Chapter II: Part III: Which shows how the editor (2)

You see, dear "Spirit of gloom," that I have sent you all my little scriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings." My God is a pastoral Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of philosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana, revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the thoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did you ever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you the heathen for your inheritance"?

XIII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, I say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes moral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things that are in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks under the flowers?

As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new. Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown into the religion of men,--do you suppose that this was not known to the world before? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enough in the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working at least, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis of Aristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zoon_ (your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The "social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we live peacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existence in a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched with that sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of its present manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does not Virgil call his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholding the poverty of the city--

neque ille
Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti?

And is not the _AEneid_ surcharged with pitying love for mankind, "the sense of tears in mortal things"? So the life and words of St. Francis of Assisi are full of the breath of brotherly love--not brotherhood with all men merely, but with the swallows and the coneys, the flowers, and even the inanimate things of nature. And the letters of St. Catherine of Siena are aflame with passionate love of suffering men.

But there is something deplorably new in these more modern books, something which makes of humanitarianism a cloak for what is most lax and materialistic in the age. I mean their false emphasis, their neglect of the individual soul's responsibility to itself, their setting up of human love in a shrine where hitherto we worshipped the image of God, their limiting of morality and religion to altruism. I deny flatly that "Democracy ... affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith," as Miss Addams says; I deny that "to attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation"; I say we do _not_ "know, at last, that we can only discover truth by rational and democratic interest in life." Why did you quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction between individual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite the other way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely the rumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, in the upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul, concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into the noise and constant coming and going of the lower rooms to speak a word of encouragement or admonition, but she returns soon to her own silence and her own contemplation. (The heart of a St. Anthony in the desert of Egypt, the heart of many a lonely Hindu sage knows a divine joy of communication of which Hull House with its human sympathies has no conception.) Morality is the soul's debt to herself.

It is a striking and significant fact that these humanitarians are continually breaking the simplest rules of honesty and decent living. Rousseau, the father of them all, sending his children (the children of his body, I mean) to the foundling asylum, is a notorious example of this; and John Howard is another. I have in my own experience found these people impossible to live with.

Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personal integrity by allusion to a novel which comes from another college-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden of Christopher_, published three or four years ago,--a clever book withal and rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his factory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates this trust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and, as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in a paragraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of the story, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero to sacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people is a higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense which would have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himself and to the world.

I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive of right thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which has relaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For that reason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil does not shock us as it once did," I am filled with anger. I wonder at the blindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth as this: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect."--Have we?

XIV

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed to breathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did I make clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to any contempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike and distrust it for its false emphasis and for its perversion of morality--and the two faults are practically one.

Last night I was reading in _Piers Plowman_ and came upon a passage which exactly illustrates what I mean. The old Monk of Malvern might be called the very fountainhead in English letters of that stream of human brotherhood which has at last spread out into the stagnant pool of humanitarianism. He wrote when the rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw was fermenting, when the people were beginning to cry out for their rights, and his vision is instinct with the finest spirit of love for the downtrodden and the humble. Yet never once does his compassion or indignation lead him to neglect spiritual things for material. Let me copy out a few of his lines on "Poverte":

And alle the wise that evere were,
By aught I kan aspye,
Preiseden poverte for best lif,
If pacience it folwed,
And bothe bettre and blesseder
By many fold than richesse.
For though it be sour to suffre,
Thereafter cometh swete;
As on a walnote withoute
Is a bitter barke,
And after that bitter bark,
Be the shelle aweye,
Is a kernel of comfort
Kynde to restore.
So is after poverte or penaunce
Paciently y-take;
For it maketh a man to have mynde
In God, and a gret wille
To wepe and to wel bidde,
Whereof wexeth mercy,
Of which Christ is a kernelle
To conforte the soule.

Imagine, if you can, such a speech in the precincts of Hull House! I am not concerned to exalt poverty, I know how much suffering it creates in the world; and yet I say that an age to which poverty is only a degradation without any possible spiritual compensation, is an age of materialism. I wish I might follow the use of the word _comfort_ from its early nobility as you see it here down to its modern degeneracy, where it signifies the mere satisfaction of the body. The history of that word would be an eloquent sermon. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand what I mean by the false emphasis of our humanitarianism? And do you see why I could not stomach your review of Miss Addams's book?--I am sending by express several novels, among them....

XV

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Here in the South we are born into our traditions and we generally die by them. We never encourage the mental extravagance of adding new dimensions to our minds. When you have had an hour's conversation with any of us, or have exchanged three letters, you can be comfortably sure of what we think on any subject under the sun. Thus, you see, I was wholly unprepared for the point of view expressed in your last two letters. I thought you were a gentle disciple,--following the lights behind us indeed; but I did not suspect that you were bent upon this journey through the dust of centuries with the temper of a modern savage.

However, it seems a man must have either ass's ears or a cloven foot; and, soon or late, most of us expect to find our hero in Bottom's predicament. But I would rather have acknowledged the beam in my own eye than have discovered this diabolical split in your heel. All my life I have been familiar with the inhumanity of the merely spiritually minded. And I think it was because your own spirit was not denominational, nor fitted to any dogma of my acquaintance, that I trusted it. But really, the product is always the same. And I begin to wonder if there is not something fundamentally cruel in the law that governs soul-life. No matter what the age or the colour of the doctrine is, those most highly developed in this way generally show a _conscientious selfishness_ that is dehumanising. They have no tender sense of touch, their relation to the world about them is obtuse; and for this reason, I think, they excite aversion in normally minded people.

I leave you, my dear sir, to "expose the serpent lurking under the flowers." For my part, I believe humanitarianism is the better part of any religion. And while my knowledge of social orders does not reach so far back into the grave-dust of the past, I am unwilling to agree with you that it is "coeval with human nature." But it is one of the ends toward which all religions must tend,--for if a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?--But I forget! Love is not essential to your sort of Nirvana mysticism. In you, spirituality is a sort of cruel aspiration toward personal perfection. Still, that little scripture represents the advance made by this modern religion of Christianity over your Hindu theosophy.

Do you know I think a man's religious philosophy ought to fit him particularly for his present environment of earth and flesh. One cannot tell so much about the life after death. It may be necessary to make us over in the twinkling of an eye, and even to change the very direction of all spirit life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are; and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way of dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human obligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none the less real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by a philosophic pose. You see I am reading your last two letters by the light of certain earlier confessions.

And again I do not think you can fairly complain of humanitarianism because in some books "it is synonymous with all that is lax and materialistic in the age." The author of a novel is never so concerned to tell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory. You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can you judge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that in your "own experience" you have found these humanitarians "impossible to live with." I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is, Did they find _you_ impossible to live with? Come to think of it, I would rather live with a humanitarian, myself, even if his soul was carnally bow-legged. But my sort of charity is so perverse, so awry with humour, that the constant contemplation of a man trying to wriggle out of the flesh through some spiritual key-hole, made by his own imagination, into a form of existence much higher than agreeable, would be, to say the least of it, diverting.

You copy several sentences from the Hull-House book in your letter and cry to me in an accusing voice to know why I quoted them in my review "with approval." Suppose I did not comprehend their important relation to the subject from your point of view? But I do understand enough to know that the "social compunction" in Aristotle's day was a mere theory, a sublime doctrine practised by a few, whereas now it is a great governing principle, a dynamic power in the social order of mankind. And I challenge your accuracy in calling such social sympathy "only a rumour in the lower rooms of our existence." My notion is that the choir voice of it has already reached that grand third story of yours, and that the "solitary soul" in the "upper chamber" will presently find herself along with other traditions--in the attic! Oh, I know your sort! You stay in your upper chamber as long as atmospheric conditions make it comfortable. But before this time I have known you to sneak down into those same "lower rooms" to warm yourself by humanitarian hearthstones. And that you are not nearly so immortal as you think you are is proved by these winter chills along the spine. There come occasions when you get tired of your own stars and long to feel the thrill of that royal life-blood that leaps like a ruby river of love through the grimy, toiling, battling humanitarian world beneath you. Did you once intimate to me that if ever I conjured you out of the shadows which seem to surround you, I should be horrified at the vision? Well, I am!

XVI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

So your servant has a cloven hoof and just escapes the adornment of ass's ears! Dear, dear, what a temper! But, jesting aside, you must not suppose I abhor the cant of humanitarianism from any thin-blooded selfishness or outworn apathy. Have I not made this clear to you? It is the negative side of humanitarianism (the word itself is an offence!), and not its portion of human love that vexes my soul.

Through one of the crooked streets not far from Park Row that wind out from under the grim arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, I often pass on business. Here on the step at the entrance to a noisome court, where heaven knows how many families huddle together behind the walls of these monstrous printing-houses, there sits day after day a child, a little pale, peaked boy, who seems to belong to no one and to have nothing to do--sits staring out into the filthy street with silent, wistful eyes. There is only misery and endurance on his face, with some wan reflection of strange dreams smothered in his heart. He sits there, waiting and watching, and no man knows what world-old philosophy comforts his weary brain. The face haunts me; I see it at times in my working hours; it peers at me often from the surging night-throngs of upper Broadway; it passes dimly across my vision before I fall asleep. It has become a symbol to me of the long agony of human history. Because I know the misery of that face and the evil that has produced it, because I know that misery has been in the world from the beginning and shall endure to the end, and because my heart is sickened at the thought,--that is why I rebel so bitterly against a doctrine that turns away from all spiritual consolation for some vainly builded hope of a socialistic paradise on this earth. I have heard one of these humanitarians avow that he and practically all his friends were materialists, and such they are even when they will not admit it. Dear girl, believe me, I have lived over in my mind and suffered in my heart the long toil and agony which the human race has undergone in its effort to wrest some assurance of spiritual joy and peace from these clouds of illusion about us; I have read and felt what the Hindu ascetic has written of lonely conflict in the wilderness; I have heard the Greek philosophers reason their way to faith; I have comprehended the ecstasy of the early Christians; I have taken sides in the high warfare of mediaeval realists against the cheap victory of nominalism. I know that the word of deliverance has been spoken by all these and that it is always the same word. And now come these humanitarians, with their starved imaginations, who in practice, if not in speech, deny all the spiritual insight of the race and seek to lower the ideal of mankind to their fools' commonwealth of comfort in this world. Because I revolt from this false and canting conception of brotherly love, am I therefore devoted to "conscientious selfishness"? Ah, I beg you to revise your reading of this book of my heart, and to remodel your criticism.

But I am saying not a word of what is most in my thoughts. In two days I shall set out for a trip to the South which will bring me to Morningtown. Will you turn away in horror if you see a wretched creature hobbling with cloven hoof up the scented lane of your village? For sweet charity's sake, for your own sweeter sake, believe that his heart is full of love however wrong his mind may be.

-----

[1] Much of the routine matter in regard to
reviewing has been omitted from these letters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Second Part

which shows how the editor visits Jessica in the country, and how love and philosophy sometimes clash.

XVII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

WRITTEN AFTER RETURNING FROM MORNINGTOWN

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

It is all different and the morning has forgotten to return since I left you where your village meets the great world. Have you kept God's common dayspring imprisoned among your garden trees and flowers? What shall I say? What shall I not say? Only this, that I gave my happiness into your hands and you have broken it and let it drop to the ground. See what a shipwreck I have suffered of all my dreams. These long years of solitary reading and study I have been gathering up in my imagination the passions and joys and hopes of a thousand dead lovers,--the longing of Menelaus for Helen, the outcry of Catullus for Lesbia, the worship of Dante for Beatrice--all these I have made my own, believing that some day my love of a woman should be rendered fair in her eyes by these borrowed colours; and now I have failed and lost; and what I would give, you have accounted as light and insufficient. Is there no speech left to tell you all the truth? I am a little bewildered, and have not been able to pluck up heart of courage. Write me some word of familiar consolation; do not quite shut the door upon me until my eyes grow accustomed to this darkness. All the light is with you, and the beauty that God has given the world, all the meaning of human life,--and I turn my back on this and go out into the night alone. Dear girl, I would not utter a word of reproach. I know that my love, which seemed to me so good, may be as nothing to you, is indeed not worthy of you, for you are more than all my dreams--and yet it was all that I had. I shall learn perhaps to write to you as a mere reviewer of books;--the irony of it.

XVIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Can you believe it? I was absurdly glad to receive your letter this morning. Ever since you went away I have felt so brave and desolate--like a poor dryad who has fought her way out of her own little kingdom of love and peace and green silence, for the sake of a foreign ideal which really belongs to the world at large. (I shouldn't wonder if I did become a deaconess after all!) In my effort to escape a romantic sacrifice to a strange heathen divinity, I find myself offered upon this common altar in the name of a theory, Humanitarianism. My smoke arises. I have been consumed, and now I write you merely in the spirit,--you see I am learning _your_ incantations.

But being disembodied, I may at least be truthful. Besides, it is sometimes wiser to make long-distance confessions than to tell the truth face to face. Then listen, dear Heart, it was not Philip, but poor Jessica who was vanquished that day as we walked through the lanes and fields around Morningtown. I do not know how to tell you, but of a sudden I am becoming learned in all the joys and griefs of this world. There is a sweetheart reason for them all, lying buried somewhere. For love is nature's vocation in us, I think. We cannot escape it. Our vision is already love-lit when the prince comes. All he needs do is to step within the radiant circle. Oh, my Heart, is it not terrible when you think of it, that we may keep our wills, but our hearts we cannot keep! They go from us happy pilgrims, and return unto us old and grey, sometimes lost and forsaken.

You came so fast upon the heels of your other letter that I did not have time to put on my shield and buckler before you were here in the flesh, formidable, real, cloven hoof and all! I was frightened and militant,--frightened lest you should win from me the freedom of my heart, militant for the freedom of my will. Well, at least I kept the latter, but I can tell you, it is making a poor bagpipe tune of the victory. When I went down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy, dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage 1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you will bear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. In any case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and as you stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my hands clasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candles suddenly lighted in an open grave. You had not come merely to make peace with me, you had my capitulation ready, but I knew then I should never sign. Let the dead bury their dead; as for me, I am too much alive to die long and amicably with any ghost of a philosopher in the "upper chamber." I do not even belong in the "lower rooms," but outside under the skies of our ever green world. I have already determined that if there is nothing going on in heaven when I am translated thither, I will ask to be changed into a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring round and round the earth.

And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that I do not really know _you_, only your mind. The time I saw you in New York does not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicap just to try each other's intellectual paces, did we not? But when you ventured boldly down here upon my own heath--oh! that was a different matter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should not ride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew _you_. Well, you know the dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by asking his opinions or by classifying his face and expression according to biological records. Now, a man's features are only his great-grand somebody's modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover's wreath on the Morningtown road beyond my father's church. And behold! it was as if we had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs in friendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for a difference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did not reach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity was the ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the first time I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty of your spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimation of Nature's indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth of trees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassion anywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact.

But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thought pierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to the life of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in the cold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with the trees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then I asked myself this question: "What is the good, where is the wisdom in loving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in life or love?" Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayer to be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannot remember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leaves upon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so that you can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all my will in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day, perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but sound as a brownie's. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in the forest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poor heart that was dead and shall live again,--a tall lady-tree as heartless as any man-oak, or only a poor vine!

XIX

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regrets a witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes in sackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I'd give half my forest now to have back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, I wish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman's heart yesterday, to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach her prudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that we be generally true to the mood we are in.

When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of the subject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference, but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your "upper chamber" and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge, however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof of your "higher nature." When my father, for instance, who has long suspected the soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-fire premises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that you showed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict.

Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You are angry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who the Hull-House classes are,--people so poor and starved and cold that their very souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you have fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imagination across the fair fields of youth's summer years. Believe me, the humanitarian's calling seems stupid from your point of view because you are born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-House principles have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted the whole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth, then will be time enough for the spiritual luxury of such teachings as yours.

The last batch of books has come, Creelman's novel, _Eagle Blood_, among them. Evidently it is a story written to prove the intellectual and commercial ascendency of Americans over mere Anglo-Saxons. The heroine and a few romantic details are thrown in as a bait to the "average reader." Alas for the "average reader"! How many crimes of this sort are committed in his name! We can never hope to have a worthy literature until he has been eliminated from the consciousness of those who make it. In the days when he was not to be reckoned with, and men wrote for a very few appreciative admirers and some desperately cruel critics, then Carlyle began to swear at his "forty-million fool," and so attracted their attention, and ever since we have had them with us, forty-million average readers, calling for excitement and amusement. It is this same "forty-million fool" who has made historical romances an inexhaustible source of revenue to the writers of them. For he is naive, and has never suspected the real dime-novel character of such fiction. Can you not get some one to write an article outlining a plan by which the "average reader" may be abolished?

XX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

DEAR JESSICA:

I will not for any consideration of custom put such a breach between my dreams and reality as to go on addressing you in the old formal way. It will be idle to protest; I have bought the privilege with a great price; nay, I have even bought you, and no outcry of your rebel will shall ever redeem you from this bondage to my hopes. One thing I know: there is no power in all the world equal to love, and he who has this power may win through every opposition. And was ever a man in such a position as mine? Others have been compelled to overcome a prejudice against what was base or unworthy in themselves, but I am forced to defend myself for my best heritage of understanding. Would it help me in your esteem if I flung away all my hard-won philosophy and ranged myself with the sentimentalists of the day? I will not believe it. I will fight this upstart folly while breath is in me, and I will teach you to fight it with me. This morning I took that poor book of Miss Addams's and, in place of what you sent me, wrote such a review as will quite astound the "forty-million fool" you so despise--we agree there, at least. And all the while I was writing, I kept saying to myself, How will Jessica answer that? and, Will not Jessica believe now that my hatred of humanitarianism does not spring from selfishness or contempt, but from sympathy for mankind?

Yet if anything could bring me to hate my brothers it would be this monstrous certainty that my feeling towards them stands in the way of the one supreme, all consuming desire of my heart. I could cry out in the words of the _Imitation_:

"As often as I have gone among men, I have returned less a man"; for their foolish chatter has stolen from me the possession without which we are dwarfed and marred in our being. Your love is more to me than all the hopes of men. You must hearken to me. I have charged the winds with my passion; the scent of flowers shall tell you the sweetness of love; you shall not walk among your beloved trees but their whispering shall repeat the words they heard me speak. I will wrap you about with fancies and dreams and passionate thoughts till no way of escape is left you. You shall not read a book but some word of mine shall come between your eyes and the printed page. You shall not hear a simple song but you shall remember that music is the voice of love. You think that I have no heart for the many and can therefore have no heart for one. Dear girl, my love is so great that it has made me stronger a thousand times than you; there is no escape for you.

As I passed the little goblin boy this morning I dropped a coin in his hand and said: "It is from a lady in Georgia who loves you." His face lighted up with surprise at the words (not at the money, for I have given him that before), and I was glad to extend the benediction of your sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor; but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism, sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew of _isms_!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for an impossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among men. They are the followers of Simon Magus, these humanitarians; they would buy the gifts of Heaven with a price; and their creed is the real Simonism. Have you ever read the _Imitation_, and do you remember these verses?

For though I alone possessed all the comforts of the world and might
enjoy all the delights thereof, yet it is certain that they could
endure but a little.

Wherefore, O my soul, thou canst not be fully comforted, nor be
perfectly refreshed, save in God, the comforter of the poor and the
helper of the humble.

Let temporal things be for use, but set thy desire on the eternal.

Man draweth nearer to God so as he departeth further from all earthly
comfort.

You have taught me to love, dear Heart; and now, as you see, you are teaching me to be orthodox. Do not think I shall give you up; there is only one power greater than my desire, and that is Death. I would not end with so ill-omened a word, but rather with your own sweet name, Jessica.

XXI

JESSICA TO PHILIP

DEAR FATHER CONFESSOR:

You observe, I do not retaliate by addressing you as Dear Philip. After reflecting, I conclude that this would be an undue concession to make, while the above title removes you to a safer sphere. It limits and qualifies your relationship and at the same time affords me the happy advantage of confessing my heart to you. Really, I have always felt the need of such an officer in my spiritual kingdom. I could never reconcile myself to the incongruity of confessing in our experience meetings. It seemed to me that sharing my confidence with so many people was heterodox to nature itself. For this reason I have always thought that while Protestantism is based upon a nobler theory of the truth, Roman Catholicism is founded upon a much shrewder knowledge of human nature.

However, I do not come seeking absolution for any sins. Such shortcomings as I have are so personal, so really a part of dear me, that I should scarcely be complete without them. They are vixenish plagues of character that distinguish me from more conventional saints. But now that I have willed myself away from you, I need no longer conceal my heart. My love has been shriven, and, like a little white ghost out of heaven, must hark back to you occasionally for a blessing.

To begin with, then, when your letter came this morning, I took just a peep inside to see if it was good, and then hurried away to our forest to enjoy it, for I always feel more at home with you there. And although the season is so far advanced that the whole earth is chilled and desolate, my heart was like the springtide, swelling with gladness. Joy reached to my vagabond heels, and I had much ado to maintain the resignation gait of a minister's daughter through the village streets. And once out of sight I kissed my hand quickly over my shoulder till my face burned. For had you not promised to attend me? "I will wrap you about with fancies and dreams," you said. I was like a young-lady comet drawing after me a luminous trail of love. I began to comprehend the advantages of my position, to rejoice in my sacrifice. I caught the finer aspiration of love, like one who lays down his life and finds it again in nobler forms. Brave, good father, this thing that you have revealed to me is like a sweet eternity. It neither begins nor ends: only we do that. When our time comes we are swept into the current of it, happy, predestined atoms, and afterwards we are lost out of it like the leaves on the trees. But love is like the wind in their branches; it never is gone. So it seems to me now when all my heart's leaves are stirred to gladness by the dear gale of love.

But do not despise me, O sage in the upper chamber, for my selfishness. I keep far to the windward of you because I was made for love, not for sacrifice. The altar of your soul life is very fine, very beautiful, but I am too much alive to be offered up on such a table. Suppose I trusted you, gave myself with my heart, and in after years you should fall upon the idea of expurgating all sensations, all heresies, all affections from your life as the Brahmins do, what then would become of poor Jessica? I should sit upon your altar like a withered fairy, casting dust over my unhallowed head and calling down elfish curses upon you. Ah me! when I come upon a splendid man-statue that suddenly glows into living heart and flesh, I may wonder and love, but I should never trust myself in the arms of that phenomenon, lest, being clasped there, he should as suddenly turn back to his native stone and freeze the life in me!

Have you noticed that I tell you nothing of the village doings here, the little church sociables and a thousand commonplace details that go to make up the sum of existence amid such surroundings? It is because I do not really live among them. My mind is alien to these narrow margins of society and religion. But it is always of the little forest that I tell you, as if that were my real home, as indeed it is. And it is the dearer to me now that we have walked through it together. So in each letter you may expect a report of how things go there. This morning, as I looked about at the sober ground covered thick with dying leaves, I thought of what a gallant display of autumnal colors we had on that morning. Our little friends of the summer time are flitting here and there through the naked branches in silent confusion. There are no green boughs behind which to conceal their orchestral moods. Besides, their inspiration is gone, their singing hearts are benumbed by the cold. But for your letter thrust somewhere I could not have escaped the ghost of sadness that seemed to haunt the earth and sky. Suddenly, as I stood in the midst of it all, a cardinal flashed like a red spark into a tall pine, fluffed out his breast, and swept the forest with a defiant note of melody. It was a challenge to the long winter time, a prophecy of spring and of high green trees, and of a mate cloistered now far away in the wilderness: "You shall not hear a simple song, but you shall remember that music is the voice of love," whispered the letter against my heart. What a brave thing is life when we have love and the hope of spring latent within us! I admit, as I listened to the little red troubadour of the pine, that, had you been as near as the dreams and fancies that wrapped me about, this fight in me for freedom would have been at an end. Do not trust these feeble moods of mine, however; not one of them would last half the length of time you would need to make the journey from New York to Morningtown!

So! you have written such a review of Miss Addams's book as will astonish the "average reader," and all the while you wondered: "How will Jessica answer that?" Abridged, this is her opinion: That an editor should be careful how he kicks his heels at the spirit of his age. The world has an ancient and effective way of dealing with such heroes.

No, I am not familiar with the _Imitation_. But I gather from the passages you quote that it is a spiritual exercise prepared for those who "possess all the comforts of this life," and are weary enough of them to pass on to the philosophy of renunciation. But you should remember that the Hull-House classes have not had the necessary experience with comforts. Renunciation is impossible for them, for they have nothing to give up.

My love to the little goblin boy.

XXII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR JESSICA:

Did ever "Father Confessor" have so sweet and so wilful a sinner to shrive! Your only sin is that you love me, and do you think I shall grant absolution for that? As I read your letter with its wayward confession, it seemed to me indeed that I was in some temple of the gods instead of this book-littered den, and the rumble of the street was transfigured into the sound of triumphant music. And all the while the voice of the little penitent, hidden from my eyes, but almost within reach of my breath, murmured in my ears: "I love you, I love you, and that is my sin." Dear girl, when you have given me your heart, do you suppose I shall be slow to confiscate your will? It is not lawful that a man's, or a woman's, heart and will should be at enmity with each other. I know that your will is strong, but I know, too, that your heart is stronger. Why did you turn me away without one word of hope or consolation when I visited you in Morningtown? Out of the great store of happiness that God has given you, could you not spare one little morsel? Ah, I would not offer you up a sacrifice on the altar of any spiritual creed, but take you with me into that upper chamber that looks toward the golden sunrise. I would share your happiness and give you in return a portion in the hope that I too have found. With you at my side I could walk through the world, (for I am not such a recluse as you might suppose,) knowing that the desire of all men's hearts had fallen to me, and that my life was consecrated henceforth to noble uses. And yet to-day I am very sad.

Let me tell you a little story of the way your admired Simonians act when their general promulgations of brotherhood are brought to an individual test. Our proprietor and manager, a smooth-faced, meek-eyed Jew, who has made himself right with this world, at least, is much concerned with charities and civic meetings and reform clubs and progress societies and the preaching of universal democracy, and all that,--a veritable Pharisee among the humanitarians. He often asks me to give a good word to some Simoniacal book. Well, I have a poor broken-down Irishman named O'Meara, who reviews a certain class of publications for me. He is the kind of man you would never expect to meet in this country: a relic of eighteenth-century Grub Street,--a man who reads Latin and Greek, who can quote pages of the Fathers, who has a high ideal of literature and conscience in writing, and withal a victim to the demon whiskey that has dragged him down to the very gutter. His life has been a mystery to me, and some feeling of shame has kept him from ever telling me where and how he lives. At intervals he comes shuffling into my office, with bleared eyes and palsied hand, and for charity's sake I give him a book to review--and not exactly for charity either, for he does his work well. Two or three weeks ago our Simoniacal manager came into my office and asked me who that tramp was whom he had seen several times go away with books. I told him the whole story, thinking to arouse his sympathy. What was my surprise when he broke out into a mild stream of abuse--the more startling because he ordinarily says so little--against allowing such besotted tramps to come into the offices! When a man drank himself into such a state as that there was no doing anything with him, etc. O'Meara came back in a day or two with his "copy," and I told him that the chief had ordered me to cut him off. Poor wretch! he said never a word for himself, but turned and shambled guiltily out of the room--I shall never forget the sound of his trailing, despondent feet.

I heard no more from him until yesterday, when the office boy came in and told me a beggar child insisted on seeing me. What was my astonishment when it proved to be our goblin boy, who had been sent to ask me to come to his father; and his father was O'Meara! It all seemed as unsubstantial as a dream. I went with the child, of course. He guided me through the dark entry where I had seen him so often, in behind a great printing house, to a foul court hidden away from the street like some criminal outlaw. I will not try to describe the noisomeness of that reeking hole. I found O'Meara lying on a heap of sacks in a mouldering closet which was entirely dark save for what little light came through the doorway. Darkness, indeed, was his only comfort. He would not shake hands with me, for he has, withal, the instincts of a gentleman, and it seemed as if the shame of his whole degraded life lay with him before me in his misery. His tragedy will have been played out in a day or two, I think; and I wish the memory of it might also pass from my mind. What shall I do with the goblin boy? The hatefulness of it all stands between me and my thoughts of you. I cannot harden myself yet for a while to dream of pure beauty. I read your letter over and over, but its sweet medicament cannot purge my breast. Not even the acknowledgment of your love can drown these sighs I have heard.

XXIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. PHILIP TOWERS:

You lack the proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I have excommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audacious advantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in my romantic vagrancy. For a man giving himself airs in the "upper chamber," you have very human ways, and I begin to suspect you only keep your creed and philosophy up there.

But you are greatly mistaken if you think you can ever wheedle me into such a sunrise attic. I can be domesticated, but not etherealised. And you hold strange doctrines for an ascetic. You think that because I love it will be easy to "confiscate" my will. Even _I_ know better than that. We live to conquer our hearts. There is no freedom of mind and spirit till that decisive battle has been fought and won. My heart is a gay vagabond, ready to dance before the door of your tent, but my will is better disciplined. It weighs and counts the costs and rejects this sentimental bargain, because, O Stranger to my soul, I doubt if you can pay the interest love demands upon so large an investment. There is not enough of you; and your capital consists in something less vital,--in wind-cooled philosophies, and the passions of an occult spirit ever ready to escape into mysticism. Why will you not be content with a companionship on this basis? You keep your wings and you wish mine also. Well, you shall not have them! I have no disposition to simulate the example of those small insects who come out in early spring with splendid wings, make one flight far enough through the sunlight to lose them, and crawl all the remainder of their days in the domestic dust of their little tenements.

Besides, does not the science of biology teach that romantic love, in the very nature of things, is transient?--a little heathen angel that we entertain unawares, who comes and goes at will? I cannot tell you what satisfaction and what distress that theory has caused me of late. I would have my own heart free, but I am willing to move my little heaven and earth to prolong your bondage. Selfish?--I know, but consider upon what loneliness and terror such selfishness is based. A man is always sufficient unto himself, particularly if he can abstract and divert himself into a line of thought as you are able to do, but a woman without a lover is a pathetic thing. There is no real reason for her existence; all her little miracles of expression and posing are for naught. She is a sort of prima donna lost out of the play. There is no one to give her the happy cue to the whole meaning of life. Oh, my Love! I _cannot_ live without a lover. Do not bereave me! I should shrivel up, I am sure,--grow old and sour and sad. I might even become a deaconess with Hull-House propensities. I am a naive beggar, you see; I ask all you have, and admit that I am unwilling to give in return what I myself have.