TheJessica Letters An Editor's Romance G. P. Putnam's SonsNew York and LondonThe Knickerbocker Press1904 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright, 1904byG. P. PUTNAM'S SONSPublished, April, 1904 The Knickerbocker Press, New York ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _Dear Jessica_: _For a little while like shadows we have played our parts on a shadowystage, aping the passions and follies of actual life. And now, as the kindauthors who gave us being withdraw their support and leave us to fade awayinto nothingness, the doubt arises whether our little comedy was not allin vain. I do not know. A wise poet of the real world once said that man'slife was merely_ the dream of a shadow, _yet somehow men persuadethemselves that their own pursuits are greatly serious. Was our life anyless than that, and were not our hopes and sorrows and tremulous joy asfull of meaning to us as theirs to the creatures who strut upon the stageof the world? Again I say, I do not know: Only I am troubled that so fairan image as yours should prove after all a dream, a shadow's dream, andmelt so swiftly away_:-- In what strange lines of beauty should I draw thee? In what sad purple dreamshine paint thee true? How should I make them see who never saw thee? How should I make them know who never knew? _And my last word is a message. He who created me would convey in this, myfarewell letter, his thanks to the creator of Jessica. He himself hasfound in our correspondence only pleasure, and, as he turns from thisromance to other and different work of the pen, he hopes that she who madeyou will be encouraged by your charm to deal bravely with her imaginationand to give the world other romances quite her own and without the alloyof his coarser wit_. _Philip_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS PAGE PART I--Which shows how Jessicavisits an editor in the city, andwhat comes of it 1 PART II--Which shows how the editorvisits Jessica in the country, andhow love and philosophysometimes clash 83 PART III--Which shows how the editoragain visits Jessica in the country, andhow love is buffeted betweenphilosophy and religion 212 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The First Part which shows how Jessica visits an editorin the city, and what comes of it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I PHILIP TO JESSICA NEW YORK, April 20, 19--. MY DEAR MISS DOANE: You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, Itrust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me someright to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell youthat we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall bepleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you canalways use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I sayatrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch ofthat genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subjectthe lively creatures of his own brain. "Mr. Howells, " you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces thespiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really youhave made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is amalicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy, " is it not? And you dare tospeak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freakelement in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby, good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitalsand sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic. "Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the most ungallanteditor would be constrained to call fair! I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of greatmoment. But be assured neither you nor your perplexing query has reallyslipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy roomwith the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my onebarricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to oneexperienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life toliterature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbsme in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words, _give my life_. Literature is a despised goddess in these days to receivesuch devotion. Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy, as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whetherit will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writingreviews and sketches and stories, --why, certainly, do so by all means. Ihave no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honoursof society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, Godforbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such aconsuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal canonly come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think apeople that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as agreat critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or anysympathy for the follower? It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I havein all my experience met just four men who have given themselves toliterature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in themountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerkin New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever ananchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterlyunrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, theunhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealouspassion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of cleverreading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from thedecorous worship of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failureis the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the lifeabout us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due for suchearnestness in writing to one who is, after all, practically a stranger tome. Forgive my naïve zeal; but I remember that you spoke to me on the subjectwith a note of restrained emotion which flatters me into thinking I maynot be misunderstood. And, to seek pardon for this personal tone by anadded personality, it distresses me to imagine a life like yours, withwhich the world must deal bountifully in mere gratitude for the joy ittakes from you, --to imagine a life like yours, I say, sacrificed to anysuch grim Moloch. Write, and win applause for gay cleverness, but do notconsider literature seriously. Above all, write me a word to assure me Ihave not given offence by this very uneditorial outburst of rhetoric. Sincerely yours, PHILIP TOWERS. II JESSICA TO PHILIP MORNINGTOWN, GEORGIA, April 27, 19--. MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Since my return home I have thought earnestly of my visit to New York. That was the first time I was ever far beyond the community boundaries ofsome Methodist church in Georgia. I think I mentioned to you that myfather is an itinerant preacher. But for one brief day I was a small andinsignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted andunclassified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you werenot brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense ofirresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through thebuckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in theworld at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could havedanced and glorified God on a curbstone, if such a manifestation ofheathen spirituality would not have been unseemly. But the chief event of that sensational day was my visit to you. Of courseyou cannot know how formidable the literary editor of a great newspaperappears to a friendless young writer. And from our brief correspondence Ihad already pictured you grim and elderly, with huge black brows bunchedtogether as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I eventhought of adding a white beard, --you do use long graybeard wordssometimes, and naturally I had associated them with your chin. You canimagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs ofmy courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious inappearance, and not even _old_! The revulsion from my fears and anxietieswas so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands insalutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you should have hadthat also. I am so pleased to have you confirm my judgment of Howells's novel; andthat I am to have more books for review. I doubt, however, if Mr. Howellswill ever reap the benefit of my criticisms, for not long since I read anote from him saying that he never looked into _The Gazette_. You mustalready have given offence by doubting his literary infallibility. But on the whole you question the wisdom of my ambition to "give my lifeto literature. " As to that I am inclined to follow Ellen ThorneycroftFowler's opinion: "Writing is like flirting, --if you can't do it, nobodycan teach you; and if you can do it, nobody can keep you from doing it. "With a certain literary aspirant I know, writing is even more likeflirting than that, --an artful folly with literature which will never riseto the dignity of a wedding sacrifice. She could no more give herselfseriously to the demands of such a profession than a Southern mockingbirdcan take a serious view of music. He makes it quite independently of mind, gets his inspiration from the fairies, steals his notes, and dedicates thewhole earth to the sky every morning with a green-tree ballad, utterlyfrivolous. Such a performance, my dear Mr. Towers, can never be termed a"sacrifice"; rather it is the wings and tail of humour expressed in asong. But who shall say the dear little wag has no vocation because hissmall feather-soul is expressed by a minuet instead of an anthem? Therefore do not turn your editorial back upon me because I am incapableof the more earnest sacrifice. Even if I only chirrup a green-tree ballad, I shall need a chorister to aid me in winning those "laughing honours ofsociety. " And your supervision is all the more necessary, since, as yousaid to me, I live in a section where the literary point of view is moresentimental than accurate. This is accounted for, not by a lack of nativewit, but by the fact that we have no scholarship or purely intellectualfoundations. We are romanticists, but not students in life or art. We makeno great distinctions between ideality and reality because with usexistence itself is one long cheerful delusion. Now, while I suffer fromthese limitations more or less, my ignorance is not invincible, and Icould learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal, and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial. Sincerely, JESSICA DOANE. III PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledgedsooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment myletter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they canget nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once Ilay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond towhat seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myselfand launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to myown experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me inthe course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances morethan once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please, welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shutnature out of the door, she will come in at the window, " is an old saying, and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see. But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was notthe vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life toliterature, "--that question you very properly answered in a tone ofbantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner oflife to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heavensave the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there isno literature in New York. There are millions of books manufacturedhere, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has nosense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain whatI mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even thelove of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. Thedistinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in myactual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between thelife of a _religiosus_, Thomas à Kempis, let us say, and of a faithfulman of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble youwith mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southernmockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that birdmewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not forspontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by expressseveral books. .. . [1] IV PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: I have said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that Iam going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by livingwriters who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's_Victorian Prose Masters_, and the other is Santayana's _Poetry andReligion_. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I knowI shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a littledisheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of thesemen has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluentMr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American_bourgeoisie_. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as agood touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professionalweigher of books yourself, you ought to be acquainted with thesegentlemen. V JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Do not reproach yourself for having written me a "journalistic" letter. Ialways think of an editor as having only ink-bottle insides, ever ready toturn winged fancies into printed matter, or to enter upon a "lyricaldisquisition" concerning them. Your distinction consists in a dispositionto abandon the formalities of the editorial desk that you may "respond tothe personal demands of a new acquaintance. " And this humane amiabilityleads me to make a naïve confession. There are some people whose demandsare always personal. I think it is their limitation, resulting from astate of naturalness, more or less primitive, out of which they have notyet evolved. They do not appeal to your judgment or wisdom or even to yoursympathy, but to _you_. Their very spirits are composed of a sort ofsunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term thehigher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-topspirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistictraining of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners ofyour editorial dignity by impressing _personal_ demands. And just so am I related to the whole of life, --even to the "publicans" inmy father's congregation. Indeed, if the desire "to eat with sinners"insured salvation, there would be less cause for alarm about my miraculousfuture state. The attraction, you understand, depends not upon the fact oftheir being sinners, but upon the sincerity of their mortality. The moreunassumingly these reprobates live in their share of the common flesh, farbelow spiritual pretences, the more does my wayward mind tip the scales ofunregenerate humour in their direction. My instincts hobnob with theirdust. But do not infer that I have identified you with these undisciplinedcharacters. When I was a child, out of the rancour of a well-tutoredSouthern imagination I honestly believed that every man the other side ofMason and Dixon's line had a blue complexion, thin legs, and a long tail. And once when I was still very young, as I hurried from school through alonely wood, I actually _saw_ one of these monsters quite plainly. And Ithought I observed that his tail was slightly forked at the end! I havelong since forgiven you these terrifying caudal appendages, of course, but, for all that, I keep a wary eye upon my heavenly bodies and at leastone wing stretched even unto this day when my guardian angel introduces aNorthern man. My patriotic instincts recommend at once the wisdom ofstrategy. And it is well the "personal demands" come from me to you; for, had the direction been reversed, by this time I should have sought refugesomewhere in my last ditch and run up a little tattered flag of rebellionto signify the state of my mind. It is just as well that you advise me against trying my fortunes in your"literary metropolis. " My father is set with all his scriptures againstthe idea. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternallife"; and, having predestined me for a deaconess in his church, he isfirmly convinced that the strait and narrow way for me does not lie in thedirection of New York. However, I have already whispered to myconfidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maiddesperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess. Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye whilehe practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavensare doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow, propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiringclouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for anotherouting in your literary regions. Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has nosense, or indeed only contempt, " and I await the promised explanation withinterest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain anyopportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy(?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance andresources with "improvements, " cut down all the trees to make houses of, and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then weshall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tallbuildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art onlyfor vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and greatoperas. The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort tomake a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburnedheels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpingardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give hisexperience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these littlefreckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses andlilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinerycreations. VI JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literaturein E---- College, which you will remember is not very far fromMorningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of someold English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father'sone carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). Heis a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermitintelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice ispitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believingthat he is a bachelor. Still we had some talk together, and that is how I came to practise adeceit upon you. Seeing a copy of _The Gazette_ lying on the table thismorning, Professor M---- was reminded to say that there was a "strongman, " Philip Towers by name, connected with that paper now. I cocked myhead at once like a starling listening to a new tune, for that was thefirst time I had heard your name praised by a literary man in the South. He went on to say that he had been delighted with your last book, _Miltonand His Generation_, and asked if I had observed your work in the literarydepartment of _The Gazette_. I admitted demurely that I had. He praisedseveral reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you werethe only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modernfiction. Then he incensed me with this final comment: "I do not understand how he does this newspaper work so forcefully, almostsavagely, and is at the same time capable of writing such delicate, scholarly essays as this volume contains!" "I have seen Mr. Towers, " I remarked, mentally determining that you shouldsuffer for that distinction. "Indeed! what manner of man is he?" "His dust has congealed, stiffened into a sort of plaster-of-Parisexterior, and he has what I call a _disinterred_ intelligence!" "A what?" "A man whose very personality is a kind of mental reservation, and whoseintelligence has been resurrected up through the thought and philosophy ofthree thousand years. " M---- looked awkward but impressed. And I hoped he would ask how you actually looked, for I was in the mood togive a perfectly God-fearing description of you. But from the foregoing you will see that I am capable of sharing yourliterary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false rôlecreated in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussionwith M---- that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring hisjudgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, theassumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neitherimagination nor genius has always amused me. And this one danced now asfrantically as if he had unintentionally grasped a live wire that hurt andburned, but would not let go! Finally I said very engagingly: "Doctor M----, I hope to improve in these matters by taking a course ofinstruction under you next year. " "Now God forbid that you should ever do such a thing, Miss Doane! I wouldsooner have you thrust dynamite under the chair of English Literature, than see you in one of my classes!" Thus am I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And thatreminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold andBrownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticismof Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that hasbeen written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed suchloose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do notstick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you wouldnot tolerate them from me. But of all the books you have given me I likebest George Santayana's _Poetry and Religion_. Who is he anyhow? It may bea disgraceful admission to make, but I never heard of him before. His nameis foreign, and his style is not American. For when an American says adaring thing, particularly of religion, he says it impudently, with avulgar bravado. But this man writes out his opinion coolly, simply, withthat fine hauteur that will not condescend to know of opposition. I thinkthat is admirable. Arnold's courtesy and satirical temperance in dealingwith what he discredits is a pose by the side of this man's mental graceand courage. And you know how we usually denominate style: it is thelittle lace-frilled petticoat of the lady novelist's mincing passions, orthe breeches that belong to a male author's mental respirations. But withthis man, style is a spirit sword which cleaves between delusions andfacts, which separates religion from reality and establishes it in ourupper consciousness of ideality. Is it not absurd for such a barbarian as I am to discuss thesegospel-makers of literature with you? But it is much more remarkable thatone or any of them should excite my admiration and respect. Really, if youmust know it, Mr. Towers, this is where I grow humble-minded in yourpresence. I am fascinated with your ability to deal with the usuallyindefinable, the esoteric side of art, --the esoteric side of life byinterpretation. And here I discover a shadowy, ghostly likeness betweenyou and this George Santayana. You do not think toward the same ends, orwrite in the same style, but you _know_ things alike, as if you had bothdrunk from the same Eastern fountain of mysteries. And now I am about to change my gratitude into indignation. For I begin tosuspect that you sent me these books to inculcate the doctrine of literaryhumility. If so, you have succeeded beyond your highest expectations. Until now, writing has been a series of desperate experiments with me. Iprogressed by inspiration. But these fellows--Arnold especially--discreditall such performances. And he does it with the air of an English gentlemaninspecting a naked cannibal. He makes my flesh creep! He regards aninspiration as a sort of vulgarity that must be dressed and stretchedbefore it can be used. From his point of view I infer that he considersgenius as a dangerous kind of drunkenness that fascinates the world, butis really closely related to bad form in literature. On the other hand, father says that if Matthew Arnold had known of me he would have purchasedme, placed me in a cage with a fountain pen, and exhibited me to hisclasses at Oxford as a literary freak! VII PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: I will remember your amused hostility to "hairpin gardeners" and see thatno more out-of-door books come to you until I have one with a stimulatingodour of burning cornstalks and rotting cabbages. Meanwhile let me assureyou that your reviews of _Elizabeth, Evelina, Judith_, and their sistershave been none the less delightful for a vein of wicked impatience runningthrough them. The books I am now sending. .. . You ought not to be amazed at my dismal comments on latter-day literature. The fact is, you have dissected our present book-makers better than Icould do it myself, for the reason that I am too amiable (I presume, yousee, that I have the wit) to judge my fellow-workers with such mercilessveracity. But I have just read an article in the _Popular Science Monthly_ whichthrows an unexpected light on the subject. The paper is by Dr. Minot andis a biologist's comment on "The Problem of Consciousness. " You might notsuppose that an argument to show how "the function of consciousness is todislocate in time the reactions from sensations" (!) would have much to dowith the properties of literature, but it has. Let me copy out some of hiswords, as probably you have not seen the magazine: "The communication between individuals is especially characteristic of vertebrates, and in the higher members of that subkingdom it plays a very great rôle in aiding the work of consciousness. In man, owing to articulate speech, the factor of communication has acquired a maximum importance. The value of language, our principal medium of communication, lies in its aiding the adjustment of the individual and the race to external reality. Human evolution is the continuation of animal evolution, and in both the dominant factor has been the increase of the resources available for consciousness. " Now that sounds pretty well for a scientist. It should seem to followthat literature, being, so to speak, the permanent mode ofcommunication, --conveying ideas and emotions not merely from man toman, but from generation to generation, --is the predominant means by whichthis development of consciousness is attained. It is a pretty support wederive from the enemy. But mark the serpent in the grass--"theadjustment of the individual and the race to external reality. " The realaim of evolution is purely external, the adjustment of man toenvironment; consciousness has value in so far as it promotes thisadjustment. Flatly, to me, this is pure nonsense, a putting of thecart before the horse, a vulgar _hysteron-proteron_, none the lessexecrable because it is the working principle not of a single man, butof the whole of soctety to-day. Consciousness, I hold, is the supremelyvaluable thing, and progress, evolution, civilisation, etc. , are onlysignificant in so far as they afford nourishment to it. Literature isthe self-sufficient fruit of this consciousness, I say; the world says itis a mere means of promoting our physical adjustment. You see I take uplightly the huge enmity of the world. This is wild stuff to put into a journalistic letter, no doubt. If I werewriting a treatise I would undertake to show that this difference of viewin regard to consciousness and physical adjustment is the oldest and mostserious debate of human intelligence. Saint Catharine, Thomas à Kempis, and all those religious fanatics who counted the world well lost, made agod of consciousness and thought very little of physical adjustment. Thedebate in their day was an equal one. To-day it is all on one side--and_væ victis_! I cry out--why should I not?--as one of the conquered, and Iam charitable enough to advise another not to enter the combat. It is apoor consolation to wrap yourself in your virtue, mount a little pedestal, set your hand on your heart, and spout with Lucan: _The winning cause forthe gods, but the vanquished for me_! Sometimes we begin to wonderwhether, after all, the world may not be right, and at that moment thewind begins to blow pretty chill through our virtue. VIII PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: Is my suspicion right? Was my last letter to you really a tangle of crudeideas? That has grown to be my way, until I begin to wonder whether thehorrid noises of Park Row may not have thrown my mind a little out ofbalance. For my strength lay in silence and solitude. It is hard for me toestablish any sufficient bond between my intellectual life and my personalrelationships, and as a consequence my letters, when they cease to be merejournalistic memoranda, float out into a sea of unrestrained revery. Yet I would ask you to be patient with me in this matter. From the first, even before I saw you here in New York, I felt that somehow you might, bymere patience and indulgence, if you would, re-establish the lost bond inmy life; that somehow the shadow of your personality was fitted to moveamong the shadows of my intellectual world. What a strange compliment tosend a young woman!--for compliment it seems in my eyes. Meanwhile, as some explanation of this intellectual twilight into which Iwould so generously introduce you, I am sending you a little book I wroteand foolishly printed several years ago on the quiet life of the Hindus. The mood of the book still returns to me at times, though I have cast awayits philosophy as impracticable. I look for peace in the way that Platotrod, and some day I shall write my palinode in that spirit. Let me, inthis connection, copy out a few verses I wrote last night and the nightbefore. It is my first digression into poetry since I was a boy: THE THREE COMMANDS I Out of this meadow-land of teen and dole, Because my heart had harboured in its cell One prophet's word, an Angel bore my soul Through starry ways to God's high citadel. There in the shadow of a thousand domes I walked, beyond the echo of earth's noise; While down the streets between the happy homes Only the murmur passed of infinite joys. Then said my soul: "O fair-engirdled Guide! Show me the mansion where I, too, may won: Here in forgetful peace I would abide, And barter earth for God's sweet benison. " "Nay, " he replied, "not thine the life Elysian, Live thou the world's life, holding yet thy vision A hope and memory, till thy course be run. " II Then said my soul: "I faint and seek my rest; The glory of the vision veils mine eyes; These infinite murmurs beating at my breast Turn earthly music into plangent sighs. "Because thou biddest, I will tread the maze With men my brothers, yet my hands withhold From building at the Babel towers they raise, And all my life within my heart infold. " The Angel answered: "Lo, as in a dream Thy feet have passed beyond the gates of flame; And evermore the toils of men must seem But wasteful folly in a path of shame. "Yet I command thee, and vouchsafe no reason, Thou shalt endure the world's work for a season; Work thou, and leave to others fame and blame. " III I bowed submission, dumb a little while. Then said my soul: "Thy will I dare not balk; I reach my hands to labours that defile, And help to rear a plant of barren stalk. "Yet only I, because in life I bear The vision of that peace, may never feel The spur of keen ambition, never share The dread of loss that makes the world's work real. "Therefore in scorn I draw my bitter breath, And sorrow cherish as my proudest right, Till scorn and sorrow fade in sweeter death. " The Angel answered, turning as for flight: "The labour sorrow-done is more than sterile, And scorn will change thy vision to soul's peril: Be glad; thy work is gladness, child of light!" IX JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Many thanks for this copy of your book, _The Forest Philosophers ofIndia_. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better. Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East. The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lostthat, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminationswhich you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of aNirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, awhisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impressionof a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short ofterrifying. You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one ofyour own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your "Three Commands" have laid meunder a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much;and I am a little rebellious. X JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness, because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot's article. At last I got hold ofthe magazine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crudeideas, " they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way youexpected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could havebeen some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced thatdesperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historicalnovelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do notknow any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be soreadily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the sameslaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survivethe ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero, "wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even thesewould not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page. But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection withmy first venture into the realm of biological thought. _The PopularScience Monthly_ has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account ofits heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret thefact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot's article. But somedemon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term"epiphenomenon. " Now a long association with the idea of omniscience hasrendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke theimagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give adefinition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary ishis only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and hedeclines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority. Therefore he reasoned that "epiphenomenon" had been built up toaccommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mindnever dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pairof accusing glasses, he inquired: "My daughter, where did you see this remarkable word?" I do not question that I am a direct descendant from my fictitiousgrandmother, Eve! I am always being tempted by apples of information, andI have often known the mortifying sensation of wishing to hide my guiltycountenance in my more modern petticoat on that account. He read the "blasphemous" article through, only pausing to point outheresies and perversions of the sacred truth as he went along. But when hereached the sentence in which the author calmly asserts the theory ofmonism, he actually gagged with indignation: "My child, do you know thatthis godless wretch claims that the same principle of life which makes thecabbage also vitalises man?" I looked horrified, but I could barelyrestrain my laughter; for, indeed, there are "flat-dutch"-headed gentlemenin his congregation who might as well have come up at the end of a cabbagestalk for all the thinking they do. But I need not tell you that themagazine containing the profane treatise on consciousness was burned, while a livid picture was drawn of my own future if I persisted instealing forbidden fruit from this particular tree of knowledge. But your last letter put me into a more serious frame of mind. And I _am_complimented that you entertain the hope that I may be of assistance inre-establishing the lost bond between you and real life. But do you knowthat you have appealed to the missionary instincts of a barbarian? Theattributes of patience and indulgence do not belong to natures like mine. Never has any affliction worked out patience in me, never has my strongestaffection taken the form of indulgence. In me Love and Friendship, Sorrowand Gladness, take fiercer forms of expression. But I will not conceal from you the fact that from the first I have feltin our relationship a curious sensation of magic in one opposed to mysteryin the other. I have felt the abandon and madness of a happy dancer, whirling around the dim edge of your shadow-land in the wild expectationof beholding the disembodied spirit of you come forth to join me. It isnot that I _wished_ to work a charm, but the shadow of your mysteriouslife draws me into the opposition of a counter-influence. The gift ofpower is not in me to set foot across the magic line into the dim land ofyour soul, any more than I could dissolve into a breath of moonlit air, ora wave of the sea. For, in you, I seem to perceive some strange phenomenonof a spirit changed to twilight gloom which covers all your hills andvalleys with the mournful shadow of approaching night. Often thisconception appalls me, but more frequently I conceive a wild energy fromthe idea, as of one sent to rim the shadows in close and closer till somestar shall shine down and bless them into heroic form and substance. And Ihave been amazed to find within my mind a witch's charm for workingrainbow miracles upon your dim sky, --but so it is. There have always beenmad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got holdof the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of mylimitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be takenseriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to createthe necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance. Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows butto-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a littlehomeless wren seeking shelter in your valley. XI PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: So I am a disembodied ghost in your estimation, and you, "happy dancer, "are whirling around the rim of my shadow-land with some sweet incantationlearned in your Georgia woods to conjure me out into the visible world. Really I would call that a delicious bit of impertinence were I not afraidthe word might be taken in the wrong sense. And yet, I must confess it, there is too much truth in what you say. Someday, when I am bolder, I may unfold to you the whole story of my ruin--forit is a ruin to be disembodied, is it not? I may even indicate the singlephrase, the mysterious word of all mysteries, that might evoke the spiritfrom the past and incarnate him in the living present. Do not try to guessthe phrase, I beseech you, for it would frighten you now and so I shouldlose my one chance of reincarnation. When I visit you in the South, someday soon, I will tell you the magic word I have learned. What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheaptragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived astamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt atplaying Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a merebattling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your homeby Dr. Minot's heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadowfight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed, was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you thinkof me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit toa rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precociousMr. Pound-text printed in the New York _Observer_ when he was as much asnine years old--and the sermon might be worse. I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faiththat I passed through a few years later I can no more realise than I cannow realise your father's blessed assurance of heaven. I know vaguely thatit was a time of unspeakable agony for me, a rending asunder, as it were, of soul and body. The doctrine was bred into my bones; I saw the folly ofit intellectually, but the emotional comfort of it was the veryquintessence of my life. The struggle came upon me alone and I was withouthelp or guidance. Into those few years of boyish vacillation, I see nowthat the whole tragedy of more than a century of human experience wasthrust. One day I sat in church listening to a sermon of appealingeloquence: "And this is the condemnation, that light is come into theworld, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds wereevil. " Was I too deliberately turning my back on the light? I hid my faceand cried. That was the end. I came out of the church free, but I hadsuffered too much. Something passed from my life that day which nothingcan replace; for perfect faith, like love, comes to a man but once. 1 was empty of comfort and without resting-place for my spirit. Then saidI: Look you, belief in this religion as dogma is gone; why not hold fastto its imaginative beauty! If revelation is a fraud, at least theintricacies of this catholic faith have grown up from the long yearning ofthe human heart, and possess this inner reality of corresponding with ourspiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism, trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. Butin the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham, a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindnessof true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now agrown man. Then by some inner guidance I turned to India. How shall I tell you what Ifound in the philosophies of that land! One thing will surprise you. Instead of pessimism I found in India during a certain period of time ahappiness, an exultation of happiness, such as the world to-day cannoteven imagine. And I found that this happiness sprang from no pretendedrevelation but from a profound understanding of the heart. Do this, saidthe books, and you will feel thus, and so step by step to the consummationof ecstasy. I read and was amazed; I understood and knew that I too, if mywill were strong, might slip from bondage and be blessed. But I sawfurther that the path lay away from this world, that I must renounce everydesire which I had learned to call good, that I must strip my soul nakedof all this civilisation which we have woven in a loom of three thousandyears. The dying command of Buddha terrified me: "All things pass away;work out your own salvation diligently!" The words were spoken to comfortand strengthen the bereaved disciples, but to me they sounded as animprecation, so different is the training of our society from theirs. Theloneliness and austerity of the command appalled me; I would not take thefirst step, and turned back to seek the beautiful things of the eye. And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal--notChristianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement maysound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shaltlove God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law ofChristianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of theindividual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of ourneighbour's earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians, followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of theworld to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape--and none but astrong man shall open that door. So I look at the world and life, but, even as I write, something like aforeboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father andthe straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether afterall the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this lawwhich darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim the joy of mymaturer years? Alas, you who venture to trip so gayly about the rim of my shadow-landwith your brave incantations, behold what spirit of gloom and malignantmutterings you have evoked from the night. I have written more than Imeant--too much, I fear. XII JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: An evangelist has been here this week. He fell upon us like a howlingdervish who had fed fanaticisms on locusts and wild honey. And he hasstirred up the spiritual dust of this community by showing an intimacywith God's plans in regard to us very disconcerting to credulously mindedsinners. As for me, I have passed this primer-state of religious emotion. I am sure a kind God made me, and so I belong to Him, good or bad. In anycase I cannot change the whole spiritual economy of Heaven with my poorprayers and confessions. I try to think of my shortcomings, therefore, asmerely the incidents of an eternal growth. I shall outlive them all in thecourse of time, quite naturally, perennially, as the trees outlive theblight of winter and put forth each year a new greenness of aspiringleaves. I dare not say that I know God, and I will not believe somedoctrines taught concerning Him; but I keep within the principle of lifeand follow as best I can the natural order of things. And for the mostpart I feel as logically related to the divine order as the flowers are tothe seasons. I know that if this really is His world, should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. Are you shocked, dear Shadow, at such a creed of sun and dust?--you, adishoused soul, wandering like a vagrant ghost along life's green edge?After all, I doubt if I am so far behind you in spiritual experience. Thedifference is, I have two heavens, that orthodox one of my imagination, and this real heaven-earth of which I am so nearly a part. But you haveforced the doors of mystery and escaped before your time. And you cannever return to the old dust-and-daisy communion with nature, yet you areappalled at the loneliness and the terrible sacrifices made by a man inyour situation. Your spiritual ambition has outstripped your courage. Youare an adventurer, rather than an earnest pilgrim to Mecca. And yet day after day as I have weathered farther and farther back in thechurch, like a little white boat with all my sails reefed to meet thegospel storm of damnation that has been raging from the pulpit, I havethought of you and your Indian philosophy, by way of contrast, almost as ahaven of refuge. Our religion seems to me to have almost the limitationsof personality. There can be no other disciples but Christian disciples. Our ethics are bounded by doctrines and dogmas. But, whether Buddhist orChristian, the final test of initiation is always the same--"All thingspass away, work out your own salvation with diligence, " "Die to theworld, " "Present your bodies a living sacrifice"--and you would not makethese final renunciations. You "turned back to seek the beautiful thingsof the eye. " Well, if one is only wise enough to know what the reallybeautiful things are, it is as good a way as any to spin up to God. Meanwhile, I doubt if that "Western ideal, " the kind-hearted naturalismwhich "makes a fetish of our neighbour's welfare, " will hold you long. Already you "see one door" of escape. I wonder into what starry desert ofheaven it leads. Do you know, I cannot rid myself of the notion that yours is an enchantedspirit, always seeking doors of escape; but at the moment of exit the wildwings that might have borne you out fail. Some earth spell casts you back, incarnate once more. A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desiresof your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye, "that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like asweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And propheciescannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentenceswhich shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimesthink, --like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tallenough, only to be crowned at last with a white flag of blooms. And do not expect me to pray you through these open ways of escape. I onlywatch them to wish you may never win through. Something has changed me andset my heart to a new tune. I must have already made my escape, for itseems to me that I am on the point of becoming immortal. As I pass alongthe world, I am Joy tapping the earth with happy heels. I am gifted all atonce with I do not know what magic, so that all my days are changed toheaven. And almost I could start a resurrection of "beautiful things" onlyto see you so glad. But that will never be. There are always your wings tobe reckoned with; and with them you are ever ready to answer the voicesyou hear calling you from the night heavens, from the temples and tombs ofthe East. Yesterday I saw a woman sitting far back in the shadows of the churchwearing such a look of sadness that she frightened me. It was not goodnessbut sorrow that had spiritualised her face. And to me she seemed a wanprisoner looking through the windows of her cell, despairing, like one whoalready knows his death sentence. "What if after all I am mistaken, " Ithought, "and there really is occasion for such grief as that!" I couldthink of nothing but that white mystery of sorrow piercing the gloom withmournful eyes. And when at last the "penitents" came crowding the altarwith quaking cowardly knees, I fell upon mine and prayed: "Dear Lord, I amThine, I will be good! Only take not from me the joy of living here in thegreen valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish thanthe sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, askingfor heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forestsas sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more. You see, dear "Spirit of gloom, " that I have sent you all my littlescriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings. " My God is a pastoralDivinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems ofphilosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana, revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive thethoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did youever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you theheathen for your inheritance"? XIII PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon ofperversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams'sHull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-heartedmaterialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric onthis last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, Isay, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotesmoral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things thatare in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks underthe flowers? As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new. Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown intothe religion of men, --do you suppose that this was not known to the worldbefore? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enoughin the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working atleast, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis ofAristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zôon_(your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The"social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we livepeacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existencein a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched withthat sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of itspresent manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does notVirgil call his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholdingthe poverty of the city-- neque ille Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti? And is not the _Æneid_ surcharged with pitying love for mankind, "thesense of tears in mortal things"? So the life and words of St. Francis ofAssisi are full of the breath of brotherly love--not brotherhood with allmen merely, but with the swallows and the coneys, the flowers, and eventhe inanimate things of nature. And the letters of St. Catherine of Sienaare aflame with passionate love of suffering men. But there is something deplorably new in these more modern books, something which makes of humanitarianism a cloak for what is most lax andmaterialistic in the age. I mean their false emphasis, their neglect ofthe individual soul's responsibility to itself, their setting up of humanlove in a shrine where hitherto we worshipped the image of God, theirlimiting of morality and religion to altruism. I deny flatly that"Democracy . .. Affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith, " asMiss Addams says; I deny that "to attain individual morality in an agedemanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personaleffort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail toapprehend the situation"; I say we do _not_ "know, at last, that we canonly discover truth by rational and democratic interest in life. " Why didyou quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction betweenindividual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite theother way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely therumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, inthe upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul, concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into thenoise and constant coming and going of the lower rooms to speak a word ofencouragement or admonition, but she returns soon to her own silence andher own contemplation. (The heart of a St. Anthony in the desert of Egypt, the heart of many a lonely Hindu sage knows a divine joy of communicationof which Hull House with its human sympathies has no conception. ) Moralityis the soul's debt to herself. It is a striking and significant fact that these humanitarians arecontinually breaking the simplest rules of honesty and decent living. Rousseau, the father of them all, sending his children (the children ofhis body, I mean) to the foundling asylum, is a notorious example of this;and John Howard is another. I have in my own experience found these peopleimpossible to live with. Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personalintegrity by allusion to a novel which comes from anothercollege-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden ofChristopher_, published three or four years ago, --a clever book withal andrather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from hisuniversity, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued withcollege-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordancewith the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed bycompetitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in hishands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of hisfactory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates thistrust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and, as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in aparagraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of thestory, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero tosacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people isa higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense whichwould have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himselfand to the world. I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive ofright thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which hasrelaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For thatreason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil doesnot shock us as it once did, " I am filled with anger. I wonder at theblindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth asthis: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, andhave ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusiverespect. "--Have we? XIV PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed tobreathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did Imake clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to anycontempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike anddistrust it for its false emphasis and for its perversion of morality--andthe two faults are practically one. Last night I was reading in _Piers Plowman_ and came upon a passage whichexactly illustrates what I mean. The old Monk of Malvern might be calledthe very fountainhead in English letters of that stream of humanbrotherhood which has at last spread out into the stagnant pool ofhumanitarianism. He wrote when the rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Strawwas fermenting, when the people were beginning to cry out for theirrights, and his vision is instinct with the finest spirit of love for thedowntrodden and the humble. Yet never once does his compassion orindignation lead him to neglect spiritual things for material. Let me copyout a few of his lines on "Poverte": And alle the wise that evere were, By aught I kan aspye, Preiseden poverte for best lif, If pacience it folwed, And bothe bettre and blesseder By many fold than richesse. For though it be sour to suffre, Thereafter cometh swete; As on a walnote withoute Is a bitter barke, And after that bitter bark, Be the shelle aweye, Is a kernel of comfort Kynde to restore. So is after poverte or penaunce Paciently y-take; For it maketh a man to have mynde In God, and a gret wille To wepe and to wel bidde, Whereof wexeth mercy, Of which Christ is a kernelle To conforte the soule. Imagine, if you can, such a speech in the precincts of Hull House! I amnot concerned to exalt poverty, I know how much suffering it creates inthe world; and yet I say that an age to which poverty is only adegradation without any possible spiritual compensation, is an age ofmaterialism. I wish I might follow the use of the word _comfort_ from itsearly nobility as you see it here down to its modern degeneracy, where itsignifies the mere satisfaction of the body. The history of that wordwould be an eloquent sermon. Have I made myself clear? Do you understandwhat I mean by the false emphasis of our humanitarianism? And do you seewhy I could not stomach your review of Miss Addams's book?--I am sendingby express several novels, among them. .. . XV JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Here in the South we are born into our traditions and we generally die bythem. We never encourage the mental extravagance of adding new dimensionsto our minds. When you have had an hour's conversation with any of us, orhave exchanged three letters, you can be comfortably sure of what we thinkon any subject under the sun. Thus, you see, I was wholly unprepared forthe point of view expressed in your last two letters. I thought you were agentle disciple, --following the lights behind us indeed; but I did notsuspect that you were bent upon this journey through the dust of centurieswith the temper of a modern savage. However, it seems a man must have either ass's ears or a cloven foot; and, soon or late, most of us expect to find our hero in Bottom's predicament. But I would rather have acknowledged the beam in my own eye than havediscovered this diabolical split in your heel. All my life I have beenfamiliar with the inhumanity of the merely spiritually minded. And I thinkit was because your own spirit was not denominational, nor fitted to anydogma of my acquaintance, that I trusted it. But really, the product isalways the same. And I begin to wonder if there is not somethingfundamentally cruel in the law that governs soul-life. No matter what theage or the colour of the doctrine is, those most highly developed in thisway generally show a _conscientious selfishness_ that is dehumanising. They have no tender sense of touch, their relation to the world about themis obtuse; and for this reason, I think, they excite aversion in normallyminded people. I leave you, my dear sir, to "expose the serpent lurking under theflowers. " For my part, I believe humanitarianism is the better part of anyreligion. And while my knowledge of social orders does not reach so farback into the grave-dust of the past, I am unwilling to agree with youthat it is "coeval with human nature. " But it is one of the ends towardwhich all religions must tend, --for if a man love not his brother whom hehath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?--But I forget! Loveis not essential to your sort of Nirvana mysticism. In you, spiritualityis a sort of cruel aspiration toward personal perfection. Still, thatlittle scripture represents the advance made by this modern religion ofChristianity over your Hindu theosophy. Do you know I think a man's religious philosophy ought to fit himparticularly for his present environment of earth and flesh. One cannottell so much about the life after death. It may be necessary to make usover in the twinkling of an eye, and even to change the very direction ofall spirit life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are;and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way ofdealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me moremesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, anegation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or humanobligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none theless real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by aphilosophic pose. You see I am reading your last two letters by the lightof certain earlier confessions. And again I do not think you can fairly complain of humanitarianismbecause in some books "it is synonymous with all that is lax andmaterialistic in the age. " The author of a novel is never so concerned totell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory. You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can youjudge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely adecadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. Thescriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honestnor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that inyour "own experience" you have found these humanitarians "impossible tolive with. " I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is, Did they find _you_ impossible to live with? Come to think of it, I wouldrather live with a humanitarian, myself, even if his soul was carnallybow-legged. But my sort of charity is so perverse, so awry with humour, that the constant contemplation of a man trying to wriggle out of theflesh through some spiritual key-hole, made by his own imagination, into aform of existence much higher than agreeable, would be, to say the leastof it, diverting. You copy several sentences from the Hull-House book in your letter and cryto me in an accusing voice to know why I quoted them in my review "withapproval. " Suppose I did not comprehend their important relation to thesubject from your point of view? But I do understand enough to know thatthe "social compunction" in Aristotle's day was a mere theory, a sublimedoctrine practised by a few, whereas now it is a great governingprinciple, a dynamic power in the social order of mankind. And I challengeyour accuracy in calling such social sympathy "only a rumour in the lowerrooms of our existence. " My notion is that the choir voice of it hasalready reached that grand third story of yours, and that the "solitarysoul" in the "upper chamber" will presently find herself along with othertraditions--in the attic! Oh, I know your sort! You stay in your upperchamber as long as atmospheric conditions make it comfortable. But beforethis time I have known you to sneak down into those same "lower rooms" towarm yourself by humanitarian hearthstones. And that you are not nearly soimmortal as you think you are is proved by these winter chills along thespine. There come occasions when you get tired of your own stars and longto feel the thrill of that royal life-blood that leaps like a ruby riverof love through the grimy, toiling, battling humanitarian world beneathyou. Did you once intimate to me that if ever I conjured you out of theshadows which seem to surround you, I should be horrified at the vision?Well, I am! XVI PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR MISS DOANE: So your servant has a cloven hoof and just escapes the adornment of ass'sears! Dear, dear, what a temper! But, jesting aside, you must not supposeI abhor the cant of humanitarianism from any thin-blooded selfishness oroutworn apathy. Have I not made this clear to you? It is the negative sideof humanitarianism (the word itself is an offence!), and not its portionof human love that vexes my soul. Through one of the crooked streets not far from Park Row that wind outfrom under the grim arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, I often pass onbusiness. Here on the step at the entrance to a noisome court, whereheaven knows how many families huddle together behind the walls of thesemonstrous printing-houses, there sits day after day a child, a littlepale, peaked boy, who seems to belong to no one and to have nothing todo--sits staring out into the filthy street with silent, wistful eyes. There is only misery and endurance on his face, with some wan reflectionof strange dreams smothered in his heart. He sits there, waiting andwatching, and no man knows what world-old philosophy comforts his wearybrain. The face haunts me; I see it at times in my working hours; it peersat me often from the surging night-throngs of upper Broadway; it passesdimly across my vision before I fall asleep. It has become a symbol to meof the long agony of human history. Because I know the misery of that faceand the evil that has produced it, because I know that misery has been inthe world from the beginning and shall endure to the end, and because myheart is sickened at the thought, --that is why I rebel so bitterly againsta doctrine that turns away from all spiritual consolation for some vainlybuilded hope of a socialistic paradise on this earth. I have heard one ofthese humanitarians avow that he and practically all his friends werematerialists, and such they are even when they will not admit it. Deargirl, believe me, I have lived over in my mind and suffered in my heartthe long toil and agony which the human race has undergone in its effortto wrest some assurance of spiritual joy and peace from these clouds ofillusion about us; I have read and felt what the Hindu ascetic has writtenof lonely conflict in the wilderness; I have heard the Greek philosophersreason their way to faith; I have comprehended the ecstasy of the earlyChristians; I have taken sides in the high warfare of mediæval realistsagainst the cheap victory of nominalism. I know that the word ofdeliverance has been spoken by all these and that it is always the sameword. And now come these humanitarians, with their starved imaginations, who in practice, if not in speech, deny all the spiritual insight of therace and seek to lower the ideal of mankind to their fools' commonwealthof comfort in this world. Because I revolt from this false and cantingconception of brotherly love, am I therefore devoted to "conscientiousselfishness"? Ah, I beg you to revise your reading of this book of myheart, and to remodel your criticism. But I am saying not a word of what is most in my thoughts. In two days Ishall set out for a trip to the South which will bring me to Morningtown. Will you turn away in horror if you see a wretched creature hobbling withcloven hoof up the scented lane of your village? For sweet charity's sake, for your own sweeter sake, believe that his heart is full of love howeverwrong his mind may be. ----- [1] Much of the routine matter in regard to reviewing has been omitted from these letters. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Second Part which shows how the editor visits Jessicain the country, and how loveand philosophy sometimes clash. XVII PHILIP TO JESSICA WRITTEN AFTER RETURNING FROM MORNINGTOWN MY DEAR MISS DOANE: It is all different and the morning has forgotten to return since I leftyou where your village meets the great world. Have you kept God's commondayspring imprisoned among your garden trees and flowers? What shall Isay? What shall I not say? Only this, that I gave my happiness into yourhands and you have broken it and let it drop to the ground. See what ashipwreck I have suffered of all my dreams. These long years of solitaryreading and study I have been gathering up in my imagination the passionsand joys and hopes of a thousand dead lovers, --the longing of Menelaus forHelen, the outcry of Catullus for Lesbia, the worship of Dante forBeatrice--all these I have made my own, believing that some day my love ofa woman should be rendered fair in her eyes by these borrowed colours; andnow I have failed and lost; and what I would give, you have accounted aslight and insufficient. Is there no speech left to tell you all the truth?I am a little bewildered, and have not been able to pluck up heart ofcourage. Write me some word of familiar consolation; do not quite shut thedoor upon me until my eyes grow accustomed to this darkness. All the lightis with you, and the beauty that God has given the world, all the meaningof human life, --and I turn my back on this and go out into the nightalone. Dear girl, I would not utter a word of reproach. I know that mylove, which seemed to me so good, may be as nothing to you, is indeed notworthy of you, for you are more than all my dreams--and yet it was allthat I had. I shall learn perhaps to write to you as a mere reviewer ofbooks;--the irony of it. XVIII JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Can you believe it? I was absurdly glad to receive your letter thismorning. Ever since you went away I have felt so brave and desolate--likea poor dryad who has fought her way out of her own little kingdom of loveand peace and green silence, for the sake of a foreign ideal which reallybelongs to the world at large. (I shouldn't wonder if I did become adeaconess after all!) In my effort to escape a romantic sacrifice to astrange heathen divinity, I find myself offered upon this common altar inthe name of a theory, Humanitarianism. My smoke arises. I have beenconsumed, and now I write you merely in the spirit, --you see I am learning_your_ incantations. But being disembodied, I may at least be truthful. Besides, it issometimes wiser to make long-distance confessions than to tell the truthface to face. Then listen, dear Heart, it was not Philip, but poor Jessicawho was vanquished that day as we walked through the lanes and fieldsaround Morningtown. I do not know how to tell you, but of a sudden I ambecoming learned in all the joys and griefs of this world. There is asweetheart reason for them all, lying buried somewhere. For love isnature's vocation in us, I think. We cannot escape it. Our vision isalready love-lit when the prince comes. All he needs do is to step withinthe radiant circle. Oh, my Heart, is it not terrible when you think of it, that we may keep our wills, but our hearts we cannot keep! They go from ushappy pilgrims, and return unto us old and grey, sometimes lost andforsaken. You came so fast upon the heels of your other letter that I did not havetime to put on my shield and buckler before you were here in the flesh, formidable, real, cloven hoof and all! I was frightened andmilitant, --frightened lest you should win from me the freedom of my heart, militant for the freedom of my will. Well, at least I kept the latter, butI can tell you, it is making a poor bagpipe tune of the victory. When Iwent down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy, dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you willbear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. Inany case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and asyou stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my handsclasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candlessuddenly lighted in an open grave. You had not come merely to make peacewith me, you had my capitulation ready, but I knew then I should neversign. Let the dead bury their dead; as for me, I am too much alive to dielong and amicably with any ghost of a philosopher in the "upper chamber. "I do not even belong in the "lower rooms, " but outside under the skies ofour ever green world. I have already determined that if there is nothinggoing on in heaven when I am translated thither, I will ask to be changedinto a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring roundand round the earth. And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that Ido not really know _you_, only your mind. The time I saw you in New Yorkdoes not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicapjust to try each other's intellectual paces, did we not? But when youventured boldly down here upon my own heath--oh! that was a differentmatter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should notride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew _you_. Well, you knowthe dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by askinghis opinions or by classifying his face and expression according tobiological records. Now, a man's features are only his great-grandsomebody's modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, maynot represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of myown. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, butfriends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence andvirtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my littleheart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover's wreath onthe Morningtown road beyond my father's church. And behold! it was as ifwe had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs infriendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for adifference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did notreach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity wasthe ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the firsttime I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty ofyour spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimationof Nature's indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth oftrees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassionanywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact. But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thoughtpierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to thelife of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in thecold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with thetrees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then Iasked myself this question: "What is the good, where is the wisdom inloving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in lifeor love?" Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayerto be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannotremember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leavesupon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so thatyou can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all mywill in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day, perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but soundas a brownie's. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in theforest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poorheart that was dead and shall live again, --a tall lady-tree as heartlessas any man-oak, or only a poor vine! XIX JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regretsa witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes insackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I'd give half my forest now tohave back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, Iwish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman's heart yesterday, to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach herprudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that webe generally true to the mood we are in. When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of thesubject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference, but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your "upper chamber"and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge, however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof ofyour "higher nature. " When my father, for instance, who has long suspectedthe soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-firepremises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that youshowed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict. Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You areangry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who theHull-House classes are, --people so poor and starved and cold that theirvery souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boywho sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until youhave fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imaginationacross the fair fields of youth's summer years. Believe me, thehumanitarian's calling seems stupid from your point of view because youare born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-Houseprinciples have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted thewhole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth, then will be time enough for the spiritual luxury of such teachings asyours. The last batch of books has come, Creelman's novel, _Eagle Blood_, amongthem. Evidently it is a story written to prove the intellectual andcommercial ascendency of Americans over mere Anglo-Saxons. The heroine anda few romantic details are thrown in as a bait to the "average reader. "Alas for the "average reader"! How many crimes of this sort are committedin his name! We can never hope to have a worthy literature until he hasbeen eliminated from the consciousness of those who make it. In the dayswhen he was not to be reckoned with, and men wrote for a very fewappreciative admirers and some desperately cruel critics, then Carlylebegan to swear at his "forty-million fool, " and so attracted theirattention, and ever since we have had them with us, forty-million averagereaders, calling for excitement and amusement. It is this same"forty-million fool" who has made historical romances an inexhaustiblesource of revenue to the writers of them. For he is naïve, and has neversuspected the real dime-novel character of such fiction. Can you not getsome one to write an article outlining a plan by which the "averagereader" may be abolished? XX PHILIP TO JESSICA DEAR JESSICA: I will not for any consideration of custom put such a breach between mydreams and reality as to go on addressing you in the old formal way. Itwill be idle to protest; I have bought the privilege with a great price;nay, I have even bought you, and no outcry of your rebel will shall everredeem you from this bondage to my hopes. One thing I know: there is nopower in all the world equal to love, and he who has this power may winthrough every opposition. And was ever a man in such a position as mine?Others have been compelled to overcome a prejudice against what was baseor unworthy in themselves, but I am forced to defend myself for my bestheritage of understanding. Would it help me in your esteem if I flung awayall my hard-won philosophy and ranged myself with the sentimentalists ofthe day? I will not believe it. I will fight this upstart folly whilebreath is in me, and I will teach you to fight it with me. This morning Itook that poor book of Miss Addams's and, in place of what you sent me, wrote such a review as will quite astound the "forty-million fool" you sodespise--we agree there, at least. And all the while I was writing, I keptsaying to myself, How will Jessica answer that? and, Will not Jessicabelieve now that my hatred of humanitarianism does not spring fromselfishness or contempt, but from sympathy for mankind? Yet if anything could bring me to hate my brothers it would be thismonstrous certainty that my feeling towards them stands in the way of theone supreme, all consuming desire of my heart. I could cry out in thewords of the _Imitation_: "As often as I have gone among men, I have returned less a man"; for theirfoolish chatter has stolen from me the possession without which we aredwarfed and marred in our being. Your love is more to me than all thehopes of men. You must hearken to me. I have charged the winds with mypassion; the scent of flowers shall tell you the sweetness of love; youshall not walk among your beloved trees but their whispering shall repeatthe words they heard me speak. I will wrap you about with fancies anddreams and passionate thoughts till no way of escape is left you. Youshall not read a book but some word of mine shall come between your eyesand the printed page. You shall not hear a simple song but you shallremember that music is the voice of love. You think that I have no heartfor the many and can therefore have no heart for one. Dear girl, my loveis so great that it has made me stronger a thousand times than you; thereis no escape for you. As I passed the little goblin boy this morning I dropped a coin in hishand and said: "It is from a lady in Georgia who loves you. " His facelighted up with surprise at the words (not at the money, for I have givenhim that before), and I was glad to extend the benediction of yoursweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolishas to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor;but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven fromthe world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism, sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crewof _isms_!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for animpossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among men. They are the followers of Simon Magus, these humanitarians; they would buythe gifts of Heaven with a price; and their creed is the real Simonism. Have you ever read the _Imitation_, and do you remember these verses? For though I alone possessed all the comforts of the world and might enjoy all the delights thereof, yet it is certain that they could endure but a little. Wherefore, O my soul, thou canst not be fully comforted, nor be perfectly refreshed, save in God, the comforter of the poor and the helper of the humble. Let temporal things be for use, but set thy desire on the eternal. Man draweth nearer to God so as he departeth further from all earthly comfort. You have taught me to love, dear Heart; and now, as you see, you areteaching me to be orthodox. Do not think I shall give you up; there isonly one power greater than my desire, and that is Death. I would not endwith so ill-omened a word, but rather with your own sweet name, Jessica. XXI JESSICA TO PHILIP DEAR FATHER CONFESSOR: You observe, I do not retaliate by addressing you as Dear Philip. Afterreflecting, I conclude that this would be an undue concession to make, while the above title removes you to a safer sphere. It limits andqualifies your relationship and at the same time affords me the happyadvantage of confessing my heart to you. Really, I have always felt theneed of such an officer in my spiritual kingdom. I could never reconcilemyself to the incongruity of confessing in our experience meetings. Itseemed to me that sharing my confidence with so many people was heterodoxto nature itself. For this reason I have always thought that whileProtestantism is based upon a nobler theory of the truth, RomanCatholicism is founded upon a much shrewder knowledge of human nature. However, I do not come seeking absolution for any sins. Such shortcomingsas I have are so personal, so really a part of dear me, that I shouldscarcely be complete without them. They are vixenish plagues of characterthat distinguish me from more conventional saints. But now that I havewilled myself away from you, I need no longer conceal my heart. My lovehas been shriven, and, like a little white ghost out of heaven, must harkback to you occasionally for a blessing. To begin with, then, when your letter came this morning, I took just apeep inside to see if it was good, and then hurried away to our forest toenjoy it, for I always feel more at home with you there. And although theseason is so far advanced that the whole earth is chilled and desolate, myheart was like the springtide, swelling with gladness. Joy reached to myvagabond heels, and I had much ado to maintain the resignation gait of aminister's daughter through the village streets. And once out of sight Ikissed my hand quickly over my shoulder till my face burned. For had younot promised to attend me? "I will wrap you about with fancies anddreams, " you said. I was like a young-lady comet drawing after me aluminous trail of love. I began to comprehend the advantages of myposition, to rejoice in my sacrifice. I caught the finer aspiration oflove, like one who lays down his life and finds it again in nobler forms. Brave, good father, this thing that you have revealed to me is like asweet eternity. It neither begins nor ends: only we do that. When our timecomes we are swept into the current of it, happy, predestined atoms, andafterwards we are lost out of it like the leaves on the trees. But love islike the wind in their branches; it never is gone. So it seems to me nowwhen all my heart's leaves are stirred to gladness by the dear gale oflove. But do not despise me, O sage in the upper chamber, for my selfishness. Ikeep far to the windward of you because I was made for love, not forsacrifice. The altar of your soul life is very fine, very beautiful, but Iam too much alive to be offered up on such a table. Suppose I trusted you, gave myself with my heart, and in after years you should fall upon theidea of expurgating all sensations, all heresies, all affections from yourlife as the Brahmins do, what then would become of poor Jessica? I shouldsit upon your altar like a withered fairy, casting dust over my unhallowedhead and calling down elfish curses upon you. Ah me! when I come upon asplendid man-statue that suddenly glows into living heart and flesh, I maywonder and love, but I should never trust myself in the arms of thatphenomenon, lest, being clasped there, he should as suddenly turn back tohis native stone and freeze the life in me! Have you noticed that I tell you nothing of the village doings here, thelittle church sociables and a thousand commonplace details that go to makeup the sum of existence amid such surroundings? It is because I do notreally live among them. My mind is alien to these narrow margins ofsociety and religion. But it is always of the little forest that I tellyou, as if that were my real home, as indeed it is. And it is the dearerto me now that we have walked through it together. So in each letter youmay expect a report of how things go there. This morning, as I lookedabout at the sober ground covered thick with dying leaves, I thought ofwhat a gallant display of autumnal colors we had on that morning. Ourlittle friends of the summer time are flitting here and there through thenaked branches in silent confusion. There are no green boughs behind whichto conceal their orchestral moods. Besides, their inspiration is gone, their singing hearts are benumbed by the cold. But for your letter thrustsomewhere I could not have escaped the ghost of sadness that seemed tohaunt the earth and sky. Suddenly, as I stood in the midst of it all, acardinal flashed like a red spark into a tall pine, fluffed out hisbreast, and swept the forest with a defiant note of melody. It was achallenge to the long winter time, a prophecy of spring and of high greentrees, and of a mate cloistered now far away in the wilderness: "You shallnot hear a simple song, but you shall remember that music is the voice oflove, " whispered the letter against my heart. What a brave thing is lifewhen we have love and the hope of spring latent within us! I admit, as Ilistened to the little red troubadour of the pine, that, had you been asnear as the dreams and fancies that wrapped me about, this fight in me forfreedom would have been at an end. Do not trust these feeble moods ofmine, however; not one of them would last half the length of time youwould need to make the journey from New York to Morningtown! So! you have written such a review of Miss Addams's book as will astonishthe "average reader, " and all the while you wondered: "How will Jessicaanswer that?" Abridged, this is her opinion: That an editor should becareful how he kicks his heels at the spirit of his age. The world has anancient and effective way of dealing with such heroes. No, I am not familiar with the _Imitation_. But I gather from the passagesyou quote that it is a spiritual exercise prepared for those who "possessall the comforts of this life, " and are weary enough of them to pass on tothe philosophy of renunciation. But you should remember that theHull-House classes have not had the necessary experience with comforts. Renunciation is impossible for them, for they have nothing to give up. My love to the little goblin boy. XXII PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR JESSICA: Did ever "Father Confessor" have so sweet and so wilful a sinner toshrive! Your only sin is that you love me, and do you think I shall grantabsolution for that? As I read your letter with its wayward confession, itseemed to me indeed that I was in some temple of the gods instead of thisbook-littered den, and the rumble of the street was transfigured into thesound of triumphant music. And all the while the voice of the littlepenitent, hidden from my eyes, but almost within reach of my breath, murmured in my ears: "I love you, I love you, and that is my sin. " Deargirl, when you have given me your heart, do you suppose I shall be slow toconfiscate your will? It is not lawful that a man's, or a woman's, heartand will should be at enmity with each other. I know that your will isstrong, but I know, too, that your heart is stronger. Why did you turn meaway without one word of hope or consolation when I visited you inMorningtown? Out of the great store of happiness that God has given you, could you not spare one little morsel? Ah, I would not offer you up asacrifice on the altar of any spiritual creed, but take you with me intothat upper chamber that looks toward the golden sunrise. I would shareyour happiness and give you in return a portion in the hope that I toohave found. With you at my side I could walk through the world, (for I amnot such a recluse as you might suppose, ) knowing that the desire of allmen's hearts had fallen to me, and that my life was consecrated henceforthto noble uses. And yet to-day I am very sad. Let me tell you a little story of the way your admired Simonians act whentheir general promulgations of brotherhood are brought to an individualtest. Our proprietor and manager, a smooth-faced, meek-eyed Jew, who hasmade himself right with this world, at least, is much concerned withcharities and civic meetings and reform clubs and progress societies andthe preaching of universal democracy, and all that, --a veritable Phariseeamong the humanitarians. He often asks me to give a good word to someSimoniacal book. Well, I have a poor broken-down Irishman named O'Meara, who reviews a certain class of publications for me. He is the kind of manyou would never expect to meet in this country: a relic ofeighteenth-century Grub Street, --a man who reads Latin and Greek, who canquote pages of the Fathers, who has a high ideal of literature andconscience in writing, and withal a victim to the demon whiskey that hasdragged him down to the very gutter. His life has been a mystery to me, and some feeling of shame has kept him from ever telling me where and howhe lives. At intervals he comes shuffling into my office, with blearedeyes and palsied hand, and for charity's sake I give him a book toreview--and not exactly for charity either, for he does his work well. Twoor three weeks ago our Simoniacal manager came into my office and asked mewho that tramp was whom he had seen several times go away with books. Itold him the whole story, thinking to arouse his sympathy. What was mysurprise when he broke out into a mild stream of abuse--the more startlingbecause he ordinarily says so little--against allowing such besottedtramps to come into the offices! When a man drank himself into such astate as that there was no doing anything with him, etc. O'Meara came backin a day or two with his "copy, " and I told him that the chief had orderedme to cut him off. Poor wretch! he said never a word for himself, butturned and shambled guiltily out of the room--I shall never forget thesound of his trailing, despondent feet. I heard no more from him until yesterday, when the office boy came in andtold me a beggar child insisted on seeing me. What was my astonishmentwhen it proved to be our goblin boy, who had been sent to ask me to cometo his father; and his father was O'Meara! It all seemed as unsubstantialas a dream. I went with the child, of course. He guided me through thedark entry where I had seen him so often, in behind a great printinghouse, to a foul court hidden away from the street like some criminaloutlaw. I will not try to describe the noisomeness of that reeking hole. Ifound O'Meara lying on a heap of sacks in a mouldering closet which wasentirely dark save for what little light came through the doorway. Darkness, indeed, was his only comfort. He would not shake hands with me, for he has, withal, the instincts of a gentleman, and it seemed as if theshame of his whole degraded life lay with him before me in his misery. Histragedy will have been played out in a day or two, I think; and I wish thememory of it might also pass from my mind. What shall I do with the goblinboy? The hatefulness of it all stands between me and my thoughts of you. Icannot harden myself yet for a while to dream of pure beauty. I read yourletter over and over, but its sweet medicament cannot purge my breast. Noteven the acknowledgment of your love can drown these sighs I have heard. XXIII JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. PHILIP TOWERS: You lack the proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I haveexcommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audaciousadvantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in myromantic vagrancy. For a man giving himself airs in the "upper chamber, "you have very human ways, and I begin to suspect you only keep your creedand philosophy up there. But you are greatly mistaken if you think you can ever wheedle me intosuch a sunrise attic. I can be domesticated, but not etherealised. And youhold strange doctrines for an ascetic. You think that because I love itwill be easy to "confiscate" my will. Even _I_ know better than that. Welive to conquer our hearts. There is no freedom of mind and spirit tillthat decisive battle has been fought and won. My heart is a gay vagabond, ready to dance before the door of your tent, but my will is betterdisciplined. It weighs and counts the costs and rejects this sentimentalbargain, because, O Stranger to my soul, I doubt if you can pay theinterest love demands upon so large an investment. There is not enough ofyou; and your capital consists in something less vital, --in wind-cooledphilosophies, and the passions of an occult spirit ever ready to escapeinto mysticism. Why will you not be content with a companionship on thisbasis? You keep your wings and you wish mine also. Well, you shall nothave them! I have no disposition to simulate the example of those smallinsects who come out in early spring with splendid wings, make one flightfar enough through the sunlight to lose them, and crawl all the remainderof their days in the domestic dust of their little tenements. Besides, does not the science of biology teach that romantic love, in thevery nature of things, is transient?--a little heathen angel that weentertain unawares, who comes and goes at will? I cannot tell you whatsatisfaction and what distress that theory has caused me of late. I wouldhave my own heart free, but I am willing to move my little heaven andearth to prolong your bondage. Selfish?--I know, but consider upon whatloneliness and terror such selfishness is based. A man is alwayssufficient unto himself, particularly if he can abstract and diverthimself into a line of thought as you are able to do, but a woman withouta lover is a pathetic thing. There is no real reason for her existence;all her little miracles of expression and posing are for naught. She is asort of prima donna lost out of the play. There is no one to give her thehappy cue to the whole meaning of life. Oh, my Love! I _cannot_ livewithout a lover. Do not bereave me! I should shrivel up, I am sure, --growold and sour and sad. I might even become a deaconess with Hull-Housepropensities. I am a naïve beggar, you see; I ask all you have, and admitthat I am unwilling to give in return what I myself have. Your account of O'Meara interests me. But what right have you to slip outof your stern character as a merely spiritual man, and assume the guise ofa good Samaritan? Really it is not fair; your tender compassion isillogical, and, however benign, I cannot accept it as evidence in yourfavour. But your account of the poor man's distress touched my heart. Andyou ask me what ought to be done with the little goblin boy. Dear Philip, could _we_ not adopt him? Think how many years then, we should have tocorrespond in and to dispute with each other about his upbringing! I wouldmake the jackets and you should furnish the ethics for him. You shouldprovide a home for him, and I would give a little of the warmth that anywoman's tenderness imparts to any child. I will begin at once with amaternal dictation, --he must be sent into the country. For children arelike lambs, I think; they also need to grow up in a green field, and togambol there. He must have no cares, no obligations--just be encouraged tolet go all the good and evil there is in him. When he has expanded to hisnatural size morally and physically, we can tell better what to do withhim. Are you laughing at me, or are you scandalised at such a proposition?Then why did you ask my advice? When a child is without parents, is it notbetter to provide him with a pair of them, even if one is a wizard whoknows how to metamorphose himself into many different personalities, suchas sage, mystic, lover, good Samaritan, and I know not how many more? XXIV PHILIP TO JESSICA [THIS LETTER WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE PRECEDING LETTER OF JESSICA'S, BUT WASNOT RECEIVED UNTIL LATER. ] DEAR JESSICA: I often wonder whether I have made it quite clear to you why it ispossible to hold in high esteem personally the workers of Hull House andthese other philanthropists, while detesting their views as formulatedinto a dogma. Just after I had sent off my last letter to you I met withsomething in a morning paper which will throw light on my position. In anaddress before Princeton Theological Seminary Dr. Lyman Abbott is reportedto have used these words: "To follow Christ is, first of all, to give yourself to the service of God by serving your fellow-men. This is more important than the question of the Trinity, of the atonement, or of creeds. " Now the question of the Trinity or of the atonement may not seem essentialto me. My faith has passed out of them--beyond them, I trust; and at leastI do not call myself a Christian. But remember that Dr. Abbott is ateacher of Christianity and was on this occasion addressing students oftheology. Certainly to him and to his audience these are, they must be, the first of all matters in the realm of ideas, whether accepted orrejected, and to speak slightingly of them is to show contempt foreverything that transcends the material world. I know that Dr. Abbott, like some others, makes this service of our fellow-men to be a form of theservice of God; but the slightest knowledge of the spirit of the day, indeed any intelligent reading of the words I have quoted, makes plain howentirely this "service of God" is a tag, a meaningless concession to anolder form of speech. What seriously concerns our humanitarians is theservice of mankind. Now am I not justified in saying that true religionwould at least change the order of ideas and declare that to serve mankindis, first of all, to give one's self to the service of God? This is not aquibbling of words, but a radical distinction. It is because I find in allso-called humanitarians this tendency to place humanity before God, material needs before ideals, that I call them, when all is said, the mostinsidious foes of true religion. Their very virtues make them moredangerous than outspoken materialists and scoffers. It is largely due tothem and their creed that we have no art and no literature; for art andliterature depend, at the last analysis, on a reaching out after ideas, onan attempt to transmute material things into spiritual values, --on faith, in a word. The humanitarians cry out against the materialism and thecommercial spirit of the age. They do not perceive that the only remedyagainst this degeneracy is the renewal of faith in something greater andhigher than our material needs. Let them preach for a while the blessingsof poverty and other-worldliness. The attempt to instil benevolence orso-called human justice into society as the chief message of religion ismerely to play into the hands of the enemy. Do you see why I call them thereal followers of Simon Magus, who sought to buy the gift of God with aprice? "Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter; for thy heart isnot right in the sight of God. " Consider how impossible it would have been in any age of genuine or realcreativeness for a leading preacher of Christianity to have pronounced Dr. Abbott's words, and you will see how far humanitarianism has fallen fromfaith in the spirit. I know that passages maybe quoted from the Biblewhich might seem to make Christ himself responsible for this new Simony;but Satan, too, may quote Scripture. Surely the whole tenor of Christ'steaching is the strongest rebuke to this lowering of the spirit's demands. He spent his life to bring men into communion with God, not to modifytheir worldly surroundings. Indeed, the world was to him a place of miseryand iniquity, doomed to speedy destruction. He sought to save a remnantfrom the wrath of judgment as a brand is plucked from the fire, and heseparated his disciples utterly from acquiescence in the comforts of thisearth; they were to be in the world but not of it: "Render unto Cæsar thethings which are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's. " Hetaught poverty and not material progress. Those he praised were the poorand the meek and the unresisting and the persecuted--those who were cutoff from the hopes of the world. And now, dear girl, do you ask me to apply my preaching to my own case? Ofa truth I have faith. I think it my true service to men that I shouldlearn to love you greatly; and out of that love shall flow charity andjustice and righteousness toward the world. Let it be my meed of servicethat men shall see the beauty of my homage. XXV PHILIP TO JESSICA DEAR JESSICA: The end has come even sooner than I looked for it. This afternoon, littleJack, our goblin boy, came to my office and I followed him back to thedismal court where his father lay expecting me. I had arranged that thepoor wretch should be carried into a room where at least there was a bedand where a ray of clean sunshine might greet his soul when departing onthe long journey; and there I found him lying perfectly quiet save for thetwitching of his hands outstretched on the counterpane. I thought aglimmer of content lightened his dull eyes as I sat down beside him. Italked with him a little, but he seemed scarcely to heed my words. Thenturning his head towards me he plucked from under his pillow an oldthumb-worn copy of _Virgil_ (so bedraggled and spotted that no second-handbook-seller would have looked at it) and thrust it out to me, intimatingby a gesture that he would have me read to him. I asked him where I shouldbegin, and he held up two fingers as if to indicate the second book of the_Æneid_; and there I began with the fall of Troy-town. He listened with apparent apathy, though I know not what echoes thesonorous lines awakened in his mind, until I came to the words: Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus. I saw his hands clench together feebly here, and then there was no moremotion. Presently I looked into his face, and I knew that no sound of myvoice, nor any sound of the world, could ever reach him again; for thestory of his unspeakable sorrow, like the ruin of Troy, had been told tothe end. He had spoken not a single word; he had carried the silence ofhis soul into the infinite silences of death. The secret of his life hadpassed with him. I shall probably never know what early dreams andambitions had faded into this squalid despair. And his pitiful wan-facedboy--who was the child's mother? I am glad I do not know; I am only glad Ican tell him of your love. I shall see that the father is buried decentlywith a wooden slab to distinguish his grave from the innumerable dead whorest in the earth. Might we not print above his body the last words of thepoem he seems to have loved so much: _Fugit indignata sub umbras_! For Ithink it was the indignity of shame in the end that killed him. Is he notnow all that Cæsar and Virgil are? Shall he not sleep as peacefully in hispauper's bed as the great General Grant in that mausoleum raised by theriver's side?--Commonplace thoughts that came to me as I sat for a whilemusing in the presence of death; but is not death the inevitablecommonplace that shall put to rout all our originality in the end? And all the while our Jack was sitting perfectly motionless by the window, looking out into the court--into the blue sky, I think. I picked up one ofhis thin hands and said to him: "Little Jack, your father has gone awayfrom us and is at rest. There is a beautiful lady in the South who lovesyou as she loves me; will not her love make you happy?" He did not appearto understand me, but shrank into himself as if afraid. Indeed, sweetbenefactress, I shall send him into the country somewhere as you bid me, and I shall see that your love brings him greater happiness than it hasbrought me, for with him you shall not withdraw with one hand what youhave held out in the other. I went away, leaving an old woman to care for the dead man and his child. It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noises of thestreet sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence. Is it not astrange thing that death should have this power of benediction? Of asudden a breath comes out of the heavens, our little cares are touched byan eternal presence, a rift is blown in the thick mists that hem us about, and behold, we look out into infinite visionless space. And now I am backin my office. I open O'Meara's worn and much-stained _Virgil_, and insidethe cover I find these words scribbled in pencil: "_I have cried unto Godand He hath not heard my cry; but thou, O beloved poet, art ever near withconsolation_!" I do not know whether the sentence is original with O'Mearaor a quotation; it is certainly new to me. One other book I brought withme, and the two were the whole worldly possession of the dead man. This isa small but pretty thick blank-book, written over almost to the last page. I have not examined the contents carefully, but I can see that they aremade up of miscellaneous passages copied from books and of reflections ona great variety of topics, with few or no records of events. One of thelast entries is from Clarence Mangan's heart-breaking poem, _The NamelessOne_: And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow, And want, and sickness, and houseless nights, He bides in calmness the silent morrow That no ray lights. Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble, Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell! He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble Here, and in hell. And is it not a touch of Fate's irony that I should be sending thisthrenody of death to one who might expect to receive from me only messagesand pleadings of love? Death and love are the very antipodes of ourexistence, one would say. And yet I do not know; I feel nothingincongruous in linking the twain together. Love, too, breaks open thebarriers of our poor personality that the breath of the infinite may blowin upon us. I cannot say how it is with others, but so it is with me: lovelays a hand upon me, and instantly the discords of the world are hushed inmy ears, the little desires and fears that trouble me are shamed intosilence, and I am rapt away into the infinitely great heart that throbs atthe centre of all. It is strange, but life itself seems to pass away inthe presence of this power that is the creator of life. I speak darkly, but my words have a meaning. And, dear sweetheart, be not afraid that youshall be left without a lover; that I shall bereave you! Do you think foran instant that I can cease to love? I cannot understand this war betweenyour heart and your will; am I very stupid? Surely when I come to you, Ishall bring this contention to an end, and you--it hath not entered intothe heart of man to conceive what you shall give me. Out of theconclusions of death into the prophecies of love! I am filled withwondering. You shall hear more hereafter of poor Jack, our adopted child. XXVI JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR PHILIP: See how you shame me! For this long while I have wished to begin myletters thus, but I waited, hoping you would entreat me to do so. Iexpected you to provide an excuse. I thought my own pleasure would wearthe genial air of a concession to your wishes. Indeed, the way you waitfor me to be obliged to do such things of my own accord, fills me withsuperstitious anxieties. It is as if you had some unfair foreknowledge ofthe natural order of events. You would take things for granted, and thusproduce an hypnotic effect by your convictions so strong as to compel myconformity. But I console myself with the reflection that all this ismental. You terrify only my intelligence with your strange sorcery. Andfor this reason I shall always escape your bondage, for I am too wise toconcede my familiar territory to such an overbearing foreign power. However, I must not forget the prime object I have in writing this letter. It is to tell you that the little box of childish things, which you musthave received already and wondered at, are _not_ for the literary editorof _The Gazette_, but for Jack, sent with the hope that they may in somemeasure comfort his sad heart. I went so far as to purchase material forthe promised set of jackets, when suddenly I remembered that I wasignorant of both his age and size. You have never told me that, though youhave given me such a real picture of him that I could almost trust myimagination to cut those garments to fit him! Your account of O'Meara's death affected me deeply. With what sublimeabandon does such a man let go his soul into the mystery of that silencewhich we call eternity! Is it not strange how the same impressions come to many, but by differentways! "It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noisesof the street sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence, " yousaid, and the sentence recalled a somewhat similar experience of my own onCumberland Island, where father and I went last summer for a shortvacation. One day, leaving the group of happy bathers to their surf, Iclimbed up inland among the sand-hills, that lie along the shore like thewhite pillows of fabulous sea-gods. Presently I came upon one of thosegreat sand-pits that stretch along the Island, deep and wide like mightygraves. Far below me a whole forest stood in ghostly silence, with everywhitening limb lifted in supplication, as if all had died in a terrifiedstruggle with the engulfing sands. Unawares, I had happened upon one ofNature's griefs--and I do not know how to tell you, but the sight of itaged me. Of a sudden this death of the trees seemed a far-off part of myown experience. I was swept out of this contesting, energetic world into astill region where great events come to pass in silence, and inevitably. And so real was the illusion that, as I turned to hurry back, it seemed tome that centuries had passed since I saw the same little tuft of flowerslike a group of purple fairies nodding to me from the top of a tall cliff. And so I stood there confused by the significance of this silence, soincredible that even the winds could not shake it. I felt so near and kinto death that I became "alien" to all the living world about me. For thefirst time in my life, I lost the _sense_ of God, which is always a kindof mental protection against the terrors of infinity. There was nothing topray to, only the sea on one side and this grave on the other, with alittle trembling life between. Thus you will understand that not only have I had a similar experience toyour own upon the occasion of O'Meara's death, but that for once I cameinto your region of shades and terrors. I was like one on the point ofdissolution, and almost my soul escaped into your dim habitation. Fromyour letters I had already learned how near together love and death stoodin your consciousness. Each is an exit through which your spirit is everready to pass. And for the moment, crowded in with skeleton shadows there, you seemed sensibly near me. I was divided between fear and love. But theblood of life in me always triumphs, --and then it was that I made my firstflight in consciousness from you. I kissed my hand to the twilight andran! I am sure you were there, Philip, a cold-lipped spirit-lover seekingmy mortal life. And, oh my Heart! is it wrong that I would love and beloved in the flesh? I do not object to spirituality, only it must have avisible presence and a warm cheek. P. S. --But, dear Philip, how am I to reconcile this tender charity to Jackwith your anti-humanitarian views? Is a man's heart so divided from hisphilosophy? Or do you intend to make a mystic of that poor child, so thathe may escape the woes of his condition? I am curious to see what you willdo with him. Also, I shall certainly defend him against your Nirvanadoctrines if I suspect you of juggling with his soul. XXVII PHILIP TO JESSICA DEAR, TEASING, RARE JESSICA: I have so many things to say to you. First of all, why do you blame me formy "foreknowledge"? You scold me for my hostility to the sentimentalism ofthe day, you scold me then for any act of common human sympathy, and nowyou take me to task because I foresee how you will address me in a letter. Dear me, what a horrid little scold it is! I wonder you didn't quote _TheRaven_, -- "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!" But really no great powers of prophecy were required. Have you forgottenthat in the very letter before this one you called me "Dear Philip"? Andwasn't that a good index of your tempestuous, contradictory sweet self, that you should have begun your letter "My dear Mr. Philip Towers" andthen thrown in your "Dear Philip" by the way, as if it would not beobserved! Why, my naughty Jessica, when I came to that phrase, I just tookmy longest, biggest blue pencil and put a ring about it so that I mightfind it at a moment's notice and feast my eyes a thousand thousand timeson its sweet familiarity. Do not suppose that anything ever escapes me inyour letters. I con every little lapse in your spelling until I know it byheart. And you do make so many slips, you know, in your reviews as well asin your letters! I never correct them, --that would be a desecration, Ithink, --but send up your copy just as it comes to me. Indeed, I findmyself imitating unawares some of your most unaccountable originalities. Only the other day I was in the reading-room and our head proofreader, asour, wizened old man, cried out to me: "I say, Mr. Towers, what is thematter with your spelling? You write _propotion_[2] for proportion and_propersition_ for proposition, and get your _r_'s all mixed upgenerally!" There was a titter from all the girls in the room. Then saidI: "Thou fool! knowest thou not that Jessica lives in the South, andtreats her _r_'s with royal contempt as she was taught to treat the blackman? And shall I not imitate her in this as in all her high-bornoriginalities?" Of course I didn't say that aloud, but just thought it tomyself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, whenhe taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties withour good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of yourright Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties withpoor human souls? And you make my prophetic powers a bulwark for your licentious rebellionand declare that you will always escape my bondage. Shall you, indeed? Youonce intimated that I wore ass's ears. I begin to believe it. What ablind, solemn animal I was when I came to Morningtown to beg for yourlove! I was so afraid of you. And as we sat in the circle of yourwatching, motionless trees, something of their stiff ways entered into myheart. I told you of my love so solemnly, and you answered so solemnly. Fool! Fool! I should have spoken not a single word, but just taken you inmy arms and kissed you once and twice. Don't frown now, it is too late. There would have been one wild, tempestuous outbreak of indignation, andthen my dryad maiden would have known my "foreknowledge" indeed. Is it toolate to rehearse that curtain-raiser? Dear girl, I would be merry, but Iam not so sure that all is well with my heart. I need you so much now, forI have entered on a new path and the way is obscure before me. I need you. Your hand in mine would give me the courage I require. Do you remember how you warned me of dangers when I reviewed Miss Addams'sbook? You, too, were a prophet. Let me tell you how it all came about. Theother day I wrote up Mme. Adam's _Romance of My Childhood and Youth_(Addams and Adam--the name has a fatality for me), and took occasion tomake it the text of a tremendous preachment against our latter-daySimony, --as well it might be, for Mme. Adam grew up in the thirties andforties when France was a huge seething caldron in which all these modernnotions were brewing together. And unfortunately we are just beginning nowwhere France left off a score of years ago. You have already seen thereview, no doubt, and it is superfluous to repeat its argument. But for myown justification to you I want to quote a few sentences from the book. You disdained to make any reply to my letter on Lyman Abbott, and I fearyou have grown weary of the whole subject; but certainly you will beinterested in what I am copying out for you now. In one of her chapters, then, Mme. Adam writes: Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature, revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of phenomena for useful social purposes. .. . There is no error in nature, no perversity in man; evil comes only from society. .. . He [Mme. Adam's father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain. .. . They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father. Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent a date to have dried up their souls; _they no longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one_. They worshipped that mysterious Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under machinery. Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth theclose cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growthof the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of asensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this moderncult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of thatfresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evokeonce more the golden destiny of man? Well, this morning the particular Simon Magus who rules _The Gazette_walked into my office and, after some preliminary sparring, came out witha complaint which I knew had been preparing in his brain for some time. Itseems that he had already been deluged with letters about my hereticalattack on Miss Addams, and now a new storm had begun over my furtherdelinquencies. He kindly told me that my views were a hundred years behindthe age and that they were doing injury to the paper. Against the lattercharge I had no defence, and immediately capitulated. To cut adisagreeable tale short, I anticipated his purpose and offered to make wayfor some man who would better harmonise with the benevolent policy of thepaper. The first of the month comes in four days, and then I shall bethrown once again on my own resources. The shock, though expected, is alittle disconcerting; for at times a man grows weary and discouraged infighting against the perpetual buffeting of the current. But most of all Iam wondering how my independence will affect the hopes that were beginningto colour my dreams. Dear Jessica, you will not forsake me now; you willput away your perversity and love me simply and unreservedly? There aredifficulties before me, I know; but I am not afraid if only my heart is atpeace. I am free, and if there is any power in my brain, any skill in myright hand, I will make such a pother that the world shall hear me. I willnot die till I am heard. And so I ask you to help-me. With your love Ishall be made bold, and no opposition and no repeated reverses shalltrouble me. And in the end your happiness is in my making. Indeed, your box of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment inNewspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack isten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot writemore of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to----;and when I open that letter will it bring me joy or grief? Your joy maycast a ruddy light on my path, but nothing that you can say will shake mein my firm resolve. No sorrow shall hinder me, but, oh, happy Heart! I, too, long for happiness. XXVIII JESSICA TO PHILIP KIND SIR: Which do you think requires the more grace in a woman, to hold out againsta dear enemy or to yield? My own experience teaches me that there is morefacility in resistance. Acting thus I have always felt in accord withnatural instincts, and there is a barbaric sense of security in followingthem. .. . Yet I have only one thing to tell you in reply to your "so many. "Can you guess what it is? Already I think the birds know it. I have so fardeparted from my natural order of perversity and self-protection that theyfeel it, and twitter together when I pass by. I think they look down uponme now with high-feathered contempt. Could anything be more mortifying? Do not laugh, Philip! You have behaved little better than a robber in thismatter. I have lost to you, but the game was not fair; dear mendicant, youplayed with a card up your sleeve! All my life I have planned to outwitpredestination. I have ignored Sabbath-day doctrines and faith-bindingdogmas to this end. I could even have held out indefinitely against your"foreknowledge, " but when you come, heralded by an unexpected misfortune, asking "peace" of me that you may meet your own difficulties with asteadier courage, I find you invincible. It is as if you had suddenlyslipped through the door of my heart and left will, betrayed, on guardoutside. I have no defence in my nature against your plea. The diplomacyof your need takes me unawares, and, no matter how I fear the future, nowI am bound to add myself to you in love and hope. The prospect is terribleand sweet. Already it has made me a stranger in my father's house, aforeigner among the trees, and a wakeful, frightened mystery to myself. Iam full of tears and secresy. I am no longer Jessica, the wind-souleddryad of the forest, but merely a woman in definition, facing a new worldof pain and joy. Oh, my beloved! you have taken all that I have, all thatI am! Henceforth I shall be only a part of you, --a little hyperbole ofdomesticity always following after, or advancing to meet you. .. . Dear godsof the world, defend me from such a fate! . .. After all, I cannot admitthe "one thing. " I cannot submit to this annihilation, this absorption ofcharacter and personality. If you take me, you do so at your own risk, Iwill not promise "peace, " but confusion rather. But if you get me, youmust take me. Yet, if you come to Morningtown after me, I will deny mylove, not out of perversity, but out of fear. The sight of you is a signalfor me to take refuge upon my tallest bough. And I can no more come downto you than a young lady robin could fly into your pocket. It is all verywell for you to exhort me to love you "simply and unreservedly, "--I do. Nothing could be simpler, more elemental, than my love is; and do Ireserve a single thought of it from you? But I am not conventional enoughin heart or training to surrender. My genius for you does not extend sofar. To lose myself does not seem to me wise or logical, howeverscriptural or legal the practice is. The truth is, I cannot agree to betaken, any more than the little petticoated planet above your head cankick off her diadem of light. I do not know what you will do about it, because it is not my business to know these things. All I am sure of isthat I love you, and that I belong to you if only you can get myextradition papers from Nature herself. Meanwhile I have ventured to prepare my father's mind for a new idea. Aswe sat before the library fire this evening, each employed according tohis calling, he with Fletcher's _Appeal_ and I with my sewing, I asked theusual introductory question to our conversations. And it is always thesignal for him to raise his shield of orthodoxy; for it has long been myhabit to creep around the corner of my private opinion and tease him withwhat he is pleased to term "the most blasphemous speculations. " Thereforewhen I said, "Father, I wish to ask you a question, " he looked up with theguarded eye of a man who expects an assault from an unscrupulousantagonist. "Well, my daughter, ask. " "Which would you advise me to marry, father, a humanitarian whose highestlaw is the material welfare of his kind, or an ascetic whose spiritualityis something more and something less than scriptural?" "Neither, Jessica; if you must marry, choose a man who believes in thedivinity of Christ and lives somewhere within the limits of the TenCommandments!"--Heavens! think of bondage with a man who is bounded uponthe north, east, south, and west of his soul by laws enacted to disciplinethe Israelites in the Wilderness! In that case, I should insist upon abridal trip to Canaan, with the hope of reaching the Promised Land as awidow. And this reminds me to ask you what manner of man you are yourself. Do youreflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you wereon guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has fadedto a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about thepicture[3], is like to vanish clean away into nothing. Only yourencompassing eyes peer at me with solemn expostulation out of theshimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip?And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental poseas a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. A longterm of years with a serene, gentle-spirited man would be unbearable tome. Rather than prolong the futility of existence with one I could notprovoke, even enrage, I should commit suicide. My own disposition is soequally divided between perversity and repentance that I could not endurethe placidity, the ennui, of a level turnpike existence. And now isn't it an evidence of your high-minded heartlessness, that inthe same letter where you sue for love you also introduce a philosophicaldiscussion and show even more heat in maintaining it than you do in youramorous petition? Why I cannot take warning and fly to the ends of myearth away from you now while there is yet time, is a mystery to me! And so you expect to make such a pother in your opposition to the spiritof the times that all the world will hear you. Dear Master, I doubt if youwill! Your bells ring too high up. The angels in heaven may hear you, butmen are not listening in that direction. I did not reply to yourcontention against Lyman Abbott, because it is a far cry from you to me onthis subject. In consciousness we are at opposite ends of a great problem, and I think the normal man walks somewhere between. Besides, I am not surethat I understand your position; I am not familiar with the starryhighways of your mind. Still, in a general way it has always seemed to methat material things are, after all, "counters which represent spiritualrealities. " And I take comfort in the fact that it must require us all towork out the Great Plan, --humanitarian, sage, pilgrim, ascetic, even thebutcher and candlestick maker. And while we do not know it, really we areworking together for one end hidden now in the divine economy of far-offdestiny and justice. .. . To me the wonder of wonders is that I may some daylight a little taper in your upper chamber myself, and kneel together withyou before the same window to worship. Only, dear Heart, please get yourdeity named before I come! P. S. --As to my spelling, that is a coquettish licence I take with thegenealogy of words. And you may tell your proofreader that the letter _r_has never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in myomission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with farmore vigour without _g_'s or _r_'s than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where isJack? XXIX PHILIP TO JESSICA KIND MADAM: Yes, a little more than kind, dear Jessica, for you have put into my graspthe flower of perfect delight, and "my hand retains a little breath ofsweet. " You have opened a window into my heart and poured through it thewarmth and golden glory of your own sunlight. I am filled with ajoyousness of a new spring--and yet there is something in your letter thatmakes me a little sad. You express so frankly that reserve of resentment, even of bitterness, which always, I think, abides with a woman in all thesweetness of her love, but which with most women never comes to entireconsciousness. Listen, dear Heart, while I talk to you of yourself andmyself, until we comprehend each other better. It is so much easier for meto understand you than for you to understand me, because a woman's natureis single, whereas a man's is double, and in this duality lies all thereason of that enmity of the sexes which draws us together yet still holdsus asunder. You complain of my letter because I argue a philosophical proposition init while pleading for love. Do you not know that this is man's way? And Iwould not try to deceive you: this philosophical proposition, which seemsto you almost a matter of indifference, is more to me than everything elsein the world. For it I could surrender all my heart's hope; for it I couldsacrifice my own person; even, if the choice were necessary, which cannotbe, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man's nature. Theambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the worldsome vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in himside by side with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused. Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led thisdual existence? You reviewed for me Bismarck's Love Letters and wereyourself struck by this sharp contrast between the iron determination ofthe man in public affairs and the softness and sweetness of his domesticlife. That is but one case in point of the eternal dualism in masculinenature which a woman can never comprehend, and which always, if itconfronts her nakedly, she resents. For a woman is not so. There exists nosuch gap in her between her heart and brain, between her outer and innerlife. And the consequence shows itself in many ways. She is less efficientin the world and is never a creator or impresser of new ideas; but, on theother hand, her character possesses a certain unity that is the wonder ofall men who observe. She calls the man selfish and is bitter against himat times, but her accusation is wrong. It is not selfishness which leads aman if needs be to cut off his own personal desires while sacrificinganother; it is the power in him which impels the world into new courses. Aman's virtues are aggressive and turned toward outer conquest and may havelittle relation to his own heart. But a woman's virtues are bound up withevery impulse of her personal being; they work out in her a loveliness andunity of character which make the man appear beside her coarse andunmoral. Men of vicious private life have more than once been benefactorsof the human race; I think that never happened in the case of a woman. And because of this harmony, this unconsciousness in woman's virtue, aman's love of woman takes on a form of idealisation which a woman neverunderstands and indeed often resents. What in him is something removedfrom himself, something which he analyses and governs and manipulates, isin the woman beloved an integral part of her character. Virtue seems inher to become personified and he calls her by strange names. For thisreason men who make language tend always to give to abstract qualities thefeminine gender, as you must have observed in Latin and might observe in ascore of other tongues. For this reason, too, a man's love of womanassumes such form of worship as Dante paid to Beatrice or Petrarch toLaura. It would be grotesque for a woman to love in this way, for virtueis not a man's character, but a faculty of his character. And so is itstrange that I should approach you asking for love that my soul may havepeace? It cannot enter into my comprehension that such a cry should comefrom you to me. All that I strive to accomplish in the world, all that Igird myself to battle for, the ideals that I would lay down my life thatmen may behold and cherish, --is it not now all gathered up in the beautyand serenity of your own person? What I labour to express in words isalready yours in inner possession. If I ask you for peace, it is notselfishness, dear girl; it is prayer. If you should come to me begging forpeace, I should be filled with amazement; for I myself have it not. What Ican give is love's unwearied tenderness and love's unceasing homage to thebeauty of your body and your soul. More than that, I shall give you in theend the crown of the world's honour. Without you I may accomplish the tasklaid upon me, but only with heaviness of soul and abnegation of all thatmy heart craves. I was reading in an old drama last night until I came tothese words, and then I set the book aside: Once a young lark Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies. In that sweet hyperbole I seemed to read a transcript of your beauty. If Iam selfish, beloved, all love is selfishness. Dear girl, it seems that always I must woo you in metaphysics and expressmy ardour in theorems. But have I not made myself understood? "Man's loveis of man's life a thing apart, " as a thousand women have quoted: and itis true. But do you not see that even for this reason his love swells intoa passionate idolatry of the woman who knows no such cleavage in her soul. Try us with sacrifices. I could throw away every earthly good to bestow onyou a year of happiness--only not my philosophic proposition, as yousarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you--prayheaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think, meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of Æneas and Dido, only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within Æneas he expresseddramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but littleunderstanding of the poem or of human nature to censure Æneas as a coldegotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart, _multagemens_? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terrorand death. The tragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so the Fates haveordered. But why do I write such grim reflections? There is no tragedy, noseparation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness: The treasures of the deep are not so precious As are the concealed comforts of a man Locked up in woman's love. All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think ofthis new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber's part, sweet Jessica, andhe who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried awayso large a draft on the world's happiness as this that I have stolen. Icannot be repentant while this golden glow is upon me; later I shall beginto question my own worthiness. I cannot now tell you one half that is in my mind to write, or answer onehalf the questions in your letter. Jack is living with me just at present, but of him I will speak next time. I have planned to change my abode, butof that too next time. And I would not attempt to give a name to the deityI serve in a postscript, as it were. Dear Heart, only let your love add alittle to your happiness as it has added so much to mine; and trust me. --Iam sending a letter to your father, the contents of which you mightimagine even if he should not show it to you. XXX JESSICA TO PHILIP WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER MY BELOVED: Last night, I dreamed myself away to you. I walked beside you, a littlewraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city, --butyou did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but I wore green leavesin my hair and a red Southern rose on my breast to remind you of a brownforest maid and summer-time far away--and you would not see me! I facedyou in gay mockery and swept a bow, but the blue silence in your eyesterrified me. I held out my hands beseechingly, touched my cheek to yours, and you did not feel the pressure. Then I slipped down upon the snow andwept, and you did not hear me. We were both "in the spirit, " I think. Only, dear Love, when I am in thespirit, all my thoughts are of you; but though I looked far and near, Icould not find in all your regions one little thought of poor Jessica. Allwas misty and dim within your portals. _Your_ thoughts were vague ancientshapes that wandered past me like Brahmin ghosts. And not one gallantmemory of Jessica legended upon those inner walls of yours! Dear, I cannot escape now, my heart _will_ not come back to me; and sinceit is too late I will not complain. But for a little while I must tell youthese things and pray for your kind comfort, till I shall have becomeaccustomed to your attic moods and exaltations. Do you recall the woman I told you of last summer, whose sorrow-smittenface in the church terrified me so? Grief became credible to me as I gazedat her. And could it have been, do you think, a message foretold to me ofthis magic future, full of intangible fears, wherein I am to live withyou? XXXI PHILIP TO JESSICA Love is a mystic worker of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on thatvery day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenlystanding before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful thatI reached out my hand to touch you--but grasped only the impalpable air. All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, seekingin the ways of thought some word of comfort for the human heart, until atlast my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real isthis search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul werea thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim andperilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me outinto that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead. And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth wasvaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomabledarkness as a clear night might look wherein no moon or stars appeared, and so lonely "that God himself scarce seemed to be there. " Then, as often when this mood comes upon me, I went out to walk under thehard flaring lights and amid the streaming crowds of Broadway, in order tobring back the sense of mortal illusion and unite myself once more tohuman existence. The people were pouring from the theatres, and I soughtthe densest throng. But still I could not awaken in myself the illusion oflife. And then suddenly, without warning, there in the noisy brawl of thestreet, I beheld you standing before me, looking into my face and smiling. You wore a burning Southern rose upon your breast and were more wondrouslyand delicately fair than the dream of poets. And there was a smile uponyour lips as if to say: "Dear Philip, thou hast put away the pleasures andloveliness of this world as they had been a snaring web of illusion; yet Ido but look upon thee, and forthwith thou art pierced with love and knowthat in this scorned desire of beauty dwells the great reality. " I reachedout my hand to touch the rose against your heart, but the vision was gone, and all about me was only the tumultuous mockery of the street. Sweetheart, you have smitten me with remorse. Shall I take from you onlyhappiness, and give in return only this spectral dread? Ah, you shalllearn that I am very real, very earthly, capable of love and tendernessand daily duties and quiet human sympathies! I told you of the dualisminto which my life, into which, indeed, every man's life, is cast; whywill you persist in clinging to that part which is cold and inhumaninstead of seizing upon that which is warm and very near by? I would nottake you with me into those bleak ways where always there is fear lest ourpersonality be swallowed up in the dark impersonal abyss. I would love youas a man loves a woman and cleaves to her. Nay, more, I perceive dimly inthat love a strange reconcilement wherein the dual forces of my natureshall be made one, wherein truth and beauty shall blend together in akiss, and there shall be no more seeking in obscurity, but only peace. When the vision faded from me on Broadway, I turned back to my home, andthere, before the dawn came, tried to write out in words one thought ofthe many that thronged upon me. I have almost forgotten the art of makingrhymes if ever I knew it. A RECONCILIATION All beauteous things the world's allurement knows: Starred Venus, when she droops on Tyrian couch While Evening draws her dusky curtains close, Or pearled from morning bath she seems to crouch; In bleak November one strayed violet; The rathe spring-beauty scattered wide like snow; The opal in a cirque of diamonds set; Rare silken gowns that rustle as they flow; The dumb thrush brooding in her lilac hedge; The wild hawk towering in his proudest flight; A silver fountain splashed o'er mossy ledge; The sunrise flaming on an Alpine height;-- All these I've seen, yet never learned, till now In thy sweet smiling, to accord my vow Austere of truth with beauty's charmed delight. XXXII JESSICA TO PHILIP WRITTEN IN ANSWER TO LETTER XXIX MY DEAR PHILIP: You are a magician rather than a lover. And no lover, I think, was ever sosubtle at reasoning. At least you do not act the part as I supposed it wasplayed. A lover, I thought, was one who stood at the door of a woman'sheart and serenaded till she crept out upon her little balcony of sighsand kissed her hand to him, or shed a tokening bloom upon his upturnedcountenance. So far as I could imagine, he was prehistoric in thesimplicity of his methods. Two things I never suspected: that love is thekind of romantic exegesis you represent it to be, or that every lover, psychically, is a sort of twin phenomenon--that he is _two_ men instead ofone! And after he is married, I suppose he will be a domestic _trinity_, but with his godhead concerned with the affairs of the world at large. Iam awed by the revelation; still, it excuses much in my conduct that I hadbefore felt was reprehensible; for I have scarcely faced my own reflectionin the glass since my ignominious capitulation. Something within chargedtreachery against poor Jessica. But if there are _two_ of you, and only_one_ of me, that fact gives a new and honourable complexion to my part inthe transaction. However, the way you have multiplied yourself and doubled forces upon memay be good masculine tactics, but I am sure it is an unparliamentaryadvantage you have taken. For you have not only posed as a lover, but withthe cunning words of a logician you prove what seemed wrong to be really asublime right; and what _I_ charged as selfishness, _you_ call "a prayer. "I am confused by your argument; it seems incontestable. But do you know, my Philip, that a woman's convictions are never reached by a mereargument? For they are hidden in her heart, not in her little bias-foldmind. And so, in spite of your sweet reasoning with me, and the assumptionyou make of omniscience concerning me, my convictions remain. Only, now, Ido not know whether I cherish them against you or against the God who mademe simple and you double. But granting all you say to be true, that every man has a personal lifeand at the same time a universal life energy as well, that there is in hima little domestic fortress of love, and a battle power of lifeapart, --admitting all this, how do you reconcile justice with the factthat you frankly offer only half of your duality for all of Jessica? Haveyou never suspected that she also has fair kingdoms of thought apart fromyour science of her? My Prophet, it is you who have discovered them to me!Love has added a sweet Canaan to my little hemisphere. I have heardinvisible birds singing, I have trysted with spirits of the air since Iknew you. And I have felt the pangs of a consciousness in me so new and sotender, that I am no longer merely the maid you know, but, dear Master, Iam some one else, near and kin to you as life and spirit are kin! What isthis strange white space in my soul that love has made, so real, yet soholy that I dare not myself lift the veil of consciousness before it? Andall I know is that I shall meet you there finally heart to heart!--Philip, kiss me! For I am a frightened white-winged stranger in my own new heavensand new earth. I am no longer as you imagine, simply one, but I have aforeign power of life and death in me, and the fact terrifies me. You declare that there is a difference and a distance between a man's loveand a man's mind which account for his dual nature. There is also anintelligence of the heart, more astute, more vital, which divides woman'snature also between the abandon of love and the resentment ofunderstanding. We know, and we do not know, and we _feel_. What we know isof little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of eachsucceeding generation. But what we do _not_ know constitutes that elementof mystery in us that makes us also dual. For we feel and suspect furtherthan we can understand. Thus, your faculty for projecting yourself inspirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of lonelinessthat sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher halfof your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but thegeometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturbyour "philosophic proposition. " The point is, I love that in you more thanI love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as somethingapart from our relationship offends me, excites forebodings. Tell me, are"philosophic propositions" alien to love? And after all do you think youare the only one who may claim them? This is a secret, --I have a littlediagram of feminine wisdom hid away from you somewhere, founded upon thewit of love. And we shall see which lasts the longer, your proposition ormy understanding! But I must not forget to speak of a matter much more practical just now. You mentioned the letter that you sent to father, --"The contents you mightimagine even if he did not show it to you. " Well, he did not show it tome, but from the effect it produced upon him I am obliged to infer that itcontained the most iniquitous blasphemies. Philip, I do hope you are notsubject to fits of "righteous indignation!" I could welcome a season ofsecular rage in a man as I could a fierce wind in sultry weather, but thiskind of fury that cloaks itself in the guise of outraged piety is verytrying. No sooner did father read your letter than he strode in upon melike a grey-bearded firebrand. The offending letter was crushed in hishand, and his glasses were akimbo on his nose, the way they always arewhen he is perturbed. I spare you the details, but from the nature of hisquestions you might have thought he was examining you through me for alicence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views, but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of myreplies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped uponyour absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted inthe felony of my love, and there was a certain humorous satisfaction inhearing father give a "philosophic proposition" to your criminality. Myonly prayer was that he might not ask me if I loved you. Philip, I wouldrather live on bread and water a week than confess it to any living manbesides yourself. But father has dwelt too long outside the realm ofromance to ask that very natural question. Finally I protested feebly:"But how can it vitally affect a woman's happiness whether or not herhusband accepts the doctrine of repentance just as you do? Can he not loveand cherish his wife even if he does question the veracity of Jonah'swhaling experience?" But when I looked up and saw his face, I was ashamed, and ran and kissed him, and straightened his glasses so that he could seeme with both eyes. But, dear Heart, his eyes were too full of tears tofire upon me. And as I sat there upon the arm of his chair, twisting hissacred beard, this is what he told me. When my mother died, he said, andleft me a little puckered pink mite in his arms, he had solemnly dedicatedme to God. And he declared, moreover, that he could not be faithless tohis vow by giving me in marriage to an infidel. Being an infidel, Philip, is much worse than being a plain heathen; an infidel is a heathen raisedto the sixteenth power of iniquity! Now I rarely quote Scripture, for Ihave too much guile in me to justify the liberty, but I could not refrainfrom mentioning Abraham's dilemma, it seemed so appropriate to theoccasion, --how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a littlehe-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggestedthat instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith's littleJohnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaicalaptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul isas worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become arighteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this world oftemptations an unconscionably long time? But father was not to be reasonedwith or comforted. And yesterday, Sunday, he preached impressively fromthe text, "Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?"Of course _you_ are the heathen, Philip, and of course _I_ am the "vainthing. " But that is not father's idea. The vain thing you imagine is thathe will give his consent to our marriage! Well, you may settle it betweenyou! All I know is that now I am predestined, but not in the dedicateddeaconess direction! JESSICA, THE BRAVE. P. S. --What do you think, _our_ little forest is for sale. And oh, Philip, if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life willdie of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there andasked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (Isuppose all the prophets were like this, their writings produce thatimpression!) And my father would consent, even if the bridegroom were aheathen instead of a prophet. For he would be obliged to attend religiousservices at Morningtown, and father does not believe any man can longremain under the drippings of his sanctuary without being forgiven. And Ido not either. God would have mercy upon him somehow! XXXIII PHILIP TO JESSICA Your letter, dearest Jessica, and your father's came by the same post, andthe sensation they gave me was as if some moral confusion had befallen theelements and summer were mingled with winter in the same sky. Not that hisletter was anything but kind and dignified, but it seemed to remove youand your life so far away from me. I confess I had some fears that hemight insist on the little we have seen or, as the world judges, know ofeach other; it had not occurred to me that my "infidelity" would block mypath to happiness--so little do the people I commonly meet reck of thatmatter. I have been accusing the world all along of indifference to thespirit and to theology, and now, by a sort of poetical irony, I am blockedin my progress toward happiness by meeting one who adheres to an old-worldbelief in these things. The burden of his reply was in these words: "Icannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who wasnot strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I wouldgladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of thosewho trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility ofChristian faith. "Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love aswell as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me withouthearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father thewhole truth. Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I mustleave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that Ihave faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief inthe Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believethe whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, aredivided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible worldis real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible, and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusionwhereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just thisperception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to thosewithout faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of thespirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because Ifind among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I denythe existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lostthe sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony ofthe humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should dobetter to discuss household economy than religion. Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties, but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage toMorningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my"infidelity" is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you issufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how willJessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoofwhich I never had and those ass's ears which, alas! I did flourish soportentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have astrange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematicallycorrect if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a newrendering of Catullus's _Da Basia_. And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land, sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carrya sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not forthe love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought bywoman's grace from the desert into the circle of perfect Paradise. Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we shouldbend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of thetrees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand inthe cool of the evening, --sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voiceof our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it wasGod. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for thisdream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreamsuntil I come to you and learn in your arms the more "sober certainty ofwaking bliss. " Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your "brothers, " as you callthe trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leavethem and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call NewYork? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on thestern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all theconcerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into themist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write withseriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love's isolation, butthe rude contact of affairs, yet with love's encouragement, to hold mewithin practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar thebeauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk togetherwhen I come. I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the----and have taken acouple of cheap rooms here at----. For some months I shall not be writingfor money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. Oneroom is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but stillcrowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have hadin mind for several years, --the history and significance ofhumanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist of that _magnum opus_is to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form asto stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I havelearned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. WhenI return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition. Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material isalready well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn tomaking money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income--andcan you imagine what that means to you and me? I had thought to send our goblin boy into the country as you bade me, butfor a while I am keeping him here. He sleeps in a cot beside me, and inthe day, when not at school or crouching in sphinxlike silence on thecurbstone, he sits in a great chair by the window. Often when I look upfrom my book his eyes are fixed on me with a kind of mute appealingwonder. Somehow I could not let him go. He seems a link between us in ourseparation; and while my thoughts are set upon rebuking the errors ofhumanitarianism it will be well to have this object of human pity beforemy eyes. I wonder if you comprehend what a strange wistful letter you have written. You are no longer merely the maid I knew, and my ways of thought excite inyou a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment--so you say. Oncemore, dear girl, we will talk of all this when I come. Until that happyday, wait, and fortify your love with trust. XXXIV JESSICA TO PHILIP I have a number of terms, my Philip, with which I might begin this letter, but I have not yet the courage to call you by such dear names beyond thewhispering gallery of my own heart. And you wonder how I have concealed my romantic deflections from father. Indeed, I am sure he has noticed a heavenly-mindedness in me for some timepast; but out of the sanctity of his own heart he probably attributed thisimprovement to the chastening effects of a particularly gloomy course ofreligious reading that he has insisted upon my undertaking this winter. And, after all, father is not so far wrong as to my spiritual state, forwhen love becomes a woman's vocation, she carries blessings in her eyesand all her moods tiptoe reverently like young novices who follow oneanother down a cathedral aisle. This life of the heart becomes her piety, I think, and the highest form of religion of which she is capable. Jessicabegins to magnify herself, you see! A kingdom of heaven has been set upwithin me, dear creator, and naturally I feel this extension of myboundaries. But do not expect me to tell father "the whole truth, "--how you firstfascinated me with editorial magnanimity, then baited me with compliments, and later with deepest confidences, and finally slipped into my Arcadiadisguised as a philosopher, but, when you had got entire possession, declared yourself a victorious lover! I wonder that you can contemplatethe record you have made in this matter without blushing! As for your "infidelity, " and what you call your "faith, " I think fatherwill denounce them both as blasphemous. Religion to father is somethingmore than "the poetry he believes in. " It has the definition ofexperience, miracles, and a whole body of spiritual phenomena quite asreal to him as your upper-chamber existence is to you. Only father hasthis advantage of you, he has a real Divinity, with all the necessaryattributes of a man's God. His "voice of happiness" speaks to him from thestars, and he does not call it an echo, as you do, of a fair voice withinyour own heart. Father gets his salvation from the outside of his warringelements; you speak to your own seas, "Peace be still!" As for me, betweenyou, I stand winking at Heaven; and I say: "It is evident that neither ofthem understands this mystery of life; I will not try to comprehend. Iwill be good when I can, and diplomatic when I must, and leave the rest toheaven and earth and nature. " Meanwhile, I advise you not to quote yourpagan authorities to father. If the very worst comes, you may say that youhave almost scriptural proof of my affections, --and mind you sayaffections, father could not bear the romantic inflection of such a termas love. It sounds too secular, carnal, to him. You ask me if I will consent to abandon such a life as our forest offersand come with you into "this great solitude of people" which you call NewYork. Philip, when a man holds a starling in his hand he does not ask thebird whether it will stay here or wing yonder, but he carries it with himwhere he will; and the starling sings, no less in one place than inanother, because its nature is to sing. But, I think, dear Master, themotive which prompts the song in the cage is not the same as the impulseto sing in the forest. So it is with me. If we live here among the trees, where their green waves make a summer sea high in the heavens above ourheads, I could be as content as any bird is. But if you make our home inthe city, or in the midst of a desert for that matter, I could notwithhold one thought from your happiness, for love has transformed me, adapted life itself to a new purpose. I have been "called, " and I have nowill to resist, because my heart tells me there is goodness in thepurpose, a little necklace of womanly virtues for me. When I think ofpain, and sorrow, my eyes are holden, I can see only the fair form of lovesanctified, and I can hear only your voice calling me to fulfil a destinywhich you yourself do not understand. And as all these things approach, beloved, father's God is more to me than your fine illusion. I wish forguardian angels, I feel the need of a Virgin Mary and of all the ladymothers in heaven to bless me. But I have been telling you only of my inner life. Outwardly I shall everbe capable of the most heathen manifestations. For instance, loving as Ido, how do you account for this personal animosity I feel toward you, almost a madness of fear at the thought of your approaching visit? Thereis something that has never been finished in this affair of our hearts. Perhaps it is that really you have never kissed me. Well, I find it aseasy to write of kisses as to review a sentimental romance, but actuallythere is some instinct in me stronger than mind against the fact, do youunderstand? Philip, you have no idea of the depths of feminine treachery!Did I ever intimate a willingness to do such a thing? I do not say that I_wish_ to kiss another, but I affirm that it would be easier for me tokiss my father's presiding elder--and heaven knows he is a didacticmonster of head and whiskers! It is not that I do not love you, but that Ido! Do you know what will happen when you come to Morningtown? I will meet youat the station, not as Jessica, but as the demure little home-madedaughter of the Methodist minister here; we will greet each other withblighting formality, for there will be the station-master's wife toobserve us; we will walk home along the main street, and we will speak ofthe most trivial or useful subjects, of the weather in New York, and ofJack more particularly. Out of sheer bravado I will scan your face now andthen, but my eyes will not rest there long enough to fall before yoursdiscomfited. When we reach the house father will greet you from his Sinaielevation, with pretty much the same holy-man courtesy Moses would haveshowed if a heathen Canaanite had appeared to him. And while you two areexchanging platitudes, I will escape into this room of mine, take oneglance at my mirror, and then cover my face with my hands for joy andshame while the red waves of love mount as high as they will over it. Ah, Philip, I shall be _so_ glad to see you, and so afraid! But you shall havesmall satisfaction in either fact, for I do not aim to make it easy foryou to win what is already yours in my heart. P. S. --So you are keeping Jack mured up with you and your _magnum opus_. Nowonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone. " He prefers itto your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficultto live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in thedomestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in asimilar situation I may be driven to seek the cold curbstone forcompanionship. XXXV PHILIP TO JESSICA It seems to me as I read your letters, my sweet wife to be, that I am onlybeginning to learn the richness of my fortune. And will you not, when youwrite to me next time--will you not call me by one of those dear namesthat you speak in the whispering gallery of your heart? I shall barelyreceive more than one letter from you now before I come to see you inperson and tell over with you face to face the story of our love. Just afew more days and I shall be free. But for the present I want to talk to you about Jack. Indeed, I feel alittle sore on this point. It was you who proposed our adopting him, yet, after your first words of advice, you have left me to work out thesituation quite unaided; and now I can see that you are laughing at me. Poor Jack, he was something like a "philosophical proposition" which I hadnever very thoroughly analysed. One thing, however, begins to growperfectly clear: my home is no place for him; he is only a shadow in mylife and needs to take on substance. Well, I thought at last I had solvedthe problem--or at least that O'Meara had solved it for me; but here too Iwas disappointed. Really, you must help me out of this muddle. Do you remember the note-book of O'Meara's that I told you about? Eversince his death I have been too busy really to look through the volume;but day before yesterday it occurred to me that I might find someinformation there about Jack's parentage, and with that end in view Ispent most of the day deciphering the smeared pages. At first I foundeverything in the notes except what I wanted, but toward the end of thebook I discovered a whole group of memoranda and reflections in which thename Tarrytown occurred again and again. I will read you the notes when Icome; without giving many events they tell in a disjointed way a littleidyllic episode in the story of his life. He, too, knew love, and wasloved. There in that village by the Hudson for a few short months he keptthe enemy at bay and was happy. And then, too soon, came the fatalstory--the only dated note in the book, I believe: September 3d: A son was born and she has left me to care for him alone. I had thought that happiness might endure, and this too was illusion. I stand by the tomb and read the graven words: _Et ego in Arcadia fui_. And so, yesterday, on a venture I took our little goblin boy with me toTarrytown, and after some inquiry found that his mother's relations werefarm people living on the outskirts of the town. They proved to have beenpoor but respectable people. At present only the grandfather is livingalone in the house, and he is very feeble. He was willing to assume thecare of Jack, but I cannot persuade myself to leave the child in thosetrembling hands. Indeed, when it comes to the issue, I cannot quite decideto let him go entirely from me, for is he not one of the ties that bind meto you? I have brought him back with me to New York--which will onlyincrease your merriment at my expense. Some day when you have come to live in New York--if this is to be ourhome--we will go together up the river to Tarrytown, and you shall see theland where O'Meara dreamed his dream of happiness and where your adoptedchild was born. And when we go there, I will take you to a bowered nook overhanging theriver, where I passed the afternoon reading and thinking of many things. There together we will sit in the shadow of the trees and talk and plantogether how _our_ happiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and youshall teach me to lose this haunting sense of illusion in the greatreality of love. And as the evening descends and twilight steals upon theever-flowing water, I will take you in my arms a moment, and this shall bemy vow: God do so to me and more also, if any darkness falls from my lifeupon yours, until our evening, too, has come and the light of this worldpasses quietly into the dream that lies beyond. All this I thought yesterday while I sat alone and read once more the sadrecord of O'Meara's ruin. He did not stay long in Tarrytown, it seems, after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in thehope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas, you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful daysreturned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them--soone may surmise from a number of memoranda--with a new meaning he began todiscover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of the _Æneid_became a symbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the lastbewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to hisdestruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses fromthose books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not atouch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?-- There the meaning of the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the _loetas segetes_ seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills, and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the poet: _Flumina amem silvasque inglorius_, and his pathetic envy of those Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew The wonders of their state! And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself, still I was in Virgil's haunted world. Some distance from the house was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I learned to enjoy the _levium spectacula rerum_, as he calls the story of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature, --so wide and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of men, --I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines with which he closes his account of the warring bees: These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast, With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest. In this way Jack's father learned the illusion of life by looking back onhis happy days. I did not mean to fill my letter with this long extractfrom his note-book, nor would I end with such ill-omened words. Dear girl, I too have learned the deception of life in other ways. Teach me, when Icome to you, the great reality. In all O'Meara's memoranda after hisreturn to New York I could find only a single direct allusion to the womanhe loved. It was very brief: "On this day two years ago she said I madeher happy!" Shall I bring happiness to you when I come? A CODICIL TO LETTER XXXIV JESSICA TO PHILIP. WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER FROMPHILIP Think of this, --I love you, but I do not know you. I only know your heart, your mind, that part of you which meets me in spirit like the light fromsome distant star that slips across my window sill at evening. But you, oh! Philip, I do not know _you_. You are a stranger whom I have seen onlytwice in my life. Do not be angry, my beloved, I do love you; but cannotyou understand that I must get used to the idea of your being some onevery real? These are thoughts forced upon me by your approaching visit, and so I ask a favour: Do not tell me when to expect you. If you threatenme with the identical day of your coming, I will vanish from the face ofthe earth! But if you come upon me unawares, I shall have been spared thatconsciousness of _confession_ face to face involved by a deliberatewelcome. And if you come thus, I shall not have time to retire behind myinstinctive defence against you. You see that I plan in your favour, thatI wish to be unrestrainedly glad when you come. And about the kisses, you understand of course, dear Philip, that I amincapable of determining them really! I only contemplated the possibilitywhen distance made it an impossibility. Still, you cannot fail to knowthat I love you, that it would even break my heart if you did not come!For, Philip, a woman's heart is like the Scriptures, apparently full ofcontradictions, but really it is the symbol of our everlasting truth, ifonly you have the wisdom to understand it. And another thing, Philip, the more I think of it, the more I amscandalised by the way you drag that poor goblin child about. My heartyearns for him and his solitude in the midst of your philosophies. Youhave made a perfect jumping-jack of him for your lordly amusement, and itisn't fair. Bring him with you to Morningtown. I charge you. And remember, don't lose him or philosophise him out of existence on the way. I havetalked with father about the boy, and he is primed with religious zeal tosnatch this tender brand from your burning. XXXVI PHILIP TO JESSICA Just a note, sweet lady, to bid you expect me on the afternoon trainThursday--and is not that a long while from to-day? And please do not cometo the station. I would not have our meeting chilled by the curious eyesof that station-master's wife; I remember the scrutiny of her gaze toowell. And as for our greeting--you have made a very pretty story out ofthat, but have you not omitted Philip from the account? Is it not justpossible that he may mar all Jessica's nicely laid plans? I have asuspicion that, in his crude masculine way, he may prefer to translateinto fact what Jessica finds so easy to contemplate in words. I feel a bituncertain as to how he will behave as a lover; the rôle is new to him, andhe may be awkward and a bit vehement. Yes, I will bring Jack and leave him to be brooded under your kindmaternal feathers. You will love him for the pathos of his eyes and forhis quaint ways. ----- [2] It is unnecessary to say that the spelling throughout these letters has been corrected for the press. [3] Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Third Part which shows how the editor again visitsJessica in the country, and how loveis buffeted between philosophyand religion. XXXVII PHILIP TO JESSICA WRITTEN ON RETURNING FROM HIS VISIT TO MORNINGTOWN Here I am back in my own room, in this solitude of books; and howdifferent is this home-coming from that other when I brought with me onlybitterness and despair! Shall I tell you, sweetheart, some of the things I learned during my threedays in Morningtown? First of all, I discovered that you are clothed withwonderful beauty. In a dim way I knew this before, but the full mystery ofyour loveliness was not revealed to me until this third time. Can it bethat love has transformed you a little and added grace to grace, or is itonly my vision that has been purged of its earthly dulness? I could love ahomely woman whose spirit was fair, but to love one who is altogetherbeautiful, in whose perfect grace I can find no spot or blemish--that isthe miracle of my blessedness. There was a strange light in your eyes thathaunts me yet. Such a light I have seen on a lonely pool when the eveningsunlight slanted upon it from over the brown hills of autumn, but nowhereelse. My soul would bathe in that pure water and be baptised into the newfaith. For my faith, of which I boasted so valiantly, has changed since I haveseen you. Faith, I had thought, was a form of insight into the illusion ofearthly things, of transient joys and fears. And always a little dreadwould creep into my heart lest love, too, should prove to be such anillusion, the last great deception of all, binding the bewildered soul ina web of phantom desires. So I still felt as I walked with you that firstevening out into the circle of your trees. And there, dear Jessica, in thewaiting silence and the grey shadows of that seclusion I put my arms aboutyou and would have drawn you to my heart. Ah, shall I not remember thewild withdrawing of your eyes as I stooped over your face! And then with acry of defiance and one swift bound, you tore yourself loose from me andran like a frightened dryad deeper into the forest. That was a mad chase, and forever and forever I shall see your lithe form darting on before methrough the mingled shadow and light. And when at last I caught you andheld you fast, shall I not remember how you panted and fluttered againstme like a bird in the first terror of captivity! And then, suddenly, youwere still, and looked up into my face, and in your eyes I beheld thewonder of a strange mystery which no words can name. Only I knew that mydread was forever at end. It was for a second--nay, an eternity, Ithink--as if we two were rapt out of the world, out of ourselves, intosome infinite abysm of life. It was as if the splendour of the apocalypsebroke upon us, and poured upon our eyes the ineffable whiteness of heaven. I knew in that instant that love is not an illusion, but the one reality, the one power that dispels illusion, the very essence of faith. Ishuddered when the vision passed; but its memory shall never fade. So muchI learned on that day. And I also learned, or thought I learned, that your father's realobjection to my suit lay not so much in his hostility to my views, as inhis fear of losing you out of his life. And as I talked with him, evenplead with him, I was filled with pity and with something like remorse forthe sorrow I was to bring upon his heart. He is a saint, dear Love, butvery human. You have said that I acted like a robber toward you. I couldsmile at your fury, but to your father I do indeed play the robber's part. Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me and will give me the onejewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It ishard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own. XXXVIII JESSICA TO PHILIP I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all mylilies changed once more to roses--as they did, you remember how often, while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South youknow we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northernwomen. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, torecall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose oflove burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic ofcolour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to havemystified you. And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as theshadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a tryst with youbeneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless andterrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will bethe first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!)And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright forme, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that Icould ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer fromthis that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shallhave a saner reason for withholding them, --that of economy. For iffrugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be truein love as in the less romantic experiences of life. And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finishedme, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewilderedwoman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of yourillusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as thelittle green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrappedyet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detachmy thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personalemphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am sosure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that? Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does noteverything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be coveredsoon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified withmany a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained. No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenlyprocession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year, inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And asfor me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart togrow a green wreath about my head by next spring! Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where thereis so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow forhim to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent butacquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will behappier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watchesthe miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally, however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some oneshould be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow myalms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaicindifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not bejealous! XXXIX PHILIP TO JESSICA I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardenerand that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toilwas to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our firstgreat parent to me? There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies show-- and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change theone bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheekthat the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? Andwas it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose inaromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed Icould hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as ingoing through the poets and bringing together all that they have said inprophecy of your many divine properties. Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, forthese dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions!I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming andrhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble ofthe first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaicsummons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn underthe covers and think of the day's work. I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet, bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believewhen Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with aLatin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: DoesGabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?) I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little. Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting yourLatin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made ourSunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the airhovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured downupon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in thecellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day Imust set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sattogether and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter languagewas required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piledup, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet, that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousandforbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads, fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost tothink of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumbfear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aërial visionand leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lipshad all the fragrance of humanity. Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that presentbliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To readof Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my handseemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of thegroves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions withthe hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradisebefore me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words, you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clingsto my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do theyclothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare andbeautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with everyimage and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The morefully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certainis it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. Yousee I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by yourmystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away. With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses: VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found, The moss-grown rock, the pines around! And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms, Catullus and his love's alarms. _Da basia mille_, so the poem ran; And, lip to lip, our hearts began With ne'er a word translate the words complete:-- Did Lesbia find them half so sweet? A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more, And then confound the telltale score! So may we live and love, till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout. Yon failing sun shall rise another morn, And the thin moon round out her horn; But we, when once we lose our waning light, -- Ah, Love, the long unbroken night! XL JESSICA TO PHILIP A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I haveever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For iflove fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back tothe classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird mightmeasure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across hismorning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth iswe have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathybetween the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than ourascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that noother gods can afford to bless them! Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionshipwith you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father isgratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christianscholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerateeven Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keenerappreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful isthe youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. Itis we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyricalexperience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back intothe primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to theseancients for an interpretation of our hearts, --also because theirdefinition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is betterthan we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or aform of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtualfaculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies showa beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first tolast they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts. This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from ourprosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you senthas awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into myheart as warm as kisses. But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us infather's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _TheForest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in thelibrary, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author asthe same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, hesettled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worstfears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of anIndian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth isbased upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolvetruth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth inother words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublimeauthorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard, for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "nofemale intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of yourheathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thoughthe was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to bealarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is theworst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into afrenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to takesome radical stand against us. Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a factitiousinterest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. Iam tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest, particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of"Misther Towers. " "Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone beforethe library fire. "Nope, "--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silentsympathy. "Did he often talk to you?" "Yes, when we went for a walk. " "Tell me what about, Jackie. " "I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation. "You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated. "Never did know. He talks queer!"--I tittered and Jack wrinkled up hisface into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you. "Did he ever mention any of his friends, " I persevered. "Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent, "--the littlescamp knew the direction of my curiosity! "But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?" "Never did!"--I was wounded. "What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst. "His pipe, " he affirmed without hesitation. "And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings hemade like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss hishand to 'em. " "Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?" "Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed. " "Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed;Mr. Towers was very rude to you!" I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, eversmiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew howjealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how Icould consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer toa prayer. XLI PHILIP TO JESSICA Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now andcast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of thatbook of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with himinto his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us inhis determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come tosee the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book isfalse or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy ofthose old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see howunsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. Theybeheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was, not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous anddizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the bodyis so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanicalcivilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turnaway from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. Aman among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide isin danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, oursalvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Someday I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvationaccording to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a realityto me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy ofreconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Someway we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are tobe my wife. And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in myaffections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious impwrite to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside, he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of mypipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment, (for I never even read during this sacramental act, ) there arises beforemy eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed treesdown whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and asshe moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweetJessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awakeinto life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself. " . La begin XLII JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had castoff the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course isopen to me after what has happened. After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, fatherthinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty towardus. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if hedeliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt anddestroy her soul with "heathen mysticism, " his own must pay the forfeit, and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry willbecome as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He isentirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I amsure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have thereforebeen obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end thiscorrespondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by anyprotest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against afanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but uponsuperstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent whenopposed. And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves mefrom your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brandhe has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to hisremaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He willwrite to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have ina way a prior authority over him. Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have triedto take refuge in the biologist's definition of love, --that it isessentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like theblossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth anepic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in thegale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tendernessout of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all myglory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget, --only thatit is best for us both to forget now if we can. XLIII PHILIP TO JESSICA MY DEAR JESSICA: My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately toMorningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts haveprevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, ifI came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingledeceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house whilehe feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to themeeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for theworld belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all theprophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those wordswe read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart layin my hands fluttering like a captive bird: So let us live and love till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout. And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in myears, --that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joyyou promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had notseemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality ofpassion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help methen! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must havecost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you havebrought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle withreligion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and thatresounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you knowLandor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? Andso, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of thepoets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion hastroubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, thatno tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you. And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when youwill, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall begarnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, andwithin, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Willyou remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, butJessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world, and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. Therehas grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name. But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflectingafter the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me toyou, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses. And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. Youare altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would notexchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleetingloves. And once again, good-bye. (Enclosed with the foregoing) DEAR SIR: My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it toyou, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to stepin where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her tocease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect andesteem. Faithfully yours, EZRA DOANE. XLIV EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in thebitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note ofanxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in thestars, " which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one afteranother, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, writtento me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myselfthat they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy, far-off things, " a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that hasbeen singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made onewith the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweetreality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring ofsorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether throughgratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has somejealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternaldeceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and manymadnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion? And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. Imove among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone. Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past. And that is the torture of it, --the torture of a man in a wide sea whobeholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach, beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand yourgrief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me sounnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of afrantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in myheart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always thatthe remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a senseof unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to mypassion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusadeagainst the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phaseof the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breastfor the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that mytrue interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passedaway, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by thereligious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which Isupposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imaginedthat the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at leastlearned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in thepresent religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my owncalamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony ofFate that warns us to be humble. And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with theirfoolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words thathave been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:_Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also. XLV FROM PHILIP'S DIARY May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I waswalking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of springfloating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest. Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promiseof life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly. Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree, holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I sawthe woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even passedbetween them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone. I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walkaway still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is themeaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting tillthe last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no betterthan glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest?Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces ofmy physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess thething I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and thenwithout reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumblingrun. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I leftthe Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness stillsurged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remotenessfrom life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; Iwas bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, butwere shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the passion oflove, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turnedmy brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit someatrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageousinsult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, somechance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changedthese demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physicalachievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home andthe blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it tenyears hence? XLVI JACK TO PHILIP DEAR SIR: I have not wrote you before. This is a beautiful place. I like it, especially the young lady. The old man have been acting wild, like a copwhen he can't find out who done it. The difference is that it is the biblein the old man and the devil in the cop. He says you have hoodooed theyoung lady, and he says let you be enathermered. This is a religious cussword. The young lady don't cry. She is dead game, and have lost hercolour. So good by, Yours trewly, JACK O'MEARA. P. S. --The young lady have quit the family prayers, but me and the old manhave to say ours just the same, only more so. XLVII FROM PHILIP'S DIARY A wise man of the sect of Simon Magus has replied to an assault of mine onhumanitarianism by trying to show that in this one faith of modern daysare summed up all the varying ideals of past ages, --renunciation, self-development, religion, chivalry, humanism, pantheistic return tonature, liberty. Ah, my dear sir, I envy you your easy, kindly vision. Indeed, all these do persist in a dim groping way, empty echoes of greatwords that have been, bare shadows without substance. What made themsomething more than graceful acts of materialism was that each and allended not in themselves or in worldly accommodation, but in some purposeoutside of human nature as our humanitarians comprehend that nature. Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel moreof bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of theflesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purgingand making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of aman's own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit ofbeauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brotherto its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circlein which humanitarianism gyrates. My dear foe might read Castiglione'sbook of _The Courtier_ and learn how high the Platonic ideal of the betterhumanists floated above the charitable mockery of its name to-day. As forreligion--go to almost any church in the land and hear what exhortationsflow from the pulpit. The intellectual contention of dogmas isforgotten--and better so, possibly. But more than that: for one word onthe spirit or on the way and necessity of the soul's individual growth, you will hear a thousand on the means of bettering the condition of thepoor; for one word on the personal relation of man to his God, you willhear a thousand on the duties of man to man. Woe unto you, preachers of abase creed, hypocrites! These things ought ye to have done, and not toleave the other undone! You have betrayed the faith and forgotten yourhigh charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world's use ofmaterialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Likeyour father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift ofGod with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with akiss of brotherhood! Now might the Keeper of the Keys cry out to-day withother meaning: "How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake Creep and intrude and climb into the fold! Of other care they little reckoning make Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast, And shove away the worthy bidden guest. Blind mouths!" XLVIII FROM PHILIP'S DIARY Reading a foolish book on the Literature of Indiana (!) and find thissentence on the first page: "It is not of so great importance that a fewindividuals within a State shall, from time to time, show talent orgenius, as that the general level of cultivation in the community shall becontinually raised. " Whereupon the author proceeds to glorify the "generallevel" through a whole volume. Now the noteworthy thing about thisparticular sentence is the fact that it was set down as a mere truismneeding no proof, and that it was no doubt so accepted by most readers ofthe book. In reality the sentiment is so far from a truism that it wouldhave excited ridicule in any previous age; it might almost be said tocontain the fundamental error which is responsible for the low state ofculture in the country. Unfortunately the point cannot be profitablyargued out, for it resolves itself at last into a question of taste. Thereare those who are chiefly interested in the life of the intellect and theimagination. They measure the value of a civilisation by the kind ofimaginative and intellectual energy it displays, by its top growth inother words. They crave to see life express itself thus, _sub specieoeernitatis_, and apart from this conversion of human energy and emotioninto enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transienthuman lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuationof the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of onemasterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfareof a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectualwelfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently tothe products of the higher imagination. There are others for whom thislife of the imagination has only a lukewarm interest, for the reason thattheir own faculties are weak and stunted. Naturally they think it a slightmatter whether genius appear to create what they and their kind can onlydimly enjoy; on the contrary, they hold it of prime importance thatmaterial welfare and the form of mental cunning which subdues materialforces should be widely diffused among the people. Now no one would say a word against raising "the general level ofcultivation"; the higher it is raised the better. Only the cherishing ofthis ideal becomes pernicious when it is made more sacred than theappearance of individual genius. Nor is it proper to say that theappearance of genius is itself contingent on the level of cultivation. There is much confusion of thought here. The influence of the people onliterature is invariably attended with danger. It has its element of good, for the people cherish those instinctive passions and notions of moralitywhich keep art from falling into artificiality. But refinement, distinction, form, spirituality--all that makes of art a transcript oflife _sub specie oeernitatis_--are commonly opposed to the popularinterest and are even distrusted by the people. The attitude of theElizabethan playwrights toward their audiences gives food for reflectionon this head. Just so sure as the ideal of general cultivation is madeparamount, just so sure will the higher culture become degraded to thisconsideration, and with its degradation the general cultivation itselfwill grow base and material. XLIX FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I lead a strange dual existence, the intensity of whose contrast is almostuncanny. After sitting for hours at my desk working on my History ofHumanitarianism, I throw myself wearily on the sofa and smoke. And as thegrey fumes float above my face, slowly they lay a spell upon me like thewaving of mesmeric hands. I lose consciousness of the objects about me, the very walls dissolve away in a mist, and I am lifted as it were onsoftly beating pinions and borne swift and far like a bird. The sensationis curiously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, yet it never causesme surprise. Sometimes I am carried out into the wide sky and soar as itseems for hours without ever alighting, until I am brought to myself witha sense of rapid falling. At other times I am borne to the blessed forestwhere my love walks, and always then the same thing happens. I know notwhether it is my spirit or some emanation of my body, but, however it is, I am there always pursuing her as once I did in reality, until at last Ilay hold of her and draw her into my arms beneath that ancient oak. I kissher once and twice and a third time, gazing the while into her startledeyes. Then an inexpressible sweetness takes possession of me, a shudderruns through my veins, and of a sudden all is dark; I am sinking down, down, in unfathomable abysses, until abruptly I awake. No words can conveythe mingled reality and remoteness of these sensations. Jessica, Jessica, you have troubled the very sources of my being; you have abandoned me tocontend with shadows and the fear of shadows. L JACK TO PHILIP DEAR MR. TOWERS: You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up hereand bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark ofsafety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lordhave turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young ladythat is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now. She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church. She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jollyall the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiarspirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets himunder a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but Icreep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her intosomething else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now andhave took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. Heknows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardenedher heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible, nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this, I will show it to her. Your trew friend, JACK O'MEARA. P. S. --She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she giveit to the old man. LI FROM PHILIP'S DIARY Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination, and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are thesentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and withoutgrip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and, being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, theysurrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good therebyand a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoreticalsocialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has beenperverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of thereal springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces awayfrom the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in afantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain. They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages, having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise inthe heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, thoughthey mask themselves in formulæ of universal brotherhood. LII FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's. It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour thatexhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid ofthe obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or bydestroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflectionsit alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man whohas hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. Aswith me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fateoppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking theregions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steepinghis fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figurewith bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile tothink how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffledalong and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be pollutedby rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in hisbook and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats theproverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoyingthe world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of hislife he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to thatof the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment theygained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. Helooked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and throughthat isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and evena kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness hismood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one'sself too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless astrong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for withoutthese the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation tothrow away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifferenceor something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often oflate and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of yourblessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference youhave cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare thatpursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determinationto work and in work achieve my own destiny. LIII PHILIP TO JACK It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and oftenI wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and youwere brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where youare. You must listen to everything Miss Jessica tells you about the trees andbirds, and learn to love all the beautiful things growing around you. Iremember there were four or five great trees in my father's garden when Iwas a boy living in the country, and I loved them, each in a differentway, and had names for them and talked to them. One was an oak tree thatgrew up almost to the clouds, and its boughs stood out stiff and square asif nothing could bend them. That was the tree I went to when I had somehard task to do and wanted strength. Another was an elm that alwayswhispered comfort to me when I was in trouble. I used to go to it as someboys run to their mother, for I grew up like you without a mother's love, and I did not even have any sweet lady like Miss Jessica to be fond of me. You must ask Miss Jessica to teach you all she knows about the trees inMorningtown, and you must listen to what she says to them. Perhaps shewill tell you about the famous oaks that grew in a place called Dodona, and were wiser than any man or woman in the world. People used to talkwith them as Miss Jessica does with her favourite tree. And now, dear Jack, I am going to tell you a story which I have made upjust for you. It isn't about trees exactly, but it all took place in adeep forest that spread around a wonderful city. From the high white wallsof the town one could look out over the green tops of the trees as youlook down on the grass, and that was a marvellous sight. There was asingle road that ran through the forest right up to the gate of the city;but it was a hard road to travel, dark most of the time because the suncould not shine through the leaves, and very lonely, and so still that youcould hear your heart beat except when the winds blew, and then sometimesthe boughs clashed together overhead and roared and moaned until youlonged for the silence again. It was a long road too, and the men whowalked through the forest to the city all had great packs on theirshoulders. And what do you suppose was in their packs? Why, everytraveller carried with him a gorgeous suit of clothes heavy with velvetand gold and silver; for so the people dressed in the beautiful city, andno one could enter the gate unless he too bore with him the royal robes. But you see, while they were walking in the rough forest, they wore theirold clothes of course. Now in one place a wonderful woman sat by the roadside. She was a maga, orwitch, named Simona. She was beautiful if you did not see her too close, with large round eyes that looked very gentle and kind. And when anytraveller came by, the big tears would begin to roll down her cheeks andshe would cry out to him as if she pitied him and wanted to help him. "Dear traveller, " she would say, "why do you trudge along this gloomyroad, and why do you carry that bundle which bends your shoulders andtires your back? Don't you know that it is all a lie about the city youare seeking? There is no city of palaces at your journey's end. Indeed, you will never get to the end of the woods, but will walk on and on, stumbling and falling, and growing weaker and weaker, until at last youfall and never rise. And the wild beasts that you hear at night howling inthe bushes will rend and gnaw your body until only your bones are left. " At this the travellers would stop and say: "But what shall we do, wisewitch, and whither shall we go?" Then she would say to them: "Turn aside by this pleasant path, and in alittle while you will come to my beautiful garden which is namedPhilanthropia. There you will find many others whom I have wept for andsaved as I do you; and there amid the open glades you may live with themin everlasting peace and love. Houses are there which you need only toenter and call your own. And when you are hungry you have only to speak, and immediately all that you desire to eat will appear on the tables. Andwhen you are tired, soft beds will rise up to receive you. And clotheswill be spread before you--not stiff and uncomfortable robes like thoseyou carry in your pack, but soft garments suited to that land ofcomfort. " Most of the travellers believed the witch and turned into the by-path. But, alas! it was soon worse for them than it had been on the road; forthey were led, not to a garden, but into a great sandy desert, wherenothing grew and no rain or dew ever fell. And somehow they could find noway out of the desert, but wandered to and fro in the endless fields ofdust, while the hot sun beat upon their heads and their hearts failed themfor hunger and thirst. But now and then a wary traveller did not believe the witch and laughed ather tears and soft voice. And then, unless he got away very quick, something dreadful happened to him. The witch suddenly changed into a hugemonster with a hundred flaming eyes, and a hundred mouths with which sheraved and bellowed, and a hundred long arms that coiled about likeserpents. She was so terrible that most men who saw her in her true formfell down fainting at her feet; and these she lifted up and threw intodeep dark holes, hidden from the road, where the poor wretches soon diedof sheer loneliness. And now comes the heart of the story, dear Jack, if you are not too tiredto read to the end. One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was notvery strong, nor was his armour much to look at, --just an ordinary knight, but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart toslay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rodehe turned often to look into his lady's eyes, and always he seemed todrink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinksrefreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passingfair--as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest womanin all the world. And so at last they came to where the witch was sittingand weeping. Without a word the knight drew his sword and rushed upon her. Of course she changed instantly to the monster with the hundred eyes andmouths and arms. The air was filled with the fire from her eyes and withthe dreadful bellowing from her mouths, and her arms swung franticallyabout on every side to seize the knight and crush him. But this was thestrange thing about the battle: as often as the knight looked at the lady, who stood near him, he gained new strength and the witch could not harmhim. He was cutting off her arms one by one and victory was almost his, whendown the road came an old man wagging his grey beard dolefully andmuttering into his breast. And when he reached the three there at theroadside, he stood for a moment watching the battle and still muttering inhis beard. Then without a word he beckoned to the lady. She hesitated, sighed, and turned away, leaving the poor knight to struggle alone withoutthe blessing of her eyes. And immediately his strength seemed to abandonhim and his sword dropped at his side. You may be sure the witch shoutedwith triumph at this, and the noise of her bellowing sounded like theclanging of a hundred discordant bells. It was almost over with theknight. But suddenly he too uttered a great cry. Despair came to give himstrength where hope had been before. "For love and the world!" he criedout and drove at the monster once again with his uplifted sword. And, dear Jack, do you wish to know how the battle ended? I am very, verysorry, but I can't tell you, for when I came through the forest the knightand the witch were still fighting. There was a look of desperatedetermination in the knight's eyes, but, to tell you the truth, I thinkhis heart was with the lady who had left him, and it is not easy to fightwithout a heart in this world, you know. Write to me soon, a long, long letter and tell me about the trees ofMorningtown. Some day when you are grown up and live with men, you will beglad to remember the friendship and the wise conversation of thosebrothers of the forest. Good-bye for a time, my boy. Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS. LIV FROM PHILIP'S DIARY A wan beggar, seated on the coping that surrounds St. Paul's andexploiting his misery before the world. A strange scene calculated to giveone pause, --the poor waif crying his distress on the curb, within the ironfence the ancient sleeping dead, and along the thoroughfare of Broadwaythe ceaseless unheeding stream of humanity. As I walked up the street withthis image in my mind, the lines of an old Oriental poem kept time with mysteps until I had converted them into English: I heard a poor man in the grave-yard cry: "Arise, oh friend! a little hour assume My weight of cares, whilst I, Long weary, learn thy respite in the tomb. " I listened that the corpse should make reply; Who, knowing sweeter death than penury, Broke not his silent doom. I am reminded of that joke, rather grim forsooth, which Lowell thought thebest ever made. It is in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The god Dionysus andhis slave Xanthias are travelling the road to Hades, the slave as a matterof course carrying the pack for the two. They meet a procession bearing acorpse to the tomb. Xanthias begs the dead man to take the pack with himas he is borne so comfortably on the same road to the nether world. Whereupon they dicker over the portage. "Two shillings for the job, " saysthe corpse, sitting up on his bier. "Too much, " says Xanthias. "Twoshillings, " insists the corpse. "One and sixpence, " cries Xanthias. "_I'dsee myself alive first_!" says the corpse, sinking down on the bier. LV JACK TO PHILIP DEAR MR. TOWERS: The young lady have the letter you wrote me and I cant get it. But youneedent bother about writing any more tales. I guess you done the best youcould, but we dont neither one like what you told about the witch and themyoung people in the forest. Why do the knight stand there fighting thewitch when the old man have run off with his girl? Why dont he take outafter them and leave the witch to bleed to death? And the young ladythinks of it worse than I do. She went on awful when she read it, andcried. I guess she was sorry about the way the knight kept on cutting offthat woman's legs and arms even if she was bad. She don't say nothing elsenice about you now, nor let me. But she says you are the crewelest man shehave known. And she cries a heap when there aint nothing the matter, andblames at every thing. The old gentleman feels bad about it but he dontknow what to do. I guess now he wishes he hadent fooled with the younglady's salvation none. Because she have told him one day when he wastrying to talk pious at her, not to say nothing, that she dident believein nothing now but damnation. And he say "Dont talk that way before thechild. " But I aint come to neither one of them things yet. Your trew Frend, JACK O'MEARA. P. S. --She goes to see her tree spirit every day. But she dont talk to himno more. She just lays down on her face and cries. LVI PHILIP TO JACK I am afraid, little Jack, that my long story about the lady and the knightin the woods did not interest you very much; and that is a pity, for, if Icannot amuse you, how shall I do when I come to write stories for grown-upfolk? Well, anyway, I am going to tell you what happened after the ladyand the old man went away into the forest. For awhile they walked side by side in silence. But the road was long andit was already late, and by and by the night fell and wrapped all thetrees in solemn shadows. It was not easy to keep the path in the darkness, and pretty soon they were quite lost and found themselves wanderinghelplessly in the black tangled aisles of the forest. That was bad, forthe lady was tired in body and discomforted in heart. But worse happenedwhen the old man left her to seek out the path alone, for he only losthimself more completely in the treacherous shadows and could not get backto her. Ah, Jack, if the lady was beautiful when the sunlight shone uponher, how lovely do you suppose she was here in the night with the whitebeams of the moon sifting down through the swaying boughs upon herblanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in herterrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthywhisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows upyonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a lowinarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her outof the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on herface under a great tree, and wept and wept for very terror andloneliness. Now wonderful things may happen in the night, dear Jack. The trees thenhave a life of their own, and sometimes when the sun, which belongs to manonly, is gone they have power to do what they please to foolish people whocome into their circle. And so this tree that stood leaning over theprostrate lady whispered and whispered to itself in a strange language. Then out of the boughs there came creeping a dark cold shadow. It droppeddown noiselessly to the ground and covered the lady all about. It movedand swayed in the faint moonlight like a column of wind-blown smoke. Youwill hardly believe the rest, but it seemed slowly to take the very shapeof the lady herself, as if it were her own shadow that had found her; andso it began to creep into her body. And as it melted into her flesh, shegrew cold and ever colder as if her blood were turning to ice. Pretty soonit would have reached her heart and then--I shudder to think what wouldhave become of her. But when the first chill touched her heart, sheuttered a loud cry of fear: "Dear knight, dear knight, " she called out, "where are you? Save me! save me!" Then another wonderful thing happened in the darkness, for at such timesour spoken words may take on a life of their own just as the trees andshadows do. And so these words of the lady, instead of scattering in theair, were changed into a marvellous little fairy elf that went stealingaway through the forest. And as the elf ran swiftly under the trees andover the long grass, so lightly indeed that the flowers and weeds onlybowed under his feet as when a gentle breeze passes over them, --as the elfsped on, I say, everywhere the earth sent up a lisping whisper, "Save me, dear knight! save me!" Now the knight was far away, resting from his battle with the old witch. He had wounded her in many places, and might perhaps have killed her, hadnot the sly wicked creature suddenly slipt away from him into some hidingplace of hers in the desert. And so, as he could not reach her, he wasresting, very tired and very sad. Then suddenly, as he sat with his headhanging down, the little elf came tripping over the grass and plucked himby the arm, and the faint whisper stole into his ear, "Save me, dearknight! save me!" Do you suppose he was long in rising and following the clever little elfback to their mistress? Ah, Jack, there was a happy hour and a happy yearand a blissful life for the lady and her knight then, was there not? And now, Jack, I will not bother you with any more stories after this. Write to me and tell me all you are doing. Be good, little Jack, andlisten to the wise words of the trees and other growing things; and, aboveall, love that sweet lady, Miss Jessica. Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS. LVII FROM PHILIP'S DIARY There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There isthe way of the _Imitation_ trod by those who have perceived the illusionof this life and the reality of the spirit, --the way over whose entrancestand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, thefurther doth he recede from all earthly solace. " And truly he who hathboldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadowstrample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that otherway pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory, --theway of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day withoutgrasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded withthe golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgmentand purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafterto be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest beforethe gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doingrighteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity hereor in the _Imitation_, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, andonly too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities. And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to aman's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levellinghuman sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it werepossible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear andknow that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for theharvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, untilwe learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work asMillet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with theHoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his artwith noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and whorespected himself and the material he worked in; the other is thedisturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu. LVIII FROM PHILIP'S DIARY The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has alwaysrather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at leasthe had to proclaim to the world, --the ancient imperishable truth that manlives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the sterncall of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyselfright and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlastingverity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seemsto perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reformand the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, bypresenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, werereally playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation ofriches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chiefobstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism thatattains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight ofjudgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with thevirtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by afalse sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense ofpersonal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the endcertain decay. LIX FROM PHILIP'S DIARY _Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, andit only remains now to see this labour of months--of years, rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book, in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that Ihave spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That anygreat result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if themessage falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ringtoo high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. Afterall it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friendSydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, andchoose the best things; and number is not weight with thee. " I have triedto show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this presentsham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundlesssentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have novision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--thatfor this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sicklysympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And Ihave written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to ridone's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality andbrotherhood, " to rise above the coils of material getting, and to makenoble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been savedhad the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and ourhope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (thoughthis too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast theancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beautyand high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, makeglad your heart!" And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It hasovermastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all thingsby their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me fromthat _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and bettergrowth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are inthemselves. LX FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures whichhas been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressedme so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walkingunaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a pictureby Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide lookof expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawnthan of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event. A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almostindistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road woundinto the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on alittle expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens. Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wanand cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hintof the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense ofinexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eyeto intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden worldhad withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As Istood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinaryexpansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broadwindow is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishingvistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure thathe had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargementas mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in itsloneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and throughthat act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austereexultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that theindignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him, as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heartof Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his, --towrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlastingbeauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yetpurged of trouble. LXI FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. Itseemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land--notin wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau's picture, but insome wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarelythrough the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew thatsomewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted layin an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through thenight. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime passed, and still Isought and could not find her--only shadows met me and fantastic shapesout of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, ifthis long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and sheperish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be morethan I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: "Fear not, beloved; be at peace until I come!" I think I must actually have calledout in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound stillringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own miseryhas lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine whatyou too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to meso incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on yourpart has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood--can itbe that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your daysthat has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while Ihave sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of mywork, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused meonce of conscientious selfishness--have I made you a victim of that sin?Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a suredetermination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that youwalked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent offresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspringwithin my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn thateven now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless thehalf-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled mydream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me thatsomehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroadthis night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound ofmy voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace, beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and nopower of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw usapart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come. LXII JESSICA TO PHILIP I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack. But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine, out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And Iwonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that Inow am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forestwhen we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I holdyou more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen mesince! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch. But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, tobecome the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent tothis sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change aJessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into aHottentot, --provided either were possible. I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to comehere; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why didyou not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible thanthe beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed lesswisdom, --you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your ownheated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside tofollow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than intoit. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but withme it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion, burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite infather's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded allhis doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for isdeliverance. But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart, --submitting to apaternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true loveoften runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of aredbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers inheaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt itshining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clearillumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know, draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gayrhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Likethe poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart fromit. And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage tobreak my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a"revelation, " when he is about to construe life for me according to theprayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble theChristian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle, and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, mylife is so near and kin to Pan's that my vision never goes far beyond thegreen edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell yourfortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!--as near as you werethat day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in ourforest, --for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures ofCatullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too, rather than ascetic. I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the longfairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our goodstars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you. Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear youswiftly upward and ever upward. But I--I cannot soar, I cannot breathe inthat silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness ofthis long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of ourlove--until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning waswhen a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, whichwas not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way intothe office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I canremember she was in search of fame, and she found, --ah, dear Heart, --shefound both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to aprimitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my wholeexperience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow youlifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehendedme altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had ajudgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! Iwas divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more naturalone to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, thatevery woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day whenfirst you encompassed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all ina moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you. You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you werereally thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a smallwinged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale. All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this yearwith you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my lifebefore. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown, a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, andwith an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not knowfor what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilmentwas before me. After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart, only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. AndI had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happierdestiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Somelimitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathenfellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only ofyou. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters, foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by somemiracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of yourwindow sill. This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you. Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which youassumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass inphilosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention, compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe ofyour "upper chamber. " I resented that cold expression of yourspirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wingsagainst your high windows. In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I_knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strangealtitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in thefirst assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set mefree. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every birdwith a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfectpeace, --the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And Iwas resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice ofromance to reality. But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only thebeginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and thathis love is a sort of _fi. Fa. _, which he will some day serve upon herheart. Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you, for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparentdiffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantageover the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I toknow there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your classic pose?Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth Imarched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have savedmyself if a thousand Blüchers had hurried to my defence. And there evencame a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing tosome perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will. But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have comeso much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same briganddetermination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll youtwo looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting yourwelcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justifypoor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed soludicrously artificial, --as if you had somehow got an undeserved iotasubscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at sucha humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard, uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien, that the terror I had felt in anticipation of your visit vanished away. Ithink the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be tryingto domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenlythat your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were lessformidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to thewalk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from yourenigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effortto break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about somethingand kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now andthen, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon theissue at hand. .. . Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. Theworld changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman init. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, Icould have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expressionof a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startledme so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know howsincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should becaptured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, Icould not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that oldMerlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorryfor me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terrorand shame against your breast. Philip, why does a woman always weep whenthe first man kisses her the first time, no matter how glad she is? I hopeyou do not know enough to answer this question. But I am sure every womandoes weep; and I think it is because she feels even in the midst of hergreat happiness, an irremediable loss, for which nothing ever fullyatones. But another question is, How could I, after being lost to you in this dearway, turn my face from you at the command of a religious enthusiast? Aregard for father and not for his righteousness is the explanation; for Ifelt more nearly right following my heart to you. But now, dear knight, Iam ready to forgive you the fault of assenting to such an unnaturalsacrifice, if only you will come and take me once more. At present I am asorry little vagabond, very much the worse for wear, owing to father'sefforts to sanctify me. But if you will only love me enough, I think Icould be Jessica again. And perhaps you have some more natural way ofsanctifying me yourself; for I doubt now if I shall ever see heaven unlessI may ascend through your portals. Every day since our bereavement of each other, I have kept a tryst underour big tree in the forest. At first this was a tender formality, amemorial of a happiness that had passed. But after a time I began to havea power of mental vision that was akin to communication. I came out ofmyself to meet you somewhere in that mysterious world of silence to whichyou seem to belong. There were hours when I felt absolutely certain ofyour nearness, a tender peace enfolded me as warm as your arms are. And Ihad the supreme satisfaction of having outwitted all father's powers andprincipalities. Then came days when by no sweet incantation could I bringmyself near you. I wept upon my sod like one forsaken, and grieved themore because I conceived that you must be far out of my regions in one ofyour "upper chamber" moods, where all your faculties were concentratedupon some merely philosophical proposition. I wonder now if you arelaughing! If you knew how I have suffered, you would not even smile. Ifyou knew how I have _needed_ to be kissed, you would make haste to come tome. I had been making these excursions into the forest for a long time beforeI discovered that Jack was playing the part of eavesdropping guardianangel. Do you know, by the way, what a quaint little ragamuffinphilosopher that child is? He has a shrewd sobriety, a steady watchfulnessover all about him, and he is endowed with a power of silent devotion thatis absolutely compelling. He has been such a comfort to me! and there isno way of keeping him out of your confidence. He knows things by someoccult science of loving. Thus I was not offended one day when I looked upfrom the shadows under my oak and saw him regarding me gravely, almostcompassionately, from behind a neighbouring tree. After this we had atacit understanding that he might play sentinel there when I came into theforest. See how much I have said, and still I have not told you the strangest partof my story--the moonlit revelation of you to me. I am writing, writing, to ease my heart until you come. And always as I write I listen for thesound of your dear footsteps. For many successive days I had found ourtrysting place a veritable desert. I seemed to have lost my heart's way toyou; and in proportion to my bewilderment, life became more and moreintolerable. I had the desperate sensation of one who is about to be lostin a waste land, and I felt that I could not live through the frightfulloneliness of such an experience. Yesterday again I failed to find thecomfort of your occult presence when I went into the wood. I was filledwith consternation, and when the night came I lay tossing in a sleeplessfever. Unless I knew once more in my heart that you loved me, I felt thatI could no longer endure life. So I lay far into the night. At last indesperation I arose from my bed, slipped on my shoes and the big cloakthat you will remember, and fled away to our tree in the forest, pursuedby a thousand shadows. For indeed I am usually afraid of the dark; it islike a silence to me--your silence, Philip--and I fear it because I do notknow what it contains. But I had got one of father's wrestling-Jacob'smoods upon me by this time, and if Mahomet's mountain had come booming byI should not have been deterred from my purpose. But do you know thatthere is more life in a little forest when darkness falls than in a bigtown? and that every living thing there recognises you as an intruder withwarning calls from tree to tree? I had not more than cast myself upon theground to sob out all my griefs to whatever gods would listen, when asleepy little robin just overhead called up to his mistress the tone of mytrouble. The young leaves whispered it, the boughs swept low about me, andthe winds carried messages of it away into the heavens, so that suddenlythe whole night knew of my woe and pitied me. I know not how long I lay there staring up at the blue abyss of starsthrough the grizzly shades of night. I only know that my face was wet withtears and that I seemed to tremble upon the brink of a long life'sdespair. And oh! Philip I never _loved_ you so, --not only with my heartand lips, but with my soul. And it was my soul that went out in a prayerto you to come. I remembered not only the dear ways you have of folding meinto your arms and making me surpassingly happy, so against my own will, but I remembered the silent young sage in his upper chamber, and I feltthat indeed it was to this esoteric personality that I must pray forhelp. And so I gave my soul away to the sweet silence, and waited. The moonlightfalling down through an open space made a cataract of tremulousbrightness. It edged all the shadows with a silver whiteness, as of wingshidden. And then suddenly there came to me out of the far abyss above my trees amessage, a sweet assurance. Oh, I know not how to call to it, only I feltthe nearness of my love. And I was afraid, my darling, and closed my eyeslest I should _see_ you. And then, oh, Philip, I felt, I am sure I feltyour face close to mine, and in my ears a low whisper breathed like thepassing of the breeze, a voice saying: "Fear not, beloved; be at peaceuntil I come!" And I knew then that you loved me and had not forsaken mealtogether. And when at last I raised my eyes, I became aware of the fact that I wasstill not alone; and peering through the dim spaces about me I beheld_Jack_ sitting hunched up on the root of his tree like a small toad offidelity! The little owl sprite in him never quite slumbers, I think; andseeing me leave the parsonage, he had crept out and followed bravely afterthrough the shadows. But the picture he made now startled me into a pealof laughter. "You are the lady in the story that was lost, " said Jack, with the solemnintonation of one who has himself received a revelation. "Yes, " I confessed softly. "But will the knight come to find you?" "I hope so; I think he is coming now, dear Jack. " "Well damn him if he don't!" was the little wretch's impious comment. Ialways suspected him capable of using strong language, but this was thefirst time we had met upon a sufficiently intimate basis of friendship forhim to exploit it. And now, Philip, that is all until you come. But hasten, my beloved! I amalready aged with this long waiting for you. Do not ask me about father. He is a good shepherd, but I am a small black sheep determined not to bemade white according to his plan. And he has come to that place where hewould be ready to take even you as an under-shepherd of this factious ewelamb. Besides, could we not make a providential offering of Jack, asAbraham did of the goat when he was about to slay Isaac? Jack, I think, has a heavenly wit withal, and could adjust the little prayer light of hissoul even to father's high altar mind. As for me, I cannot conceive oflife alone without you one whole day longer. Indeed, so strong is mypremonition of your approach, that even now I listen for the sound of yourfootsteps upon the gravel outside. THE END