just betrothed. Earl was a cripple and poor and
helpless, but Barbara knew better than we, for she knew how to give
herself. Poor little one, whom nobody congratulated! She sends you and
Hester her love, unfolding you both in her eager tenderness.
DANE.
VI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
November 19, 19--.
Metaphysics is contagious. I caught it from Barbara, and I cannot resist
the impulse to pass it on, and to you of all others.
The mood leapt upon Barbara out of the pages of "Katia," a story by
Tolstoy. To my mind, it is a painful tale of lovers who outlive their
love, killing it with their own hands, but the author means it to be a
happily ending novel. Tolstoy attempts to show that men and women can
find happiness only when they grow content to give over seeking love
from one another. They may keep the memory but must banish the hope.
"Hereafter, think of me only as the father of your children," and the
woman who had pined for that which had been theirs in the beginning of
their union weeps softly, and agrees. Tolstoy calls this peace, but for
Barbara and me this gain is loss, this end an end indeed, replete with
all the tragedy of ending.
I found Barbara to-day on the last page of "Katia," and much disturbed.
"Dear, I saw a spirit break," she said. I waited before asking whose,
and when I did, she answered, "That of three-quarters of the world. The
ghost of a Dream walked to-day--when after the spirit broke, I saw
it--and myself and my Earl vanished in shadow. We and our love thinned
away before the thought-shape."
"Your dreaming, Barbara, can scarce be better than your living."
We looked long at each other. She knew herself a happy woman, yet to-day
the ghost had walked in the light, and her eyes were not held, and she
saw. Even her life was not sufficient, even her plans were paltry, even
her heart's love was cramped. Such times of seeing come to happy men and
to happy women. Barbara was reading the opinions of the world and the
acceptances of the world, and in disliking them she came to doubt
herself. Perhaps she, too, should be less at peace, she too may be
amongst Pharisees a Pharisee.
"In the midst of the breaking of spirit, how can I know?" she demanded.
"Love is sure," I prompted, my hand on her forehead. "Earl and I are
sure, dear," she laughed low, and a drift of sobbing swept through the
music; "it is not that we are in doubt about ourselves, but sometimes,
like to-day, you understand, one finds oneself bitten by the sharp tooth
of the world, and a despair courses through the veins and blinds the
eyes, and then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, comes a great
visioning."
I heard her and understood, and my heart leapt as it had not done for
long. Think of it, Herbert, fifty-three and still young! When was it
that I last fluttered with joy? Ah, yes, that time the summer and the
woods had a great deal to do with it, and a few words spoken by a boy. I
think Barbara's majesty of attainment through vicarious breaking of
spirit a greater cause for rejoicing.
_And then, in the midst of the bitterest throe, came a great visioning._
When pain is good and to be thanked for, how good life is! By this alone
may you know the proportion and the value of the good of being.
Three-quarters of the world are broken spirited, but from out the
wreckage a thought-shape, and it is well. The Vision fastens upon us,
and what was full seems shrunken, what whole and of all time a passing
bit, an untraceable flash. And that is well, for the dream recalls the
hope, and the heart grows hardy with hoping and dreaming.
So Barbara.
And you? You do not repine because of these things. Let the Grand Mujik
mutter a thousand heresies, let three-quarters of the world accept and
live them, you would not think the unaspiring three-quarters
broken-spirited. You would hail them right practical. And if you held a
thought as firmly as your sister holds the thought of love, and you
found yourself alone in your esteem of it, you would part from it and go
over to the others. You would not be the fanatic your sister is, to stay
so much the closer by it that of necessity she must doubt her own
allegiance, fearing in her devotion that, without knowing it, she, too,
is cold and but half alive. You would not see visions that would put
your best to shame. The thought-shape of the more you could be, were you
and the whole world finer and greater, would not walk before you. You
would rest content and assured, and--I regret your assurance.
Always yours,
DANE KEMPTON.
VII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
December 6, 19--.
No, I am not in love. I am very thankful that I am not. I pride myself
on the fact. As you say, I may not be adjusting my life artistically to
its environment (there is room for discussion there), but I do know that
I am adjusting it scientifically. I am arranging my life so that I may
get the most out of it, while the one thing to disorder it, worse than
flood and fire and the public enemy, is love.
I have told you, from time to time, of my book. I have decided to call
it "The Economic Man." I am going over the proofs now, and my brain is
in perfect working order. On the other hand, there is Professor Bidwell,
who is likewise correcting proofs. Poor devil, he is in despair. He can
do nothing with them. "I positively cannot think," he complains to me,
his hair rumpled and face flushed. He did not answer my knock the other
day, and I came upon him with the neglected proofs under his elbows and
his absent gaze directed through window and out of doors to some rosy
cloudland beyond my ken. "It will be a failure, I know it will," he
growled to me. "My brain is dull. It refuses to act. I cannot imagine
what has come over me." But I could imagine very easily. He is in love
(madly in love with what I take to be a very ordinary sort of girl), and
expects shortly to be married. "Postpone the book for a time," I
suggested. He looked at me for a moment, then brought his fist down on
the general disarray with a thumping "I will!" And take my word for it,
Dane, a year hence, when the very ordinary girl greets him with the
matronly kiss and his fever and folly have left him, he will take up the
book and make a success of it.
Of course I am not in love. I have just come back from Hester--I ran
down Saturday to Stanford and stopped over Sunday. Time did not pass
tediously on the train. I did not look at my watch every other minute. I
read the morning papers with interest and without impatience. The
scenery was charming and I was unaware of the slightest hurry to reach
my destination. I remember noting, when I came up the gravel walk
between the rose-bushes, that my heart was not in my mouth as it should
have been according to convention. In fact, the sun was uncomfortable,
and I mopped my brow and decided that the roses stood in need of
trimming. And really, you know, I had seen brighter days, and fairer
views, and the world in more beautiful moods.
And when Hester stood on the veranda and held out her hands, my heart
did not leap as though it were going to part company with me. Nor was I
dizzy with--rapture, I believe. Nor did all the world vanish, and
everything blot out, and leave only Hester standing there, lips curved
and arms outstretched in welcome. Oh, I saw the curved lips and
outstretched arms, and all the splendid young womanhood swaying there,
and I was pleased and all that; but I did not think it too wonderful and
impossible and miraculous and the rest of the fond rubbish I am sure
poor Bidwell thinks when his eyes are gladdened by his ordinary sort of
girl when he calls upon her.
What a comely young woman, is what I thought as I pressed Hester's
hands; and none of the ordinary sort either. She has health and strength
and beauty and youth, and she will certainly make a most charming wife
and excellent mother. Thus I thought, and then we chatted, had lunch,
and passed a delightful afternoon together--an afternoon such as I might
pass with you, or any good comrade, or with my wife.
All of which rational rightness is, I know, distasteful to you, Dane.
And I confess I depict it with brutal frankness, failing to give credit
to the gentler, tenderer side of me. Believe me, I am very fond of
Hester. I respect and admire her. I am proud of her, too, and proud of
myself that so fine a creature should find enough in me to be willing to
mate with me. It will be a happy marriage. There is nothing cramped or
narrow or incompatible about it. We know each other well--a wisdom that
is acquired by lovers only after marriage, and even then with the
likelihood of it being a painful wisdom. We, on the other hand, are not
blinded by love madness, and we see clearly and sanely and are confident
of our ability to live out the years together.
HERBERT.
VIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
December 11, 19--.
I have been thinking about your romance and my rational rightness, and
so this letter.
"_One loves because he loves: this explanation is, as yet, the most
serious and most decisive that has been found for the solution of this
problem._" I do not know who has said this, but it might well have been
you. And you might well say with Mlle. de Scuderi: "_Love is--I know not
what: which comes--I know not when: which is formed--I know not how:
which enchants--I know not by what: and which ends--I know not when or
why_."
You explain love by asserting that it is not to be explained. And
therein lies our difference. You accept results; I search for causes.
You stop at the gate of the mystery, worshipful and content. I go on and
through, flinging the gate wide and formulating the law of the mystery
which is a mystery no longer. It is our way. You worship the idea; I
believe in the fact. If the stone fall, the wind blow, the grass and
green things sprout; if the inorganic be vitalised, and take on
sensibility, and perform functions, and die; if there be passions and
pains, dreams and ambitions, flickerings of infinity and glimmerings of
Godhead--it is for you to be smitten with the wonder of it and to
memorialise it in pretty song, while for me remains to classify it as so
much related phenomena, so much play and interplay of force and matter
in obedience to ascertainable law.
There are two kinds of men: the wonderers and the doers; the feelers and
the thinkers; the emotionals and the intellectuals. You take an
emotional delight in living; I an intellectual delight. You feel a thing
to be beautiful and joyful; I seek to know why it is beautiful and
joyful. You are content that it is, no matter how it came to be; I, when
I have learned why, strive that we may have more beautiful and joyful
things. "The bloom, the charm, the smile of life" is all too wonderful
for you to know; to me it is chiefly wonderful because I may know.
Oh, well, it is an ancient quarrel which neither you nor I shall
outlive. I am rational, you are romantic,--that is all there is to it.
You are more beautiful; I am more useful; and though you will not see it
and will never be able to see it, you and your beauty rest on me. I came
into the world before you, and I made the way for you. I was a hunter of
beasts and a fighter of men. I discovered fire and covered my nakedness
with the skins of animals. I builded cunning traps, and wove branches
and long grasses and rushes and reeds into the thatch and roof-tree. I
fashioned arrows and spears of bone and flint. I drew iron from the
earth, and broke the first ground, and planted the first seed. I gave
law and order to the tribe and taught it to fight with craft and wisdom.
I enabled the young men to grow strong and lusty, and the women to find
favour with them; and I gave safety to the women when their progeny came
forth, and safety to the progeny while it gathered strength and years.
I did many things. Out of my blood and sweat and toil I made it possible
that all men need not all the time hunt and fish and fight. The muscle
and brain of every man were no longer called to satisfy the belly need.
And then, when of my blood and sweat and toil I had made room, you came,
high priest of mystery and things unknowable, singer of songs and seer
of visions.
And I did you honour, and gave you place by feast and fire. And of the
meat I gave you the tenderest, and of the furs the softest. Need I say
that of women you took the fairest? And you sang of the souls of dead
men and of immortality, of the hidden things, and of the wonder; you
sang of voices whispering down the wind, of the secrets of light and
darkness, and the ripple of running fountains. You told of the powers
that pulsed the tides, swept the sun across the firmaments, and held the
stars in their courses. Ay, and you scaled the sky and created for me
the hierarchy of heaven.
These things you did, Dane; but it was I who made you, and fed you, and
protected you. While you dreamed and sang, I laboured sore. And when
danger came, and there was a cry in the night, and women and children
huddling in fear, and strong men broken, and blare of trumpets and cry
of battle at the outer gate--you fled to your altars and called vainly
on your phantoms of earth and sea and sky. And I? I girded my loins,
and strapped my harness on, and smote in the fighting line; and died,
perchance, that you and the women and children might live.
And in times of peace you throve and waxed fat. But only by our brain
and blood did we men of the fighting line make possible those times of
peace. And when you throve, you looked about you and saw the beauty of
the world and fancied yet greater beauty. And because of me your fancy
became fact, and marvels arose in stone and bronze and costly wood.
And while your brows were bright, and you visioned things of the spirit,
and rose above time and space to probe eternity, I concerned myself with
the work of head and hand. I employed myself with the mastery of matter.
I studied the times and seasons and the crops, and made the earth
fruitful. I builded roads and bridges and moles, and won the secrets of
metals and virtues of the elements. Bit by bit, and with great travail,
I have conquered and enslaved the blind forces. I builded ships and
ventured the sea, and beyond the baths of sunset found new lands. I
conquered peoples, and organised nations and knit empires, and gave
periods of peace to vast territories.
And the arts of peace flourished, and you multiplied yourself in divers
ways. You were priest and singer and dancer and musician. You expressed
your fancies in colours and metals and marbles. You wrote epics and
lyrics--ay, as you to-day write lyrics, Dane Kempton. And I multiplied
myself. I kept hunger afar off, and fire and sword from your habitation,
and the bondsmen in obedience under you. I solved methods of government
and invented systems of jurisprudence. Out of my toil sprang forms and
institutions. You sang of them and were the slave of them, but I was the
maker of them and the changer of them.
You worshipped at the shrine of the idea. I sought the fact and the law
behind the fact. I was the worker and maker and liberator. You were
conventional. Tradition bound you. You were full bellied and content,
and you sang of the things that were. You were mastered by dogma. Did
the Mediaeval Church say the earth was flat, you sang of an earth that
was flat, and danced and made your little shows on an earth that was
flat. And you helped to bind me with chains and burn me with fire when
my facts and the laws behind my facts shook your dogmas. Dante's highest
audacity could not transcend a material inferno. Milton could not shake
off Lucifer and hell.
You were more beautiful. But not only was I more useful, but I made the
way for you that there might be greater beauty. You did not reck of
that. To you the heart was the seat of the emotions. I formulated the
circulation of the blood. You gave charms and indulgences to the world;
I gave it medicine and surgery. To you, famine and pestilence were acts
of providence and punishment of sin: I made the world a granary and
drained its cities. To you the mass of the people were poor lost
wretches who would be rewarded in paradise or baked in hell. You could
offer them no earthly happiness of decency. Forsooth, beggars as well as
kings were of divine right. But I shattered the royal prerogatives and
overturned the thrones of the one and lifted the other somewhat out of
the dirt.