or three letters, and they read like a set of briefs for a debate.
Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become
rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week.
It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters
too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, "They make me
sick talking of their duty to God." Yet friend should speak to friend,
should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. "Let there be
light, and there was light"--a ripple of light, and a flash, then the
darkness broke and dispersed from the face of the waters. It was a
trumpet-call of words bringing drama into a nebulous creation. Let the
Word break up our night and let us not only grant, but avow the
conviction it brings us, no matter what the consequence. Let us worship
the irrefragable Fact.
You hold that marriage is an institution having for its purpose the
perpetuation of the species, and that respect and affection are
sufficient to bring two people into this most intimate possible
relation. You also hold that the business of the world, pressing hard
upon men, makes "love from their lives a thing apart," and that this is
as it should be. Your letters are an exposition and a defence of what I
may loosely call the practical theory. You show that the world is for
work and workers, and that life is for results as seen in institutions
and visible achievements. I, on the other hand, maintain that it takes a
greater dowry to marry upon than affection, and that men love as
intensely and with as much abandon as women. People love in proportion
to the depth of their natures, and the finest man in the world has an
infinite capacity for giving and receiving love store. The spell is
strongest upon the finest.
This, briefly, is what we have been saying to each other. You attack my
idealism, call me dreamer, and accuse me of being out of joint with the
time, which itself is rigorously in joint with the laws of growth. And
I class you with the Philistine because of your exaggeration of
practical values. I hold that it is gross to respect the fact tangible
at the expense of the feeling ineffable.
In your last letter you exploit the theory of Nutrition and Reproduction
with a charm and warmth which helps me see you as I have so long known
you, and which tells me again that you are worth fighting for and
saving. But to trace love to its biologic beginning is not to deny its
existence. Love has a history as significant as that of life. When, eons
ago, the primitive man looked at his neighbour and recognised him as a
fellow to himself, consciousness of kind awoke and a cell was exploded
which functioned love. When, through the ages, economic forces taught
men the need of mutual aid, when everywhere in life the law of
development charged men with leanings and desires and outreachings, then
the sway of love began in life. What was subconscious became conscious,
what, back in the past, was a mere adumbration gloried out in Aurora
splendours. The love of a Juliet is the outgrowth of natural processes
manifesting themselves everywhere down the scale, but it is also the
gift of the last evolution, and it speaks to us from the topmost notch
in the scale. The charm of morning rests on a Juliet's love because its
hour is young and yet old, striking the time of the past and the future.
It is thus that the hunger of the race and the passion of the race
become in the individual the need for happiness. The need of the race
and the need of the individual are at once the same and different.
What was the point of your letter? That sexual selection obtains? I
grant it. That it is incumbent upon us as intelligent men and women to
call to the aid of instinct our social wisdom? I grant and avow it. But
our social wisdom insists that we obey the choices of instinct; our
social wisdom is only another phase of our refinement, which, in
impelling us to a love of the beautiful, does not the less impel us to
love. Our social wisdom educates our taste without lessening our taste
for the thing. "Love a beautiful person nobly, but be sure you love
her," says our social wisdom with interesting tautology. Besides, you
are a heretic to your own breed, Herbert. It is you who would forsake
our present social wisdom, ruling modern men by laws which obtained in
primitive life. It is you who steadily hark back to the past, and to
states of consciousness which were but can never be again. The early
facts of biology cannot include that which transcends them. To borrow
from Ernest Seton Thompson, man is evolved with the lower orders in the
same way that water is changed into steam, and the nature of the change,
when it is effected, is as radical. Add a number of degrees of heat to
water and it is still water. Let one degree be wanting to the necessary
number, and the substance is still intact. Add the last degree, and
water is no longer water. From water to steam is a radical change and a
transformation.
You agree to improve upon the beasts of the fields and upon our own race
in the past, and in this you go farther than you have need if marriage
is for nothing else than to serve the instinct for perpetuation. You
shew some respect for what is natural and instinctive, yet you say that
all would be as well if individual choice had not prevailed, and men and
women were "shuffled about." You draw up a cold programme for action in
affairs of the spirit and formulate a code of procedure in matters of
the heart.
I have a programme too. Mine does not break with nature. On the
contrary, it obeys every instinct and listens to every call on the
senses. My love begins in my biologic self, grows with my growth, takes
its hues from visioned sunsets in corn-flower skies, its grace from
swaying rivers of grain seen in dreams. It is for me what it is for fish
and fowl, beast and vegetable. It is my passion for perpetuation, but it
is also something as different from this as I am different from beast
and vegetable. My love is "blind, unreasoning, and compelling," and for
that I trust it. I do not conceive myself Man-god, therefore I do not
say to Nature, "Allow me." I cannot be sure that when I say it in the
case of the horse, who obeys like me "dim yearning and vague desires," I
do not sacrifice him to a lust of my own. The lust for owning and
spoiling is hard to cope with. Perhaps a purer time is near, when,
upborne by a sense of the dignity of romance and the sacredness of life,
man will refrain from laying rough hands on his mute brothers.
The romance which is my proof of the good of being does not rest on
passion. The unclean fires that consume the loutish and degenerate are
not of love. You quote instances of the hyperphysical and hysterical.
The feeling that I would have you obey for your soul's sake and without
which you are but half alive, is not the blind passion of an oversexed
sentimentalism. Rousseau was never in love in his life, though to say it
were to accuse him of perjury.
One word more. Do you wish to know why I care? I care because I know you
to be of those who are capable of love. Probably it was one little twist
in your development that has turned you into alien ways of thinking and
living. Yes, and more than for this I care because you are the
fulfilment of a sacred past. You are the son of my sacrifice and your
mother's love.
I care very much indeed. I do not wish you to awake some terrible night
to find that you had ended your romance before you had begun it. I vex
your days and call you dead? It is because I know the life that is by
the grace of God yours, and because I cannot bear to let you coffin it.
Herbert, there is misery when the blood pales, and the tears dry up, and
the flame of the heart sinks, and all that is left is a memory of a
thought--a memory of very long ago when one was young and might have
chosen to live.
I am sorry we darken the days for each other.
Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.
XIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
February 12, 19--.
Barbara and Earl celebrated their anniversary yesterday. Invitations
were sent out, the guests consisting of Melville and myself.
"Anniversary of what?" we asked. For answer we received inscrutable
smiles. Birthdays are accidents of fate. You may regret the accident or
you may be thick enough in illusion to rejoice over it, but you cannot
in decency celebrate an occurrence wholly independent of personal
control and yet concerning itself with you! Leave the merrymaking for
appreciative friends. So rules Barbara. Not a birthday, then, nor the
date of their marriage. The occasion was in some flash struck from
Being, the memory of which enriches them,--in a mood that for an hour
held them in strong grasp, in the utterance of a word charged with
destiny, in the avowal of their love if their love awaited avowal.
Whatever the cause, they honoured it with a will.
Barbara's eyes flashed, her cheeks were sweetly suffused, and her voice
was vibrant. Earl, too, was at his best. My heart loved this man who had
lain all his life with death. His health is at its bad worst this
winter, which fact made of the "Celebration" a rather heart-rending
affair. He has been obliged to abandon the _Journal_, but we hope he can
stay with the school. Meanwhile, his chronic invalidism of body and
purse does not too much affect him. He keeps his charm of tenderness and
strength. He rivets his pupils to him almost as he riveted his Barbara.
I have discovered my proof of this couple's happiness. It is that I have
always taken it for granted. Simple, is it not? And absolute. Often in
their presence I catch myself imagining their mutual lives and seeing
vaguely the graces that each brings to each. "How she must delight him!"
I say. "How his eyes speak to her!" "They can never come to the end of
each other," and so on. The ordinary married couple so often brings a
sense of distressed surprise: "How can these two foot it together?"
"How did it happen?" "How can it go on?"
Last night counted to me. Your father and I have had such evenings, but
I did not think I could do it all over again. We spoke with the fire
(and conceit) of young students, exciting ourselves with expired
theories, hoping old hopes, smarting under blows that perhaps had long
ceased to fall. What then? What if we were ill-read in the facts? We
could not have been wrong in the feeling. For the old hope that has been
proven vain, a new; for the ancient hurt, a modern wrong, as great and
as crying. It was good to feel that we had not grown too wise to harbour
thoughts of change and redress, or too much ironed out with doctrine to
be resigned. I confess it is long since I have eaten my heart in fury,
in impatience, in wildness, but last night we awoke the radical in one
another. We condemned the system. We placed ourselves outside the
regime, refusing aught at its hands, registering our protest, hating the
inordinate scheme of things only as hotly as we loved the juster Hand of
a future time.
It is curious that we, offsprings of parvenue success, should be capable
of such repudiation. Barbara accepts the Management without the trouble
of a question. "What do you know? What do you know?" the girl demands, a
radiant little angel in white, and a conservative. "You must know
yourselves in the wrong, else would you smite your way through the
world."
Ah, Barbara has yet to learn that it is hard to live. It is not so hard
to fight, and it is easy to rest neutral, but to be fighter and bearer
both, to stand staunch, holding ever to the issue, and yet, without
tameness, to take rebuff and wait, there's the true course and the
heroic. It is difficult when one has been conquered to know it. It is
difficult to honour an outgrown ideal, which cost us, nevertheless,
comfort and prestige--prizes which youth scorns and which oncoming age,
pathetically enough, holds dear. It is difficult to pull up when driving
too fast and too far, when galloping towards fanaticism, and it is
impossible to whip oneself into passion and martyrdom. It is difficult
to live, little Barbara.
For me it is also difficult to report a social function. At this one
Browning presided, for Melville took up "Caponsacchi" and read it to us.
That voice of his is in itself an interpretation, but Browning needs
interpreting less than any other man who wrote great poems, because he
wrote the greatest. It was four in the morning when the "O great, just,
good God! Miserable me!" of the soldier-saint fell upon our ears. How we
had listened! Earl steadily paced the floor, Barbara leaned her cheek
upon my hand. Her soul was doing battle, and so was mine. We were all
fighting the gallant fight. Read "Pompilia" and you are filled with
reverence, read "Caponsacchi" and you are caught up by the spirit of
action. You must rise and forth to burn your way like he, though you may
have been too weary in spirit before to answer to your name when
opportunity called roll.
It was Earl who broke the silence caused by the inner tumult. In a
dreamy voice, his eyes very eager and intent, he told us how at one time
he had gone up a hill that faced the house in which he lived. A hard
rain was driving, he fell at every step up the slippery steepness, but
at every step the beauty of it became more and more wondrous, hardly
bearable. The little village sank lower and lower, and about him were
soft hills, graceful and verdant, a stretch of water lying dark under
the clouded sky, and the mountain gray and watchful in the distance. It
was then, in the chill of a January rain, on an oak-clad hill of a
western spot, that he recognised the dear features of the Mother, knew
her his as hers he was, and loved her with passion. The sea is vast and
wondrous, but it is alien. It holds you apart; it is not of you. But the
gentle earth with her undulating form and the growing life in her lap,
soothes with wordless harmonies. It was then that he forgave the fate
which deformed him. A twisted oak, that is all--no less a tree and no
less beautiful in the landscape! And it was sufficient to live. In the
bosom of so much beauty sufficient also to die. As he stood, thinking it
out, feeling the wonder and the glory, at times sorry for those who can
see no longer the slanting sheets of rain and the grass at the feet, at
times feeling that since this is good, in some impalpable way oblivion
to all this may be also good, as he stood there, flushed with the
climbing and sad with great joy, the thought came: With whom? It cannot
be lived alone. With whom? He turned at the touch of an arm at his
shoulder to meet the smile and the look and the quick breath of her who
had sent herself his Eve.
In the dawn stealing over the world of London, Earl told the story, and
there and then we saw it all--the hill in the heart of the hills, the
reconciled boy who had climbed its brow, the rain-drenched woman
hurrying to overtake him, with the gift of all of herself in her eyes.
We looked neither at Barbara nor at Earl. Possessed of the secret, we
spoke a few words and left. Our host had divulged what the anniversary
sought to celebrate. We understood and were glad.
Good night, lad. Would you could have shared our heyday at the dawning!
DANE.
XIV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
February 31, 19--.
Love is a something that begins in sensation and ends in sentiment.
Thanks to beautiful and permissible hyperbole, you have begun with
sensation in your description of love, and have ended with sentiment.
You have told me about love, in terms of love, which is a vain
performance and unscientific. Now let me make you a definition. _Love is
a disorder of mind and body, and is produced by passion under the
stimulus of imagination._
Love is a phase of the operation of the function of reproduction, and it
occurs solely in man. Love, adhering to the common understanding of the
term, is an emotional excitement which does not obtain among the lower
animals. The lower animals lack the stimulus of imagination, and with
them the passion for perpetuation remains a mere passion. But man has
developed imagination. The pure sexual passion is glossed over and
obscured by a cloud of fancies, mistaken yearnings, and distorted
dreams. And so well is the real intent of the function obscured, that it
is actually lost to him, especially during the period of love madness,
so that there seems an apparent divorce between the parts which go to
make up love, between passion and imagination.
The romantic lover of to-day (expressing sensation in terms of
sentiment, and fondly imagining that he is reasoning) cannot reconcile
his soul-exaltation with bodily grossness, cannot conceive that soul can
turn body, and in the embrace of body tell out all the wonder of soul.
To all sensitive and spiritual men and women come times of anguish and
tears and self-revolt, when they are confounded and heart-broken by the
physical aspect of love. Poor men and women! they suffer keenly and
sincerely through lack of something more than a sentimental concept of
love. To them, body and soul appear things apart, to be kept apart, lest
the one contaminate the other. And in the end, loving well and truly,
they prove their love by enduring, though unable ever quite to shake off
the sense of sin and shame and personal degradation. They do not
understand life, that is the trouble. The beast, lacking imagination,
needs no rational rightness for the various acts of living, such as they
need, and which they do not possess. Because of their unchecked and
unbalanced imagination they mistake the half of life for the whole, and
when forced to face the whole are affrighted and shocked. They do not
reason that the need for perpetuation is the cause of passion; and that
human passion, working through imagination and worked upon by
imagination, becomes love.
And while I am in this vein, I may as well deny that a greater spiritual
dowry than affection is required for marriage. (For that matter, I fail
to see anything so spiritual in erotic phenomena.) If a man may achieve
affection for a woman, without undergoing pre-nuptial madness,--if a man
may take the short cut, as it were,--then I see no reason why he should
not marry that woman. He is certainly justified, since affection is what
romantic love must evolve into after marriage. But do not mistake me,
Dane. I do not intend this sweepingly. It will not do for the whole
human herd; for at once enters that abhorrent thing you rightly fear,
the marriage for convenience. Alas, it too often masquerades under the
guise of romantic love. Certainly, every man is not capable of taking
this short cut and at the same time of avoiding a violation of true
sexual selection. Having little brain, the average man can only act in
line with sexual selection by undergoing the romantic love malady. But
for some few of us, and I dare to include myself, the short cut is
permissible. This short cut I shall take, and far be it from any worldly
sense of stocks and bonds and comfortable housekeeping.
Marriage means less to man than to woman? Yes, by all means, at least to
the normal man or woman. As surely as reproduction is woman's peculiar
function, and nutrition man's, just so surely does marriage sum up more
to woman than to man. It becomes the whole life of the woman, while to
the man it is rather an episode, rather a mere side to his many-sided
life. Natural selection has made it so. The countless men of the past,
even from before the time they swung down out of the trees, who devoted
more time and energy to their love-affairs than to the winning of food
and shelter, died from innutrition in various ways. Only the men, normal
men, with a proper respect for the mechanism of life, survived and
perpetuated their kind. The chance was large that the abnormal lover did
not win a wife at all. At least it is so to-day. The abnormal lover is
not a successful bidder for women, and is usually passed by.
But while we are on this topic, do not let us forget Dante Alighieri,
your prince of lovers. Has a suitable explanation ever occurred to you
concerning how he came to marry Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, who
bore him seven children, and was never once mentioned in the "Divina
Commedia?" You remember what he said of his first meeting with Beatrice,
"At that moment I saw most truly that the spirit of life which hath its
dwelling in the secretest chambers of the heart began to tremble so
violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith." And he
later had seven children by Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and whom,
as the historian has recorded, "there was no reason to suppose other
than a good wife."
As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very
primitive. How many thousands years of culture, think you, have rubbed
and polished at our raw edges? One, probably; at the best, not more than
two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body
and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as
highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla. And before that
time, think you, how many thousands of years of savagery did we endure?
and how many myriads of thousands in the long procession of life up from
the first vitalised inorganic? Two thousand years are an extremely thin
veneer with which to cover the many millions.
And further, our much-vaunted two thousand years of culture is a thing
of the mind, an acquired character. We are not born with it. Each must
gather it for himself after he is born, from the spoken and written
words of his fellow and forerunners. Isolate a babe from all of its kind
and it will never learn to speak, and without speech words, it can never
think save in the concretest possible way. Yet it will possess all the
brute instincts and passions--the raw edges which do constantly shove
through the culture varnish of the civilised man.
Our culture is the last to come, the first to go. I have seen it go from
a man in an hour, nay, on the instant. Our culture is nothing more than
the accumulated wisdom of the race. It is not part of us, not a thing or
attribute handed down from father to son. It is a something acquired in
varying degree by each individual for himself. Yes, I do well to hark
back to the primitive. It tells me where I am to-day and describes to me
the world I am living in. You, Dane, are hyper-refined, or refined
beyond the times. You are like the idealistic and advanced zealots, who,
when such action would mean destruction, advise these United States to
disarm in the face of the war-harnessed world.
But no more of this jerky letter. Soon I shall proceed to make my
contention good. I shall show the higher part intellect plays in
conjugal love, the control, restraint, forbearance, sacrifice. And I
shall show that conjugal love is higher and finer than romantic love.
HERBERT.
XV
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
March 15, 19--.
Clyde Stebbins was here an hour after your theories and definitions
reached me. The fact that I had been reading treason against his sister
made me pick my subjects a little too carefully for smooth conversation.
Your letter, partly open, was on the table before us, and my eyes fell
upon it often as I wondered what it would mean to Hester's brother--if
he could read it. I no longer think only of you.
I reject your definition of love. It is not a disorder of the mind and
body, nor is it solely the instrument of reproduction. I reject and
resent your distinction between the pre-nuptial and post-nuptial states
of feelings. Further, I hold that marriage may not be based on
affection alone, and I disagree with you that population is better than
principle. Children need not be brought into the world at any cost.
Love is not a disorder, but a growth. There is spiritual as well as
physical growth. Some men and women never grow up strong enough to love.
Their development is arrested, or they are, from the beginning, poor
creatures born of starvelings, and perhaps fated to give birth to pale,
sapless beings like themselves. Others there are who love, and this is
no ill chance, no disease of the mind and body calling for psychiater
and physician. It is a strength, a becoming, a fulfilment. Let us reason
from the effect to the cause. How does this madness manifest itself? Not
in weakness. You never saw a man or woman in love who was the worse for
it. The lover carries all things before him, and not for himself alone,
but for a larger world than ever had been his. He who loves one must
perforce love all the world and all the unborn worlds. This is the way
life goes, which is another way of saying it is a scientific fact. That
which makes men capable of consecration is not a disorder of the mind
and body. It is the greatest of all forces, and it turns the wrangling
and grabbing human creature into an inspired poet.