Part 14 (1/2)

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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds; 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 compa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 acc.u.mulation 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, mult.i.tudinous-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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 ma.s.ses (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, pa.s.sing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a little expanse of dark water, and vanis.h.i.+ng 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 trespa.s.s 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-vanis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed, 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