Part 3 (1/2)
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 G.o.d's plans in regard to us very disconcerting to credulously minded sinners. As for me, I have pa.s.sed this primer-state of religious emotion.
I am sure a kind G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.nation 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d.
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 pa.s.s 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 pet.i.tions 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d is a pastoral Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of philosophy, vanis.h.i.+ng before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana, revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the thoughts of such a G.o.d 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sisi 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 pa.s.sionate love of suffering men.