enterprise, I draw the world together and make it kin. The uplift is but
begun. And in the great world I am making I shall be as of old to you,
Dane. I, who have made you and freed you, shall give you space and
greater freedom. And, as of old, we shall quarrel as when first you came
to me and found me at my rude earth-work. You shall be the scorner of
matter, and I the master of matter. You may laugh at me and my work, but
you shall not be absent from the feast nor shall your voice be silent.
For, when I have conquered the globe, and enthralled the elements, and
harnessed the stars, you shall sing the epic of man, and as of old it
shall be of the deeds I have done.
HERBERT.
IX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
December 28, 19--.
The curtain is rung down on an illusion, but it rises again on another,
this time, as before, with the look of the absolute Good and True upon
it. It is because we are at once actor and spectator that we find no
fault with blinking sight and slothful thought. We are finite branded
and content, except during the shrill, undermining moments when the
orchestra is tuning up. "Thus we half-men struggle."
I follow your letter and wonder whether your illusions have qualities of
beauty which escape me. I give you the benefit of every doubt which it
is possible for me to harbour with regard to my own system of illusions.
You glorify the crowd practical. You attach yourself to the ranks that
carried thought into action. You inspire yourself with rugged strength
by dwelling on the achievements of ruggedness, forgetting that the
progress of the world is not marshalled by those who work with line and
rule. It was not his crew, but Columbus, who discovered America. The
crew stood between the Old and the New, as indeed the crew always does.
Between the idealist and his hope were hosts of practical enemies whom
he had to subdue before he reached land. But I must not fall into your
mistake of dividing men into categories. Men are not either intellectual
or emotional; they are both. It is a rounded not an angular development
which we follow. Feeling and thinking are not mutually exclusive, and
the great personality feels deeply because he thinks highly, feels
keenly because he sees widely. Common sense is not incompatible with
uncommon sense, evil does not of necessity attend beauty, nor weakness
the strength of genius.
I shall sing of the deeds you have done if your deeds are worthy of
song. I shall sing a Song of the Sword, too, should the sword "thrust
through the fatuous, thrust through the fungous brood." Whatever helps
the races to better life sings itself into racial lore, and I alone
shall not refuse the tribute. When you come to see that the Iliad is as
great a gift to the race as the doings of Achilles, that the Iliads are
more significant than the doings they celebrate, you will cease to
classify men into doers and singers. You will cease to dishonour
yourself in the eyes of the singers with the hope that in so doing you
gain somewhat elsewhere.
Professor Bidwell is in love and it interferes with his work. You have
the advantage of him there, no doubt. However, you lose more than you
gain. You have shattered the dream and have awakened. To what? What is
this reality in which your universe is hung? Where shine the stars of
your scientific heaven? By the beauty of your dreaming alone, Herbert,
shall you be judged and known. You dream that you have learned the
lesson, solved the problem, pierced the mystery, and become a prophet of
matter. But matter does not include spirit, so the motif of your dream
grows all confused. Your race epic omits the race. You sing the branch
and the leaf rather than the sunlit and tenebral wood. Bidwell thinks
his ordinary sort of girl a "lyric love, half angel and half bird, and
all a wonder and a wild desire." Bidwell exaggerates, perhaps, but
unless he feels this for his wife, he has no wife. Barbara obeyed the
voice of her heart. That sounds sentimental, but it is none the less a
courageous thing to do. I was inconsistent enough to be sorry because
she loved a crippled man. Bidwell and Barbara are wiser and happier than
you can be, Herbert, than you from whose hand the map of Parnassus Hill
has been filched.
Is there one state of consciousness better than another? I think yes.
Better to have long, youthful thoughts and to thrill to vibrant emotions
than to grovel sluggishly; better to hope and dream and aspire and sway
to great harmonies than to be blind and deaf and dumb--better for the
type, better for the immortality of the world's soul. This to me is a
vital thought, therefore life or death is in the issue. For the rest I
know not. By the glimmer of light lent me, I can but guess greatness and
descry vagueness. You go further and would touch the phantasmagorial
veil. "Right!" I say, and I pray, "Godspeed." But there must be
intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the
beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of
life that I would wake you to bid you dream better.
Well, Herbert, I have quarrelled with you and shall to the end, I
promise. I wish I could take you away, hide you from your Hester's
sight, and pour my poetic spleen out on you. Oh, I shall torment you
into reason and passion! Whatever you may choose to be, you are my son.
I must take you and keep you as you are, of course, but I choose to tell
the truth to you though I do love you and hold you mine. Disagreeable of
me, but how else?
DANE.
X
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
Sunday, January 1, 19--.
Behold, I have lived! I press your face to the breathing, stinging roses
of my days, and bid you drink in the sweet and throb with the pain. What
is my philosophy but a translation of the facts which have stamped me?
Perhaps if I let you read these facts, you will the sooner come to share
my consecration and my faith. I must teach you to know that you are the
fact of my whole tangled web of facts, and that all that I have and am,
and all that might have been I and mine, stretches itself out in the
unmarked path which is before you.
I take you back with me to the road, white with dust, upon which like a
Viking and like a feeble girl I have travelled. It is not long, but how
many paths, what byways and what turns! What sudden glimpses of sea and
sky, what inaccessibleness! Hark, from the wood on either side
murmurings of hope and hard sobbing of despair, young laughter of joy
and aged renunciations! See from amongst the pines the farewell gleam of
a white hand. All of it dear--dearly bought and precious and miraculous,
the heartache even as the gladness.
"Life is worth living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death."
Ay, through every grain of it. Even that morning in the wood, thirty
years ago, when your mother put her hand in mine and looked a great pity
into my eyes. Indeed, she loved me well, but romance shone on the brow
of John Wace. For her his face was sunlit, and she needs must take it
between her hands and hold it forever. He was her Siegfried, her master.
Thus the gods decreed, and we three obeyed. What else was there to do?
We must be honest before all, and Ellen did not love me any more, and I
must know it, and wipe out a past of deepest mutuality, and strengthen
and console and restore the woman whose hand held mine while her eyes
were turned elsewhere.
Before that bright, black summer morning which saw me woman-pitied, I
knew I should have to renounce her. Their souls rushed together in their
first meeting. John had been away, knocking about museums and colleges,
and carrying on tempestuous radical work. He was splendidly picturesque.
I was a youth of twenty-three, almost ten years his junior, a boy full
of half-defined aims and groping powers, reaching toward what he had
firm in his grasp. Ellen talked of his coming, and she planned that she
should meet this my one friend in the environment she loved best--in my
rooms, whose atmosphere, she declared, belonged to an earlier time and
place. (She found in me Nolly Goldsmith and all of Grub Street.) So they
met at the tea-table in my study, and a great warmth stole over your
father. He spoke without looking at either of us, while Ellen looked as
if her destiny had just begun.
Without, it rained. I strode to the window and in a dazed way stared at
the lamp-post which was sticking out its flaming little tongue to the
night. Why was I mocked? There was no mocking and there should have been
no bitterness. Of that there was none either, after a while.
Ellen put her hand on my hair, and a strong primal emotion rose in me.
In that moment civilisation was as if it had not been. I reverted to the
primitive. The blood of forgotten ancestors, cave-men and river-men,
reasoned me my ethics. I turned to her, met her flushed cheeks and moved
being and the glory of dawning in her eyes. I measured my strength with
hers and your father's, Herbert. Easily, great strength was mine in my
passion, easily I could carry her off!
You, too, have had moments of upheaval when you heard the growling of
the tiger and the bear, when the brute crowded out the man. Then your
soul writhed in derision, you scoffed at that which you had held to be
the nobility of the soul, and you minced words satirically over the
exquisiteness of the type which we have evolved. Then the experiment of
life turned farce, the heavens fell about your ears and "Fool!" was upon
your lips. Oh, the hurricane that sweeps over the soul when it is
cheated of its joy! In the first instant of Ellen's indifference, when I
felt myself pushed out of her life, I forgot everything but my desire.
I could not renounce her. I was in the throes of the passion for
ownership.
Gentle girl between whom and myself there had been naught but sweetness
and fellowship! How often had we talked large (we were very young!) of
our sublimities and potentialities, how often had we pictured tragedies
of surrender and greatened in the speaking! Ah, it should come true. For
her and for me there must be miracles, and there were. So was the
strength of the spirit proven, so was it shown to be "pure waft of the
Will." So was I confirmed in the creed which believes that to keep we
must lose, and to live we must die. So was I assured that there may be
but one way, and that, the way of service.
I did not grip her passionately in my arms. I withdrew; I did much to
make her task of leaving me an easy one. Were it not for my efforts, it
would have been harder for her to obey a mandate which made for my pain.
She could not quite drown an old, Puritan voice, speaking with the
authority of tradition, which bade her hold to her vows. Yes, I made it
easy for her. Harrow my soul with theories of selection and survival if
you dare!
In those days the spires of the temple were golden, the shrine white.
The door was seen from every point in the fog-begirt world. We who
worshipped knew not of doubt. Stirred by the rumbling organ tones of
causes and ideas, we immolated our lives gladly. High priests of
thought, we swung the censers and rose on the breast of the incense.
Ellen and John and myself glorified God and enjoyed Him forever,--God,
the Type, the Final Humanity, the giant Body Soul of man. In our hearts
dwelt a religion which compelled us to serve the ideal. We strove to
become what organically we felt the "Human with his drippings of warm
tears" may become. We were the standard-bearers of the advancing margin
of the world. We were the high-water mark toward which all the tides
forever make. We were soldiers and priests.
And so when Ellen loved, and lacked courage for her love, I helped her.
A past of kindness and ardour riveted her to my side. She knew that we
were in feeling and fact divorced from each other by virtue of her
stronger love for John, yet did she do battle with the rich young love.
For two years we had been close; she had been so much my friend, she
could not in maiden charity seal for me a so unwelcome fate. I had
awakened her slumbering soul with my first look into the sphinx wonder
of her eyes. For me she had become fire and dew, flame of the sun, and
flower of the hill. Without me to help her do it she could not leave me.
To the master of matter this coping with spiritual abstractions must
appear like juggling with intellectual phantasmagoria. Yet I protest
that life is finally for intangible triumphs. Unnamed fragrances steal
upon the senses and the soul revels and greatens. Unseen hands draw us
to worlds afar, and we are gathered up in the dignity of the human
spirit. Unknown ideas attract and hold us, and we take our place in the
universe as intellectual factors. In giving up Ellen I helped her, and,
sacredly better still, I sent on into a world of vague thinking and weak
acting the impulse of devotion to revealed truth.
She had a sweet way of sitting low and resting her head on my knee. She
sat through one whole day with me thus, and for hours I could have
thought her asleep were it not for the waves of feeling which surged in
her upturned face. Toward the end she raised her head, ecstasy in her
eyes and on her cheek and lip. "Dane, I love you. Dane! Dane!" The whole
of me was caught up in the accents of that tremulousness. She had know
John three months; but her love for him was young, it had come
unexpectedly, it was still unexpressed and ineffable. Her yearning for
him led to softness toward me, and though she rose out of her mood as
one does from a dream, the hours when we were like the angels, all love
and all speech, were mine. So much was vouchsafed me.
Memories and echoes, gusts of sweet breath from the violets on your
mother's grave--the prophet of matter will have none of them, and, I
fear, will pity me that I am so much theirs. I am yours also, dear lad,
and I wish to serve you.
DANE KEMPTON.
XI
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
January 20, 19--.
I do not know whether to laugh or weep. I have just finished reading
your letter, and I can hardly think. Words seem to have lost their
meaning, and words, used as you use them, are without significance. You
appear to speak a tongue strangely familiar, yet one I cannot
understand. You are unintelligible, as, I dare say, I am to you.
And small wonder that we are unintelligible. Our difference presents
itself quite clearly to the scientific mind, and somewhat in this
fashion: Man acquires knowledge of the outer world through his
sensations and perceptions. Sensation ends in sentiment, and perception
ends in reason. These are the two sides of man's nature, and the
individual is determined and ruled by whichever side in him happens to
be temperamentally dominant. I have already classed you as a feeler,
myself as a thinker. This is, I _think_ true. You, I am confident,
_feel_ it to be true. I reason why it is true. You accept it on faith as
true, lose sight of the argument forthwith, and proceed to express it in
emotional terms--which is to say that you take it to heart and feel
badly because it happens to be so.
You feign to know this modern scientific slang, and you are contemptuous
of it because you do not know it. The terms I use freight no ideas to
you. They are sounds, rhythmic and musical, but they are not definite
symbols of thought. Their facts you do not grasp. For instance, the
prehensile organs of insects, the great toothed mandibles of the black
stag-beetle, the amorous din of the male cicada and the muteness of his
mate--these are facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor
can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters,
and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the
fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent,
splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no
worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the
glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of
silver. What make you of the hoarse voice of the gorilla? Is not the
dewlap of the ox inscrutable? the mane of the lion? the tusks of the
boar? the musk-sack of the deer? In the amethyst and sapphire of the
peacock's wing you find no rationality; to you it is a manifestation of
the wonder which is taboo. And so with the cock bird, displaying his
feathered ruffs and furbelows, dancing strange antics and spilling out
his heart in song.
I, on the other hand, dare to gather all these phenomena together, and
find out the common truth, the common fact, the common law, which is
generalisation, which is Science. I learn that there are two functions
which all life must perform: Nutrition and Reproduction. And I learn
that in all life, the performance, according to time and space and
degree, is very like. The slug must take to itself food, else it will
perish; and so I. The slug must procreate its kind, or its kind will
perish; and so I. The need being the same, the only difference is in the
expression. In all life come times and seasons when the individuals are
aware of dim yearnings and blind compulsions and masterful desires. The
senses are quickened and alert to the call of kind. And just as the fish
and the reptile glimmeringly adumbrate man, so do these yearnings and
desires adumbrate what man in himself calls "love," spelled all out in
capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amoeba, up the ladder
of life to you and me, comes this passion of perpetuation. And in
yourself, refine and sublimate as you will, it is none the less blind,
unreasoning, and compelling.
And now we come to the point. In the development of life from low to
high, there came a dividing of the ways. Instinct, as a factor of
development, had its limitations. It culminated in that remarkable
mechanism, the bee-swarm. It could go no farther. In that direction life
was thwarted. But life, splendid and invincible, not to be thwarted,
changed the direction of its advance, and reason became the all-potent
developmental factor. Reason dawned far down in the scale of life; but
it culminates in man and the end is not yet.
The lever in his arm he duplicates in wood and steel; the lenses in his
eyes in glass; the visual impressions of his brain on chemically
sensitised wood-pulp. He is able, reasoning from events and knowing the
law, to control the blind forces and direct their operation. Having
ascertained the laws of development, he is able to take hold of life and
mould and knead it into more beautiful and useful forms. Domestic
selection it is called. Does he wish horses which are fast, he selects
the fastest. He studies the physics of velocity in relation to equine
locomotion, and with an eye to withers, loins, hocks, and haunches, he
segregates his brood mares and his stallions. And behold, in the course
of a few years, he has a thoroughbred stock, swifter of foot than any
ever in the world before.
Since he takes sexual selection into his own hands and scientifically
breeds the fish and the fowl, the beast and the vegetable, why may he
not scientifically breed his own kind? The fish and the fowl and the
beast and the vegetable obey dim yearnings and vague desires and
reproduce themselves. "Poor the reproduction," says Man to Mother
Nature; "allow me." And Mother Nature is thrust aside and exceeded by
this new creator, this Man-god.
These yearnings and desires of the beast and the vegetable are the best
tools nature has succeeded in devising. Having devised them, she leaves
their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls
and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious
intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires,
promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is
called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in
sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as
they master the beast and all the acts of the beast. And they operate in
the development of man with the same blindness of chance that they
operate in the development of the beast.
Now this is the law: _Love, as a means for the perpetuation and
development of the human type, is very crude and open to improvement.
What the intellect of man has done with the beast, the intellect of man
may do with man_.
It is a truism to say that my intellect is wiser than my emotions. So,
knowing the precise value and use of this erotic phenomenon, this sexual
madness, this love, I, for one, elect to choose my mate with my
intellect. Thus I choose Hester. And I do truly love her, but in the
intellectual sense and not the sense you fanatically demand. I am not
seized with a loutish vertigo when I look upon her and touch her hand.
Nor do I feel impelled to leave her presence if I would live, as did
Dante the presence of Beatrice; nor the painful confusion of Rousseau,
when, in the same room with Madame Goton, he seemed impelled to leap
into the flaming fireplace. But I do feel for Hester what happily mated
men and women, after they have lived down the passion, feel in the
afternoon of life. It is the affection of man for woman, which is
sanity. It is the sanity of intercourse which replaces love madness; the
sanity which comes upon sparrows after the ardour of mating, when they
leave off wrangling and chattering and set soberly to work to build
their nest for the coming brood.
Pre-nuptial love is the madness of non-understanding and
part-understanding. Post-nuptial affection is the sanity of complete
understanding; it is based upon reason and service and healthy
sacrifice. The first is a blind mating of the blind; the second, a clear
and open-eyed union of male and female who find enough in common to
warrant that union. In a word and in the fullest sense of the word, it
is sex comradeship. Pre-nuptial love cannot survive marriage any
considerable time. It is doomed inexorably to flicker out, and when it
has flickered out it must be replaced by affection, or else the parties
to it must separate. We well know that many men and women, unable to
build up affection on the ruins of love, do separate, or if they do not,
continue to live together in cold tolerance or bitter hatred.
Now, Hester is my mate. We have much in common. There is intellectual,
spiritual, and physical affinity. The caress of her voice and the feel
of her mind are pleasurable to me; likewise the touch of her hand (and
you know that in the union of man and woman the higher affinities are
not possible unless there first be physiological affinity). We shall go
through life as comrades go, hand in hand, Hester and I; and great
happiness will be ours. And because of all this I say you have no right
to challenge my happiness, and vex my days, and feel for me as one dead.
My dear, bewildered Dane, come down out of the clouds. If I am wrong, I
have gone over the ground. Then do you go over that ground with me and
show where I am wrong. But do not pour out on me your romantic and
poetic spleen. Confine yourself to the Fact, man, to the irrefragable
Fact.
HERBERT.
Ah, your later letter has just arrived. I can only say that I
understand. But withal, I am pained that I am not nearer to you. These
intellectual phantasmagoria rise up like huge amorphous ghosts and hold
me from you. I cannot get through the mists and glooms to press your
hand and tell you how dear I hold you. Do, Dane, do let us cease from
this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so
long as I do no sin and harm no one; and be you father to us, and bless
us who else must go unblessed. For Hester, also, is fatherless and
motherless, and you must be to her as you are to me.
HERBERT.
XII
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
February 10, 19--.