Chapter IV: Part 4

‘I made my own point, which was better than being run through by yours,’ I laughed.

Then I had to listen to his explanation of how there were now no Greeks of that breed. The Persians had destroyed that great race.

His scholarly indignation frequently rose to the pitch of sarcasm. But I was never abashed. I could not be made to hang my head mentally or to feel what is now called the inferiority complex. If you can finance the outrageous courage of ignorance with a certain secret wisdom of your own, you stand a very good chance of disconcerting a learned man in an argument. I always came out of these intellectual scrimmages exhilarated like a ragged young sparrow that has enjoyed an upward flight upon an eagle’s wings.

One little trait I venture to record by way of illustrating how shrewd a woman’s mind can be at ducking out of sight at the right moment. Lundy was resentful like most learned men--or unlearned for that matter--if it appeared that I was about to get the better of the contention. He felt the trickery of wit at his expense, a petticoated Puck putting Bottom’s head on a wise man’s shoulders. Intellectual rage caused him to blink. Whenever he regarded me with this fluttering blue gaze I cast the argument aside, rushed to him, laid my head upon his knees as these knees were the executioner’s block and invited him to strike in case he desired to make such a disposition of a fool. In such a manner I was always able to restore the equilibrium of love and charity between us without his ever suspecting that this was balm I laid upon his wounded vanity.

I have now a certain misty tinge of time in the colors of my mind, elegant wisps of culture, pseudo evidences of learning obtained from my association with Lundy. I have practically no accurate information on any subject, which is one reason I so rarely burden the reader with a quotation; but I have the sense and feeling of all these things Lundy studied in his lifetime to learn. I walked for years in the rich pastures of his mind.

XXIII

THE YEAR IN OXFORD

As the years passed there were happier periods, all of which have been recorded in ‘My Book and Heart.’ The years in Oxford, for example.

More than one circumstance contributed to the relaxation I enjoyed there. The prim academic life of the little college town was stimulating and refreshing to me after the hard and lean years in the itineracy. We were relieved from the burden of souls, and Lundy was absorbed in his work as teacher of Greek in the college. This is the one interest he had that I could not share. I had worried and prayed with him through all the Gospels, but when it came to feeling my way through the enclitics and iota subscripts of a dead cross-stitch language I had no conscience about leaving him to his fate.

Now that I look back, this is a queer circumstance, that I never had the least ambition to keep pace with my husband mentally. I was not uneasy lest he should escape me by this route, as I always felt he might do in those frightfully arduous pilgrimages he made toward God in the spirit. Anything might happen to such a traveler, I feared. But I have always enjoyed the assurance of having a very dexterous mind, regardless of whether I had as much information or intellectual training as the other person had or not.

This is no more a conceit than a man feels in the strength of his muscles. He is not disposed to skin the cat in order to prove his physical power. He is much more apt to sit down comfortably observant while some weaker man boasts of his biceps. I have done a lot of that kind of sitting down in my life. Nothing fans me into such a state of peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own, merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of his shanks.

The literary life of Oxford was the most youthful and strident feature of this old college town. I do not know how the dean of the English department contrived to mislead so many young men, but year after year a certain per cent of the senior class were imbued with the idea that they had some kind of gift for literary creation or literary criticism. The latter predominated. During the winter months they shook the very battlements of English literature. They spared nobody from Henry Fielding to Dickens. Never shall I forget the way the feathers of the Brontë sisters used to fly when half a dozen of these young whelps seized upon ‘Jane Eyre.’ I was in my George Eliot stage at the time and suffered a graver mind, but I recall with no flattery to myself the part I took in these discussions. There may be such a thing as a mature mind under the age of forty, but if so it is the result of premature gray matter. I was still in the adolescent period mentally and found great refreshment in the group of young-rooster intellectuals who frequently came to the house. We worked out our theories and opinions on one another as growing children wrestle.

Oxford was a narrow-minded little community, but it was pigeon-breasted morally. The only disciple of Zola in the town was an innocent young man from Arkansas, who had been well grounded in his morals. He was by way of becoming a novelist at that time, but turned out to be a historian. He graduated in vain from the English departments of five universities and was finally reduced to recording facts and dates and rewriting information that he could not digest. It was a form of mental regurgitation. A great many people have it. The one rash thing he ever did was to espouse the cause of realism in fiction, which none of us knew or cared enough to attack. He came in frequently to discuss the subject with me, chiefly, I suppose, because no one else would listen to him.

I have always been interested in bores. They are in my opinion the strangest of human phenomena, probably the one type of character impossible to dramatize. Has any one ever read a novel entitled ‘The Bore’? You have not, because the creative mind cannot produce him. He is automatic mentally. He can learn, frequently more than an intelligent man, but he cannot think. He is without imagination and the personal messengers of sensibility. He never knows or suspects how the other fellow feels. Poor D---- could talk indefinitely in a sensible monotone without the glint of a thought to brighten his durable conversation. To me it has ever been fascinating to watch a good brain work that was totally disconnected from life, charm, or personality.

Everything was settled except the relative merits of the new school of realism in fiction as compared to the old school of romanticism. This was a burning question then. As I remember, Émile Zola was the father of the realists. He had written a particularly disgusting novel, the title of which I do not recall; but one scene in it I am compelled against my will to remember--which, I suppose, proves that Zola was indeed a realist, because I have forgotten ten thousand lines of poetry that entranced me more.

This was a description of the decomposed body of a soldier plowed up on a battlefield after the Franco-Prussian War. Zola omitted not one worm from this picture. Yorick’s skull was a clean white bone as compared with this horrible pollution of what had been a man. He made realism stink for five pages. I shall never be willing to confound this monstrous insensate vitalizing of the processes of death with the convincing romanticism of life, which is what the best literature is. However, my opinion is prejudiced in this matter, for I am an incurable romanticist, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last breath I draw. I think the world of life is one bright illusion conferred upon us by a good God, and that if it becomes anything else, that also is an illusion by which we damn ourselves.

I have a vague recollection of Cæsar or some such person having said that the Romans were made indolent and effeminate by the importation of luxuries from the provinces--a free translation, but the gist of what he meant. I cannot tell what might have happened to me if we had gone on living in Oxford and if Lundy had continued to hold the chair of Greek in Emory College. We were as poor as possible, but I had my little luxuries from the various provinces of literature. Every college community titters with quotations from the best writers and speakers. I was subject during this period to short-flighted aspirations, such, for example, as trying to understand prosody. But I could make nothing of this science of poetry, not even with Lundy’s illuminating assistance. I remember at another time reading Guizot’s ‘History of France.’ This was a real experience and came near starting me to thinking. There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

I cannot tell how I missed my cue, but my suspicion now is that I must have made a more or less deliberate effort to develop mentally. I do recall regretfully certain intellectual flutterings which are never to be confounded with the stirrings of the creative mind.

When it is all over, or nearly over, and we look back with the wisdom of all our experiences gained, we know that love is the best thing in life and that it leads through whatever shadows to the best things we are capable of. So I know now that my devotion to little Faith was more stimulating and informing than anything else.

In contrast to this tender happiness I enjoyed as a mother, I was never free from a nameless fear and anxiety for my husband. It turned out that his duties as the head of the Greek department in the college did not divert his mind from that absorbing passion for peace in God. Rather the fatalism of the Greek mind reacted disastrously upon his own mind. In addition to this his vitality was depleted by overwork. No matter how pale saints are--and I have observed that as a rule they have poor complexions--I shall always contend that it is easier to step up and trust the Lord if you are in good health. Lundy’s strength began to fail and he passed more frequently into those dark periods of despair. So I labored with him in good faith according to his interpretation of the Scriptures. I remember now the premonitions I had of unimaginable misfortunes.

Years passed and our fate had come upon us, driving us far from our little world at Oxford before I finally realized that this was not a spiritual condition from which Lundy suffered, but a very real and dangerous disorder of the mind; melancholia, which took one form after another of religious mania.

I have written out in another place the life we lived during this period, but not the terror and silence that fell upon me. This cannot be set down in words; the frantic efforts I made to save him from himself, and to protect him from that terrible world in the Church. I know where the spirit of all tragedies dwells--in the silence which you dare not break, with even one call for help. I contracted the habit of holding my breath in these years of suspense. Even when my body slept it seemed to me my heart was forever sitting up with Lundy in the dark hours of the night.

This was long before the Great War, but I distinctly recall how I used to wish I could find relief in a real battle, see the dreadful face of my enemy and feel his wounds rather than face the powers and principalities of Lundy’s terrible darkness.

I fell sick under the strain and lay at the very doors of death for a long time, but not wishfully. I survived the predictions of various physicians for no other reason, I believe, than that I felt obliged to live and stand by my husband.

I did it. No one can say I failed him or ever drew back once from the shadows that finally engulfed him. I had written ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ and put the crown he so richly deserved upon him before he passed away. I remember being in a hurry to do that.

Nothing was further from my plans than to become a writer, but I must have already begun the practice of studying characters, for I remember all those people whom I knew then, not their faces but their attributes, their inside minds. Otherwise, I am inclined to believe now that this was not an important period in my own mental development. It seems to me that I had very little raiment on my thoughts, not much sweetness or color. That bright and halcyon past which came back to me later in a dark time was eclipsed by some sort of adolescent egotism of the mind. I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity. I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.

Nothing that I have ever written about myself humbles me so much as this confession, for I have observed the same state of mind in others. It is ugly, insincere, and leads to maudlin movements, agitations, and other disorders of our times, especially among women. The wonder to me now is that I did not get the idea that I had a message for the world. God in his mercy saved me from feminine screech of this emotion which so many of us mistake for noble inspiration.

XXIV

HOMELY PLEASURE

I was thirty years of age before the character of my mind differed consciously from that of any other woman’s mind who is a devoted wife and mother, and, by marriage, deeply and sincerely pious. I was backward with my needle, but necessity compelled me to become skillful in this art. I made my own clothes and they proclaimed the fact. But I was more successful with dear little Faith’s things. She came up in the drawn-line period. We could not afford linen, but every ruffle and hem on her white muslin frocks was hemstitched. The gathers were rolled and whipped. The yokes were elaborately carved with the needle into blossoms and webs worked into the drawn threads.

Faith was an adorable mite of a woman from the very beginning of her life. She felt her feathers and could not resist the joy of switching when she pranced forth in one of these dresses. I wore the long skirts of that period and held them up behind after the manner of those former ladies. Likewise, Faith invariably reached back, caught a fold of her exceedingly abbreviated skirt between her thumb and forefinger, the other three fingers hoisted and curled as daintily as if she held an afternoon teacup. Then, bent slightly forward, head thrown proudly back, she frisked forth glorified in her own pride. It comforts me now to remember that I never chided her for these airs and that she had the joy of her things.

They really were beautiful little garments, if I do say it who should not boast of my handiwork. You may have observed that love can impart to a woman who has no sense of style about her own clothes, a rare genius for dressing her girl child.

I had no domestic accomplishments, but I had one hard-and-fast rule as a loving wife. This was to appeal to the eye. I have a vaguely guilty feeling that I was not an exquisitely neat housekeeper--which immediately became a belligerent feeling the moment some one referred to the fact--but I always kept one place attractive in the house that would strike Lundy’s eye as he entered the door.

I remember once after we had left Oxford and our fortunes were at the lowest ebb we lived in two rooms far up in the mountains. I had saved his dearer books, some draperies and precious ornaments from the sale of our household things in Oxford, but not enough to furnish a whole room cheerfully. So I massed our wealth in one corner of it.

There was an ugly little stove set far enough out to admit of a seat behind it on both sides of the corner. I had it put in, no more than a low wide shelf against the wall. But it was softly cushioned and I covered it with a dark blue chenille curtain. I covered some old sofa pillows with the red-and-yellow borders of these curtains and piled them like gaudy mushrooms on this seat. Some distance above I put in narrow shelves for the books. These were arranged without regard for their titles or inside substance, but to bring out as much color as possible. A red or green backed book was precious and must be placed where the light would fall on it.

There was a vase on the top shelf, two brass candlesticks, and wedged in the corner was a remarkable plaster-of-Paris little boy, quite naked, sitting cross-legged on a square pedestal, reading from a large book open upon his knees. I take it that he was an erudite child, because from the looks of his pouncy body he could not have been more than three years old. Lundy had given me this thing in an opulent moment years before. Remembering the classical Greek turn of his mind, I cannot believe it truly represented his taste, only what he could afford to buy. But he craved statuary of the graver sort to the last and treated himself now and then to the moulded bust of a great poet or a great philosopher. I keep them all, though the little boy has lost half his book, broken off long since in our travels.

Two very wide chenille curtains remained. These were split and hung at the windows on either side of this corner. I do not suppose a professional decorator would have admired the general effect, but compared with the remaining space and furnishing of that wretched room, it was palatial.

On very cold evenings when Lundy came in, the stove would be glowing like a grotesquely deformed red-hot coal. The two candles would be lighted and flickering bravely. The little boy high up in his corner between them would still be studiously reading his book. The books on the shelves below would be lined up brightly like old friends waiting as usual to spend the evening with us. And Lundy, merely giving me the peck of a kiss as he passed, would make straight for that long cushioned seat behind the stove. He stretched out there like a wealthy man and read or scribbled notes for a sermon. I do not think he ever really saw the other part of that wretched room.

This was the life I lived then and the mind I had then. Good, tender and very anxious for my dear ones, but not by any stretch of imagination an intellectual existence. I doubt if we can be very active in such a love affair as this and be intellectual at the same time. Love itself is the self-expression of such a woman, which is something we hear more about these days than in those days, when it seems to me women loved more giftedly than they do now.

XXV

LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP

Mothers are especially methodical. Love makes them and tempers their minds in the beginning. They find out how to love each one of their little children differently, then they settle down in their maternal formulas of affection. These children grow up, their natures change, but this makes no difference. She remembers that Thomas was a sensitive little boy and had to be treated tenderly. So she goes on making allowances for his beautiful, sensitive nature, although he may have grown up into a cold-blooded wretch who has made his fortune on a widow’s mite.

By the same token, she never forgets that her other son was a normal hard-headed youngster who must be disciplined and required no petting. So she goes on giving him the lick and the promise of a sterner affection, although he may now be a broken-hearted man who has failed on account of going into business with the meaner, more excitable brother, and is very much in need of tenderness. But she apportioned her affections between them like an estate she willed them long ago. Now she is too old and _non compos mentis_ affectionally to change her will.

Authors do their work the same way. They find out how to write. They get their own method, a certain set of characters, and they stick to this method and these characters, with a few lay figures added here and there in different stories. What I mean is that their leading heroes and heroines show a marked family resemblance to one another in every succeeding book. And why not? They are all out of the same parent mind. I should recognize a certain author’s heroine anywhere on earth, even if she escapes from all the stories in which she figures. She is a young woman who usually works her way up, when the reader has every reason to believe she is bound to fall. I have not seen her lately, but she used to make me very anxious on account of her threadbare skirt and having to heat a can of tomato soup over an alcohol burner behind her washstand screen. I do hope she has kept her chastity and married well as usual these late years, since I have been too busy to keep up with her struggles. She was a model and an inspiration then to every working girl without a job. Which, when you think about it, is very high praise for her procreator.

I had been one of the most diligent unknown authors in this country for ten years before circumstances thrust me into the written rôle of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ It was then that I seemed to have found myself as an interpreter and at last capable of producing that literature of the heart which is peculiar to all of us. I am not wholly in my right mind in any other character now. She knows the very gist of everything I feel or know about men and women.

I would not attempt to tell how earnestly and unsuccessfully I have tried to be a younger, lovelier, and more attractive woman in fiction. Being a youthful, coquettish heroine is frightfully hypocritical and embarrassing. If I am compelled to play that rôle, I always put that dearer, wiser old woman in as a neighbor to the girl so that I may rest and dwell in her for a scene now and then.

I am far removed these many years from the circumstances that made the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ She was very poor and enjoyed her economies; I am now no longer poor, but cannot bring myself to commit an extravagance. She walked very softly before the Lord, and I walk even more softly before the world, on account of having attracted some attention from that quarter which she never had. She was always anxious for the peace and fate of her circuit rider; now I am lonely for the lack of these cares, and Lundy has passed away into what may be called the literature of my soul. She went to church every Sabbath day, and I do not go. Nevertheless she constrains me. Sometimes even yet the mind she had comes back to me like a song and I am tempted to sit down in the amen corner of my years, tell everything that is comforting to know, sing a hymn and try to lead us all in prayer! I seem to slip off into that same old-fashioned tenderness for men and women we used to feel for mourners kneeling about the altar during a revival.

Then the woman I am now looks about me and takes a more sensible view. What the world really needs is to have its emotional nature disciplined and trained even more carefully than we take the pains to develop the purely mental faculties. Praying will not meet this emergency.

My hope is to get at least ten strides ahead of this woman I used to be in the record I am now writing of my mind, which has changed considerably since she managed its downsittings and uprisings.

The question is whether I can do it. As we grow older it seems to me we break none of the bonds that formerly bound us; we simply add to them. I doubt very seriously if there is any such experience as liberty. It is a notion we get from not remembering for a moment the habits that bind us no less in the spirit than in our more obvious affairs.

XXVI

THE MIND OF THE WRITER

I had been writing ten years before I discovered the amazing capacity even the ordinary mind has for creating from experience and memory, and that its powers of production are limited only by one’s courage to think, and by the amount of physical strength and endurance one can afford to spend on the performance. After the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was written I was in the gravest state of anxiety lest I should never muster the material for another book.

About this time I met an old friend who now holds the chair of metaphysics in one of our great universities. I may have given some intimation of my despairing state. In any case, he instructed me in the laws governing mind. He drew a diagram of my mind on a piece of paper and showed me how it worked. I had only one consolation as I studied this thing--that he did not know or suspect the thoughts I was thinking about him at that moment. They were not complimentary.

I rejected his theory, but I could not get the picture of his infernal diagram out of my mind. Every time I sat down to work at my desk, I could see the lines and segments of my mind on that piece of paper and the dot where a thought would probably appear. The result was a hysteria of self-consciousness mentally which made thinking impossible. Quite by accident that great student hit upon the method of obstructing thought. The mind turned like a worm on itself!

In my opinion it is wiser not to fumble with this delicate piece of machinery, no matter how much you may find out by tearing it to pieces. What I know is that he who peeps at his mind will never have the use of it. It is wiser to leave not only your mind but your gender severely alone if you hope to do good spirit-level thinking. It would not surprise me at all if these were not the bonds which do somehow bind us to God, to be accepted, but not understood.

After all is said and done and taught that we can possibly learn from others, every man faces his own problems and solves them the best way he can. The lawyer learns law, then he practices law according to the bias of his own mind and character. Maybe he is a shyster. Maybe he has an honest legal sense. It all depends on the kind of man he is. The same thing is true about the physician. After a while he gets his own mental habits of diagnosing our complaints and diseases. If his mind catches and holds some fixed idea about neurasthenic tendencies, apt as not he will diagnose your case accordingly, although you may be having fits on account of an ulcer in the stomach. In any case, he finally works out a system of favorite prescriptions. Then he fits us to his medicines, and his methods as he grows older, no matter how new our disease may be. He cannot help it. His mind has made him and it is too old, inelastic, to add another cubit to his wisdom or courage as a physician. If you are about to become a patient, the risks are six of one and half a dozen of the other whether you choose a young doctor in the experimental stage of his practice or this old one who has settled down in his methods, because they are reasonably successful and rarely ever result in your death.

Preachers are the same way. They see God according to their lights, make sermons until they exhaust their vision. Then they go on preaching this same body of thought as long as they live under various texts from the Scriptures.

I am wondering how a literary critic would go about reviewing the mind of an author instead of his book. He would probably decline the assignment. He is a judge of the material, the copy a writer produces, but he is no mental mechanic to pass judgment upon the amazing motor of our faculties. The best he could do would be to write an illuminating essay upon the times in which an author lived; the effect, by inference, of that particular period of civilization upon his work; whether he was well and in good circumstances, or wrote under the pressure of ill-health and poverty.

But none of these circumstances would account for the main fact that he became an author instead of, say, a fishmonger or a banker. The great majority of poor people or sick people never take it out on the world by writing books. Neither does their state of health determine their literary style or their choice of material to convert into copy. Robert Louis Stevenson was an invalid, suffering from an incurable malady. By all the laws governing such a life he was due to die early without accomplishing anything. But he sat up in bed and wrote the healthiest, most entrancing stories of his times, and died later.

The mind is something else, not us. It is an instrument set up in us, controlled by spiritual forces which reach it through the medium of our emotions. It can be well and powerful when we are weak and ill. ‘By my spirit,’ thus also sayeth such a man. On the other hand, the mind is frequently ill to the point of dissolution when we are enjoying perfect health. Witness the sickly slime copy produced by a decadent writer who may be an athlete physically. ‘By my spirit,’ also says such a man who has adopted his powers and principalities of darkness. My notion is that it is a choice between spirits which determines the quality of your thinking, but not the power with which you can do it. That, I suppose, is the personal equation in the whole phenomenon and would depend upon the strength of your emotions and the capacity of your mental motor.

It is not for me to venture into the realm of metaphysics with my cheerful, flat-footed ignorance of this subject, but I am now writing the record of my own mind in relation to my work as an author merely from experience. The conclusions I have reached in this manner may be erroneous from the standpoint of the professional students. But I have frequently erred with the happiest practical results in my own living and achieving.

I remember being very much upset upon learning that poetry, religion, and sex animation were all products of the same emotional reactions. This was a serious matter. If I could not dispose of it in a manner satisfying to my mental and moral platform in living, it would take the luster off my thoughts and render me some sort of automaton in spiritual consciousness. You are not really the author of a thought which splashes up like spray from a wave of emotion which has its origin in sex. This information was too diminishing. Also, I prefer to believe in God, not because of my sex, even if I was of the other sex, but because I have a spiritual consciousness which only the idea of Providence can satisfy.

Still, I had a squeamish feeling that we probably were made precisely by this economical pattern, one emotion carrying all our sensations; thrift in expenses being one of the axioms in creation as I have observed it.

Any sensible person must have reached the same conclusion I reached, provided he did not consult too many learned authorities, but stuck like a leech to his Scriptures, which was something like this: By nature, delicacy, and decency, by all prayers, every hope and noble ambition, the sensations of sex are so mixed in us with the highest emotions of religion, eloquence, and every sublime imagination that we have been for ages the parents of spiritually minded beings instead of brutes.

I suppose this was the only way to insure such a phenomenon in an apparently physical and carnal world. We are thus born convinced of immortality by that admirable device of the Almighty. I am ready to stretch a neck ahead of the current animal propaganda concerning sex and contend that it is probably the basic principle of the instinct we have of immortality. How else does the lowest type of savage also arrive at faith in God and keep company with ghosts and spirits? Superstition is the name we apply to that, when it may be a much sounder, though more elemental, faith than we have ourselves. In any case, how do you account for the character of his superstitions or for his ability to produce them at all? He has no Bible, no literature, neither theologians nor scholars to direct his mental processes. But he has his emotions. He is some kind of stick-in-the-mud poet, and he arrives at the idea of God because he is a man. A dog cannot do it, though he has the same procreating instinct, but is not informed with the spiritual sense.

These conclusions have given me great satisfaction as a writer. I am never embarrassed if a particularly entrancing thought comes to me. I do not attribute it to the inspirations of my gender, but to the spiritual quality of the mind produced by gender in general, if you will have it so, not that I am personally disposed to dig down to the rudiments of my thoughts. Some mysteries are sacred so long as they are hidden, but shocking when they are exposed. It seems to me that the tendency of our times is to suspect sex of something which is really good, but that we are inclined to make something bad of what we suspect.

XXVII

DO YOU WANT TO WRITE?

I should be slow to advise the most gifted person to enter the literary profession. It is a life of infinite labor and hardship. The rewards are commensurate if you win them. But comparatively few who strive to enter in do so. Nobody lacks the sense to write, I believe; but most people lack the intuition, that hidden truth out of which romance and poetry and all literary illusions are made.

Very few people who read books know or suspect the literary casualties in an author’s life. The most successful, as the least renowned of us, suffer amazing losses in labor and a corresponding depreciation in self-confidence. You may buy a seat on the stock exchange, get a ticker and do business there according to your own secret information about the market. But you cannot buy a seat among the editors in this country if you are a writer. Neither can you discover the ticker in their mind which determines the worth and unworthiness of your copy. They also are taking a chance with the public which reads. It is a fickle public, apt to change its mind any time.

Nothing is less profitable than to study a magazine with reference to producing copy peculiar to it. You are almost sure to make the mistake of writing something similar to the article or story you have studied, when your common sense should warn you that the editor will not want to repeat that dose. You have been subtly guilty of a repetition of the motive back of the story you took for a pattern, which is reason enough to expect that the thing will be refused.

An editor must have a kaleidoscopic mind. He cannot tell you with any degree of accuracy what he wants, because he does not know very far in advance what his readers want. But he can tell you as quick as a flash what he does not want, because he has more past experience than you can imagine to guide him in rejecting unavailable copy.

The best bet, I discovered long ago, was to find out what was true and vital in the experience of the greatest number of people and to write that. As a rule it is so old and elemental as to have become identical with them, like a man’s ribs. He rarely ever thinks of them. There is such a body of thought and emotion in all of us of which we no longer speak. We have lost the words to do so. But when we see them written out it is as if we had recovered some dearer speech of ourselves.

The language we use is for the obvious, the things we do and say, or for the impressions we wish to make upon others. We have ten thousand dialogues for lovers, a considerable vocabulary for speaking piety and eloquence, and we are not short on narrative sentences; but I challenge any man to prove that it is easy to tell in words what is going on in his mind which is peculiar to him and not to be told. He is thinking them in the same way he breathes to live--by way of being mentally conscious. He is registering himself in every emotion, motive, and desire faster than these mental sensations can be translated into words.

Language is artificial. We only use it to be heard, or to be seen in the written word, or when we are so moved that we are practically talking to ourselves. The greater part of the thinking we do is so mixed with feeling that it is like a circulatory system of consciousness, therefore the only absolutely veracious mental versions of what we really are.

To set down as much of this copy of us as possible has been my particular business as an author. It requires a sort of loving cunning in the use of words which has been the most fascinating feature of my work. Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader’s mind. If you take pains, make every one count like a stroke in the picture of a secret trait which is peculiar to all of us, the individual reader gets the same shock of surprise that he would have if his mother had been eavesdropping his mind. It makes him nervous, wondering how much else she has heard.

As to that, it is like seeing God; you cannot do it without being pure in heart. So I doubt if we could interpret the secret hearts of men and women without feeling very close to them in love and sympathy. My observation of meaner-minded people is that they never really understand other people, only what is evil or potentially evil in them. I reckon it is a blessed provision of Providence that we only see through the glass darkly when our deeds are evil. Otherwise the wicked would have a frightful advantage over the innocent and good.

One of the most profitable experiments I make along this line is to write out good impulses peculiar to people who are not good, but have a perpetual hankering after their might-have-been virtues.

They invariably rise like woefully undone children to the bait. I get a batch of letters from sinners the moment such a paragraph picture of their futile goodness appears in print. Some of them very smart and bitter, but feeling that soothing plaster I have laid on the wounds their sins have made in them. Others are low in the dust. They do not expect to rise. Still, they want me to know they have enjoyed the relief of a few tears on their cheeks.

I do think this is a dear thing about men, even the worst of them--how they will confess their tears of grief or regret to a woman in whom they believe or whose confidence they desire to win. If she is an elderly person with some wisdom of their sex, she knows that these are histrionic tears, shed to move her. Still, it is an artless sort of compliment they pay her good old simplicity. But if we should tell how many men and which men we have seen weep, the world would never believe us! The poor things are driven to it as we are driven to little hysterical manifestations with our dearer men which we should never try to put over on another woman. Before other men they must play the part of pride, strength, and courage, even if they have no such attributes; but once in so often the last of them will break down before one of us, quiver his chin and let his tears flow, because he knows that we know he is really a child who never grows up, begging for cake when he is a boy and for sympathy when he is a man.

Very few lost and undone women ever show up, but now and then one comes in a letter, lays her head on my Circuit Rider’s Widow’s knees and whispers that she remembers when she felt like that, referring to some paragraph, say, in ‘My Book and Heart.’ This is as near as one of them ever comes to admitting that she no longer has the right to feel like that. And none of them ever sign their names. Thus they let you know they do not expect an answer. It is their sad way of walking like ghosts for a few lines close to what they believe is a kind heart.

It must be fearful not to be good if you are a woman, because you never can forgive yourself, while a man can and will do so with the least encouragement from you. If the woman he loves shrives him, he will rise up and strut like a spiritual peacock without ever taking the trouble to lay his case before the Lord in prayer. He is the greatest economist in contrition the world ever saw.

But when you think about it, this only goes to prove how transparent they are. I am by men as I am by the more occult Scriptures--they are not difficult to understand if you have the right mind toward them, not antagonistic or suspicious.

But I am always careful never to let one know I am reading him. Nothing upsets a man so quickly as to realize that you are seeing him maneuver in and out of sight behind the lines of the rôle he is reciting so well to you. He is offended. He takes his leave of you like a puppy with its tail between its legs, or he goes off with a prideful stride. Presently he tells somebody that he does not like that woman. But he does. He simply dislikes the glimpse he had of himself mirrored in her old Sea-of-Galilee mind.

I never answer such letters. Let them read Paul’s epistles! But I do feel closer kin to them than one ever does to the comfortable saints or to the brazenly virtuous.

When you have been a mother and known such richness of hovering love as that, after you are childless the wings of your heart do feel strangely empty. I have sometimes considered adopting a bunch of bad grown-up children and starting them all over at their A B C’s of morals and decencies. But it would never do. This whole countryside would be working presently with runaway children. I have a vague suspicion that I am not an easy person to live with. I have a hot and heady temper, and exacting standards acquired in these lonely hills where there is no world to obstruct or soften my convictions about what is right or wrong, and about the exceedingly early hour when dutiful people should get up and go about their tasks. As the stepmother of sinners I might be rather terrible in my manifestations. Besides, I could not love them as a real mother loves. I should lack that essential wisdom in dealing with them. So I have abandoned the idea, except to think about it.

XXVIII

EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF

Personally, I do not think so much of self-expression as a noble yearning. I would not go so far as to suggest that it is a wave of feminine psychosis; but the suspicion grows in my mind that it may be a sort of hysteria peculiar to that class of people who have boastful souls and considerable mortal vanity, neither of which can be financed by the finer art of living privately. We notice it in women now, as we do other symptoms which were formerly characteristic only of men. Job had a notable case of it. He fretted his wife until at last she lost patience with his groaning vanity about his integrity and advised him to curse God and die. Carlyle made his wife miserable while he expressed himself like a winged leviathan in ‘Sartor Resartus.’ It is easier to write an epic than to live your own life becomingly with no audience to cheer the performance. Therefore we are a trifle long on epics and short on achieving a good record of ourselves in secret. Women have at last become infected with this disorder of the mind, a pathetic desire to cast themselves on the wide screen of the world in some rôle of self-expression.

My mail has been laden with letters from them for years asking advice about how to do it. They are either distracted spinsters or married women who are childless and unhappy. Their homes and their husbands have got on their nerves. They are the pseudo heroines of their own sorrows, futile egotists in tears who wish to publish their tears in a book. They have only a martyr illusion of themselves and no sense at all of other people. They are totally lacking in that quality of the medium without which there is no such thing as a truthful interpretation of any life. God himself could not teach such a woman to write an honest sentence about herself, much less her husband, concerning whom she is determined to reveal the worst.

Recently a mean little wife with a soul-pulling use of words sent in a long account of her grievances. She had married beneath her own position in life. Her husband was an honest man, but not--oh, not a gentleman! He did not understand or appreciate her. He was cruel, contemptuous, and overbearing. Judging by the way she praised herself, it was easy to infer that she was one of those women who make a damnable use of their virtues and would not lend one for any consideration to her husband. I suppose she wore that sad accusative look which provokes the worst in any man. She felt that it might relieve the tension if she could find some means of self-expression and she wanted advice about writing the revelations of her married life.

On account of being partly Irish, I am not always able to resist the temptation to use the shillalah of my wit upon these little Judases.

‘Do not write the record of your wrongs,’ I advised her; ‘but meet your husband with a smile the next time he comes in and strike him over the head with some blunt instrument. He will probably clean you up, which is precisely what you need. This will much more quickly relieve your nervous tension than writing a book, which is a drastic business and very hard on the nerves, even when you tell the truth.’

The women’s organizations have a less sensational way of cashing in these unhappy ones. They give them a task to perform in connection with their vast activities. They are doing everything, maintaining schools and clinics, they are lobbying for bills. They are the most rapacious collectors for charity on earth. They have their publicity departments and their propaganda. They are setting up monuments and preserving the memory of honorable men. They almost invariably do what they set out to do and they are the only corporations in this country that get their labor free of charge, that even collect dues from their workers--which will indicate the fierce passion in the women of our times to achieve worthy ends and to express themselves in honorable service before the world, whatever happens to their homes, husbands, and children.

No one respects them more than I do, but a burned child is afraid of fire. For so many years I did not have the use of my own life. It was controlled entirely by the rules of the Methodist Church and limited by the adversities of a circuit-rider’s life. Never in this world would I yield it to the executive committee of any kind of woman’s board. I am a woman myself and know very well how much greater our talent is for governing others than the most despotic form of government founded by men.

My idea is that the good little life, with no publicity screen in the background, leads with less confusion and certainly less embarrassment to peace and happiness.

The theory is excellent and does me credit written out in words. But a master mind could never put into words the web I have spun upon it to ensnare my own life, liberty, and happiness.

For years past I have felt my immortal spirit zooning in it like an insect with its legs tied. No woman ever longed for self-expression as I long now to escape from my own plan of happiness.

XXIX

SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE

I could have been contented with intimate blessings. I do not remember ever to have craved a career. I do not now understand those who strive so brilliantly and senselessly for recognition, fame, and one sort of distinction or another.

For me the career of an author was purely accidental and resulted from a desperate emergency. I have written all this out more particularly in another book, but while we are on this subject of careers and recognition I may as well set down now what I have to say about that.

Anything you do, however well, which draws the world’s attention is a fearful thing, not to be lightly sought. And I do not refer in this connection to the competitive jealousies engendered by success, having had no experiences along this line. What I am trying to tell you is that with the rewards one earns in this business some right to live privately passes away. Your habitation may be divided from the crowded world by a thousand hills, but there are voluntary biographers in it who create the life they think you live back there. I could write much more entrancing legends about myself.

I have an ambition to sit gracefully in the public eye, one hand resting on my desk, neatly littered with manuscript, and the other curled like a white lily across my breast. When you are posing thus in your own mind it is disconcerting to learn that you are a country policeman, conscientious in the discharge of your duties. I respect policemen, but I should shrink from crowding into that profession.

If you have written much testifying to your Christian faith, even if you do admit a somewhat crank-sided human nature, it is depressing to learn that you are an atheist smoking with bad doctrines.