the "absurdities" and "philanderings" alone. If in the lover's voice
throb the voices of myriads of lovers, it is because he is stirred even
as they. If a ballad wakes a response in him, it is because its motif
has been singing itself of its own accord in his heart, and its rhythm
was the dream nightingale to which he bade Her hearken. Behind the
tradition lies the fact. The expression may be ephemeral, the song flat,
the motto conventional, but the feeling which prompted it is true. Else
it could not have survived. And it has more than survived. It has grown
with growth. For centuries it lodged in the nature of man, lulled in
acquiescence, then, when the sense of recognition awoke, back in those
wondrous young days, it wakened to pale life, and now the feeling is
man's whole support, giving him courage to work and purpose to live.
But the half brute of the London slums kicks his wife when she offends
him and knows nothing of love. Well for the honour of love that it is
so! The half brute of the London slums had not food enough when a child,
and malnutrition is deadly. Later, he stole and lied in order to eat,
and he was bullied and kicked for it out of human shape. The trick was
passed on to him. The unfortunate of the London slums will push us all
from heaven's gate, because we do not do battle with the conditions that
make him. It is not such as he that should lead you to scorn love, for
he is a mistake and a crime.
In your example of the isolated boy babe and girl babe we meet with a
different condition. The individual repeats the history of the race, and
as these have been left out by the civilising forces, they revert to
past racial states. For these it is natural to live stolidly--is it
therefore natural for us? The point I make is that our refinement,
crying in us with great voice, is as much a part of us as are the simple
few hungers of the racial infant. We are not the less natural for being
subtle. And can it not be that the face of romance reveals itself even
to savage eyes? According to the need is the power, and the early man
needs must hope and desire; he is curbed by waiting and taught by loss
in the hunting, he is hungry, and he dreams that he is feasting. This
dream is his romance--a red flicker in the dawn, then still the gray. To
suppose this is not to be unscientific, for what is true of us must have
had a beginning, and feeling, as well as being, cannot have been
spontaneously generated.
There is an absolute gravitation to justice in nature. This was the
creed preached by Huxley to Kingsley a week after his boy's death. Grief
had turned the mind upon itself, and in the upheaval he formulated a
philosophy of faith and joy!
Our reward is meted out according to our obedience to all of the law,
spiritual and physical. Nature keeps a ledger paying glad life's arrears
each minute of time. And the creed rises to my lips when I hear you cry
shame upon the delight of love. It must be good, this thing which is so
fraught with joy! You brand it sense delight, but all delight is of the
senses, and Darwin at the conclusion of "The Descent of Man," if he was
not overtaken by a feeling of incompleteness in the work and a
consuming fever for the further task, was glad in a human way, with the
senses and through the emotions. Darwin's supreme moment may have come
at quite a different time. What can we know of the moments of repletion
that fall into another's life? With Huxley we may only know that our
hearts bound high when we strike a chord of harmony and prove ourselves
obedient to "all of the law," and our hearts bound high when we love. It
is nature's way of showing her approval. Oh, the strength of love and
the miracles of its compensations! The sense of becoming that it gives,
even in its defeats, the gladness that ripples in its sob-strangled
throat!
The day for asceticism is gone, or shall we say the night? We are not
afraid of sense delights. We are intent upon living on all sides of our
natures, roundly and naturally. You have a fine gospel of work and I
congratulate you upon it, but you make no mention of the purpose of it
all. It must not be work for work's sake. "When I heard the learned
astronomer--" says Whitman. Do you remember? He caught in one hour the
whole majesty, caught to himself the wonder that was unseen by the
watching astronomers. Somehow you feel the learned ones had made a
mistake in calculating so long that they had no time to see with
personal eyes the glory of the stars, and that Whitman had been
philosopher and had gained where they failed. The inspiration of the
poet, of the painter, of the economist, and biologist, is in the
revelation which they receive of what to do and why to do. For this
reason philosophy, which treats of the life and works of man, is in the
highest sense sociological. The generalisations of philosophy go to
improve our methods so that we may have greater proneness for sense of
delight and greater possibility for sense delight. Why, what else is
there? You are a poet, and you give an unrestorable day, when the sun is
shining and the hills lie purple in the distance, to writing a sonnet.
If you do so merely to employ yourself, it must be that the wolf of
despair is at your being's door. You have come to the end, and the sun
and the hills do not matter. You and they have parted company. But if
you write, impelled by the wish that others should read and recognise,
read and remember, and grow to know and feel better, and perhaps to love
the sun and hills better, then is yours a work of love, and it will be
made good to you, so that for the day which you have not seen, your
night shall be instinct with light. And if your labours are more
especially in the service of art, then, also, with each approach toward
expression, you are warmed through with the delight of achievement.
Is my meaning quite dashed away by this torrent of speech? It is simply
this: Before we think we feel, and the end of thinking is feeling. The
century of Voltaire and Dr. Johnson held that man is rational, the
century of James, Ribot, Lange, and Wundt is thrilled to the heart with
the doctrine that first, last, and always man is emotional. To speak
loosely, the dimensions of the human cosmos are feeling, emotion, and
sensation.
Build your fine structures. We like to see the foundations laid well and
the thick walls go up. Keep to your wizard inventions. We like to live
in a magic world. And ah, the indomitable machines with their austere
promise of free days for weary hands, and ah, the locomotives and the
ships steaming their ways toward intercourse, toward comity, toward
fellowship! We like the intricacy and the vastness of the world in which
we live. But "an unconsidered life is not fit to be lived by any man,"
says Aristotle. We must consider the phenomenon, civilisation, searching
down for the nucleus of its worth. We will find that the stone
structure without hope were a pitiable thing, that the making of
compacts and the banking of capital, without hope, were pitiable. This
hope that is the life germane, the immortal flash of mortality, the most
keenly human point in all humanity, is the hope for greater and greater
social happiness. Our world is an ever unfinished house which we are
employed in building. If we are imbued with the spirit of the architect
and not of the hod-carrier, we will hope sweetly for the work. The house
beautiful will begin to mean our life, and each night we will consult
our drawings, looking to it that on the house built of our days the sun
shall wester, and that within shall be intimacy, and laughter, great
speech and close love, looking to it that the home be such as to better
to-day's tenant so that he be more loving and lovable than the one of
yesterday.
We are wrong, perhaps. Long ago we were no less than now. When we
reached a hand in the darkness and grasped that of our fellow, the love
and the strongly frail human abandon were no less. We have not grown in
heart's munificence, perhaps. It is one of the illusions only. But the
hope is ours. For what do you hope?
DANE.
XXVII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
July 22, 19--.
Your birthday, Herbert, and for greeting I state that I walk your length
with you. A truce to quarrelling! It is now a year since you informed me
you were going to be married, and since then the gods have thundered
their laughter at the sight of two muttering men who sat themselves on
the axes of earth to dangle their legs into orbit vastness. Chronic
somnambulists that they are, they took their monopolist way thither in
their sleep.
I cannot tell you how full of vagary the correspondence we have fallen
into seems to me. I deliberately attempted to write you into passion and
for months you deliberately continued to convict yourself out of your
own mouth, and we did not see that it was tragic and comic and
preposterous. Could we personify this our dealing, we would do well to
call it a kind of Caliban. And the tentacles we threw out, clawing at
everything, stealing for prop to our little theory all of man and God!
It is the conceit of us that I find utterly hopeless of grace. So I drop
my role of omniscience. I take my form off the hub, believing the system
will maintain its gravity though I go my private way, and I promise to
let you alone. Forgive me, and God bless you. Ah, yes, and many happy
returns of the day. All my heart in the blessing and the wish.
I did some remembering to-day, dear lad. When you were born, I was five
years younger than you are now, yet I felt myself old. "If we were as
old as we feel, we would die of old age at twenty-one." My life seemed
all behind me, long, turbulent, packed with pain, useless. I spoke of
myself as if all were over. "It had been full of purpose, but what came
of it? A few rhymes and a spoilt hope." To my morbid fancy your having
come to be was a signal for me to go. I had no thought of dying, yet I
accepted you as the proof of my failure. In the exacting eyes of the
genius of the race I was insolvent. You were not mine. I looked into
Time, and saw none of me there.
Yet the letter I wrote to your parents was sincere,--how else? And that
night and the next and the next, I wrote "Gentleman Adventurers," which
the critics called the epitome of all that is balladesque. One pitied
the dead because they could go forth no more on water and under sky.
This poem, written in a mood which beneficent nature sends on the
too-sick spirit, has served for more than a quarter of a century as the
complete and accepted catalogue of the reasons for living. Well, I must
not laugh at it. It may be true that the passion of my heart incarnated
itself in it beyond the rest, that my one song sang itself out those
first three days of your life. If so, it is true that love is never
cheated of its fruit, and that the joy which might have been for the
individual oozes out of him to the race, that the strength which would
have settled upon itself in the calm of satisfied hope, filters through
him outwards.
Good night, lad. My hand is on your shoulder and I am loath to take it
off. For a while I would like what cannot be, to travel with you the
red-brown country-roads fragrant with hay, to cross the stiles and knock
upon the cabin doors, and enter where sorrow and where gladness is, big
with greeting and sure of welcome. I have often pleased myself with the
fancy that the outer aspects of life are patterned after the inner, so
that in the map of the spirit are to be found city and country, wood,
desert, and sea, so that we know these outer worlds through having
travelled the worlds within. Though I stay behind, my eyes can follow
you from this night's landmark along the stretch, on to the city
avenues, up the highways, tracing the twists of the bypaths, clambering
untrod trails of wilderness and mountain, on, on, till out upon the sea.
In one of the near turnings a woman with waiting face smiles subtly. Her
hands beckon you to the tryst. Godspeed, my son.
DANE.
XXVIII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
August 6, 19--.
As I have constantly insisted, our difference is temperamental. The
common words we lay hold of mean one thing to you and another thing to
me. I do not equivocate when I say that love is instinctive, and that
the latter-day expression of love is artificial. "Art," as I understand
the term in its broadness, contradistinguishes from nature. Whatever man
contrives or devises is an artifice, a thing of art not of nature, and
therefore artificial.
As for ourselves, among animals we are the only real inventors and
artificers. Instead of hair and hide, we have soft skins, and we weave
cunning textures and wear wondrous garments. In cold weather, in place
of eating much fat meat, we keep ourselves warm by grate fires and
steam heat. We cut up our blood-dripping meat chunks with pieces of iron
hardened by fire and sharpened by stone, and we eat fish with a fork
instead of our fingers. We put a roof over our heads to keep out storm
and sunshine, sleep in pent rooms, and are afraid of the good night air
and the open sky. In short, we are consummately artificial.
As I recollect, I have shown that the natural expression of the love
instinct is bestial and brutal and violent. I have shown how imagination
entered into the development of the expression of this love instinct
till it became _romantic_. And, in turn, I have shown how artificial was
the romantic expression of this love instinct, by isolating a boy babe
and a girl babe in a natural state wherein they expressed their love
instinct bestially and brutally and violently. As you say, they have
simply been "left out by the civilising force." And this civilising, or
socialising force is simply the sum of our many inventions. The isolated
pair merely expressed their instincts in the unartificial, natural way.
They had not been taught a certain particular fashion in which to
express those instincts as have you and I and all artificial beings been
taught.
As Mr. Finck has said, "Not till Dante's 'Vita Nuova' appeared was the
gospel of modern love--the romantic adoration of a maiden by a
youth--revealed for the first time in definite language."
Dante, and the men who foreshadowed and followed him, were inventors.
They introduced an artifice for protracting one of our most vital
pleasures. Well, they succeeded. And what of it? There are artifices and
artifices, and some are better than others. The automobile is a more
cunning artifice than the ox-cart, the subway than a palanquin. Devices
come and devices go. Change is the essence of progress. All is
development. The end of rapes and romances is the same--perpetuation.
There may be head love as well as heart love. And in the time to come,
when the brain ceases to be the servant of the belly, the head the
lackey of the heart, in that time stirpiculture, which is scientific
perpetuation, will take the place of romantic love. And in the present
there may be men ready for that time. There must be a beginning, else
would we still be jolting in ox-carts. And I am ready for that time now.
You say, "Love is of a piece with life, like hunger, like joy, like
death." Quite true. And civilisation is merely the expression of
life--a variform utterance which includes love, and hunger, and joy, and
death. Else what is this civilisation for? How did it happen to be? And
I answer: It is the sum of the many inventions we have made to aid us in
our pursuit of life and love and joy. It helps us to live more
abundantly, to love more fruitfully, to joy more intelligently, and to
get grim old Death by his knotty throat and hold him at arm's length as
long as possible.
I stated that "all progress consists in the arbitrary alteration, by
human efforts and devices, of the normal course of nature." This
sociological concept comes inevitably into accord with my philosophy of
love. It is the law of development, and all things of human life (which
includes love) come inside of it. Wherefore, certainly, I am not outside
our province when I demand of you to bring your philosophy of love into
like accord.
Incidentally, I will state that I _have_ fallen in love. I have grown
feverish with desire, gone mad with dumb yearning. I have felt my
intellect lose dominion, and learned that I was only a garmented beast,
for all the many inventions very like the other beasts ungarmented.
Nay, I am no cold-blooded theorist, no thick-hided dogmatist; nor am I a
chastely simple young man mooning in virginal innocence. My
generalisations have been tempered in the heats of passion, and what I
know I know, and without hearsay.
I have seen a learned man, drunk with wine, interrogate the new states
of consciousness of his unwonted condition, and so doing, gain a more
comprehensive psychological insight. So I, with my loves. I was impelled
toward the women I shall presently particularise. I asked why the
impulsion. I reasoned to see if there were a difference between these
illicit passions of mine and the illicit passions of my respectable and
respected friends. And I found no difference. Separated from codes and
conventions, shorn of imagination, divested of romance, stripped naked
down to the core of the matter, it was old Mother Nature crying through
us, every man and woman of us, for progeny. Her one unceasing and
eternal cry--PROGENY! PROGENY! PROGENY!
Just as little girls, instinctively foreshadowing motherhood, play with
dolls, so children feel vague sex promptings, and in sweetly ridiculous
ways love and quarrel and make up after the approved fashion of lovers.
You loved little girls in pigtails and pinafores. We all did. And in our
lives there is nothing fairer and more joyful to look back upon than
those same little pigtails and pinafores. But I shall pass the child
loves by, and instance first my calf love.
Do you remember the incident of the torn jacket and the blackened
eyes?--so inexplicable at the time. Try as you would, neither you nor
Waring could get anything out of me. Oh, believe me, it was tragic! I
was fifteen. Fifteen, and athrill with a strange new pulse; flushed, as
the dawn, with the promise of day. And, of course, I thought it was the
day, that I loved as a man loved, and that no man ever loved more. Well,
well, I laugh now. I was only fifteen--a young calf who went out and
butted heads with another calf in the back pasture.
She was a demure little coquette, Celia Genoine, Professor Genoine's
daughter, if you will recollect. "Ah," I hear you remonstrate, "but she
was a woman." Just so. Fifteen and twenty-two is usually the way of calf
loves. I invested her with all the glow and colour of first youth, and
in her presence became a changed being. I blushed if she looked at me;
trembled at the touch of her hand or the scent of her hair. To be in
her presence was to be closeted with the awfulness and splendour of God.
I read immortality in her eyes. A smile from her blinded me, a gentle
word or caressing look and I went faint and dizzy, and I was content to
lurk in some corner and gaze upon her secretly with all my soul. And I
took long, solitary walks, with book of verse beneath my arm, and
learned to love as lovers had loved before me.
Sufficient romance was engendered for me to pass more than one night
worshipping beneath her window. I mooned and sentimentalised and fell
into a gentle melancholy, until you and Waring began to worry over an
early decline, to consult specialists, and by trick and stratagem to
entice me into eating more and reading less. But she married--ah, I have
forgotten whom. Anyway, she married, and there was trouble about it,
too, and I bade adieu to love forever.
Then came the love of my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton
creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My
blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my
dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate,
indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can
I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered
the globe with his sword and pillowed his head between the slim breasts
of Egyptian Cleopatra while that hard-won world crashed to wrack and
ruin?
As I say, This was the love of my whelpage, and it was vigorous,
masterful, masculine. There was no sentimentalising, no fond foolishness
of youth; nor was there that cool, calm poise which comes of the
calculation and discretion of age. Man and woman, we were in full tide,
strong, simple, and elemental. Life rioted in our veins; we were
a-bubble with the ferment; and it is out of such abundance that Mother
Nature has always exacted her progeny. From the strictly emotional and
naturalistic viewpoint, I must consider it, even now, the perfect love.
But it was decreed that I should develop into an intellectual animal,
and be something more than a mere unconscious puppet of the reproductive
forces. So head mastered my heart, and I laid the grip of my will over
the passion and went my way.
And then came another man's wife, a proud-breasted woman, the perfect
mother, made pre-eminently to know the lip clasp of a child. You know
the kind, the type. "The mothers of men," I call them. And so long as
there are such women on this earth, that long may we keep faith in the
breed of men. The wanton was the Mate Woman, but this was the Mother
Woman, the last and highest and holiest in the hierarchy of life. In her
all criteria were satisfied, and I reasoned my need of her.
And by this I take it that I was passing out of my blind puppetdom. I
was becoming a conscious selective factor in the scheme of reproduction,
choosing a mate, not in the lust of my eyes, but in the desire of my
fatherhood. Oh, Dane, she was glorious, but she was another man's wife.
Had I been living unartificially, in a state of nature, I would
certainly have brained her husband (a really splendid fellow), and
dragged her off with me shameless under the sky. Or had her husband not
been a man, or had he been but half a man, I doubt not that I would have
wrested her from him. As it was, I yearned dumbly and observed the
conventions.
Nor are these experiences heart soils and smirches. They have educated
me, fitted me for that which is yet to be. And I have written of them to
show you that I am no closet naturalist, that I speak authoritatively
out of adequate understanding. Since the end of love, when all is said
and done, is progeny; and since the love of to-day is crude and
wasteful; as an inventor and artificer I take it upon myself to
substitute reasoned foresight and selection for the short-sighted and
blundering selection of Mother Nature. What would you? The old dame
would have made a mess of it had I let her have her way. She tried hard
to mate me with the wanton, for it was not her method to look into the
future to see if a better mother for my progeny awaited me.
And now comes Hester. I approach her, not with the milk-and-water
ardours of first youth, nor with the lusty love madness of young
manhood, but as an intellectual man, seeking for self and mate the ripe
and rounded manhood and womanhood which comes only through the having of
children--children which must be properly born and bred. In this way,
and in this way only, can we fully express ourselves and the life that
is in us. We shall utter ourselves in the finest speech in the world,
and, our children being properly born and bred, it shall be in the
finest terms of the finest speech in the world. To do this is to have
lived.
HERBERT.
XXIX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
August 26, 19--.
You insist that the question is not on the value of love but on the
significance of the artificial. Be that as it may. To me love is
integral with life, and to speak of civilising it away, seems, in point
of fact, as preposterous and as anomalous as a Hamletless play of
Hamlet. You forget that in developing you carry yourself along; you
change, yet you remain racial and natural. Else there were too many
missing links in all your departments. We read Homer to-day--telling
proof that the chain of sympathy stretches unbroken through epochs of
inventions and discoveries and revolutions. Truism that it is, it
presents itself with particular force at this stage.