Chapter III: Part III: Which shows how the editor (3)

Your account of O'Meara interests me. But what right have you to slip out of your stern character as a merely spiritual man, and assume the guise of a good Samaritan? Really it is not fair; your tender compassion is illogical, and, however benign, I cannot accept it as evidence in your favour. But your account of the poor man's distress touched my heart. And you ask me what ought to be done with the little goblin boy. Dear Philip, could _we_ not adopt him? Think how many years then, we should have to correspond in and to dispute with each other about his upbringing! I would make the jackets and you should furnish the ethics for him. You should provide a home for him, and I would give a little of the warmth that any woman's tenderness imparts to any child. I will begin at once with a maternal dictation,--he must be sent into the country. For children are like lambs, I think; they also need to grow up in a green field, and to gambol there. He must have no cares, no obligations--just be encouraged to let go all the good and evil there is in him. When he has expanded to his natural size morally and physically, we can tell better what to do with him. Are you laughing at me, or are you scandalised at such a proposition? Then why did you ask my advice? When a child is without parents, is it not better to provide him with a pair of them, even if one is a wizard who knows how to metamorphose himself into many different personalities, such as sage, mystic, lover, good Samaritan, and I know not how many more?

XXIV

PHILIP TO JESSICA

[THIS LETTER WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE PRECEDING LETTER OF JESSICA'S, BUT WAS NOT RECEIVED UNTIL LATER.]

DEAR JESSICA:

I often wonder whether I have made it quite clear to you why it is possible to hold in high esteem personally the workers of Hull House and these other philanthropists, while detesting their views as formulated into a dogma. Just after I had sent off my last letter to you I met with something in a morning paper which will throw light on my position. In an address before Princeton Theological Seminary Dr. Lyman Abbott is reported to have used these words:

"To follow Christ is, first of all, to give yourself to the service
of God by serving your fellow-men. This is more important than the
question of the Trinity, of the atonement, or of creeds."

Now the question of the Trinity or of the atonement may not seem essential to me. My faith has passed out of them--beyond them, I trust; and at least I do not call myself a Christian. But remember that Dr. Abbott is a teacher of Christianity and was on this occasion addressing students of theology. Certainly to him and to his audience these are, they must be, the first of all matters in the realm of ideas, whether accepted or rejected, and to speak slightingly of them is to show contempt for everything that transcends the material world. I know that Dr. Abbott, like some others, makes this service of our fellow-men to be a form of the service of God; but the slightest knowledge of the spirit of the day, indeed any intelligent reading of the words I have quoted, makes plain how entirely this "service of God" is a tag, a meaningless concession to an older form of speech. What seriously concerns our humanitarians is the service of mankind. Now am I not justified in saying that true religion would at least change the order of ideas and declare that to serve mankind is, first of all, to give one's self to the service of God? This is not a quibbling of words, but a radical distinction. It is because I find in all so-called humanitarians this tendency to place humanity before God, material needs before ideals, that I call them, when all is said, the most insidious foes of true religion. Their very virtues make them more dangerous than outspoken materialists and scoffers. It is largely due to them and their creed that we have no art and no literature; for art and literature depend, at the last analysis, on a reaching out after ideas, on an attempt to transmute material things into spiritual values,--on faith, in a word. The humanitarians cry out against the materialism and the commercial spirit of the age. They do not perceive that the only remedy against this degeneracy is the renewal of faith in something greater and higher than our material needs. Let them preach for a while the blessings of poverty and other-worldliness. The attempt to instil benevolence or so-called human justice into society as the chief message of religion is merely to play into the hands of the enemy. Do you see why I call them the real followers of Simon Magus, who sought to buy the gift of God with a price? "Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter; for thy heart is not right in the sight of God."

Consider how impossible it would have been in any age of genuine or real creativeness for a leading preacher of Christianity to have pronounced Dr. Abbott's words, and you will see how far humanitarianism has fallen from faith in the spirit. I know that passages maybe quoted from the Bible which might seem to make Christ himself responsible for this new Simony; but Satan, too, may quote Scripture. Surely the whole tenor of Christ's teaching is the strongest rebuke to this lowering of the spirit's demands. He spent his life to bring men into communion with God, not to modify their worldly surroundings. Indeed, the world was to him a place of misery and iniquity, doomed to speedy destruction. He sought to save a remnant from the wrath of judgment as a brand is plucked from the fire, and he separated his disciples utterly from acquiescence in the comforts of this earth; they were to be in the world but not of it: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." He taught poverty and not material progress. Those he praised were the poor and the meek and the unresisting and the persecuted--those who were cut off from the hopes of the world.

And now, dear girl, do you ask me to apply my preaching to my own case? Of a truth I have faith. I think it my true service to men that I should learn to love you greatly; and out of that love shall flow charity and justice and righteousness toward the world. Let it be my meed of service that men shall see the beauty of my homage.

XXV

PHILIP TO JESSICA

DEAR JESSICA:

The end has come even sooner than I looked for it. This afternoon, little Jack, our goblin boy, came to my office and I followed him back to the dismal court where his father lay expecting me. I had arranged that the poor wretch should be carried into a room where at least there was a bed and where a ray of clean sunshine might greet his soul when departing on the long journey; and there I found him lying perfectly quiet save for the twitching of his hands outstretched on the counterpane. I thought a glimmer of content lightened his dull eyes as I sat down beside him. I talked with him a little, but he seemed scarcely to heed my words. Then turning his head towards me he plucked from under his pillow an old thumb-worn copy of _Virgil_ (so bedraggled and spotted that no second-hand book-seller would have looked at it) and thrust it out to me, intimating by a gesture that he would have me read to him. I asked him where I should begin, and he held up two fingers as if to indicate the second book of the _AEneid_; and there I began with the fall of Troy-town.

He listened with apparent apathy, though I know not what echoes the sonorous lines awakened in his mind, until I came to the words:

Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus.

I saw his hands clench together feebly here, and then there was no more motion. Presently I looked into his face, and I knew that no sound of my voice, nor any sound of the world, could ever reach him again; for the story of his unspeakable sorrow, like the ruin of Troy, had been told to the end. He had spoken not a single word; he had carried the silence of his soul into the infinite silences of death. The secret of his life had passed with him. I shall probably never know what early dreams and ambitions had faded into this squalid despair. And his pitiful wan-faced boy--who was the child's mother? I am glad I do not know; I am only glad I can tell him of your love. I shall see that the father is buried decently with a wooden slab to distinguish his grave from the innumerable dead who rest in the earth. Might we not print above his body the last words of the poem he seems to have loved so much: _Fugit indignata sub umbras_! For I think it was the indignity of shame in the end that killed him. Is he not now all that Caesar and Virgil are? Shall he not sleep as peacefully in his pauper's bed as the great General Grant in that mausoleum raised by the river's side?--Commonplace thoughts that came to me as I sat for a while musing in the presence of death; but is not death the inevitable commonplace that shall put to rout all our originality in the end?

And all the while our Jack was sitting perfectly motionless by the window, looking out into the court--into the blue sky, I think. I picked up one of his thin hands and said to him: "Little Jack, your father has gone away from us and is at rest. There is a beautiful lady in the South who loves you as she loves me; will not her love make you happy?" He did not appear to understand me, but shrank into himself as if afraid. Indeed, sweet benefactress, I shall send him into the country somewhere as you bid me, and I shall see that your love brings him greater happiness than it has brought me, for with him you shall not withdraw with one hand what you have held out in the other.

I went away, leaving an old woman to care for the dead man and his child. It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noises of the street sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence. Is it not a strange thing that death should have this power of benediction? Of a sudden a breath comes out of the heavens, our little cares are touched by an eternal presence, a rift is blown in the thick mists that hem us about, and behold, we look out into infinite visionless space. And now I am back in my office. I open O'Meara's worn and much-stained _Virgil_, and inside the cover I find these words scribbled in pencil: "_I have cried unto God and He hath not heard my cry; but thou, O beloved poet, art ever near with consolation_!" I do not know whether the sentence is original with O'Meara or a quotation; it is certainly new to me. One other book I brought with me, and the two were the whole worldly possession of the dead man. This is a small but pretty thick blank-book, written over almost to the last page. I have not examined the contents carefully, but I can see that they are made up of miscellaneous passages copied from books and of reflections on a great variety of topics, with few or no records of events. One of the last entries is from Clarence Mangan's heart-breaking poem, _The Nameless One_:

And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow
That no ray lights.

Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
Here, and in hell.

And is it not a touch of Fate's irony that I should be sending this threnody of death to one who might expect to receive from me only messages and pleadings of love? Death and love are the very antipodes of our existence, one would say. And yet I do not know; I feel nothing incongruous in linking the twain together. Love, too, breaks open the barriers of our poor personality that the breath of the infinite may blow in upon us. I cannot say how it is with others, but so it is with me: love lays a hand upon me, and instantly the discords of the world are hushed in my ears, the little desires and fears that trouble me are shamed into silence, and I am rapt away into the infinitely great heart that throbs at the centre of all. It is strange, but life itself seems to pass away in the presence of this power that is the creator of life. I speak darkly, but my words have a meaning. And, dear sweetheart, be not afraid that you shall be left without a lover; that I shall bereave you! Do you think for an instant that I can cease to love? I cannot understand this war between your heart and your will; am I very stupid? Surely when I come to you, I shall bring this contention to an end, and you--it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what you shall give me. Out of the conclusions of death into the prophecies of love! I am filled with wondering.

You shall hear more hereafter of poor Jack, our adopted child.

XXVI

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR PHILIP:

See how you shame me! For this long while I have wished to begin my letters thus, but I waited, hoping you would entreat me to do so. I expected you to provide an excuse. I thought my own pleasure would wear the genial air of a concession to your wishes. Indeed, the way you wait for me to be obliged to do such things of my own accord, fills me with superstitious anxieties. It is as if you had some unfair foreknowledge of the natural order of events. You would take things for granted, and thus produce an hypnotic effect by your convictions so strong as to compel my conformity. But I console myself with the reflection that all this is mental. You terrify only my intelligence with your strange sorcery. And for this reason I shall always escape your bondage, for I am too wise to concede my familiar territory to such an overbearing foreign power.

However, I must not forget the prime object I have in writing this letter. It is to tell you that the little box of childish things, which you must have received already and wondered at, are _not_ for the literary editor of _The Gazette_, but for Jack, sent with the hope that they may in some measure comfort his sad heart. I went so far as to purchase material for the promised set of jackets, when suddenly I remembered that I was ignorant of both his age and size. You have never told me that, though you have given me such a real picture of him that I could almost trust my imagination to cut those garments to fit him!

Your account of O'Meara's death affected me deeply. With what sublime abandon does such a man let go his soul into the mystery of that silence which we call eternity!

Is it not strange how the same impressions come to many, but by different ways! "It will be long before I forget how alien and far-away the noises of the street sounded as I passed out of that chamber of silence," you said, and the sentence recalled a somewhat similar experience of my own on Cumberland Island, where father and I went last summer for a short vacation. One day, leaving the group of happy bathers to their surf, I climbed up inland among the sand-hills, that lie along the shore like the white pillows of fabulous sea-gods. Presently I came upon one of those great sand-pits that stretch along the Island, deep and wide like mighty graves. Far below me a whole forest stood in ghostly silence, with every whitening limb lifted in supplication, as if all had died in a terrified struggle with the engulfing sands. Unawares, I had happened upon one of Nature's griefs--and I do not know how to tell you, but the sight of it aged me. Of a sudden this death of the trees seemed a far-off part of my own experience. I was swept out of this contesting, energetic world into a still region where great events come to pass in silence, and inevitably. And so real was the illusion that, as I turned to hurry back, it seemed to me that centuries had passed since I saw the same little tuft of flowers like a group of purple fairies nodding to me from the top of a tall cliff. And so I stood there confused by the significance of this silence, so incredible that even the winds could not shake it. I felt so near and kin to death that I became "alien" to all the living world about me. For the first time in my life, I lost the _sense_ of God, which is always a kind of mental protection against the terrors of infinity. There was nothing to pray to, only the sea on one side and this grave on the other, with a little trembling life between.

Thus you will understand that not only have I had a similar experience to your own upon the occasion of O'Meara's death, but that for once I came into your region of shades and terrors. I was like one on the point of dissolution, and almost my soul escaped into your dim habitation. From your letters I had already learned how near together love and death stood in your consciousness. Each is an exit through which your spirit is ever ready to pass. And for the moment, crowded in with skeleton shadows there, you seemed sensibly near me. I was divided between fear and love. But the blood of life in me always triumphs,--and then it was that I made my first flight in consciousness from you. I kissed my hand to the twilight and ran! I am sure you were there, Philip, a cold-lipped spirit-lover seeking my mortal life. And, oh my Heart! is it wrong that I would love and be loved in the flesh? I do not object to spirituality, only it must have a visible presence and a warm cheek.

P. S.--But, dear Philip, how am I to reconcile this tender charity to Jack with your anti-humanitarian views? Is a man's heart so divided from his philosophy? Or do you intend to make a mystic of that poor child, so that he may escape the woes of his condition? I am curious to see what you will do with him. Also, I shall certainly defend him against your Nirvana doctrines if I suspect you of juggling with his soul.

XXVII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

DEAR, TEASING, RARE JESSICA:

I have so many things to say to you. First of all, why do you blame me for my "foreknowledge"? You scold me for my hostility to the sentimentalism of the day, you scold me then for any act of common human sympathy, and now you take me to task because I foresee how you will address me in a letter. Dear me, what a horrid little scold it is! I wonder you didn't quote _The Raven_,--

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or
devil!"

But really no great powers of prophecy were required. Have you forgotten that in the very letter before this one you called me "Dear Philip"? And wasn't that a good index of your tempestuous, contradictory sweet self, that you should have begun your letter "My dear Mr. Philip Towers" and then thrown in your "Dear Philip" by the way, as if it would not be observed! Why, my naughty Jessica, when I came to that phrase, I just took my longest, biggest blue pencil and put a ring about it so that I might find it at a moment's notice and feast my eyes a thousand thousand times on its sweet familiarity. Do not suppose that anything ever escapes me in your letters. I con every little lapse in your spelling until I know it by heart. And you do make so many slips, you know, in your reviews as well as in your letters! I never correct them,--that would be a desecration, I think,--but send up your copy just as it comes to me. Indeed, I find myself imitating unawares some of your most unaccountable originalities. Only the other day I was in the reading-room and our head proofreader, a sour, wizened old man, cried out to me: "I say, Mr. Towers, what is the matter with your spelling? You write _propotion_[2] for proportion and _propersition_ for proposition, and get your _r_'s all mixed up generally!" There was a titter from all the girls in the room. Then said I: "Thou fool! knowest thou not that Jessica lives in the South, and treats her _r_'s with royal contempt as she was taught to treat the black man? And shall I not imitate her in this as in all her high-born originalities?" Of course I didn't say that aloud, but just thought it to myself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties with poor human souls?

And you make my prophetic powers a bulwark for your licentious rebellion and declare that you will always escape my bondage. Shall you, indeed? You once intimated that I wore ass's ears. I begin to believe it. What a blind, solemn animal I was when I came to Morningtown to beg for your love! I was so afraid of you. And as we sat in the circle of your watching, motionless trees, something of their stiff ways entered into my heart. I told you of my love so solemnly, and you answered so solemnly. Fool! Fool! I should have spoken not a single word, but just taken you in my arms and kissed you once and twice. Don't frown now, it is too late. There would have been one wild, tempestuous outbreak of indignation, and then my dryad maiden would have known my "foreknowledge" indeed. Is it too late to rehearse that curtain-raiser? Dear girl, I would be merry, but I am not so sure that all is well with my heart. I need you so much now, for I have entered on a new path and the way is obscure before me. I need you. Your hand in mine would give me the courage I require.

Do you remember how you warned me of dangers when I reviewed Miss Addams's book? You, too, were a prophet. Let me tell you how it all came about. The other day I wrote up Mme. Adam's _Romance of My Childhood and Youth_ (Addams and Adam--the name has a fatality for me), and took occasion to make it the text of a tremendous preachment against our latter-day Simony,--as well it might be, for Mme. Adam grew up in the thirties and forties when France was a huge seething caldron in which all these modern notions were brewing together. And unfortunately we are just beginning now where France left off a score of years ago. You have already seen the review, no doubt, and it is superfluous to repeat its argument. But for my own justification to you I want to quote a few sentences from the book. You disdained to make any reply to my letter on Lyman Abbott, and I fear you have grown weary of the whole subject; but certainly you will be interested in what I am copying out for you now. In one of her chapters, then, Mme. Adam writes:

Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First
comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature,
revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear
in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of
phenomena for useful social purposes.... There is no error in nature,
no perversity in man; evil comes only from society.... He [Mme.
Adam's father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man
to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite
which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the
immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily
explain.... They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father.
Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent a date to have
dried up their souls; _they no longer believed in a divine Christ;
they still believed in a human one_. They worshipped that mysterious
Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not
then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under
machinery.

Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth the close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern cult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of that fresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evoke once more the golden destiny of man?

Well, this morning the particular Simon Magus who rules _The Gazette_ walked into my office and, after some preliminary sparring, came out with a complaint which I knew had been preparing in his brain for some time. It seems that he had already been deluged with letters about my heretical attack on Miss Addams, and now a new storm had begun over my further delinquencies. He kindly told me that my views were a hundred years behind the age and that they were doing injury to the paper. Against the latter charge I had no defence, and immediately capitulated. To cut a disagreeable tale short, I anticipated his purpose and offered to make way for some man who would better harmonise with the benevolent policy of the paper. The first of the month comes in four days, and then I shall be thrown once again on my own resources. The shock, though expected, is a little disconcerting; for at times a man grows weary and discouraged in fighting against the perpetual buffeting of the current. But most of all I am wondering how my independence will affect the hopes that were beginning to colour my dreams. Dear Jessica, you will not forsake me now; you will put away your perversity and love me simply and unreservedly? There are difficulties before me, I know; but I am not afraid if only my heart is at peace. I am free, and if there is any power in my brain, any skill in my right hand, I will make such a pother that the world shall hear me. I will not die till I am heard. And so I ask you to help-me. With your love I shall be made bold, and no opposition and no repeated reverses shall trouble me. And in the end your happiness is in my making.

Indeed, your box of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment in Newspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack is ten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot write more of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to----; and when I open that letter will it bring me joy or grief? Your joy may cast a ruddy light on my path, but nothing that you can say will shake me in my firm resolve. No sorrow shall hinder me, but, oh, happy Heart! I, too, long for happiness.

XXVIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

KIND SIR:

Which do you think requires the more grace in a woman, to hold out against a dear enemy or to yield? My own experience teaches me that there is more facility in resistance. Acting thus I have always felt in accord with natural instincts, and there is a barbaric sense of security in following them.... Yet I have only one thing to tell you in reply to your "so many." Can you guess what it is? Already I think the birds know it. I have so far departed from my natural order of perversity and self-protection that they feel it, and twitter together when I pass by. I think they look down upon me now with high-feathered contempt. Could anything be more mortifying?

Do not laugh, Philip! You have behaved little better than a robber in this matter. I have lost to you, but the game was not fair; dear mendicant, you played with a card up your sleeve! All my life I have planned to outwit predestination. I have ignored Sabbath-day doctrines and faith-binding dogmas to this end. I could even have held out indefinitely against your "foreknowledge," but when you come, heralded by an unexpected misfortune, asking "peace" of me that you may meet your own difficulties with a steadier courage, I find you invincible. It is as if you had suddenly slipped through the door of my heart and left will, betrayed, on guard outside. I have no defence in my nature against your plea. The diplomacy of your need takes me unawares, and, no matter how I fear the future, now I am bound to add myself to you in love and hope. The prospect is terrible and sweet. Already it has made me a stranger in my father's house, a foreigner among the trees, and a wakeful, frightened mystery to myself. I am full of tears and secresy. I am no longer Jessica, the wind-souled dryad of the forest, but merely a woman in definition, facing a new world of pain and joy. Oh, my beloved! you have taken all that I have, all that I am! Henceforth I shall be only a part of you,--a little hyperbole of domesticity always following after, or advancing to meet you.... Dear gods of the world, defend me from such a fate! ... After all, I cannot admit the "one thing." I cannot submit to this annihilation, this absorption of character and personality. If you take me, you do so at your own risk, I will not promise "peace," but confusion rather. But if you get me, you must take me. Yet, if you come to Morningtown after me, I will deny my love, not out of perversity, but out of fear. The sight of you is a signal for me to take refuge upon my tallest bough. And I can no more come down to you than a young lady robin could fly into your pocket. It is all very well for you to exhort me to love you "simply and unreservedly,"--I do. Nothing could be simpler, more elemental, than my love is; and do I reserve a single thought of it from you? But I am not conventional enough in heart or training to surrender. My genius for you does not extend so far. To lose myself does not seem to me wise or logical, however scriptural or legal the practice is. The truth is, I cannot agree to be taken, any more than the little petticoated planet above your head can kick off her diadem of light. I do not know what you will do about it, because it is not my business to know these things. All I am sure of is that I love you, and that I belong to you if only you can get my extradition papers from Nature herself.

Meanwhile I have ventured to prepare my father's mind for a new idea. As we sat before the library fire this evening, each employed according to his calling, he with Fletcher's _Appeal_ and I with my sewing, I asked the usual introductory question to our conversations. And it is always the signal for him to raise his shield of orthodoxy; for it has long been my habit to creep around the corner of my private opinion and tease him with what he is pleased to term "the most blasphemous speculations." Therefore when I said, "Father, I wish to ask you a question," he looked up with the guarded eye of a man who expects an assault from an unscrupulous antagonist.

"Well, my daughter, ask."

"Which would you advise me to marry, father, a humanitarian whose highest law is the material welfare of his kind, or an ascetic whose spirituality is something more and something less than scriptural?"

"Neither, Jessica; if you must marry, choose a man who believes in the divinity of Christ and lives somewhere within the limits of the Ten Commandments!"--Heavens! think of bondage with a man who is bounded upon the north, east, south, and west of his soul by laws enacted to discipline the Israelites in the Wilderness! In that case, I should insist upon a bridal trip to Canaan, with the hope of reaching the Promised Land as a widow.

And this reminds me to ask you what manner of man you are yourself. Do you reflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you were on guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has faded to a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about the picture[3], is like to vanish clean away into nothing. Only your encompassing eyes peer at me with solemn expostulation out of the shimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip? And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental pose as a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. A long term of years with a serene, gentle-spirited man would be unbearable to me. Rather than prolong the futility of existence with one I could not provoke, even enrage, I should commit suicide. My own disposition is so equally divided between perversity and repentance that I could not endure the placidity, the ennui, of a level turnpike existence.

And now isn't it an evidence of your high-minded heartlessness, that in the same letter where you sue for love you also introduce a philosophical discussion and show even more heat in maintaining it than you do in your amorous petition? Why I cannot take warning and fly to the ends of my earth away from you now while there is yet time, is a mystery to me!

And so you expect to make such a pother in your opposition to the spirit of the times that all the world will hear you. Dear Master, I doubt if you will! Your bells ring too high up. The angels in heaven may hear you, but men are not listening in that direction. I did not reply to your contention against Lyman Abbott, because it is a far cry from you to me on this subject. In consciousness we are at opposite ends of a great problem, and I think the normal man walks somewhere between. Besides, I am not sure that I understand your position; I am not familiar with the starry highways of your mind. Still, in a general way it has always seemed to me that material things are, after all, "counters which represent spiritual realities." And I take comfort in the fact that it must require us all to work out the Great Plan,--humanitarian, sage, pilgrim, ascetic, even the butcher and candlestick maker. And while we do not know it, really we are working together for one end hidden now in the divine economy of far-off destiny and justice.... To me the wonder of wonders is that I may some day light a little taper in your upper chamber myself, and kneel together with you before the same window to worship. Only, dear Heart, please get your deity named before I come!

P.S.--As to my spelling, that is a coquettish licence I take with the genealogy of words. And you may tell your proofreader that the letter _r_ has never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour without _g_'s or _r_'s than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is Jack?

XXIX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

KIND MADAM:

Yes, a little more than kind, dear Jessica, for you have put into my grasp the flower of perfect delight, and "my hand retains a little breath of sweet." You have opened a window into my heart and poured through it the warmth and golden glory of your own sunlight. I am filled with a joyousness of a new spring--and yet there is something in your letter that makes me a little sad. You express so frankly that reserve of resentment, even of bitterness, which always, I think, abides with a woman in all the sweetness of her love, but which with most women never comes to entire consciousness. Listen, dear Heart, while I talk to you of yourself and myself, until we comprehend each other better. It is so much easier for me to understand you than for you to understand me, because a woman's nature is single, whereas a man's is double, and in this duality lies all the reason of that enmity of the sexes which draws us together yet still holds us asunder.

You complain of my letter because I argue a philosophical proposition in it while pleading for love. Do you not know that this is man's way? And I would not try to deceive you: this philosophical proposition, which seems to you almost a matter of indifference, is more to me than everything else in the world. For it I could surrender all my heart's hope; for it I could sacrifice my own person; even, if the choice were necessary, which cannot be, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man's nature. The ambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the world some vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in him side by side with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused. Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led this dual existence? You reviewed for me Bismarck's Love Letters and were yourself struck by this sharp contrast between the iron determination of the man in public affairs and the softness and sweetness of his domestic life. That is but one case in point of the eternal dualism in masculine nature which a woman can never comprehend, and which always, if it confronts her nakedly, she resents. For a woman is not so. There exists no such gap in her between her heart and brain, between her outer and inner life. And the consequence shows itself in many ways. She is less efficient in the world and is never a creator or impresser of new ideas; but, on the other hand, her character possesses a certain unity that is the wonder of all men who observe. She calls the man selfish and is bitter against him at times, but her accusation is wrong. It is not selfishness which leads a man if needs be to cut off his own personal desires while sacrificing another; it is the power in him which impels the world into new courses. A man's virtues are aggressive and turned toward outer conquest and may have little relation to his own heart. But a woman's virtues are bound up with every impulse of her personal being; they work out in her a loveliness and unity of character which make the man appear beside her coarse and unmoral. Men of vicious private life have more than once been benefactors of the human race; I think that never happened in the case of a woman.

And because of this harmony, this unconsciousness in woman's virtue, a man's love of woman takes on a form of idealisation which a woman never understands and indeed often resents. What in him is something removed from himself, something which he analyses and governs and manipulates, is in the woman beloved an integral part of her character. Virtue seems in her to become personified and he calls her by strange names. For this reason men who make language tend always to give to abstract qualities the feminine gender, as you must have observed in Latin and might observe in a score of other tongues. For this reason, too, a man's love of woman assumes such form of worship as Dante paid to Beatrice or Petrarch to Laura. It would be grotesque for a woman to love in this way, for virtue is not a man's character, but a faculty of his character. And so is it strange that I should approach you asking for love that my soul may have peace? It cannot enter into my comprehension that such a cry should come from you to me. All that I strive to accomplish in the world, all that I gird myself to battle for, the ideals that I would lay down my life that men may behold and cherish,--is it not now all gathered up in the beauty and serenity of your own person? What I labour to express in words is already yours in inner possession. If I ask you for peace, it is not selfishness, dear girl; it is prayer. If you should come to me begging for peace, I should be filled with amazement; for I myself have it not. What I can give is love's unwearied tenderness and love's unceasing homage to the beauty of your body and your soul. More than that, I shall give you in the end the crown of the world's honour. Without you I may accomplish the task laid upon me, but only with heaviness of soul and abnegation of all that my heart craves. I was reading in an old drama last night until I came to these words, and then I set the book aside:

Once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies.

In that sweet hyperbole I seemed to read a transcript of your beauty. If I am selfish, beloved, all love is selfishness.

Dear girl, it seems that always I must woo you in metaphysics and express my ardour in theorems. But have I not made myself understood? "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart," as a thousand women have quoted: and it is true. But do you not see that even for this reason his love swells into a passionate idolatry of the woman who knows no such cleavage in her soul. Try us with sacrifices. I could throw away every earthly good to bestow on you a year of happiness--only not my philosophic proposition, as you sarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you--pray heaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think, meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of AEneas and Dido, only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within AEneas he expressed dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little understanding of the poem or of human nature to censure AEneas as a cold egotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart, _multa gemens_? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terror and death. The tragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so the Fates have ordered.

But why do I write such grim reflections? There is no tragedy, no separation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness:

The treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman's love.

All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber's part, sweet Jessica, and he who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried away so large a draft on the world's happiness as this that I have stolen. I cannot be repentant while this golden glow is upon me; later I shall begin to question my own worthiness.

I cannot now tell you one half that is in my mind to write, or answer one half the questions in your letter. Jack is living with me just at present, but of him I will speak next time. I have planned to change my abode, but of that too next time. And I would not attempt to give a name to the deity I serve in a postscript, as it were. Dear Heart, only let your love add a little to your happiness as it has added so much to mine; and trust me.--I am sending a letter to your father, the contents of which you might imagine even if he should not show it to you.

XXX

JESSICA TO PHILIP

WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER

MY BELOVED:

Last night, I dreamed myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,--but you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but I wore green leaves in my hair and a red Southern rose on my breast to remind you of a brown forest maid and summer-time far away--and you would not see me! I faced you in gay mockery and swept a bow, but the blue silence in your eyes terrified me. I held out my hands beseechingly, touched my cheek to yours, and you did not feel the pressure. Then I slipped down upon the snow and wept, and you did not hear me.

We were both "in the spirit," I think. Only, dear Love, when I am in the spirit, all my thoughts are of you; but though I looked far and near, I could not find in all your regions one little thought of poor Jessica. All was misty and dim within your portals. _Your_ thoughts were vague ancient shapes that wandered past me like Brahmin ghosts. And not one gallant memory of Jessica legended upon those inner walls of yours!

Dear, I cannot escape now, my heart _will_ not come back to me; and since it is too late I will not complain. But for a little while I must tell you these things and pray for your kind comfort, till I shall have become accustomed to your attic moods and exaltations.

Do you recall the woman I told you of last summer, whose sorrow-smitten face in the church terrified me so? Grief became credible to me as I gazed at her. And could it have been, do you think, a message foretold to me of this magic future, full of intangible fears, wherein I am to live with you?

XXXI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

Love is a mystic worker of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that I reached out my hand to touch you--but grasped only the impalpable air. All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, seeking in the ways of thought some word of comfort for the human heart, until at last my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real is this search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul were a thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim and perilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me out into that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead. And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth was vaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomable darkness as a clear night might look wherein no moon or stars appeared, and so lonely "that God himself scarce seemed to be there."

Then, as often when this mood comes upon me, I went out to walk under the hard flaring lights and amid the streaming crowds of Broadway, in order to bring back the sense of mortal illusion and unite myself once more to human existence. The people were pouring from the theatres, and I sought the densest throng. But still I could not awaken in myself the illusion of life. And then suddenly, without warning, there in the noisy brawl of the street, I beheld you standing before me, looking into my face and smiling. You wore a burning Southern rose upon your breast and were more wondrously and delicately fair than the dream of poets. And there was a smile upon your lips as if to say: "Dear Philip, thou hast put away the pleasures and loveliness of this world as they had been a snaring web of illusion; yet I do but look upon thee, and forthwith thou art pierced with love and know that in this scorned desire of beauty dwells the great reality." I reached out my hand to touch the rose against your heart, but the vision was gone, and all about me was only the tumultuous mockery of the street. Sweetheart, you have smitten me with remorse. Shall I take from you only happiness, and give in return only this spectral dread? Ah, you shall learn that I am very real, very earthly, capable of love and tenderness and daily duties and quiet human sympathies! I told you of the dualism into which my life, into which, indeed, every man's life, is cast; why will you persist in clinging to that part which is cold and inhuman instead of seizing upon that which is warm and very near by? I would not take you with me into those bleak ways where always there is fear lest our personality be swallowed up in the dark impersonal abyss. I would love you as a man loves a woman and cleaves to her. Nay, more, I perceive dimly in that love a strange reconcilement wherein the dual forces of my nature shall be made one, wherein truth and beauty shall blend together in a kiss, and there shall be no more seeking in obscurity, but only peace.

When the vision faded from me on Broadway, I turned back to my home, and there, before the dawn came, tried to write out in words one thought of the many that thronged upon me. I have almost forgotten the art of making rhymes if ever I knew it.

A RECONCILIATION

All beauteous things the world's allurement knows:
Starred Venus, when she droops on Tyrian couch
While Evening draws her dusky curtains close,
Or pearled from morning bath she seems to crouch;

In bleak November one strayed violet;
The rathe spring-beauty scattered wide like snow;
The opal in a cirque of diamonds set;
Rare silken gowns that rustle as they flow;

The dumb thrush brooding in her lilac hedge;
The wild hawk towering in his proudest flight;
A silver fountain splashed o'er mossy ledge;
The sunrise flaming on an Alpine height;--

All these I've seen, yet never learned, till now
In thy sweet smiling, to accord my vow
Austere of truth with beauty's charmed delight.

XXXII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

WRITTEN IN ANSWER TO LETTER XXIX

MY DEAR PHILIP: