The Secret Life

The Pleasures of Pessimism

A man who took me in to dinner Wednesday night said, pityingly,

"You seem to be a pessimist. Why is that? Are you unhappy?"

That sort of remark is a shot between wind and water, and leaves one speechless. I crossly denied being an – ist of any sort, and changed the subject.

Possibly he was led to his banal personality by some remark I had made, of the sort that is commonly called cynical because it is true.

The optimists have a theory that those who don't take the same view of life as themselves must therefore be unhappy. It's an amazing conclusion. They seem to have no idea how the pessimists enjoy their own sense of superiority. It is as if the blind should say to the man with eyes: "How unhappy you must be to see things just as they are. Now I can imagine them to be anything I please!"

The man with eyes could, of course, only smile; it being obviously impossible to discuss such a proposition.

The believers in personal immortality labour under the same curious illusion apparently. They are so sorry for those who don't believe in it, and imagine them frightened at the thought of death. To their minds the universe is inconceivable without their presence, seemingly forgetful of the fact that it got on quite well before they came. It is rather an imposing bit of egotism, after all. It rises to the level of grandeur.

Catholics, I know, have the same pity and astonishment about the state of mind of Protestants that the optimists feel for pessimists, the religious for the unbelieving. Each thinks the heretic in parlous state and fancies he must be secretly disturbed by it, when of a truth the heretic is simply amused by this anxiety for his welfare, and cheerfully certain of his own superiority.

September 18.

Moral Pauperism

M – , who has, with some flourish of trumpet and tuck of drum, gone over to Rome, is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, I am told, and, what is odder still, is a very clever and humorous creature. One can discount the parson and the cleverness, but a humorous Protestant 'verting is more difficult to understand.

I tried hard to get some explanation from her as to her point of view, but she was entirely vague. Fancy – she has a patron saint, beads, etc.! One can only gape.

Very probably every one is at birth – no matter what the environment – either Catholic or Protestant by nature. To many it is an absolute necessity that someone else should furnish their spiritual and mental support. With these, no matter how frequently one sets them on their feet their knees will give under them; no matter how often one starts them in spiritual business one has eventually to come again to the rescue. To such an one the perpetual supervision and personal tyranny of the Catholic Church must seem deliciously comfortable and protecting. No wonder they are drawn to it across all barriers.

To the born Protestant such bondage is as intolerable as spoon feeding and a wheeled chair would be to an athlete. Whatever the moral or mental situation may be he must deal with it for himself – must stand on his own feet – use his own moral muscles. Neither can ever understand the other. Their whole attitude toward life is directly opposed. Each seeks what his nature demands.

September 30.

On a Certain Lack of Humour in Frenchmen

The book-club has eliminated Marcel Prevost's "Mariage de Julianne" as too naughty for our perusal – though not until we had all read it, to see how undesirable it was.

To what H – calls my "robust nature" it seemed merely deliciously funny and human, and I am not fond of French fiction as a rule. Most of it leaves in my mind only a sense of dreary nastiness – a sort of more closely knit Hall Caine-ism, with his sloppiness of style left out. Yet a good many of one's contemporaries profess to find French fiction vastly superior to English literature of the same sort: to find Balzac a greater artist than Thackeray; but those who make this assertion are, I find, generally lacking in humour and imagination themselves, and therefore blind to a whole side of life. They, of nature, think marionettes liker life than beings of flesh and blood. Balzac's dry, minute descriptions give them an impression of reality. To hear that a man had a red nose, had iron-grey hair growing thin on top, and that his bottle-green trousers wrinkled at the knees, gives them the sensation that Balzac is presenting them with "a slice of life" – not being aware, it would seem, that this might be equally truthful a description of a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. Such matters as these are not the essentials that differentiate a man from his fellows.

Henry James thinks this elaboration of detail is Balzac's "strongest gift" and adds, "Dickens often sets a figure before us with extraordinary vividness, but the outline is fantastic and arbitrary – we but half believe in it." It seems to me that James has, like Balzac, but a half developed sense of life. He too is meticulous in his efforts to make one see and feel what he wishes to convey, because he only half feels and sees it himself; though he is concerned rather with emotions than objects, and in spite of the labour and care expended by each, but a shadowy impression remains. Dickens can dash in a few broad, half caricatured lines of a portrait because the figure he wishes to show is so vivid to his own eye he feels it only necessary to indicate it broadly to make others recognize it. Uncle Pumblechook in "Great Expectations" is suggested, as far as written description goes, in merest outline – "A large, hard-breathing, middle-aged, slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head" – yet after half a page of his conversation and his welcome to Pip at the funeral, "breathing sherry and crumbs," one needs no more. The man lives and moves. One knows him inside and out.

James speaks again of Balzac's "choking one with his bricks and mortar," and thinks his houses, his rooms, his towns, "unequalled for vividness of presentation, of realization." To an imaginative reader they are as dry and superfluous as a real-estate agent's pamphlets; one has a sense of the author's heavy straining effort to make the places palpable to his own mental vision. It is the weary iteration of the bore, who having no imagination can leave nothing to that of his hearer.

Dickens somewhere describes a room merely by telling how the winking fire was reflected in every smooth object. The fire winks cheerily; the pewters winking dully, as if afraid of being suspected of not seeing the joke; the furniture twinkling slyly from every polished point, etc., etc., in Dickens's well-known fashion of pursuing a happy fancy round and round. There is not one word of catalogue of the room's contents, yet it remains forever as vivid in the reader's memory as a chamber with which one is intimately familiar.

Bulwer says that "French nature is not human nature," and if human nature was necessarily the Anglo-Saxon conception of life it would be true. Nothing so points French heterogeneousness from ourselves as the attitude of our two chosen masters of the novel, Balzac and Thackeray. Not a gleam of humour ever irradiates for a moment the pages of the former. A mere glimmer would make impossible his story of the young man who endeavours to compromise a pretty woman, whose refusal to yield to his dishonourable suggestions so puzzles and disgusts him that he can only explain her coldness as being the probable results of some secret but mortal disease!.. A lover abducts a reluctant fair by mingled force and stratagem, and attempts to brand her with hot irons; accompanying this gentle gallantry with the mummeries of a thirteenth-century Inquisition. This picturesque proof of devotion so touches the lady that she promptly grovels in an agony of affection for this chivalrous admirer…

All this is told with perfect gravity, the author having not the smallest suspicion of its absurdity – and yet there be actually Anglo-Saxons who solemnly announce that Balzac knew human nature to its depths. French nature, perhaps; certainly not ours…

A spinster lives twenty years in a family, all of whose members she venomously hates, and not one of them suspect her unselfish devotion until she aids in humiliating them and wrecking their fortunes… Madame Hulot is a saint, and yet at fifty years of age offers her person to a repulsive scoundrel in order to provide a marriage portion for her daughter; Balzac evidently considering this one of her noblest acts.

The point at which one finds the widest divergence of the French and English attitudes toward life is in the essay made by each of these chosen spokesmen to show us the adventuress. Taine, who honestly tried to see English literature from English eyes and interpret it to his countrymen, breaks down entirely when he reaches this angle of vision.

He says: "There is a personage unanimously recognized as Thackeray's masterpiece, Becky Sharp… Let us compare her with a similar personage of Balzac in 'Les Parents Pauvre,' Valerie Marneff. The difference in the two works will exhibit the difference in the two literatures" – and they do indeed.

Valerie to the English reader is the old commonplace, stereotyped adventuress of the melodrama. One can imagine none save those as vile and stupid as herself being deceived by such a greedy, outrageous creature. The descriptions of her looks and behaviour smack of the unhumorous shilling shocker. She gives glances from beneath "her long eyelids like the glare of cannon seen through smoke!" … and again "her eyes flashed like daggers."

Such figures of speech sound like the pompous rhodomontade of a Laura Jean Libby, yet Taine quotes them with much admiration.

Becky, Taine finds incomprehensible. He complains that Thackeray "degrades her" when he laughingly reveals her secret vulgar shifts. Also he is resentful because her carefully built schemes crumble one by one like houses of cards, being ignorant, apparently, of that choice old utilitarian proverb as to Honesty being the best policy, founded upon a very general observation that the same cleverness and energy employed by adventurers in their nefarious schemes pays a far higher rate of interest when turned to legitimate pursuits.

The half affectionate, half contemptuous humour with which her creator regards Becky shocks Taine. With his French passion for logical completeness he cannot comprehend that Thackeray's vision for truth should make him capable of admitting and admiring that arch-adventuress's good qualities, – the very qualities of her defects which made her career of deception possible. The consistent monster Valerie could delude no one, while Becky's patience, gaiety, and good nature made Rawdon Crawley's devotion plausible, and forced even Lord Steyne, who recognized her baseness, after a fashion to respect and like her, and consent to be used by her, until – by a fundamental impulse of womanliness – "she admired her husband standing there, grand, brave, victorious," above the prostrate body of her seducer. It is that same underlying womanliness in Becky – of which Valerie lacked even an intimation – which makes her human and real. Its absence leaves Valerie incredible and shadowy.

Take again Lear and Goriot. The latter's children have no excuse whatever for their crimes of greed and selfishness. They are grotesque succubi, while the astounding wickedness of Regan and Goneril is made credible by Lear's own violent foolishness and vanity. His tempestuous senility is of the sort that wakes the blindest revolt of youth, which is always restless under the dominance of age, a restlessness likely to deepen to cruelty when age is unrestrained by wisdom or dignity.

A Frenchman once complained to me bitterly of the comic porter in Macbeth, who comes grumbling to unlock the gate so soon after the horror of the murder of Duncan. To him the touch of comedy seemed vulgar and inept. It was impossible to make him understand how to the Anglo-Saxon mind this veracious touch of comedy jostling tragedy but heightened the dramatic poignancy of the play. This incapacity to see the humorous contrasts of life and character is generally characteristic of youth with its narrow inexperience of realities, and the French and the unhumorous of our own race seem never to outgrow this juvenility.

October 15.

The Value of a Soul

I wonder if anyone will ever muster up sufficient courage to write the true history of the ferocious egotism engendered in the human heart by a belief in human immortality. The most cynical might well shrink from the sorrowful task. Self-preservation, supposedly the first law of nature, is but a feeble instinct when placed in comparison, for motherhood, patriotism, sexual love; a thousand minor passions will induce human beings to abandon their inheritance in the warm precincts of the cheerful day, but all that a man hath, and all that his friends, and the wife of his bosom, and the children of his loins have, will he give for that wretched little flyspecked object he calls his soul.

Buckle rather shocked a pious world when he announced that in many cases the best kings, considered from the point of view of their private characters, made the worst rulers; but all history is loud with this truth. The moment anyone in power began to consider the question of his soul with seriousness, tears and blood soon began to flow. A ruler who had strong secular tendencies usually had some sort of consideration for human happiness, but one who turned his mind to what was called "higher things" waded through the wretchedness of those in his power with noble insouciance. Henri IV., who was cheerfully indifferent as to whether he heard preaching by parsons or the mass of priests, provided he might have Paris for his capital, quieted the fratricidal religious conflicts of France and made life happy for his subjects; and Henry II. of England, who was the only one of the Angevin Kings entirely unconcerned about his immortal future, did more for England than any ruler since Alfred, and would have trebled those wise secular benefits had à-Becket and the rest of the troublesome clergy permitted it.

I have been roused to these moral generalizations by Quiller-Couch's novel, "Hetty Wesley." It's a poignant book.

Hetty was the sister of the founders of Methodism, and Quiller-Couch has availed himself, in writing the book, of the letters and papers of that remarkable family. He has told his tale very simply and with an artist's comprehension and sympathy, setting down nothing in malice and leaving the reader to draw his own inferences.

The picture of that damp Epworth Rectory where Charles and John were born (two out of the ten living children, several others had died early) makes the Bronté Parsonage, over which it is the fashion to shiver, seem like an amiable idyl by contrast. Samuel Wesley, the father, was passionately religious. The first of his concerns was the saving of his own soul for immortal happiness, the second was the saving of as many other like heirs to bliss as possible, and a part of this second ambition implied the training of his sons for the ministry. In pursuit of these ends he sacrificed the comfort and happiness of his wife and seven lovely daughters with a ruthless persistency and consistency that would be incredible did we not have his own complacent writings in testimony thereto.

The sons found his example worthy of imitation, it appears. Of late, apropos of the Wesley Centennial, one has heard much of John Wesley, of his tangled love affairs and his amazing marriage, and one can't but be conscious of a secret liking for that tempestuous termagant, Mrs. John, because that she after a fashion avenged those eight unlucky kinswomen whose lives he so complacently sucked dry to nourish his religious aspirations.

One has wondered, when reading them, if those meek and loyal addresses from the scaffold, made to Henry VIII. by the innocent victims of his bloodthirstiness, could have been genuine documents. They contradict all one knows of human nature in their humble acquiescence and submissive affection; but here in this book we have Hetty Wesley's own tender appeal to her father – a father who had ruthlessly cast her into a lifelong hell – to forgive what he called a sin, really only a girl's generous foolish mistake, and we have also his answer. An answer which would have made even Tudor Henry blush for its cruelty. One could almost wish that there was somewhere an immortal part of Samuel Wesley, burning eternally in the knowledge of himself as he really was. Mrs. John Wesley saves us the need of wishing that Hetty's brother had a soul.

After all, this is but one of thousands of grim stories of human beings trampling upon the lives and hearts of their fellows in the endeavour to achieve for themselves an infinity of bliss. To my heretical mind such behaviour for such an end seems inexpressibly sordid, vulgar, and selfish. I at least prefer to be one with the dumb beasts that perish, but who pass away knowing that no creature has ever suffered a pang in order that they may have saved their souls alive.

A Grateful Spaniard

Time is not long enough for meTo hate mine enemy perfectly,But God is of infinite mercy and heTo Time has added Eternity.

October 16.

Bores

I reproached J – last night for sending me to dinner with E – . "This is the third time you have done it," I grumbled, "and it is just twice too often. None of the other women will talk to him, and because I treat him decently you take advantage of my good nature."

"Oh, but my dear," she countered impishly, "you know you are so juicy with bores!"

Of course, that was true, though there is nothing I envy more than the courage of ruthlessness – one of the first laws of social self-preservation. I am always the helpless prey of bores. They drink as they choose from my "sacred fount," though it is shallow enough, heaven knows! for me to need all its contents for myself. If this condition of affairs arose from good nature I should not be ashamed of it, but it is all sheer cowardliness. My imagination is so vivid that I can feel the corroding humiliation of neglect and indifference to the poor souls as if it were being applied to my own skin, and I labour on, crying protests inwardly, rather than free myself by a moment of brutality.

"Tell bores who waste my time and me" that the best hours of my life have been burned in their dull fires. Again and again have I lost my opportunity to seek the friendship of some adorably amusing creature while sweating to pull the oar that was the bore's own proper task.

This indolent cowardice enfeebles me in a dozen ways; makes it impossible for me to train my dogs for fear of hurting their feelings, and to discharge a servant costs me a white night and a fausse digestion. It is not kindliness, it is only that I feel their discomfort more than they do themselves.

November 7.

Emotions and Oxydization

H – told a curious story last night of the bobstay on his yacht, which time after time rusted, broke, and betrayed him at critical moments of racing. Replacing with the best material and by the best workmen was futile, though all the rest of the wire rigging remained intact. It seemed a "hoodoo" until it was discovered to be due to oxydization from a bolt which touched a copper plate on the stem. F – said it was easy to see how, before the chemical action of steel and copper were understood, the most sensible and logical mind might be driven to attribute such a thing to witchcraft, and it occurred to me that perhaps when we know more of the chemistry of psychology, many of our emotional puzzles will be more easily solved. Jealousy, anger, suspicion, ingratitude, it will then be easy to correct by some simple act of insulation. We know that many evil moral tendencies are caused by pressure upon certain portions of the brain, and my own personal experience and long observation makes me confident that half the baser passions are due to acidity in the blood. It makes one slow to indulge one's emotions when one realizes they may simply be the result of a lack of a therapeutic alkali. With such a conviction one will generally wait for the slower and more balanced action of reason.

What a great alteration would take place in the history of the world if it could be rewritten from the point of view of what the doctors describe as "the gouty acid diathesis."

Bess of Hardwicke's marital troubles, which convulsed all England, and even drew Elizabeth and Burleigh into the turmoil, were due entirely to the unhappy Earl's gout, as no one can doubt after reading his letters. Charles V. was driven from his throne by it, and Napoleon's gout lost him the battle of Leipsic and set his feet in "slippery places." Henry VIII.'s shoes were not slashed without reason, and Pitt was lost to England when she most needed him by the same agent. These are but a few of the notorious examples, but how many wars, revolutions, massacres, had their origin in that same corroding oxydization of the spirit of man we will probably never fully determine.

November 10.

Abelard to Heloise

Dear Sister in Christ:God send you peace from Heaven!I would that to your restless heartHis blessed peace was given,And that you foundIn contemplation of His loveBalm for that woundThat ever frets you sore.'Twere meet you woreMuch sack cloth,And with scourge and fasting droveThis passion from your soul…Christ's Bride thou art;Therefore give Him the whole.I charge thou keep'st back not any partOf His just due to spend upon a worm…Nay, woman! would'st thou bring on me a curseFor that I stand between thy soul and God?..Thy love for me is but a thing perverse.Cast it forth from thee, or a heavy rodMay prove that God is still a jealous God.But that you are a woman, and infirmOf will and purpose, I should saySome bitter words to purge you of this sin!Natheless each dayI painful penance doFor that 'twas I who led you first astray —(For which great sin may He my soul assoil!)And wrestle mightily each night in prayerThat Christ may yet your stubborn heart subdueTo His sweet will, and – the sharp fret and coilOf earth cast forth – He then may enter inTo find a garnished chamber, and an altar fair…– Nay, now, bethink you!Love like yours is grievous sin,And the time wasteth swift toward death.All love is but a breathWhich clouds the glass that we see darkly through —When you to Heaven shall winAnd there see face to face your risen Lord,Wilt know 'twas but the hot fume of a wordSpake by a devil, dimmed your earthly glass…In essence love is sin! —Save only love of God.It is a gin,Set by the Evil One to snare the feetOf those who haste toward Heaven,By its false likeness to the spiritual love,And by it man is drivenDown the steep slope to Hell.'Tis thus when sanctioned by the Church; how thenOf love like thine, which is accursed of men,And doubly cursed by God?..Last night in dreams I trodUp the long windings of the heavenly stair,And heard the angels singing loud and sweet,And neared the gate, when sudden both my feetWere caught amid the tangles of thy hair, —Spread like a cruel web across my path, —In which I struggled, mad with woe and wrath,And could not free me; so at last I fell,Stumbling and plunging down to blackest Hell,Wherein I cursed the hour I saw thy face,And most I cursed the hour, the day, the placeWhen thou didst give me love…Waking then, I stroveFor holier thoughts, and could at last forgiveThe wrong thou didst me.But no more, I prithee, vex me with thy taleOf love. It wearieth me, and henceforth I must liveIn larger peace, or I may not prevailWithin the SchoolsAgainst the babbling of the narrow foolsWho blindly are withstanding my new lightUpon the Divine Essence's nature, and my claspOf the ringed Trinitarian mysteries. Matters your slightWoman's comprehension may not grasp…Farewell. Neglect not prayer.

Heloïse to Abelard

My good Lord Abbot: – But this onceI speak, and then no more.I must not 'gainst the loreOf the great SchoolsSet my weak criesFor warmth and life and love.The snow now liesDeep round the Paraclete,Where from my pale nuns riseIn never ceasing chant of nones and primesIncense of prayers to ease the need of GodFor broken contrite hearts and dropping tears.And sometimes I have fearsThat each one wears'Neath her long habitAs sad a heart as mine,For in their eyes,Which each unto the skiesLifts many times each day,I see desire for love,A gift they prayFrom God, since man gives notThat which they need.I watch them from my carven chair,While lingering on a bead,And add, beneath my hood,Beads to my rosary of tearsTo think how goodTo each 'twould seem to changeThis Latin drone and censer's clankFor the dear homely noiseAround the hearthOf little girls and boys —For all these weary prayersThe daily household caresFor some tired labourerWho earned their bread.Oh, little hands and feet! —There is no roomWithin this cloistered tombWherein we worship God,For one dear curly head.Sometimes at prayersA vision seems to rise —Borne on an airMayhap that blows from Hell.And then I see the great Lord JoveAnd all His mighty peersWho ruled so many yearsAbove the ancient heavens,Dwindle, and fade, and pass away,And only Love remains —I see the doctors of the ancient schools,Great Egypt's sages, those who made the rulesOf wisdom in the Academe,Fade also like a dream;All their wise thoughts grow foolishnessAnd all their learning turns to dust,And only Love remainsForever young, forever wise and great,And in the time to comeI see the same strong fateSeize on our Mighty GodWho binds us in his chains,And makes our love a sinTo drive our souls to Hell,He too, with all his doctorsFades – and only Love remainsForever and forever. Fare you well.