Chapter IX: Part 9

Imagine the situation--an elderly woman who discreetly retired from the world years ago to spend the remainder of her days in a remote place, basking in the grace of God without making a fuss about it; showing her head once in so often above the horizon with a few neat laurels on her brow; doing a little good here and there, giving herself the airs of a beloved woman--only suddenly to awaken to the realization that she is a terrible old woman, autocratic, overbearing, who has set up a very small but clearly visible empire over which she reigns regardless of the manners, customs, and convictions of her friends and neighbors--when all this time I thought I was minding my own business and dressing my own garden to the profit and delectation of everybody who passed by!

These dear good people have been speculating in my attributes, revising them privately according to their amazingly vigorous but uncouth imaginations. They have not left one pretty soft feminine sin sticking to me. If I had entered one of the modern professions of banditry or bootlegging, I should have needed less courage than would be required to play the rôle assigned to me. It calls for buckram breeches, two guns, a club and the vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave. The news of my deeds in this amazing disguise have percolated far and near.

We are hard to please. I have frequently pitied women who were criticized for the way they dressed, rouged, or smiled, not knowing how vulnerable many people are to vivid coloring and a Mona Lisa sweetness of expression. Now I could find it in my heart to envy them. It is less embarrassing to be so suspected than to be shorn of one’s dearer charms and vanities as a woman, and to be accused instead of setting upon strong men with sticks. You wonder painfully if you actually have faded and toughened so much in the estimation of your neighbors that you have passed beyond the pink and glorified pale of a more delicate feminine transgression.

Mrs. Virginia Woolf, novelist and critic, recently made this statement in an article published in the ‘Criterion’: ‘On or about December, 1910, human character changed.’ One must envy her perspicuity, even if she does not mention the exact day of the month when this transformation took place; but I cannot imitate it about so intimate a thing as my own reputation. I do not know how long this primitive artistry in changing it has been going on; but my suspicion is that it began the day I set foot in this valley and started spinning literary rainbows above the heads of these simple folk who share the attic life of these simple hills with me.

Six busy years passed in love and charity with them before I had the least hint of what was going on. When at last I came face to face with my local likeness I was confounded. Long afterward the explanation occurred to me--in dealing with other people it is a mistake not to take into account the furtiveness of human nature and the guarded indirectness of the mortal mind. Wearing creeds and civilization like garments, we still practice within many of the traits of our primitive ancestors. A man is frequently on guard or on the offensive when we approach him in a friendly tail-wagging spirit, all unconscious of his bristling attitude, due to some weakness in himself of which you are not aware, or to a competitive animosity which you do not feel.

I have learned this too late in life to practice a corresponding discretion in my association with other people. I seem to have an infernal gift for telling what is going on in my mind or feelings. This is the quickest way possible to kick the skylights out of your own reputation. But I do not regret it, having had a grander time telling on myself than most people ever have concealing themselves. I have told the truth too much. It makes you free, but you pay for it. I remember hoping at the time that the scandalous caricature of my virtues might be a compliment inadvertently implied. One must protect himself before his immediate public either with conceit or with resignation. I use both as the occasion demands.

After this experience, I resolved to have done with my various reputations. They are nowhere required of us in the Scriptures. On the contrary, in the second chapter of Philippians, it is recorded that he ‘made himself of no reputation.’ I have willed mine to the world, which makes them and takes them away. They are too ephemeral and too expensive to keep up. If you have caught the wind of the world in your sails, you have only to do your work to insure your fame--a drastic business, but not nearly so difficult as maintaining your own personal reputation if you have become one of the assets of the public mind.

Besides, the older you grow the less comfortably does any reputation fit you. It is like a garment you used to wear, now out of style with your thoughts and your aspirations, which are stretching away like dreams beyond the mind of this world. There was a time, for example, when it troubled me to be regarded as a tightwad, because instead of contributing in the conventional public-spirited manner to movements, memorials, monuments and notorious charities, I have done my alms in secret. And though my heavenly Father who seeth in secret has not yet seen fit to reward me openly as they are praised who do good accompanied by a press agent, I am beginning to feel more solvent morally and independent spiritually by disregarding these character prints, good or bad, left in passing upon the minds of other people. The image depends too much upon the quality of the mind that receives it to be always reputable or veracious.

But whenever you become truly philosophical, you never are quite truthful toward your own humanness. I may write convincingly concerning this noble ideal of myself. It is held, you may say, on principle; I have never been able to live up to it except by fits and starts. The fact remains that I frequently suffer like a sinner under conviction over the impression made upon a friend, knowing how I have touched up the crooked lines of his character so that it will shine in a sentence more becoming to him. When he reads this sentence later in the book, he never seems to recognize himself. He never comes to clasp me by the hand and regard me with tear-dimmed eyes of appreciation. But just let me write out a fault, and forty men and women of my acquaintance will take offense, when my innocent purpose had been to dramatize one of my own secret shortcomings!

The greatest inconvenience I experience comes from the constant effort to repress my friendly instincts. I have a talent for loving people and would like to use it, but my flare of affection is put out when I perceive myself mirrored in the eye of that man or this woman as a fearsome person, liable to explode an opinion which will reflect upon his dearest prejudice or outrage her most sacred fallacy.

I am not complaining, you understand; I am simply indicating how much worm-and-dust wisdom of this world is required to finance a reputation even for sweetness and light, and that it does not pay if you have any safer way of employing your talents.

We permit conscience to make cowards of us all. Then by instinct we turn upon the highest everywhere to reduce it to the level of our own conduct. We cannot even get far enough away from our own transgressions to believe in the Almighty. We condemn ourselves to dust and despair, and we cover the whole ignoble performance with flubdub philosophy and think we get away with it. But we do not. We live best by faith, not by what we know or the uttermost that we can think; and certainly not according to our reputations, because very few people know what kind of reputations they have.

XLVI

FITTING INTO LIFE

Growing up year after year in a place like this requires more studious application than taking a master’s degree in a university, where you attend lectures and have a course of reading to defend you from thinking your own thoughts on that subject. It is a fact which you discover for yourself under the circumstances that ‘knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.’ We are at best no more than the imitators of wisdom. We borrow it, show off in it; but I have yet to see the faintest trace of natural wisdom in man, though the lower animals seem gifted with enough of it not to worry about their fate, whatever fate it is. I reckon this is the reason they remain lower, the damned harnessed victims of their content, as we are the more aspiring victims of our discontent, doubts and anxieties.

I do not think, for example, that a man ever lived who could have conceived the idea of peace. That is something handed down to us by inspiration and tradition from the great beginning. The Lord alone knows what peace is, and He declared it--‘On earth peace, good will toward men.’ We have been repeating that Scripture for ages as children recite verses without the mind to comprehend the meaning. This is not hypocrisy on our part; it is our very nature to be incapable of peace.

After a while you get to the clear place in mind where you can see through so many theories and philosophies, even professions of faith, you know that they are no more than the defenses we throw up against our own weaknesses and fears. One of the touching revelations of this kind to me has been the shrewd way we shift for ourselves at the very last. We get a marvelous confidence in the goodness of God then. We come clean and do see Him, whether we were ever before pure in heart or not.

The last deathbed I attended was that of a notoriously wicked man. No saint could have been more serenely at peace so far as his immortal future was concerned. He had worked hard and sinned fiercely. No man, it seemed, was his brother; but he lay there upon his dingy pillows beneath his ragged quilt with the innocent eyes of a child. He had done with guilt. He was out of pain so far as the Lord was concerned. Lying so wanly weak, never again to move hand or foot, he assured me that he was ready to go. The idea that he would be off presently upon an immeasurable journey was fixed in his mind, accompanied by no fears.

They who stick to their creeds and the meaner mortal facts we all produce in living cannot comprehend the courage of a man like this. In considering his case they remember their favorite damnation doctrines, but never their own transgressions. Nothing will convince them that the Lord is not a theologian, but a Creator; and that a history of His will would be a history of the one fundamental law, not as we understand law, but what He has made it, followed whether you keep it or break it by inevitable consequences.

This man had broken it in his flesh, and was dying for that reason as surely as if he had cut himself down. But now he was forced at last to keep that last most important part of it. With the vision of a child he had learned the meaning of God. He rested serenely upon what we preach and so rarely have the courage to achieve--real faith in God, and it had turned out precisely as the Scriptures promise--eased him of every fear. His sins had been removed as far from his consciousness as presently his body would be. I felt very close and soothingly kin to him, and reverently amazed at this perfect miracle of faith; also glad that he would die and escape that pit of himself into which he surely would have fallen if he had survived.

When you get far down your slope of time, however, and care less than you used to care about being the heroine of your life dolled up in your best deeds, then you can take a look at yourself according to the mind you have now calmed and cooled by the years, and you may come into that last and greatest of all vanities--the boldness to portray the person you really are.

Most people think they do that when they confess their sins; the worse they are the better they are for this purpose. My notion about that is if you must boast, it is more polite to proclaim your virtues. I have always been very courteous to others about that. But the queer thing is that I have never felt that my virtues really belong to me. Lecky’s ‘History of European Morals’ knocked the last ray of conceit out of me about being even a chaste woman. First one virtue and then another seems to have been thrust upon us according to the self-protecting instinct of men against frauds in paternity or some other economy for their comfort and peace of mind.

I am not complaining, you understand. It has all turned out for the best long ago; but I am just saying how queer I feel about having had decency and honor thrust upon us like foreordination by men, instead of choosing these distinctions for ourselves according to the word and will of God as we think we do. I have wondered if other women feel the same way about this. But I have never had the courage to ask the question point-blank. I have a sort of premonition that most of us are so ignorant of the processes by which we become virtue-bearing in an unvirtuous world that almost any woman might resent the question.

But I suppose our sins do actually belong to us. However, there is practically no originality about them. We can only commit two or three, the others are mere variation of the same perversities. My notion is that there is not much satisfaction to be had from exposing them. If you make an art, a literature, or a science of your vices, the result is some kind of puerile decadence, not entertaining to normal people.

In any case, I have been a very dull person along this line. To the best of my knowledge I have never committed an interesting sin, nor one that even held my own attention for longer than the moment it took to get rid of it by prayer and repentance. For this reason I am obliged to confine myself to the moderate activities of that narrow and monotonous existence already mentioned with becoming heat in these pages.

Looking back now through the mirror of my mind, the thing that astonishes me most is that nothing seems to have changed me. I made my little history of courage, honor and sacrifices, and from start to finish I can trace the silent, invincible child I was through all the women I have become in various periods of my life. I lived the whole of it with a curious mental reservation which was myself. I still love with a stronger passion the things that child loved--the earth, the sky, the living things that do not speak, but know and mean so much more than we can think or even tell with all our living or dead languages.

There is a speech in the wind that we do not know, a heroism in Nature that we do not comprehend, some wisdom of beauty in the grass and the faintest flowers that bloom which we shall never achieve, a kind of fearless liberty to live to which we shall never attain with all our ideals and declarations of independence. We only believe that all men are created free and equal and entitled to the pursuit of happiness, but it is something we have never experienced because our minds constrain us. These verdant boughs have no mind, so they live in perfect liberty without our poor fears and transient knowledges. The seeds of the grass that is cut down and withers to-day will spring green above our graves to-morrow with not one memory of pain or death. As a child, I could not have said what drew me to the earth, but it was this feeling of being closer there to life that neither fears nor perishes.

I am poorer in faith than that child was, but I still believe wearily in the same Providence in which she rejoiced. As she went silently about her affairs regardless, so have I gone on doing the thing I meant to do with a determination that will not be defeated. I made no appearance at this business, and do not now attract the least attention at working my will; only the thing accomplished is seen and read, not me. What I mean is that I am literally an unobtrusive person by nature. No one would recognize me except by name. I remember the same shyness as a child at being noticed. I have played my little tunes on the heart of the world, but I never craved to be identified by my strut with my works.

XLVII

FACTS AND TRUTHS

I love truth, although I shall die hating mere facts, because they are misleading. They are the weapons and defense of literalists, strangely mean-minded people in my opinion who have caused much trouble and strife in the world. But I have the same happy talent the child I was had for prevaricating. Let me have some wisdom of the truth even if it is no larger than a mustard seed and the sensation inflates me. I cannot set it down in the little raw words of mere veracity. I must garnish it and spread it like a rainbow above my mind.

Some people would call this lying. I think they have done it, but I am not embarrassed or convinced. My notion is that it is a very precious kind of inebriation of the spirit. I remember lying myself into a state of happy intoxication as a child, even if I had to go out behind the house to do it where no one could hear me. I think this is one reason I live concealed behind so many hills now. The occasional excursions I make into the world bring me face to face with so many confusing and depressing facts which I cannot endure and cannot deny. Here, there is nothing to deny. All is an affirmation of the old order of things as in the beginning. It is only my mind that travels. Sometimes then I see visions of the future like Cassandra. But I try to be sensible about this and remember that it is the weariness of the years which darkens the glass.

The world is not really whirling to destruction. It is we who are old and no longer able to keep pace with the times and who must pass away. Everything will go on as usual when we are out of it. And I shall not be scared up out of my grave, disheveled and demented by the din of some fearful battle going on above me. Such thoughts I do have for the moment, and am mastered by them as I used to be enchanted when I was young by a star-blossoming night. But presently I take a sort of recumbent comfort in the situation; nothing is really changed that should remain fixed by His almighty will--the same bright days, the same kind nights, the same seasons; only I have grown older.

As to facts, I have always been a faithful interpreter of the truth as my mind finds it; but I never have been able to stick to facts. In my opinion they are among the most misleading things we have to contend with in this present world. A fact is something somebody finds out about you that is not true, one of those capital-letter deeds you performed in a high mood or a low mood which is not characteristic of the man you really are. Personally, I had much rather be judged by the life I have lived than by the books I have written. In both places I have said things or done things that outrage the fact-tacking genius of critics. But on the whole I have come out very well.

My idea of Heaven is a place where there are no hard and fast facts of mortality sticking to us, but we shall be what we really are, true hearts at last, easy to know and easier to believe, no reasons left to envy one another or to suspect one another. I have a faint impression that this may reduce mental activity among us beyond endurance, but I am willing to try it for a while.

I am not opposed to facts, you understand; but my point is that we attach too much importance to them as evidence. Facts make war; they are used by ambitious men and greedy men to sway the minds of people. Does any one believe now that there would have been any Great War if the common people who furnished the cannon fodder for it had known the real truth underlying the conflict? I doubt it.

I should like to get back to that honest feline normalcy of being just a woman with the ordinary exercise of my give-and-take disposition. I would spare more time for living instead of working. I wish above everything else to indulge more in inconsequential conversation about just pleasant things. What has become of all the natural, cheerful little topics we used to discuss? I rarely ever hear a conversation now that does not turn out for the worst instead of ending in a gale of laughter.

Am I wrong, or is there a note of sinister wisdom in laughter these days? Is there some dreadful quality in the knowledge we are getting which changes innocent merriment to cynical hysteria? I must be wrong about this; but when you live alone most of the time, and only go abroad occasionally in the world, you do notice things like that--the eyes of people not so trustful of one another as I remember them long ago, a fearful wit, and that queer triumphant note in laughter like a comment indulged at the world’s expense.

I am merely setting down my thoughts about all this as one thrusts out his hands in the dark and feels his way toward the door. What actually happens is that I spend most of my days alone here in this cabin with a companionable fire upon the hearth. Usually I get away with it; but if I am in a particularly keen mood, the illusion fails. I know it is only a bright combustion of heat and wood in the fireplace. No real sense to the crackling of these blazing logs. I read some, walk abroad with the dogs, and I have my usual look at the stars, as a poor lonesome shepherd may watch his flock a long way off and beyond his reach, but his sheep still. So are these stars mine. The heavens above this cabin are familiar to me like a garment I have worn a long time upon my heart.

But I have never seen an angel ascending or descending! That keeps one strained up too much--no respite from this business of believing what you cannot see with the naked eye. I am not denying that it is good for the soul, but sometimes I have wished for something that was just good for me.

XLVIII

BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS

When the harvests are in and all the summertime guests are gone and a crisper, cooler silence begins to blow through this valley, I settle down to a nine months’ stretch of living alone here in the best company to be had. What I mean is that you can lay the book you are reading on the shelf without being obliged to think about what you will serve to the hero and heroine for dinner that evening. But after dinner you can take it up again and resume your companionship with the author and these characters which are frequently more interesting than real people, because they are derived from human nature at large and are the composites of many men and women. Also, there is the country in which they live, which may be on the other side of the world from where you live. So, sitting in your chair before your own fire, you enjoy all the benefits of travel without the inconvenience and confusion.

To read any one of Balzac’s stories is like spending an evening in France, even if you have never been in France and cannot pronounce one single fluted word of that language. And to read Victor Hugo is like spending one half the evening among the sobbing stars and the other half of it amid scenes of the direst poverty made by the meanest minds.

Hugo was the dramatist of human emotions at their highest pitch and lowest ebb. He had the gift of being vicariously sublime in a character like that of the old communist or Jean Valjean, but I doubt if he himself possessed the attributes of any kind of permanent character. I have the feeling that he was an irresponsible person with a histrionic conscience and practically no modesty of morals. Otherwise it is not clear to me how we can account for the serial romances of his own life, or his description of the Battle of Waterloo, or the fact that he took his morning ablutions in a glass bathroom on top of his house. The sun was, indeed, above him, but the populace was also in attendance in the streets below.

As for Balzac, he was a literary comedian who handled the tragedies of the human heart with a wit kin to the irony of fate. He could never have interpreted any other people but the French. He is peculiar to them, a medium through which the France of his day still lives, loves, sins, and suffers with a charm and a talent for indecency which it probably never had in reality. The art of a master is required to lift the squalor of the lowest lives and the grandeur of the noblest lives into imperishable scenes on paper, because in life they do change and fade into forgetfulness.

I recall one of his heroines, a stupid moron who could impart no animation to her immorality. He finds her reclining on a couch and spends ten thousand words describing her figure. I can spend a fascinating hour under that splendid spray of language, reading the mind and nature of the author. There is something idiotic in French genius of the first water like the artless simplicity of a defective person going about with his clothing disarranged.

Before he has done making images of this woman she has ceased to exist except as a feminine mollusk of beauty. Then I am invariably moved to mirth by his efforts to get her off the couch and induce her to say something or do something bad enough or sufficiently entrancing to justify his description. Only an author who has struggled with a stubborn or stupid character in a story can appreciate his dilemma, and the fiasco when she finally sits up and sobs, with no visible explanation of the sob. The reader is left in suspense until the next chapter reveals the cause of her grief, which is not grief at all, but the French hysteria of passion. It is clear to the envious like me that he cannot bear to sacrifice one sentence of the marvelous description he has written of her and that she can never measure up to it in actual performance.

I remember having a similar experience years ago with one of my own heroines who turned out to be another kind of fool. Nothing was further from my expectations when I introduced her with a few complimentary sentences. I must have got the idea from an old valentine card. Anyway, she was standing beautifully gowned beside a tall fluted column on the veranda of a magnificent old Southern mansion. I managed to give the reader the impression that she was rich, handsome, thirty, not married and vaguely unhappy.

She stood regarding the gently rolling landscape with this expression, which was as far as my talents as a struggling literary genius could carry her. I knew what would happen to her next day, but by no flight of my imagination could I fathom the thoughts that should be passing through her sad spinster mind at that moment. Neither could I move her from her gracefully leaning pose against the column. She became cataleptic. I labored with her frantically through three blistering hot summer days without ever persuading her to so much as turn her head.

Finally, in desperation, I sent her an anonymous note by a messenger couched in the language of a bold lover, saying that he would see her presently and settle a few old scores. She had run through with many lovers in her earlier youth, and could only perceive that the chirography of this note was vaguely familiar. It was a disgraceful thing to do, but the effect was electrical. From that time to the end of the story I have never had a more elastic heroine. Every author must have similar experiences, but very few of us would dare Balzac’s insolence to the reader’s intelligence and get by with the performance.

Certain books are more interesting to read than others in a place like this. There is nothing in the sublime propriety of these trees, the wide skies above and this earth so innocently green below to finance the erotic in fiction. It gives the impression of decadence artificially conceived in circumstances so old and decent.

Scott’s novels go like a singing charm. So do Stevenson’s stories. And it is the most pleasant place imaginable to read Addison’s papers. But not Christopher North’s ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’; too much scholarly wit flashing between North and his brilliant companions in these ambrosial nights. My own experience is that, living alone with the stars by night and with the hills by day, the mind of the heavens and the earth overcome you and you cannot think of anything very smart or funny to say to yourself. I have never understood that great man who went off one summer, settled himself like a hermit in the midst of an immense landscape and wrote an essay on the ‘Sense of Humor in Jesus.’ That which always impressed me more about Jesus was his sense of man, who is the tragic figure in all creation.

The one book stimulating beyond all others in a place like this is the Bible. No matter how great a theologian a man may be, I doubt if he could come anywhere near comprehending the wisdom and the majesty of the thirty-eighth chapter of Job unless he has spent years in the wind and weather of a quiet place.

‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

‘Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou have understanding.’

Job makes no reply.

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

‘Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof;

‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’

Job remains silent.

‘Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?

‘When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it,

‘And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,

‘And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?’

Job hangs his old gray head.

‘Hast thou commanded the morning since thy day; and caused the dayspring to know his place;

‘That it might take hold of the ends of the earth--’

When you consider that these are the unthinkable thoughts of the Almighty which must be delivered by the tongue of a mortal man and that the trace of his emotion and simplicity run through them like a weakness, it is amazing how near he caught the majesty and meaning of what he had to tell. Nothing ever written compares with the last five chapters of the Book of Job and the first five chapters of Genesis, and the authors of these books were the popular writers of their day. Compare their works with the works of modern poets, novelists, or historians. Let any modern scientist answer the questions the Lord put to Job, and observe how reduced in manner and substance his answers are. He gets the stuff out of his mind, but these Scriptures were blown across creation to the minds of the men who recorded them. They have a roll and a rumble mortal intelligence can never impart, and they contain more hints of scientific truth than the wisest among us have found out, though they labor in that direction.

We are still wrinkling our noses and squinting through a telescope at Mars, disputing about that one little bright speck in the heavens. If this planet had been mentioned by a single prophet in the Bible, we should know more about it than the astronomers will ever find out, just as there is more information about creation as applied to this earth in Genesis than has ever been translated into the terms of science.

I have long since accepted the heavens and the earth as a part of my future scriptures and let it all go at that.

But what I am trying to do now is to indicate the way I have passed the time for so many years in this quiet place. One cannot work all the time, and I was never one of those worms that inhabit books written by others. If it is a particularly entrancing tale, I close the book and envy the author. I pace the floor and wring the neck of my spirit in grief because I shall never write anything as good. There are stacks of little ragged notebooks scattered in the dusty corners of this study which carry the record of these idle hours. Rarely ever a diary note in them of my own performances, but they contain studies of men and women.

At that hour of the evening when mother used to pick up her knitting and pass into a peaceful trance of industry, I reach for one of these headless blank books and write characters from memory. Maybe of one dead long since, but I recall her with a comprehension I never had when she was in the flesh. The copy she has left behind her is cleared of the fog which living casts over us. Or it is of one whom I never knew, but I have heard or read a news item concerning him which omits every personal detail. I piece him together as you construct a mastodon from the bones he left behind him. I have some grand portraits of the prophets made this way, intimate and terrible like the Scriptures they left behind them. Sometimes I get the whiff of a man’s reputation, compare it with his deeds and deduce a character which is finer or worse than either the one or the other. After this it is easy to draw the features of his face, the length of his legs, the cut or sag of his eye. Presently I have a hero or a knave put together, respiration as good as Adam’s, who may come in handy for copy.

There is one whom I always wanted to put into a tale, but could never set up a situation sufficiently noble and stupid to contain him. He is old now and coming to his end; but in the days when I knew him he was a great man who had no manner or sensibility about achieving greatness--homely, with what you might call a country-town smile, which is an expression of facial simplicity. He had a splendid figure and wore his clothes as if he hated clothes. He walked as if he were stepping over dead bodies. I do not know why, because he was by nature singularly merciful. He worked indefatigably and rose to the top of his profession without distinction.

This vicious stride he had was an offense his fellow men would not forgive. His unpopularity was cumulative. He did not need to boast to get it; he had only to be seen striding along the street to his office, down the aisle of a church, or even as a pall-bearer at a funeral, to add fury to these flames that never consumed him. He loved music and had no talent for it, but he always kept mute musical instruments in his house, as some people keep a Bible on the center table which they do not read. He loved learning and had no learning, but he had the finest private library in the city; not to show his friends, because he had no friends, but probably by way of brushing shoulders with poets, philosophers, and historians.

The queer thing was that he read these books, as you perform a wearying task. Every evening for twenty years he would sit down in this library, cross his legs, lean back like a tired man and get through as many pages of a volume as he could endure before bedtime. He never referred to this prodigious labor, and no one ever heard him quote an opinion or passage from one of these books. He made his own opinions and maintained them without citing authorities to uphold them.

I seem to have filled a notebook with speculations half touching, half humorous, on the character of this man; but it appears from the record that I could not determine whether he formed this habit of reading as a lonely person sometimes plays solitaire to pass the time, or whether it was a terrific duty he performed toward himself. In any case, I record the sequel. He finally simmered down to silence and fishing. His conscience was clear. He had read every volume in that populous library and now reads no more.

Follows a very good paragraph on the quality of valor peculiar to noble stupidity. It shows up cleaner than the makeshift courage of smarter people. But I must have been by this man as Lundy used to be by the great textbook he would write for teaching Greek. He had the idea, as entrancing as any fiction could be, but he did not write the book. Such a romance of the rudiments of a language was really beyond any man to achieve. Just so, you will not find a trace of this valorous dunce so carefully thought out in any story I have written. Evidently I could not find the deeds to dramatize him.

Many writers probably practice their art in this manner, as those of us who are not writers practice the oral art of gossiping. I have sometimes wondered if an author’s sketchbook might not read better than an artist’s sketchbook looks. But it is unusual to be reduced to talking to yourself with a pen about people whom you have actually known or suspected by way of entertainment.

XLIX

CHANGE AND CONFUSION

I suppose the shortening of human life is really a blessing. This may be why so many men and women look forward to immortal life. That would not only involve an incredible change of scenes but of conditions. We should be relieved of both our virtues and vices, and that wearing monitor inside, conscience; of appetites, indigestion and every other vicissitude of the mortal mind and the mortal body. Certainly we do tire of any existence we work out for ourselves if we keep an active mind, because the mind no less than the spirit of man is migratory. So he migrates, or endures all the hardships of a sabbatical year, or he changes his business, or he retires from business. The point is that we are made so that we cannot stay put, as the saying goes, without disintegrating.

Lately I have contemplated the adventure of sailing forth into the world as one goes to meet a good old comrade. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I might meet a stranger not suitable to my years or habits of thought. The mind and character of the world I knew has changed.

When I left it in 1912 to take up my residence in this valley, nearly as many people in Nashville attended prayer meeting on Wednesday night as went to the theater on other evenings. Now prayer meetings are about to become obsolete. A popular preacher was a good pastor, but never the sensational feature of the Sunday morning paper. The Methodist Church had not lifted the ban on worldly amusements, and we had only a few earthly amusements, like playing flinch and croquet. As a Church, it was lenient toward penitents on principle, but not nearly so lenient as it is now toward the world. Nobody would have dreamed of putting on a drive for seventy-five million dollars for Christian education. The price of salvation and education have advanced more than worldly luxuries since then.

Women were still in hot pursuit of culture if they were particularly worldly minded. Otherwise they were the handmaidens of the Lord as usual. Polite social gambling was limited to a very small set, and was not recognized as a respectable diversion. Now these same women are citizens, politicians, and reformers. They have the same brains, the same natures, the same nervous systems they have always had, which are differently tempered from those of men; but they are running neck and neck now with men in civic virtue and public service. Even more of them are testing out these vices which formerly were supposed to be peculiar to men. They are much more easily deceived by their own emotions and by the flattery of politicians than the simplest maidens ever were by the eloquence of false lovers. I suppose when they realize that they have caught the bull by the horns they will retire from public life, go home and pay more attention to their yearling sons and daughters. Right now it seems to me that there are too many delinquent mothers broadcasting noble thoughts as mere citizens.

I shrink like a criminal from a nearer approach to these women. I have neither the rostrum mind nor the qualities of courage suitable for bearing banners in a parade. I must vote because it is my duty now to do so, but this is taxing to my moral nature on account of the character of the candidates put up. When it comes to choosing a politician for office I am a conscientious objector. I am an impractical Democrat who would prefer to vote for a Republican if he proved more nearly competent. I have barely sense enough not to follow my conscience in this matter and must always keep out of the way or stand among more valiant women a cubit short of the correct political stature. This keeps me silent when I should like to write a few pertinent political paragraphs for publication, especially before elections.

Crime has become an intellectual pursuit and a profitable profession these latter years. Formerly only rascals and defectives became criminals; now learned men and youngsters choose criminal careers. The youths are criminally insane because they have not received the training and discipline necessary to insure moral sanity. The passing of parents is a tragic circumstance. Formerly they exercised control and commanded obedience of their children. Now they do not. I know many families where the elder sons and daughters were brought up, you may say, under the old dispensation of parental authority, while the younger ones have grown up under the new order since the spirit of the times has changed. They matriculate into the streets, then into an adventurous school life, and finally into the universities, where they are provided with funds and speed facilities that would turn the head of a wise man, besides being made subjects for intellectual experiments by professors who have theories to prove.

The contrast between the characters of the older and younger sons and daughters in these families is frightfully significant. The first are morally sane, the others are not. Even if they commit no crimes, they practice a license in conduct and thinking which leads to the disruption of society.

This is the reason why the defense of these young criminals depends upon the testimony of alienists rather than upon the evidence of witnesses to their crime. They have managed in this sentimental age to struggle beyond the control of parents and beyond the reach of judges and juries. They are voluntary moral idiots with intellectual leanings toward every vice. My feeling is that we wait too long to send for the alienist. One should be employed to visit these boys and girls like any other health officer, so that we may be warned in time of sprouting criminals.

Somewhere in this confusion men and women are passing out into the light of great achievements. Maybe the time will come when the science of medicine will have advanced so far inoculation will take the place of morals in eradicating the physical effects of vice. But to what end? Nature is a better economist. She condemns the depraved to death. Disease is her quarantine method against every excess. Maybe in time we shall have more and more machinery to do the work of the world. Machines will not strike or join a labor union, but neither will they work without a man’s brain and aid to guide them. In any case, what is to become of the surplus man power?

This is not a happy moment in the world’s history. Never was there such a smoke screen between us and the future. I have a great wish to travel out there, at least to the edge of it, not as a tourist, but as a tired pilgrim who has come a long way in bad weather lifts his eyes and sees through the darkness a light shining, the open door of a house warm with peace and kindness. I want again at the very last the faith and hopes with which I started life. I remember that feeling, a sort of winged lightness of the heart. But I may never find the way. Something seems to be turning to ashes on my lips; not this valley or the scenes I have laid in it for happiness, but it is because I have no power of happiness now in me.

L

CAN WE BE HAPPY?

At the risk of offending many people, but with the hope of helping a few who are making the same mistake, I am venturing at the very end of the record to set down the only explanation that occurs to me: I believe I have totally misunderstood the Scriptures by which I was guided during the formative years of my life. I had in the beginning a natural gift for the simplest, most innocent happiness. I needed no more than a bright day and a long path winding across the hills and through the fields. I had a mind which retained the lacy shadows leaves made upon the ground. Now I seem to have lost the will to take these little idle paths to peace and happiness. I could weep sometimes when at this season of the year the wind blows a shower of yellow elm leaves twinkling like gold high in the sunlight because I can only see them. I do not feel the loveliness of the sight.

The reason is that I have spent my life and strength in service and sacrifice according to the way the Scriptures have been heaped upon me by preachers and my own dear saint who died a martyr’s death to such teachings. If I had had the courage to interpret them according to my own good senses, provided especially by the Lord for that purpose, I should have known the doctrines precisely as He promises.

How many sermons I have heard from this text, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens,’ but not one preacher ever interpreted them to mean, ‘Do not bear the other fellow’s burden unless he will bear one of yours.’ Therefore this bearing of other people’s burdens has contributed more to damnable selfishness in this world than any other Christian virtue. Here is another one, ‘Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’

I got the right cue on that one long ago. When Lundy was in mortal need of some earthly blessing, I used to go out and seek it with both hands and knock on every door until the right one opened to him. But I lacked the time and sense to practice the same wisdom for myself. I have earned more than I deserve, Heaven knows, but I have not sought sensibly the little things I needed for happiness. I have wasted too much of my time for others, without having the spiritual gumption to ask them to pay it back. There is no telling how much moral damage I have done in this world practicing the religion I have been taught, which I now know was a puerile and spiritually illiterate interpretation of the Scriptures. I have had my share of blame in making whimpering parasites of honest people in the name of the Lord. It was blasphemous, and my hope for forgiveness is repentance and a determination to reform.

I shall never be able to face what remains of the future properly without weaning myself of this inglorious and sentimentally spiritual past. Therefore I must change my scenes, as a bad man sometimes goes off to escape the temptation of evil companions. At the present moment I am in bondage to all manner of charitable habits and false obligations which would read like the calendar of a saint’s deeds if I should set them down here, but they are really the tax I pay upon a wrong interpretation of the Christian life.

This is what I have discovered--that there is no way to satisfy a sentimental conscience. It is the thief in your breast. The more you give, the more will it urge you to give; the more you sacrifice, the greater sacrifices will it demand of you. I am determined to stop gratifying my conscience. I am far more honorable and sensible than it is. I shall be guided by my sense. And that points directly to casting off every weight that besets me and looking about for the fair weather of happier days.

My idea is to prove the Scriptures by seeking and finding happiness. I am late starting off on this adventure, and I have no very definite idea about the direction in which happiness lies, but that very uncertainty has a sort of sparkle in it. My feeling now is that I shall need only to get away from my dreadful past to find it changing me to some easier goodness of mind, a place where I can sit down and not be responsible for anything or anybody, where I shall feel light on my feet and ready to travel a long way in bright silence to another country. Sometimes it seems to me that I may be thinking of the kingdom of Heaven.

We do grow up at last somewhere, but not in this present world. We invariably pass out of it trying to add another cubit to our stature, topping it off with a poor little deed of no importance to any one but ourselves. I doubt if any man or woman, however old, is really ready to give up his ghost. There is something he had not time to say or to finish before this chill came on and this shortening of the breath. Maybe it is a blessed illusion with which we instinctively finance our feeling of worth and importance when we are no longer of any worth or importance, but I do not think so. My idea is that it may be a sort of a dull intimation of immortality, a feeling of incompleteness, as if there must be much more life in which to finish up things; not the things we started here, but other cubits to be added later. I have always thought of saints as being exceedingly tall spirits, probably a trifle top-heavy as to their countenances.