Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Part 22

THE MEASURE OF JOY IN LIFE.

_She._ Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks and months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve of a few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of death. I shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life that! And perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life, prepared for a different state; and in that change we may find a new joy--a longing for perfection and peace.

_He_. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry--there is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer no more.

Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of pa.s.sivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it were a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of sorry accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes overmuch to making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and the sick and old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the unfortunate to slide through: I think it would be more sensible to make it worth their while to stay. The great philanthropists are those who enn.o.ble life, and make it a valuable possession. It would be well to poison the forlorn, hurry them post haste to some other world where they may find the conditions better suited. Then give their lot of misery and opportunity to another who can find joy in his burden.

_She._ A world without mercy would be hard--it would be full of a strident clamor like a city street.

_He._ Mercy for all; no favoritism for a few. Whoever could find a new joy, a lasting activity; whoever could keep his body and mind in full health and could show what a tremendous reality it is to live--would be the merciful man. There would be less of that leprosy, death in life, and the last problem of death itself would not be insurmountable.

So I think the common men who know things, concrete things,--the price of grain, if you will; the men of affairs who have their minds on the struggle; the artists who in paint or words explore new possibilities--all these are the merciful men, the true comforters whom we should honor. They make life precious--aside from its physical value.

You know the keen movement that runs through your whole being when you come face to face with some great Rembrandt portrait. How much the man knew who made it, who saw it unmade! Or that Bellini's Pope we used to watch, whose penetrating smile taught us about life. And the greater t.i.tian, the man with a glove, that looks at you like a live soul, one whom a man created to live for the joy of other men. In another form, I feel the same gift of life in a new enterprise: a railroad carried through; a corrupt government cleaned for the day. And, again, that Giorgione at Paris, where the men and women are doing nothing in particular, but living in the sunlight, a joyful, pagan band.

And then think of the simpler, deeper notes of the symphony, the elements of light and warmth and color in our world, the very seeds of existence. I count that day the richest when we floated into the Cape harbor in the little rowboat, bathed in the afternoon sun. The fishermen were lazily winging in, knowing, like birds, the storm that would soon be on them. We drank the sun in all our pores. It rained down on you, and glorified your face and the flesh of your arms and your hands. We landed, and walked across the evening fields to that little hut. Then nature lived and glowed with the fervor of actual experience. You and the air and the sun-washed ocean, all were some great throbs of actualities.

_She._ You remember how I liked to ride with you and sail, the stormy days. How I loved to feel your body battling even feebly with the wind and rain. I loved to see your face grow crimson under the lash of the waves, and then to _feel_ you, alive and mine!

_He._ It would not be bad, a heaven like that, of perpetual physical presentiment, of storms and sun, and rich fields, and long waves rolling up the beaches. For nerves ever alive and strung healthily all along the gamut of sensation! Days with terrific gloom, like the German forests of the Middle Ages; days with small nights spent on the sea; September days with a concealed meaning in the air. One would ride and battle and sail and eat. Then long kisses of love in bodies that spoke.

_She._ And yet, how strange to life as it is is that picture--like some mediaeval song with the real people left out; strange to the dirty streets, the breakfasts in sordid rooms, the ign.o.ble faces, the houses with failure written across the door-posts; strange to the life of papa and mamma; to the comfortable home; the chatter of the day; the horses; the summer trips--everything we have lived, you and I.

_He._ Incomplete, and hence merely a literary paradise. It is well, too, as it is, for until we can go to bed with the commonplace, and dine with sorrow, we are but children,--brilliant children, but with the unpleasant mark of the child. Not sorrow accepted, my love, and bemoaned; but sorrow fought and dislodged. He is great who feels the pain and sorrow and absorbs it and survives--he who can remain calm in it and believe in it. It is a fight; only the strong hold their own.

That fight we call duty.

And duty makes the only conceivable world given the human spirit and the human frame: even should we believe that the world is a revolving palaestrinum without betterment. And the next world--the next? It must be like ours, too, in its action; it must call upon the same activities, the same range of desires and loves and hates. Grander, perhaps, more adorned, with greater freedom, with more swing, with a less troubled song as it rushes on its course. But a world like unto ours, with effort, with the keen jangle of persons in effort, with sorrow, aye, and despair: for there must be forfeits!

Is that not better than to slink away to death with the forlorn comfort of a

"_Requiescat in pace?_"

PARIS, December, 1895.