The Jessica Letters Part 3

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.

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 wors.h.i.+pped the image of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. She pa.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 compet.i.tive 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 pa.s.sage which exactly ill.u.s.trates 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 compa.s.sion 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 sh.e.l.le 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 G.o.d, 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 n.o.bility 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 a.s.s'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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sive and dignified by a philosophic pose. You see I am reading your last two letters by the light of certain earlier confessions.