The Secret Life

November 30.

Yumei Mujitsu

The Japanese possess a delightful word – Yumei Mujitsu – which signifies "Having-the-Name-but-not-the-Reality." They use it to express certain assumptions – such, for example, as the claim of the Mikado's descent from the Sun Goddess, which, like the formulæ of Algebra, achieve desired results though they recognize that in itself it has no existence. How valuable such a word would be to express the attitude of the Sentimentalist regarding a coloured man named Booker Washington, much discussed of late.

Now if there is one creature more than a saint whom I fear and distrust it is the Sentimentalist, whom Hawthorne pungently characterizes as "that steel machine of the Devil's own make." The ruthless heartlessness of the Sentimentalist would be unbelievable if one had not seen it with one's own eyes. Take, for example, the Abolitionists. To gratify their own emotions they caused the death of a million men, the infliction of wounds and pain that make the imagination shudder, and all that long succeeding anguish of a people – the grief, the poverty, humiliation, and despair that burned itself indelibly upon the hearts of those who shared it.

Stevenson – that misunderstood moralist now chiefly remembered as a story teller! – put his finger upon the enigma of the Sentimentalist's cruelty:

"Everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: – Ah, if I could show you these! if I could show you these men and women all the world over … clinging in the brothel and on the scaffold to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!.. They may seek to escape and yet they cannot … they are condemned to some nobility, all their lives the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter… To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God."

The Sentimentalist, along with all his kind, is hunted by that implacable need of virtue. To satisfy it he seizes upon the wrongs done by others, and in his hot denunciation of another's sin, in his clamour for its punishment, he experiences the warm ennobling glow of personal merit.

The pietist will meticulously perform rites and ceremonies in this same need to soothe the imperious call within him for some justification of his life. Having washed and bowed and recited, his sins of practice trouble him but little – those genuflections have made his balance good in the book of virtue. But the Sentimentalist cannot content himself with pale ceremonies. He is by instinct devouring and bloody, but his soul cringes before his inward monitor. By fierce denunciation of the sins he has no mind to he can soothe his desire to inflict pain in perfect content, upborne by a consciousness of his own righteousness. Torquemada was a type, John Brown of Ossawatamie another; both were criminal paranoics tortured by desire for blood and for self-justification. Real goodness does not stimulate the Sentimentalist's emotions – it gives no opportunity for the outcries that warm his heart with a consciousness of rectitude.

The Boer war was a great opportunity for the American Sentimentalist. Protesting against the suppression of a Republic, he could forget his own suppression of the Confederate Republic and of the nascent government of the Philippines. Execrating the burning of farmhouses in the Veldt, he could ignore the track of smoking desolation that marked Sherman's march through Georgia or Sheridan's raid in Virginia. Criticism of British greed for gold kept him cheerfully superior to the contrast of the gift of fifteen millions and the patient labour spent by the English to repatriate the Boer and start him again in life, with the protest he and his kind made against General Grant's willingness to leave to the Southern soldier his starved horse as a means of reaching his ruined home.

Conscience, demanding of the Sentimentalist the bread of uprightness, he prodigally offers it a stone upon which to break its gnawing teeth.

The African brother has long been one of the most valued of the Sentimentalist's resources. Passionately generous demands for the negro's equality have made it possible for him to cordially and contentedly insult and oppress his white fellow countrymen.

It is in this relation that the Sentimentalists find Booker Washington so greatly to their taste. Washington, innocent of their purposes, of course is an admirable and sensible man, who has established an excellent school for the young people of his race. A school far wiser and more merciful in conception than any attempt made by the negrophiles to benefit their protégés, and all honour is due this enlightened ex-slave for his own astonishing progress and his generous sharing of his fruitful labours with his own people. The Sentimentalist professes to find in it "something godlike," a "touch of the divine," as one of them recently characterized what is, reduced to simple facts, the establishing of an industrial school for negroes by a negro.

December 1.

The Real Thing

The man who has educated the negro, the man who has had in him really a touch of the divine, would never appeal to the Sentimentalist.

Booker Washington, very properly, of course, lives and lives well upon the results of his school. He has claimed from the rich, and justly has received, lavish aid for his enterprise. He dresses well, lives amply, travels in comfort, is entertained by Royalty and Chief Magistrates, and with his family, is put beyond even a chance of narrow means by his sympathizers' lavishness. But who heeds the man who has really educated the negro? What crowned head or President entertains the small farmer in rough brogans and faded jeans, who sweats over his hoe in the cotton and tobacco fields, or in the steaming rice and sugar-cane swamps, and who has in forty years spent more than a hundred millions upon the education of the negro? This is the man, and the son of the man who turned heart-brokenly home on the begrudged horse to fields overgrown and laid waste – fields to which his conquerors, unlike the English, contributed no seeds or implements or stock – and from that land he has wrung by the hard labour of his hands that hundred millions which has been spent in educating his ex-slave.

He has lived hardly, in dingy, decaying houses, he has eaten of the coarsest, he has known no beauty or grace, and but scant comfort, he has been clothed in the plainest, he has politically known little but injury and contempt from the larger and wealthier half of his country, and worst of all he has seen his sons grow to manhood but partially and inadequately equipped with learning, because so large a portion of their birthright must be shared in the teaching of the negro in whose name he had been plundered and slaughtered.

The touching point of the story is that it has all been done without any consciousness of special merit. The duty was to be done, and was done without trumpets or drums. Such silent, patient, unreflecting, unadvertised goodness would, of course, never appeal to the Sentimentalist. If he could be brought to see it 'twould merely disturb his self-satisfaction.

It is only to the fantastic mind of a heretic that its meaning appeals, only the heart of a cynic is touched by the instinctive heroism of the white man of the South.

December 15.

"Oh, Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death."

I am just home from a meeting of one of those literary clubs we American women so much affect, in the absence of any masculine society, and we have been talking about Stevenson as the poet most typical of the mind of the nineteenth century. It was all that delicious welter in the sentimentalities of the domestic affections which any assemblage of females finds it impossible to avoid; and we read aloud to one another – with the vox humana lilt turned on – all those decidedly dull little lyrics in the "Child's Garden of Verses," and came away with just that moist brightness of the eye, that wistful, tender "mother-smile," which was correct of the occasion.

I say we, but of course my wicked old eyes were as hard as horn, yet, thank heaven! my unruly tongue uttered not a note out of tune with the Domestic Symphony. Who will say that social slappings have taught me nothing? Even I can be daunted by the unhappy silences that so often greet my blurted comments, and by the soft rustles of relief that respond to the rising of some gentle lady, who will obliquely but certainly crush me with her pious phrases, that throb with the warm sweetness of the dear old human platitudes, and which are rewarded by applause which politely accentuates my disgrace… Oh, amiable and philosophic white page! To you I can be a tiresome and protesting bore, sure of no strictures in your silence. Here I can unpack my heart with words, unrebuked. Here I can whisper safely my suspicion that dear R. L. S. himself would have been consumed with cheerful amusement at our gentle comments upon his doughty spirit.

The world says all sorts of absurd things about Stevenson. Some one the other day called him "an unquenchable Calvinist"! – He who was all pagan and Roman. The Calvinist was the European most subdued by the Semitic beliefs, most merged into Oriental preconceptions of life.

Certainly the European mind in its natural state faced its consciousness of existence with no preconceived theories. Its attitude was that of the child. It found itself face to face with a great, astonishing, beautiful universe, and asked itself what it must think of this universe; how use its opportunities therein. The child stumbled into a thousand infantile delusions and misconceptions, but its eyes were unclouded, its intelligence good. He soon discovered that though many things were pleasant, these pleasant things, when used indiscreetly, had a hidden potentiality of pain. With this second discovery, however – being a wise child – came no foolish horror of all pleasant things; only an illumination as to the value of moderation.

The phenomena of age, death, and decay left the child serious, but not depressed. These were not pleasant things, admittedly; but since they appeared inevitable, there was plainly no use in attempting to escape them. The proper attitude toward such solemnities was a manly courage, a brave submission. In any case, the child concluded, with all the sufferings, contradictions, and puzzling inequalities of existence, at least for all those called upon to face these griefs, there remained some small space of clear, warm, beautiful life; sunshine, food, love, and – more and better than all – that tingling, exquisite quiver of the senses which he agreed to call by the divine name of Beauty. He saw that the pains, the joys, the growth and blight, decay and extinction, were not of his lot only, but were shared by all his surroundings. Feeling himself alone neither in his opportunities nor his inevitable doom, he accepted his fate with the courageous calm, the uncomplaining resignation, of his fellow-creatures. He lived and he died as unresentfully as did the summer leaves, whose season of existence was so much briefer than his own.

His kinship with encompassing nature was so close that it touched him on every side. He became as aware of the souls of all things about him as he was aware of his own. He felt a similar spirit of life in the trees of the forest, the stones of the mountains, in the sea winds, in the brooks, the rivers and their reeds. He guessed at their names, their loves, their histories, as one guesses at those of unknown passers-by travelling the same road. Out of these speculations arose all his arts, his poetry, his legends, and his myths. When the moon stooped toward the western hills she leaned in a passion like his own toward youth and desire. The blood of a slain love became visible to him as it returned to the upper air in dim, faint-scented blossoms, bearing written on their purple leaves the plaintive ai! ai! of her left mourning for dead beauty. The very breeze that sighed through the rushes was the wistful voice of one unwisely reluctant of earthly joy and pain.

It is almost impossible for us – so long saturated with Semitic thought – to recreate for ourselves the mind of the Greeks and Romans fed upon the strength and beauty of a noble pantheism – whose interpretation of life knit their souls to the wholesome earth, and filled them with zest to live and patience to die – whose gods embodied their own lovely ideals of youth immortal, beauty unfading, serene wisdom, the soil's natural wealth, the vine's purple joy. Their attention was fixed upon the present life – their problem how to live it bravely, wisely, richly. All beyond this were uncertain shadows, about which it was impossible to know, and useless to speculate.

Upon the Etruscan tombs, of all mortuary monuments the most lovely, is to be found a revelation clearer than words of the European attitude toward death – those recumbent figures, all grace and peace, carved by the hands of forgotten genius with so inexplicable a skill that the immemorial stone grows deliquescent before one's eyes as if melting and sinking into the mother earth. In them is no sense of struggle or rebellion. They consent to extinction as gently as autumn's last day fades into the silence and darkness of winter. Their season has been fulfilled. They have lived and loved, and they are proudly willing to sink into the elements from which they rose.

It was not until the Asiatic conquests of Alexander brought the mind of Europe into contact with the religions of the East, that this sane attitude was darkened by a conception as radically opposite as the antipodes. Nor did the Roman civilization suffer a shadow upon its manhood until it in turn brought home with its eastern captives that fierce egotism that feared extinction as an irremediable horror. This mind of the other hemisphere could never reconcile itself to the inevitable blotting out of its own individuality. Impossible as it was to deny the incontrovertible fact of death, it conceived, as an escape from the greatest of evils, the idea of the continuance of its identity either in an endless round of reincarnations, or as an impalpable essence triumphant in heaven or defeated in hell. The shadow of their own terror cast upon their imagination the figures of monstrous deities – thousand-armed, myriad-eyed, maleficent, and unakin to themselves. Gods not to be propitiated by song and dance, or the offering of fruit and flowers, but loving to snuff at altars drenched in blood; placated for the sins of the guilty only by the anguish of the innocent, and so meticulous in their tyranny as to require not only the abandonment of all natural appetites, but pursuing even unwitting lapses from submission with eternal and malignant penalties.

Oriental egotism flung itself with equal persistence against the limitations of time, space, and character. In the East arose the systems of magic which sought philosopher's stones, elixirs of youth; which endeavoured to overcome all obstacles through pure intensity of will, and undertook to constrain even the prodigious gods it had itself created by sheer force of its own asceticism and determination.

Rome had been completely honeycombed and corrupted by Eastern mysticism before the final fatal clash of faiths occurred under Constantine, and the Semitic conception of the immortal importance of the human individual overthrew European nature-worship. So potent was this idea that for more than a thousand years Europe lent itself to scorn and repression of nature, and attempted to deal with life as only a pathway to death and the infinitely more important future beyond. The miserable confusion of the Dark Ages was the result of this struggle of the materialistic spirit of the European race in the bonds of a mysticism foreign to its genius.

The Renaissance was rightly named a new birth. Out of the womb of this long night arose once again the mind of the West in its natural shape. Slowly beauty, knowledge, health, regained their old empire. Life grew in importance, and the futile, millennial-long struggle against death began to seem what it truly was – a mere terrified dream of the darkness.

All this appears a long way around to Stevenson, but it is by this avenue I travelled – amid all those soft declamations – to find him the typical poet of the nineteenth century. Stevenson is pure Roman, not a touch of the Semitic is upon him. Every line of his prose and verse attests it. Someone said the other day that Hardy was not so much a pagan as a "revolted Christian," and brought as a charge against him that he did not resent the hard fates of the characters in his books. The second charge, of course, contradicts the first. It was the Eastern rebellion against Fate – against things as they are – that nourished its mysticism. But however one may decide as to Hardy there is no uncertainty as to Stevenson. His relish for life – life with all its pains and limitations – was keen to ecstasy. He leaves no dubiety on that head. Here was no wish for a city of gold and pearl, fenced from care, in which to take the refuge of ease in an impossible Elysium. His "House Beautiful" was and

"A naked house, a naked moor"

and

– "the incomparable pomp of Eve"

was all he asked to make desirable "this earth, our hermitage."

That this life leads to nothing more does not daunt him.

"On every hand the roads begin,And people walk with zeal therein,But wheresoe'er the highways tendBe sure there's nothing at the end."

To which he adds cheerfully:

"Hail and farewell! I must arise,Leave here the fatted cattle,And paint on foreign lands and skiesMy Odyssey of battle."The untented Cosmos my abode,I pass, a wilful stranger;My mistress still the open roadAnd the bright eyes of danger."Come ill or well, the Cross, the Crown,The rainbow, or the thunder,I fling my soul and body downFor God to plow them under."

He will allow no mistake as to the purpose of his existence. He cares not what may lie beyond the portals of an undreaded death, but this bright, present existence is for manful struggle; a struggle not maintained in hope of future, or terror of punishment, but because he loves not only

"Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,A bin of wine, a spice of wit,A house with lawns enclosing it,A living river by the door,A nightingale in the sycamore" —

but loves also to

" – ClimbWhere no undubbed civilian dares,In my war-harness, the loud stairsOf honour – "

Nothing so moves his scorn as the lazy maggot who shuts himself into the snug nut of his religion and concern himself only to save his own poor, unimportant little soul. Hear the call of his "Lady of the Snows" to the pallid monks uttering prayers and memento mori. And Stevenson speaks as does he who knows. It is easy enough for those sitting cozily at home to talk loudly of war and danger, but this was a man who literally fought with death daily. An extract from one of his private letters, written shortly before the end, says:

"For fourteen years, I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on – ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head."

And after a desperate illness, when he rose gasping from the waters of extinction, his first cry on feeling the earth beneath his feet once more were those brave verses "Not Yet my Soul."

He was not upborne by any of that so amazing sense of superiority to the rest of the universe which has aided vain humanity to minimize its defeats. He knew how small was his place in what Carlyle calls "the centre of immensities, the conflux of eternities." Hear him paint what he calls his "Portrait," and he reiterated that his noblest impulses were akin to "a similar point of honour which sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little."

Finally, in the famous Christmas Sermon he sums up in prose the thoughts that breathe through all the varying cadence of his verse —

"Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall – a mere bag's end, as the French say – or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some nobler destiny … whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse, – in each and all of these situations there is but one conclusion possible; that a man should stop his ears to paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind."

In that Sermon is all the philosophy of Greece, the stern courage of Rome.

December 23.

"Philistia, be Thou Glad of Me."

Strange things rise up to us out of the deeps. Because I am a heathen, and Apollo is my god rather than any other, I have never been quite able to comprehend the powerful appeal the Hebrew Messiah makes to the hearts of so many. The solution is to be found in this "De Profundis" – Oscar Wilde's posthumous volume. It is a beautiful book: likely to become a classic of our language by reason of its beautiful, limpid English, its amazing exposition of the course of reasoning by which an outcast of humanity reaches peace and reconciliation with his own soul.

The man's crime, I think, was the result of his reluctance to relinquish youth, with its passions and stimulations of the senses. We all find its relinquishment a tragedy. Some of us refuse to accept the slow, cold enveloping of that cruel serpent of Time, which squeezes out of us our beauty, our vigour, our warmth, and leaves us pallid and eviscerated before devouring us entirely. Wilde, whose whole existence was the pursuit of passion and beauty, violently resenting the fact that with the lapse of years he was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods – finding that poetry, art, and the beauty of women all left him more and more jaded and cold, he grasped at vice as a means of heat, and brought himself within the iron clutch of the law. One can guess, even without the aid of his own confessions, at the hysterical rage of this sybaritic dandy caught in the grim trap of the reprobation of Society. Not only the physical discomforts and restraints bore heavily, but more intolerable was the contempt and disgust of the average man – the Philistine – to whom he had always held himself airily and scornfully superior. The old primal laws of the struggle for life lie too deep for even the boldest of us to lightly face universal condemnation. The worst of rebels and cynics is so dependent upon the countenance of his fellows that when good-will is withdrawn a sort of madness of despair falls upon him, and this vain, sensitive poet makes it plain how the passionate protest of the ordinary criminal was in his case intensified to ecstasy. One sees the poor creature, like a rat in a cage, darting hither and thither, and shivering with sick and furious helplessness at the rigidity of the barriers by which the world had shut him away from any further part in the body corporate.

In the last exhaustion of his grief a light dawned for him. There was one who had protested against these laws of reprobation which Society had codified – one who had mercy for the sinner; who had insisted that the suffering and sorrow experienced by those not conforming themselves to the pattern Society demanded regenerated the victims of sorrow, and they became of more worth than those who condemned them. Here was a means of regaining his own peace with himself. Here was a way out of his imprisonment in the scorn of his fellows.

Mary Magdalen, because of her sumptuous repentance, was of more value than the busy and virtuous Martha. The Prodigal Son was more welcome than the patient home-keeper. The lost sheep was the really important member of the flock. The repentant thief was the heir of Paradise. The sinning woman was bid go in peace. All the offenders against the laws of Society were welcomed: the dull walkers in the beaten path were contumeliously branded as Philistines and Pharisees. At once, by this point of view, the prisoner was freed from his cell. It was possible to stand upright once more and return frown for frown with his judges. All these were redeemed by their "beautiful moment" – ? Well, let him too have his beautiful moment and he was really of more worth than those who had condemned him.