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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance, by
+Paul Elmer More and Corra Harris
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance
+
+Author: Paul Elmer More
+        Corra Harris
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2008 [EBook #26523]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JESSICA LETTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The
+Jessica Letters
+
+An Editor's Romance
+
+G. P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+1904
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Copyright, 1904
+by
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+Published, April, 1904
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+_Dear Jessica_:
+
+_For a little while like shadows we have played our parts on a shadowy
+stage, aping the passions and follies of actual life. And now, as the kind
+authors who gave us being withdraw their support and leave us to fade away
+into nothingness, the doubt arises whether our little comedy was not all
+in vain. I do not know. A wise poet of the real world once said that man's
+life was merely_ the dream of a shadow, _yet somehow men persuade
+themselves that their own pursuits are greatly serious. Was our life any
+less than that, and were not our hopes and sorrows and tremulous joy as
+full of meaning to us as theirs to the creatures who strut upon the stage
+of the world? Again I say, I do not know: Only I am troubled that so fair
+an image as yours should prove after all a dream, a shadow's dream, and
+melt so swiftly away_:--
+
+          In what strange lines of beauty should I draw thee?
+            In what sad purple dreamshine paint thee true?
+          How should I make them see who never saw thee?
+            How should I make them know who never knew?
+
+_And my last word is a message. He who created me would convey in this, my
+farewell letter, his thanks to the creator of Jessica. He himself has
+found in our correspondence only pleasure, and, as he turns from this
+romance to other and different work of the pen, he hopes that she who made
+you will be encouraged by your charm to deal bravely with her imagination
+and to give the world other romances quite her own and without the alloy
+of his coarser wit_.
+
+                                                               _Philip_.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                          PAGE
+
+PART I--Which shows how Jessica
+visits an editor in the city, and
+what comes of it                             1
+
+PART II--Which shows how the editor
+visits Jessica in the country, and
+how love and philosophy
+sometimes clash                             83
+
+PART III--Which shows how the editor
+again visits Jessica in the country, and
+how love is buffeted between
+philosophy and religion                    212
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The First Part
+
+which shows how Jessica visits an editor
+in the city, and what comes of it.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+                                               NEW YORK, April 20, 19--.
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, I
+trust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me some
+right to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell you
+that we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall be
+pleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you can
+always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say
+atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of
+that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject
+the lively creatures of his own brain.
+
+"Mr. Howells," you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces the
+spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you
+have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a
+malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to
+speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak
+element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby,
+good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals
+and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic."
+Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the most ungallant
+editor would be constrained to call fair!
+
+I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of great
+moment. But be assured neither you nor your perplexing query has really
+slipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy room
+with the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my one
+barricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to one
+experienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life to
+literature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbs
+me in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words,
+_give my life_. Literature is a despised goddess in these days to receive
+such devotion.
+
+                 Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy,
+
+as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether
+it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing
+reviews and sketches and stories,--why, certainly, do so by all means. I
+have no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honours
+of society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, God
+forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a
+consuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can
+only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a
+people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a
+great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any
+sympathy for the follower?
+
+It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I have
+in all my experience met just four men who have given themselves to
+literature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in the
+mountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerk
+in New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever an
+anchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterly
+unrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, the
+unhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealous
+passion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of clever
+reading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from the
+decorous worship of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failure
+is the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the life
+about us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due for such
+earnestness in writing to one who is, after all, practically a stranger to
+me.
+
+Forgive my naive zeal; but I remember that you spoke to me on the subject
+with a note of restrained emotion which flatters me into thinking I may
+not be misunderstood. And, to seek pardon for this personal tone by an
+added personality, it distresses me to imagine a life like yours, with
+which the world must deal bountifully in mere gratitude for the joy it
+takes from you,--to imagine a life like yours, I say, sacrificed to any
+such grim Moloch. Write, and win applause for gay cleverness, but do not
+consider literature seriously. Above all, write me a word to assure me I
+have not given offence by this very uneditorial outburst of rhetoric.
+
+                                                    Sincerely yours,
+                                                          PHILIP TOWERS.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+                                   MORNINGTOWN, GEORGIA, April 27, 19--.
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+Since my return home I have thought earnestly of my visit to New York.
+That was the first time I was ever far beyond the community boundaries of
+some Methodist church in Georgia. I think I mentioned to you that my
+father is an itinerant preacher. But for one brief day I was a small and
+insignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted and
+unclassified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you were
+not brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense of
+irresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through the
+buckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in the
+world at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could have
+danced and glorified God on a curbstone, if such a manifestation of
+heathen spirituality would not have been unseemly.
+
+But the chief event of that sensational day was my visit to you. Of course
+you cannot know how formidable the literary editor of a great newspaper
+appears to a friendless young writer. And from our brief correspondence I
+had already pictured you grim and elderly, with huge black brows bunched
+together as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I even
+thought of adding a white beard,--you do use long graybeard words
+sometimes, and naturally I had associated them with your chin. You can
+imagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs of
+my courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious in
+appearance, and not even _old_! The revulsion from my fears and anxieties
+was so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands in
+salutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you should have had
+that also.
+
+I am so pleased to have you confirm my judgment of Howells's novel; and
+that I am to have more books for review. I doubt, however, if Mr. Howells
+will ever reap the benefit of my criticisms, for not long since I read a
+note from him saying that he never looked into _The Gazette_. You must
+already have given offence by doubting his literary infallibility.
+
+But on the whole you question the wisdom of my ambition to "give my life
+to literature." As to that I am inclined to follow Ellen Thorneycroft
+Fowler's opinion: "Writing is like flirting,--if you can't do it, nobody
+can teach you; and if you can do it, nobody can keep you from doing it."
+With a certain literary aspirant I know, writing is even more like
+flirting than that,--an artful folly with literature which will never rise
+to the dignity of a wedding sacrifice. She could no more give herself
+seriously to the demands of such a profession than a Southern mockingbird
+can take a serious view of music. He makes it quite independently of mind,
+gets his inspiration from the fairies, steals his notes, and dedicates the
+whole earth to the sky every morning with a green-tree ballad, utterly
+frivolous. Such a performance, my dear Mr. Towers, can never be termed a
+"sacrifice"; rather it is the wings and tail of humour expressed in a
+song. But who shall say the dear little wag has no vocation because his
+small feather-soul is expressed by a minuet instead of an anthem?
+
+Therefore do not turn your editorial back upon me because I am incapable
+of the more earnest sacrifice. Even if I only chirrup a green-tree ballad,
+I shall need a chorister to aid me in winning those "laughing honours of
+society." And your supervision is all the more necessary, since, as you
+said to me, I live in a section where the literary point of view is more
+sentimental than accurate. This is accounted for, not by a lack of native
+wit, but by the fact that we have no scholarship or purely intellectual
+foundations. We are romanticists, but not students in life or art. We make
+no great distinctions between ideality and reality because with us
+existence itself is one long cheerful delusion. Now, while I suffer from
+these limitations more or less, my ignorance is not invincible, and I
+could learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal,
+and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial.
+
+                                                          Sincerely,
+                                                          JESSICA DOANE.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledged
+sooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment my
+letter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they can
+get nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once I
+lay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond to
+what seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myself
+and launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to my
+own experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?
+Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me in
+the course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances more
+than once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please,
+welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shut
+nature out of the door, she will come in at the window," is an old saying,
+and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see.
+
+But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was not
+the vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life to
+literature,"--that question you very properly answered in a tone of
+bantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner of
+life to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heaven
+save the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there is
+no literature in New York. There are millions of books manufactured
+here, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has no
+sense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain what
+I mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even the
+love of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. The
+distinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in my
+actual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between the
+life of a _religiosus_, Thomas a Kempis, let us say, and of a faithful
+man of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble you
+with mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southern
+mockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that bird
+mewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not for
+spontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by express
+several books....[1]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+I have said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that I
+am going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by living
+writers who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's
+_Victorian Prose Masters_, and the other is Santayana's _Poetry and
+Religion_. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I know
+I shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a little
+disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these
+men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent
+Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American
+_bourgeoisie_. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a
+good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional
+weigher of books yourself, you ought to be acquainted with these
+gentlemen.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+Do not reproach yourself for having written me a "journalistic" letter. I
+always think of an editor as having only ink-bottle insides, ever ready to
+turn winged fancies into printed matter, or to enter upon a "lyrical
+disquisition" concerning them. Your distinction consists in a disposition
+to abandon the formalities of the editorial desk that you may "respond to
+the personal demands of a new acquaintance." And this humane amiability
+leads me to make a naive confession. There are some people whose demands
+are always personal. I think it is their limitation, resulting from a
+state of naturalness, more or less primitive, out of which they have not
+yet evolved. They do not appeal to your judgment or wisdom or even to your
+sympathy, but to _you_. Their very spirits are composed of a sort of
+sunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term the
+higher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-top
+spirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistic
+training of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners of
+your editorial dignity by impressing _personal_ demands.
+
+And just so am I related to the whole of life,--even to the "publicans" in
+my father's congregation. Indeed, if the desire "to eat with sinners"
+insured salvation, there would be less cause for alarm about my miraculous
+future state. The attraction, you understand, depends not upon the fact of
+their being sinners, but upon the sincerity of their mortality. The more
+unassumingly these reprobates live in their share of the common flesh, far
+below spiritual pretences, the more does my wayward mind tip the scales of
+unregenerate humour in their direction. My instincts hobnob with their
+dust. But do not infer that I have identified you with these undisciplined
+characters. When I was a child, out of the rancour of a well-tutored
+Southern imagination I honestly believed that every man the other side of
+Mason and Dixon's line had a blue complexion, thin legs, and a long tail.
+And once when I was still very young, as I hurried from school through a
+lonely wood, I actually _saw_ one of these monsters quite plainly. And I
+thought I observed that his tail was slightly forked at the end! I have
+long since forgiven you these terrifying caudal appendages, of course,
+but, for all that, I keep a wary eye upon my heavenly bodies and at least
+one wing stretched even unto this day when my guardian angel introduces a
+Northern man. My patriotic instincts recommend at once the wisdom of
+strategy. And it is well the "personal demands" come from me to you; for,
+had the direction been reversed, by this time I should have sought refuge
+somewhere in my last ditch and run up a little tattered flag of rebellion
+to signify the state of my mind.
+
+It is just as well that you advise me against trying my fortunes in your
+"literary metropolis." My father is set with all his scriptures against
+the idea. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternal
+life"; and, having predestined me for a deaconess in his church, he is
+firmly convinced that the strait and narrow way for me does not lie in the
+direction of New York. However, I have already whispered to my
+confidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maid
+desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess.
+Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while
+he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens
+are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow,
+propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring
+clouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for another
+outing in your literary regions.
+
+Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has no
+sense, or indeed only contempt," and I await the promised explanation with
+interest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain any
+opportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy
+(?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and
+resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of,
+and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we
+shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall
+buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only
+for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and great
+operas.
+
+The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort to
+make a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburned
+heels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpin
+gardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give his
+experience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these little
+freckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses and
+lilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinery
+creations.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literature
+in E---- College, which you will remember is not very far from
+Morningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of some
+old English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father's
+one carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). He
+is a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermit
+intelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice is
+pitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believing
+that he is a bachelor.
+
+Still we had some talk together, and that is how I came to practise a
+deceit upon you. Seeing a copy of _The Gazette_ lying on the table this
+morning, Professor M---- was reminded to say that there was a "strong
+man," Philip Towers by name, connected with that paper now. I cocked my
+head at once like a starling listening to a new tune, for that was the
+first time I had heard your name praised by a literary man in the South.
+He went on to say that he had been delighted with your last book, _Milton
+and His Generation_, and asked if I had observed your work in the literary
+department of _The Gazette_. I admitted demurely that I had. He praised
+several reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you were
+the only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modern
+fiction. Then he incensed me with this final comment:
+
+"I do not understand how he does this newspaper work so forcefully, almost
+savagely, and is at the same time capable of writing such delicate,
+scholarly essays as this volume contains!"
+
+"I have seen Mr. Towers," I remarked, mentally determining that you should
+suffer for that distinction.
+
+"Indeed! what manner of man is he?"
+
+"His dust has congealed, stiffened into a sort of plaster-of-Paris
+exterior, and he has what I call a _disinterred_ intelligence!"
+
+"A what?"
+
+"A man whose very personality is a kind of mental reservation, and whose
+intelligence has been resurrected up through the thought and philosophy of
+three thousand years."
+
+M---- looked awkward but impressed.
+
+And I hoped he would ask how you actually looked, for I was in the mood to
+give a perfectly God-fearing description of you.
+
+But from the foregoing you will see that I am capable of sharing your
+literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role
+created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion
+with M---- that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his
+judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the
+assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neither
+imagination nor genius has always amused me. And this one danced now as
+frantically as if he had unintentionally grasped a live wire that hurt and
+burned, but would not let go! Finally I said very engagingly:
+
+"Doctor M----, I hope to improve in these matters by taking a course of
+instruction under you next year."
+
+"Now God forbid that you should ever do such a thing, Miss Doane! I would
+sooner have you thrust dynamite under the chair of English Literature,
+than see you in one of my classes!"
+
+Thus am I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that
+reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and
+Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism
+of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has
+been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such
+loose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do not
+stick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you would
+not tolerate them from me. But of all the books you have given me I like
+best George Santayana's _Poetry and Religion_. Who is he anyhow? It may be
+a disgraceful admission to make, but I never heard of him before. His name
+is foreign, and his style is not American. For when an American says a
+daring thing, particularly of religion, he says it impudently, with a
+vulgar bravado. But this man writes out his opinion coolly, simply, with
+that fine hauteur that will not condescend to know of opposition. I think
+that is admirable. Arnold's courtesy and satirical temperance in dealing
+with what he discredits is a pose by the side of this man's mental grace
+and courage. And you know how we usually denominate style: it is the
+little lace-frilled petticoat of the lady novelist's mincing passions, or
+the breeches that belong to a male author's mental respirations. But with
+this man, style is a spirit sword which cleaves between delusions and
+facts, which separates religion from reality and establishes it in our
+upper consciousness of ideality.
+
+Is it not absurd for such a barbarian as I am to discuss these
+gospel-makers of literature with you? But it is much more remarkable that
+one or any of them should excite my admiration and respect. Really, if you
+must know it, Mr. Towers, this is where I grow humble-minded in your
+presence. I am fascinated with your ability to deal with the usually
+indefinable, the esoteric side of art,--the esoteric side of life by
+interpretation. And here I discover a shadowy, ghostly likeness between
+you and this George Santayana. You do not think toward the same ends, or
+write in the same style, but you _know_ things alike, as if you had both
+drunk from the same Eastern fountain of mysteries.
+
+And now I am about to change my gratitude into indignation. For I begin to
+suspect that you sent me these books to inculcate the doctrine of literary
+humility. If so, you have succeeded beyond your highest expectations.
+Until now, writing has been a series of desperate experiments with me. I
+progressed by inspiration. But these fellows--Arnold especially--discredit
+all such performances. And he does it with the air of an English gentleman
+inspecting a naked cannibal. He makes my flesh creep! He regards an
+inspiration as a sort of vulgarity that must be dressed and stretched
+before it can be used. From his point of view I infer that he considers
+genius as a dangerous kind of drunkenness that fascinates the world, but
+is really closely related to bad form in literature. On the other hand,
+father says that if Matthew Arnold had known of me he would have purchased
+me, placed me in a cage with a fountain pen, and exhibited me to his
+classes at Oxford as a literary freak!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+I will remember your amused hostility to "hairpin gardeners" and see that
+no more out-of-door books come to you until I have one with a stimulating
+odour of burning cornstalks and rotting cabbages. Meanwhile let me assure
+you that your reviews of _Elizabeth, Evelina, Judith_, and their sisters
+have been none the less delightful for a vein of wicked impatience running
+through them. The books I am now sending....
+
+You ought not to be amazed at my dismal comments on latter-day literature.
+The fact is, you have dissected our present book-makers better than I
+could do it myself, for the reason that I am too amiable (I presume, you
+see, that I have the wit) to judge my fellow-workers with such merciless
+veracity.
+
+But I have just read an article in the _Popular Science Monthly_ which
+throws an unexpected light on the subject. The paper is by Dr. Minot and
+is a biologist's comment on "The Problem of Consciousness." You might not
+suppose that an argument to show how "the function of consciousness is to
+dislocate in time the reactions from sensations" (!) would have much to do
+with the properties of literature, but it has. Let me copy out some of his
+words, as probably you have not seen the magazine:
+
+  "The communication between individuals is especially characteristic
+  of vertebrates, and in the higher members of that subkingdom it plays
+  a very great role in aiding the work of consciousness. In man, owing
+  to articulate speech, the factor of communication has acquired a
+  maximum importance. The value of language, our principal medium of
+  communication, lies in its aiding the adjustment of the individual
+  and the race to external reality. Human evolution is the continuation
+  of animal evolution, and in both the dominant factor has been the
+  increase of the resources available for consciousness."
+
+Now that sounds pretty well for a scientist. It should seem to follow
+that literature, being, so to speak, the permanent mode of
+communication,--conveying ideas and emotions not merely from man to
+man, but from generation to generation,--is the predominant means by which
+this development of consciousness is attained. It is a pretty support we
+derive from the enemy. But mark the serpent in the grass--"the
+adjustment of the individual and the race to external reality." The real
+aim of evolution is purely external, the adjustment of man to
+environment; consciousness has value in so far as it promotes this
+adjustment. Flatly, to me, this is pure nonsense, a putting of the
+cart before the horse, a vulgar _hysteron-proteron_, none the less
+execrable because it is the working principle not of a single man, but
+of the whole of soctety to-day. Consciousness, I hold, is the supremely
+valuable thing, and progress, evolution, civilisation, etc., are only
+significant in so far as they afford nourishment to it. Literature is
+the self-sufficient fruit of this consciousness, I say; the world says it
+is a mere means of promoting our physical adjustment. You see I take up
+lightly the huge enmity of the world.
+
+This is wild stuff to put into a journalistic letter, no doubt. If I were
+writing a treatise I would undertake to show that this difference of view
+in regard to consciousness and physical adjustment is the oldest and most
+serious debate of human intelligence. Saint Catharine, Thomas a Kempis,
+and all those religious fanatics who counted the world well lost, made a
+god of consciousness and thought very little of physical adjustment. The
+debate in their day was an equal one. To-day it is all on one side--and
+_vae victis_! I cry out--why should I not?--as one of the conquered, and I
+am charitable enough to advise another not to enter the combat. It is a
+poor consolation to wrap yourself in your virtue, mount a little pedestal,
+set your hand on your heart, and spout with Lucan: _The winning cause for
+the gods, but the vanquished for me_! Sometimes we begin to wonder
+whether, after all, the world may not be right, and at that moment the
+wind begins to blow pretty chill through our virtue.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+Is my suspicion right? Was my last letter to you really a tangle of crude
+ideas? That has grown to be my way, until I begin to wonder whether the
+horrid noises of Park Row may not have thrown my mind a little out of
+balance. For my strength lay in silence and solitude. It is hard for me to
+establish any sufficient bond between my intellectual life and my personal
+relationships, and as a consequence my letters, when they cease to be mere
+journalistic memoranda, float out into a sea of unrestrained revery.
+
+Yet I would ask you to be patient with me in this matter. From the first,
+even before I saw you here in New York, I felt that somehow you might, by
+mere patience and indulgence, if you would, re-establish the lost bond in
+my life; that somehow the shadow of your personality was fitted to move
+among the shadows of my intellectual world. What a strange compliment to
+send a young woman!--for compliment it seems in my eyes.
+
+Meanwhile, as some explanation of this intellectual twilight into which I
+would so generously introduce you, I am sending you a little book I wrote
+and foolishly printed several years ago on the quiet life of the Hindus.
+The mood of the book still returns to me at times, though I have cast away
+its philosophy as impracticable. I look for peace in the way that Plato
+trod, and some day I shall write my palinode in that spirit. Let me, in
+this connection, copy out a few verses I wrote last night and the night
+before. It is my first digression into poetry since I was a boy:
+
+                          THE THREE COMMANDS
+
+                                   I
+
+         Out of this meadow-land of teen and dole,
+           Because my heart had harboured in its cell
+         One prophet's word, an Angel bore my soul
+           Through starry ways to God's high citadel.
+
+         There in the shadow of a thousand domes
+           I walked, beyond the echo of earth's noise;
+         While down the streets between the happy homes
+           Only the murmur passed of infinite joys.
+
+         Then said my soul: "O fair-engirdled Guide!
+           Show me the mansion where I, too, may won:
+         Here in forgetful peace I would abide,
+           And barter earth for God's sweet benison."
+
+         "Nay," he replied, "not thine the life Elysian,
+         Live thou the world's life, holding yet thy vision
+           A hope and memory, till thy course be run."
+
+                                  II
+
+         Then said my soul: "I faint and seek my rest;
+           The glory of the vision veils mine eyes;
+         These infinite murmurs beating at my breast
+           Turn earthly music into plangent sighs.
+
+         "Because thou biddest, I will tread the maze
+           With men my brothers, yet my hands withhold
+         From building at the Babel towers they raise,
+           And all my life within my heart infold."
+
+         The Angel answered: "Lo, as in a dream
+           Thy feet have passed beyond the gates of flame;
+         And evermore the toils of men must seem
+           But wasteful folly in a path of shame.
+
+           "Yet I command thee, and vouchsafe no reason,
+         Thou shalt endure the world's work for a season;
+           Work thou, and leave to others fame and blame."
+
+                                  III
+
+         I bowed submission, dumb a little while.
+           Then said my soul: "Thy will I dare not balk;
+         I reach my hands to labours that defile,
+           And help to rear a plant of barren stalk.
+
+           "Yet only I, because in life I bear
+           The vision of that peace, may never feel
+         The spur of keen ambition, never share
+           The dread of loss that makes the world's work real.
+
+           "Therefore in scorn I draw my bitter breath,
+           And sorrow cherish as my proudest right,
+         Till scorn and sorrow fade in sweeter death."
+           The Angel answered, turning as for flight:
+
+           "The labour sorrow-done is more than sterile,
+         And scorn will change thy vision to soul's peril:
+           Be glad; thy work is gladness, child of light!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+Many thanks for this copy of your book, _The Forest Philosophers of
+India_. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better.
+Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East.
+The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost
+that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations
+which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a
+Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a
+whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression
+of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short of
+terrifying.
+
+You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one of
+your own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your "Three Commands" have laid me
+under a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much;
+and I am a little rebellious.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness,
+because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot's article. At last I got hold of
+the magazine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crude
+ideas," they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way you
+expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have
+been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that
+desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical
+novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not
+know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so
+readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same
+slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive
+the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero,
+"wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these
+would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.
+
+But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection with
+my first venture into the realm of biological thought. _The Popular
+Science Monthly_ has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account of
+its heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret the
+fact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot's article. But some
+demon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term
+"epiphenomenon." Now a long association with the idea of omniscience has
+rendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke the
+imagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give a
+definition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary is
+his only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and he
+declines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority.
+Therefore he reasoned that "epiphenomenon" had been built up to
+accommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mind
+never dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pair
+of accusing glasses, he inquired:
+
+"My daughter, where did you see this remarkable word?"
+
+I do not question that I am a direct descendant from my fictitious
+grandmother, Eve! I am always being tempted by apples of information, and
+I have often known the mortifying sensation of wishing to hide my guilty
+countenance in my more modern petticoat on that account.
+
+He read the "blasphemous" article through, only pausing to point out
+heresies and perversions of the sacred truth as he went along. But when he
+reached the sentence in which the author calmly asserts the theory of
+monism, he actually gagged with indignation: "My child, do you know that
+this godless wretch claims that the same principle of life which makes the
+cabbage also vitalises man?" I looked horrified, but I could barely
+restrain my laughter; for, indeed, there are "flat-dutch"-headed gentlemen
+in his congregation who might as well have come up at the end of a cabbage
+stalk for all the thinking they do. But I need not tell you that the
+magazine containing the profane treatise on consciousness was burned,
+while a livid picture was drawn of my own future if I persisted in
+stealing forbidden fruit from this particular tree of knowledge.
+
+But your last letter put me into a more serious frame of mind. And I _am_
+complimented that you entertain the hope that I may be of assistance in
+re-establishing the lost bond between you and real life. But do you know
+that you have appealed to the missionary instincts of a barbarian? The
+attributes of patience and indulgence do not belong to natures like mine.
+Never has any affliction worked out patience in me, never has my strongest
+affection taken the form of indulgence. In me Love and Friendship, Sorrow
+and Gladness, take fiercer forms of expression.
+
+But I will not conceal from you the fact that from the first I have felt
+in our relationship a curious sensation of magic in one opposed to mystery
+in the other. I have felt the abandon and madness of a happy dancer,
+whirling around the dim edge of your shadow-land in the wild expectation
+of beholding the disembodied spirit of you come forth to join me. It is
+not that I _wished_ to work a charm, but the shadow of your mysterious
+life draws me into the opposition of a counter-influence. The gift of
+power is not in me to set foot across the magic line into the dim land of
+your soul, any more than I could dissolve into a breath of moonlit air, or
+a wave of the sea. For, in you, I seem to perceive some strange phenomenon
+of a spirit changed to twilight gloom which covers all your hills and
+valleys with the mournful shadow of approaching night. Often this
+conception appalls me, but more frequently I conceive a wild energy from
+the idea, as of one sent to rim the shadows in close and closer till some
+star shall shine down and bless them into heroic form and substance. And I
+have been amazed to find within my mind a witch's charm for working
+rainbow miracles upon your dim sky,--but so it is. There have always been
+mad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got hold
+of the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of my
+limitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be taken
+seriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to create
+the necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance.
+Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows but
+to-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a little
+homeless wren seeking shelter in your valley.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS DOANE:
+
+So I am a disembodied ghost in your estimation, and you, "happy dancer,"
+are whirling around the rim of my shadow-land with some sweet incantation
+learned in your Georgia woods to conjure me out into the visible world.
+Really I would call that a delicious bit of impertinence were I not afraid
+the word might be taken in the wrong sense.
+
+And yet, I must confess it, there is too much truth in what you say. Some
+day, when I am bolder, I may unfold to you the whole story of my ruin--for
+it is a ruin to be disembodied, is it not? I may even indicate the single
+phrase, the mysterious word of all mysteries, that might evoke the spirit
+from the past and incarnate him in the living present. Do not try to guess
+the phrase, I beseech you, for it would frighten you now and so I should
+lose my one chance of reincarnation. When I visit you in the South, some
+day soon, I will tell you the magic word I have learned.
+
+What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap
+tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as
+tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at
+playing Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a mere
+battling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your home
+by Dr. Minot's heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadow
+fight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed,
+was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you think
+of me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit to
+a rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precocious
+Mr. Pound-text printed in the New York _Observer_ when he was as much as
+nine years old--and the sermon might be worse.
+
+I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faith
+that I passed through a few years later I can no more realise than I can
+now realise your father's blessed assurance of heaven. I know vaguely that
+it was a time of unspeakable agony for me, a rending asunder, as it were,
+of soul and body. The doctrine was bred into my bones; I saw the folly of
+it intellectually, but the emotional comfort of it was the very
+quintessence of my life. The struggle came upon me alone and I was without
+help or guidance. Into those few years of boyish vacillation, I see now
+that the whole tragedy of more than a century of human experience was
+thrust. One day I sat in church listening to a sermon of appealing
+eloquence: "And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the
+world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
+evil." Was I too deliberately turning my back on the light? I hid my face
+and cried. That was the end. I came out of the church free, but I had
+suffered too much. Something passed from my life that day which nothing
+can replace; for perfect faith, like love, comes to a man but once.
+
+1 was empty of comfort and without resting-place for my spirit. Then said
+I: Look you, belief in this religion as dogma is gone; why not hold fast
+to its imaginative beauty! If revelation is a fraud, at least the
+intricacies of this catholic faith have grown up from the long yearning of
+the human heart, and possess this inner reality of corresponding with our
+spiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism,
+trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. But
+in the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham,
+a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindness
+of true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now a
+grown man.
+
+Then by some inner guidance I turned to India. How shall I tell you what I
+found in the philosophies of that land! One thing will surprise you.
+Instead of pessimism I found in India during a certain period of time a
+happiness, an exultation of happiness, such as the world to-day cannot
+even imagine. And I found that this happiness sprang from no pretended
+revelation but from a profound understanding of the heart. Do this, said
+the books, and you will feel thus, and so step by step to the consummation
+of ecstasy. I read and was amazed; I understood and knew that I too, if my
+will were strong, might slip from bondage and be blessed. But I saw
+further that the path lay away from this world, that I must renounce every
+desire which I had learned to call good, that I must strip my soul naked
+of all this civilisation which we have woven in a loom of three thousand
+years. The dying command of Buddha terrified me: "All things pass away;
+work out your own salvation diligently!" The words were spoken to comfort
+and strengthen the bereaved disciples, but to me they sounded as an
+imprecation, so different is the training of our society from theirs. The
+loneliness and austerity of the command appalled me; I would not take the
+first step, and turned back to seek the beautiful things of the eye.
+
+And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal--not
+Christianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement may
+sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt
+love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of
+Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the
+individual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of our
+neighbour's earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians,
+followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of the
+world to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape--and none but a
+strong man shall open that door.
+
+So I look at the world and life, but, even as I write, something like a
+foreboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father and
+the straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether after
+all the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this law
+which darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim the joy of my
+maturer years?
+
+Alas, you who venture to trip so gayly about the rim of my shadow-land
+with your brave incantations, behold what spirit of gloom and malignant
+mutterings you have evoked from the night. I have written more than I
+meant--too much, I fear.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+An evangelist has been here this week. He fell upon us like a howling
+dervish who had fed fanaticisms on locusts and wild honey. And he has
+stirred up the spiritual dust of this community by showing an intimacy
+with God's plans in regard to us very disconcerting to credulously minded
+sinners. As for me, I have passed this primer-state of religious emotion.
+I am sure a kind God made me, and so I belong to Him, good or bad. In any
+case I cannot change the whole spiritual economy of Heaven with my poor
+prayers and confessions. I try to think of my shortcomings, therefore, as
+merely the incidents of an eternal growth. I shall outlive them all in the
+course of time, quite naturally, perennially, as the trees outlive the
+blight of winter and put forth each year a new greenness of aspiring
+leaves. I dare not say that I know God, and I will not believe some
+doctrines taught concerning Him; but I keep within the principle of life
+and follow as best I can the natural order of things. And for the most
+part I feel as logically related to the divine order as the flowers are to
+the seasons. I know that if this really is His world,
+
+                          should the chosen guide
+               Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
+               I cannot miss my way.
+
+Are you shocked, dear Shadow, at such a creed of sun and dust?--you, a
+dishoused soul, wandering like a vagrant ghost along life's green edge?
+After all, I doubt if I am so far behind you in spiritual experience. The
+difference is, I have two heavens, that orthodox one of my imagination,
+and this real heaven-earth of which I am so nearly a part. But you have
+forced the doors of mystery and escaped before your time. And you can
+never return to the old dust-and-daisy communion with nature, yet you are
+appalled at the loneliness and the terrible sacrifices made by a man in
+your situation. Your spiritual ambition has outstripped your courage. You
+are an adventurer, rather than an earnest pilgrim to Mecca.
+
+And yet day after day as I have weathered farther and farther back in the
+church, like a little white boat with all my sails reefed to meet the
+gospel storm of damnation that has been raging from the pulpit, I have
+thought of you and your Indian philosophy, by way of contrast, almost as a
+haven of refuge. Our religion seems to me to have almost the limitations
+of personality. There can be no other disciples but Christian disciples.
+Our ethics are bounded by doctrines and dogmas. But, whether Buddhist or
+Christian, the final test of initiation is always the same--"All things
+pass away, work out your own salvation with diligence," "Die to the
+world," "Present your bodies a living sacrifice"--and you would not make
+these final renunciations. You "turned back to seek the beautiful things
+of the eye." Well, if one is only wise enough to know what the really
+beautiful things are, it is as good a way as any to spin up to God.
+Meanwhile, I doubt if that "Western ideal," the kind-hearted naturalism
+which "makes a fetish of our neighbour's welfare," will hold you long.
+Already you "see one door" of escape. I wonder into what starry desert of
+heaven it leads.
+
+Do you know, I cannot rid myself of the notion that yours is an enchanted
+spirit, always seeking doors of escape; but at the moment of exit the wild
+wings that might have borne you out fail. Some earth spell casts you back,
+incarnate once more. A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desires
+of your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye,"
+that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like a
+sweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And prophecies
+cannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentences
+which shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimes
+think,--like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tall
+enough, only to be crowned at last with a white flag of blooms.
+
+And do not expect me to pray you through these open ways of escape. I only
+watch them to wish you may never win through. Something has changed me and
+set my heart to a new tune. I must have already made my escape, for it
+seems to me that I am on the point of becoming immortal. As I pass along
+the world, I am Joy tapping the earth with happy heels. I am gifted all at
+once with I do not know what magic, so that all my days are changed to
+heaven. And almost I could start a resurrection of "beautiful things" only
+to see you so glad. But that will never be. There are always your wings to
+be reckoned with; and with them you are ever ready to answer the voices
+you hear calling you from the night heavens, from the temples and tombs of
+the East.
+
+Yesterday I saw a woman sitting far back in the shadows of the church
+wearing such a look of sadness that she frightened me. It was not goodness
+but sorrow that had spiritualised her face. And to me she seemed a wan
+prisoner looking through the windows of her cell, despairing, like one who
+already knows his death sentence. "What if after all I am mistaken," I
+thought, "and there really is occasion for such grief as that!" I could
+think of nothing but that white mystery of sorrow piercing the gloom with
+mournful eyes. And when at last the "penitents" came crowding the altar
+with quaking cowardly knees, I fell upon mine and prayed: "Dear Lord, I am
+Thine, I will be good! Only take not from me the joy of living here in the
+green valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish than
+the sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, asking
+for heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forests
+as sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more.
+
+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.
+
+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:
+
+You are a magician rather than a lover. And no lover, I think, was ever so
+subtle at reasoning. At least you do not act the part as I supposed it was
+played. A lover, I thought, was one who stood at the door of a woman's
+heart and serenaded till she crept out upon her little balcony of sighs
+and kissed her hand to him, or shed a tokening bloom upon his upturned
+countenance. So far as I could imagine, he was prehistoric in the
+simplicity of his methods. Two things I never suspected: that love is the
+kind of romantic exegesis you represent it to be, or that every lover,
+psychically, is a sort of twin phenomenon--that he is _two_ men instead of
+one! And after he is married, I suppose he will be a domestic _trinity_,
+but with his godhead concerned with the affairs of the world at large. I
+am awed by the revelation; still, it excuses much in my conduct that I had
+before felt was reprehensible; for I have scarcely faced my own reflection
+in the glass since my ignominious capitulation. Something within charged
+treachery against poor Jessica. But if there are _two_ of you, and only
+_one_ of me, that fact gives a new and honourable complexion to my part in
+the transaction.
+
+However, the way you have multiplied yourself and doubled forces upon me
+may be good masculine tactics, but I am sure it is an unparliamentary
+advantage you have taken. For you have not only posed as a lover, but with
+the cunning words of a logician you prove what seemed wrong to be really a
+sublime right; and what _I_ charged as selfishness, _you_ call "a prayer."
+I am confused by your argument; it seems incontestable. But do you know,
+my Philip, that a woman's convictions are never reached by a mere
+argument? For they are hidden in her heart, not in her little bias-fold
+mind. And so, in spite of your sweet reasoning with me, and the assumption
+you make of omniscience concerning me, my convictions remain. Only, now, I
+do not know whether I cherish them against you or against the God who made
+me simple and you double.
+
+But granting all you say to be true, that every man has a personal life
+and at the same time a universal life energy as well, that there is in him
+a little domestic fortress of love, and a battle power of life
+apart,--admitting all this, how do you reconcile justice with the fact
+that you frankly offer only half of your duality for all of Jessica? Have
+you never suspected that she also has fair kingdoms of thought apart from
+your science of her? My Prophet, it is you who have discovered them to me!
+Love has added a sweet Canaan to my little hemisphere. I have heard
+invisible birds singing, I have trysted with spirits of the air since I
+knew you. And I have felt the pangs of a consciousness in me so new and so
+tender, that I am no longer merely the maid you know, but, dear Master, I
+am some one else, near and kin to you as life and spirit are kin! What is
+this strange white space in my soul that love has made, so real, yet so
+holy that I dare not myself lift the veil of consciousness before it? And
+all I know is that I shall meet you there finally heart to heart!--Philip,
+kiss me! For I am a frightened white-winged stranger in my own new heavens
+and new earth. I am no longer as you imagine, simply one, but I have a
+foreign power of life and death in me, and the fact terrifies me.
+
+You declare that there is a difference and a distance between a man's love
+and a man's mind which account for his dual nature. There is also an
+intelligence of the heart, more astute, more vital, which divides woman's
+nature also between the abandon of love and the resentment of
+understanding. We know, and we do not know, and we _feel_. What we know is
+of little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of each
+succeeding generation. But what we do _not_ know constitutes that element
+of mystery in us that makes us also dual. For we feel and suspect further
+than we can understand. Thus, your faculty for projecting yourself in
+spirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness
+that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half
+of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat,
+your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the
+geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb
+your "philosophic proposition." The point is, I love that in you more than
+I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something
+apart from our relationship offends me, excites forebodings. Tell me, are
+"philosophic propositions" alien to love? And after all do you think you
+are the only one who may claim them? This is a secret,--I have a little
+diagram of feminine wisdom hid away from you somewhere, founded upon the
+wit of love. And we shall see which lasts the longer, your proposition or
+my understanding!
+
+But I must not forget to speak of a matter much more practical just now.
+You mentioned the letter that you sent to father,--"The contents you might
+imagine even if he did not show it to you." Well, he did not show it to
+me, but from the effect it produced upon him I am obliged to infer that it
+contained the most iniquitous blasphemies. Philip, I do hope you are not
+subject to fits of "righteous indignation!" I could welcome a season of
+secular rage in a man as I could a fierce wind in sultry weather, but this
+kind of fury that cloaks itself in the guise of outraged piety is very
+trying. No sooner did father read your letter than he strode in upon me
+like a grey-bearded firebrand. The offending letter was crushed in his
+hand, and his glasses were akimbo on his nose, the way they always are
+when he is perturbed. I spare you the details, but from the nature of his
+questions you might have thought he was examining you through me for a
+licence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views,
+but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of my
+replies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon
+your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in
+the felony of my love, and there was a certain humorous satisfaction in
+hearing father give a "philosophic proposition" to your criminality. My
+only prayer was that he might not ask me if I loved you. Philip, I would
+rather live on bread and water a week than confess it to any living man
+besides yourself. But father has dwelt too long outside the realm of
+romance to ask that very natural question. Finally I protested feebly:
+"But how can it vitally affect a woman's happiness whether or not her
+husband accepts the doctrine of repentance just as you do? Can he not love
+and cherish his wife even if he does question the veracity of Jonah's
+whaling experience?" But when I looked up and saw his face, I was ashamed,
+and ran and kissed him, and straightened his glasses so that he could see
+me with both eyes. But, dear Heart, his eyes were too full of tears to
+fire upon me. And as I sat there upon the arm of his chair, twisting his
+sacred beard, this is what he told me. When my mother died, he said, and
+left me a little puckered pink mite in his arms, he had solemnly dedicated
+me to God. And he declared, moreover, that he could not be faithless to
+his vow by giving me in marriage to an infidel. Being an infidel, Philip,
+is much worse than being a plain heathen; an infidel is a heathen raised
+to the sixteenth power of iniquity! Now I rarely quote Scripture, for I
+have too much guile in me to justify the liberty, but I could not refrain
+from mentioning Abraham's dilemma, it seemed so appropriate to the
+occasion,--how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a little
+he-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggested
+that instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith's little
+Johnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaical
+aptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul is
+as worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become a
+righteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this world of
+temptations an unconscionably long time? But father was not to be reasoned
+with or comforted. And yesterday, Sunday, he preached impressively from
+the text, "Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?
+"Of course _you_ are the heathen, Philip, and of course _I_ am the "vain
+thing." But that is not father's idea. The vain thing you imagine is that
+he will give his consent to our marriage! Well, you may settle it between
+you! All I know is that now I am predestined, but not in the dedicated
+deaconess direction!
+
+                                                     JESSICA, THE BRAVE.
+
+P.S.--What do you think, _our_ little forest is for sale. And oh, Philip,
+if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life will
+die of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there and
+asked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (I
+suppose all the prophets were like this, their writings produce that
+impression!) And my father would consent, even if the bridegroom were a
+heathen instead of a prophet. For he would be obliged to attend religious
+services at Morningtown, and father does not believe any man can long
+remain under the drippings of his sanctuary without being forgiven. And I
+do not either. God would have mercy upon him somehow!
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+Your letter, dearest Jessica, and your father's came by the same post, and
+the sensation they gave me was as if some moral confusion had befallen the
+elements and summer were mingled with winter in the same sky. Not that his
+letter was anything but kind and dignified, but it seemed to remove you
+and your life so far away from me. I confess I had some fears that he
+might insist on the little we have seen or, as the world judges, know of
+each other; it had not occurred to me that my "infidelity" would block my
+path to happiness--so little do the people I commonly meet reck of that
+matter. I have been accusing the world all along of indifference to the
+spirit and to theology, and now, by a sort of poetical irony, I am blocked
+in my progress toward happiness by meeting one who adheres to an old-world
+belief in these things. The burden of his reply was in these words: "I
+cannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who was
+not strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I would
+gladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of those
+who trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility of
+Christian faith. "Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love as
+well as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me without
+hearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father the
+whole truth.
+
+Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I must
+leave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that I
+have faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief in
+the Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believe
+the whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, are
+divided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible world
+is real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible,
+and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusion
+whereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just this
+perception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to those
+without faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of the
+spirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because I
+find among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I deny
+the existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lost
+the sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony of
+the humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should do
+better to discuss household economy than religion.
+
+Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties,
+but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to
+Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my
+"infidelity" is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is
+sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will
+Jessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoof
+which I never had and those ass's ears which, alas! I did flourish so
+portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a
+strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically
+correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a new
+rendering of Catullus's _Da Basia_.
+
+And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land,
+sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry
+a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for
+the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by
+woman's grace from the desert into the circle of perfect Paradise.
+Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we should
+bend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of the
+trees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand in
+the cool of the evening,--sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voice
+of our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it was
+God. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for this
+dream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreams
+until I come to you and learn in your arms the more "sober certainty of
+waking bliss."
+
+Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your "brothers," as you call
+the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave
+them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New
+York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the
+stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the
+concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the
+mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with
+seriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love's isolation, but
+the rude contact of affairs, yet with love's encouragement, to hold me
+within practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar the
+beauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk together
+when I come.
+
+I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the----and have taken a
+couple of cheap rooms here at----. For some months I shall not be writing
+for money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. One
+room is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but still
+crowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have had
+in mind for several years,--the history and significance of
+humanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist of that _magnum opus_
+is to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form as
+to stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I have
+learned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. When
+I return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition.
+Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material is
+already well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn to
+making money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income--and
+can you imagine what that means to you and me?
+
+I had thought to send our goblin boy into the country as you bade me, but
+for a while I am keeping him here. He sleeps in a cot beside me, and in
+the day, when not at school or crouching in sphinxlike silence on the
+curbstone, he sits in a great chair by the window. Often when I look up
+from my book his eyes are fixed on me with a kind of mute appealing
+wonder. Somehow I could not let him go. He seems a link between us in our
+separation; and while my thoughts are set upon rebuking the errors of
+humanitarianism it will be well to have this object of human pity before
+my eyes.
+
+I wonder if you comprehend what a strange wistful letter you have written.
+You are no longer merely the maid I knew, and my ways of thought excite in
+you a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment--so you say. Once
+more, dear girl, we will talk of all this when I come. Until that happy
+day, wait, and fortify your love with trust.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+I have a number of terms, my Philip, with which I might begin this letter,
+but I have not yet the courage to call you by such dear names beyond the
+whispering gallery of my own heart.
+
+And you wonder how I have concealed my romantic deflections from father.
+Indeed, I am sure he has noticed a heavenly-mindedness in me for some time
+past; but out of the sanctity of his own heart he probably attributed this
+improvement to the chastening effects of a particularly gloomy course of
+religious reading that he has insisted upon my undertaking this winter.
+And, after all, father is not so far wrong as to my spiritual state, for
+when love becomes a woman's vocation, she carries blessings in her eyes
+and all her moods tiptoe reverently like young novices who follow one
+another down a cathedral aisle. This life of the heart becomes her piety,
+I think, and the highest form of religion of which she is capable. Jessica
+begins to magnify herself, you see! A kingdom of heaven has been set up
+within me, dear creator, and naturally I feel this extension of my
+boundaries.
+
+But do not expect me to tell father "the whole truth,"--how you first
+fascinated me with editorial magnanimity, then baited me with compliments,
+and later with deepest confidences, and finally slipped into my Arcadia
+disguised as a philosopher, but, when you had got entire possession,
+declared yourself a victorious lover! I wonder that you can contemplate
+the record you have made in this matter without blushing!
+
+As for your "infidelity," and what you call your "faith," I think father
+will denounce them both as blasphemous. Religion to father is something
+more than "the poetry he believes in." It has the definition of
+experience, miracles, and a whole body of spiritual phenomena quite as
+real to him as your upper-chamber existence is to you. Only father has
+this advantage of you, he has a real Divinity, with all the necessary
+attributes of a man's God. His "voice of happiness" speaks to him from the
+stars, and he does not call it an echo, as you do, of a fair voice within
+your own heart. Father gets his salvation from the outside of his warring
+elements; you speak to your own seas, "Peace be still!" As for me, between
+you, I stand winking at Heaven; and I say: "It is evident that neither of
+them understands this mystery of life; I will not try to comprehend. I
+will be good when I can, and diplomatic when I must, and leave the rest to
+heaven and earth and nature." Meanwhile, I advise you not to quote your
+pagan authorities to father. If the very worst comes, you may say that you
+have almost scriptural proof of my affections,--and mind you say
+affections, father could not bear the romantic inflection of such a term
+as love. It sounds too secular, carnal, to him.
+
+You ask me if I will consent to abandon such a life as our forest offers
+and come with you into "this great solitude of people" which you call New
+York. Philip, when a man holds a starling in his hand he does not ask the
+bird whether it will stay here or wing yonder, but he carries it with him
+where he will; and the starling sings, no less in one place than in
+another, because its nature is to sing. But, I think, dear Master, the
+motive which prompts the song in the cage is not the same as the impulse
+to sing in the forest. So it is with me. If we live here among the trees,
+where their green waves make a summer sea high in the heavens above our
+heads, I could be as content as any bird is. But if you make our home in
+the city, or in the midst of a desert for that matter, I could not
+withhold one thought from your happiness, for love has transformed me,
+adapted life itself to a new purpose. I have been "called," and I have no
+will to resist, because my heart tells me there is goodness in the
+purpose, a little necklace of womanly virtues for me. When I think of
+pain, and sorrow, my eyes are holden, I can see only the fair form of love
+sanctified, and I can hear only your voice calling me to fulfil a destiny
+which you yourself do not understand. And as all these things approach,
+beloved, father's God is more to me than your fine illusion. I wish for
+guardian angels, I feel the need of a Virgin Mary and of all the lady
+mothers in heaven to bless me.
+
+But I have been telling you only of my inner life. Outwardly I shall ever
+be capable of the most heathen manifestations. For instance, loving as I
+do, how do you account for this personal animosity I feel toward you,
+almost a madness of fear at the thought of your approaching visit? There
+is something that has never been finished in this affair of our hearts.
+Perhaps it is that really you have never kissed me. Well, I find it as
+easy to write of kisses as to review a sentimental romance, but actually
+there is some instinct in me stronger than mind against the fact, do you
+understand? Philip, you have no idea of the depths of feminine treachery!
+Did I ever intimate a willingness to do such a thing? I do not say that I
+_wish_ to kiss another, but I affirm that it would be easier for me to
+kiss my father's presiding elder--and heaven knows he is a didactic
+monster of head and whiskers! It is not that I do not love you, but that I
+do!
+
+Do you know what will happen when you come to Morningtown? I will meet you
+at the station, not as Jessica, but as the demure little home-made
+daughter of the Methodist minister here; we will greet each other with
+blighting formality, for there will be the station-master's wife to
+observe us; we will walk home along the main street, and we will speak of
+the most trivial or useful subjects, of the weather in New York, and of
+Jack more particularly. Out of sheer bravado I will scan your face now and
+then, but my eyes will not rest there long enough to fall before yours
+discomfited. When we reach the house father will greet you from his Sinai
+elevation, with pretty much the same holy-man courtesy Moses would have
+showed if a heathen Canaanite had appeared to him. And while you two are
+exchanging platitudes, I will escape into this room of mine, take one
+glance at my mirror, and then cover my face with my hands for joy and
+shame while the red waves of love mount as high as they will over it. Ah,
+Philip, I shall be _so_ glad to see you, and so afraid! But you shall have
+small satisfaction in either fact, for I do not aim to make it easy for
+you to win what is already yours in my heart.
+
+P.S.--So you are keeping Jack mured up with you and your _magnum opus_. No
+wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone." He prefers it
+to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult
+to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the
+domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a
+similar situation I may be driven to seek the cold curbstone for
+companionship.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+It seems to me as I read your letters, my sweet wife to be, that I am only
+beginning to learn the richness of my fortune. And will you not, when you
+write to me next time--will you not call me by one of those dear names
+that you speak in the whispering gallery of your heart? I shall barely
+receive more than one letter from you now before I come to see you in
+person and tell over with you face to face the story of our love. Just a
+few more days and I shall be free.
+
+But for the present I want to talk to you about Jack. Indeed, I feel a
+little sore on this point. It was you who proposed our adopting him, yet,
+after your first words of advice, you have left me to work out the
+situation quite unaided; and now I can see that you are laughing at me.
+Poor Jack, he was something like a "philosophical proposition" which I had
+never very thoroughly analysed. One thing, however, begins to grow
+perfectly clear: my home is no place for him; he is only a shadow in my
+life and needs to take on substance. Well, I thought at last I had solved
+the problem--or at least that O'Meara had solved it for me; but here too I
+was disappointed. Really, you must help me out of this muddle.
+
+Do you remember the note-book of O'Meara's that I told you about? Ever
+since his death I have been too busy really to look through the volume;
+but day before yesterday it occurred to me that I might find some
+information there about Jack's parentage, and with that end in view I
+spent most of the day deciphering the smeared pages. At first I found
+everything in the notes except what I wanted, but toward the end of the
+book I discovered a whole group of memoranda and reflections in which the
+name Tarrytown occurred again and again. I will read you the notes when I
+come; without giving many events they tell in a disjointed way a little
+idyllic episode in the story of his life. He, too, knew love, and was
+loved. There in that village by the Hudson for a few short months he kept
+the enemy at bay and was happy. And then, too soon, came the fatal
+story--the only dated note in the book, I believe:
+
+  September 3d: A son was born and she has left me to care for him
+  alone. I had thought that happiness might endure, and this too was
+  illusion. I stand by the tomb and read the graven words: _Et ego in
+  Arcadia fui_.
+
+And so, yesterday, on a venture I took our little goblin boy with me to
+Tarrytown, and after some inquiry found that his mother's relations were
+farm people living on the outskirts of the town. They proved to have been
+poor but respectable people. At present only the grandfather is living
+alone in the house, and he is very feeble. He was willing to assume the
+care of Jack, but I cannot persuade myself to leave the child in those
+trembling hands. Indeed, when it comes to the issue, I cannot quite decide
+to let him go entirely from me, for is he not one of the ties that bind me
+to you? I have brought him back with me to New York--which will only
+increase your merriment at my expense.
+
+Some day when you have come to live in New York--if this is to be our
+home--we will go together up the river to Tarrytown, and you shall see the
+land where O'Meara dreamed his dream of happiness and where your adopted
+child was born.
+
+And when we go there, I will take you to a bowered nook overhanging the
+river, where I passed the afternoon reading and thinking of many things.
+There together we will sit in the shadow of the trees and talk and plan
+together how _our_ happiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and you
+shall teach me to lose this haunting sense of illusion in the great
+reality of love. And as the evening descends and twilight steals upon the
+ever-flowing water, I will take you in my arms a moment, and this shall be
+my vow: God do so to me and more also, if any darkness falls from my life
+upon yours, until our evening, too, has come and the light of this world
+passes quietly into the dream that lies beyond.
+
+All this I thought yesterday while I sat alone and read once more the sad
+record of O'Meara's ruin. He did not stay long in Tarrytown, it seems,
+after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in the
+hope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas,
+you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful days
+returned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them--so
+one may surmise from a number of memoranda--with a new meaning he began to
+discover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of the _AEneid_
+became a symbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the last
+bewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to his
+destruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses from
+those books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not a
+touch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?--
+
+  There the meaning of the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was
+  before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the
+  _loetas segetes_ seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes
+  about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills,
+  and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep
+  slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I
+  used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I
+  would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the
+  crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped
+  heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but
+  laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a
+  horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath
+  them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed
+  to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise
+  the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the
+  fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the
+  poet:
+
+                  _Flumina amem silvasque inglorius_,
+
+  and his pathetic envy of those
+
+                 Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew
+                 The wonders of their state!
+
+  And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself,
+  still I was in Virgil's haunted world. Some distance from the house
+  was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a
+  row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit
+  through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning
+  home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I
+  learned to enjoy the _levium spectacula rerum_, as he calls the story
+  of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,--so wide
+  and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of
+  men,--I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines
+  with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
+
+         These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast,
+         With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest.
+
+In this way Jack's father learned the illusion of life by looking back on
+his happy days. I did not mean to fill my letter with this long extract
+from his note-book, nor would I end with such ill-omened words. Dear girl,
+I too have learned the deception of life in other ways. Teach me, when I
+come to you, the great reality. In all O'Meara's memoranda after his
+return to New York I could find only a single direct allusion to the woman
+he loved. It was very brief: "On this day two years ago she said I made
+her happy!"
+
+Shall I bring happiness to you when I come?
+
+
+
+
+A CODICIL TO LETTER XXXIV
+
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP. WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER FROM
+PHILIP
+
+Think of this,--I love you, but I do not know you. I only know your heart,
+your mind, that part of you which meets me in spirit like the light from
+some distant star that slips across my window sill at evening. But you,
+oh! Philip, I do not know _you_. You are a stranger whom I have seen only
+twice in my life. Do not be angry, my beloved, I do love you; but cannot
+you understand that I must get used to the idea of your being some one
+very real? These are thoughts forced upon me by your approaching visit,
+and so I ask a favour: Do not tell me when to expect you. If you threaten
+me with the identical day of your coming, I will vanish from the face of
+the earth! But if you come upon me unawares, I shall have been spared that
+consciousness of _confession_ face to face involved by a deliberate
+welcome. And if you come thus, I shall not have time to retire behind my
+instinctive defence against you. You see that I plan in your favour, that
+I wish to be unrestrainedly glad when you come.
+
+And about the kisses, you understand of course, dear Philip, that I am
+incapable of determining them really! I only contemplated the possibility
+when distance made it an impossibility. Still, you cannot fail to know
+that I love you, that it would even break my heart if you did not come!
+For, Philip, a woman's heart is like the Scriptures, apparently full of
+contradictions, but really it is the symbol of our everlasting truth, if
+only you have the wisdom to understand it.
+
+And another thing, Philip, the more I think of it, the more I am
+scandalised by the way you drag that poor goblin child about. My heart
+yearns for him and his solitude in the midst of your philosophies. You
+have made a perfect jumping-jack of him for your lordly amusement, and it
+isn't fair. Bring him with you to Morningtown. I charge you. And remember,
+don't lose him or philosophise him out of existence on the way. I have
+talked with father about the boy, and he is primed with religious zeal to
+snatch this tender brand from your burning.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+Just a note, sweet lady, to bid you expect me on the afternoon train
+Thursday--and is not that a long while from to-day? And please do not come
+to the station. I would not have our meeting chilled by the curious eyes
+of that station-master's wife; I remember the scrutiny of her gaze too
+well. And as for our greeting--you have made a very pretty story out of
+that, but have you not omitted Philip from the account? Is it not just
+possible that he may mar all Jessica's nicely laid plans? I have a
+suspicion that, in his crude masculine way, he may prefer to translate
+into fact what Jessica finds so easy to contemplate in words. I feel a bit
+uncertain as to how he will behave as a lover; the role is new to him, and
+he may be awkward and a bit vehement.
+
+Yes, I will bring Jack and leave him to be brooded under your kind
+maternal feathers. You will love him for the pathos of his eyes and for
+his quaint ways.
+
+-----
+
+  [2] It is unnecessary to say that the spelling throughout
+      these letters has been corrected for the press.
+
+  [3] Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The Third Part
+
+which shows how the editor again visits
+Jessica in the country, and how love
+is buffeted between philosophy
+and religion.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+WRITTEN ON RETURNING FROM HIS VISIT TO MORNINGTOWN
+
+Here I am back in my own room, in this solitude of books; and how
+different is this home-coming from that other when I brought with me only
+bitterness and despair!
+
+Shall I tell you, sweetheart, some of the things I learned during my three
+days in Morningtown? First of all, I discovered that you are clothed with
+wonderful beauty. In a dim way I knew this before, but the full mystery of
+your loveliness was not revealed to me until this third time. Can it be
+that love has transformed you a little and added grace to grace, or is it
+only my vision that has been purged of its earthly dulness? I could love a
+homely woman whose spirit was fair, but to love one who is altogether
+beautiful, in whose perfect grace I can find no spot or blemish--that is
+the miracle of my blessedness. There was a strange light in your eyes that
+haunts me yet. Such a light I have seen on a lonely pool when the evening
+sunlight slanted upon it from over the brown hills of autumn, but nowhere
+else. My soul would bathe in that pure water and be baptised into the new
+faith.
+
+For my faith, of which I boasted so valiantly, has changed since I have
+seen you. Faith, I had thought, was a form of insight into the illusion of
+earthly things, of transient joys and fears. And always a little dread
+would creep into my heart lest love, too, should prove to be such an
+illusion, the last great deception of all, binding the bewildered soul in
+a web of phantom desires. So I still felt as I walked with you that first
+evening out into the circle of your trees. And there, dear Jessica, in the
+waiting silence and the grey shadows of that seclusion I put my arms about
+you and would have drawn you to my heart. Ah, shall I not remember the
+wild withdrawing of your eyes as I stooped over your face! And then with a
+cry of defiance and one swift bound, you tore yourself loose from me and
+ran like a frightened dryad deeper into the forest. That was a mad chase,
+and forever and forever I shall see your lithe form darting on before me
+through the mingled shadow and light. And when at last I caught you and
+held you fast, shall I not remember how you panted and fluttered against
+me like a bird in the first terror of captivity! And then, suddenly, you
+were still, and looked up into my face, and in your eyes I beheld the
+wonder of a strange mystery which no words can name. Only I knew that my
+dread was forever at end. It was for a second--nay, an eternity, I
+think--as if we two were rapt out of the world, out of ourselves, into
+some infinite abysm of life. It was as if the splendour of the apocalypse
+broke upon us, and poured upon our eyes the ineffable whiteness of heaven.
+I knew in that instant that love is not an illusion, but the one reality,
+the one power that dispels illusion, the very essence of faith. I
+shuddered when the vision passed; but its memory shall never fade. So much
+I learned on that day.
+
+And I also learned, or thought I learned, that your father's real
+objection to my suit lay not so much in his hostility to my views, as in
+his fear of losing you out of his life. And as I talked with him, even
+plead with him, I was filled with pity and with something like remorse for
+the sorrow I was to bring upon his heart. He is a saint, dear Love, but
+very human. You have said that I acted like a robber toward you. I could
+smile at your fury, but to your father I do indeed play the robber's part.
+Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me and will give me the one
+jewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It is
+hard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all my
+lilies changed once more to roses--as they did, you remember how often,
+while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South you
+know we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northern
+women. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, to
+recall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose of
+love burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic of
+colour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to have
+mystified you.
+
+And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as the
+shadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a tryst with you
+beneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless and
+terrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will be
+the first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!)
+And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright for
+me, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that I
+could ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer from
+this that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shall
+have a saner reason for withholding them,--that of economy. For if
+frugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be true
+in love as in the less romantic experiences of life.
+
+And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finished
+me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered
+woman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your
+illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods, as the
+little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped
+yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach
+my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal
+emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so
+sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?
+
+Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not
+everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered
+soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with
+many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained.
+No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly
+procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year,
+inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as
+for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to
+grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!
+
+Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there
+is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for
+him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but
+acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be
+happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches
+the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally,
+however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one
+should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my
+alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic
+indifference with which he endures these caresses, you _could_ not be
+jealous!
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener
+and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil
+was to care for the world's early-blooming flowers. But what was our first
+great parent to me?
+
+                  There is a garden in her face,
+                  Where roses and white lilies show--
+
+and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the
+one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia's cheek
+that the poet described as "rose leaves floating in the purest milk"? And
+was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could "die of a rose in
+aromatic pain"? I could write an anthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I
+could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in
+going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in
+prophecy of your many divine properties.
+
+Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself--think of that!--me, for
+these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions!
+I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and
+rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of
+the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic
+summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under
+the covers and think of the day's work.
+
+I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet,
+bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe
+when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a
+Latin quotation on my lips--_At tuba terribili_, like as not. (Query: Does
+Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)
+
+I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little.
+Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your
+Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our
+Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air
+hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down
+upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the
+cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I
+must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat
+together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language
+was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled
+up, with your great cloak twisted about your body--all except your feet,
+that would creep out into the sun, tantalising me with a thousand
+forbidden thoughts--I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads,
+fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to
+think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb
+fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aerial vision
+and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips
+had all the fragrance of humanity.
+
+Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present
+bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read
+of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand
+seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the
+groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with
+the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise
+before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words,
+you must not therefore suppose that something fantastic and inhuman clings
+to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they
+clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and
+beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every
+image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more
+fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain
+is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You
+see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your
+mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away.
+With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:
+
+                         VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS
+
+           Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found,
+               The moss-grown rock, the pines around!
+           And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms,
+               Catullus and his love's alarms.
+           _Da basia mille_, so the poem ran;
+               And, lip to lip, our hearts began
+           With ne'er a word translate the words complete:--
+               Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?
+           A hundred kisses, said he?--hundreds more,
+               And then confound the telltale score!
+           So may we live and love, till life be out,
+               And let the greybeards wag and flout.
+           Yon failing sun shall rise another morn,
+               And the thin moon round out her horn;
+           But we, when once we lose our waning light,--
+               Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have
+ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if
+love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to
+the classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might
+measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his
+morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is
+we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy
+between the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than our
+ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no
+other gods can afford to bless them!
+
+Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship
+with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is
+gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian
+scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate
+even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener
+appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is
+the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It
+is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical
+experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into
+the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these
+ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their
+definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better
+than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a
+form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual
+faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show
+a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to
+last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts.
+This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our
+prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent
+has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my
+heart as warm as kisses.
+
+But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in
+father's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _The
+Forest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in the
+library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as
+the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he
+settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst
+fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an
+Indian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is
+based upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve
+truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in
+other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime
+authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard,
+for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no
+female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your
+heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought
+he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be
+alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the
+worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a
+frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to take
+some radical stand against us.
+
+Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a factitious
+interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I
+am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest,
+particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of
+"Misther Towers."
+
+"Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone before
+the library fire.
+
+"Nope,"--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent
+sympathy.
+
+"Did he often talk to you?"
+
+"Yes, when we went for a walk."
+
+"Tell me what about, Jackie."
+
+"I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation.
+
+"You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated.
+
+"Never did know. He talks queer!"--I tittered and Jack wrinkled up his
+face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.
+
+"Did he ever mention any of his friends," I persevered.
+
+"Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,"--the little
+scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!
+
+"But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?"
+
+"Never did!"--I was wounded.
+
+"What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst.
+
+"His pipe," he affirmed without hesitation.
+
+"And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he
+made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his
+hand to 'em."
+
+"Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?"
+
+"Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed."
+
+"Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed;
+Mr. Towers was very rude to you!"
+
+I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever
+smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how
+jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I
+could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to
+a prayer.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and
+cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that
+book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him
+into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in
+his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to
+see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is
+false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of
+those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how
+unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They
+beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was,
+not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and
+dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body
+is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical
+civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn
+away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A
+man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is
+in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our
+salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some
+day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation
+according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality
+to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of
+reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some
+way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to
+be my wife.
+
+And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my
+affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp
+write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside,
+he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my
+pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment,
+(for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before
+my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees
+down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as
+she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweet
+Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake
+into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself."
+
+.la begin XLII
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had cast
+off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is
+open to me after what has happened.
+
+After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father
+thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward
+us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he
+deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and
+destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit,
+and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will
+become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is
+entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am
+sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore
+been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this
+correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any
+protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a
+fanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon
+superstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when
+opposed.
+
+And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me
+from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand
+he has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his
+remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will
+write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in
+a way a prior authority over him.
+
+Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have tried
+to take refuge in the biologist's definition of love,--that it is
+essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the
+blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an
+epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the
+gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness
+out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my
+glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,--only that
+it is best for us both to forget now if we can.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+PHILIP TO JESSICA
+
+
+MY DEAR JESSICA:
+
+My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to
+Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have
+prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if
+I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle
+deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house while
+he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the
+meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the
+world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the
+prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words
+we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay
+in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:
+
+               So let us live and love till life be out,
+               And let the greybeards wag and flout.
+
+And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my
+ears,--that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joy
+you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not
+seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of
+passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me
+then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have
+cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have
+brought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle with
+religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that
+resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know
+Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And
+so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the
+poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has
+troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that
+no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you.
+And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you
+will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be
+garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and
+within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will
+you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but
+Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world,
+and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There
+has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name.
+But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting
+after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to
+you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses.
+And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You
+are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not
+exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting
+loves. And once again, good-bye.
+
+                     (Enclosed with the foregoing)
+
+DEAR SIR:
+
+My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to
+you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you,
+sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step
+in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to
+cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and
+esteem.
+
+                                                   Faithfully yours,
+                                                             EZRA DOANE.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the
+bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of
+anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the
+stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after
+another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written
+to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself
+that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy,
+far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has
+been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one
+with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet
+reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of
+sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through
+gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some
+jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal
+deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many
+madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?
+
+And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I
+move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone.
+Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past.
+And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who
+beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach,
+beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your
+grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so
+unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a
+frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my
+heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that
+the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense
+of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my
+passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade
+against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase
+of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast
+for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my
+true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed
+away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the
+religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I
+supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined
+that the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least
+learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the
+present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own
+calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of
+Fate that warns us to be humble.
+
+And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their
+foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that
+have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:
+_Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was
+walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring
+floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest.
+Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise
+of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly.
+Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree,
+holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw
+the woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even passed
+between them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone.
+I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walk
+away still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is the
+meaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting till
+the last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no better
+than glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest?
+Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces of
+my physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess the
+thing I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and then
+without reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumbling
+run. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I left
+the Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness still
+surged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remoteness
+from life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; I
+was bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, but
+were shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the passion of
+love, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turned
+my brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit some
+atrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageous
+insult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, some
+chance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changed
+these demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physical
+achievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home and
+the blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it ten
+years hence?
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+JACK TO PHILIP
+
+
+DEAR SIR:
+
+I have not wrote you before. This is a beautiful place. I like it,
+especially the young lady. The old man have been acting wild, like a cop
+when he can't find out who done it. The difference is that it is the bible
+in the old man and the devil in the cop. He says you have hoodooed the
+young lady, and he says let you be enathermered. This is a religious cuss
+word. The young lady don't cry. She is dead game, and have lost her
+colour.
+
+So good by,
+
+                                                   Yours trewly,
+
+                                                          JACK O'MEARA.
+
+P.S.--The young lady have quit the family prayers, but me and the old man
+have to say ours just the same, only more so.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+A wise man of the sect of Simon Magus has replied to an assault of mine on
+humanitarianism by trying to show that in this one faith of modern days
+are summed up all the varying ideals of past ages,--renunciation,
+self-development, religion, chivalry, humanism, pantheistic return to
+nature, liberty. Ah, my dear sir, I envy you your easy, kindly vision.
+Indeed, all these do persist in a dim groping way, empty echoes of great
+words that have been, bare shadows without substance. What made them
+something more than graceful acts of materialism was that each and all
+ended not in themselves or in worldly accommodation, but in some purpose
+outside of human nature as our humanitarians comprehend that nature.
+Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel more
+of bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of the
+flesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purging
+and making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of a
+man's own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit of
+beauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brother
+to its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circle
+in which humanitarianism gyrates. My dear foe might read Castiglione's
+book of _The Courtier_ and learn how high the Platonic ideal of the better
+humanists floated above the charitable mockery of its name to-day. As for
+religion--go to almost any church in the land and hear what exhortations
+flow from the pulpit. The intellectual contention of dogmas is
+forgotten--and better so, possibly. But more than that: for one word on
+the spirit or on the way and necessity of the soul's individual growth,
+you will hear a thousand on the means of bettering the condition of the
+poor; for one word on the personal relation of man to his God, you will
+hear a thousand on the duties of man to man. Woe unto you, preachers of a
+base creed, hypocrites! These things ought ye to have done, and not to
+leave the other undone! You have betrayed the faith and forgotten your
+high charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world's use of
+materialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Like
+your father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift of
+God with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with a
+kiss of brotherhood! Now might the Keeper of the Keys cry out to-day with
+other meaning:
+
+          "How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
+          Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake
+          Creep and intrude and climb into the fold!
+          Of other care they little reckoning make
+          Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,
+          And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
+          Blind mouths!"
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+Reading a foolish book on the Literature of Indiana (!) and find this
+sentence on the first page: "It is not of so great importance that a few
+individuals within a State shall, from time to time, show talent or
+genius, as that the general level of cultivation in the community shall be
+continually raised." Whereupon the author proceeds to glorify the "general
+level" through a whole volume. Now the noteworthy thing about this
+particular sentence is the fact that it was set down as a mere truism
+needing no proof, and that it was no doubt so accepted by most readers of
+the book. In reality the sentiment is so far from a truism that it would
+have excited ridicule in any previous age; it might almost be said to
+contain the fundamental error which is responsible for the low state of
+culture in the country. Unfortunately the point cannot be profitably
+argued out, for it resolves itself at last into a question of taste. There
+are those who are chiefly interested in the life of the intellect and the
+imagination. They measure the value of a civilisation by the kind of
+imaginative and intellectual energy it displays, by its top growth in
+other words. They crave to see life express itself thus, _sub specie
+oeernitatis_, and apart from this conversion of human energy and emotion
+into enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transient
+human lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuation
+of the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of one
+masterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfare
+of a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectual
+welfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently to
+the products of the higher imagination. There are others for whom this
+life of the imagination has only a lukewarm interest, for the reason that
+their own faculties are weak and stunted. Naturally they think it a slight
+matter whether genius appear to create what they and their kind can only
+dimly enjoy; on the contrary, they hold it of prime importance that
+material welfare and the form of mental cunning which subdues material
+forces should be widely diffused among the people.
+
+Now no one would say a word against raising "the general level of
+cultivation"; the higher it is raised the better. Only the cherishing of
+this ideal becomes pernicious when it is made more sacred than the
+appearance of individual genius. Nor is it proper to say that the
+appearance of genius is itself contingent on the level of cultivation.
+There is much confusion of thought here. The influence of the people on
+literature is invariably attended with danger. It has its element of good,
+for the people cherish those instinctive passions and notions of morality
+which keep art from falling into artificiality. But refinement,
+distinction, form, spirituality--all that makes of art a transcript of
+life _sub specie oeernitatis_--are commonly opposed to the popular
+interest and are even distrusted by the people. The attitude of the
+Elizabethan playwrights toward their audiences gives food for reflection
+on this head. Just so sure as the ideal of general cultivation is made
+paramount, just so sure will the higher culture become degraded to this
+consideration, and with its degradation the general cultivation itself
+will grow base and material.
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+I lead a strange dual existence, the intensity of whose contrast is almost
+uncanny. After sitting for hours at my desk working on my History of
+Humanitarianism, I throw myself wearily on the sofa and smoke. And as the
+grey fumes float above my face, slowly they lay a spell upon me like the
+waving of mesmeric hands. I lose consciousness of the objects about me,
+the very walls dissolve away in a mist, and I am lifted as it were on
+softly beating pinions and borne swift and far like a bird. The sensation
+is curiously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, yet it never causes
+me surprise. Sometimes I am carried out into the wide sky and soar as it
+seems for hours without ever alighting, until I am brought to myself with
+a sense of rapid falling. At other times I am borne to the blessed forest
+where my love walks, and always then the same thing happens. I know not
+whether it is my spirit or some emanation of my body, but, however it is,
+I am there always pursuing her as once I did in reality, until at last I
+lay hold of her and draw her into my arms beneath that ancient oak. I kiss
+her once and twice and a third time, gazing the while into her startled
+eyes. Then an inexpressible sweetness takes possession of me, a shudder
+runs through my veins, and of a sudden all is dark; I am sinking down,
+down, in unfathomable abysses, until abruptly I awake. No words can convey
+the mingled reality and remoteness of these sensations. Jessica, Jessica,
+you have troubled the very sources of my being; you have abandoned me to
+contend with shadows and the fear of shadows.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+JACK TO PHILIP
+
+
+DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up here
+and bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark of
+safety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lord
+have turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young lady
+that is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now.
+She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church.
+She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jolly
+all the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiar
+spirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets him
+under a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but I
+creep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her into
+something else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now and
+have took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. He
+knows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardened
+her heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible,
+nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this,
+I will show it to her.
+
+                                               Your trew friend,
+
+                                                          JACK O'MEARA.
+
+P.S.--She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she give
+it to the old man.
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination,
+and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are the
+sentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and without
+grip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and,
+being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they
+surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby
+and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical
+socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been
+perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the
+real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away
+from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a
+fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain.
+They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages,
+having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in
+the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though
+they mask themselves in formulae of universal brotherhood.
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's.
+It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that
+exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of
+the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by
+destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections
+it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who
+has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As
+with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate
+oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the
+regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping
+his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure
+with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to
+think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled
+along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted
+by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his
+book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the
+proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying
+the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his
+life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that
+of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they
+gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He
+looked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and through
+that isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and even
+a kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness his
+mood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one's
+self too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless a
+strong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for without
+these the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation to
+throw away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifference
+or something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often of
+late and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of your
+blessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference you
+have cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare that
+pursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determination
+to work and in work achieve my own destiny.
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+PHILIP TO JACK
+
+
+It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and often
+I wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and you
+were brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where you
+are.
+
+You must listen to everything Miss Jessica tells you about the trees and
+birds, and learn to love all the beautiful things growing around you. I
+remember there were four or five great trees in my father's garden when I
+was a boy living in the country, and I loved them, each in a different
+way, and had names for them and talked to them. One was an oak tree that
+grew up almost to the clouds, and its boughs stood out stiff and square as
+if nothing could bend them. That was the tree I went to when I had some
+hard task to do and wanted strength. Another was an elm that always
+whispered comfort to me when I was in trouble. I used to go to it as some
+boys run to their mother, for I grew up like you without a mother's love,
+and I did not even have any sweet lady like Miss Jessica to be fond of me.
+You must ask Miss Jessica to teach you all she knows about the trees in
+Morningtown, and you must listen to what she says to them. Perhaps she
+will tell you about the famous oaks that grew in a place called Dodona,
+and were wiser than any man or woman in the world. People used to talk
+with them as Miss Jessica does with her favourite tree.
+
+And now, dear Jack, I am going to tell you a story which I have made up
+just for you. It isn't about trees exactly, but it all took place in a
+deep forest that spread around a wonderful city. From the high white walls
+of the town one could look out over the green tops of the trees as you
+look down on the grass, and that was a marvellous sight. There was a
+single road that ran through the forest right up to the gate of the city;
+but it was a hard road to travel, dark most of the time because the sun
+could not shine through the leaves, and very lonely, and so still that you
+could hear your heart beat except when the winds blew, and then sometimes
+the boughs clashed together overhead and roared and moaned until you
+longed for the silence again. It was a long road too, and the men who
+walked through the forest to the city all had great packs on their
+shoulders. And what do you suppose was in their packs? Why, every
+traveller carried with him a gorgeous suit of clothes heavy with velvet
+and gold and silver; for so the people dressed in the beautiful city, and
+no one could enter the gate unless he too bore with him the royal robes.
+But you see, while they were walking in the rough forest, they wore their
+old clothes of course.
+
+Now in one place a wonderful woman sat by the roadside. She was a maga, or
+witch, named Simona. She was beautiful if you did not see her too close,
+with large round eyes that looked very gentle and kind. And when any
+traveller came by, the big tears would begin to roll down her cheeks and
+she would cry out to him as if she pitied him and wanted to help him.
+
+"Dear traveller," she would say, "why do you trudge along this gloomy
+road, and why do you carry that bundle which bends your shoulders and
+tires your back? Don't you know that it is all a lie about the city you
+are seeking? There is no city of palaces at your journey's end. Indeed,
+you will never get to the end of the woods, but will walk on and on,
+stumbling and falling, and growing weaker and weaker, until at last you
+fall and never rise. And the wild beasts that you hear at night howling in
+the bushes will rend and gnaw your body until only your bones are left."
+
+At this the travellers would stop and say: "But what shall we do, wise
+witch, and whither shall we go?"
+
+Then she would say to them: "Turn aside by this pleasant path, and in a
+little while you will come to my beautiful garden which is named
+Philanthropia. There you will find many others whom I have wept for and
+saved as I do you; and there amid the open glades you may live with them
+in everlasting peace and love. Houses are there which you need only to
+enter and call your own. And when you are hungry you have only to speak,
+and immediately all that you desire to eat will appear on the tables. And
+when you are tired, soft beds will rise up to receive you. And clothes
+will be spread before you--not stiff and uncomfortable robes like those
+you carry in your pack, but soft garments suited to that land of
+comfort."
+
+Most of the travellers believed the witch and turned into the by-path.
+But, alas! it was soon worse for them than it had been on the road; for
+they were led, not to a garden, but into a great sandy desert, where
+nothing grew and no rain or dew ever fell. And somehow they could find no
+way out of the desert, but wandered to and fro in the endless fields of
+dust, while the hot sun beat upon their heads and their hearts failed them
+for hunger and thirst.
+
+But now and then a wary traveller did not believe the witch and laughed at
+her tears and soft voice. And then, unless he got away very quick,
+something dreadful happened to him. The witch suddenly changed into a huge
+monster with a hundred flaming eyes, and a hundred mouths with which she
+raved and bellowed, and a hundred long arms that coiled about like
+serpents. She was so terrible that most men who saw her in her true form
+fell down fainting at her feet; and these she lifted up and threw into
+deep dark holes, hidden from the road, where the poor wretches soon died
+of sheer loneliness.
+
+And now comes the heart of the story, dear Jack, if you are not too tired
+to read to the end.
+
+One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was not
+very strong, nor was his armour much to look at,--just an ordinary knight,
+but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart to
+slay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rode
+he turned often to look into his lady's eyes, and always he seemed to
+drink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinks
+refreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passing
+fair--as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest woman
+in all the world. And so at last they came to where the witch was sitting
+and weeping. Without a word the knight drew his sword and rushed upon her.
+Of course she changed instantly to the monster with the hundred eyes and
+mouths and arms. The air was filled with the fire from her eyes and with
+the dreadful bellowing from her mouths, and her arms swung frantically
+about on every side to seize the knight and crush him. But this was the
+strange thing about the battle: as often as the knight looked at the lady,
+who stood near him, he gained new strength and the witch could not harm
+him.
+
+He was cutting off her arms one by one and victory was almost his, when
+down the road came an old man wagging his grey beard dolefully and
+muttering into his breast. And when he reached the three there at the
+roadside, he stood for a moment watching the battle and still muttering in
+his beard. Then without a word he beckoned to the lady. She hesitated,
+sighed, and turned away, leaving the poor knight to struggle alone without
+the blessing of her eyes. And immediately his strength seemed to abandon
+him and his sword dropped at his side. You may be sure the witch shouted
+with triumph at this, and the noise of her bellowing sounded like the
+clanging of a hundred discordant bells. It was almost over with the
+knight. But suddenly he too uttered a great cry. Despair came to give him
+strength where hope had been before. "For love and the world!" he cried
+out and drove at the monster once again with his uplifted sword.
+
+And, dear Jack, do you wish to know how the battle ended? I am very, very
+sorry, but I can't tell you, for when I came through the forest the knight
+and the witch were still fighting. There was a look of desperate
+determination in the knight's eyes, but, to tell you the truth, I think
+his heart was with the lady who had left him, and it is not easy to fight
+without a heart in this world, you know.
+
+Write to me soon, a long, long letter and tell me about the trees of
+Morningtown. Some day when you are grown up and live with men, you will be
+glad to remember the friendship and the wise conversation of those
+brothers of the forest. Good-bye for a time, my boy.
+
+                                          Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS.
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+A wan beggar, seated on the coping that surrounds St. Paul's and
+exploiting his misery before the world. A strange scene calculated to give
+one pause,--the poor waif crying his distress on the curb, within the iron
+fence the ancient sleeping dead, and along the thoroughfare of Broadway
+the ceaseless unheeding stream of humanity. As I walked up the street with
+this image in my mind, the lines of an old Oriental poem kept time with my
+steps until I had converted them into English:
+
+             I heard a poor man in the grave-yard cry:
+             "Arise, oh friend! a little hour assume
+             My weight of cares, whilst I,
+             Long weary, learn thy respite in the tomb."
+             I listened that the corpse should make reply;
+             Who, knowing sweeter death than penury,
+             Broke not his silent doom.
+
+I am reminded of that joke, rather grim forsooth, which Lowell thought the
+best ever made. It is in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The god Dionysus and
+his slave Xanthias are travelling the road to Hades, the slave as a matter
+of course carrying the pack for the two. They meet a procession bearing a
+corpse to the tomb. Xanthias begs the dead man to take the pack with him
+as he is borne so comfortably on the same road to the nether world.
+Whereupon they dicker over the portage. "Two shillings for the job," says
+the corpse, sitting up on his bier. "Too much," says Xanthias. "Two
+shillings," insists the corpse. "One and sixpence," cries Xanthias. "_I'd
+see myself alive first_!" says the corpse, sinking down on the bier.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+JACK TO PHILIP
+
+
+DEAR MR. TOWERS:
+
+The young lady have the letter you wrote me and I cant get it. But you
+needent bother about writing any more tales. I guess you done the best you
+could, but we dont neither one like what you told about the witch and them
+young people in the forest. Why do the knight stand there fighting the
+witch when the old man have run off with his girl? Why dont he take out
+after them and leave the witch to bleed to death? And the young lady
+thinks of it worse than I do. She went on awful when she read it, and
+cried. I guess she was sorry about the way the knight kept on cutting off
+that woman's legs and arms even if she was bad. She don't say nothing else
+nice about you now, nor let me. But she says you are the crewelest man she
+have known. And she cries a heap when there aint nothing the matter, and
+blames at every thing. The old gentleman feels bad about it but he dont
+know what to do. I guess now he wishes he hadent fooled with the young
+lady's salvation none. Because she have told him one day when he was
+trying to talk pious at her, not to say nothing, that she dident believe
+in nothing now but damnation. And he say "Dont talk that way before the
+child." But I aint come to neither one of them things yet.
+
+                                                Your trew Frend,
+
+                                                          JACK O'MEARA.
+
+P.S.--She goes to see her tree spirit every day. But she dont talk to him
+no more. She just lays down on her face and cries.
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+PHILIP TO JACK
+
+
+I am afraid, little Jack, that my long story about the lady and the knight
+in the woods did not interest you very much; and that is a pity, for, if I
+cannot amuse you, how shall I do when I come to write stories for grown-up
+folk? Well, anyway, I am going to tell you what happened after the lady
+and the old man went away into the forest.
+
+For awhile they walked side by side in silence. But the road was long and
+it was already late, and by and by the night fell and wrapped all the
+trees in solemn shadows. It was not easy to keep the path in the darkness,
+and pretty soon they were quite lost and found themselves wandering
+helplessly in the black tangled aisles of the forest. That was bad, for
+the lady was tired in body and discomforted in heart. But worse happened
+when the old man left her to seek out the path alone, for he only lost
+himself more completely in the treacherous shadows and could not get back
+to her. Ah, Jack, if the lady was beautiful when the sunlight shone upon
+her, how lovely do you suppose she was here in the night with the white
+beams of the moon sifting down through the swaying boughs upon her
+blanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her
+terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy
+whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up
+yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low
+inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out
+of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her
+face under a great tree, and wept and wept for very terror and
+loneliness.
+
+Now wonderful things may happen in the night, dear Jack. The trees then
+have a life of their own, and sometimes when the sun, which belongs to man
+only, is gone they have power to do what they please to foolish people who
+come into their circle. And so this tree that stood leaning over the
+prostrate lady whispered and whispered to itself in a strange language.
+Then out of the boughs there came creeping a dark cold shadow. It dropped
+down noiselessly to the ground and covered the lady all about. It moved
+and swayed in the faint moonlight like a column of wind-blown smoke. You
+will hardly believe the rest, but it seemed slowly to take the very shape
+of the lady herself, as if it were her own shadow that had found her; and
+so it began to creep into her body. And as it melted into her flesh, she
+grew cold and ever colder as if her blood were turning to ice. Pretty soon
+it would have reached her heart and then--I shudder to think what would
+have become of her. But when the first chill touched her heart, she
+uttered a loud cry of fear: "Dear knight, dear knight," she called out,
+"where are you? Save me! save me!"
+
+Then another wonderful thing happened in the darkness, for at such times
+our spoken words may take on a life of their own just as the trees and
+shadows do. And so these words of the lady, instead of scattering in the
+air, were changed into a marvellous little fairy elf that went stealing
+away through the forest. And as the elf ran swiftly under the trees and
+over the long grass, so lightly indeed that the flowers and weeds only
+bowed under his feet as when a gentle breeze passes over them,--as the elf
+sped on, I say, everywhere the earth sent up a lisping whisper, "Save me,
+dear knight! save me!"
+
+Now the knight was far away, resting from his battle with the old witch.
+He had wounded her in many places, and might perhaps have killed her, had
+not the sly wicked creature suddenly slipt away from him into some hiding
+place of hers in the desert. And so, as he could not reach her, he was
+resting, very tired and very sad. Then suddenly, as he sat with his head
+hanging down, the little elf came tripping over the grass and plucked him
+by the arm, and the faint whisper stole into his ear, "Save me, dear
+knight! save me!"
+
+Do you suppose he was long in rising and following the clever little elf
+back to their mistress? Ah, Jack, there was a happy hour and a happy year
+and a blissful life for the lady and her knight then, was there not?
+
+And now, Jack, I will not bother you with any more stories after this.
+Write to me and tell me all you are doing. Be good, little Jack, and
+listen to the wise words of the trees and other growing things; and, above
+all, love that sweet lady, Miss Jessica.
+
+                                                     Affectionately,
+
+                                                          PHILIP TOWERS.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There is
+the way of the _Imitation_ trod by those who have perceived the illusion
+of this life and the reality of the spirit,--the way over whose entrance
+stand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, the
+further doth he recede from all earthly solace." And truly he who hath
+boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows
+trample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that other
+way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,--the
+way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without
+grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with
+the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment
+and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter
+to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before
+the gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doing
+righteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity here
+or in the _Imitation_, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, and
+only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.
+
+And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to a
+man's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levelling
+human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were
+possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and
+know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the
+harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until
+we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as
+Millet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with the
+Hoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art
+with noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who
+respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the
+disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always
+rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least
+he had to proclaim to the world,--the ancient imperishable truth that man
+lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern
+call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself
+right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting
+verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seems
+to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform
+and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by
+presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were
+really playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation of
+riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief
+obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that
+attains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight of
+judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the
+virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a
+false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of
+personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end
+certain decay.
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+_Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, and
+it only remains now to see this labour of months--of years,
+rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book,
+in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I
+have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any
+great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the
+message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring
+too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After
+all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend
+Sydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and
+choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee." I have tried
+to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present
+sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless
+sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no
+vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--that
+for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly
+sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I
+have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid
+one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and
+brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make
+noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved
+had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our
+hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (though
+this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the
+ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty
+and high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, make
+glad your heart!"
+
+And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has
+overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things
+by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from
+that _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and better
+growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which
+has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed
+me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking
+unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a picture
+by Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide look
+of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn
+than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event.
+A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost
+indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound
+into the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a
+little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens.
+Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan
+and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint
+of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of
+inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eye
+to intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden world
+had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I
+stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary
+expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad
+window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing
+vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure that
+he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement
+as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its
+loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through
+that act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austere
+exultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that the
+indignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him,
+as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heart
+of Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his,--to
+wrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlasting
+beauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yet
+purged of trouble.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+FROM PHILIP'S DIARY
+
+
+I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. It
+seemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land--not
+in wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau's picture, but in
+some wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarely
+through the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew that
+somewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted lay
+in an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through the
+night. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime passed, and still I
+sought and could not find her--only shadows met me and fantastic shapes
+out of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, if
+this long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and she
+perish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be more
+than I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: "Fear not,
+beloved; be at peace until I come!" I think I must actually have called
+out in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound still
+ringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own misery
+has lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine what
+you too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to me
+so incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on your
+part has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood--can it
+be that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your days
+that has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while I
+have sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of my
+work, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused me
+once of conscientious selfishness--have I made you a victim of that sin?
+Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a sure
+determination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that you
+walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of
+fresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspring
+within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that
+even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the
+half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my
+dream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that
+somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad
+this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of
+my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace,
+beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no
+power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us
+apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+JESSICA TO PHILIP
+
+
+I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack.
+But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine,
+out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I
+wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I
+now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest
+when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold
+you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me
+since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch.
+But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to
+become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to
+this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a
+Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a
+Hottentot,--provided either were possible.
+
+I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come
+here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did
+you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than
+the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less
+wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own
+heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to
+follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into
+it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with
+me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion,
+burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite in
+father's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all
+his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is
+deliverance.
+
+But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,--submitting to a
+paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love
+often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a
+redbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers in
+heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it
+shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear
+illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know,
+draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay
+rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like
+the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from
+it.
+
+And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage to
+break my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a
+"revelation," when he is about to construe life for me according to the
+prayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble the
+Christian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle,
+and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, my
+life is so near and kin to Pan's that my vision never goes far beyond the
+green edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell your
+fortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!--as near as you were
+that day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in our
+forest,--for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures of
+Catullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too,
+rather than ascetic.
+
+I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the long
+fairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our good
+stars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you.
+Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear you
+swiftly upward and ever upward. But I--I cannot soar, I cannot breathe in
+that silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness of
+this long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of our
+love--until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning was
+when a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, which
+was not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way into
+the office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I can
+remember she was in search of fame, and she found,--ah, dear Heart,--she
+found both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to a
+primitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my whole
+experience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow you
+lifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehended
+me altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had a
+judgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! I
+was divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more natural
+one to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, that
+every woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day when
+first you encompassed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all in
+a moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you.
+You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you were
+really thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a small
+winged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale.
+
+All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year
+with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life
+before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown,
+a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and
+with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not know
+for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilment
+was before me.
+
+After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart,
+only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And
+I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier
+destiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some
+limitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathen
+fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of
+you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters,
+foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some
+miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your
+window sill.
+
+This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you.
+Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which you
+assumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass in
+philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention,
+compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of
+your "upper chamber." I resented that cold expression of your
+spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings
+against your high windows.
+
+In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I
+_knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange
+altitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the
+first assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me
+free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird
+with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect
+peace,--the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And I
+was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of
+romance to reality.
+
+But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the
+beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that
+his love is a sort of _fi. fa._, which he will some day serve upon her
+heart.
+
+Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you,
+for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparent
+diffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantage
+over the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I to
+know there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your classic pose?
+Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth I
+marched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have saved
+myself if a thousand Bluechers had hurried to my defence. And there even
+came a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing to
+some perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will.
+
+But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have come
+so much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same brigand
+determination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll you
+two looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting your
+welcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justify
+poor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed so
+ludicrously artificial,--as if you had somehow got an undeserved iota
+subscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at such
+a humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard,
+uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien,
+that the terror I had felt in anticipation of your visit vanished away. I
+think the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be trying
+to domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenly
+that your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were less
+formidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to the
+walk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from your
+enigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effort
+to break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about something
+and kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now and
+then, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon the
+issue at hand.... Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. The
+world changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman in
+it. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, I
+could have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expression
+of a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startled
+me so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know how
+sincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should be
+captured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, I
+could not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that old
+Merlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorry
+for me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terror
+and shame against your breast. Philip, why does a woman always weep when
+the first man kisses her the first time, no matter how glad she is? I hope
+you do not know enough to answer this question. But I am sure every woman
+does weep; and I think it is because she feels even in the midst of her
+great happiness, an irremediable loss, for which nothing ever fully
+atones.
+
+But another question is, How could I, after being lost to you in this dear
+way, turn my face from you at the command of a religious enthusiast? A
+regard for father and not for his righteousness is the explanation; for I
+felt more nearly right following my heart to you. But now, dear knight, I
+am ready to forgive you the fault of assenting to such an unnatural
+sacrifice, if only you will come and take me once more. At present I am a
+sorry little vagabond, very much the worse for wear, owing to father's
+efforts to sanctify me. But if you will only love me enough, I think I
+could be Jessica again. And perhaps you have some more natural way of
+sanctifying me yourself; for I doubt now if I shall ever see heaven unless
+I may ascend through your portals.
+
+Every day since our bereavement of each other, I have kept a tryst under
+our big tree in the forest. At first this was a tender formality, a
+memorial of a happiness that had passed. But after a time I began to have
+a power of mental vision that was akin to communication. I came out of
+myself to meet you somewhere in that mysterious world of silence to which
+you seem to belong. There were hours when I felt absolutely certain of
+your nearness, a tender peace enfolded me as warm as your arms are. And I
+had the supreme satisfaction of having outwitted all father's powers and
+principalities. Then came days when by no sweet incantation could I bring
+myself near you. I wept upon my sod like one forsaken, and grieved the
+more because I conceived that you must be far out of my regions in one of
+your "upper chamber" moods, where all your faculties were concentrated
+upon some merely philosophical proposition. I wonder now if you are
+laughing! If you knew how I have suffered, you would not even smile. If
+you knew how I have _needed_ to be kissed, you would make haste to come to
+me.
+
+I had been making these excursions into the forest for a long time before
+I discovered that Jack was playing the part of eavesdropping guardian
+angel. Do you know, by the way, what a quaint little ragamuffin
+philosopher that child is? He has a shrewd sobriety, a steady watchfulness
+over all about him, and he is endowed with a power of silent devotion that
+is absolutely compelling. He has been such a comfort to me! and there is
+no way of keeping him out of your confidence. He knows things by some
+occult science of loving. Thus I was not offended one day when I looked up
+from the shadows under my oak and saw him regarding me gravely, almost
+compassionately, from behind a neighbouring tree. After this we had a
+tacit understanding that he might play sentinel there when I came into the
+forest.
+
+See how much I have said, and still I have not told you the strangest part
+of my story--the moonlit revelation of you to me. I am writing, writing,
+to ease my heart until you come. And always as I write I listen for the
+sound of your dear footsteps. For many successive days I had found our
+trysting place a veritable desert. I seemed to have lost my heart's way to
+you; and in proportion to my bewilderment, life became more and more
+intolerable. I had the desperate sensation of one who is about to be lost
+in a waste land, and I felt that I could not live through the frightful
+loneliness of such an experience. Yesterday again I failed to find the
+comfort of your occult presence when I went into the wood. I was filled
+with consternation, and when the night came I lay tossing in a sleepless
+fever. Unless I knew once more in my heart that you loved me, I felt that
+I could no longer endure life. So I lay far into the night. At last in
+desperation I arose from my bed, slipped on my shoes and the big cloak
+that you will remember, and fled away to our tree in the forest, pursued
+by a thousand shadows. For indeed I am usually afraid of the dark; it is
+like a silence to me--your silence, Philip--and I fear it because I do not
+know what it contains. But I had got one of father's wrestling-Jacob's
+moods upon me by this time, and if Mahomet's mountain had come booming by
+I should not have been deterred from my purpose. But do you know that
+there is more life in a little forest when darkness falls than in a big
+town? and that every living thing there recognises you as an intruder with
+warning calls from tree to tree? I had not more than cast myself upon the
+ground to sob out all my griefs to whatever gods would listen, when a
+sleepy little robin just overhead called up to his mistress the tone of my
+trouble. The young leaves whispered it, the boughs swept low about me, and
+the winds carried messages of it away into the heavens, so that suddenly
+the whole night knew of my woe and pitied me.
+
+I know not how long I lay there staring up at the blue abyss of stars
+through the grizzly shades of night. I only know that my face was wet with
+tears and that I seemed to tremble upon the brink of a long life's
+despair. And oh! Philip I never _loved_ you so,--not only with my heart
+and lips, but with my soul. And it was my soul that went out in a prayer
+to you to come. I remembered not only the dear ways you have of folding me
+into your arms and making me surpassingly happy, so against my own will,
+but I remembered the silent young sage in his upper chamber, and I felt
+that indeed it was to this esoteric personality that I must pray for
+help.
+
+And so I gave my soul away to the sweet silence, and waited. The moonlight
+falling down through an open space made a cataract of tremulous
+brightness. It edged all the shadows with a silver whiteness, as of wings
+hidden.
+
+And then suddenly there came to me out of the far abyss above my trees a
+message, a sweet assurance. Oh, I know not how to call to it, only I felt
+the nearness of my love. And I was afraid, my darling, and closed my eyes
+lest I should _see_ you. And then, oh, Philip, I felt, I am sure I felt
+your face close to mine, and in my ears a low whisper breathed like the
+passing of the breeze, a voice saying: "Fear not, beloved; be at peace
+until I come!" And I knew then that you loved me and had not forsaken me
+altogether.
+
+And when at last I raised my eyes, I became aware of the fact that I was
+still not alone; and peering through the dim spaces about me I beheld
+_Jack_ sitting hunched up on the root of his tree like a small toad of
+fidelity! The little owl sprite in him never quite slumbers, I think; and
+seeing me leave the parsonage, he had crept out and followed bravely after
+through the shadows. But the picture he made now startled me into a peal
+of laughter.
+
+"You are the lady in the story that was lost," said Jack, with the solemn
+intonation of one who has himself received a revelation.
+
+"Yes," I confessed softly.
+
+"But will the knight come to find you?"
+
+"I hope so; I think he is coming now, dear Jack."
+
+"Well damn him if he don't!" was the little wretch's impious comment. I
+always suspected him capable of using strong language, but this was the
+first time we had met upon a sufficiently intimate basis of friendship for
+him to exploit it.
+
+And now, Philip, that is all until you come. But hasten, my beloved! I am
+already aged with this long waiting for you. Do not ask me about father.
+He is a good shepherd, but I am a small black sheep determined not to be
+made white according to his plan. And he has come to that place where he
+would be ready to take even you as an under-shepherd of this factious ewe
+lamb. Besides, could we not make a providential offering of Jack, as
+Abraham did of the goat when he was about to slay Isaac? Jack, I think,
+has a heavenly wit withal, and could adjust the little prayer light of his
+soul even to father's high altar mind. As for me, I cannot conceive of
+life alone without you one whole day longer. Indeed, so strong is my
+premonition of your approach, that even now I listen for the sound of your
+footsteps upon the gravel outside.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jessica Letters: An Editor's
+Romance, by Paul Elmer More and Corra Harris
+
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